I had of course heard of the Feast of Fools, even though we had had nothing similar in the City when I was young. At some big country houses, on a day between Christmas and New Year’s, for the whole day the ordinary social structures were reversed, and a boy became the lord and the lord a stable boy.
But while I knew what happened in a general way on the Feast, I was still startled to wake and find the queen in my bedroom, as a dark, sleeting morning began outside the window. I pulled the blankets up to my chin.
“Here’s your breakfast, Chaplain,” she said with a laugh, presenting me with a breakfast tray.
I reached for it hesitantly. It contained a donut, rather stale, but also a hot cup of tea. “Why are you calling me the chaplain?”
“We’re all backwards today,” she said with a smile. “I’m the kitchen maid; Gwen and Jon are the queen and king; and you and the chaplain are taking each other’s positions. When you’re ready to get dressed, get some of his vestments and give him some of your clothes to wear.”
Neither of the chaplains, the duchess’s nor Joachim, liked this plan at all. “Chaplains never take part in the Feast of Fools,” said the duchess’s chaplain loftily.
“But this is an unusual Christmas!” the queen insisted. She seemed to be taking direction of the Feast, perhaps, I thought, to wrest control from the duchess. “You won’t have to do anything evil.”
I ended up having to go into the chapel for morning service in the chaplains’ place, wearing an old set of robes from the duchess’s chaplain. If the members of the staff who came to the chapel, dressed in finery, had expected me to give a satirical version of the service, however, they were disappointed, for I merely laid the Bible on the altar, lit the candles, and went out again. Until I had decided what to do about Yurt, I did not dare risk offending the powers of the supernatural.
In the great hall, Gwen and Jon, wearing very fancy and very old draperies that I assumed had come from chests in the duchess’s attic, sat on tall chairs next to the fireplace. Both held rods that apparently represented scepters, something I had never seen the real king and queen use, and both were shouting orders.
“Go weed my roses!” yelled Jon in a high, cracked voice that did not sound at all like the king’s voice. “And do it right, this time! Don’t start breaking off the branches like you did last time!” Since the king did almost all his own weeding, I was surprised at this, but the assembled staff seemed to find it hilarious.
“Why aren’t you feeding my stallion?” cried Gwen in a voice that actually did sound a lot like the queen’s. “Why aren’t you exercising him? Cook!” to one of the ladies. “We’re going to have a hundred and fifty extra people for supper. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier, but you’d better get started. We have to eat in twenty minutes!”
I stood at the edge of the hall, leaning against the wall and watching. I found this disturbing, and was even more disturbed when one of the stable boys started shouting back at the “royal pair.” “Why don’t you let the cook alone? Why don’t you and the hundred and fifty guests go dig in the fields for a while and work up an appetite?”
Gwen, as the queen, replied, “Don’t bother me with your complaints! Can’t you see the king and I are busy?” and threw herself into Jon’s arms, to his evident approval.
The staff laughed uproariously. The real queen came to stand next to me. “Are you sure allowing this is wise, my lady?”
She smiled. “We did it every year when I was growing up, and I started the practice when I came to Yurt. The staff are somewhat limited, being away from home, but some years they have elaborate props and even whole episodes they act out.”
“But aren’t you encouraging them to think badly of you?”
“Not at all. That’s why it’s called the Feast of Fools; you have to remember not to take anything seriously.”
“They’re saying insulting things to you!”
“If they say insulting things to the false king and queen, they won’t need to say those things to us. And sometimes we can pick up an indication of a real problem, something with which we had started burdening the staff without even realizing it. King Haimeric and I like to think that we treat our staff as well as anyone in the western kingdoms, but as long as they’re in our pay they’re always going to be a little inhibited about speaking up about their problems.”
I nodded, somewhat dubiously. She seemed quite calm about the proceedings, even complacent, but if the queen thought this was all fun and harmless, maybe it was. I was still quite shocked when one of the trumpeters came running into the hall, wearing a ripped red velvet tunic. “The powers of darkness must obey me!” he shouted. “I am stronger than trees and rocks!”
