The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) (65 page)

There was the window above her, the stone sill within reach of her hands. She stood tiptoe on the ladder, and looked in.

At first she thought he was a statue, leaning back against the elaborate bedpost, pale and beautiful, with ivy twined around his chest. But statues do not have long dark hair that caresses their naked shoulders, nor yet more dark hair springing in a place whose details are usually hidden by drapery. Frannie stared. It occurred to her that this statue looked familiar. He had, in fact, once given her half a cheese tart, and a very fine ghost story of his own.

She tapped softly on the glass. He turned then, his hair whipping behind him, and saw her. He dashed to the window and flung it open and pulled her inside with him.

“Softly!” he said. “We have little time.”

“Oh, yes!” she breathed, caught in the story, whatever it was. “I know. How can I help you? What happened to your clothes?”

“My sister took them,” he said. “She locked me up in here, and I need to get out.”

“My sister did that to me once. She’ll get it when your mama finds out.”

“I don’t think so. But never mind. Give me your breeches.” She scrambled out of the canvas trousers. They came only down to his calves and rested low on his hips, so that the ivy disappeared around his back and down into them behind.

“Wait!” She ran to the window, in time to see Agatha, clutching a stout stick, on her way up to rescue her. “Aggie, back down! It’s a friend, he needs to escape. Hold the ladder below!”

He put his hands on Frannie’s shoulders and looked down into her face. “You are a true friend of the Land,” he said. “As you have helped me to my kingship, you shall be first among my Companions. My sister has lost that right.”

He was out the window before she could ask him what he meant. He really did look like art, especially his chest.

AS THE PROCESSION PASSED THROUGH THE COURT, THE crowd moved to fill in behind it. Justis shuffled into a spot behind a short man, and put his arm around Marianne. “Which one’s yours?” she asked as the Historians followed their seconds up the steps. “I do hope it’s not the squidgy one.”

Whatever his feelings about Roger Crabbe, Justis did not like outsiders making judgments. “Doctor Crabbe is the smaller man,” he said austerely.

Marianne snorted. “He ought to take a leaf from your man’s book and cut his hair short. There’s nothing more pitiful than a man with his twelve long hairs bound back in a tail that’s thinner than the string.”

Justis had been thinking that St Cloud looked different, but hadn’t quite known how until Marianne spoke. The familiar sheaf of thick, black hair was gone. With his hair curling at his ears, he looked broader in the jaw, older.

“He’s a looker, whatever else he may be,” said Marianne.

“Pity the Governors aren’t all as susceptible as you,” said Justis. “He’s going to need all the good will he can get.” Even at this distance, he could see that the Master Governor’s formal greeting was distinctly warmer for Crabbe than for St Cloud, and that several of the Doctors frowned when St Cloud made his bow to them.

The Master Governor climbed to the speaker’s platform and held up his arms. The horns gave one final admonitory blast, and fell silent.

“Fellow scholars and lovers of truth,” the Master Governor began. “I welcome you here as witnesses to this debate between two men of learning.”

While the Master Governor droned on about the procedure and the nature of the debate, Justis contemplated history and ethics and how the study of the former had demonstrated the complexity of the latter as the most brilliant lecturer could not. Was it wrong to break a law when the law enforced belief in a lie? What did it matter whether a wizard, dead two hundred years, was a charlatan or the misguided priest of a dying religion? Finally, what did it matter whether magic had been real or not?

He came to himself at a tug on his sleeve. Marianne was growing restless. “Don’t he love the sound of his voice, though?” she said scornfully. “Too bad he’s the only one that does.”

At last the Master Governor entered his peroration, made an end, and stepped down. Doctor St Cloud mounted the platform with no more ceremony than if he’d been mounting the dais in his drafty lecture hall, folded his hands before him, and spoke in a clear, carrying voice, “I call challenge upon Doctor Roger Crabbe. I challenge him on his facts, his reasoning, and his conclusions. The wizards were true wizards, and their power was true magic.”

AFTER HIS ORIGINAL SHOCKING STATEMENT, ST CLOUD spoke moderately and well. Nicholas Galing listened with an interest informed by months of Henry’s lecture notes while he took his audience back five hundred years and more, to the ancient Kingdom of the North. Everyone there knew of it, of course—the land it comprised was a third of their own country. But few of them knew anything of its history: a mountain kingdom, isolated and rich, protected by warrior kings and ruled by wizards.

