The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) (3 page)

ASPLATTER OF RED ON A DISCARDED BOOT. MILKY BLUE glass lying shattered in a pool of water. Garlands of greenery swirling everywhere, with little eddies of leaves torn loose from them. And everywhere the sheets, torrents of white fabric lying in fantastic patterns, twisted and ruched, almost spinning, creating lines dipped in and out of shadow, now black, now white, following the logic of the candles placed above them, interrupted here and there by the crosshatching of random streaks of harsh, dull red.

The sheets spilled over the edge of a platform; in front of it, a naked man, streaked in the same red, his long hair matted with it, but clotted also with bits of ochre and vermilion, burnt sienna and indigo.

The woman watching him from across the room was silent. She was dressed from neck to ankle in a plain white smock, smeared in places with the same colors. Her hair was bound up with a twisted scarf, leaving her face a clear and perfect oval.

“Theron,” she said. “You moved. I have particularly asked you not to do that.”

With one hand he tore a sheet from the platform, sending spatters of paint flying in every direction. “What will you paint, then,” he shouted, “the aftermath, the destruction you have wrought?”

“
I
have wrought? I’m not the one who’s just torn the studio apart. Now, would you please take up the pose again?”

He froze, staring at her. “You have no heart.”

“I told you that, ages ago.” She dipped her finger in the paint of her canvas and sketched his lines into it. “You should listen to me. I said this would be the last painting I wanted you for. Stand still, I’m not done with you yet. I’m using you for the murderer as well as for the king. It makes a nice effect.”

Incredulous, he almost laughed. “You want me to pose killing myself.”

“I
want
you to put your body in some interesting positions—”

The laugh burst out. “Oh—haven’t I been satisfying you that way, either?”

“Theron.” Still sketching with naked fingers, she talked. “You have satisfied me entirely. I’ve got maybe twenty-five finished canvases, and dozens of studies. You have been satisfying in every sense. But I’ve run out of things for you to do. I’ve told you all along, no one can hold me forever. I can’t find any more ways to enjoy you.”

A year ago he would have shown her one or two on the spot. Now he said, “Ysaud. Please.” She shook her head as though the noise were a distraction. “Paint what you like, who you like—I don’t care. But don’t send me away.”

“I don’t want you if I’m not painting you.”

“You’re mad.”

“You’ve just wasted a lot of my materials, Theron.” She crossed the floor to take a dab of ochre from his chest with one finger.

“Don’t do this to me. I love you.”

“Please hold still.”

He lifted a hand to his chest. Where her finger had run over his collarbone, there lay exposed a pattern of vines and leaves. It had been etched into his skin with ink.

“You can’t take this back,” he said, “nor what it means. It marks me forever yours.”

“No,” she said. “It’s the paintings that mark you forever mine.” She returned to her canvas. “My vision of you will be alive when your pretty skin is turned to dust. That should make you happy.”

“Stop,” he said. “Stop painting and look at me.”

Now it was she who laughed. “All I’ve done is look at you. If you can’t stop talking, then put on your clothes and go.” He followed her, breaking an unspoken law of the studio, treading on forbidden ground, a space he entered only with her permission. The artist glared at him. Then, with a hiss of exasperation, she stepped back and let him go around the easel to see what stood there.

Coming alive in the candlelight was an image of death: a pale man splayed out on the bed, one hand lying open as if in invitation, the other still clutching a deerskin across his chest. Theron recognized himself, his own body in the languor after sex. The deerskin and bedsheets were speckled with blood. Next to them, she had begun another figure. His dark hair was a waterfall of grief spilling between the hands he pressed to his face with bloody fingers. A shadow of horns rose on the wall behind them, as if a phantom stag had lifted its head.

“This is different,” Theron said, “from the others.”

“Yes.” She observed the canvas and the man together. “This is the last of them; it has to be, you see, because it’s heading off in a new direction. That’s how I know the series is over.”

“I could be a new direction for you.”

“No, you can’t.” Ysaud pressed his chest gently with the brush’s tip. “Not you. Not for me. Go be a new direction for someone else, will you?”

He went out into the night, caked with her colors. He was very sure that he would never love again.

book I

HARVEST TERM

chapter I

FIVE HUNDRED YEARS AGO AND MORE, A KING RODE out of the North at the head of an army. He rode with a company of splendid men, all armed to the teeth. They rode not to war, but to a wedding. After centuries of conflict, the rocky North and the fertile South were at last to be joined into one kingdom in the persons of their King and Queen and their heirs perpetual, united against their common enemies and increasing in mutual prosperity.

The Southern Queen’s Chronicler, Valerian Hollis, had described the King’s army in horrified detail. Their armor was leather and hammered bronze. Under their helms, their long hair was braided with leather and bones and beads and even nuggets of gold. Every one of them was blood kin to his king, and as they came through the streets of the capital city, they sang.

In the eyes of the Southern nobles, the King’s Companions were strange enough, with their barbaric mien and their uncouth songs of war and the hunt. But they brought with them men that they called wizards, and the wizards were worse.

