The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) (9 page)

“Thank you.” It was the strange young man, standing below the lectern. “That was interesting, about King Hilary and his lover. All those details, about the slit throat and the deerskin on the bed, they aren’t in Tortua or Trevor, or even Vespas. But I know I’ve seen something like it, something very like it, and I’m trying to remember where. . . .”

Something about him—his voice, perhaps, or his arrogance, or his suggestion that St Cloud’s discovery was not as astonishing as he’d thought—put Basil’s back up. “Indeed?” he said. “When you remember where, you must certainly let me know. Independent corroboration is always important.”

“In case someone thinks you made it all up,” the young man agreed.

St Cloud considered ignoring this, but could not. “Will you hear some advice, Master . . . ?”

“Campion.” The young man swept a courtly bow. “Theron Campion.”

“Master Campion. A scholar’s facts are a scholar’s honor. I was not made a Doctor of this University for inventing colorful details.”

“Of course not, Doctor St Cloud.” Campion’s glance flicked up mischievously. “But . . . how charming of you if you had!”

His eyes were greenish. Basil found that he was looking into them. Theron Campion smiled engagingly, and Basil felt his heart begin to hammer with what, under the circumstances, could only be outrage. “Truth is hardly a jesting matter,” he said coldly.

A moment later, the young man and his disturbing eyes were pushed aside by a group of students wanting to carry Doctor St Cloud off to the Blackbird’s Nest for a drink and more stories. They were disappointed, but not entirely surprised, when he laughingly informed them that being a magister did not absolve him from the exercise of scholarship.

“If I’m to be as immortal as Trevor and Fleming are, as Doctor Tortua will be, I need to write a text as great as theirs. Such texts are not written in taverns, my friends, not even taverns as stimulating as the Blackbird’s Nest.”

ALL THE GREAT HISTORIANS HAD MADE THEIR REPUTATIONS on a single defining work. Tortua, for instance, had written a study of the Inner Council and endless monographs on various pre-Fall laws and treaties, but
Hubris and
the Fall of the Kings
was the thing he would be remembered for, just as Trevor was remembered for
Of Decadence and
Deceit
and Fleming for
The Tragedy of Kingship
.

Basil St Cloud doubted that he would be remembered for
The Origins of Peace.
He considered it a journeyman work, competent but not inspired. The book focused entirely on the nobles’ activities around the Union. It was little more than a paean to the Council of Nobles for forging an alliance that would bring peace and prosperity to both kingdoms and put an end to the interminable border wars that harvested too many lives and not enough food. What finally brought them together was an invasion that threatened both kingdoms; what had kept them together was the marriage of the monarchs. He’d used only established sources, and had come to the unexceptionable conclusion that the barbaric North had gained more from the Union than the civilized South.

Basil had written
Origins
to suit the Doctors and Governors, before he’d discovered the heady joys of true scholarship. And before he’d realized the truth about the ancient kings.

For too many years, that truth had been buried; buried not only by courtiers and scholars eager to please their noble masters, but by the genuinely despicable behavior of the kings immediately preceding Gerard, who had quite rightly been deposed by the Council of Lords. It had been nearly two hundred years since the last king was slain; now, Basil thought, might be time to uncover the truths about the first ones, who ruled the land for hundreds of years: strong and beautiful warriors who had united the two kingdoms against foreign invaders despite the bickering of Northern and Southern partisans; men of daring and imagination who had left their mark on treaties and laws still in place, on stable borders and prosperous farms.

It was a truth that would be hard for anyone now living to accept. The assumption was that all the kings had been more or less as mad as Hilary, as wicked as Gerard. But Basil had read their very words, had touched the paper that they had touched, breathed the dust of their official documents and private correspondence, and Basil knew better. There was nothing of madness in Anselm’s letters to his councilors, no wickedness in the love poetry Roland the Stout wrote to his wife, Queen Isabelle, or in the clever sketches Orlando the Fair had scribbled in the margins of the draft of the Arkenvelt Treaty. For generations after the Union, the kings had ruled fairly and well, presiding over courts in which scholars and statesmen practiced their crafts, and young men danced, fenced, debated, jousted, dallied with the daughters of nobles and with each other. And before that, the Northern kings had kept their rocky little kingdom independent and prosperous against the twin threats of foreign invasion and famine. Basil loved the ancient kings. He loved them for their mystery, for their bright courage, for the love and poetry and art that they had inspired. He loved them because nobody else did, and because loving them seemed to be the same as loving buried truth. He loved them, and wanted justice for them.

