Fool School

by James Comins

  The bathing coliseum, I learn, is part of the Fool School only insofar as nobody else in the Christian city goes near it. We're led a distance from the temple, following cheerful Nuncle and his drum.

  Here, then, is the Fool School proper. It's a sight I'd never have thought to imagine, but it's deceptive. At a rocky prominence not too far from the bathing building, a tiny castle has been built in the old Roman style, a single circular stone keep on top of the crag. By itself, it wouldn't be much. Only, as you enter the stark doors, as I and Malcolm and Nuncle and the finally-split cart are doing now, you find a stairwell going down, and it hits you right away: the prominence is hollow, a hollow mountain, and we descend into it, leaving the cart up top for now, and Nuncle speaks about the building.

  "Now, what you see around you is what's left of the old Bath prison system."

  "Prison?" exclaims Malcolm.

  "Good," says Nuncle, "that's the correct response. Here, sit on the step and I'll tell you."

  Uncertainly I sit on the angled stone of the spiral staircase, with Malcolm beside me. Nuncle climbs to a step above us, and we turn and look over our shoulders at him. His fists meet his hips, a conqueror.

  "And now? You are both bastards," Nuncle says in an exaggerated voice, and kicks us with his squishy plush toes.

  Malcolm rises, anger cresting inside him, I can tell. His hand flies to the handle of his good knife, but my hand encloses his and he leaves his knife sheathed.

  Nuncle laughs and claps and pirouettes and shuffles his feet. "I am higher than you," he exclaims, "and I have insulted you. What will you do now? I am your looorrrd and master. I am above you in rank! I am above you in power! I am above you on the stairs of life! And I have insulted you."

  Malcolm is wary, a threatened fox.

  "What do you feel, sirrah?" Nuncle says, leaning in, lording over us, crowing.

  "I want to drive a dagger through your chest," Malcolm says, seething. He seems to have taken it quite personally, I'm surprised.

  "And now," says Nuncle, and in a feat of acrobatics he does a quick cartwheel down the stairs to arrive a few steps below us, he screws up his face, which is lined with age with flat-looking blue eyes and a burst of graying brown hair under his red liripipe hat, screws it up to look like he's cringing and weeping at our feet, a whipped hound.

  "And now," he says, sniveling, "you are both bastards." He makes a big show of weeping, and gives our shoes--my orange curly one and Malcolm's hard brown one--a quick kiss, one two three four. Malcolm recoils at the foul display, and frankly I don't blame him. Nuncle is pathetic and vile now, and I think we both want to kick him down the stairs.

  "Messires," the tambrel teacher whimpers, "what do you feel?"

  His perfect mouth slightly agape, Malcolm stares down at the man. "I feel nothing like I did," he says. "Et's a different feeling. I felt compassion, like I'd done something evil to you, but you were aye revolting, too."

  I nod helpfully. I enjoy letting Malcolm talk for me. I like his voice, his accent.

  Nuncle rises and transforms into an equal, shrugging his head in a circle around his shoulders, becoming easy and relatable with nothing more than a change of face and posture. He sits between us on our step, his elbows on his knees and his chin balanced on a cherubic dais of fingers. "What do you think a king is?" he asks, humming through his cancerous nose as he speaks.

  "A king's a great man," Malcolm says.

  "How does a great man feel if you talk down to him like he were naught but a child?" Nuncle asks.

  "He'd knife you," says Malcolm.

  "And the same words from below, cringing like a dog?" Nuncle says.

  "Less so," I say.

  "You'd nae be stabbed, at least," Malcolm adds. "But he'd despise you."

  "Let me show you one more," Nuncle says, and lopes down to the very bottom of the spiral stairs, standing out of view of where we sit. A faux-nasal voice, pitched high, like a child's, comes: "You're bastards! --bastards --turds --erds!" echoes up and down the long stairwell. Suddenly the dopeyness of above or below fades and it's just a funny thing to hear. "Try to stab me! --me! --ee!" the teacher adds. It's quite funny.

  We descend to him.

  "Thus," Nuncle says, standing at the bottom step, "we work tirelessly to remain at the very bottom of the stairs of life. It's funnier that way. Now fetch your effects and I'll show you around."

