Fool School

by James Comins

  A squeak. Not a mouse, though. I push on the door, turn the handle, but the door is shut and locked somehow. I push, and the door bows around its lock and hinges. I hear Dag outside the door, chuckling stupidly.

  I am dead. I am dead flesh. Perille will carve my skin off, another pelt for his collection. Nuncle won't stop him.

  I will miss class. This is undoubtedly worse.

  Why am I in Perille's room? I just ducked in because . . .

  I'm not as strategic as I believe.

  "Malcolm!" I hiss. There's no reply.

  "Malcolm!" again.

  Every five seconds for the next hour, I say Malcolm's name, louder and louder. Twenty minutes in I begin slapping the door, then banging it. I find if I slap both hands in a certain rhythm it resonates sonorously, I decide this is most likely to attract help, but it doesn't do anything. Nobody comes. I'm in this strange room with the smell of flowery Provençal perfume and body odor and the wood of the door and the sound of my drumming constant, and I imagine that Perille has been sent to check on me and naturally he notices drumming from the inside of his own room and he unsticks the door, probably Dag has put a wood shiv into the jamb, and Perille is holding a long knife between three fingers like he's about to dip into a fingerbowl at dinner, he tells me to kneel and he makes a quick cut across my forehead, I feel the blade scraping the bone under my foreheadskin, he cuts over my ears like a barber trimming a man's hair, then around the back of my head, my hands are in my lap so he doesn't go for my neck, I feel a curly red shoe braced on my shoulder and with a terrific tug my skullcap separates from my skull, and Perille, wearing his insane smiling face, all krrrrazy, he begins curing my pelt in a bowl full of cow's urine--and--and--

  A second drumming. I stop at once. It's coming from across the hall, I decide. Malcolm's room. Dag has trapped him, too. Now I know how to survive this.

  Some ten minutes after I know Malcolm is also trapped, I am banging on the door when I hear, "That'll do," and a squeak and the door pops open explosively, shuddering. A man I don't know, a rather squat, unimpressive man with a sheriff's black wheel of beard stands there.

  "Dag stuffed me in here," I say immediately, having practiced my alibi for some time. "I was on the way to the bathroom when he grabbed me and put me in here to frame me to look like I was snooping in Perille's room, then he made it so I couldn't open the door!"

  The man flicks a wooden shiv (exactly like the one I imagined) away with a finger and thumb.

  "Yeah, plausible," this new figure says in the voice of a regular man, a man without much juice or human honeysuckle or religion, just a guy, the kind of guy who can probably be found in his garden trying out new rabbit traps on a Wednesday, probably owns a dog and a cat, probably repairs good stone walls just as a hobby. "Look, who are you?" he asks. He legitimately doesn't know. How pleasant; he wasn't expecting me, I'm not in so much trouble.

  "I'm Tom Motley," I say, and he nods and repeats my name, and I think it's nice, maybe he doesn't make up insulting nicknames for his students. I see that Malcolm's door is open, and I peek in and Malcolm isn't there, and the man says, "C'mon, you're late for class already," and I follow him up the stairs, and ask him his name, and he's Stan. Of course he is. He is utterly a Stan.

  Nuncle is leading a practice of drums, the sort of tabor you hold in one hand and beat with a mallet in the other, a single-headed drum, and he is so consumed by the joy of drumming and hearing his students drum that he doesn't notice me or Stan, his face is a mask of pleasure, he hears every drumbeat without commenting, the sound is an approaching army, tum tum ta-tum tum, tum tum ta-tum, and I pull a chair a sit down but Stan taps me on the shoulder and hands me a tabor and mallet, and hesitantly I join in, and of course I've screwed it up, I have no rhythm, and Nuncle has become aware of the little drummer boy who couldn't drum, I have exploded his perfect rhythm, and I see Malcolm is here, although Dag is not, Malcolm looks awful, his face is draped by a wet towel, with one swollen eye peeking out.

  Here's angry Nuncle.

  "The hell were you?" he asks.

  "Didn't Malcolm say?" I say quietly.

  "Malcolm was in his sickbed," Nuncle snaps. "What's your excuse?"

  "Dag stuffed me into Perille's room and jammed the door shut," I say quickly.

