It wasn’t them. It was me. Through the donning of a mask, I had made myself into the living equivalent of uncharted territory, a thing that was meant to be explored and claimed. As habit would ensure, they had stamped their name across my forehead without knowing anything about me. So like a child grown to adolescence, it was only natural for me to question the ways of being that had been prescribed to me. When I left, there was no ill will. It wasn’t a grand gesture of spite or trying to teach them a lesson. I simply gathered my meager belongings into a sack and stole away in the early hours of the morning without any intent of returning to that first town that had called me Jester.
It was absurd to miss them. By the time the sun was fully in the sky, and the marketeers would be just starting to lay out their wares in the market square, and the early risers emerging with baskets on their arm and coins jangling in their pouches, and the children trundling off to school with confused glances at my empty bench-- by the time most clocks would be striking seven or eight, that little mountain village was far behind me. I even stopped and looked back to see if I might discern a speck amidst the scenery. But the treeline was thick, and the path arced in such a way that it disappeared behind a hill and never appeared again.
It occurred to me then that I was quite alone. Around me, the trees rustled their leaves and something small dashed through a bush not so very far away. The sunlight alternated with shadows in strange ways, so different from the light and dark that played over the village road. The world was composed of greens and browns and greys, a calm and soothing palette. My purples and golds screamed for attention in comparison. The bright colors of my regalia stood out as much there as my enigmatic bearing stood out back home, and I felt my shoulders sloping beneath the weight of self-awareness.
“Having second thoughts?”
I startled in an unflattering way. My hands flung up into the air, and I whipped around fast enough to briefly tangle in my own capelet. It was a boy.
He bit back a timid smile at my reaction as he slunk from the tree behind which he had been hiding. I recognized him from the village --dusty ill-cropped hair, ever-shuffling feet, and eyes that never quite looked higher than any other person’s nose. His stature and angular limbs were just beginning to tilt from boyhood to manhood.
“Sorry,” was the next thing he said to me. “I saw you leaving and wanted to come.”
Me? I pressed my hands to my chest and tilted my head at him, but the boy seemed oblivious to the folly of such an urge --following a masked entity named “Jester” away from the village in the dark hours of the morning.
The boy tried for a feeble grin --directed at my chin-- and shuffled from one foot to the other. “Yeah...” he said, although I’m sure he knew not what he was agreeing to. He dug his toe into the ground. “Can I come with you?”
I stared at him from the depths of my mask, hands frozen over my chest as if attempting to guard my heart from the confusion presently assaulting it. The request was wholly unexpected. It was akin to the abruptness of being invited to a family’s dinner, but somehow felt the more intimate for the setting and isolation. Here, he was not inviting me to his home, but asking to abscond with me from his home. He was asking, in effect, for me to steal him away like some Pied Piper.
Again I looked back along the road down which I --and apparently he also-- had come. I swept my hands back in the direction of the village and then pointed at it. It was a question that needed answering. Shouldn’t he be back at home?
He followed the movement, turned and considered the road as he rocked his weight from one foot to the other. “I want to travel,” he explained. “Wanna see stuff. You could...You could take me on as an apprentice or something?”
An apprentice. The very idea of it brought with it many implications, and I crossed my wrists in a decided X before he had even finished speaking. While he clearly had marked abilities in the realm of sneaking and going unnoticed, he was clearly ill-prepared to make this trek in many other respects. He had friends who would wonder after him. An education to complete. A void to fill at the dinner table. So I shook my head adamantly and pointed back up the path.
The poor child clasped his hands and beseeched me as if I held his very life in my hands. “Please! I’ll be good. I won’t make you take off your mask or anything. I just want to come with you!”
Persistence was nothing new to me. The people back in town had been adamant about getting words out of me many times. My solution was simple: I gave a dismissive flick of the hands, turned, and marched onward down the path.
He followed me.
I made it approximately seven steps before coming to a halt and turning to look over my shoulder at him.
He gave me a shy smile and turned his palms forward in an apologetic shrug.
I heaved a deep shoulder-sagging sigh as I faced him again. Setting my heels shoulder-width apart, squaring my shoulders, I effectively made myself into as much of a roadblock as I could manage before stabbing a finger back in the direction we had come. Go.
The boy looked. The boy shuffled his feet and rubbed at the back of his wrist. “I-I could learn to trade a-a-and help you get food and supplies? I could translate for you. S-since you don’t talk.”
Evidently this was a new brand of persistence. Keeping my arm outstretched in the direction he ought to go, I shook my head once: no.
Then, finally, his posture deflated. He scuffed a foot and nodded woefully. “Alright,” he mumbled. “I’m sorry for bothering you.”
The poor child looked so defeated as he stood there in the path, but I knew it was the best option for both of us. Children are keen, and I could see that he still held a note of that intelligence in his heart, but it simply would not do to have him riding on my coattails wherever I went. And he, too, thought to know me by name.
Feeling a small bit reassured by my victory, I turned a hand at the air until he started to shuffle his way back up the path, then I turned to resume my own trek deeper into the woods. I took one step --one single, happily oblivious step-- before that peculiar sixth sense that makes the hair stand on-end had me pausing to glance around.
The boy froze in the act of hiding behind a tree and stared at me.
There was something in me that was fascinated by his determination to travel with me. It was that youthful need to rebel which drove him to such lengths. That innate urge to escape the nest and fly to some other, supposedly greater, land. It was naive, and it was inspiring. A fire yet untamed.
But I ignored that instinct, that temptation. Without flinching away or even pointing this time, I drew myself upward and marched forward, grabbed the boy by his wrist, and hauled him back up the path, like it or not. His heels scrabbled at the dirt as he tried to put up a fight.
“Please! Please! I won’t hurt you! I won’t take your mask! Please let me come! Please!”
But I just hung onto his wrist and kept walking.
His pleas fell to sulking with disappointing speed. He quit his tugging and just trudged along behind me at full-arm’s length. He was just enough of a deadweight that I knew better than to let him go: He’d run. He’d hide. He’d follow me again.
* * * * *
The sun was high in the sky by the time we made it back to the village. I could hear the busy clamor of the market square even from several lanes down, and there were people walking to and fro along the street. I got a couple calls of “Hi, Jester!” and one person was so optimistic as to ask, “Where ya goin, Jester?” But I just kept marching straight onward until we reached the seventh house inward --the second house on the right past the intersection.
I thumped my fist on the door three times and then stepped back to pull the boy in front of me.
When the door opened, a gruff mid-aged man with a greying beard and disapproving eyes squinted out at us. The eyes widened. “Jester..!” The eyes dropped. “...Hunter?”
The boy bowed his head until I gave his shoulder a push and pointed at the man. He shuffled from foot to foot and stared at his feet. “I got...got lost walking out in the woods. Jester found me’n showed me the way back.”
Storm clouds darkened the older man’s face --enough that even his beard seemed to get some of its color back. His grip on the doorpost made the wood creak. “What were you doing out in the woods enough to get yourself lost all on your own?”
Hunter’s head bowed further. He glanced back at me, but I just took a step back to disown myself from his plight. I knew his father well enough to know that his temper wouldn’t come to any harm. It was a protective anger. A loving anger. An anger of which I wouldn’t be capable, and another reason the boy was better off there than out in the great wild with me.
When night fell, I left the village a second time. I walked along in darkness for some time before settling against a tree to one side of the path. When morning came, I started down the path once more until the village was well out of sight, and then beyond. This time I knew that I was alone.
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