The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) (25 page)

NOT LONG BEFORE MIDWINTER, BASIL ST CLOUD came home one dismal afternoon to a slip of paper under his door: a summons to dinner that evening at Doctor Leonard Rugg’s.
“Eels at 6:30,”
it read,
“with
Cassius and Elton. Do honor us. L.R.”

He stood in the open door facing his cluttered worktable and thought he would rather work. Then his somnolent ambition woke and counseled him to follow his self-interest for once and take his scolding for neglecting his students. Besides, pride whispered, it might be good for Campion to call in Minchin Street one night and find his lover engaged elsewhere.

So Basil sent the scruffy boy off to Rugg’s with a politely worded acceptance, and set out for Rugg’s lodgings determined to swallow whatever the acerbic metaphysician might serve up.

Leonard Rugg’s chambers bore witness to the popularity of his lectures. He had a sitting room and a study as well as a bedroom and a chilly closet, where his manservant Barkis slept beside the casks of beer. Among his other duties, Barkis did basic cooking over the sitting room fire: toast and hot water for chocolate and punch. Anything else was sent up by the landlady or, on state occasions, by the cookshop on the corner. As the cookshop’s specialty was jellied eels, jellied eels is what Rugg commonly served his guests when he was moved to entertain—jellied eels and a very decent Ruthven claret.

The stairwell smelled faintly of eels and more strongly of a smoking chimney. As St Cloud ascended the steps to Rugg’s door, he was uncomfortably conscious of notes unanswered, appointments missed, and conversations avoided or curtailed to make time for Theron Campion’s seductive tutorials in the pleasures of the flesh. Elton and Cassius— and Rugg, above all—were undoubtedly offended at his recent behavior, and Basil hardly knew how to appease them. He would not apologize for doing what he so badly wanted to do, for following a joy he had not imagined knowing.

It was therefore in no very comfortable mood that Basil knocked at Rugg’s door. When Barkis let him in, he was not surprised to see the three friends already gathered around the fire like the Three Wise Men of Huffington, glasses of wine in their hands, an empty bottle at their feet, and a second open beside it.

The astronomer lifted his glass in greeting and Cassius said, “There’s ten coppers I owe you, Elton. I never thought he’d come.”

“I only bet on sure things,” Elton said. “I’m glad to see you, Basil, and so is Cassius, for all his sour face.”

“Of course I’m glad to see him,” said Cassius. “I never said I wasn’t.”

Their host stood up, glass in hand. “Don’t stand in the door, man—it’s cold. Come in. Barkis, another glass here, and a new bottle. My learned friend looks dry.”

It was as if they’d all dined together yesterday. St Cloud relaxed a little. Rugg filled his glass with clear, red Ruthven and regaled the company with a salty tale about the Harris Chair of Rhetoric and his newest lover.

“Illiterate, I heard,” said Cassius when the laughter had died down. “A pickpocket from Riverside.”

“Why do you immediately presume he’s a pickpocket?” Elton objected. “I acknowledge that most pickpockets live in Riverside, but it’s absurd to say that everyone in Riverside is a pickpocket. He might be a swindler or a gambler or a house-breaker or a petty thief or a swordsman—”

“Or a whore,” Rugg finished. “Which seems by far the most likely. I think we should eat now. Barkis, the eels.”

The conversation over the jellied eels was largely political. Elton was at daggers drawn with Sanderling of Astronomy over the subject of the movement of the spheres. Doctor Sanderling subscribed to the ancient belief that all heavenly bodies visible in the night sky revolved around the earth. Elton, who had studied mathematics along with astronomy, had come up with a theory that the earth, and possibly everything else as well, revolved around the sun. Cassius supported him on the basis of mathematics, Rugg on the basis of friendship. St Cloud privately thought the entire question uninteresting and unimportant, the relative antics of the sun and earth having no discernable effect on human history. But he was entirely in sympathy with Elton’s methodology.

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” he asked rhetorically, his fork poised over his plate. “The old guard just won’t accept that there’s anything new to be learned by looking at the heavens or reading old documents or experimenting with systems of numbers, as Cassius did in that monograph there was such a flap over last year. They think all the important facts are already known, and all that’s left for a scholar to do is refine methods of interpreting them. Which is absurd.”