  "Dag," Nuncle snarls, "is in Brystow, getting sewn up. I hardly see how he 'jammed the door shut' on you. I expected better of you. Begin again and follow the beat this time."

  Apparently there are no punishments at the Fool School save embarrassment. Well, that and Ab'ly's cane. I bang the drum. Over time I find the tempo and overcome my lack of rhythm. It's a Navarran quality, rhythm, not a French one. It's two hours of the same beat, non-stop, and I secretly wonder what the point of it all is.

  The drumming ceases. Nuncle ushers Stan to the front of the room. He clears his throat.

  "So I understand we have two new students. I'll say my usual."

  Nuncle nods at him.

  "Keep with it," says Stan in his flat voice, through his stormcloud of beard. "It's worth it, it really is. It's a great education. Don't give up."

  Stan is not an inspiring speaker, but I suppose it was well-meant.

  "For those of you who are on your first day, we'll meet back here for the oboe and recorder after an hour and a half for lunch, and after that you'll go upstairs and--have you met Weatherford, Tom?"

  "Is that Hamlin's name?"

  Nuncle shakes his head.

  "Oh, you'll like him," Stan says.

  Nuncle stifles a smile. I find myself afraid again.

  The group files down the stairs. Nuncle stops me by the ear and gestures Malcolm to head downstairs.

  "Listen to me, boy," the headmaster hisses once the other students are gone, shaking his infected nose redly at me. "The surgeons of Brystow have a record of a lad coming in with a deathly wound, do you hear me? It's written down in ledgers, boy, you understand? All it takes--" He snaps his fingers. "Is for me to bring you before the hundredscourt and tell them what I and Abramopouli witnessed. That's it." He draws an imaginary dagger and stabs himself in the side of the neck, the universal gesture for dead. "Gone. Do you take my meaning?"

  I feel the body heat of Stan at my other side, and my eyes rise to meet his. I find myself surprised he hasn't gone to luncheon already. It seems like his sort of thing. He looks down at me with unlit coals for eyes.

  "We'd hate to lose you," he says. "Shame to have you hung for acts of wounding."

  These are not priests. I don't have to do anything they say. But it might be a good idea. The rows of music stands press in on me and the smell of Perille's faint cologne lingers.

  "I pledge not to start fights," I say, hoping I'm audible.

  "Better concern yourself with how your fights end," Nuncle hisses. "Dag's worth another eight gold marks to us, Tomworth, and that's a great many sins pardoned at the traveling fair, you understand, boy? See that Dag pays his next two years' shinies to us, oh wouldn't you?"

  It had not occured to me that we'd need to pay the gold every year. It took Papa a decade to save up four marks. How will I get the money for more school? Another thing to worry about. But--

  They're threatening me. Perhaps I can threaten them, too.

  "Where's the change for Malcolm's mancuses?" I ask. I see Nuncle silently cursing himself that I was awake and remembered, that I hadn't convinced myself I had dreamt it. I always know a dream from reality. In the real world there's always pain in my body, and there is no God in dreams.

  "If we returned the money, he'd only spend it," says Stan.

  "And then he might not have enough to pay for the rest of his schooling. See?"

  Nuncle pokes me in the injured bone under my chest, and I imagine myself passing out, falling backward into the rows of music stands, getting impaled on the wire spindles. In my imagination my fallen body has broken straight through the floor and plummeted through the acrobatics room, end over end, and landed safely onto the wool Northumbrian b
lankets below . . .

  "Better we keep the money, don't you think?" Nuncle says. "I think the surgeons of Brystow would agree, don't you?"

  Yessir, I tell him, and he shoves me toward the stairs. I look back over my shoulder like Orpheus, and I expect to see Eurydice sucked like cream through a clay straw down to Hell, but instead Stan has a sideways smile, red lips, and I believe those red lips will haunt me. In my mind I see the sick depths that are consuming this fat bearded man, a network of evil strands, some devil spider dragging tiny claws over his plain stolid soul, spinning webs, spinning so many webs. A sick man, Stan, I can see it now. Nuncle is Nuncle, but Stan is a squad of devil spiders dressed in the mortarboard-bereted body of an oboe player. How strange this world is. I remember Malcolm speaking of weakness and holes in our hearts, and I begin to see. Stan has a hole in his heart. I stumble down the stairs.

