The Beggar of Josseah (A Tale of Tarot #4, As Written by The Fool)

The Hermit’s name was Sangaroa. For many days he traveled on roads flattened by oxen-pulled carts or on trails not even hunters in their forest dens knew existed. He used a sturdy stick to support his unsteady and gaunt frame, and he tucked himself warm and dry with rags he could pick up along the way.

But one night in his travels through the land, rainfall lathered the path. The Hermit sought for shelter but found none save for the village of Josseah. Lights glowed from windows. Silhouettes of families and friends darted within warm homes. Hurriedly the Hermit sped. Now came the lightning and its slow companion, thunder. Now poured the rain even harder.

Soaked and sullen, the Hermit knocked on the first door he reached. One of the many farmers of Josseah saw the filthy figure and recoiled at the Hermit’s crooked back, gnarled fingers, and locks crawling with lice within a hideous face. The Hermit begged the farmer for food and shelter, but the farmer, afraid that the Hermit might harm his sons and daughters and wife, shooed the Hermit out of his farm and locked his doors tight.

The Hermit knocked on the second door he reached. The baker of Josseah listened to the Hermit begging for food and shelter, and fearful that his bread would be befouled by the beggar, he also refused the Hermit’s request and locked his doors tight.

The Hermit knocked on the third door he reached. The blacksmith of Josseah was also appalled by the Hermit’s features. Again the Hermit begged the blacksmith for food and shelter, and this time the blacksmith wanted to know what the Hermit offered in exchange.

“A pittance of promises and a bag full of wind,” said the Hermit with a grin filled with yellow and black teeth.

The blacksmith refused the Hermit’s request and locked his doors tight.

Now the Hermit moved to a fourth door, and it was the priest of Josseah who listened to the Hermit begging. The priest, far from being a pious and compassionate man, was concerned that the Hermit might ransack the Temple of the Moon.

“Never!” the Hermit cried in a shrill voice of a rat. “The Moon’s silver plates and candles and spoons, she can keep. For that which brightens the night tarnishes, and silver fades to moondust most of all. And I’m allergic to moondust. My nose runs as fast as sunlight when I inhale a whiff of the Moon’s dandruff.”

The priest sealed the Temple gates shut.

Far from dismayed by the townsfolk’s neglect, the Hermit continued to roam around Josseah. To the mayor of Josseah’s house, the Hermit knocked. And the door slammed shut at the Hermit’s first few words.

To the constable of Josseah, the Hermit knocked. And the door was bolted and shut.

To the seamstress, the butcher, the musician, the Hermit knocked thrice, and thrice he was rejected by the townsfolk. To any house with a door where hearths warmed away the chill of night’s storm. Even to hovels and holes where the one truly poor person in town frequented.

He was driven out.

Finally, he arrived at the last house of Josseah: the home of the town’s physician. When the physician opened the door and took a good look at the Hermit, he thought the Hermit was like any ordinary beggar out in the cold downpour. Even when the Hermit spoke in his strange way of speaking for food and shelter, the physician thought nothing untoward. Certainly, he was revolted by the Hermit’s appearance and the odor of drenched garbage and offal exuding from the man. But because the physician took an oath to care for the needy and the sick, he permitted the Hermit to enter his home. He gave the Hermit food from his kitchen and wrapped the Hermit in dry towels to stave off the cold and wet.

“Tell me, sir,” asked the physician, “what is your name?”

“Name? What a strange man you are,” said the Hermit. “No one ever asks my name. And if they ever should ask, they forget it. What are you, exactly?”

“I am a doctor. You may call me Herred. And yourself?”

“Call me what others have called me: Shoo! Off with you! Begone! Rat! Scum! Keep walking! Stay out!” He giggled. But in the end, he told the physician his true name, and that only his family ever called him by such a name.

“Ah, you have a family?” prompted Herred the physician.

“Sometimes I wish I didn’t. Only priests and fools believe the kind of trouble we cause the world. But such troubles have given you a noble job.”

Herred was amused by the Hermit. The beggar certainly had loose screws, but such unhinged mannerisms belied a wry and cunning intellect.

“Where do you come from, and where are you heading?”

“From nowhere to nowhere, Doctor Herred.”

“Not a very precise course.”

“On the contrary, it is the only course. After all, life comes from nowhere and goes nowhere.”

Herred chuckled. “Technically, you are right. But for clarification, what I meant was where you literally come from and your destination, rather than a philosophical course.”

“Good of you to clarify, Herred. Yes, I came from the mountain village of Shimrod west of here, and I intend to head out into the city of Donusalem to continue my trade.”

“Your trade, being?”

“Begging, naturally. I beg and I plead and I scrounge and scrape. I eke the ‘eeks!’ out of every passerby who passes my wayward way.”

“I don’t mean to be impudent, but the way we have been conversing makes me believe you are no simple beggar.”

“And you, a doctor, have a doctorate on beggary?”

“I’m afraid not.” Herred stifled a yawn. “It is late. You can rest in one of the patients’ rooms.”

“Are you bored here, doctor?” the Hermit asked suddenly.

“Sometimes.”

“Would you give up your peace for action?”

