The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) (6 page)

“Is that Tortua?” Fremont asked. “He looks a hundred years old. Two hundred. He looks like he knew Gerard the Last King personally.”

St Cloud stared at Doctor Tortua with horrified pity. The old magister moved as if he were walking over smooth ice, and even from the other side of the great room St Cloud could see him trembling and nodding. Tortua arranged his notes on the podium, perched a pair of round spectacles on his nose, and began to speak.

In a few minutes it became painfully clear that rumor had only exaggerated a sad truth. Gone was the mellifluous voice Basil remembered and the great analytical mind that had driven it.

“Welcome to you all.” His voice was a barely audible mumble, but the lofty vault of the Great Hall caught it up and magnified it. “I wrote a book, you know, and I doubt I shall write another one. So I wish to share with you today . . . with you today. . . .” He fumbled with his notes. “Oh, yes. Now, this is very interesting. The court wizards were curious sorts. They made rituals out of everything—like women, eh?—only worse. Even the act of love. Especially the act of love. Vespas writes of goings-on between the first kings and their court wizards that would bring blushes to a dockman’s cheek. There was a reason for it all, he said, but the annoying bastard did not say what it was. Apart from the obvious, of course.”

Basil winced. It was all too clear that his illness had robbed Doctor Tortua of his discretion as well as everything else.

“Of course the kings were very naughty. And as we know, the wizards were worse. They encouraged them. How else could they do it? They didn’t fight—the king and his Companions did that. This was in the North, of course. I’m speaking of the Northern kings. Who were ruled by the wizards. A king who doesn’t rule . . . what, then, does he do, eh? Answer me that! He is ruled by powerful men who—who— well, I don’t like to say, but scholarship demands—who
dominate
him. . . .”

This was intolerable. The nobles left, not very quietly. A clutch of scarlet-robed Governors conferred in shocked whispers. Basil shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Pity and grief for his old magister’s public decline warred in him with acute embarrassment. He took refuge in studying the ancient stained glass window, brought, it was said, by Alcuin from Hartsholt in the North. It was very beautiful, a window onto a bright, sharp world. A hart knelt to a man robed in a bear’s pelt, who held a collar of gold suspended above the hart’s antlered head. A pool of blue water sparkled at their feet and a flat, golden sky arced over their heads.

The sun burned down through the colored glass of the window, flooding one bank of benches in green and brown and gold and blue. Basil’s eye was caught by a young man sitting there, a young man of remarkable beauty. He was slouched forward in his seat with his ankle on one knee, his elbow on the other, and his chin in his hand, looking very interested and somewhat puzzled. The light burnished his long fall of dark hair and gilded his pale skin, making him look as bright and sharp as the stained glass. As St Cloud stared, he looked up, and their eyes met across the horseshoe.

The young man smiled deeply at him and St Cloud hastily turned his gaze back to Doctor Tortua.

“So you see—you see—”

Between one word and the next, Doctor Tortua dropped all his notes and began painfully, terrifyingly to bend down to gather them up again. Then Roger Crabbe was standing beside him, holding him upright with one strong hand, gesturing angrily to a servant, who brought forward a chair. Doctor Crabbe eased the old man into the seat and at last, at long last, Doctor Tortua fell silent.

For a horrible moment, St Cloud thought no one was going to do anything. Then a furious clapping broke out on the lower benches. Soon the hall was ringing with somewhat hysterical cheering. Some men began to push toward the dais. Out of pity and ancient affection, St Cloud joined them. Flanked by his students, he made his way to the front of the crowd, and greeted the old man respectfully, braced against a rebuff.

“Welcome back, Doctor Tortua. It’s good to see you so well.”

Doctor Tortua peered shortsightedly at him, lifted his silver-rimmed glasses from his lap, and hooked them over his ears. “Thank you, young man. I don’t think . . .”

Roger Crabbe leaned over his shoulder. A short man, he didn’t have to lean very far. His features were large for his narrow face: a heavy nose, lips made for sneering, and shallow-set, heavy-lidded eyes of a curious pale brown that was almost gold. “It’s Basil St Cloud,” he informed Tortua. “He was a student of yours. He lectures now in Ancient History.”

