Fool School

by James Comins

  Perille rises and descends the staircase. In moments we hear an astonishing flurry of notes, I've never heard the like, it's thousands of notes together, up and down scales and notes between scales, it paints pictures, it's raw humanity, it becomes a starlit night in my mind.

  "Nay, wait," says Malcolm. "You said there were four styles."

  "Yeah," says Stan, smiling a know-it-all's smile. "There's also vagina music. You'll figure it out on your own."

  Malcolm blinks. "You mean like . . . romantic music?" he asks.

  "Call it whatever you want. I'm not scared of calling it what I do with it. Now, tone. Begin playing, you two."

  We spend an hour and a half listening to Malcolm squeak. He's far from a natural at music, but then, so am I. I don't begrudge him his inexperience. Hero, or Eadmun or Weir--I'm not sure which is his name, but I like Hero best--is able to play a scale, but he's had a year to practice. Me, I've been playing mostly recorder, but sometimes oboe, I've practiced maybe once a month when I need a diversion, I can make nice sounds so long as I squeeze shut the crack in the oboe. Papa wanted me to concentrate on recorder, I don't know why.

  After some length of oboe practice, Nuncle intercedes, and Stan instantly gets absorbed by a small chair in the back of the room. It's like he was never there. Nuncle has inhaled all power in the room, subsumed the oboe lesson into his august wiry presence. Now we will practice the recorder, only we're all exhausted, just fashed, Hero's head sags on his thin neck and this other Eadmun or Weir person is slumped over a music stand, an elbow propped, squashing his or her cheek on a palm. Small hands. A girl, I'm certain.

  Nuncle sees our misery. Nuncle is wise. Nuncle asks nothing of us. Nuncle picks his recorder out of its case, lifts the jig to his lips, arranges himself, and plays.

  It's not "Bird on a Bough," that's for sure. I really don't know what it is. I hear pictures, not too different from what I saw when I heard Perille downstairs, only Nuncle's song is very different. I hear love, a tryst, a highly placed man, a night window, a face so beautiful that a thousand men would kill each other for it, a scorned husband, a scurrying of vermin into a--a ship, I realize, she's stealing away with her lover to far away lands, and her husband has summoned an army to take his wife back from the upstart lover. I realize I know the story Nuncle is telling solely through music: it's the Ilium story, the war over the lady Helen, whose face brought a thousand warships to her door. Nuncle tells the first act of the story through music, using all two and a half octaves the recorder provides, sometimes flat-bending the notes into full soprano, other times all the way down to upper baritone, the lowest an English recorder will go. Mine will go several notes lower without squeaking, someday I'll show that to Nuncle and he'll be impressed with me and won't threaten me anymore. As the act of the song closes, Malcolm and I applaud him despite our feelings about him. It was virtuosity.

  "Tomorrow," says Nuncle to the two of us, "bring your recorders after lunch." We nod.

  Hero leads us upstairs, to what I hope is our last class of the day. We don't have candles to leave at the bottom of the steps, but then, it's still clinging to high summer and there's still light out the thin arrowloop windows.

  The smell of vellum and wood together is very nice. I wish Mass smelled this way, without the scent of stinky smoky incense. Above the reclined form of Hamlin, who is a black resting hedgehog in the far end of the room, is a very large crystal lanthorn of a style I'm never seen. It had not been there when Malcolm and I met Hamlin on the tour.

  The lanthorn's surface is like unto a pinecone's, a grid of white spikes layered and layered. I'm not sure whether each spike is manufactured separately or whether a truly master glassblower has done this all at once, created a white pinecone cylinder with an oil lamp built into it. I see the lid has glass tubes for air, rather than simply holes, and I imagine it's been constructed to be fireproof, perhaps even unbreakable. Warm light floods.

  The desks are angled, of gold-colored wood, with the iron scroll-turners nearly blocking one's view of the front table. The seats are hard but sculpted to prevent the legs from falling asleep. The light from the lanthorn comes from the back, it's enough to illuminate the surface, and the desks are angled just enough that there is not much shadow. The professor will be less well lit at the front. Darkness arrives shallowly from the night.

  A procession of scuffy shoe noises rises from the stairwell. This must be the Classics professor. I hope he'll be easy and engaging, being (I assume) the last class of each day.

