[Galazon 00] When the King Comes Home

by Stevermer, Caroline

  “Warmth would aid your work. You’ll get chilblains down here.”

  “What is a physical inconvenience in comparison with the task before me?”

  “You’ll never be free of distractions if that’s your attitude toward chilblains. For another thing, the damp is bad for books.” I had noticed that the central table was stacked a foot high with books and papers.

  “I’ll send someone down with a brazier,” said Ludovic. He looked around. “One should be safe enough. Don’t ask for more. It would be a shame to smother yourself down here. Will you be all right?”

  “Of course,” said Rigo and I together.

  “Stay with her,” Ludovic told Tig, and took his leave.

  Tig kept silent, arms folded across his chest, expression profoundly unimpressed.

  “Where should we start?” I asked.

  “Stand over there.” Rigo directed me to a spot in the center of the ring of torch holders. With great care and the aid of a triangular device made of brass, he arranged the iron torchères around me. “That’s good. Stay there just a moment longer.” He marked my position with a lavish dusting of chalk. “You may help me mark the rest of the ring.” He gave me a handful of powdered chalk and sent me off in the opposite direction around the circle of torch holders. Dutifully, I marked positions. The mud swallowed up the chalk at once, but despite that, a lighter ring remained visible. “We’re well grounded in the earth. That’s a great help. It isn’t always easy to manage.”

  “It wouldn’t be hard outdoors.”

  “Working outdoors renders one vulnerable to all manner of difficulties. One may be well grounded in the earth, but what is there to defend one from the air?”

  I was puzzled. “Does one need to be defended from the air?”

  “Each element plays a part. We are well situated here, shielded from the air, close to the water, though not too close, and well grounded.”

  “Is that why you didn’t want a brazier? Because of the fire? Are you’re using some theory based on the elements? Are you familiar with the works of Maspero?”

  “One brazier can do no harm,” Rigo conceded. “I ought to have asked Captain Nallaneen to send down a chair as well. Or at the very least, a bench. One can’t sit in the mud, after all.”

  “Of course not. Are you familiar with the works of Gil Maspero?”

  “Maspero?” Rigo blinked at me. “You have something you wish to tell me, don’t you? Does it concern the works of this Maspero?”

  “Maspero cast the medal that Dalet used in her spell to conjure up Julian. Julian said Maspero used his blood in the casting, and he said the royal archive had a copy of his treatise. I never heard of it. A whole treatise I never even heard of. If Maspero used some kind of alchemical theory in his work, the book could be vital.”

  Rigo echoed me thoughtfully. “A whole treatise you never even heard of. I take it you are familiar with the body of Maspero’s work?”

  “I have studied all I could.”

  “Perhaps you would be interested in a visit to the royal archives?”

  “Is the treatise still there?”

  “I have no idea. I think several of Maspero’s works are there. The treatise you speak of may be among them. Even if it isn’t, I always enjoy a visit to the royal archives.”

  “Surely you may visit there whenever you wish?”

  “Of course. It’s one of the great benefits of my work. Unfortunately I don’t have time to visit there as often as I wish. You’ve provided us with an excellent reason. While we look in the archives, the servants can bring us a few chairs. I like a good straight-backed chair.”

  FOURTEEN

  (In which I am sent to the library.)

  Rigo led us back up into the palace. While I was getting the worst of the mud off my shoes, a messenger arrived from the prince-bishop. Rigo studied the message. “Unfortunate. May I make you my emissary to the archives? Ask the archivist for the volumes you see fit. I will come when I can be spared and we will study the works of Maspero together.” He borrowed my silverpoint crayon and scrawled an authorization on the back of the message from the prince-bishop. “That should do.”

  In my previous visits to the archives, I knew that I had not seen all there was to be seen. I had seen all I was interested in seeing, namely the cabinet in which the artworks of Maspero had been collected. I knew there were at least two adjoining chambers that contained the most select treasures of the royal library. Dimly, I understood that there were even more books kept nearby. Yet I never understood the extent of the royal archives or the nature of the treasures contained there, until I presented Rigo’s message to the archivist.

