Fool School

by James Comins

  I: "Yessir."

  Nuncle: "If you knock each other apart, I'll need to send one or the other of you away. Dag has attended three years. You, a day and somewhat. Do you see where my priorities must lie?"

  I: "Yessir."

  Nuncle: "I wonder if you do. Follow me."

  We descend. A pale, bloodless goat's-face of a boy waits. He wears red. A rise of prideful adders draws blood from my belly, but I feel more like prey, tensed to spring. The sconcelight gives the spiral corridor a hellish cast. My whole body quivers and I'm unable to speak, my mouth's too dry. If I wore a knife, my hand would encircle it, but I hate knives. Dag wears a knife, the rigid handle at his crotch, sticking out of his hose. His thumb flicks it and he grimaces.

  The headmaster stalks forward, sparks on his lips.

  "I'll have no bad blood in my school. Do you hear me?"

  Stan plays his pretty wait rounds through the stairwell; it fills me with the desire to decorate a maypole.

  "I've the right to take him to the hundreds," says Dag.

  Nuncle takes Dag's face in two long hands, around the ears, and they are forehead to forehead, pendulous nose-cancer to stubby goat nose. Fear encompasses Dag. "If either of you," Nuncle breathes wetly, "jeopardizes the presence of the other," he exhales over Dag's nose, "in my school," fingers clench around Dag's temples, mooshing his scalp, "I'll have you hanged, Dag, and I'll have Thomas hanged, and you'll both swing, for my reasons, in my time." Nuncle's frame rises and falls with breaths of madness, and for a small moment I wonder whether he wasn't bit by the clerk, but I decide he must have other purposes, and that's why he's so passionate.

  Passionate for our money?

  I wonder.

  "Say you've no bad blood, Dag. Say you'll not be striking Tom or speaking against him. Say it, Dag, I'll give no other choice."

  Under rising purple blood, clenched lips, lips like a man working out a cherrypit, skin white after so much bleeding, Dag eyes me and decides to struggle against Nuncle. The headmaster deals him a blow with an open hand upon the mouth, and Dag's fiery eyes return to watch Nuncle's.

  "Say it, Dag. I'll have you hanged don't think I won't. I'll have you fined for incitement, slug. Say--say there's no bad blood."

  They struggle, and Dag, under the weight of ill health, goes soft and relents. Stan's voice calls the other students to attend him and his marvelous wait rounds, but they open the door and lean out the doorway to the hall, to listen.

  "No bad blood," snarls Dag, and I say no bad blood, too, and he is sent unsteadily to his bed. Nuncle's eyes follow me as I return to Hamlin.

  Bells sound Vespers from Bath Cathedral, and Hamlin perks up and ushers me out the door before Weatherford arrives in the library. Hamlin has lit the lamp--set it on the floor, taken a lit taper from outside the music room, carried it up in a firm, conscientious grip, lit the whaleoil, and returned the candle to its sconce. He hangs up the crystal lanthorn on a powerful hook. I take my recorder case and scurry down the steps. I'm as eager to avoid Weatherford as he is me, although I feel sorry I'm to miss his excellent lessons at the beginning of class. Malcolm will repeat them for me, I hope.

  Stan.

  "Why aren't you attending your Classics?"

  I relate the story of Weatherford's disquieted nethers. Stan and I hold patient on the landing before the great oak door, and I'm nervous that Weatherford will enter. I'm pretty sure he doesn't live in the Fool School. I don't think any of the professors do, except maybe Nuncle, who always seems to be around.

  "So you've got some time, then. Do you hunt?" says Stan.

  I've never hunted. I say so.

  "I've got a falconing lodge, if you'd like to try it."

  Hard to avoid the memory of this same Stan threatening to take me to court, blackmailing me, just a day ago.

  It's bad form to say no to an authority figure. I say yes, and we transit through the door with Stan's key--every professor has one, I learn--and out into the evening air.

  The evening is an expanse. A country of its own. My eye flickers to where Father Bellows is buried. The square lanthorn still shines into the darkness beside a cloaked figure. Stan is oblivious, maybe, and leads me farther away, along the line of cliff into which the Fool School is built. We have no light, but the sun is still waiting at the horizon for us, and the sky is at the last of its yellow.

  "Can you make out that spire?" says Stan, a finger out. "Brystow. Have you seen it?"

