The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) (8 page)

“And he was, too,” said the fence-post. “ ‘A man who would live well must live wisely.’ ” He minced out the words savagely. “What does that
mean,
anyway?”

“That you should think before you speak, Fremont,” said Doctor St Cloud repressively.

Justis shook his head. “If you don’t mind my saying so, sir, that doesn’t contradict what I said.
On Morals and Manners
was pretty hard on Anselm’s whole court, after all, not just the wizards.”

St Cloud looked at him so blankly that Justis began to wonder just how stupid he’d been, and then smiled slowly, like the sun rising over the Hill. “No more it does, Blake.” He slapped the astonished young man on the shoulder. “Overlooking the obvious can be as dangerous as not looking beyond it. And you’re not afraid to speak your mind. Good for you.”

Justis grinned. It was good to feel intelligent again.

“Someone else’s monograph doesn’t constitute evidence,” Fremont pointed out.

“Shut up, Henry.” The speaker’s voice was high and clear, like a girl’s, but full of authority. A boy, no more than fourteen, with a fine suit of clothes under his black robe.

“It does if the author went to the original documents,” St Cloud said. “Which he did. I know. He was one of my students.”

Justis was inspired with a sudden and overwhelming desire to have the young magister say the same of him someday. “Doctor St Cloud,” he said. “I . . . I’d like to attend your lectures formally, if you’ll accept me.”

St Cloud put his hand on Justis’s shoulder. “I’m flattered, Master Blake, but I need to be sure you’ve thought this through. You’ve already begun with Doctor Crabbe, who is interested in the Fall of the Kings; I am interested in their rise. And our methods of study are as different as our fields.”

“Yes, sir. I realize that. That’s why I want—”

“I wasn’t finished. I presume you are already studying some rhetoric, geography, and metaphysics?”

“Of course,” Justis said.

“Good man. Then you will come to my lectures. You will think about history and why you wish to study it, and how. You will read Hollis’s
Chronicle History of the Northern Kings
. It may read like a collection of fables, but is the closest thing we have to a standard text on the pre-Union North. You will read Vespas, if you haven’t already, and my own humble offering on the altar of scholarship,
The Origins of Peace
. You will attend lectures by Doctors Ferrule and Wilson, and weigh their ideas against mine. And at the end of—shall we say three weeks?—if you still find yourself yearning after kings and their doings, come to me and we’ll see if something can be arranged.”

Dazzled, Justis nodded. “Good man,” said St Cloud, and squeezed his shoulder. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

He rose, threw some coppers on the table to pay the tally, smiled at the clustered students, and picked his way out through the tables and benches. He liked young Blake; a country boy with more imagination than discipline, but discipline could be learned.

By the fire, Basil’s path was blocked. A student with a long tail of sleek, burnished hair occupied a chair, his legs sprawled luxuriously out toward the hearth, taking up more than his share of room in the crowded tavern. His arms were folded over his chest and his eyes were closed, giving him the look of some beautiful young warrior of old, struck down in his prime and carved on a tombstone. As Basil’s shadow came between him and the fire, he looked up and smiled an indolent smile.

He looked familiar, but Basil could not place him. The magister continued to stare until the young man sat up and pulled in his legs to clear the path. He did not apologize, and Basil did not thank him.

Basil’s students watched their magister go, almost reverently silent; then someone shouted to the barman for more beer, and the redhead Lindley turned to Justis.

“Well,” he said acidly, “
you
certainly made an impression.”

It took Justis a moment to frame a response. The country was different from the city, with different rules of conduct. At home, he’d have fought anyone who’d baited him, and bought him a beer after. But he didn’t want to fight Lindley, who was half his size, and all too obviously hopelessly in love with the young magister. “My mother always told me I should be seen and not heard,” Justis said peaceably. “I wish I’d listened to her. I felt like a prize calf on market day.”

The redhead hesitated, then smiled more naturally. His eyes were a dense pastel blue, like dyed velvet. “I was thinking you looked rather like a prize calf myself, but I won’t say so now,” he said. “I’m Anthony Lindley, of History. That rudesby with the needle nose is Henry Fremont. The infant in the gaudy coat is Peter Godwin, and the stalwart gentleman to your left is Benedict Vandeleur. We’ve been studying with St Cloud for two years now, and consider ourselves his chief disciples.”

Justis shook Lindley’s hand and acknowledged his introductions with a nod. “Justis Blake, of heaven knows what, unless Doctor St Cloud takes me on. Some days, I think I’m getting the hang of it. Some days, I’ve got cowflops between my ears. Like today.”

Everyone looked at Benedict Vandeleur, who fixed the newcomer with a measuring eye. If every dog-pack has its leader, Vandeleur was clearly top dog here. A city man’s son, perhaps, twenty or a bit over, well-muscled, with a stubbly jaw, deep-set eyes, and coarse, dark hair bound back in a thin strip of linen. Him, Justis could have fought, but he smiled at him instead, frank and unthreatening.

There was a charged pause, and then Vandeleur nodded. “Crabbe’s a thug,” he said.

Taking this as a provisional acceptance, Justis recklessly ordered a round of beer for his prospective colleagues. The gesture no less than the beer loosened their tongues, and soon Justis knew that Peter Godwin was a nobleman’s son but nobody cared; that Henry Fremont liked insulting people but nobody cared; and that Anthony Lindley could be perfectly sensible when he wanted. He also knew that, as far as this particular group of historians was concerned, Roger Crabbe was a lick-boot toady who had insinuated himself into old Tortua’s good graces, and Ferrule and Wilson were idiots who hadn’t had a new idea since they’d traded their mothers’ breasts for tankards.

“Yes, yes, I believe you,” said Justis, “but Doctor St Cloud said to go hear them, so I will. One can learn something even from the barking of dogs, as my mother used to say.”

