The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) (7 page)

“Katherine? You look like you’ve just bitten into a green plum.”

It was Marcus, his hands full of papers.

“Jessica.” The duchess waved the letter. “She says she met Venturus—my old teacher, remember?—out over the sea somewhere, rescued him from bandits. I wonder if she’s telling the truth?”

He settled himself down on the windowseat. Middle age had thickened him, but his solidity was very much in keeping with his temperament, as though the outside man had finally caught up with the inside and was very comfortable there. “I don’t see why not. It’s not as though she goes to the trouble of writing very often. Is she trying to hit you up for anything?”

“Let me see.” The duchess scanned the letter. “No. I don’t think so. Just international gossip. Oh, wait—here’s a bit about wool prices in Chartil . . . I knew that. When did she write this, last year? Hold on—oh, this is too silly, Marcus. It’s wizards. Yes, indeed, a whole tribe of renegade wizards from hundreds of years ago who made their way east outremar, and established a school on a mountaintop . . . she ran into one in a marketplace somewhere in the Kyrillian Archipelago. She said he hailed her as—oh, this is too silly.”

“Sounds like her.” He grinned.

“
He spoke our language with a fearsome accent, and asked for
news of home. You will think this is even sillier than I did
— Well, she’s right there.
I told him we were all very well, thank you. He
asked how the land prospered, without a king. I told him that we
have a lovely duchess instead, who manages everything beautifully
— A compliment! There’s a change!
—plus a few lords
and chancellors to make up the balance. —And does not the land
hunger for a king? I said it was years since I’d seen it.

“
What do you think, madam duchess? Does it? And, if so, do
you have a candidate? Let me know at once if a coronation is toward, for I would certainly drop everything to celebrate a king of
your choosing.
” She folded the letter with an exasperated sigh. “Oh, Jessica.”

“You’d think she’d have gotten over baiting you by now.”

“I suppose I should be glad she writes at all. She can’t be expecting an answer. But poor Venturus! Imagine him still being alive after all these years! If it really is him, I should track him down and send him a pension. Ask Angela to step in here, will you? I’ll draft the instructions.”

chapter
IV

THE DAY AFTER THE TORTUA LECTURE, LEONARD RUGG sat in the Blackbird’s Nest, debating Placid’s classic text
Of Manners and Morals
with Roger Crabbe. Placid had touched on both metaphysics and history, so it was an even playing field. Their students, who were standing by, ready to pick up the rhetorical ball as needed, understood that what was really being debated was Doctor Tortua’s sanity and that Rugg was deliberately being provoking.

“Now, I’m no historian,” Rugg was saying, “and correct me if I’m wrong, but Placid wrote
Of Manners
during the reign of Anselm the Wise, some two hundred years after the Union, isn’t that so?” The historians nodded; the metaphysicians sniggered. “So when he says that wizards are, let me see, ‘perfidious, pernicious and given to unholy appetites,’ he’s talking about the ones he knows, the ones in Anselm’s court.” Everyone nodded. “These wizards are men he knows, men he’s observed, men he’s probably eaten with. Maybe one stepped on his toe, or spilled soup on him! How, then, can we take his opinion of them seriously? He’s biased. It’s not history, it’s not manners, and it’s certainly not morals. I think we should simply delete the chapter and be done with it.”

This sally was greeted by hissing and expostulations, but Crabbe’s students fell silent when the little magister raised his hand. “Say what you like about morality, Magister Rugg—and we all know that you are the expert there—” Sniggers, this time from Crabbe’s historians. “But whose opinion can we trust, if not that of a man who was present at the time and wrote so eloquently about the decadent world he witnessed?”

“The world he witnessed was in essence the same world we live in today. ‘Worlds do not change over time, nor the people in them,’ ” Rugg quoted sententiously.

Crabbe closed his eyes in weary disdain. “And it therefore follows that the study of history is a pointless exercise, I suppose?” He folded his arms across his chest and jerked his chin at the massive youth perched precariously on the end of the bench. “Blake, you answer him. You know my arguments, or you should.”

