Fool School (16 page)

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.

When I emerge, clean in the face, I see the girl-boy
step out of a room. I know which room is hers now. I consider
speaking, asking her (or his?) name, but she hurries to the
cafeteria. Not having anywhere else to go, I follow. Pottage would
do me some good.

An ear-splitting blast. Deafness and frigid numbness
cloud my consciousness. Nuncle is at the top of the stairwell,
holding a silver clarion. Dizziness washes past me and I nearly
fall. Instead I sit on the stone floor and look up at him.

"Sunday morning, my bright sunshines. Dress as well
as you might, and assemble at the top of the stairs for Mass."

Ugh. I want to throw up.

The boy-girl holds herself--himself? I'm still
uncertain, although I'm really not--around the waist, flapping soft
hands against her flank, a big hug. I stand aside, wearing green
and yellow and my sad puffy washed-out orange shoes. Nuncle unlocks
the oak door.

"Why do you keep it locked?" I ask.

Nuncle observes me from the corner of his eye. I'm
clearly still
numerus nihil
on his list. He won't even talk
to me. A snake's head of pride uncurls in my belly, and angry shame
flows through me, and I do nothing.

Malcolm smiles at me sleepily. Hero bounds between
us, a terrier pup. Perille, his head in a brown cloud of hair.

Hard sunlight, something I'd hardly realized I'd
needed, breaks into the landing on the spiral stairs. Hero braces a
hand over his eyes. I feel like a troll, shriveling beneath the
light. We march.

Dew coats our shoes. Steam rises from distant bogs.
The grass is surprisingly green in many low patches, while hillocks
are brown with early autumn death. It's the Bath water, I realize,
it soaks through, stays hot. I wonder if snow will melt where the
hot springs meet the surface. I enjoy snow, but I tire of it
easily. A week of joy followed by two months of misery. There will
be enough misery without it.

Nuncle leads us into the ways of the city of Bath;
the cobbles are cold through my shoes. Here is a family, seemingly
all women, bearing bouquets atop their felt hats. No, a merchant
man is there, caught between the swishy dresses of a half-dozen
wimpled or barenecked women. Perille's smile goes sideways and he
throws some angular "hey rose of my heart" moves in the direction
of the unwimpled girls, and he flashes some gapped buckteeth at
them, and they seem uncertain whether he's a sweetheart or an
untamed raptor moving in for the kill, for that matter I don't
think he knows the difference between the two, and the merchant man
hurries his family up the lane to the church.

Bath Cathedral is a wooden cathedral, two words no
Frenchman would have the gall to utter in his own country. We file
inside.

"Malcolm. Boy." Nuncle flicks a finger, and we
follow. Plainsong resonates up through the inner doors.

Pottering around with the blessed wine, nipping and
looking flustered, is an old priest.

"Father Bellows," says Nuncle, "our newest
parishioners. Thomas," he glares at me, "and Malcolm of
Atholl."

I look up at the cassocked man. Cleanshaven, I don't
know why all priests are cleanshaven, but he wears long scraggly
muttons down to his jaw, has white wings of eyebrows, a full head
of hair out of each nostril, and has a raw carrot in his hand,
which he nibbles, having hidden his cup of wine speedily in his
vestments by legerdemain.

"Well," he says, and I don't hear guilt in his voice,
"welcome to the parish." A quick elderly smile. His time on earth
has been tall. He might be sixty. To Nuncle he asks: "Have they
registered in the hundreds?"

"After Mass," Nuncle replies.

Pews. Bath has fine woodworkers, and there is comfort
hiding in the smooth pews of Bath Cathedral.

Yes, here comes incense. Swinging. My eyes water and
annoysome pain amasses.

Mass.

After the litany is over, Malcolm and I kneel on the
kneeler, and we take the body and blood. Priests and friars make
their cells available for confessions, and the line is already
twenty people long, and I imagine I could skip it, but Malcolm
drives through the crowd to the back of the line, and I take my
place beside him, where I belong.

It's nearly an hour before we reach a cell. I usher
Malcolm in, but he takes my hand. Bellows leads Malcolm, and he
pulls me in with him.

"Two of you?" Bellows says.

"He's me man," Malcolm says, and despite my
discomfort, the snake of pride presses to my breast.

"Scottish. Well, the northerners probably keep a warm
body against the cold at all times. How have you sinned, my
son?"

Green glass eyes focus on me in darkness.

"Es et so much of a sin for one man to love another?"
he says.

Bellows takes a moment. "No," he says at last, "no, I
shouldn't think so. It's written that our Lord Christ loved John
the Bapst, and that was a holy love. Would you say your love is a
holy love?"

Malcolm licks his lips uncomfortably. "Aye," he says,
"I would that."

"Then there is no sin. What other questions do you
have?"

"I fought another boy," says Malcolm. "Me man fought
hem, too, and gave hem a ripe knock."

Bellows sentences us to prayers, and Malcolm can't
think of any other sins, and he nudges my leg and says, "you
go."

"Pride," I say, simply.

"Explain," says Father Bellows.

"I . . . I'm French. From Anjou-Touraine," I begin.
"It seems to me that the English . . . well, French wine is
better--"

"It certainly is!" exclaims Bellows, laughing.

"And French fashion is superior, and, well, I know
I'm not superior, but I often feel superior."

Malcolm smiles at me and punches my shoulder.