  Daniel, the archivist, a gentle-seeming fellow in a suit of rumpled gray, read the message twice. He did not look more than once at me, and Tig, at my elbow, might as well have been invisible. With a disapproving sniff, he turned and walked away from us.

  I followed, nipping in front of Daniel as he opened the door, so that I could thank him for his courtesy. He said nothing as he led the way along a corridor. Through the doors that were open, I could see rooms full of light, where there were tables and chairs and shelves of books. Some of the doors were firmly shut, and I was sorely tempted to investigate, but the archivist was too brisk. Tig kept right on my heels, and I could tell from the way he looked around that the place interested him too.

  Down the corridor we went. We came to a flight of spiral steps. Daniel led us clattering down. One flight below, another corridor duplicated the one we’d begun with. Just as many doors, just as many windows, and the light was nearly as good. Down another level, halfway along the corridor, and he led us into one of the rooms. This was smaller than I had supposed the ones above to be, and the light was dimmed considerably by the trees outside. I hadn’t realized that there were trees in the palace, though I knew there were gardens here and there within the walls.

  Daniel consulted the slip of paper again. With great deliberation, he took a book down from a shelf and set it at the table nearest the best window. Then he looked at Tig and me very gravely. “Take your time,” he said, and moved a chair to block the door where he sat to watch us.

  “Rigo needs all of Maspero’s works,” I said. I’d said it before. “He was quite explicit.”

  “I’ll bring you the next when you’ve finished with this one,” Daniel replied.

  I was supposed to wait for Rigo. But then, I was to ask for Maspero’s work to study with him. Daniel didn’t intend to obey me. No doubt he would be more amenable to Rigo’s direct order. Meanwhile, it could do no harm to examine the book I’d been brought. I should at least ascertain that it really had something to do with Maspero and his works.

  Warily, I moved to the table and examined the book Daniel had selected. It was a thick volume bound in worn brown leather and looked well made and well used. There was nothing on the spine or the front cover to hint at title or author. I wiped my fingers on my bodice and opened the book.

  Within, in a sprawling hand, the flyleaf proclaimed: Nihil sine gaudeo. Maspero me fecit. I made a strangled noise.

  Tig obligingly thumped me between the shoulder blades. “Are you all right? What does it say?”

  “Stop that. I’m fine. It says ‘Nothing without pleasure. Maspero made me.’ ”

  Tig looked impatient. “Maspero made you what?”

  “Maspero made this book.” My hands shaking as much as my voice, I turned the pages with care. The sprawled writing ran throughout, interrupted at intervals with diagrams and sketches, some marginal drawings no larger than my thumbnail. “It is. It’s his notebook.” I opened the book wide and pressed my face close to the pages, sniffing hard. “It smells like him.” That was pure fancy on my part, but the smell of old paper and old leather was underlaid with something else, the faintest suggestion of sandalwood and sulfur. That scent made the artist seem more real to me than any of the printed treatises I’d read ever had. “Nihil sine gaudeo was his motto.”

  “It might have been
his motto, but it doesn’t mean ‘nothing without pleasure,’ ” said Daniel. “It doesn’t mean anything. Your fellow was certainly no scholar. Gaudium, or joy, would be the correct form after sine. Gaudeo would be a verbal form, ‘I rejoice.’ Voluptas or delectatio are better translations for pleasure. If that’s the sort of pleasure you mean.” He raised his eyebrows and waited for my reply.

  “Er. You’re right.” Reluctantly, I conceded the point. “Maspero wasn’t a scholar.” I remembered what Istvan had said about Maspero working for pints of stout. “He did enjoy the pleasures of life.”

  Daniel relented slightly. “Perhaps arbitrium would be better. It’s a good translation for pleasure in the sense of ‘whim’ or ‘preference.’ Voluptas in particular refers primarily to sensual pleasures. Eating and drinking, as well as the more obvious pleasures. Not the sort of thing one adopts as one’s motto.”

  “No, perhaps not.” Privately I wondered if that might not have been precisely the sort of motto Maspero had in mind.

