Rafe couldn’t tell if this was a threat or a statement of confidence, but he felt a momentary urge to take a potshot at the gleaming feather with one of the sandy turnips. Instead he made vaguely reassuring sounds and hurried away.
“What was that about?” the girl asked. She easily kept pace with his large strides; in fact, she seemed to glide beside him. His scowl deepened.
“I have his cousin in my rooms. A boy wonder. A mathematical genius. The key to all of my financial and academic worries! I just need to keep him.”
“The cousin of the root-vegetable vendor?”
“I could hardly believe it myself.”
“And why is he a key? Academically?”
Rafe turned to her. “Because he can put into practice my evidentiary theories! Our best theories demonstrate that the earth is round. But how does it move in the heavens? Rastin tells us that it doesn’t move at all, merely anchors hooping planetary motions. But that makes no sense, and no one has the balls to say so. There are equations that no one has been able to solve—some don’t even think they’re worth solving! But this boy . . . Micah . . .”
“You think he can solve them?”
Had he said too much? But the girl only seemed mildly interested. He wanted to know how the Kinwiinik managed to travel such great distances without the help of any landmarks, but he had no idea if his equations (if Micah’s equations) were related to their navigational techniques. And she was probably telling the truth about her unfamiliarity with that side of her family business. Who had ever heard of a woman mathematician?
“I do,” Rafe said, after a moment. “I’m betting my career on it.”
The girl considered this. “Do you know . . . I have been curious about your fine University ever since I arrived. Could you show me? And can I meet this remarkable boy?”
Rafe felt his smile spread like morning sunshine. “I would be delighted, my dear . . . er . . . what’s your name again?”
“Kaab,” said the Balam princess. “You may call me Kaab.”
Micah sat at the same table in the Blackbird’s Nest as she had the first time that Rafe brought her—in back, near the kitchens. It was a good table: away from the crowd by the bar and the rowdier gamblers. During an early afternoon on a market day, the low-roofed, tallow-lit room was full, but Micah could still think around the beer smells and kitchen noises and gamblers’ patter. All she had to do was keep her eyes on the worn cards in her hand and the fascinating pattern of the ancient wood grain beneath them.
“Call,” said the long-haired student sitting across from her. He tossed the last of his minnows casually on the pile at the center of the table. Micah calculated that the pot now held enough for two and a half tomato pies and two ginger beers. Or two tomato pies and three ginger beers. Micah frowned, trying to decide which she would prefer, and decided that it would depend on how hungry Rafe was. She had come here on her own today because all the money was gone from the chest in their rooms and she had wanted something more than a roasted potato. And now she could buy tomato pies for herself and Rafe, to thank him for the place to sleep. And the equations. The equations were very nice.
Micah didn’t have a good hand—just a pair of Suns—but the long-haired student couldn’t have any card higher than a Beast, and the older man in a dockworker’s clothes had held a three-of-a-kind that would have beat either of their hands, but he had folded for reasons that still escaped Micah, though she had learned to accept them, like the weather.
“All right,” Micah said, and held his gaze. Joshua had told her that this unnerved the other players, and so she had learned to do it for a few seconds at a time. She didn’t much like it either, but they almost always looked away first.
The other players put down their cards. The student scowled at his hand while Micah busily arranged her winnings in stacks ordered by the size and value of the coins.
“Another hand,” said the student, with a funny sort of lift in his voice. Micah decided that she should ask Joshua what it meant when their voices got tight like that, and their eyebrows started wandering up their foreheads like caterpillars. Joshua was better at that sort of thing than Rafe. Rafe was better at talking.
She was trying to decide if it was worth waiting out her next good hand when a crowd of students pushed in through the narrow front door.
“They’re meeting now, the bastards!”
“Who’s meeting, Dickson?”
“The governors! Word is they could even take the vote!”
Micah, putting the last five-minnow in its stack, had been trying to ignore the noisy intruders. But then the student with the wandering eyebrows stood abruptly and smacked his fist on the table, toppling her careful piles. The shouting grew very loud. In a sudden panic, Micah shoved the coins into the inside pocket of her jerkin. Losing the coins would be worse than jumbling them up, and she could put them in good order later. She was still very hungry. She should certainly leave. But when she looked up, all she saw was a smear, noise and high emotion blurring the angry faces before her into a mob.
Take a deep breath. That was what her grandfather had always told her to do when she was little and overwhelmed by the noises of the City on market day. She tried, but someone knocked into her and someone else held her up by her elbow so that she didn’t fall and then the chanting grew louder, like a chisel between her ears. Her eyes watered. She didn’t even have time to wipe them—the crowd swept her up like a saint on a feast day, and she was carried away.
“Freedom of the intellect!” was the chant, but they might as well have been speaking the language of the chocolate traders for all Micah understood them. She closed her eyes. An image of Cousin Reuben in his favorite feathered cap appeared behind her lids.
What have you done now, kid? said the cousin Reuben of her conscience.
Micah had been very excited about the cards and money and equations. But stumbling in the midst of a press of marching students, she began to think she would have been much better off keeping to her turnips.
Rafe’s luck held: He and Kaab got there just as the students were flooding the University streets, tumbling from the pubs and classes and chocolate houses in all directions. They all gathered in front of the Great Hall, where the board had hoped to keep their meeting secret, and at the earliest possible opportunity Rafe climbed the base of the bronze statue of old Rastin and began a modest, stirring oratory he had composed while pushing through the crowd ahead of Kaab, who looked up at him now with amusement.
