The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) (29 page)

“Where’d you get this, Cortney?” Justis asked.

“Get it?” Cortney blinked slowly. “I didn’t get it. It came to me. I looked down, and there it was. They were.” He indicated his own chest, which was decorated with a similar leaf. “I gave you the extra one.”

“Why?”

“I like you, Justis. Don’t know why.” Cortney frowned. “Hang on. I do, too. You’re a decent man, Justis Blake. Not as bright as some, but decent. I want to shake your hand.”

He held out a plump, chapped palm, which Justis, much moved, clasped with his own, and pumped energetically.

“If I may interrupt this touching moment,” Vandeleur said behind him. “Finn’s making an ass of himself—over there, by the fire.”

The crowd in the Court had cleared somewhat as the students spread their merrymaking to the surrounding streets and taverns. Justis had a clear view of Finn’s wiry figure spiraling the bonfire, holding a stick that looked suspiciously like a linkboy’s unlit torch.

“He better keep his mouth shut,” Vandeleur remarked. “He’s drunk so much his breath’ll catch fire if he gets too close.”

“What’s he think he’s doing?” Justis asked uselessly. “He’s going to get burned!”

By twos and threes, the students remaining in the Great Court stopped whatever they were doing and watched Finn approach the fire, some calling out for him to come back, some urging him on. Blake headed toward the fire, shouting, “Don’t go any closer!”

He’d hardly taken three steps before he was surrounded by a small group of Northerners, all wearing oak-leaf badges and dozens of ribboned braids.

“Don’t, Justis.” Anthony Lindley was kneeling almost at Justis’s feet. His face was flushed and sweaty and stuck with tendrils of hair and loose ribbon. “You mustn’t try to stop him. He’s going to start the Hunt.”

“What hunt?”

“The Royal Hunt, Southron.” His informant was a vaguely familiar blond with wide-set eyes—Greenleaf, his name was. “The Hunt that feeds the Land.”

“The Land wants him to.” Lindley’s voice was reverent.

Justis spread puzzled hands wide. “It’s what we’ve always done back home,” Greenleaf explained with ironic kindness. “To make the Sun come again. A primitive ritual, but it seems to work.”

“He’ll lead us to the wood,” said one of his friends, “and we’ll hunt the Deer, and all will be as it should be.”

By this time, Lindley had taken in Justis’s tumbling hair and the leaf lying on his breastbone. “I see you bear the token. You’ll soon understand.”

Justis tugged at the leaf, intending to remove the token and then himself from his disquieting company, but was distracted when a gasp went up from the assembled students. He looked up to see Alaric Finn dart up to the bonfire, thrust his torch into it, and dance back again, waving the lighted brand triumphantly over his head.

“To the Wood!” Finn shrilled. “For the Hunt and the Sacrifice and the Feast of the Sun!”

Lindley scrambled to his feet and tossed back his tinkling braids. “The Wood!” he cried. “To the Wood!” And he held out his hands to his scarlet-faced lover, who embraced him one-armed. The students, Northern and Southern, opened a path for them, stamping and cheering and picking up the chant, “To the Wood! To the Wood!”

Without actually having decided to join them, Justis found himself running through the streets surrounded by young men with loose, flying hair and loose, flying gowns, shouting, “To the Wood!” at the top of his lungs. At one point, the man coursing next to him veered to one side, grabbed at a hanging shutter, and, after a brief struggle, tore it free.

“Wood!” he shouted. And the entire pack obeyed him, tearing apart a shack some hapless merchant had built against the side of his shop and running on again, each man carrying a stick or a plank, pursuing Finn’s torch and his hoarse cry: “To the Wood!”

As they rounded a corner, the torch stopped, and with it the panting, wild-eyed pack of students. Justis wiped his streaming face against his shoulder, suddenly conscious that his lungs burned, his legs ached, and his hands prickled with splinters from the board he carried. He heard a thick, aristocratic voice drawl, “What in the Seven Hells is this?”

As if in answer, Anthony Lindley’s clear tenor cried aloud: “The Deer! The Deer! Behold the Deer!”