  Paging carefully through the text, I found a marginal sketch of a salamander, perfect to the gloss on its skin, done with seven quick strokes of the pen. “It’s wonderful.”

  “You aren’t going to kiss the pages or anything, are you?” Tig asked. My interest in the book seemed to revolt him more than anything I’d done yet.

  I reassured him while I seated myself, reluctant to look away from the pages even for a moment. Even a casual glance revealed treasures. I found a diagram that could be nothing but the elevation for the Mathias Bridge, with notations I could not read no matter how I squinted and turned the page this way and that.

  “What are you going to do with it, then?”

  I blinked up at him. “Why, read it, of course.”

  Tig measured the thickness of the book with a glance, then measured me. “Now?”

  “Of course now.”

  “All of it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Won’t it take a long time? It’s all askew, that writing.”

  “That’s all right, I’m used to it. I’ve read his inscriptions before.” I did not mention that my experience of Maspero’s inscriptions usually consisted simply of the words Anno domini followed by the year and Aetatis suae followed by an arabic numeral. In his portraits, Maspero limited himself to the year and the sitter’s age. Given his tenuous grasp of Latin, perhaps it didn’t matter if I could read the words or not.

  “There are three more volumes,” Daniel said. “I haven’t eaten yet.”

  I turned back to the first page. Absently, I said, “Well, go and eat, then.”

  “I am forbidden to leave anyone alone here. It is my duty to guard the books. Even so, we have trouble with pilfering. I hoped that might be why the prince-bishop sent you here. We’ve reported the theft to the authorities.”

  “Hmm. Don’t go, then.” The interlaced lines of Maspero’s casual hand was very difficult to decipher. Luckily the light was good. “You’ll see I’m no thief.”

  “I haven’t eaten yet either,” Tig said loudly. He was standing in the best of the light so I looked up to ask him to move. Somehow, Daniel had come round to stand beside him, and they were both looking at me as if I had done something wrong.

  “Well? What is it?”

  They wouldn’t answer me, just looked at each other and shook their heads gently.

  “I don’t suppose there’s such a thing as a footstool here anywhere?” I asked.

  “You could come back later with a footstool. You’d be far more comfortable.” Daniel’s concern surprised me. “I go off duty at four. Any time after that would be excellent.”

  “If you would stop interrupting and let me get on with my work, I could read more quickly. Tig, do you think you could find your way out of here without getting lost?”

  Tig didn’t bother to answer. The quirk of his lips made it clear that even to ask was to insult him.

  “Go get some bread and cheese for the three of us then. And some wine.” I handed money over. “I have my notebook with me, but not pen and ink, so fetch that as well.”

  “No ink in the archives,” Daniel warned.

  “I can’t take my notes in silverpoint. That’s all I have with me.”

  “No ink.”

  “Tell Rigo that I need to take notes. Bring me what he sends. And a lamp. This will take time.”

  “You won’t need a lamp. You have to leave when I go off duty at four.”

  “Bring a lamp anyway. The light’s not so good here.”

  Tig looked resigned. “You want a footstool too?”

  “I’ll make do without one. You’ll have enough to carry. Oh, come to think of it, you don’t need to bring wine after all. If there’s a rule against ink, there’s sure to be one against wine.”

  “There’s one against food too,” said Daniel, but he said it under his breath so I pretended not to hear.

  “Get on with you,” I said, and went back to work.

  The notebook was the only work of Maspero’s that Daniel would give me. When Rigo arrived, he would command the rest. My time alone with the notebook was limited. I read.

  Maspero spelled things the way they sound. Sometimes he transposed letters or left them out. Other times, whole words were missing. Such mishaps seemed more frequent when he was in a hurry. Fortunately, it was easy to tell from his handwriting when he was in a hurry. The stately interlace of his formal hand yielded to a flurry of crotchets and hangers, the calligraphic equivalent of a troop of cavalry, pennants flying in neat ranks, startled into disorderly flight. Once my eye grew accustomed to the gait of his writing, I could follow it, albeit at a slow jog. Even more fortunately, he kept his excursions into Latin to a minimum.