  I shake.

  "One of the great cities," he says, a note of longing lingering. We stand for a moment in a last burst of illumination. "I was a coroner at the capital hundreds. Second most powerful man in the third greatest city on the island. I could arrest the Earl of Wiltshire hisself if I had a reason to. You know the English custom?" I don't. "Only a coroner can condemn a man to hang, and no man may be hanged without the coroner present. I've seen more of God's justice done than most, Tom. Only a worthy soldier has seen more eyes empty themselves of their occupants than I have."

  I'm not sure if this is some sort of threat or not.

  "Tom, I'd like to tell you about one particular man I had to hang. It's been on my mind of late."

  My whole body desires flight right now, more than it did when Dag returned, even. Why must I be Stan's confessor?

  "There was a man who took his wife around the neck, punctured her throat with both thumbs until she was dead, and then ran--took refuge in the sanctuary of church. The priests sent for me to speak to him. They were wary of the man. In the door I went, to where the man was hiding.

  "I asked the man why he killed his wife. My job, y'know?" Stan continues. We walk through the evening. "It had been a fit of madness, he told me, although it was clear that they'd had marital problems. He insisted that he'd recovered, that the madness had left him. Told me he was sane now. He also let me know that in his line of work there 'uz a large number of coins--" Stan gives me a hairy eye as we break through bracken--"and that, if I gave up my position and came away with him instead of arresting him, a large heap of these coins could be mine to spend. I told him I'd be glad to accept his bribe, and when I led him out of sanctuary I arrested him, took him to the hundreds and hanged him.

  "Was it right, do you think, to hang a sane man who had a bout with madness?" Stan asks.

  I wonder why he's asking me. Actually, "Why do you ask me?" I say.

  Stan gives me a look I don't recognize, presses aside a pine limb, ducks under. "I find that kids sometimes notice stuff that grown-ups miss," he says, which seems a novel thought.

  I give him a drop of trust and do think about the question. "What if he hadn't been mad at all?" I ask. "What if that was a lie? What if he had been sane when he murdered his wife?"

  "What if that was a lie," repeats Stan thoughtfully. "Then I did right in hanging him."

  "Absolutely," I say.

  "Well, what if he were telling the truth?" Stan asks. I see a lighted lodge ahead. It's only about a mile from the school.

  "If he were telling the truth . . . a man with fits of killing madness isn't suited for this earth," I say, thinking of the clerk and his foaming teeth.

  "Then I still did right to hang him. Yes. My thoughts exactly. Meet my birds."

  He opens the door to his lodge. Outward streams the red light of a fire. A woman's voice, asking mild questions. The smell of brave wild. Yeast bread and roast game. Good-quality game, too--pheasant?

  A thin processed branch bound many times with bad leather greets me as I enter. A line of hopping hooded raptors pierce their leather-bound perch with talons. One of them, the largest, maybe an eagle, I don't know birds, has actually got iron claws attached to its talons. Stan is amused that I notice.

  "Great Scott," he says. "That's his name."

  "Who're you talking to--" comes the woman's voice. And, "Ooooh!"

  She's naked, and dives like a pink destrier to a pile of clothes in a pile. Stan covers my eyes and I feel him shaking with laughter as we wait for Mrs. Stan to dress.r />
  "Tilly? Tom. One of my students," he says at length. Mrs. Stan, or Tilly, is largely dressed now, rumpily, with a blue wimple tugged down, currently caught over her nose. I saw much of her body, for better or worse, and her belly was convex around her bellybutton, I want to ask if she's pregnant but if she isn't it would be indecent to have asked.

  "Hwell," she says, and I can see she's one of those ladies who insists on pretending she's gentry. She tugs her garments around her, but they don't really fit better. Maybe they're backward. "I ahsuppose hwe've come to know each other hrathah bettah than I might have preferred," she says in her false accent. Gentry don't talk that way, madame. I don't say that, I just think it.

  "Hullo," I say.

  "Hwell, Et'stan, what are you planning tonight?" she asks.

  Stan traverses to the perch and skins on a big glove the size and shape and color of a roast beef, and selects what to my mild surprise is a barn owl.

  "I didn't know you could train an owl," I say.