Vandeleur laughed. “You’ll do,” he said. “Tell you what. Come by my rooms later, and I’ll show you my notes.”

“Done,” said Justis. “I’ll bring a pie, shall I?”

“Oh, a rich man,” sneered Fremont. “Bring a bottle, too, and I’ll lend you my copy of Hollis.”

“Oh, a rich man,” said Justis, in perfect imitation, earning himself a rap over the head from Fremont. He hadn’t been so happy since he first came to University. To the Seven Hells with the rigors of Crabbe. Doctor St Cloud’s disciples knew how to enjoy themselves.

chapter V

IF THERE WAS ONE THING BASIL ST CLOUD LOVED MORE than digging out long-forgotten knowledge, it was presenting that knowledge to his students. Years of rooting around in the University Archives had turned up treasures: royal proclamations, letters from decades of Councils to decades of kings, paymasters’ rolls for royal households, lists of King’s Companions, drafts of laws and treaties, signed and unsigned. These documents revealed a world that was far more interesting, more brightly colored, more real than the stately abstractions of the historians Trevor and Fleming, White and even Tortua. Basil remembered the almost sexual thrill he’d felt on first handling Anselm’s letters to the Dragon Chancellor and seeing the sweeping, confident signature above the royal seal. It was that more than anything else which had ignited his fascination with the mysteries surrounding the kings of the North and their descendants.

Of course Basil was perfectly acquainted with all the standard texts, or he never would have been made a Doctor of History. But where his fellow historians were content to rehash the writings of their revered predecessors, turning argument and analysis on increasingly tiny points of interpretation and shading, Basil was quietly reaching into whole new sources—some of them very old indeed. He mined ballads and ancient legends for the grains of truth they might hold; and where most historians relied on, say, Vespas’s summary of the Ophidian Treaty in
The Book of
Kings,
Basil had been known to appear at a lecture brandishing the actual document like a banner, its red seal dark with the blood of ages, captured like a prize from the University Archives.

The small, drafty hall known as LeClerc where Basil St Cloud delivered his lectures was tucked away behind a stone wall and a small, cobbled courtyard, not easy to find. After the Tortua debacle, though, the early kings and their wizards were a hot topic, and this morning LeClerc was as full as a tavern at festival-time. Basil looked out over a floor packed with black gowns and eager young faces. More students perched along the gallery like untidy crows, elbowing one another and whispering and eating steamed buns.

It was an audience Basil could not resist. They’d come to hear scandal; well, he’d give them scandal. As it happened, he’d come across a particularly juicy morsel just yesterday.

“A treat for you today,” Basil said. “I’m going to skip over some three hundred years of councils and treaties and legislative acts, and talk about the reign of the last king but one, Mad Hilary, also called Hilary the Stag.”

He began dryly enough, with material drawn from Doctor Tortua’s
Hubris,
for the benefit, he said kindly, of any visitors who might not be familiar with the basic texts. But soon he was filling out the long-agreed-upon events of Hilary’s reign with the details he’d found in the hitherto lost memoirs of Hieronymus, Duke Karleigh, who had represented the Council of Nobles in Hilary’s court.

“Shortly after his coronation, Hilary began to show signs of the peculiar delusion that earned him his name. He spent more and more time in the compound where the royal deer were raised, and interested himself in their care and nurture to the length of feeding a young fawn pap and milk with his own hands, and bringing it into the palace to sleep in his own bedchamber. When Queen Amelia objected, he had her moved into another part of the palace.”

Laughter in the gallery, quickly shushed. Rows of dark and light heads bent over tablets with a small scratching of pencils, like hens after worms.

“It came as a considerable surprise to his court, therefore, when Hilary chose to revive the ritual, abandoned back in his great-grandfather’s time, of hunting a yearling buck and sacrificing it to the land. Hilary insisted upon hunting the deer himself and bringing it to the wizards and participating in the sacrifice, even though the ritual so disturbed him that he kept to his chamber for days after. The court wizards adored Hilary, even though almost no one else did.”

A movement caught his eye: a head shaking, as if in amused wonder. He focused on it to see slanting cheekbones, a long, fine jaw—faintly familiar, but unplaceable. Distracted, St Cloud paused to gather his thoughts.

Ah. He had it now. The young man from Doctor Tortua’s lecture, and from the tavern yesterday. The young man who had smiled at him then, who was smiling at him now. Basil hurriedly returned his full attention to King Hilary and his peculiarities. Which, in his later years, centered increasingly on beautiful young lovers of no birth and little common sense, who seldom had a choice in the matter. One of them had cut his throat for him. Hilary had been naked at the time, save for a fine deerskin. The young murderer had been discovered weeping over the corpse, his monarch’s blood smeared over his face and chest.

“The court wizards questioned him, of course,” Basil said, “but they could get nothing out of him save the babblings of madness: first he accused the king, and then the wizards themselves, of commanding him to do the deed. He died under the questioning, much irritating Hilary’s heir Gerard, who had been looking forward to executing the traitor. Not to be cheated of his revenge, King Gerard commanded that the murderer’s corpse be drawn, quartered, and burned just as if it had been alive. Gerard was a great believer in following ritual. The problem was that many of the rituals of the North were remnants of a harsher, more barbaric time, when the wizards had been a great deal more involved in government. Tomorrow, I will explain just what all this has to do with the kings of the early Union. Unless, of course, you can work it out for yourselves.”

The University bell tolled heavily over his last words, and there was a general rustle and scuffle as the students gathered up their effects. They’d always known the last kings were corrupt and mad: it was the foundation of every lecture on the monarchy they’d ever heard. But even Crabbe, who was accounted a good lecturer, never really made
corrupt
and
mad
as real as St Cloud’s account of Hilary’s death.