Ignoring Crabbe, Basil said, “You took on a difficult topic, Doctor.”

The old man drew up all his wrinkles like a pleased tortoise. “Why, thank you, young man,” he said. “Thank you. Yes. The court wizards. Fascinating. I have been rethinking Vespas’s
The Book of Kings
. We’ve been misreading him all these years.” He munched his jaws as if chewing upon Vespas.

“Misreading?” prompted Basil.

“Misreading. Though Crabbe here doesn’t want me to talk about it.” The old man shot a sharp look at his colleague. “Read a lot over again, you know, when I was ill—Delgardie’s
Mirror of History,
Vespas; I even went back and read Hollis’s chronicles. And do you know, they all mention the same things: the intimacy between wizard and king, the mysterious ritual of coronation, the killing of a deer. What do you think of that, eh? All of them. Do you know what I think? I think it’s because it’s true!”

“What’s true, sir?”

“Why, that the wizards of the North really did work magic, you foolish boy!”

By now, all that was left of the lecture audience was crowded around them, listening to the discussion with breathless attention. Nobody denied that the kings had had their wizards, sinister and mysterious counselors with roots in ancient barbaric ritual that could be mistaken for magic. When they were children, their mothers had threatened them: “Be good or the nasty wizards will come and eat you up!” From their first teachers, they’d learned that the wizards had been cynical charlatans who coupled the skills of fairground magicians with an insatiable lust for power, who inspired the mad kings to greater and greater acts of tyranny and depravity.

Nobody believed that their magic had been real. Except, apparently, now, the greatest historian of the age. Who was probably gaga, but still . . . The Horn Lecture had suddenly become a lot more interesting.

“Doctor Tortua,” Crabbe interrupted. “I really don’t think . . .”

“A fascinating theory,” said Basil helplessly. “But there’s no way to prove it. The Council of Lords burned all the wizards’ books and papers, and declared all mention of them outlaw.”

“Aha!” Doctor Tortua’s wizened face became almost frighteningly animated. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” For a moment, Basil felt as if he were back in old Tortua’s lecture hall, and the moment of truth was upon him. “The Book of the King’s Wizard,” the old man hissed. “A complete book of spells, brought down from the North with Alcuin’s wizard, Mezentian. Hollis mentions it, and so does Vespas.”

Crabbe cleared his throat. “Trevor states categorically that it did not exist.”

“Trevor,” Basil St Cloud asserted crisply, “would have stated categorically that his mother did not exist if the Council told him to.”

Crabbe smiled thinly. “There again, Doctor St Cloud, we disagree. Trevor’s
Of Decadence and Deceit
is well-recognized as the most authoritative text on the subject of our country’s sublime history.”

“It hardly matters,” Basil said irritably. “What is indisputable is that the nobles burned the wizards’ books along with the wizards.”

“But even with this fabled Book of the King’s Wizard,” Crabbe went on aggressively for the benefit of the crowd; “even if we had right here before us a page of ancient text instructing us in just how to turn straw into gold—” He paused for the laugh he knew he would get. “Even then, there is no proof of actual magic. The wizards may have been charlatans, but they were also clever politicians. By itself, a Book of the King’s Wizard would prove only that they took care to persuade their royal masters of the reality of their charade.”

St Cloud smiled coldly and said, “Very true, Crabbe. Another possibility is that the wizards believed themselves capable of true magic.”

“Absurd!” bleated one of Crabbe’s students.

“Pay attention,” said Doctor Crabbe. “He’s not saying they
were
magic; he’s saying they
thought
they were magic. An original viewpoint, but not wholly unreasonable. Most of us believe that the magic they convinced others they performed was in fact mere trickery and legerdemain. But if, like our friend St Cloud here, you want to entertain the thought that the wizards themselves were victims of their own delusions . . .” He let a thin, pitying smile finish his sentence for him.

A young voice chimed in, “But if someone did find the Book of the King’s Wizard and cast one of the spells from it and it really worked, wouldn’t that clinch it?”