"It's always best to kill our pride, throttle it
until it passes away and we find our humility before God," says
Bellows, and he gives me more Aves and Our Fathers and we duck out
of the booth.

Together we find a shady bench along the aisle and
sit together and say our prayers. It takes me rather longer,
because I must be perfect. Malcolm waits, and I open my eyes to see
his not so far away, watching mine. I know he loves me, but I'm
still embarrassed. He licks his lips again, rubs his knee, then
rubs the back of his hair with a palm.

"D'ye thenk they'll feed us when we return?" he asks.
Malcolm thinks with his stomach.

Rising, we find Hero, or better to say Hero finds us,
and when Hero finds you, you have Hero at your heel until Doomsday.
Words tumble irregularly from his lips, he comments on everything
in eyeshot, quite loudly, and I see Malcolm with his bruised eye
wincing at the young onslaught. Poor Hero means well, he finally
has people who don't terrorize him, but at the same time we have
intentions other than humoring a nine-year-old in all things. How
to rid ourselves of the pest? Malcolm and I share a look.

Nuncle is led to a confession cell, and I have an
urge to eavesdrop, but the church is crowded and I would never get
away with it.

Perille and the girl-boy pass us. For what may have
been the first time, I hear her voice. It's deeper than you'd
think, smoky, complex. It sets me to thinking of good wine. She
spots me and loses her words, goes silent.

I am plotting. I don't really fear losing Hero's
friendship, but one mustn't crush joy, either. I spot a group of
boys Hero's age and lead him to them, but he tells me he's
frightened, he sees devils in them, and when I say that it's well
to make friends with men high and low, he runs off, and I have
succeeded.

"What tithing had ye in Anjou?" Malcolm asks idly. I
shake my head and say my father never went in for registering his
presence, there were always too many people he owed money. Malcolm
laughs and says he understands.

When Nuncle emerges from confession some time later,
he looks shaken. Pale. He takes me and Malcolm by the shoulder and
we march out of the church, into the square, down the way to a row
house with a clerk's quill on the sign.

We press open the heavy dark door, ready to register
as citizens of Bath.

Dust fills our lungs; the sound of a scratchy quill;
a pile of uneaten, desiccated pottage bowls line one wall in cheap
pottery; there is a strange smell.

Stairs lead down to a wooden paneled belowground
floor and up the other side to a clerk's bar flanked with wood
shelves lined with ledgers. It doesn't smell the way the uppermost
floor of the Fool School smells, that's for sure. It's not bookish
or welcoming. It smells unhealthy in here, a wing of the
inoffensive mad in a corrupted madhouse. Nuncle has disgust on his
lips as he stirs the dusty floor, skipping down steps toward the
sound of the quill. I sneeze, and the quill doesn't stop, it keeps
scratching.

We hear: "Yes, yes, lips, she opens her lips, they
embrace, yes, yes," and Nuncle clears his throat, and the muttering
doesn't stop, it intensifies, "buttocks, yes, she has buttocks, a
pair of ripe apples," and the quill scratches its way across an
unseen page.

Lifting the countertop, we come behind the clerk's
bar. He's hunched over a slate. There is no quill, although it
sounded just like one from farther away; he scrapes a piece of
Shaftesbury chalk across the slate, writing words at a frenzy,
filling the dark slate with white letters until it's full and then
sweeping his sleeve across it. His baggy blue sleeve is blocked out
by white powder. Up and down go the man's legs, stomping the floor,
a team of hammerers, and white foam builds up on the clerk's lips.
I realize the man doesn't have a chair, he's just squatting,
squatting at a truly improbably angle, it seems he's levitating.
Nuncle comes within an ell of the man before recoiling.

I tap the man on the shoulder, but Nuncle pulls me
back.

Turning, the clerk's face is revealed: a mouth of
slavering bubbles, a trickle of blood from the nose, and eyes the
color of bad cream. The man has wet himself, a crusted mess.
Fingers have clawed ends. Teeth gleam.

"He is rabid," says Nuncle, rubbing his nose bloom in
consternation.

I go numb.

Snakelike, the man's head twists and his jaw strikes
out at us, but Nuncle balls his fist and knocks the man in the
temple, avoiding the teeth. It's known that the bite will spread
the animalism.

"I've nae seen a man fall so," Malcolm whispers.
"He's a wolfman."

"My
pépère
told me there was one cure," I say,
staring at the white-eyed beast who had once been a clerk. "He must
be buried alive under running water."

At once the clerk loses his tiptoed-squat posture and
scrabbles back. "No," he moans with a pitch indescribable. Curling
up like an injured dog, his limbs herd off unseen threats, pushing
us away, though we are far from him now.

"It cannot be exorcised," Nuncle says quietly. "Thus
there is no need for running water. It's enough to bury him. Run
out and fetch six strong men."

Outside, men leaving confession drift down the street
in a slow parade. I call for them to come bury a rabid man. They
come. Father Bellows comes. Perille and Hero come, though the
girl-boy waits.

Fifteen men and boys come. Rope and wood are brought.
We surround the entrance to the clerk's shop, bracing strong rope
as a barricade, in case the clerk runs.

Bellows: "I will go in to him. Perhaps it can be
exorcised."

Nuncle: "Father. It cannot be."

Bellows: "Under God, all things are possible."

I stand outside the shop with the mob. Malcolm
presses to my right side. Hero dances excitedly beside us. "Didja
see him? What did he look like? Was he woad? What did he say?"