  A face smooth, pointed like a badger's, no folds around the eyes, lips clenched in consternation, birdlike, ferretlike, cleanshaven and therefore rather womanly. I've known hardly any man without at least an attempt at a beard. Nuncle even has a patch of stubble around his cancer, sixteenish-year-old Perille has a youth's point of hairs on the bottom of the chin and top of the lip, but the Classics professor chooses to shave so close that he--and it is a he, I can spot a woman anywhere--he looks like a newborn in a long black robe. Only the eyes--ah! The eyes. They practically burst from their smooth, sunken sockets, orbs of life and wisdom and--dare I say it--humor. This, this is what I want from a jesting professor, a sparkle of boyishness. Perhaps he remembers what it was like being our age. He's young, I decide, probably not thirty, the youngest professor by far.

  "New ones," says the Classics professor to Malcolm and I. He smiles and lays down a pair of slim bound books of cut parchment on the large desk in front. I look around the library and see only maybe ten books. All the rest are scrolls, of which there are scores.

  Yessir, I say, and hear Hamlin harrumphing behind me. That's right, we're not to speak unless directed to.

  "I'd better teach today, then," says the Classics professor, and I wonder what he normally does. He has a pair of stones in his hand, and I wonder if he'll throw them at me, but instead he lays his two books on a broad desk and uses the stones to prop them open. I see writing on the pages, stopping at the same line on each book. The professor takes five quills from his robe pocket, the feathers are all squished, and he withdraws a straight knife from beneath his robe and pares the quill nibs and divides them, deftly forming reservoirs, he's clearly had practice. Two of the quills are approaching their feather-ends, one is brand new. He withdraws a long phial of powdered red ink--I don't know what kind of ink it is--and a pair of bowls with tall sides and a pig's bladder waterskin and mixes his inks with a few shakes of each, turning powder to liquid, swirling the red liquid by turning the bowls between a thumb and middle finger. He sets the two bowls to either side of the books, lays a short quill beside each bowl, throws the back of his robe over his chair and seats himself. His eyes sparkle.

  "What does a jest do?" he says aloud.

  Something very strange happens now. The pointed face and robe blackness stay perfectly still, but the man's hands rise and take up a quill each and dip into red and begin moving absolutely in unison, writing in the pages of the books. They are each writing the same words, you can tell by the way they follow the same paths. Only, his left hand is bent at the wrist, writing backward, and the right hand writes forwards. No one should have this skill, it must be devilry. But his voice is clear and plain, and his face fair, and I feel off of center and left of right.

  "A jest is a way of telling a story about ourselves," he says, staying perfectly still as he speaks. His hands dip quills, shake in unison, and return to the page. "It's the story, the sequence of cause and effect, that draws our interest. The familiarity. The rise of expectations, and the fulfillment of them--or not. A story that's clearly familiar to us and easy to glean the purpose of is called a parabola, or parable in English. Relatable, brief, meant to clarify a message or make it more immediate. Consider the lilies of the field, that sort of thing. Conversely, a story about foreign lands and strange practices is called allegory. Allegory is a way of highlighting how unusual our life is by contrasting it to another's. Like with a parable, an allegory works best when we can compare it easily with our own li
fe. A well-contrasted allegory is called a satire."

  I know this word well, Papa spoke of it.

  "Here is a satire." His hands lose their rhythm as a page of writing comes to an end, and the professor--whose name I still don't know, or remember, at least--Wendel-something?--reaches down and shakes a very fine sand onto the four open pages, left and right, left and right, then lifts the books and shakes the sand loosely onto the floor.

  "The vizier of the Saracens burst into the Sultan's chambers and knelt and kissed the Sultan's feet. 'My lord, the Christians are attacking,' the vizier says. 'How can this be?' the Sultan replies. 'We're surrounded by miles of uncrossable desert on every side.' 'Sire,' the vizier says, 'they are tunneling under the desert, through the sand.' 'Well then,' says the Sultan, 'dig up the desert, so that they are once again exposed to the harsh Saracen sun.' So the desert was laboriously dug down to the clay beneath the surface, and a hundred tons of sand shipped away to far India. Once the task was complete, the Sultan was astounded to find himself at the point of fifty Christian lances. 'How did you come to cross my miles of uncrossable desert?' the Sultan shrieks. 'We crawled through miles of sand,' says the Christian king. 'How can this be?' says the Sultan. 'I just had all our sand sold to India to prevent just such an invasion.' 'Oh, that's simple,' says the Christian king. 'When we saw that we would be exposed to the elements on our way to Araby, we purchased a hundred tons of sand from far India to give us cover from the hot Saracen sun.' "

  It's funny. I'm enjoying listening to the Classics professor talk. I hope he'll talk the entire time.