The problem, of course, was evidence. Charming as he found Hollis’s
Chronicle History of the Northern Kingdom,
Basil understood it to be a piece of political puffery, commissioned by Alcuin the Diplomat and his queen to introduce the history of the king’s ancient land to their new subjects. Their descendants were better documented; but in his heart Basil knew that the key to it all lay in Alcuin’s predecessors in the North, in what they had brought to the Union and how it had worked its way into this land’s living heritage. The ancient North kingdom had yielded precious few written texts, and those that survived were so fragmentary as to be almost incomprehensible. Basil believed the history of the North lay encoded in ballads and poetic fragments, in legends of skin-changers and wizards and tales of glorious battles and hopeless loves—but that was not the kind of evidence even the most liberal-minded of historians would accept as authoritative.

The Treaty of Union, however, was a document whose historical authority even Roger Crabbe could not question. And an astute scholar could deduce a great deal about the laws and customs of the mysterious northlands from the provisions of that treaty. Inheritance, for example. Why should a whole section of the treaty be devoted to ensuring that the throne never pass to a woman? It set the queen’s nobles against the king from the beginning, flying in the face of their own traditions. What did the kings and their wizards have against women, and in whose interest was such a law? What tradition did it spring from?

In pursuit of answers, Basil devoted himself to sifting through the stacks of books and papers he found in the Archives, or bought from the rag-and-bone men who made their living combing through the city’s trash. Among the useless bills and tallies and notes, occasionally he discovered historical gold: letters from an ancient Lord Davenant to his son, or a half-filled book of private musings by a Lord Montague in the reign of King Alcuin’s great-great-grandson Rufus. He’d found that one in a box of old romances and household accounts belonging to an impoverished Karleigh cousin, which had also contained the diary of old Hieronymus where he’d read the remarkable story of Hilary’s death.

Basil was annoyed, but not surprised, to find the wizards mentioned everywhere. Davenant urged his son to seek their help with his wife’s infertility. Montague cursed them for interfering in a drainage scheme before he’d told anyone about it. Montague also quoted a certain Pretorius, who “performed a ritual of Sweet Water over the well at Hemmynge House. No more sickness there, the Land be thanked. But like the shepherd in the tale, now the King desires the river purified, and P. doubts the whole College of Wizards would have sufficient power for that monstrous task, and is much given to crying, ‘Alas for the days of Guidry!’ ”

At least, it looked like
Guidry
. There was a Guidry’s Well up north. But Basil supposed it could have been
Cully
. Or even
Godfrey
. Montague’s handwriting was scratchy and faded, but he was close to the king, and every sentence was precious.

Basil kept at the notebook until his ink ran low and the fading light reminded him that he was out of candles. Whereupon he noticed that his head also ached, his mouth was as dry as the Twelve-Months’ Drought, and his belly was as empty as his inkwell. Beer was what he needed, and some food, and more ink, and probably firewood and candles as well. Which meant that he was going to have to go out.

He swore, and put on his hat. If he had a servant, he wouldn’t have to interrupt his work for trifles. But a servant’s yearly hire was a half-dozen new books, a winter’s worth of wood. He simply could not afford it.

Basil blew out his candle and locked his door behind him. The Horn Chair of History paid a good stipend, he thought as he felt his way down the stairs. It would cover not only a manservant, but new rooms and bookshelves and wax candles and all the books he needed. His chances of capturing that prize were small, though; when Tortua stepped down, the Chair would inevitably go to an established historian, not a jumped-up country boy with a minor book and a couple of mildly controversial monographs to his credit. It was foolish to think otherwise, wasn’t it?

