Academic Exercises (19 page)

It suddenly occurred to me to be glad I hadn’t touched the tea he’d poured for me. Bergamot oil would mask any number of unusual flavours. “Well—” I said.

“Anyway.” He stood up, crossed to the fireplace and gave the logs a sharp poke. Little red stars got up, like flies off a turd. “I’ve written to the faculty recommending that you get your money. I had no choice,” he said. “After all, we’re scholars, aren’t we?”

I took a deep breath. “Is that what you—?”

“No.”

I looked at him. People have mistaken us for each other. We’re both tall and skinny, with very similar long faces and straight noses. Two scholars. “Fine,” I said. “So?”

He sat down again, this time carefully moving the books, like miners clearing the fallen rocks behind which their friends are trapped, until he unearthed a long brass tube. He laid this across his knees and covered it with his forearms. “One small point in your work that I’d take issue with. Very small,” he added quickly. “It hadn’t occurred to me either until very recently. It’s about the manuscript of the
Discovery
.”

(The
Discovery of Essecuivo
, by Aeneas Peregrinus. Of course there was no manuscript.)

“You and I,” he went on, “have both spent a large part of our adult lives trying to figure out what became of the manuscript when Aeneas died. Both of us assumed that it would have been inherited by his son. We traced every living descendant, we sorted through indices and cartularies wherever there’s a library that might have received papers or books from Dives Peregrinus or his heirs. It’s all been—” He grinned. “A complete waste of time. Oh, we’ve found books and papers. Just not the one we were looking for. Agreed?”

I nodded.

“We assumed,” he went on, “that, because Dives inherited the land and the money and the house, he’d have had the papers too. After all, Aeneas was planning on going back. He died suddenly. The papers would have been with the rest of his property.”

He seemed to want me to say something. “Yes,” I said.

“Naturally enough. It was a fair assumption. But what—” He stopped, as though he’d walked into an invisible door. “What if Aeneas and his son quarrelled about something, and Aeneas gave the papers to somebody else? The land and the money; well, he didn’t really have a choice, people didn’t just disinherit their only sons back then, so Dives got them all. But the papers—”

A hot, bright light inside my head. “The niece,” I said.

He gave me a beautiful smile. “Precisely,” he said. “His sister’s daughter, whose name we don’t even know. What if
she
got the papers, while he was still alive?”

I was ashamed. I really, really should have thought of it before. But I was too excited to let that get in the way just then. “The niece—”

“Married into the Dorcelli family,” he said quietly. “Who, being at that time wealthy enough not to need to sully their hands with trade and commerce, filed the papers safely away in the archives of their beautiful library at Touchevre and forgot all about them. Probably never bothered to look to see what was in them. Meanwhile Dives, having ransacked his father’s house searching for the old fool’s last book and failed to find it, concluded that it must have been destroyed, and told people so. Naturally, they believed him. He was, after all, Aeneas’ son.”

Suddenly I could scarcely breathe. “Your uncle.”

He smiled. “Bought four large crates, sight unseen. Including—” He pointed the brass tube at me, like a weapon. “This.”

He held on to the tube. I unscrewed the cap. I could see the end of a roll of parchment. My hand was frozen solid. I couldn’t move.

“Allow me.” He pinched the parchment between forefinger and thumb and drew it out. It was stiff and brown. It looked like a stick. “Now, then,” he said. “You’re the greatest living expert on Essecuivo. You’ve just proved that, to my satisfaction. Would you care to take a look?”

My enemy, my one and only true enemy, holding in his hand the one and only manuscript. Would I care to take a look? I nodded. He leaned across, took my hand, opened the cramped fingers and pushed the scroll in between them. “Take your time,” he said. “I’m in no hurry.”

You know the story of Saint Aguellinus; how, every morning since he was nine years old, he climbed the mountain just before dawn and prayed to be allowed to look into the face of the Invincible Sun. For ninety years he prayed; then, one day, his prayer was granted. The Sun, rising above the Techenis mountains, burst upon him as he prayed and spoke to him, saying, Follow me. Whereupon Aguellinus, his prayers answered, was consumed by the fire that leaves no ash and ascended bodily into Heaven—

Me, I’m not religious. I can see the Sun any time I like. But this—

“Go on,” he said (I’ll never forget how he said it). “It won’t bite you.”