  "Train anything, if you've got the patience," says Stan, and he steals a piece of pheasant from the spit and flaps it against the owl's beak, under the leather hood. Nip, the pheasant piece vanishes. Several gasping sounds later, the bird has swallowed. Stan takes my shoulder and we depart into the night with the hooded owl.

  No light. Stan seems at home in the dark, as if the lodge and his wife were a port of call, and now we're out on the high seas or something. I can't see in the dark, which is a hindrance, although Stan's done a pretty fair job of clearing the area around his lodge. Oddly, he's left all the trees up, hasn't cut down one, only the little seedlings. We breast a ridge, and the lodge is gone from view, built in a valley. I don't know why the English insist on building under hills instead of over them, where you can see where you're going.

  Wind whips up across the trimmed heather, and the moon is shrinking this week, it's now an untended fingernail-end.

  "Now Tom, with an owl you've got the problem of a bird who swallows everything whole. Here, put your finger to the back of his neck. Yes, right there. Don't let him bite a finger off, it'll do it if you let him."

  There's a silver ring around the bird's neck preventing it from swallowing. That's why it made the gasping sounds.

  "So I've trained it to hold its food in its mouth. Here, watch this."

  A flick of fingers in the dark. The leather hood is flung off the saucer face; feathers shake themselves straight. Enormous eyes and an unsettling hoo. Another flick, and leg tethers drop. The gloved fist throws the bird upward, and from the apex the bird opens up like a wardrobe and glides away toward a patch of trees on a rise.

  "How can you be sure your birds will return?" I ask. "They seem capricious."

  "All God's creatures are lazy, lazy bastards," says Stan. "We all go to where the getting's easiest. Barnard there knows there's always food in the lodge. Besides, with the ring, he can barely choke down a vole, and he can't spit up the bones. He learned that the hard way." I imagine I hear a sharp slice-smile in Stan's voice. "So he gives the food to me, and I strip the bones and give him the good stuff. He knows the ring I made is too powerful, it can't be broken, and so he adheres to the lifestyle he's given. Put an obstacle in a bird's path to power, and it will move to the next best thing. So it is with all God's creatures."

  Barnard reappears, circles once and Stan raises his fist. A thin skinny white tail and pointed paws struggle vainly, and Barnard's neck spins to look Stan in the eye and there is a crunch and the mouse stops struggling. I cannot see Stan's expression, but I conceive a smile of satisfaction that is probably not actually there.

  Stan smacks the owl upside the fuzzy circular cheek. "Larger game," he scolds with a finger, and the owl considers the finger and declines to bite it off. Stan takes the sad bleeding bit of mouse and sends Barnard off again.

  "Owls are prideful," he tells me, taking a knife and attentively and rather deftly gutting the mouse, letting the innards drip. I hate knives. "To an owl's eyes, the capture of a mouse is an opportunity to show off its perfect eyesight, its skill in flight, its pinpoint drop. To bring it back alive is a particular display of prowess, isn't it?"

  I yessir. He begins peeling the mouse.

  "But it's generally better to perform adequately, to the satisfaction of everyone, rather than exquisitely for only yourself. Same with jesting."

  I yessir again helpfully.

  "Fifty old copper pence is more money than one silver shilling," and I am unpleasantly reminded of the wharf and its master, of my father's pile of cut copper coins. "Remember that. If you can coax plain contentment from those around you, you'll do rather better than one who aims for transcendence and inevitably falls short."

  A hare drops rather abruptly onto Stan's balding pate, and he gives Barnard an affectionate scowl and retrieves the hare. "Fuzzy. And slimy," he says, cracking the hare's spine. He bats the owl around the face, though not seriously, and presents the raw deboned flesh of the mouse. Nip.

  "Bedtime, Tom. Let's head back. You might look for some hare in your pottage tomorrow for luncheon."

  I consider mentioning that I'll be studying with Hamlin, I consider asking if I mightn't share a piece of pheasant, given that I've now missed luncheon and supper, too, but I feel that a good sturdy yessir will do more to coax contentment than aiming for transcendence would. See, Stan? I'm learning already.

  Malcolm's asleep, there's no food, and I feel a trickle of resentment that Stan took me away from my Malcolm. No matter, I can hide resentment. The pebbles of the bed are enveloping, and I'm asleep and dreaming of a struggle and a snap.

