Fool School (11 page)

"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 and 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.