Basil recognized the voice of Peter Godwin, one of his own students, and wished, not for the first time, that youth were endowed with common sense as well as enthusiasm. Doctor Crabbe had a zealot’s light in his shallow golden eye, and his students were studying the hapless Godwin with predatory intent, like wolves studying a wounded hound.

“Godwin,” said Basil. “Please consider what you have said. If an old book of wizards’ spells were to turn up in someone’s attic, say, or in a job-lot of mildewed rejects from some nobleman’s library, there’s no guarantee that it would be recognizable or even readable. Hollis speaks of a secret language, for instance, and Vespas writes of all public rituals being conducted in a kind of gibberish.”

Godwin flushed to the roots of his curly brown hair.

“Even if you could read such a spell, it would prove nothing,” Crabbe added. “If the spell had no effect, it could be argued that it was too subtle to be immediately apparent, or that only a wizard would have the training necessary to cast it successfully.”

Doctor Tortua, who had to all appearances nodded off during this exchange, roused himself. “They were a disgrace, those wizards, no matter what else they were. All the same, it’s a pity we’ll never know.”

“We certainly know that there is no such thing as magic,” Crabbe said firmly.

“Oh, really?” Doctor Tortua looked at him keenly, a quick flash of the man Basil had loved. “And always have known, I suppose. And that would be why the Council of Lords outlawed all magic, eh? Because they didn’t believe in it? One of those little conundrums of history: why pass a law against something that never existed? It’s still on the books, you know: even saying that magic once existed is a civil offense. Forgot that, did you, Roger? I thought you were a scholar of modern history.” He chuckled wickedly to himself. “Well, never mind. Good thing nobody ever pays any attention to what happens at University, or we’d all be in trouble, eh?”

NICHOLAS GALING HAD STUCK OUT THE LECTURE AS long as he could. Really, he thought, someone should have taken pity on the old fool and stopped him before he got started. Wizards and kings, indeed. It was mildly titillating to hear they’d been lovers back in the mists of time, but it shed no light on the Northern man who’d so upset the City Sessions. Ancient gossip wasn’t modern politics. Wizards were bugabears to frighten naughty children. If the University sheltered a royalist plot, poor, miserable, doddering Doctor Tortua certainly wasn’t at the center of it.

WHEN THE MONARCHY FELL, THE NOBLES ABOLISHED nearly all of their particular titles. Everyone became a Lord, for to be styled a Lord of that free realm was felt to be honor and dignity enough. An exception was made for the three Ducal Houses: Hartsholt, Karleigh, and Tremontaine. For the great good they had done the country and the ancient lineage they bore, these dukes retained their titles, even though they no longer wore their coronets or took precedence in Council. The duchies did inherit seats on the Court of Honor and they retained the right to choose their own heirs from amongst their relations. The title usually passed conventionally to the eldest male; but there were exceptions. The present Duchess Tremontaine had inherited from her uncle, her mother’s older brother, still remembered as the Mad Duke. He had no legitimate children, nor was he dead when he fled the city under a severe cloud, leaving his sixteen-year-old niece in charge of considerable estates with even more considerable income, as well as fistsful of manor houses, hunting lodges, and city property that included one of the nicest estates on the Hill.

Katherine was a practical girl, but she never could have done it if he had not also left her his manservant, a boy named Marcus, who had been in charge of keeping track of everything the Mad Duke could not, from estate revenues to his lovers’ names. Very little unsettled Marcus, and he was happy to show the new Duchess Tremontaine the ropes.

Now, some forty years later, he was still her partner in the Tremontaine fortunes, and she still relied on him for friendship and advice. As the Duchess Katherine sat in her sunny study in Tremontaine House, reading a letter newly arrived from her cousin Jessica, she wondered what Marcus would make of it.

The letter had been written the previous spring. It was stained and crusted with sea salt.
Dear Katherine
, she read.
The funniest thing happened and I thought you would like to know
about it. I picked up a man who said he was your first swordsmaster. He remembered both you and the old Duke very clearly.
He was in a bad way, being surrounded by bandits in Fulati Pass
and also down on his luck. We took care of it. I brought him on
board with me and was able to drop him in Chartil, where the
sword is still honored. He told some very amusing stories. I had no
idea you had almost killed Lord whosis in your youth. Too bad.