Fool School by James Comins

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