The student he addressed nervously raked his sandy hair behind his ears, which were prominent and, just now, rather red. Justis Blake was a large, slow young man, with large, slow thoughts. He did not like to be hurried, nor did he have the smallest idea how Doctor Crabbe would answer such a statement. He had only been attending his classes for two weeks. But he licked his lips and tried anyway. “History teaches us that worlds do change. We don’t have wizards now. That’s a change.”

The metaphysicians hooted at this statement of the obvious. Rugg said, “Yes, the nobles took care of that. They burned the old charlatans like so much cordwood, and there’s an end to it. We still have nobles, though, don’t we? Nothing really changes.”

But Justis went on, “People don’t change their basic natures, perhaps, but their surroundings can change the way they see things. For instance, a year ago I was still myself, but I lived on a farm—” Somebody mooed; it might even have been a historian.

“Honestly, Blake,” Doctor Crabbe said. “If you can’t reason logically, at least you could remember my lectures. Or quote Trevor’s glorious words on the subject. You have read Trevor, haven’t you?”

Blake’s cheeks and ears burned. This was Doctor Crabbe’s way, he reminded himself. He’d endured it in class and he’d survived it. The history magister’s habit of leaping on you and shaking your ignorance out of you reminded him of his mother’s terrier, hunting rats. Justis Blake had chosen to attend Crabbe’s lectures because he thought it would be good for him to be shaken up a bit. Now he wasn’t so sure.

Doctor Rugg turned a comradely smile on him. “Take heart, boy. Scholarly debates draw no real blood. Try again.”

Blake took a deep breath. “Thank you, sir. All right. If the question is, what was the wizards’ real function, and Placid can help elucidate it, then his opinion is as good as anyone’s, isn’t that so? Placid knew the kings, he knew the wizards. He didn’t think much of their magic.”

“What Placid thought about magic was very much what we still think,” Rugg pointed out mildly. “ ‘Magic is like strong drinke,’ ” he quoted; “ ‘for the man who trusteth therein trusteth to the shadow and the image of power, that in itself is naught.’
Of Manners and Morals.
Book IV.”

“Well, yes, but—” Justis swallowed. The whole room was looking at them. His mother had been so proud when he left to study in the city. He wondered what she would say when he appeared at her garden gate, cast out and utterly humiliated. He took a deep breath. “But we ought to look at other things besides Placid. It’s like a stool, you see, that can’t stand on one leg alone. Placid is one leg of the stool. He doesn’t like wizards and he doesn’t think much of their magic. Why isn’t he afraid of them, though? Because he isn’t, you can tell.”

Crabbe’s honey-colored eyes narrowed to little sharp points. “I had no idea what an original mind you had, Blake. Go on; I’m fascinated.”

As well be hung for a wolf as for a lamb, Justis thought, and forged on. “He’s more afraid of the king than of the wizards. Anselm curtailed their power. It’s one reason he’s called ‘the Wise.’ I think. Anyway, another leg of the stool is: Anselm enacted laws.”

“Laws?” Crabbe sneered. “What do you know about laws, after two whole weeks studying history? Yesterday, you didn’t know the names of the first Inner Council of Lords, and now you’re an expert on Anselm’s laws!”

“It was a monograph I found,” Justis went on doggedly. “About some documents to do with laws enacted to limit the wizards’ political role when Anselm came to the throne—”

“ ‘Some documents’!” Crabbe threw up his hands. “There you have it! You turn your back on the great ones, on Fleming and the immortal Trevor, and go picking through moldy papers, and what happens?”

“You get some remarkable insights.” The new voice came from over the heads of the ring of onlookers. Like rushes in the wind, everyone turned to face the speaker. He was a large, solid-looking man, with broad shoulders and springy dark hair escaping from its ribbon. To Blake’s country-bred eyes, there was something of the peasant about the way he stood, as if the Nest’s uneven floor were a ploughed field. But his green sleeves proclaimed him a Doctor of Humane Sciences. “You learn what lies behind the formal statements approved by the court censors for publication, for one.”