There was a great deal of shouting. “No! You can’t be the wizard!” “The chaplain has to be the wizard!” “But he said he doesn’t want to be!” “Let him be the wizard if he wants to be!” I was especially mortified to see the queen herself struggling with only minimal success to keep from bursting into laughter.
“Maria and I are making lunch today,” she said abruptly, straightening her face. “We’d better get started.” I could tell from the back of her shoulders as she hurried away that she was laughing again.
The cook, who had found a blond wig and apparently represented the Lady Maria, came over to talk to me. “We want to have the ‘wizard’ do magic tricks at lunch. That boy is useless; we’re going to have to have the chaplain do it. Can you teach him a good trick between now and lunch?”
“All right,” I said. Maybe concentrating on the reckless activity of the Feast of Fools would keep me from worrying when, if ever, I would hear what had happened to the old wizard’s last apprentice, much less how I was going to deal with him.
Both chaplains were sitting in their room, reading their Bibles as though determined not to hear the laughter and running feet in the castle all around them.
“They want you to do a magic trick at lunch,” I said to Joachim, deciding that the older man who served the duchess was hopeless. “I’ll make one you can do very easily.”
“Don’t you think the dangers of black magic are close enough to us already?”
“There’s certainly nothing wicked in the spell I’ll work for you. It would only become black magic if you approached it with evil intent.” As soon as I said this I wished I had not, because it sounded like an accusation, but he just looked at me from his enormous eyes in silence.
I sat down next to him, to show that nothing I was doing was hidden or even morally questionable, and started preparing an illusion ahead of time, as the old wizard had done. I murmured the words of the Hidden Language just under my breath, while the two chaplains kept looking at me surreptitiously and tried to keep on reading.
“Do you have anything I can attach this spell to?” I asked brightly when I had it almost completed.
The duchess’s chaplain snorted but found and handed me a button. I would have preferred something more inherently interesting than an old black button from a priest’s vestments, but it would certainly do. I finished the spell and handed the button to Joachim.
“There. You won’t actually have to do anything magical. Just wave this mysteriously, say a few things that sound arcane and deeply wise, and I can say the magic words to finish the spell. All you’ll have to do then is drop the button and step back.”
He took the button reluctantly, as though afraid it might come alive in his hand, and delicately slipped it into his pocket. This would have been much easier, I thought, with someone who had a sense of humor. “I’ll see you at lunch,” I said with a smile as I went out.
In the hall, one of the servants had heavily padded the stomach and arms of his tunic and was clearly meant to represent Dominic. “I’m the bravest man in the kingdom!” he announced in a roar. “Nothing can hurt me! Wait! What’s that?” with a trembling of terror. “Oh, no! It’s an illusion! It’s got me!” He fell to the floor, fought off an imaginary attacker, rolled to the feet of the “king and queen,” and stood up stiffly. “Oh, no! It’s pain! I’ve been hurt a scratch! I can’t bear a second of pain!”
I laughed as hard as anybody, but I was very glad that the real Dominic was not there.
The queen announced lunch not long afterwards. Since it was only heated-up soup that the cook had made the day before, cheese, bread, and Christmas cookies, it was an excellent meal, even if prepared by women who normally never cooked. “Wizard!” bellowed Jon to the chaplain as we finished the cookies. “I want to see some magic and I want to see it now! None of your normal foolish magic. Let’s have something really spectacular!”
Joachim took a deep breath and stood up, with a look at me as though it were all my fault. At this point there was a pause as several people at the table noticed he was wearing his ordinary vestments; since I was still wearing the older priest’s robes, we had three chaplains at the table and no wizard.
“He’s got a have a costume.” “He’s got to look like the wizard.” “What shall we do?”
“Here,” I said and pulled off my belt, which I had been wearing around my trousers under the robes. “You can wear this. It’s the chief insignia of wizardry.”