Justis squinted. The light of Finn’s torch danced on the astonished faces of three richly dressed young men standing at the mouth of the street. Two of them looked familiar. Before Justis could collect himself to think why, Lindley pointed at one of them, a long-haired beauty in green and gold, and cried again, “The Deer!”

The chosen young man’s eyes flashed with reflected light as he gaped at the panting, growling pack. Then he darted down an alley with Finn behind him, and Greenleaf and his Northerners and Lindley and Vandeleur and Fremont and cautious, decent Justis Blake, shouting “The Deer! The Deer!” as they harried their quarry out of the city.

THERON LAUGHED AS HE RAN. HE KNEW THE STREETS AND alleys of University—hadn’t he been finding his way around them since he was old enough to walk?
I’ll lead them to
Riverside, he thought, and lose them there.
He grinned to think of the University crowd staggering helpless amidst the filth and carnival of a Riverside Last Night. They were on the broad Riverway now. Their torches threw his shadow up wild against the warehouses. In another minute, he would gain the lower bridge; he’d be home free.

But suddenly he was in a daze of light and shadow, howling faces, and the heat of upraised fire. They had come round him, somehow, cut off his access to the bridge. Someone thrust a flask at him—he seized it, took a long pull of some honey-sweet liquor, cast it away, and wheeled back around, toward the North Gate. It was like the games of tag he’d played with the twins at Katherine’s on summer nights, roaming the lawn in all directions. But this was the dark night of the year, and maybe they would all keep running till the sun came up.

Ahead, through the gate, the cold night air was sweet and pure. The scent pulled him: trees were there, and clear-running streams, and the cry of owls. Theron broke through the gate with the pack behind him.

Hardly anyone was shouting now. His own breathing was loud in his throat, and he could hear gasps and grunts in his wake. His feet sucked up midwinter mud, but so did his pursuers’. He wondered what had become of his noble friends from the Hill. Were they among the panting pack, or had they fled? Over the fields they all went, under moon and star, toward the tangle of the wood.

Something happened when he found himself amongst the trees. The torches were the only bright-colored thing in the black-and-silver world of the year’s longest night. He couldn’t tell tree from shadow of tree; he fought his way forward through stripes of illusion. But no longer did he lead them; he felt that he was being driven now, driven deeper into the wood, farther from the safety of the city. The spinning shadows made him dizzy. He closed his eyes and flung himself forward, hands outstretched, and felt before him nothing, a space, a clearing in the oak trees.

He was trapped. The men and their burning brands filled in the spaces between the trees, surrounding him with a ring of fire. He flung up his head, his nostrils flared, seeking a way out.

Around him the men began to sing, and to dance to their rough music. They were holding pieces of wood in their hands: torn-off shutters, bits of barrels, the spokes of a cart-wheel. They flung them at the center, where Theron stood, so that he had to dance himself to avoid them. He understood words:

The Horn, the Horn, the King of Horn
Bless the day that he was born
Build the Fire around him high
New King in and Old King die!

The pile of wood grew at the center of the circle. Theron half-danced, half-staggered back into the arms of one of the men. It was Alaric Finn, who caught him and flung him across to another man, shouting, “The King! The King!” The next man caught him and held him tighter and longer— Theron felt the man’s desire pressing hard against his thigh. He struggled and the man kissed him, biting his lips, before the shout went up and he was spun away to the arms of another—good god, it was Henry Fremont, hair disheveled and long face flushed. Fremont didn’t kiss him. He gripped Theron’s shoulders hard and stared at him with furious eyes, then flung him into the powerful arms of Justis Blake, who picked him right up off his feet and swung him around and around. Next was red-headed lovesick Anthony Lindley, who had fled from the sight of him naked that day at Basil’s; this time, Lindley looked him full in the face and whispered, “Welcome, my lord.” It was worse than a kiss. Theron shut his eyes—but the bright flames of the torches burned through the lids. He heard the singing:

You who bear the brand
You who bear the flame
Cast away the old
Let the new year reign!