“Ah!” said Leonard Rugg happily, as though finding Basil St Cloud at his usual table at the Blackbird’s Nest was the most unexpected of chances. “St Cloud! Going to set us all straight, are you?”

“If you like,” Basil said mildly. “You, Rugg, of all people should admit that two-hundred-year-old gossip can still be valuable in evaluating historical data. Take the story about Placid dedicating
On Thought
to King Anselm. When Placid read the dedication out before the court, the king rewarded him with a purse of money and a writ of banishment.”

Leonard Rugg blew what in a less distinguished personage would have been a raspberry of disgust. “Yes, yes, we all know that story—if it’s true.”

Crabbe chopped at the air impatiently. “Of course it’s true, Rugg. Vespas reported it, and Trevor saw no reason to doubt the account.”

While Crabbe and Rugg bickered, Justis Blake studied his rescuer. At a table by the window, Basil St Cloud stood surrounded by his students, the usual band of black-robed men of various shapes and sizes. But there was something about them all that reminded him of a team of kickball players from another village: they had the ball and they knew it. And right now their ball looked a lot more attractive than Rat-Catcher Crabbe’s. On that impulse, Justis Blake did something very simple that would change the course of the rest of his life: he got up from the bench and made for the table by the window.

“Good idea,” Crabbe called after him, unwilling not to fire a parting shot. “Maybe St Cloud can knock some basic history into your thick skull. When you’ve learned what atrocities the kings committed when they came South, then you may be able to understand why they had to be deposed, and their performing wizards along with them.”

But Justis wasn’t listening. St Cloud’s black-robed throng closed ranks around him, shutting him off from Crabbe’s table—and St Cloud invited him to explain himself. Smarting from Crabbe’s needling, Justis was inclined to stammer at first, but Basil St Cloud’s clear, intelligent eyes never left his face, and soon he was constructing the kind of argument that had inspired his teacher in the village school to lend him book after book, and finally the means to make his way to the city and its university, where he’d been feeling like a prize fool ever since.

“So you see,” Justis concluded, “our society grows out of his. We cannot understand what we are if we do not understand where we came from.”

Basil St Cloud smiled, and Justis felt as if he’d just scored a difficult goal.

“I agree with you, Blake—it is Blake, isn’t it?” Justis nodded. “What do you make of that story about Placid and Anselm, by the way?”

“Do you really want to know?” Justis was incredulous; Doctor Crabbe was seldom interested in what his students thought of the material he taught them.

“Yes,” said Doctor St Cloud simply. “I do.”

“Trevor says . . .”

“I know what Trevor says,” St Cloud interrupted. “I want to hear what you think.”

“It seems pretty obvious, sir. Anselm must have taken Placid’s indictment of luxury and vice in
Of Manners and
Morals
as a personal attack.”

“Pretty obvious indeed. What if I were to tell you that Anselm banished the man because he found him a sententious bore?”

“I’d say that you were just guessing,” Justis answered promptly. “There’s nothing like that in any of the histories.”

A man like a fence-post draped in black leaned over his shoulder and said truculently, “Careful. Someone might think you were calling Doctor St Cloud a liar.”

“Let him be, Fremont. It’s a fair point.” St Cloud turned to Justis. “But consider: you yourself have noted that Anselm was instrumental in limiting the power of the wizards, so he certainly wasn’t going to banish Placid for disliking them. Furthermore, papers do indeed turn up from time to time—in attics, in old chests, even in the University Archives.” A slight young man whose long, fine hair was the color of copper laughed appreciatively and was rewarded with a smile. “In this case, it’s a notation on the writ of banishment itself. I don’t think it’s been looked at since the Fall, but it’s in the Archives. You can see it for yourself, if you’re interested. In the margin, above the king’s signature, there’s a single word.
Ass!
It’s the same hand as the signature.”