Herred shook his head.

“Don’t you worry, Doctor Herred,” said the Hermit with a toothy grin. “You’ll be working harder than ever before soon enough.”

The Hermit, however thankful he was for the physician’s generous sanctum, was not so courteous to his courteous host. At the dead of night while the physician slept off the storm, the Hermit stole away from one of the patients’ beds and pillaged the kitchen of all its contents. He ate all the edibles, the perishables, and the uneatable from the garbage. When Herred awoke, he found his guest snoring on a bed of detritus in his wracked kitchen.

Herred shook the Hermit awake. “If you were still hungry, you should have told me.”

“You are not… angry?” the Hermit frowned.

“Well, I certainly am upset. But I can always fix the kitchen, and I am grateful to the Moon you didn’t steal off into the night with my equipment or medical tools.”

“I wouldn’t want to get in on the Moon’s bad side, anyway. It’s always so dark from there. But here, it’s bright and warm.”

“I take you will be going?”

“Going? Whatever for?”

“To the city. You said so yourself.”

“I go where I must beg. And when I stop begging is the day that I have found a place where I need not beg. This is such a place. I’m home!”

The Hermit retreated to the patients’ ward and slept again. Herred argued to the Hermit that Josseah was not his home, and the infirmary was far from being a landlord’s apartment complex for the likes of the Hermit to squatter. But the Hermit would not budge. Sighing, Herred cleaned up his kitchen and went to the market to replenish his lost goods. He contemplated going to the constable and forcefully evict the Hermit. But he was sympathetic to the Hermit’s delirium. Most of all, he was curious about the man—the beggar was more than he seemed.

When he returned to his infirmary, he found the Hermit injecting himself with all sorts of medicine. Now the physician was angry! He stormed at the Hermit and carefully took the needles out of the beggar’s pallid skin, then berated the Hermit. The Hermit only smiled at the physician like a man who was so far under he could scarcely see shapes and lights, or who saw the wrong shapes and lights.

“You are a danger to yourself and to others!” Herred exclaimed. “You could have killed yourself!”

“Kill myself? Yes, that is my only capacity in life. After all, it is all I have. My life.”

“I’m sorry, but you cannot stay here.”

“It is because I am useless? Because I have no worth to Josseah? Well, in that case!” To which the Hermit leapt out of the bed, spontaneously sober in spite of the drugs in his body, and he scampered out of the physician’s infirmary faster than Herred could say, “Wait!”

The Hermit swirled like cloth in the breeze all over Josseah. He busied himself with sweeping the streets, scrubbing the roofs, washing windows, and watering garden plants. The townsfolk were shocked by the little begrimed beggar who was working harder than a child constantly reminded to do their daily chores. The Hermit plucked vegetables from the fields, hunted for game in the nearby forests, cooked meals for everyone, and arranged books in the library. He did these tasks freely and without complaint.

“He destroyed my crops!”

“He dirtied my house!”

“The books are all in the wrong place!”

“This meat is ruined! Ruined!”

“Where did he put today’s reports?!”

“The Temple of the Moon has been blasphemed!”

“He’s sleeping on my spot!” This one was from the legitimate beggar of Josseah who pointed at the sleeping form of the Hermit.

The mayor and the people called upon the constable to detain the troublemaking beggar. But as the constable was about to apprehend the Hermit, the physician Herred stopped the arrest. He explained to the constable and the people that the Hermit’s actions were not out of malice or tomfoolery, but rather the beggar was afflicted with a mental illness.

Respecting the doctor’s decision, the constable escorted the Hermit back to Herred’s infirmary, where the Hermit was strapped to a bed and giving medication to soothe the Hermit’s temper.

“All I have done was contribute to the community,” grumbled the Hermit. “Isn’t that how outsiders become part of a society? By proving their usefulness? By selling themselves as slaves and serfs?”

“You must understand that you caused a mess in Josseah,” said Herred. “What you did wasn’t good labor, it was chaos.”

“The Fool causes chaos. The Hanged Man brings evil and the Devil punishes the wicked. And I… I don’t do anything.”

“If you want to belong, why not go to your family? You said you had one. Unless…”

“They are not dead, Doctor Herred. Death cannot kill her own siblings.”

“I do not understand.”

“That is why you let me into your home, isn’t it? To understand me? To know why this beggar, this stranger, speaks so eloquently, so unlike most poor unfortunate beggars whose roofs are the harmful sky and whose floors are dirty sidewalks? You and I are quite alike in this capacity, Doctor Herred. We seek to know the unknowable. And the mind, oh the mind, is ever a mystery even among the Arcanas.” The Hermit was silent. “Do you think Josseah can ever accept a madman like me?”

“If rehabilitated, yes.”

“Rehabilitated… Hmm… Do you think a man can become a dog?”

“I do not understand.”

“Don’t you? You asked me to be trained. To be tamed.”

“That’s not what I meant—”

“Of course not. None of this is your fault. It’s just plain old me. None of it will be your fault no matter what you think or what your neighbors say.”

“What are you talking about?”

But the Hermit was fast asleep.

