The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) (16 page)

AS THE TERM WORE ON, DOCTOR ROGER CRABBE BEGAN to give small dinners for select magisters of the Faculty of Humane Sciences. Wine flowed freely at these dinners, and the main topic of discussion was radical styles of scholarship.

It was a pity, Crabbe said, that some scholars should seek out the crass and sensational just to swell their coffers with the coin of the idly curious. This matter of St Cloud and his lectures on kings and wizards, for example. Anyone who said his lectures flirted with treason was simply ignorant: certainly kings had existed in the ancient North, and had their wizards, too, and they must have done
something
besides do coin tricks and oppress the innocent. (Pause for the inevitable laughter.) No, it was St Cloud’s methodology that was at fault. Sending his students digging in the University Archives, teasing them with unanswerable questions, encouraging them to trot out antique and unprovable stories, and then treating whatever they found him as useful lessons from the past when in fact they were nothing but fairy tales. It was clear St Cloud was only going outside the traditional historical sources and approved regimen of study for the notoriety it gave him. You had to remember that he was young. There wasn’t an ounce of harm in the boy, really.

And the older magisters, who had always taught as they themselves had been taught, shook their heads grimly at what the world was coming to.

The malicious whispers seeped like marsh gas out of Doctor Crabbe’s rooms and through the streets and taverns of University. The younger, more forward-thinking scholars waited anxiously for Doctor St Cloud’s countermove. But St Cloud seemed to have lost what little interest he’d had in public life, giving his controversial lectures and vanishing again without so much as buying his colleagues a beer or pointing out to them that there were many documents of unimpeachable authority, some of them in the University Archives, which, although they may not have found their way into the holy scriptures of the accepted authorities, were available for anyone to pick up and read. And that these documents supported not only his theses, but his teaching methods. Instead, he neglected even his most intimate friends to such an extent that Cassius was ready to wash his hands of him, and even Rugg and Elton were annoyed.

Still, they tried to be sympathetic, even jocular, when he made a rare appearance at the Blackbird’s Nest. “Ancient kings keeping you busy, Basil, eh? Wizards casting spells of solitude on you?”

Basil blinked. “Did I miss our dinner, Cassius? I’m so sorry. I was working on my book.”

“And very diligent you are, too.” Rugg cleared his throat. “But a book alone won’t get you the Horn Chair. Now is not the best time for you to disappear into your study.”

Basil eyed the metaphysician with annoyance. “How else am I to get my work done? Shall I make speeches on street corners, like Crabbe? It’s much more useful for the ancient kings to keep me busy.” His mouth twitched in secret amusement.

Had any of them cared to question the scruffy boy who kept the door at Minchin Street, he could have explained a lot. His fourth-floor tenant came in these days at odd hours, in the company of a long-haired student who tipped like a god. Sometimes they stayed in the magister’s rooms together for hours at a time, and the boy made extra tips by running out on errands for wine and bread and meat pies—though seldom for candles, as before, and never paper or ink.

But no one asked him, and speculation ran unchecked.

IT WASN’T JUST BASIL’S RIVALS WHO WERE INTERESTED IN the fate of the Horn Chair. The mathematicians at Bet’s Good Eats were figuring the odds, and Basil’s students were passionately monitoring their teacher’s progress. They may not have known about his frequent visitor, but they certainly knew he always looked tired and he never wanted to come out for a drink. They were annoyed, they were worried, and they were as curious as cats.

Near the massive hearth of the Blackbird’s Nest, up against one of the small-paned windows, was a table that was known as Historian’s Corner. Blake and Vandeleur had staked it out when the weather began to turn cold, judging their money better spent on ale and tips to the potboy to save the corner for them than on wood to heat the little room they now shared. There they met and, in the magister’s absence, subjected their observations on his recent curious behavior to the same kind of analysis he’d taught them to apply to historical texts.

“It’s money trouble, count on it. He’s spent it all on books and can’t pay the rent.”

“That’s you, Lindley, not St Cloud,” Benedict Vandeleur said. “No, it’s his own book he’s writing that’s eating him alive. What I think is that he’s out to win the Horn Chair. What do you think, Blake?”