  "The most important element of a satire is the immediacy," the professor says, his back framed by the vertical black line that is the open window, a breeze blowing summertime air across the paper, assisting its drying. "A story need not be hilarious to be worth telling, if it rings true, although it always helps to be hilarious. Sometimes it's enough to say something that is perfectly true, but which no one else will dare admit. For example, Hamlin is very fat. He looks like a giant baby."

  We turn to look.

  "I shall spit in your ale," Hamlin states imperiously.

  "And he is holding up his girth with a table," says the Classics professor. "Now, let's add an element of the surreal to our factual statement. Imagine, if you will, such a table with little wheels on the bottom. Suddenly Hamlin can roll himself around, like a big boy."

  We laugh.

  "By amending our exciting new factual statement with a surreal twist, we have created a small jest. But it's not as sharp as it might be. By amending the facts still further, with rhetoric, we add a sharper element. Here, for example, is a rhetorical flourish we might use: antiphrasis, meaning to insult by praising."

  "I will not be insulted. You may, however, praise me," says Hamlin over his nose.

  "Oh Chamberlain of this most esteemed library," says the Classics professor. "What commitment, maintaining a bulk that insures your permanent presence inside your ward! What a catastrophe it would be if a mind that wanders like yours does were accompanied by a body that also wanders."

  Hamlin's piggy eyes scan we students, looking for signs of humor. "What are you goblins looking at?" he demands. I believe I detect an undercurrent of good humor, but I am cautious about letting on that I know.

  With two clunks, a spray of sand falls to the floor, and the professor turns the page again. I almost stand and ask what he's writing, but I have chosen not to, and remain undistinguished in my chair.

  "Now," says the Classics professor, "for the rest of our time this evening, one of you will read aloud from a scroll, and the rest of you will copy. You three--wait, where's the other boy?" the Classics professor says.

  Perille holds up a fist vaguely.

  "Violence. I might have guessed. Well, he'll have to catch up with Sir Tristram et Mme. Ysolde in his spare time. Now. You." He indicates me. "Seat yourself at the desk ahead of me. And Hamlin, if you would?"

  "Shall I mash your food for you, too?" the chamberlain mutters as he rises heavily and stumbles languorously across the room, a black gazebo of fabric, retrieving a scroll of parchment, giving the backside of the roll several squirts with a small glass plunger, sending a thin mist onto the paper and letting the halves unfold, slipping it onto the rollers.

  "Thank you, Hamlin. Now, while in many cases you will be expected to invent your own jests for each occasion, you'll be called upon regularly to recite the half-dozen great stories in part or whole. If you cannot recite every given fragment of the Arthur story, the Tristram, the Romance of the Rose, the Travels of Mandeville, the exploits of the Æthelings, and the Ilium saga, then you are guaranteed to anger your patron, which is never advisable. You. Must know. All of it. Capisce?"

  I nod.

  "Read aloud . . ." He looks expectantly at me, and I say Tom, "Tom."

  I look down at the scramble of red-brown scrawl and fear what I must admit.

  I shake my head. I am only two yards from the professor. I feel his eyes on me. I can't speak.

  "Tom, please begin. Don't be afraid. You'll be doing plenty of public speaking, best to begin now."

  "I can't read, professor."

  Silence. Two short quills are placed next to two half-finished pages. I am to be scolded. I can feel it.

  Instead, the professor rises and runs, not a jaunt but a flat-out run down the stairs. Robes swish. A rainfall of footsteps scatters and echoes up at us. I rise in fear, but there is nothing, he's gone down the stairwell. In my mind I imagine the professor bursting out the doors, falling to his knees on the barren earth and crying aloud to the heavens that such a thing should be. How could, in this day and age, a thirteen-year-old boy be illiterate? Why, O lord of heaven, should the world be full of such ignorance and desolation?