  Maspero’s first royal commission was from the queen. It was for a man’s ring set with a piece of jasper. That gave me a lurch of the stomach. There was a sketch of the original design. A little farther on, I found a revised design. The fiddly bits had been discarded. What was left was elegant simplicity. I wondered if the revision had been his own idea or Queen Andred’s. If I had been given the leisure, it would have been pleasant work to try to find out.

  The lurch of my stomach spurred me on, no leisure granted. The ring reminded me of Istvan, and Istvan reminded me of Julian. I counted up the days and hours since Dalet had stolen them from me and I worked all the harder. Ruthlessly, I scanned the pages of Maspero’s notebook and untangled every mysterious bit of penmanship I could. Some resisted me, the way knots in thread resist me when I try to sew. I copied out passages I thought might prove helpful. I made rough sketches of the illustrations Maspero had done to catch his thoughts and keep them on the page.

  Now and then I have done things that have made people unhappy. Any normal person must admit the same. I seldom mean to do so, and I am always sorry—almost always—yet that mends nothing. The harm has been done. Some of those unhappy people have wished me unhappiness. Their wishes came true in most elegant fashion during those days in the royal library. I was tortured superbly, for through his work on the page I was given exactly what I once wanted most in the world, that is, time alone to explore some of the workings of Maspero’s mind. Yet I was not allowed to linger. No, quite the reverse. I was forced to canter through pages and pages, notebook after notebook, discarding treasures of knowledge in search of his alchemical chimera. One by one, I worked my way through the archives’ collection of Maspero’s work.

  When Daniel understood my reverence for the work of Gil Maspero, his mistrust of me and his disapproval of Maspero’s Latin grammar turned to active cooperation. When I tugged at a lock of my hair over a reference to crows in an oak tree, he was the one who reminded me of the sketch near the end of the first notebook, in which some of the birds were clearly crows, although those flying away were even more clearly doves. When my notes drifted here and there around the room, he was the one who retrieved the loose pages and put them in some sort of order at my elbow.

  Three days passed in this way. Late on the thi
rd afternoon, Daniel took the volume I gave him and returned from the stacks empty-handed.

  “I’m sorry. That’s the last. There are no more holdings by or about Maspero in the archive.” Daniel looked around at the clutter of objects I’d brought in to help in my studies. “I suppose I could help you and Tig pack all this up.”

  I was stung. “You still haven’t brought me the treatise on alchemy. Maspero wrote about casting the siege medal. We know there’s a copy in the archive. Bring it.”

  “I can’t bring you what we don’t have. The treatise on alchemy was stolen. We reported the theft to the authorities. Remember?”

  “You told me you had to watch me read because there was a problem with pilfering. You never said anything about the treatise on alchemy. If you knew it was stolen, why didn’t you say?”

  “Please don’t raise your voice. You didn’t ask for the treatise on alchemy. You asked for Maspero’s works. I’ve brought you all we have.”

  “One by one. Rigo’s orders were perfectly plain. You were to bring me all Maspero’s books. Why didn’t you say something when I showed you Rigo’s order? The time I’ve … .” Honesty silenced me. I couldn’t claim I’d wasted a moment. However, it had never been part of my plan to read everything but the treatise on alchemy. “Oh, never mind. Come with me.” I took him by the arm.

  Daniel resisted. “What are you doing? What do you want?”

  “Rigo will wish to hear your explanation. We’re going to see him.”

  Rigo was in his cistern. He admitted the three of us, for Tig accompanied me as usual, to the high-ceilinged space. It was no longer nearly empty. There was a chair and a footstool at one end of the long row of tables. The mud on the floor had been so marked with circles of chalk that the ring of candelabra seemed to be bordered in lace. In the center of the ring rested a small, squat casting furnace similar to the one Madame Carriera used in her workshop.

  “What’s that doing here?” I crossed to it and investigated. Thanks to an elaborate effort at venting with lead pipe and terra-cotta tiles, it was even in working order. “Are you going to cast something?”