The wizards did not sing. Indeed, they barely spoke, except to one another. There were (according to Hollis) fifteen of them, riding horseback just behind the king. The King’s Wizards were robed in black or brown, russet or ochre: peasants’ colors, colors of the land. Some were cloaked in the skins of animals. Their faces were bearded, their hair unbound and crowned with leaves. From the hands of certain of them, tendrils of ivy grew.

Thus wrote Hollis in the final chapter of his
Chronicle
History of the Northern Kings,
a work written at the behest of Queen Diane and her new consort, Alcuin, later called the Diplomat. It was a book every historian should own; Basil St Cloud had bought his when he was still a student, and lived on bread and cheese for the rest of the month to pay for the used, leather-bound volume. Now he was a Doctor of History, and the margins of its pages were lined with notes, the leather cover buttery with handling. But it had failed to enlighten him on the subject he was currently researching.

With a sigh, he set the volume aside. If only Hollis had not insisted on cluttering up his account with so much about the wonder of these so-called wizards. Wizards, indeed! The very word evoked nameless rituals and dark mysteries, when everyone knew that their “magic” had been nothing more than sleight-of-hand coupled with diplomacy. But they certainly had made an impressive show. As many times as Basil had read the description, it still gave him a chill: “. . . their hair so twined about with leaves of Ivie and of Oak, as to make them seem in themselves to be Trees and Creatures of the Wood come riding into our Citie to take it through the Greening of the verrie Stones. . . .”

Basil shook his head. Very pretty. Very fanciful. Charged with collecting facts from his new compatriots, but unable to understand most of what they said, Hollis had simply conflated history and legend. Still, the book was pretty much all modern scholars had to go by. The pre-Union North was known for the strength of its warriors, not its record-keeping. And Hollis really had witnessed the events of the Union. Now, if only he’d been more interested in laws of inheritance than in trees on horseback. . . .

A knock on his door interrupted his fulminations. “St Cloud!” He recognized the voice of his friend Thomas Elton, Doctor of Astronomy. “St Cloud, I know you’re in there, now open up!”

Without regret, the historian opened the door to his rooms. “How now, my fair one!” It was an old joke. Elton had the face and figure of a bull-dog, but his hair, which he wore long by University tradition, was an incongruously beautiful honey-colored mane that his friends loved to tease him about. “Have you come all this way to invite me to dinner, or do you just want to stick your ridiculous astral spyglass out my window again?”

Elton grinned. “I’ll accept your kind offer, if it ever clears up. You live so much closer to the heavens than the rest of us, and I want to get another good look at that comet. Stars with fiery hair, they don’t come around that often. And this one’s such a beauty, Basil.”

“Yes, you’ve said. But that’s not what you’re here for.”

“Right. If I thought you had any wine to offer me I’d make you produce it—but instead, I come to tell you that there’s been a sighting of Leonard Rugg in the fiery precincts of the Blackbird’s Nest, ordering the ingredients for a brandy-punch!”

Basil said archly, “I don’t suppose it was Cassius who spotted him?”

“
And
is saving us a couple of seats.”

“Blessed Cassius.” Basil finally found his cap and jammed it on his head. “A mathematician can always be relied upon to count the right number of guests. Onward, let us onward, like the invading Ophidian army on the Plains of Garrawan. Look out for the broken step.”

The streets of the University were the streets of the city, and some of the oldest. They lay on the east bank of the river, where, it was said, King Alcuin’s wizards had first taken up residence after the Union. Certainly the streets were close and twisty and notoriously difficult to navigate, particularly late at night. The school had been tiny at first, not much more than a few classrooms nestled in a warren of government edifices. But time and history had wrought their changes. Buildings that once had been halls of state were now lecture halls, and the dens of civil servants and kings’ companions had been turned to students’ quarters, rented out to as many aspiring young scholars as could fit in a room. The taverns that dotted every corner were probably the oldest structures that retained their purpose. Across the troubled maelstrom of time, people always need a beer.

The tavern known as the Blackbird’s Nest was awash in the dark-robed scholars who gave it its name. Its ceiling was low and black-beamed, its ancient walls as deep as a man’s arm from hand to elbow, its windows sunk in alcoves. The feet of untold generations of drinkers and debaters had worn troughs into the stone of its floor; their shoulders had polished the stone walls black and smooth. Basil had been coming there since he was a young student, fresh off the farm—not as many years ago as he liked to think. He’d met Elton and Cassius there, accomplished scholars of two years’ standing. They had advised him on University ways, from simple matters like letting your hair grow long to avoid looking like a country bumpkin and always giving way to a magister on the street to the intricacies of getting credit in a tavern and the maximum number of lectures he might attend without paying the magister a fee. And they’d invited him along with them to meet the brilliant young Doctor of Metaphysics, Leonard Rugg, known for his generosity with the punchbowl and his stimulating debates on everything from women to the meaning of the stars.