Marshsong

by Nato Thompson

  Chapter 20

  So began, in earnest, Isabella’s sojourn with her inadvertent boarding house. Whether the monk’s sensed her internal acquiescence to her fate at the school or whether they had decided to shift to a more accommodating arrangement since her stay had become a long-term one, the monks relaxed many of the restrictions on her. She could now dine with the other acolytes. She received a bunk in the barracks. She was treated with a modicum of equality.

  Being of a nimble mind, even when she was depressed, she remained curious. The specter of her lost brother never fled, never stopped haunting her, but she couldn’t help but be intrigued by this sprawling world of study. The school loomed large as a labyrinth of possibilities. The School of the Divine Line turned out to be anything but a line. It was an entangled web the likes of which would make any spider envious. Lines of thought and history bent back across each other with such certainty that they hit each other with a profound resounding paradox. Whether it was the great ornate study halls for translation where the monks gathered around dug up Rosetta stones from times past to the alchemical laboratories where petri dishes and sulfur came together for the study of new forms of dynamite, each strand of research came with its own language, discoveries and axioms. Truth, it seems, is a web.

  The building was more of a series of great lumbering brick buildings separated by fields of sand with wooden knobby walkways. Isabella and the acolytes resided on the distant west campus, which came with its own barracks, dining hall and classrooms. Further east, the actual Coriander Monks, with their peculiar hierarchies and systems of organization, were busy with their solemn lifelong pursuit of inquiry. The dining hall had a beautiful arched ceiling that stretched high overhead—gold flecked mosaics of Hermes, Vishnu, and Saint Anthony the Great mixed effortlessly with numerical formulas and chemical compositions, such as H2SO4. Hanging below were the ever-familiar bleach bright lights of the fluorescents, which always cast the room in an electric hum of purgatory. Under these lights, Isabella had been made to ingest far too much stone soup and sourdough bread.

  Occasionally, the acolytes were allowed the freedom to stroll about the enormous campus. She had already become familiar with the Paleontology Guild, which sat not far from the acolyte barracks. She loved how upon entering the guild, she was greeted by skeletal displays of creatures enormous and vicious—massive teeth, jaws and bone.

  Standing outside the Paleontology Guild, she could look out over the campus and see ever so many other red brick buildings that looked exactly alike—humble, stout, without expression. It was odd, Isabella thought. The only signs of difference among the guilds were the various architectural elements built into the cornices whether they were the stone howling baboons and elephant ears of the Animal Research enclave, the tomato plants of the Agrarian Annex, the corn husks of the economists or the scales of the Law Center. The campus reeked of a hidden excitement, thought Isabella.

  They tried their best to hide it, but there was a fever on the campus; no matter that their churches looked so very different from the exterior of their houses of study; no matter that the acolytes were reprimanded for exhibiting anything that resembled normal childlike behavior and the older Coriander Monks that solemnly walked the sand paths were shadows of silence. Isabella knew that this place contained magnificent secrets. That said, the air was ever bitter and dust was always blowing into her face.

  How many monks were there she could not say. Easily thousands. The acolytes alone were nearly a thousand told. She didn’t have many opportunities to walk on the actual campus, but when she did head over, she occasionally spied the spectrum of monk’s robes that hinted at their internal hierarchy. The majority of the population was Coriander Monks. They were the meat and potatoes of the school, the dusty tan robed men, who silently slipped into the halls, mixed the mixtures and transcribed the scrolls. Occasionally, Isabella spied monks who wore eggplant tinged robes with long dangling necklaces adorned with small magnifying glasses. These were the rectors—the heralded few that were the masters of disciplines. And finally, even fewer, and only rumored as Isabella had never seen them, were the monks in black robes with red stripes along their wrists with the dangling geometric measuring tools—these an inner circle of monks that only the students whispered about. And beyond even that, because surely existed many more colors, Isabella had neither heard nor seen a thing.

  Now that Isabella could eat with the motley hoard of boys clad in mustard yellows, the image of which gave Isabella the distinct impression of a Van Gogh sea of blurry buttercups, she had a new hoop to cast herself through. The nervous energy of youthful boys around her made her stomach turn enough that she at times mistook it for Marty’s magic. As much as they avoided her, she could sense their weird energy—little guffaws, bits of food flung, and the hum of minds that couldn’t control themselves. She stared down at her stone soup wondering if she may have actually died at the hands of her brother and gone to what she considered the worst hell of all—the banality of adolescent anxiety.

  Fortunately, she found herself rescued. He sat next to her. His energy was far more steady. His need for attention was far less tortured. He had sipped his soup quietly next to her and said not an iota. When she finished, Isabella had risen from her seat and headed to the dishwashing station. Leaving the table, she heard the boy mumble, “I agree, this place sucks.” She couldn’t tell if it was to her or someone else, but that small resistance felt wonderful to have some camaraderie.

  The next day, he sat next to her again, still not saying anything but quietly working on his soup. Isabella knew it was no small thing to sit next to her. She was a pariah and even if this young man with shaggy brown hair and almond eyes did nothing but eat soup, his presence was noticed by all. In this case, actions did speak louder than words.