In the weeks since he’d paid Basil St Cloud his student’s fee, Justis Blake’s life had changed utterly. He’d gone from being “of heaven knows what,” the butt of Doctor Crabbe’s humor, a country bumpkin hanging at the fringes of University life, to being Blake of Ancient History, St Cloud’s follower. He was at ease among these men as he had not been among Crabbe’s Modernists or the men he’d met in the Mathematics and Natural Science lectures he’d attended the year before. His friendship with Benedict Vandeleur had grown over evenings spent listening to a new fiddler or spinning laughing shop-girls through the energetic steps of a country dance at the Spotted Cow. Some spirited arguments had shown him that Lindley was not as much of a drooping violet as he seemed; Lord Peter Godwin, four years his junior, reminded him of his little brother back on the farm. Even Henry Fremont wasn’t so bad if you sat on him from time to time. And Doctor St Cloud. Well, Doctor St Cloud may have been well able to argue his way through a brick wall, but he hadn’t the common sense of a day-old puppy. Justis felt quite fatherly toward him sometimes.

Justis thought for a moment. “You think he’s writing about the North?” he asked Vandeleur, who nodded.

“Of course!” Lindley exclaimed. “It’s coming clearer and clearer in the lectures that you can’t understand the Union without knowing the old ways. The magister’s writing a book that will change the world.”

Justis Blake had gotten used to ignoring Lindley’s romantic outbursts. He said to Vandeleur, “And you think that’ll get him the Horn Chair?” It didn’t seem likely to Justis that a book in which kings and wizards, however ancient, figured as heroes and statesmen was likely to find favor with the Governors. But it was not his place, as the newest of St Cloud’s followers, to say so.

“Who else is eligible?” Godwin asked.

Vandeleur frowned thoughtfully. “Well, Doctor Wilson, for one.”

“Don’t make me laugh.”

“He has more students than the Ferret—Doctor Ferrule, I mean,” young Peter Godwin observed.

“Have you ever heard him lecture?” said Henry Fremont. “Well, neither have I, even though I sat for an interminable three hours last winter watching puffs of steam rise from his mouth.”

Justis smiled. It was a fair description of Doctor Ferrule’s lectures, one of which he had obediently attended because Doctor St Cloud had told him to. “How does he manage to make a living?” he wondered aloud.

“He doesn’t,” said Godwin. Everyone stared at him. “He has money of his own,” he explained. “He’s a relation of ours, on his mother’s side. He’s not stupid, he writes books,” he went on defensively. “He’s the one who wrote the history of the University. And what he doesn’t know about the House of Godwin isn’t worth knowing.”

“Oh,” sneered Henry. “Is there anything worth knowing about the House of Godwin?”

Young Peter rose to the bait like a trout, and for a moment it looked as if there might be a scrap. But as Vandeleur prevented Godwin from crawling across the table, Justis came to the end of his train of thought and said, “Then it seems that Doctor St Cloud’s only plausible rival is Doctor Crabbe. Whose scholarship is widely known to be more orthodox, and therefore more acceptable to the Governors. He has seniority, as well—almost ten years, isn’t that right?”

Everyone nodded.

“However,” Vandeleur said, “Crabbe’s students are mostly loungers who contribute nothing new to their field. Many of them are nobles, who will not (shut up, Peter, you know they won’t) continue in the University. On the other hand, St Cloud has revived interest in an obscure branch of history. There are more of us each month, as the word of his lectures gets out and men from other disciplines come to see what the fuss is about. That has to count for something with the Governors.”

They silently tallied up the score so far. Lindley said, “What about those Northern boys who sit up in the gallery at LeClerc? Do they count for or against the Doctor?”

“Oh, them,” said Henry Fremont, clearly feeling it was high time he got some attention. “Well, it depends on whether they’re University scholars or stray actors from some theatre troupe. Those braids and beads in their hair make them look like they’ll start declaiming the king’s speech from
Fair Rosamund
or
The Wizard’s Revenge
at any moment. Do you think they’re taking notes, or are they just up there waiting for Doctor St Cloud to give them their cue?”

Justis remarked, rather wistfully, that he had never seen a play on a real stage; and the talk moved on to theatres and actresses and whether lust for a boy dressed as a girl or a girl playing a boy really counted, and other similar questions that engage the inquiring mind of youth.