Cassius swallowed his mouthful. “Exactly. Scholarship, particularly scientific scholarship, should be based on making fresh discoveries, not on the incessant mastication of old ones.”

“Especially when those discoveries are wrong,” Elton agreed. “All the gyrations the College of Astronomy has been going through year after year to make their theories fit the observations, when it’s all right in front of their noses. Why can’t they just accept that it’s not their instruments or observations that are at fault, but their stupid, outdated theories?”

“Because they’d have to accept that they were blind, narrow-minded ninnies,” said Rugg. “You can’t blame them for declining to admit that their lives have been thrown away on the study of stupidity.”

“Yes, you can,” St Cloud objected. “Why would any
real
scholar persist in pursuing falsehood when he could pursue truth? Take Crabbe, for example. He’s wasting a good, analytical mind on yet another commentary on Delgardie when what he
should
be doing is combing the archives at Halliday House or Hartsholt’s warren up North, looking for diaries and letters that would tell us what was
really
happening up there after the Fall.”

“As you have,” said Rugg dryly.

“As I have,” agreed St Cloud. “Oh, I haven’t done research in the noble houses, not yet. There’s no real need: I’ve found plenty of original documents in the Archives. And let me tell you, until Anselm’s grandson, Iron Tybald, the kings weren’t as bad as Vespas drew them, nor the nobles as spotless. It all makes sense when you know exactly what the kings did in the North before the Union. When I finish my new book . . .”

“Well, that’s it, isn’t it?” Cassius interrupted him. “When you finish your new book, how do you propose to get it past the censor?”

“The kings were deposed two hundred years ago, Cassius. There’s never been a serious claimant to the throne.”

Rugg frowned. “Wasn’t there a Herriott raised an army once?”

“Sixty farmers, stark naked and carrying sharpened sticks,” Basil said, “don’t constitute an army. Herriott himself was barking mad. And that was eighty years ago. It’s time we taught the truth, not politically convenient fictions invented by an embattled and cautious Council in our great-grandfather’s time. Nowadays, surely, they have nothing to fear.”

Rugg held up his glass for Barkis to refill. “Actually, that’s what we wanted to talk to you about, St Cloud.”

“The truth?” St Cloud asked casually, although his blood had begun to race unpleasantly. “Or Herriott?”

“Politics,” said Elton. “You know you were never any good at them.”

St Cloud carefully laid down his fork and wiped his greasy mouth on the hem of his gown sleeve. “I’m the youngest doctor in the University, Elton. I can’t see that my lack of interest in politics has done me any harm.”

“It didn’t,” said Rugg, “as long as it was obvious that all you were interested in was ancient history. Not a flashy subject, ancient history. Half of it is fairy tales and the other half, by your own accounting, is lies. If there weren’t a richly endowed chair in it, I doubt it would still be taught. You can learn all you need about the ancients in metaphysics and rhetoric, if you ask me.”

“Then I don’t see why I can’t say what I like,” said St Cloud. “Not that I agree with you, of course. I can’t see how we can hope to call ourselves educated men without understanding where we come from, the bad and the morally ambiguous as well as the good. But if the Governors feel as you do, then I should be able to preach the return of the kings on street corners and risk raising nothing but derision.”

Cassius sighed. “Well, that’s just the point. As long as it was nothing but dramatic lectures filled with highly-colored incident, slender monographs on the ancient roots of obscure laws, and
The Origins of Peace,
you were a brilliant academic scholar. What you turned up was pleasantly titillating, like listening to your grandfather reminiscing about the deviltry he got up to when he was a boy. It didn’t have anything to do with the real world.”

Elton glanced at St Cloud’s frozen countenance. “Cassius, you’re an ass. He’ll be too angry now to hear anything we say.”

“No, Elton, I’m not,” snapped St Cloud. “I am angry, but Doctor Cassius has said nothing more than I’ve suspected. As long as their contempt has encouraged the Governors to allow me to teach and publish as I wish, I am grateful for it. I am at a loss, however, to see why you are telling me this now.”