He was still sedated and strapped to a patient’s bed when night fell on Josseah. The physician wrote on his journal about the Hermit. He believed that with proper care and attention, the Hermit could be healed.

Herred’s sleep was awakened by screams. Fists pounded on his door, and he sprinted to the infirmary’s entrance and found people covered in soot and ash, coughing and choking for help. He looked past the ashen people and saw half of Josseah in flames. Sparks of fire jumped from one building to another, and the townsfolk quickly vacated out of their burning homes. The constable and other able individuals led them to the physician’s infirmary as it was the farthest away from the fires.

Herred treated the town baker, the farmers, the blacksmith, the priest. He inspected the wounds and gently washed burnt skin before applying cool ointment. Apparently, no one had perished in the fires.

Still, the flames leapt and darted and stole into other buildings in Josseah. The townsfolk rallied to quench the fire with buckets and pales of water from the town’s wells. Yet whenever they splashed water on the flames, it did not douse them, and instead the inferno grew brighter and hotter and hungrier than before. Herred, a scrutinous man, noticed this strange occurrence and quickly warned the people to stop throwing water into the fire, for it seemed the water was only strengthening the flames more.

And as Herred was hurrying through Josseah to lead survivors back to the infirmary, he spotted a ragged figure, dirty clothes unburnt, hobbling towards unburnt structures and setting them aflame with a blazoning brand.

Herred shouted at the Hermit, but his words were snatched by the roaring inferno. Covering his mouth and nose with a wet towel, the physician prioritized Josseah’s townspeople and shepherded them to the infirmary. He realized then that the infirmary was the only building untouched by the fire. He swerved when people pointed at a freshly scorched house and spotted the Hermit wobble and saunter towards them.

The constable brandished a baton and swung at the Hermit. The beggar crumpled; the burning brand fell from his grip. He lay prostate and moaning as the constable bludgeoned him much to the townsfolk’s merriment.

“Stop!” shouted the physician. Herred shoved the constable aside and knelt down to the Hermit. “Are you all right?”

“Maybe one day I will be all right,” the Hermit mumbled. Herred inspected the wounds on the Hermit’s body and, to his astonishment, saw that the beggar’s scars and welts were not oozing red blood, but golden blood. More than this, the physician and all the people of Josseah watched the Hermit stand up like nothing had happened.

“There is a saying among the Medjay of Ptomophis,” said the Hermit. “An outcast will burn a village to feel its warmth.” The Hermit looked at the flames all over Josseah.

“Is that why you’ve destroyed Josseah?” Herred said softly. “Because we shunned you?”

“Hmm? Oh, no. I became insane for a moment. See, I thought I was in a forest, so I set what I thought were camping fires to ward off the night and its monsters. But it was me all along, wasn’t it? I’m sorry. Do you know what this is?” He produced a vial of orange oil from his many pouches. “Got it from Ptomophis in exchange for three rats’ trails. Fires made from this cannot be extinguished by water, instead it grows stronger. Useful chemistry, isn’t it? Maybe I should have taught you how to make this stuff, but then you’d burn yourselves and others out of greed.”

“Are you going to kill us?” asked Herred.

“Kill you? No. I don’t kill my subjects. My subjects have the only right to kill themselves.”

“Your subjects?”

“You must recognize me, Doctor Herred.”

“You… You are an Arcana,” Herred knew from the Hermit’s golden blood. “The Hermit.”

“The way-walker. The god of the poor. I lord over a kingdom made of rubble and rags. I wear a crown knit by lice and swing a stick for a scepter. I burnt your village because I didn’t want to. It was an accident. But my creation of the poor was also an accident. You were all correct to shun and fear me when I knocked on your doors, and you were all wrong to shun and fear me when I tried to be your friend. But you are all poor now… except for you, doctor. Whereas everyone else only have their lives as their mortal possessions, you still have a few things the poor covet. Do you want to be poor, too?”

“No.”

“No one wants to be poor. I didn’t want to be poor. But circumstances—made by us, made by others—make us beggars. What’s my name?”

“What?”

“If you can tell me my name, I’ll not burn your house down.”

Herred stood pensively, then panicked when the Hermit added, “You have ten seconds. Ten, nine, eight…”

For reasons he did not understand, Herred could not instantly recall the Hermit’s true name.

“Seven, six, five…”

Sa… Sagga… Saggroda…?

“Four, three…”

Sang… Sangar…?

“Two, one—”

“Sangaroa!”

The Hermit looked up at the physician. “Are you sure?”

“Y-yes.”

“You don’t sound sure.”

“Sangaroa,” more confidently.

Then the Hermit grinned. “You did it! A man who has confidence in himself is richer than a fearful king. But you, Herred, are greater than most kings I know, because you remember my real name. I’m sorry for your houses,” he said to the townsfolk of Josseah, who cowered away from the Hermit. “For recompense.” And he tossed them an empty bag. “It’s a bag full of wind, and I leave you all with a pittance of promises. I promise not to burn Josseah a second time. I promise Herred here will keep you all alive and well. And I promise not to eat anymore hairy caterpillars!”

The Hermit took his walking stick and struck the trail, and Herred and his neighbors watched the Hermit vanish far and away from the burning village of Josseah.