Fool School (17 page)

Malcolm steadies the dancing little boy with a hand.
"It was ungodly, Hero. Dinna speak of it."

The boy squirms.

The day is clear. There's no sound from the interior
of the shop. The waiting is excruciating.

Finally the door slaps outward and the team of men
steady the ropes. The man with the soul of an animal doesn't
emerge.

Instead, kindly Father Bellows emerges, at top speed,
catching himself in half over the ropes. Quite winded, he skids and
falls to the ground. Panic fills his eyes, and he holds up a
shaking arm bleeding with the split, rutted oval of a man's
teethbite.

Nuncle says: "Tie him." He sounds worn, an old shoe
of a headmaster.

Eyes of men meet. Wordlessly the men of Bath press
their ropes over the city's priest and bind his hands. Bellows
protests, but the men don't answer him, they resign themselves to
losing their ropes and their priest.

Nuncle kneels beside the priest and speaks: "The
devil has constructed one madness in all the world that cannot be
defeated by any act of God, Father. The bite of the mad animal does
not yield to God. It is a room in the devil's own house. You have
entered that room, for what reason I know not."

Bellows whimpers.

Nuncle: "Bring a cup of water. I'll bring the wolfman
out."

A cup of water comes down a nearby set of stairs and
Nuncle takes it and enters the shop with it. Hero runs up and kicks
the priest with red shoes, but Malcolm and I wrestle him away. I
don't know what the boy's thinking.

Again ropes are braced. Through the door the wolfman
flees the cup. Men tackle him, and leather strips wrap his swollen
mouth, and I see dribbles of thick urine running down the man's
leg. The urine seeps through; it's white, as if full of mucus. The
rabid man is caught and bound. The men choose to follow Nuncle, who
leads them past the church to the fields.

The Fool School rises in the distance. I dislike the
idea that the good priest and the wolfman will be buried alive so
close to my home, but it's perfectly true that the ground here is
very wet, almost as if it's filled by running water. Shovels
arrive, and ten men dig a pit several ells deep. The bottom fills
with water immediately, and the wolfman convulses as he's lowered
in. Bellows calls out as he's lowered on top, and is not
answered.

Memories of Liza and her mother rise in me, and I see
that Malcolm is hurting, but I think we both see the virtue in
preventing the animalism from spreading. Our eyes meet. "Ef the
priest couldna heal him . . ." Malcolm says.

"He was a good man," I reply, quiet, into Malcolm's
ear. "The priest."

"Where's the sense en et?" he asks.

I shake my head.

Wet soil becomes a mound, and the mound becomes a
grave. The men set a man to watch until past nightfall, to ensure
that neither madman wriggles up through the soil. A lanthorn is
brought, and now I and the fools must truncate what might have been
a longer visit to the city and return, dancing once again within
sight of Death's scythe, to our own hole in the ground.

* * *

Dag returns the next day. But that is later, and I'll
speak of his return later. First I will discourse on the act of
literacy.

Here I am, my hair tucked inside my liripipe, hunched
over a roll of vellum, smelling the slight odor of onions emanating
from Hamlin, feeling the body heat of his belly and his wine
breath, as he recites a letter of the alphabet. I dip a poorly cut
quill--I certainly don't have Weatherford to cut them for me,
Hamlin tells me I'm not to come by Classics class today, he says he
will speak privily to the professor and arrange for me to rejoin
the class--and I fill a whole line with the letter, forming the
shape. The Latin alphabet in modern hand is circles and brief lines
and the rare diamond dot for i. Trying not to cut into the
parchment or damage the quill is my obsession now.

Then he has me sound out each letter I've written.
When all twenty-three rows of letters plus the ligatures X, &
and Æ have filled the page--it takes an hour--I begin on pairs of
letters, with an ear for their sound. Then I am told a set of
letters--A B L E, for example, or A R R O W, and begin to uncover
the blends of sound. But now it's recorder time--Nuncle has said
I'm not to miss recorder lessons, but that I can return to Hamlin
halfway through, during the mid-afternoon weariness. I can afford
to miss Stan's performance.

No lunch, but perhaps that'll sharpen me for music.
Hamlin sends me off and I trip down the stairs to pick up my
recorder case from my room. The other students join me, they've all
got their recorders, even Malcolm has a borrowed recorder case with
him as he leaves the cafeteria.

"Learning to read?" he asks me.

"I can recognize the letters, all but p and q," I
say, and he smiles through the bruises, which have largely decayed
to brown ovals today, the swelling's gone.

We sit together, and I speculate that while things
are always going amiss for me, and perfectly for Malcolm, I'm the
one who won the fight with Dag. Pride has dripping teeth.

Recorder segments leap together and the class tries
out a quick scale. Always the advantage with recorders and flutes,
no reeds to warm up and soften. The seats are hard, the sunlight is
low, and a warm muzziness rises, something atmospheric. I await the
arrival of fine sounds in this grid of hard surfaces.

Nuncle drifts over. I look up at him. Reaching, his
fingers lie like lovers over my recorder. A thoughtful look.

"Acacia, you said?" he murmurs. I nod. He nods and
drifts away.

I feel good about life. I've quietly impressed the
headmaster, although he's too proud to admit it.

Since Malcolm and, to some extent, Hero are both new
to the instrument, Nuncle spends the afternoon on scales and
fingering. There is little for him to say once he has got us going
up and down the scales, sometimes skipping notes, very rudimentary.
It's good practice, but dull.

Now Stan will give the late-afternoon demonstration.
I find myself curious as to what he'll do to show off, but he
dismisses me and I air out my recorder and take it with me upstairs
to literacy lessons.

I'm spelling
bear
and
bare
and
bruin
and
nu
when Dag returns.

Actually it's the thump on the door downstairs I
hear. It's locked, and I imagine I hear Nuncle slipping out of
Stan's recital--which I hear only as a mosquito through the heavy
door at the bottom of the stairs--and perhaps I hear a conversation
between them, the headmaster and the boy with the head of a goat.
That is how I choose to think of Dag.

After a slow approach of cloth shoes, Nuncle's face
rises up in the stairwell and he says, with unaccustomed deference,
"Hamlin?"

The hexagonal hat rises--the chamberlain had been
nodding--and Hamlin makes shapes with his fat lips. "Speak to
Nuncle, will you, Tom? I shall get no rest until his desires are
met." I pretend I see no flicker of a wink from his eye.

Nuncle: "Tom? Dag has returned from the
surgeons."

I: "Yessir."

Nuncle: "Tom. It's my desire to maintain both of you
in my school."

He isn't threatening me at all now. He sounds quite
humble, culpable, dare I admit frightened? No. I will call him
penitent.

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.