THE MAN WHO KILLED THE LAST KING WAS HIS BROTHER-IN-LAW, David, Duke Tremontaine. It was done perfectly legally, through the Rules of Challenge. Thirty-three nobles from the Council of Lords came together and one after another called challenge on King Gerard. As was their right (and, indeed, their duty), the King’s Companions accepted each challenge on the king’s behalf. But they were a roistering bunch, chosen by the king more for their ability to drink, gamble, and invent clever ways to torture his enemies than for their fighting or diplomatic skills. Some were old men, inherited from his father, mad Hilary the Stag. Their swords were no match for the nobles, who had all been training for some time. One by one they cut down the king’s defenders, until the monarch stood alone, facing Tremontaine.

The wizards might have tried to put a stop to this, but they were nowhere to be seen. As soon as the king was dead, they were condemned as well, rounded up and burned along with their books. Their pupils were disbanded, killed, or sent into exile.

What the dead king’s sister, the Duke Tremontaine’s wife, thought about it all is not recorded. Her husband was the hero of his country, and surely that pleased her.

HOW DID THE DUKE KEEP THE WIZARDS OUT OF THE way?” Peter Godwin brought up the question with his friends at the Blackbird’s Nest after the morning’s lecture. It was not a question he would have thought of asking a year ago: everyone knew that Tremontaine had invited all the wizards to a great banquet and locked them in. But according to what they’d been studying with St Cloud lately, the wizards were notorious for knowing everyone’s business before they did—“hearing thoughts on the wind,” Delgardie poetically put it, which everyone took to mean the wizards had a fabulous network of spies. But did they? If so, who were they? How were they paid? And how had they failed so spectacularly in the end, when it really mattered?

“He was rich,” said Henry Fremont in disgust. “Trevor says he bound them in chains of silver and gold—that means money, obviously. The duke bribed people to keep them out of the way, or give them false information or something.”

“Maybe the Council made promises with them to share power, which they never had any intention of keeping.”

“Or Tremontaine did it himself, and turned coat at the last minute.”

“Oh, it’s hopeless!” Vandeleur groaned. “We’re just inventing stories, like village wives. How are we ever going to
know
anything?”

“Dig, dig, dig,” said Theron Campion cheerfully. “And keep on digging.” He’d just come in out of the cold, and his face was flushed and cheerful. “Hello, Vandeleur, sorry you’re suffering—you should have stuck to Geography, with me. At least there are maps to consult.”

Benedict grinned. “Hello, Campion. I hear you’re in Rhetoric now, so don’t tell me about maps.” He indicated the table. “Do you know these gentlemen?”

Theron nodded politely. “Godwin, Lindley . . . I’m sure I’d enjoy knowing all of you, but I was just wondering whether anyone had seen Doctor St Cloud?”

“He’s never in here anymore,” Godwin piped up. “Don’t tell me you’re thinking of switching to History now!”

“No, I’m enjoying Rhetoric, thanks. Poetry, parts of speech, no dates and no dust.”

“Campion
is
History,” said Henry Fremont snarkily. He knew perfectly well they’d met at least twice, and that Theron did not remember him. “He’s a direct descendant of David, Duke Tremontaine. So tell us, Campion, what’s the family secret? You’re all so wildly successful. Is it brains? Beauty? Connections? How does a man become a hero to his country by knocking off a close relation?”

Basil would have recognized the way Theron’s face went perfectly still when he was asked about his family. In response, Theron simply quoted Redding: “ ‘Inquire of the Dead, O inquire of them; but as they died, their answer will be blood, and blood, and blood again.’ ”

“Is that conduplicatio?” Vandeleur tried to lighten the mood.

Theron relaxed a little. “Diacope, actually: repetition to express deep feeling. But close, Vandeleur; very close.”

A sallow young man at the other end of the table snorted: “Blood is right, Tremontaine. There’s enough of it spilt, and enough on your hands. King Gerard trusted the duke. He’d given him his sister’s hand in marriage. He loved him. And what did Tremontaine do? Killed him, that’s what. Where I come from, we call that treachery.”