  Luncheon.

  Pottage again, you can smell it from the hall, not a bad smell, but thick. There are crushed soup bones giving the oatmeal and cabbage a little depth. Malcolm rises when I enter; his face is turned away from me under the towel. His French tunic and jacket, embroidered with blue thread, are stained red about the collar from blood, and his knuckles are crusted black and bloody. Turning his face to the firelight--there're no windows down here, not even those glass skylights, I don't know why--he lifts the towel and I lose my breath, a corpse's face greets me, a leper's face, a thousand snakebites. I rush to him and desire to put my hands on his face, as if I could draw the wound out and place it in a jar like a necromancer, but he hands me my pottage and I have forgotten how resilient and strong he is. I want him to lie down immediately, I say so, but he shakes his head and leans into my ear and whispers that we must show our strength and temperance before enemies. He nods at Perille, who is sitting far away from us, actually not paying attention, that girl-looking boy is beside him. Hero leans in between us, I can smell his little-boy smell, he smells like dry grain in a grain tower.

  I sit on the bench, practically on the floor, dip my hands in the water bowl and eat pottage. It tastes like gluey water. Will there be strawberries again? I wonder why Nuncle brought them to us, if he was going to be so angry at me later. Hero pushes between us two, but Malcolm lifts the boy into his lap, then to the other side, so I am beside him instead.

  Perille rises, comes across, closes the breach, and eases himself into the bench opposite us. Perille is at our table. Invader.

  "I had a vision lass night," he begins. His English is worse than mine, very thickly accented. "A castle stood in a storm, beaten by rain. Den da rainclouds split open like a woman and sunlight poured through de crevice onto da castle, and the face of St. Chrissopher came down on four wings, he bore an amulet, and when de amulet touched da castle, the castle rose up into the air and cut through the sky, it entered heaven. What does it mean, do you believe, Milcom?"

  He cannot pronounce Malcolm's name quite right; he's very French, he doesn't care about other people's pride. I'm concerned that this Perille desires our thoughts. Does he know I was in his room? He threw me onto my face last night; will I forgive him his sin? Is this a sour game?

  Despite his misgivings, Malcolm tries to take Perille seriously. "St. Christopher is the patron saint of travel," he says. "Four wings could be the four directions--can you describe the wings?"

  Perille says, "Close togedder, straight up, like a dragonfly's."

  "A dragonfly is the child of a dragon and a bird," Malcolm says knowledgeably. "Something about flight, flight to the Lord?" He thinks about this, then shakes his head. "England's the land of dragons, and dragons live in caves. Something about flight into a cave, then?"

  Hero pipes up and says: "Glamorgan has caves."

  I say that many places have caves. Hero looks down, like I've spit into his eye, and I wish I hadn't spoken. It didn't benefit anyone.

  "The rain," says Malcolm, "that could be key. Now the rain is beating down on the castle--could the Fool School be the castle?--and now the rain has stopped. What changed in between, Perille?" I take pride that Malcolm bothers to pronounce the Provençal's name correctly.

  "Nothing," says Perille, "nothing changed. Only de arrival of St. Chrissopher."

  "Then it is with the beginning of a journey that you--or perhaps the school--makes its journey up to heaven," says Malcolm.

  "There's an annual fair outside Brystow," says Perille. "I've been twice, it's wild with dancing."

  "Glamorgan has a fair," mutters Hero.

  "And Glamorgan has a fair," Malcolm repeats obligingly. "Perhaps you should ask to visit the Glamorganshire Fair. It's not so far from here, it's on Brystow Channel as well."

  "Take a boat," I add, because this is just so useful for everyone to hear someone say aloud. I hate myself. I should never speak. I hide under my face.

  Unceremoniously Perille stands and returns to his own table. The boy-girl stands and together they leave the lunch area.

  The fire is low, and Maliface saunters out of a back room, his clothing and forearms sodden with oatmeal and scalding water. From a wall of split logs he takes firewood and fills out the fire. Repeatedly his eyes curl around their corners to peer at me, and it strikes me all of a sudden that he was the one who jammed the door shut. Of course he was. He and Dag must be close. I visualize a pellet of poison hidden in my pottage, its killing fumes seeping into my food, poisoning my innards or my breath, but I realize Nuncle would never stand for dead students, I've seen that already today. Avaritia vincit omnia.