  After miles of travail, the cart is in two pieces. We abandon it. I can't quite manage either trunk by myself--I'm reluctant to crack them on every step on the way down, the way I did in Cherbourg, reminded as I am now of my recorder and drum and other jesting equipment inside--so Malcolm puts one of his leather bags on one of my trunks and we take the pair down the long staircase together. Strange that dragging a cart fifty miles on foot feels like a fair day's work, but two minutes of carrying a box down a staircase is too great a task for a whole lifetime's worth of effort. After we hike back up for the second shipment, I'm ready to retire and ascend to an eternity of heaven for my toils here in the staircase. Malcolm has two bags left, and I have one trunk, and I say that we should go in two trips, and I'll even grab his last bag, but Malcolm wants to pile them both on the trunk.

  "Let's get the whole thing over with a' once," he says, and I'm sweating from my face and I'm pissed and weary and I argue, saying it'll be easier on me to take two trips, and I'll do the second one anyway, so what's he worrying so much about? It would be easier on him, too. But Malcolm's also pissy and he's arguing, too, and repeats himself and postures and we are two ferrets--no, two ermines--in a bag. We're nearly at the point in any argument where we start insulting one another's ancestry when Malcolm's hand shoots forward and catches my nose by the fleshy middle bit and hangs on with the last lengths of his fingernails.

  "Arguing with your lord," he whispers, and I find chills down my neck and a strangely alluring heat up the rest of me. "Whose man are you?" he asks, very quietly, and I find myself wanting to move closer to him, I don't even know why.

  "I'm yours," I say and want it to be true.

  "That's et," he whispers, and twists his fingernails. I don't moan in pain, but I sort of go soft and I'm at his side and drop to my knee and Malcolm has a smile that reminds me nastily of the guilty priest's smile in the darkness, and I feel like the devil's got Malcolm, but I like it, and Malcolm looks me in the eye and lets go and the pinching pain subsides and he looks like the evil is ebbing from him and then it looks like something's wrong, for him, and he sits beside me and wraps his arms around my shoulders and he looks like he hates himself and I hold him.

  Here he is at the bottom of the steps. He holds my trunk in two surprisingly strong arms, and I've got his two luggages. From down this great windowless branching hall we hear the surprising sound of Nuncle peeing; I've never heard anybody peeing indoors outside of a great castle with chamberpots. I imagine Nuncle is playing another of his teaching-jokes, but no, he comes up to see us and tells us the midden is indoors here, the Romans made pipes that wash it all away into Brystow Bay. It doesn't even smell. I find myself liking this place. I wonder where everyone else is.

  "Where's everyone else?" I ask suddenly. Bravely.

  "Brystow," Nuncle tells me as we follow him to rooms that he's giving us. "It's St. Bartholemew's Day, which is holiday for students and teachers alike. Mostly teachers, mind; you're the first new students of the season to arrive."

  "How many of us are there, total?" asks Malcolm.

  "Four now before you, and we receive at least four applicants each year," says Nuncle.

  I don't know whether I'm surprised there's so few or so many.

  "Why aren't there more, then?" asks Malcolm. "Ef we're to be here for a full course of--how long es et, to be trained to the nines, by the by?"

  "Five years," says Nuncle. "Why aren't there more students? You'll see why before long. Bottom step." And I shudder involuntarily and there are our beds, two piles of sea pebbles wrapped in burlap. A weight settles in my stomach an
d I am fear incarnate.

  For all that the bathrooms are indoors and there are fine cities nearby, I know in my heart that this is not a good place.

  * * *

  The tour is brief, as there are only two main levels of the Fool School, the circular classrooms in the tower and the fairly extensive set of rooms underground, including a cafeteria I'm absolutely convinced is original and unchanged from Roman times. Looks like an empty room, except for the low stone tables and solid benches. I guess the Romans didn't want furniture fights. Rings are set in the walls, and in my mind I see unbearded men in dark leather smocks and red socks dangling from their wrists along these walls. I wonder, briefly, whether this wasn't some sort of torture chamber rather than a cafeteria. I imagine the Romans might not have let their prisoners congregate in a high-ceilinged stone room together. That's where insurrections come from.

  We'll be seeing a lot of this staircase, I realize. Upstairs to classes, down to luncheon, up for afternoon classes, down to sleep. I ask about it, and Nuncle tells me that the more the body is exercised, the better it is at tumbling and jumping.