  Green morning again. Rolls for breakfast. Perille has his shawm and practices shrillly in the thuddy limits of the stone cafeteria. The sound is static shocks in my addled brain. Grimacing, I butter my crusty roll, and Malcolm's hand wraps my shoulder and squeezes, massages, and that's better, it releases some tension. No one speaks, it's that sort of morning, like a misery cloud has floated into the building. Hero looks dour, ready to kick another wolfman, the girl-boy grates her teeth together, and . . .

  Dag enters.

  Everyone is consumed by the sight. Dag's face is slightly scabrous and turning yellow. His mouth hangs open, and his lips are bloodless, two sacs of blue water. Through uneven breath he asks out loud for food.

  I rise, but Malcolm sets me back into my seat. He rises, and I pull him down as well. Neither of us could thread a needle with our anger toward Dag. The anger is spent. We feel only pity for him now.

  Maliface and Wensley peek out from the kitchen, then burst through to embrace Dag.

  The conversation is as follows:

  Maliface: "D'you see yourself?"

  Dag nods.

  Wensley: "Is that what they call surgery these days? You're yellow."

  Dag: " 'M not yellow."

  Maliface: "You are! That devilish Gallic prat's turned you yellow! Cut the spirit out of you."

  Dag: "Got spirit. Gimme a roll."

  Wensley: "They say cowards have yellow skin."

  Dag tries to grab Wensley by the collar, but hasn't the strength.

  Maliface: "If you don't break that Gall across your back, you're nothing. A coward. But look, let's do it together. Let's show him what a Saxe has got in his blood. We'll make him look a fair sight worse'n you, Dag."

  Dag pushes past the two toward the kitchens. I see Perille halfway out of his seat, frozen, and I'm not sure why.

  The twins face me together, and there are identical chins and nearly-identical eyes desiring revenge.

  I notice a new shape and start. Nuncle leans against the doorway, a long knife at his hip, dressed in full jester's motley, black and red and silver. He draws the knife and pares his fingernails.

  "Malcolm," says Nuncle in measured tones. "Sit in on acrobatics, would you?"

  "Yessir." He's stolen my catchphrase.

  Nuncle ducks away.

  Dag is in the kitchen. Maliface and Wensley are eyeing me with murder rising in their expressions.
Malcolm legs it over the back of the stone bench, takes my hand without losing eye contact with the chef twins, and we retreat together to the stairs.

  "So. Acrobatics," he says, circumlocutiously.

  "We've been juggling with rocks."

  "How's Ab'ly?" he asks, keeping his back to the wall.

  "A good man," I say, leading the way. "Foreign. You know that, you saw him the first day of classes," I say awkwardly. We're both avoiding speaking of difficult things right now. No one follows us.

  "Feeling strong enough to join, Pink?"

  It's Ab'ly's voice, coming down from the acrobatics room doorway. Malcolm turns and self-evaluates and says he can juggle but would prefer not to run. Ab'ly nods and says "Up up," and we enter acrobatics.

  Today Ab'ly seats us on our butts with our knees up, positions us at the edges of the room, although he generously gives Malcolm a stack of wool mats to recline on. Hero and Perille and the girl-boy arrive nervously, and Ab'ly eyes the doorway, awaiting, but Dag doesn't come through it. The professor looks put out, but he starts the stones flying and says, "No split stones," and begins calling out his nicknames for us, and we throw and catch with either hand from this less-than-ideal squatting position, practicing catching awkward flings.

  It's about forty minutes in when I hear through the open doorway a panicked Wensley's voice tell Nuncle that Dag's split his seams and passed out, and we hear the sound of panic skidding down the lower halls, but grim Abramopouli slides to the doorway and calls out, "Demi! Pink! Hairstyle!" and we absentmindedly throw stones as our ears perk for news, but no news is forthcoming.

  The shrieking void of silence continues upstairs into music lessons. Tambrels, now. Under the headmaster's tutelage we bang drums, our ears perked for news. Fierce obliviousness consumes Nuncle, he maintains his composure, although I don't doubt he's as preoccupied as we are.

  Luncheon. I ascend to Hamlin, where he shows me more challenging words, and my mind is elsewhere. I--

  Malcolm brings me a pottage. "Stan," he whispers.

  "No, no, not in the library. You've been sufficiently attentive, and I can spare five minutes. Do choke it down efficiently, however," says Hamlin.