“It was not a society in which the written word carried much weight,” St Cloud explained. “There are no formal histories, saving Martindale, who is very late, and not even much written poetry or other literature survives from those ancient days. What does survive is lists: of the kings and their battles, of the wizards and their acts, of the villages visited by the kings on their progress, of the children of royal blood. The documents, when studied in conjunction with certain legends, are very suggestive of the role the wizards played in the government of the North.”

One by one, St Cloud picked up the strands of his evidence: he cited folk tale, legend, balladry, the chronicle of a foreign prince who had fallen in love with King Martin Swordsmaster and run afoul of his wizard. He added in harder evidence—the lists, passages from Martindale’s
Chronicle of
the Wizards and their Deeds
—and wove them together into a tightly argued tapestry that pictured, in colors bright as life, a tableau of wizards who had the power to command both storms and men. He spoke of barren women growing fertile, of rivers no foreign soldier could cross, of hunts through forest and mountain in quest of deer who spoke in the tongues of men. He spoke of kings honored for their potency, and nobles vying for the honor of letting their daughters serve them.

“You may wonder,” he said at last, “why I am insisting so strongly upon ancient history when the facts under dispute are so much more recent. My answer to you is this. Our realm, our little world of city, of university, of river, of farm-land and upland, of mountain and ravine, did not appear all at once, perfect and whole as we see it today. It grew, as an apple grows, from a seed to a sapling whose branches, cut and grafted onto a sturdier stock, blow blossoms and bear fruit in their season. Our realm is of the Southern Kingdom, which was ruled equally by a monarch and a Council of Nobles. But it is of the Northern Kingdom as well. And, as I have demonstrated, the Northern Kingdom was shaped by magic.”

Uneasy murmuring rolled down the banked rows of Doctors and Governors and out into the crowd. Nicholas, who had been listening to St Cloud’s argument with growing excitement, felt his blood bubble with joy. Everything up to this point had been so much scholarly flourishing, like the formal moves with which a swordsman begins an exhibition bout. Now the fight was joined in earnest.

“I suggest,” Doctor St Cloud went on, calm and steady as before, “that it is illogical to believe that the wizards left their magic behind them when they came South. In fact, there is ample evidence that they continued to cast spells after the Union. The nobility often called on the wizards to clear their wells and bless their fields, even as they petitioned the kings to curtail their political power. For generations, an uneasy truce prevailed, and under it the Kingdom climbed toward a pinnacle of brilliance it was never to know again: the reign of King Anselm, called the Wise.

“Anselm was an innovator, a patron of the arts. And he was a reformer. Influenced by his queen and the Duke of Hartsholt, he divided the wizards from the rest of the court, severely curtailing their political power. He encouraged them to bring their knowledge and skills to this University—and limited their role in the training and upbringing of the royal children. After Anselm, the wizards’ magic seems to have weakened, although they retained enough power to protect their increasingly erratic and unpopular monarchs until David, Duke Tremontaine, found a way to bind them before he killed the last king.

“The form of the binding is instructive: ‘He bound them, Duke David of Tremontaine, behind an oaken door chained three times three: locks of iron, of gold, of lead thrice worked, with three great words upon them.’ The words are from a popular account, quoted by Vespas in his
Book of Kings
. Master Vespas presents the passage as a quaint metaphor of thoroughness, as a farmer might say he’d harnessed his ox with wood and leather, with collar and nose ring.”

He waited for his laugh and got it, but Galing noticed that it was a nervous one—they weren’t sure they liked where this was heading. “I present you,” St Cloud went on, “with another reading. I believe that David, Duke Tremontaine, bound the wizards into that hall with a spell he may have learned at this very University, where it was once possible to attend lectures in the Arts Magical.”

First blood,
Nicholas thought. The group of braid-bedecked Northerners gathered at the pedestal of Imagination raised a cheer and their leafy branches. An opposing group booed and catcalled until the Master Governor rose ponderously to his feet and raised his hand for silence. It was a while in coming, but St Cloud, undaunted, lifted his voice above the noise.