I unrolled it. The parchment creaked; I was suddenly terrified in case it snapped or crumbled into dust before I could read it. But it rolled out, smooth and springy, the surface hard under my fingernails. It was hand-written, of course, and of course I recognised the handwriting. I’d spent hours poring over the nine authentic surviving letters written by Aeneas Peregrinus—to his land agent, his son, the sherriff of his shire concerning the window tax.

Concerning the True Discovery of Essecuivo, being a faithful account—

“Go on,” he said gently. “Read it.”

I thought; if only my father was still alive. He died, as Carchedonius so thoughtfully reminded me, only a short while ago, after ten years in prison. He’d done nothing wrong; at least, not the things he was accused of doing. But when the bubble burst and millions of angels were wiped out overnight, as suddenly and irrecoverably as snow melting, someone had to take the blame. My father, who’d done nothing wrong and therefore saw no need to leave the country with a small valise filled with precious stones, put up a strong case at his trial. He always was a good speaker, and he couldn’t resist arguing the toss, even when it was clearly not the smart thing to do. I can imagine (I wasn’t there) him arguing with Death, scoring five or six good solid debating points; the last thing he’d have seen before his eyes closed for ever was the panoramic view you get from the moral high ground.

But if he’d lived just a little longer, and seen this—

He’d have scolded me for not finding it earlier. The niece, he’d have said, shaking his head in that insufferable way of his, any idiot would’ve thought to investigate the niece. And he wouldn’t have said
you failed me, you always were a bitter disappointment to me
, because he wouldn’t have had to.

I read the manuscript. I could have written it myself.

That was the extraordinary thing. All my life I’d been speculating about Essecuivo, making educated guesses, extrapolating castles from grains of sand. From a tiny handful of dubious fragments of recollections in old age by men who’d heard their grandfathers talking when they were children; from observations based on ancient artefacts that may possibly have been copied more or less faithfully from things that may or may not have been smuggled back by Aeneas’ men in their sea-chests; half the time I was pretty much making it up, on the balance of probabilities, and the rest of the time I was working from evidence you wouldn’t rely on to convict a fox of killing chickens. The thing was, though, I was
right
. Uncannily so; even my wildest reaches and most vertiginous leaps to conclusions were borne out by the tall, thin, looped brown letters on the page. It was enough to make you weep. I hadn’t needed the manuscript, except as proof. I knew it all already.

—But
proof
; oh, there’s a world of difference, isn’t there? I felt like a man accused of murder who’s made up a wild and totally false alibi, only to have it corroborated by a perfect stranger of flawless integrity.
I was right.
About everything; the height of the mountains (which I’d calculated based on an almost certainly apocryphal story about how Aeneas had spilt a kettle of boiling water over his hand on a mountaintop, and not been scalded), the source of the great river that washes the gold dust out of the northern heights, which province the red-and-yellow parrots come from. Every damn thing.

“I expect you’re feeling pleased with yourself,” he said.

I’d forgotten all about him. I’d been gazing at the illuminated capital letters. Aeneas hadn’t done them himself, he’d have hired a local scrivener or law-writer. They were typical of the period, quickly but well executed, the letters shadowed in red and embellished with leaf-and-scroll; standard decoration for title deeds, leases and contracts. Every paragraph started with one. A small touch of vanity, from a man who could afford it. “Sorry?”

“I imagine,” he said, “that you’re feeling quite happy just now. I would be, in your shoes.”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course. And you too.”

He smiled. “Very much so. You know,” he went on, “I’ve never had much in the way of good luck in my life. When things have gone well for me, it’s because I made it happen. Not very often,” he added with a grin. “But this is something quite different. I feel—well,
justified
, if you know what I mean.”

I wasn’t quite sure that I did, but I didn’t want to spoil the mood. “Splendid,” I said. “What do you intend to do?”

He leaned across and took it gently from me. I didn’t want to let go, but I was afraid of tearing it, so I opened my fingers wide and let it slip through. “The only thing that’s missing,” he said, “is map references. Co-ordinates. But most people agree Aeneas must’ve known them, because he used them to plot his course home. Odd, don’t you think?”

I thought about it. “I guess that was the one secret he didn’t want to commit to writing,” I said. “After all, he was planning on going back, like you said.”

He nodded. “I’m glad we agree,” he said. Then he leaned back a little and put the manuscript into the fire.