  I hear sniggering behind me. Perille and the girl-boy are sharing a laugh. I don't understand anything. Hero has his hand over his mouth, disguising a smile.

  I hear: "Thomas?" It's Hamlin. "Here."

  I file between the desks to where the chamberlain has returned to his accustomed spot. "You seem perplexed," Hamlin says to me, not unkindly. "Professor Weatherford has trouble with his posterior nethers. Nervous debility. It's expected you will endeavor not to disrupt his equilibrium with the unexpected or un-looked-for, and if, ahem, the good professor should be so unfortunate as to go off," and I hear Perille behind me, cracking up, "you will make no mention of it at any time. You will treat him with courtesy always. And that," he says, raising his voice slightly, "goes for you as well, Mizyer Perry. Now," and he is speaking very kindly to me, "I shall take it upon myself to teach you letters, so that you can begin learning the great stories in as timely a fashion as possible. Report to me each luncheon--before you eat, you understand--and I will instruct you. If you complete your letters expeditiously, I will send you to luncheon. Is it agreed?"

  I yessir.

  "Bed then, Thomas. Young man?" Hamlin addresses Malcolm. "Have you your letters?"

  Malcolm yessirs, and Hamlin sends me away, while the others stay. I descend the staircase shame-faced, and as I reach the lower hall, I pass Weatherford, who is pimpernel-red. His eyes fall to the floor as he identifies me, as if he's trying to remember something, and he mutters as I pass, but there are no words there, only the blunt shapes of monosyllabic madness. He smells, smells of both fresh midden and a flowery burst of fine perfume.

  Bed, a bustle of rocks in a bag. I wonder whether my nascent studentship of letters under Professor Weatherford is forever spoiled. I don't know, and I can't sleep, so I rise and ascend the stairs to the huge heavy exterior door.

  It won't open. It's locked, and thumps against the iron mechanism. I check but there's no key above the door or in the vicinity, not under the rug, no way out. If there were a fire, I think, we'd be condemned . . . but the building is stone, and won't burn.

  Prisoner.

  As I return to the lower living area, I feel hungry--when is supper?--but the cafeteria is empty, and Malifice and Wensley are Dag's,
and they're my enemy. They locked me in Perille's room--which, I realize, I never got in trouble for. I take pride in my small thistlebush of lies. I go to use the bathroom, but there's a genuinely awful smell, it's not even close to normal, and I light a candle and leave it burning by the johns and wander back out. I wonder how long Weatherford has us write for. I wonder if my first day at the Fool School will ever end.

  I am laying on rocks. Look at me: haggard, sore, cracked palms from juggling those giant rocks, my lips numb from sounding double reeds, something I'm unused to. I lay, fearing tomorrow. Everything is hard here, hard as rocks. It's just . . . just rocks, everywhere.

  I hate the Fool School. I desire to leave this place. Will I?

  I am a coward. An infinite coward.

  The day is over. Malcolm bounces in, his face looking healed, as if Weatherford has rejuvenated him. He tries to talk about class and stuff, but I am barren of words and barren of ears and he gets the hint.

  Something happens. My warm Malcolm curls up behind me, which is nice, and another cracked palm begins to circumnavigate. I don't know how I feel; I feel exhausted, and am ready to beg Malcolm to let me sleep. But I begin to feel different, I begin to feel joy which I have never looked for before. His hands guide me and change the way I feel about everything. I suddenly understand what Malcolm must have felt this morning, when I attended him in . . . the way that I attended him. Malcolm explores, and I change.

  It's too intense. I must make him stop. I grab his hand, feeling flushed, and force him back.

  "What did you feel?" his voice says in the darkness.

  "I felt something godly at the start," I say, "but it became Luciferean at the end. It was too big a feeling."

  "Aye," whispers Malcolm, settling himself in his own bed, "a beg feeling."

  Green light wakes us. It's enough sleep to survive on, but I'm not well-rested. I feel sore all over, but at least there will be no fist-fight today, God help us. I stumble to the bathroom, where the candle left a puddle of white wax on the john, dripping down to the pipe midden, but it smells okay now.