“Doctor Crabbe teaches that the wizards after the Union held power through chicanery and corruption alone. Furthermore, he assumes in every lecture he gives that their Northern forebears were charlatans likewise. By ignoring the evidence of the historical record, he paints a false picture of our antecedents, and misprizes the wit and courage of David, Duke Tremontaine, who alone was able to free our land from the tyranny of Gerard the Last King. By this reasoning, I submit to you, my lords, learned Governors, admired doctors of this University, that Doctor Crabbe’s scholarship is no such thing.”

St Cloud took his seat amid mingled applause and booing, and Nicholas reflected that an academic challenge is not a swordfight, where the give and take of blows occurs faster than an eye can follow. Now that St Cloud was no longer speaking, Nicholas could see that he had brought scarcely a single acknowledged authority to bear upon his subject. If this was all he had to go on, then Nicholas could relax. There was no danger of anyone believing him. And there was still no sign of Theron Campion.

DOWN IN THE GREAT COURT, JUSTIS BECAME AWARE OF Marianne clinging to his arm, and looked down. Her cheeks were bright, her eyes were opened to their widest extent, and her plump lips were curved in a delighted smile. Feeling her lover’s gaze on her, she tilted her head coquettishly. “Why did you say I’d be bored,” she demanded. “It’s as good as a play. The things he does say! I’d no notion history was so exciting. And those eyes! They burn right into you.”

She’d hit it precisely, Justis thought. St Cloud was in his element, lecturing to a class of hundreds. And he was telling the truth at last—triumphantly, defiantly, completely, without hold or stay.

“I collect it’s the little one’s turn now,” Marianne went on. “Don’t he look smug—like a cat at a mousehole. He thinks the booing meant they didn’t like our man, but he’s wrong, isn’t he, Justy? It just meant they’re scared of him. He’ll see.”

Watching Crabbe take his place upon the speaker’s platform, Justis wondered at the little magister’s confidence. Hadn’t he been listening? Didn’t he know, even if his blindly faithful supporters did not, that he was already beaten? Was it ambition or simple prejudice that allowed him to stand up in front of them all with his narrow chest thrown out, smiling like a man who knows that the dice are loaded?

“You have been told,” Crabbe began, “that my scholarship is nothing, that it is founded on faulty evidence—on lies, in fact. Now, it is easy for one man to call another a liar, and no harder for the second man to throw the lie back in the teeth of the first. Schoolyards are full of children whose idea of argument rises no higher than this. But I am not a child. I am a Doctor of History, approved and licensed to teach the history of our noble realm by the illustrious Governors of this ancient University. That alone should shield me from such a challenge to my scholarship and my honor.”

It soon became apparent that Crabbe had decided to take the position that St Cloud’s challenge was not really worth responding to. He began by rehearsing the death of Gerard and the binding of the wizards as it was recorded by Vespas, who had witnessed it, and Trevor, and “our own august Master Tortua, the current Horn Chair,” who had collated all the available sources and commented on them in
Hubris
.

“Shorn of the elaborate figurative language that was such a prominent feature of Late Monarchical prose, the story is a simple one. Twenty-five nobles of the Council of Lords called challenge on Gerard. They fought his Companions, who tried to protect him, and David, Duke Tremontaine, won through to deal the fatal blow. The wizards were not present, Duke David having invited them that night to a great banquet in a pavilion near the oak grove to celebrate the coming of the spring solstice.

“Now,” said Crabbe, sweetly reasonable, “you must keep in mind that this was a time of great superstition and general fear. Gerard was quite mad, and his madness manifested in particularly violent and bloody ways. Any man who displeased him in the smallest way might find himself losing his fingers one by one to the axe of the First Companion. If Gerard were more seriously displeased, it would be his toes, his nose, his genitals, oh, and his lands and goods as well. Five years before the Fall, seven nobles had conspired to put a stop to his tyranny, and had come to a nasty end. The uprising failed, leaving disappointingly little evidence behind it. Our only source for it is Vespas, who rather poetically tells us, ‘The wizards did reap them as corn is reaped at harvest, and thereafter no blade of grass did grow on their lands for a twelvemonth and a day.’ The exact interpretation of this sentence has been the subject of much controversy among later scholars. Trevor had it that . . .”