  Here's the tumbling room, incidentally. I am relieved at the sight of so many pillows and straw mattresses and woolen blankets, those uniquely Northumbrian blankets so thick and filled with so much lanolin that you can use them as a mattress in the summer and stay as warm as fireside beneath them in the frigid Northern winters. These blankets are undyed, a not-quite-uniform brownish from years of dust and dirt. The original light gray is visible in corners where they overlap. You can't really wash wool that thick without it rotting afterwards.

  The music room is lovely, smelling of good wood and metal stands with actual parchment-paper rolls with old songs drawn on them in the diamond-note style, one long meandering line and diamond notches above or below. Papa never had his songs written down, but he drew me a picture of a staff and taught me how to tell how far above or below middle A a note was. Yet again, I see that Papa was not a worthless Papa. I find this reassuring. I daydream of good French blood as we follow Nuncle to the top floor.

  Angled scroll-tables fill the top floor. The tables have iron tubes at the top and bottom of their wedge-shaped surfaces, so that when you unroll a scroll to read, you can keep them from rolling back up, Nuncle explains.

  A sneeze behind us; Malcolm lets out the girlishest shriek. He and I spin, although Nuncle merely turns his head, and we see a fat titan.

  Jowls like a bloodhound with mumps. A fat lip poking out above a series of chins. A magistrate's robes, dyed true black, blacker by far than the guilty priest's, enfolding a body made of slabs of conjoined whale blubber, the extended belly broad as Creation and sitting on a small table of its own, which is bowed under the weight. An expression of bile and disgust. An hexagonal black hat.

  "How do you do," the wet lips say without enthusiasm.

  "Sir," I say. "Tom. This is Malcolm. God keep you." We are still startled and incoherent.

  Beady eyes fix on us in turn. I get the strong impression that this man doesn't like me.

  "I am the Chamberlain of the Library," the fat man says. "I suffer myself to be addressed as 'Hamlin,' upon the incessant vocalizations of frustration on behalf of everyone but myself saying those four words each time. Thus you will address me as Hamlin. Now. During classes your Classics professor will speak, and during such classes you may be instructed to speak yourself. If you have not been instructed to speak, then don't. I despise the sound. If you desire to peruse our scrolls, you will look up the call number of the scroll you need in our catalogue," he throws a finger in the direction of a wooden case of drawers, "and bring me the number. I shall myself install the thing on the rollers. You shall not touch the parchment, only the roller handles. You shall not utilize our spritz-atomizers to soften the pages. If the pages need spritz-atomization, you shall summon me and I shall spritz-atomize for you. Once you have finished your perusal, I will detach the scroll from its rollers and return the scroll to its place. Filthy boy hands never touch parchment."

  "Only filthy chamberlain hands," adds Nuncle, who seems to have no fear of this pendulous man.

  "I shall have you gutted," mutters Hamlin without a trace of humor. Yet I find myself suppressing a smile. "If you have urgent need of a text, and I am not in my accustomed spot," he pats his chair arm, "then kindly stand there--" he points to the floor beside him--"and wait. If I'm not along in a few minutes, then do continue standing there until news of my passing is announced and my corpse inhumed. Under no circumstances am I to be awoken or disturbed from my food or Roman entreaties."

  "Roman entreaties?" Malcolm says.

  "The john," Nuncle whispers.

  "And there is to be no victual, no quaffage, and--and I shall say this unexpectedly loudly--NO FIRE," he screams from his chest, rising partway out of his chair. "Candles are left at the base of the stairs, outside the music room. Nuncle is not so cautious in his parchment as I am."

  "I also take the time to create copies of all my documents," says Nuncle in a sniffy way, dancing on the tips of his toes.

  "Regrettably I have not the hand," mumbles Hamlin, waving his small chubs in the air.

  "They say inside every chamberlain's hand is a scribe's hand struggling to get out," snips Nuncle.

  "Out, noisemaker," bellows Hamlin, thrusting his chamberlain's hand at the stairwell. "Only reason you're on the floor below mine is the odslud acrobats needed the higher ceiling of the mezzanine. Don't think yourself free of my ire, tumpty-man. You've been warned."

  On the way down, we hear the evening arrival of the other students, the four of them arriving together in a band. Before we meet them, I ask Nuncle, unexpectedly, whether Hamlin was as bilious and hateful as he made himself out to be. Nuncle and Malcolm both turn silently and give me a look I don't like at all. Nuncle's eyes narrow and he doesn't respond.