While of course it was not, the moon and stars were impressive enough, once I set them glowing, that the rest of the table clapped and approved. Joachim buckled it around himself with the look of someone who just wanted this episode over.
But I was pleased to see that he had the sense not just to pull out the button and show everyone how ordinary it was. Instead he cupped it in his hands, looked down on it as though it were something exciting, and began to speak in a low tone. “Abracadabra,” he said, which he must have known as well as I did was not a word of the Hidden Language, only the way the Language was represented in children’s fairy stories. “Let the magic begin!”
He whirled around, holding the button over his head. I started putting the final pieces of the spell I wanted together, but he was not done yet.
“Magic is all powerful!” he cried. “The supernatural is superfluous! Wizards are the kings of the universe!”
There was a good deal of laughter at this. While I was delighted that he still might be able to develop a sense of humor, I wished he had not started at my expense. He threw the button in the air, and as it came down it stopped being a button.
Instead it was a pack horse, slightly smaller than lifesize, a defect for which it made up by being brilliantly violet. On its back was a giant sack, from which brightly wrapped Christmas presents protruded. As Joachim unbuckled my belt and sat down again, the presents tumbled from the sack, their ribbons untying themselves, the gifts inside shooting out. There were diamond necklaces, a golden sword, silk dresses, whole hams, a book bound in red leather, cascades of coins, highly lifelike bluebirds, and, in the final box, a rose bush that grew, opened violet blooms, and faded away as the whole illusion disappeared into sparks.
There was a brief moment of appreciative silence, with no sound but the sleet against the windows. “Very good, Wizard!” Jon then called. “It’s much better than our usual wizard’s productions!”
I was actually very pleased myself. It was certainly the most elaborate and most realistic illusion I had ever done; maybe I would have to try more often the old wizard’s method of starting an illusion ahead of time.
But my good humor was no more permanent than the illusion and faded again in the afternoon. I was now convinced that I would never hear anything about the old wizard’s apprentice. Although there was still over a week to run on the twelve days of Christmas, my time for deciding what to do about the stranger in the cellars was very limited. Since he had already called down a dragon on us, I hated to imagine what he would do for his next effort.
The rest of the party also seemed to grow tired of the game as the afternoon wore on. At one point Gwen took off her draperies and left the hall and did not come back. When, toward the end of the afternoon, someone from the village came to the door to announce that a boar had been spotted in the woods, conversation quickly shifted from a mockery of the royal castle’s ordinary life to the question of a boar hunt.
“If the weather’s clear by tomorrow,” said the duchess, “we can start first thing in the morning. What do you say, Wizard?” addressing me. “Do you know some weather spells to make sure it’s a good day for boar hunting?”
I had never seen a live boar and knew that I would normally have been very interested; now I just wished I had some ideas of how to proceed at home. How could I try to get the stranger and his evil out of Yurt when I did not know who he was, why he was in the castle, or who of the royal party was working with him?
“The Feast of Fools will be over at sunset!” announced the duchess. It seemed to be over in fact well before then. The young count, the unwounded knights, and the men servants were already checking the duchess’s armory to see what she might have for boar spears.
At the very end of the afternoon, when the icy rain was clearing up even without a weather spell, the duchess’s constable came into the hall and approached me. “A message just came into the pigeon loft,” he said. “I think it’s for you.”
I snatched the tiny rectangle from him and unfolded it carefully, my heart pounding. Would this be the answer to the question of why the stranger had settled himself and his black magic in Yurt?
I had to read the message twice to understand it. “I was delighted to hear from the new Wizard of Yurt. I still remember my years in the kingdom fondly, even though it’s been eighty-two years since I left. Let me wish you a happy New Year.”
The message was from the old wizard’s last apprentice. He had apparently spent his entire life in the count’s castle where he had taken up his first post. If he was a hundred and fifty miles away, sending me messages, he could not possibly also be sitting in the cellars of the empty royal castle.
I was back where I had started from. If the stranger was not an apprentice wizard gone evil, who was he, and who in Yurt had invited him in?