The three men exchanged a look, and then Rugg said, “It’s this Campion business, St Cloud. It won’t do. Sullies your purity.”

Between fury and astonishment, St Cloud could hardly speak. “Purity?” he sputtered. “How can you speak to me of purity, Whoremaster Rugg? The School of Mathematics will have to invent fresh numbers to tally your mistresses.”

“Damned self-righteous prig,” Rugg muttered, pouring himself more wine. “Don’t know why I bother.”

“You had it coming, Rugg,” Elton said. “Listen, Basil. Theron Campion’s mother is the widow of a duke, lectures in the College of Surgery, and has enough power and influence to endow a chair in Mathematics—for women, too. Oh, yes, it’s a done deal; the Governors couldn’t block it, though they tried. His cousin is a duchess. Campion himself is, or will be, a very powerful and rich man some day. They already call him the Prince of Riverside! Becoming this man’s lover is a political act, Basil, whether you mean it to be or not, and it’s not a wise one. It taints you with intrigue and patronage when your chief strength was a complete and obvious unworldliness.”

Basil stood suddenly, sending his plate crashing to the floor. “Unworldliness? How dare you? My chief strength is, or ought to be, the originality of my research, the rigor of my arguments. It makes no difference whether I’m a nobleman’s lover or a ravisher of lapdogs as long as I’m a better scholar than Roger Crabbe. Which I am.”

There was a moment of silence while Basil glared at the three men and they stared uncomfortably back. Basil decided he might as well leave now, having heard and said every word he could imagine the subject warranted.

“Doctor Rugg,” he said stiffly, “Doctor Elton, Doctor . . .”

“Oh, sit down, Basil,” said Elton wearily. “Of course you’re the better scholar. What your liaison with Campion means is that now you’re going to have to prove it.”

“My book won’t be ready. I’ve found new material . . .”

“Bugger your book,” said Rugg. “You don’t need a book. You need drama, you need spectacle, you need—”

“A challenge,” Elton finished for him.

Everyone looked expectantly at Basil. He sat down slowly to think about it.

Academic challenges, like swordsmen’s challenges, had grown rare of late. The last one St Cloud could remember was when a Fellow of Law had debated a full-fledged Doctor before the University Governors for the right to be made a Doctor without having published. He’d lost, of course. He was a brilliant speaker, but that was not enough. Words draw no blood, and the final judgment rested with the Governors, who rejected his claim. Rules, after all, were rules; and the other magisters, who had duly published theses in their seasons, had made no objection.

Basil said, “If it’s all about politics, as you say, what’s to keep the Governors from deciding against me out of hand, as they did with that poor Law Fellow?”

“Well, it’s a risk,” Elton acknowledged. “But once the debate is all out in the public where everyone can hear, if you’ve got proof that Crabbe is talking out of his hat, they’ll have to give you the Horn Chair. You’re popular; there’ll be an outcry if they don’t.”

“But our subjects are so different,” Basil objected. “His specialty is the same as Tortua’s: the fall of the monarchy and the rule of the Council of Lords. Mine is hundreds of years earlier. What can we possibly debate about?”

Elton leaned forward eagerly. “Methodology, of course. Methodology is going to be the real subject of every debate at this University for the foreseeable future. If you can just catch him out on some small fact, something that you’ve come across looking for something else—you know the kind of thing.”

St Cloud nodded slowly.

“Then,” said Cassius, picking up Elton’s thread, “you can launch into a disquisition on primary sources and pure data, and leave Doctor Crab-cake to hide his head in the sand.”

Basil thought a moment. “What do I do?”

Rugg was delighted to explain the procedure to him, and did, at some length, while Barkis cleared away the debris of the meal and another bottle of claret met its fate. Soon St Cloud’s head began to spin with wine and the formal rules of academic challenge. “Time was,” he said meditatively, “that apprentice wizards cried challenge upon each other, the loser to end his life as a crow or a mule or some lesser beast.”

There was a dense and irritated silence. “You might want to keep away from the wizards,” said Cassius at last.