In the dank front hall, the scruffy boy who kept the door let him out. The evening was clear but cold. Shivering, Basil made for the nearest tavern, the Ink Pot, traditional gathering-place of poets and rhetoricians. Disinclined to company, he found an empty table by the wall and ordered burned ale and a fowl pie. The ale appeared almost immediately; Basil watched over the edge of his tankard as a hilarious group of students by the fire argued some fine point of rhetoric. One boy had his foot up on a bench, lunging like a swordsman with an accusing finger to his laughing opponent’s nose. Only eight years ago, he’d still been one of them. He sipped the fragrant brew and smiled to himself. And now he was dreaming of the Horn Chair. Still, why shouldn’t he dream? Because, he answered himself, he was not even thirty yet; an infant among magisters. Yet who were his rivals, after all? Ancient history was not a popular subject, and Doctors of History were few. Only Crabbe posed any real competition—but Crabbe had many enemies. As far as Basil knew, his only enemy was Crabbe himself.

The fowl pie came; he ate it and was contemplating more ale when a black-gowned student detached himself from the group by the fire and headed toward Basil’s corner.

“Doctor St Cloud,” said the young man brightly. “Good evening.”

This time, Basil recognized him immediately. “Campion, isn’t it?”

“May I sit down?” The green eyes were a little glassy with drink, the white hand heavy on the table’s edge.

Basil saw no reason why he should mince words with a man who was, after all, both drunk and rude. “No,” he said flatly.

Theron Campion staggered, catching himself against Basil’s shoulder. “Oops,” he said. “Sorry. Just sit here quietly. You won’t know I’m here.” He eased himself onto the bench next to Basil, thigh to thigh. Basil recoiled as though the touch had burned him.

“Sorry,” said Campion again, and moved away.

“Don’t you think you should go home while you can still walk?” Basil asked coldly.

“I’m not so drunk as all that,” said Campion. “I can still say ‘Seven seditious swordsmen sailed in exile to Sardinopolis.’ Shall I buy you a drink? The wine’s not so bad here, if you know what to ask for.” He smiled like a cat who knows where the cream is kept. “I know what to ask for.”

Basil laughed. “I’m sure you do. No, you shall not buy me wine.”

“Brandy, what about brandy? Or beer. Men who drink beer are seldom beautiful, but it’s the exception proves the rule, or so ‘Long John’ Tipton would have us believe.”

“ ‘Long John’?” Basil said, ignoring the reference to beauty. “Is that how you refer to Doctor Tipton? What do you call
me,
then?”

The boy smiled a very creamy smile. “Now, that would be telling. I would call you Basil, if you would permit it.”

Basil eyed Campion with the fascinated curiosity of someone watching a man walking blindly into a brick wall. The boy was clearly too drunk to know what he was doing. “I can’t stop you,” he said shortly.

“Oh, yes, you can. One hard look from your eyes could turn my tongue to stone. Everyone is afraid of you.”

“You exaggerate.”

“I do not, sir. I always pay ver-ry par
tic
ular attention when you speak.” An aristocratic drawl was beginning to bleed through the University sharpness. “Though, mostly, I watch your mouth. It is austere, yet sensuous. It bears watching.”

Basil repressed an urge to cover his mouth with his hand. “I wasn’t aware that you had had much opportunity to watch it before today. You are hardly a regular attendee of my lectures.”

“It’s a morning lecture,” Campion explained apologetically. “I have come before, though. I heard you speak on the rise of the Inner Council and the court wizards. You’re wrong about the wizards, you know.” He leaned closer. “I understand about them, you see, because I have studied the
rhetoric
of the situation. Being a student of Rhetoric. Which I am—this year. Last year I did Geography . . . but never mind. I like History, too. What I’m trying to say is,” he sat up straight and drew a deep breath: “What were the court wizards? What was their function, after all? They were counselors to the kings. They gave advice. All this business we read in Hollis about their seeing into men’s hearts, binding the kings with chains of gold . . . it’s figurative language. A rhetorical device. Any poet can tell you that. What they really were . . . they were like you, Basil: they sifted the evidence, looking for truth. They were scholars of the heart.” Pleased, he repeated it: “Scholars of the heart. And because they were good scholars, they got it right often enough to be credible and thus gain a reputation for real magic.”