  I am mistaken, only two of the students in this band are together. The other two voices I heard coming in through the big door are professors--no, again I'm mistaken. They're cooks, you can tell from their slovenly demeanor and filthy clothes. Not only are they cooks, but twins. Nuncle thrusts me and Malcolm toward the band of cloaked merrymakers.

  "Ah, messirs, here is the freshest meat," he says, and introduces us to each of the four.

  Douglas Rhodes, or Dag, is angular, a teenager made of elbows, with an elongated head, like it had been crushed, although it's not as big as Malcolm's. Dag seems slow, but I imagine it might just be because he's English. I look into his large brown eyes and wonder whether his heart's really in jesting. I don't understand why he's here.

  Perille LeBlanc is Provençal, and more than anyone I have ever met, I find myself fearing him and his wiry and insane presence. His hands move of their own accord, flexing and twisting, snakes and adders. His belly is sunken, and he wears a misshapen garment I have never seen on a man, it clings like lingerie and displays his sunken frame in each contour. His hair is a massed, curly nest, and a gap between his teeth flashes with every sinister smile. I hate him and want him as far from me as possible, but he's taken a liking to me and I feel his sickly grasping threads weaving towards me.

  The cooks call themselves Maliface and Wensley, although I feel safe in thinking these names are invented.

  Here is what we say:

  Perille: "Wow, what a surprise, what a nasty surprise, we have two little antelopes caught in our prison house, what should we do with dem? Should dey be strung up on flagpoles like thieves, stealing our exclusive soverignty in this way?"

  Dag: "I know a man, Perry, a man who knows how to brew the blood and bones of boys like these. Have you heard his name, Perry? His name is John Barleycorn."

  I: "My name's Barliwine."

  I don't speak adroitly with strangers.

  Maliface: "Your name's Barliwine, is it? Was your father a drunkard, boy?"

  I don't answer this question.

  Dag: "But no, listen to this. I knew a man John Barleycorn, he stole the blood from boys, he beat
them and cut them and boiled them down, and drank their blood as his wine."

  Wensley: "Din't rhyme, Dag."

  Malcolm: (very quietly): "You have et backwards, Douglas."

  The group of us, having finished descending the staircase to the underground hall, stops as Dag takes Malcolm by the hair cracks his chin against the stone wall, showing teeth full of spittle. "What'd you say, shitboy?"

  Malcolm struggles against Dag's fist, which is grinding his beautiful face back and forth into the stone, but Dag is considerably older than us, probably at least sixteen, and Malcolm has no chance.

  I: "Let him go--" but Perille has put his wormfingers all over my face in a filthy way, then seized my head and thrown it aside. The rest of me follows down to the floor.

  Dag: "What'd you say? I asked you," to Malcolm, who's kicking, defending himself, and failing to get free.

  Malcolm: "Listen! Listen!"

  Dag makes a stupidface and looks around at Perille uncertainly. He pushes Malcolm's face into the wall once more and steps back, still a tor casting a shadow across Malcolm, and folds his arms. "Listen to what?" he asks.

  Malcolm is not held back by pain. I've seen it before. He says: "It's the woman who kills."

  Dag: "What? What woman?"

  Malcolm: "The man John Barleycorn turned to his wife. 'I've a thirst in my belly,' quod he. She brought him clean water in the bowl of her hat, but he spilled it out passionately. 'I've a thirst for summat stronger,' quod he. She went to the swamp and brought him thick stillwater, awash with flies and frogs, and he took a sip thirstily." Perille stifles a giggle. "Yet he threw it away, too. 'I've a thirst for summat stronger still,' quod he. She took a bowl to the privy and pissed in it and brought it to he." Maliface's eyes sparkle unpleasantly. "He took a big swig, but spilled it across the floor. 'Still not strong enough,' quod he. She pricked her thumb until she wept, and let her husband lick her tears, one, two, three. 'Not strong enough yet,' quod he. So at last she fell to rage and woad, threw her husband to the floor, knocked his head off with a scythe, lay his head by the door and struck him and struck him with a flail, took those pieces that were left to the miller. The miller took her coin and ground Barleycorn's bone to dust. She filled barrels with his blood and bone, left them for a year, only just, and brought the miller home to lay in bed and drink the drink she had brewed. And the drink was strong, and the drink was thick, and the drink was all they needed. And in the candlelight, on her old bed together, she and the miller rose a toast: ' 'Tis strong enough at last. And here's to you, John Barleycorn.' "