  Stan and Nuncle wait for us in the music room. Neither displays any sign that I'm in any more trouble. They've said their piece. The music room retains an aura of threat, however. Stan asks whether Malcolm and I have shawm oboes. I do, not a good one like my good recorder, it's a sixpence oboe with no mechanisms, just finger-holes, I run down to get it downstairs, because of course I've neglected to bring it with me, and this time I don't make sly detours, I go straight down and come back with my oboe case. As I come up the stairs I hear a regular clunking, like stone on stone, like an old woman working a sticky quern, but it's Ab'ly, or Abramopouli I guess I heard Nuncle call him, standing in his foreign blouses and throwing the juggling stones against the wall of the acrobatics room. I stand briefly in the doorway, and I see that he's hung a large piece of white flint on the wall and is chucking the rocks at the flint sheet. Pieces break off the balls at each impact, sparking, and the stones are increasingly round. Soon all three will be perfect spheres. Sharp eyes meet mine and I hurry up the stairs.

  My Malcolm is sucking on reeds, Nuncle has a whittling knife and dried cattails and has arranged a pile of four or five fresh flat oboe reeds. I imagine him slipping with the whittling knife and slicing that growth off the end of his nose. I wish he'd do it.

  Nuncle looks up from his whittling and flicks two reeds at me. I don't catch them both, only one, and the other falls to the floor, where it will make my cheap oboe taste like dust for the day. I bend down and pick it up, then assemble it into the oboe's mouthpiece. I see that my oboe has a split halfway down. It won't last much longer. Malcolm has a modern oboe with levers to hold down unused holes, so you don't have to squeeze all your fingers down all the time.

  Nuncle leaves his snippings and comes over and looks up and down my shawm oboe. "Hardly acacia wood," he hisses through disapproving teeth. He is a snake, I decide; slippery. Devilish. I desire to say that it wasn't my oboe that's acacia, this is just pine and has a split, it's my recorder that's good, but I am a rat in the eyes of this snake, and I am silent.

  Stan comes to the front of the class, standing like a pile of rejected bricks, his legs wide-set beyond the width of his shoulders, his knees clutched inward, and he speaks:

  "There are four styles of shawming. I'll describe them. In high heraldry, you strive to make as much noise as possible." With his eyes bent straight up, facing Hamlin's library of scrolls, Stan huffs a big breath and makes a sound that, if you hadn't seen him blowing through a wooden oboe, you'd swear cam
e out of a silver trumpet, announcing the arrival of King Henri and his entourage. I prefer to imagine that Hamlin rose somewhat out of his chair before finding himself caught on his belly table. The thought gives me some pleasure.

  "The second style is called waitry," and I know this word vaguely, it's an English practice, a group of London nightwatch guards once started carrying instruments to play when there was no call for policing, I'm told parts of London are very safe, and the practice of watchmen forming musical performance troupes caught on around England. It's not so popular in France, where we expect our public men to dedicate themselves to their responsibilities; these English are frivolous in our eyes. Stan says words that confirm this, then says: "In waitry you've got to blend your sound into that of the flute and drum. Nuncle, would you?"

  Nuncle plays a staccato tambrel beat of some intricacy, and Stan's shawm begins weaving into the beat, then across the beat. My estimation of him, despite his spiderousness, is rising. I begin to see why Stan's been elected to teach the instrument.

  "The third style of shawming is solo minstrelsy, the entertainer in court. Of course, many times you'll have several musicians in a court, and then you'll incorporate waitry style into your minstreling. Other times you'll be alone, but you'll always need to entertain, with or without accompaniment." Stan plays "Bird on a Bough," which is absolutely the lowest common denominator of music, it's hard to get away from in the jesting business. Papa always refused to play it, he said it was beneath him. While Stan plays it fine, I believe Stan isn't as much a solo entertainer as he is a former member of a wait. Nuncle teaches the recorder, I remember, and I hope he's more talented at teaching solo performance, which, insofar as I care about music at all, is what I hope to do. No reliance on other people. Other people can never be trusted.

  "Now," says Stan, "we'll start work on tone, for you two. Eadmun, Weir, follow along. Perille, feel free to go downstairs and practice your piece for the fair."