  On the third day, it struck Isabella that this young man might win in the war of silence. She wasn’t particularly the quiet type and this slow moving camaraderie had already begun to not appeal to her. Who was he to crowd into her space and then not say a thing?

  “I’m not your friend, you know?” she said turning to the intruder. Her sudden whisper of words startled him and he looked up suddenly awake.

  “Who said you were?” he whispered back. “I really could care less.” He went back to slurping his soup.

  They sat in silence with just the sound of liquid entering lips. Their bodies bent forward, the lack of anything interesting becoming a cacophony in Isabella’s ear. Was that to be it? The conversation ended there? Isabella didn’t like the way he had ended her breakthrough in such bland fashion.

  “It’s you that sat in my area, you realize? I didn’t ask you to join me. How about you join your little buddies over there and talk about your lame ambitions or something.”

  If Isabella meant to insult the boy, it did not work. Her words made him smile. He looked over at Isabella and it startled her to find that she found him attractive. His nose looks like a bird's, she thought. He gave her a sly smile and said,

  “It is just that kind of painful conversation that has me sitting near you. I didn’t come here to be your friend. I just figured people wanted to avoid you so much, I could avoid them best by being near you.”

  This peculiar thought made her laugh, which received familiar shhh sounds from the monks.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  The boy went back to eating in silence and they took their soup bowls away without another word.

  His name was Milliard Penn and though it took time, Isabella and he became friends. They shared an antipathy for the school, although Isabella found his a peculiar blend of something from childhood and arrogance whereas hers came from the predicament of being trapped and arrogance. He was a bit of a downer always grumbling about this or that, but he became Isabella’s only friend. They were both bored and the optimism that seemed to fill the voices of his peers made them equally ill. The enemy of one's enemy.

  As time was ever regulated, she would cat
ch him on his walk to the Paleontology Guild and chat with him. They would wander off on the eastern path to take the long way around the Horology bunker, to arrive back in the classroom. He often talked about boredom, which Isabella found was something that could really be a source of conversation for people. Boredom, Isabella told Milliard, is the slow-winded agony of birthing an idea. She had imagined that he would have been forced through some family obligation to join the monkhood but instead she was surprised to find that membership to the Guild was far more guarded than that. He had tested well at a young age and been moved to school for potential acolytes. His entry into the church had not been assured but instead was the result of many years of study and competition.

  “I was so focused on winning,” he said as they kicked little basalt stones along the wooden walk. “I forgot to ask what the prize was.”

  “And here it is in all its splendor,” Joked Isabella.

  Milliard enjoyed the research on the dinosaurs, but the digs themselves felt like a prison sentence.

  “This isn’t actually about digging for dinosaurs,” he told Isabella. “This is a training in obedience.”

  Isabella knew the truth of that although such training clearly had some unintended consequences in the dissatisfaction of Milliard and the overt intention of Isabella to run for the hills. It was the eyes of Milliard that made Isabella more than a little embarrassed each time she dropped her pick and bounded out into the wastelands, or the time she hijacked a waiting donkey and rode off at a snail's pace. There at the horizon she pictured herself through his eyes dropping to the ground, like the rotted limb of a tree careening toward the sand.

  Milliard had grown up far outside Barrenwood and the idea of a place beyond Barrenwood filled Isabella with great fascination. For all her worldliness, she knew she was rather provincial. Milliard didn’t think much of it. He said the world was all rather the same. There were places to eat, places to sleep, places to buy the basic functions of life and a few places to augment life to make it seem less boring. It was, all in all, a moribund perspective. He came from a prominent family in a village called Exington. Isabella could have guessed only because his particular blend of insouciance could only be bred through privilege. His father worked in making sales catalogues for the growing number of discount home goods stores. His mother was an avid reader and writer. He talked about her quite often. She was a suffragist in every sense. Extolling the merits of the female gender and railing against the patriarchy that she so clearly witnessed around her. For Milliard, it had clearly added to his already growing well of ambivalence.

  “She’s right, of course,” he told Isabella. “Women get a raw deal. But strangely, the only woman allowed into this hellhole is you, Isabella. Men get the privilege of a pathetic work-life and entry into this sand pit of celestial education.”

  Milliard and Isabella studied in the same class of chronological mapping where the monk professors would replace plastic sheets on the overhead projector and discuss the various methods for dating their finds.

  It was in this class that they met their nemesis: Walter Mayhew. It wasn’t that he was particularly mean that made him a nemesis, but that he was particularly invested in the truth of the church. It was his fascistic determination to be right that made Isabella and Milliard find him a useful subject for a joke or two. Every question, his hand went up. Every opportunity to extol the virtues of the School’s commandments, he would sing them out as though from a songbook. He was an acolyte through and through and perhaps it was this very quality that allowed Milliard and Isabella to focus much of their disdain for their surroundings on him. This is all to say that if looked at from a different direction, Isabella and Milliard were simply terribly frustrated people acting out their agony on a relatively simple, nice person.