He struggled in Lindley’s arms—they were both holding him now, Lindley and the proud Northerner, Alaric Finn, between them—and a tall man was holding the honey flask to his lips, tipping the sweet burning liquid down his throat. Everything was orange and black, even the people—
Ysaud would
love this,
Theron thought. He seemed to have stumbled into one of her paintings, and now he was trapped in it.

Someone shoved a burning torch into his face. He pulled his arm from Lindley’s to grasp it, and Finn cried, “Light it, my lord! Light the fire now, you bollocks, and bid the Sun return!”

Theron hurled the brand into the center of the pile of scavenged wood. A great cry went up around the circle; all the torches were flung in, and the fierce honey liquor went round. He heard singing and shouting. As the flames rose up, the men fell back from the bonfire. Some retreated into the shadows of the trees; he heard sharp cries of pleasure, mixed with howls that might have been bloody murder but were not.

No one held his arms; now was his chance to escape, to return to civilization and warmth and safety. He looked up, and froze at what he saw.

Across the fire, across the circle, a figure stood very still amidst the trees. It was green as new grass, and brown as old leaves. It stepped forward into the firelight and smiled at him.

It was the King Man: the man from his dreams, walking free as dreams may on this night of all nights. Theron recognized the heavy brows and thin-lipped mouth, the powerful shoulders and the bearskin that hung from them. And, exactly as in his dream, the man held out the cup and said, “Will you drink, my lord?”

Theron shook his head,
No,
but the King Man still came forward, walking through the fire, which settled at his feet.

“The old year is dead,” the King Man said, “and the new not yet begun. The door is open between the worlds. The old kings are dead, and the Land cries out for a new one.”

Theron stepped back, but there was a pool of water behind him now, a flat pool of water silver in the moonlight. He was afraid to look into it, afraid he might see the horns spring from his head.

Again the King Man offered him the cup. “I tell you this. You will drink before the year is out, from the pool or from the cup, it makes no matter. Between that time and this, however you run, you will always run to me.” He reached down and took a fistful of brown oak leaves from the forest floor, and cast them in Theron’s face. Theron smelt old earth and fresh mold, the debris of a hundred centuries; he tasted the land in the back of his throat, and clutched at the forest as it rained around him.

“Now, run!” The voice rumbled through his bones, and he ran.

HIS PILLOW OVER HIS HEAD, BASIL ST CLOUD IGNORED the noise of pounding as long as he could. There were plenty of drunks out tonight. He’d seen them as he made his way home from the festivities in the Great Hall, none too sober himself. Best to stay behind closed doors.

But then he realized that the door being pounded on was his. He rose and dragged himself to where he knew the door was, fumbled with the lock. His nose was assailed by wood smoke and dead leaves, and the sharp tang of a man he had lain with many times this year.

He clasped the man to him. “Theron,” he whispered. But Theron said nothing. Basil pulled him in, and flung open a shutter so that a little starlight could enter.

Theron’s hair was unbound, tangled like a skein the cat had played with. His gaudy festival clothes were muddy and torn. He stared at Basil mutely, his eyes wide and helpless.

“My dear, what is it?”

Theron shook his head, opened his hand. An oak leaf, crushed and dry, crumbled to nothingness.

“It’s all right,” Basil said. “It’s all right.” He smoothed the hair back from his lover’s face. Theron’s breath was pungent with liquor. His lips were rough and cracked, but his mouth was still eager. Basil closed his eyes and saw himself falling into a sea of old green—holly leaves, bright against the midwinter snow, and ivy that grew up around him, twining around his legs, growing up to his forked crotch with the inevitable power of life.

His fingers were clenched in Theron’s hair. Slowly he released them and looked down into his lover’s face, where Theron knelt at his feet. The boy’s face was a mask of passion. The edges of his mouth were stained with blood and seed. He did not look entirely human.

Basil searched himself for pity or concern and did not find them, only the hot flush of power over the creature he had before him. All questions of wealth and poverty, of Hill and University, of Theron’s father and Basil’s father, dissolved into nothing before that power. It was more than desire. There was something almost sacred about it, bright and consuming as the flames of a bonfire.