Fool School (18 page)

"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.

"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.

Thanking him, I take the pottage to the stairs and
begin to eat. The oats do seem richer, actually, thicker and gamy.
While I imagine I hear the sound of a spine snapping, I'm grateful
to Stan for having it sent up--

Wait. I definitely did hear a sound like a spine
snapping. I listen, but there is nothing. I eat, and there it is
again. Is Maliface standing down the stairs with a pair of bones,
scraping them--

Augh, it's coming through the spoon. The sound is
coming through the spoon. What's happening? What is that awful
sound--?

I dig down to the bottom of my pottage. Did they put
some kind of noisemaker in my pottage? This is the trouble with
pissing off the cooks, I decide. There's--

There's a skull and spinal column in my pottage.
There's ears. Long bunny ears.

The arrow slits are too high up to hurl through, and
the bathroom is--

My lunch. Back up into the pottage bowl. My body
convulses. Hideous.

So much for sustenance. I return to Hamlin, leaving
the puke-filled skull dish on the lower landing.

From below, sniggering.

* * *

Words, words, words. I can spot them now, sound out
some of them. Oddly, it's French that gives me the most trouble. I
had no idea that my tongue could pronounce these bizarre curlicues
of letter clusters. Why should Saxon English be pronounced as it's
written and High French fill endless pages with false letters?