  Isabella, at first, had attempted to enter into a conversation with Walter, but he would kindly demur. Like everyone, he knew no good could come from associating with Isabella, nor would it come from making her an enemy, so he would kindly excuse himself. But Isabella was determined to make him decide. Friend or foe, either way, Walter would have to put his neck out a little bit. It was through some mutual plotting that Milliard and Isabella managed to switch out one of Walter’s tests with another of their creation. Walter received a perfect score of A+. They then proceeded to do it yet again. Upon receiving his tests back, Walter began to see the light of it. He knew something was amiss and it only required one wink from Isabella to figure out what was going on. He was now in a bind. Should he accept her help and forever bind himself to her or should he out her, and thus, immerse himself in a painful and embarrassing series of conversations with higher-ups about why on earth someone would cheat on his behalf. It was torturous for Walter. Each direction was full of agony and as someone who actively sought out the most efficient route to respectability, he was at a crossroads of shame.

  In the end, he outed Isabella and her plot. The anger that raged in him from his confusing situation forced a cathartic burst of confession. And just as he had foretold in his worst of imaginings, the affair required numerous meetings with him and Isabella and various other higher up entities at the School whose attentions he had hoped to gain in a far more laudatory light. Isabella, of course, couldn’t get kicked out of the church and in the end, as counter-intuitive as cheating on someone else’s behalf might be, the officials couldn’t help but consider that anything was possible when it came to her. She was more than a wild card. She was a female prisoner in an all male research and religious center. They decided to absolve Walter of all responsibility. That said, his name remained associated with this bad bit of luck and his stellar reputation had now gained some ill-fated personality. He was not pleased. He had become a nemesis.

  It was through Milliard that Isabella was able to make the acquaintance of Lamont, Calwyn, and Jada. They were friends of his from his studies in Exington. Lamont was in botany, Calwyn in death studies and Jada in biology. They found Milliard’s interaction with the lone female on the premise a bit of a nuisance, but at the same time not surprising.

  “Milliard has always been a strange duck,” said Jada. They were very much boyhood chums and their jokes and jests reflected the adolescent qualities that made being young actually enjoyable (for them). For Isabella, she suffered through their encounters. To her, they were such boys—always hitting, joking, being dumb, and rarely, if at all, saying anything of substance. Even while what they studied was at the most interesting aspects of the known world, she found their approach absolutely miserable. How Calwyn could actually study death and have not a single insight into it? Isabella knew that only people invented absolutes, that the universe operated in the terrain of the obvious. The greatest mysteries were only that way because they sat so obliquely in front of you. The grave, if anything, pointed out the obvious fact that people weren’t truly alive. Perhaps it was this insight about their lack of insights that Isabella took away most.

  Yes, it is true that in some respects the School of the Divine Line had presented itself to Isabella as an opportunity to find a community of sorts. As austere as her setting was, the everyday foils and increasing number of acquaintances allowed her to briefly take her mind off all the pressing issues that had catapulted her into exile. Nevertheless, she hadn’t forgotten her ultimate goal: to escape to the castle and learn about people like her. At this point, surely Marty had returned. He and Fennel were laughing back at the cave playing Texas Hold 'em while she remained stuck in this school? How strange and awful a thought. She wasn’t miserable, but really? Her brother had just left her. How could he? It scared her to consider how deep his anger must be to do that. She had been abandoned to this dusty campus. And as much as she was enjoying it because in many ways she was, she also had no intention of staying. No, she would escape.

  The sickness, yet again, had emerged as her biological corral. She was chained in essence by nausea and if she could just make the fish sauce, she could catch the first bus out of town. Thus, it c
ame as a welcome surprise when in passing she heard Jada mention his upcoming class on rainbow trout anatomy. Fish! These underwater creatures had been on her mind most avidly since the day she entered. The meals at the church never had fish. There was not a spring or river in sight. The entire aquatic world it seemed had been banished from the studies of these monks. But finally, a piece of the recipe came into place and with impeccable timing.

  “Rainbow trout?” asked Isabella, butting into a conversation that she almost always obviously ignored with indignation.

  “Oh, hello. I didn’t realize you were there,” replied Jada and the boys all collectively laughed together. Even Milliard couldn’t help but smile.

  “Well, I am here. I’m right here. Did you say your class was doing something with Rainbow Trout?”

  Jada pulled his book bag off his shoulder in an exaggerated way and sat onto one of the minimal wood blocks that served as seating in the courtyard. He pulled his cloak from his head and turned his sardonic eye on Isabella. He was handsome with black shaggy hair and piercing grey eyes.

  “Yes, we are doing dissections for the purpose of learning fish anatomy. We have already dissected frogs, of course, but also ducks, lizards and chickens. Fish, it seems, are next.”

  “I need something from you,” Isabella said. She was eager to get to the point.

  “Of course you do,” quipped Jada. “Why else would you be talking to me?”

  “I thought you wanted something from Milliard,” Calwyn threw in. “I had never guessed it would be Jada.”