“If we let this gaggle of barely educated nobles dictate, for political ends, the course of our intellectual pursuits,” called Rafe, aware that his black curls had fallen out of the leather tie, lending him a pleasingly raffish air in the current circumstances, “we might as well return to thinking that the stars have been painted on the cloth of the sky. We might as well tear down the lecture halls and burn the books. Because they will come for those next, if we say something that does not agree with the political aspirations of those lordlings on the Hill.”
This got a satisfying cheer and another chant. He was just thinking of whether he should follow with a rather fine poem of Joshua’s composition or something more traditional, when he heard his name called in a strangled voice, followed immediately by the somewhat sticky embrace at his knees of a young lad with a bowl cut and the family chin.
Rafe slid down the pedestal and only remained upright by dint of Micah’s surprising strength.
“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again!” said the boy.
“Goodness, no need to get apocalyptic. . . . Did you fall asleep in a beer keg? You smell like a bad amber wheat five days flat.”
Micah sniffed. “I fell.”
Some smart aleck from the crowd shouted, “Who’s the sweetheart, Rafe?” and at least five others laughed. He glowered, but Kaab distracted him from identifying the culprits.
“Is this Micah?” she asked, peering at them both with that curious intensity of hers.
“Yes,”
he said shortly. “Talk amongst yourselves. I want to see the faces of those cowards when they walk out and have to face us.”
The crowd that had gathered to hear him speak was now drifting toward the closed doors of the hall. The rumor was that the governors could even vote today, but after a few panicked moments Rafe had decided to discount it. The Board of Governors was, above all, a conservative body. The vote had been set for next month. Even student unrest was unlikely to make them move it up. Rafe did not want them to pass the bylaw change at all, of course, but provided that they did so safely after he sat his Master’s exams, the outrage would give plenty of opportunity to intelligent men dedicated to the new modes of investigation. Once he had been accepted as a doctor, he would be able to open a school that would revolutionize the way a generation of scholars would think about natural philosophy. When he died, they might erect a statue of him beside natty old Rastin here in the Great Court. Not that he had mentioned that last ambition to anyone, even Joshua.
Despite the general air of expectation in the square, the doors remained stubbornly closed and barred. A few daring students attempted to rush them, but they had been built to withstand the dangers of a more volatile age. The aged oak and thumb-thick iron hasps would take more than a few students drunk on outrage to force open.
The meeting had been going on for hours, according to the latest rumors. They should have finished by now. Was the board actually voting? Rafe felt jittery, his throat full of bile or fire, his skin vibrating with the desire to do something, not just wait here like sheep in a defile. Was there another way out of the hall? Could those cowards be attempting an escape through the delivery entrance? Rafe elbowed his way back toward old Rastin, simultaneously pleased and worried that the crowd had grown so thick so quickly. Some kind of band blocked the most direct path to where he had left Micah and Kaab. The sound of pipe and tambour had never so offended him—what was this, a festival or a protest? If they didn’t take themselves seriously, how could they expect the board to?
He was composing a few choice paragraphs on the subject when he reached the southern edge of the square. Here the crowd had thinned enough to finally let him beat his way back to Rastin’s shit-stained shoulders. He shuddered to think of what he would tell Cousin Reuben if he managed to lose the boy. Micah did not do well in crowds. But, Rafe reasoned, he was with Kaab, who—for all that she was a woman and a foreigner new to the City—seemed like the sort who could keep her head at anything short of a chopping block.
A towheaded man, half a hand taller than most of those around him, composed as though by an artist of lean and elegant lines, rested against the retaining wall and looked nervously at the students still pouring in through the side streets and alleyways. Their eyes met and locked. The jittery feeling that had propelled Rafe away from his vigil by the entrance returned. Only now, that vague static seemed to align and gather force and move his feet and tongue as though of their own accord, so that he heard himself saying: “You look lost. Are you?”
The towheaded man looked down at him and shook his head with a twisted half smile that revealed a deep dimple in his left cheek.
“Am I so out of place, then?”
A voice as graceful as his carriage. Rafe did not like aristocratic men. He did not like men who towered over him. If they had to be fair, he preferred a bit of dirt to darken the blond. Rafe felt somewhat breathless.
“Oh, not at all,” Rafe drawled. “You blend in like a vulture among crows. What are you looking for?”
The man raised his eyebrows. His eyes were blue as the poet’s cornflowers. They crinkled in the corners, as though they were used to smiling. “I was hoping to hire a chair. I don’t suppose it’s possible in this mess.”
“You’d have to walk the few turns to Chambers Street. Hire a chair, you say?” A terrible suspicion clawed its way through Rafe’s consciousness. “Why, you’re not here by chance at all! Are you one of their lackeys, attempting to help those dogs escape without facing the victims of their actions?”
The man did smile at this, with infuriating kindness. “You make it sound very dramatic. I was given to understand they were just reviewing a proposed change to the bylaws. Mundane stuff.”
“The free pursuit of knowledge could never be mundane, and only someone whose livelihood depends on those spoiled wretches on the Hill could say such a thing!”
The lackey blinked. “Spoiled wretches on the Hill, you say?”
“What do they know of the intellectual life? Of dedication to knowledge? Why, hardly any of them even so much as take classes here.”
“That doesn’t preclude their having some knowledge of your activities, does it? They could read monographs and attend lectures. They could carry on correspondence. They could even, in a modest way, of course, contribute their own findings! Knowledge, surely, does not limit itself to one’s physical presence in the pubs and chocolate houses on Chambers Street.” He paused artfully, looked down, and seemed to notice for the first time a—quite small!—stain on Rafe’s cravat. He rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. “Though no doubt you claim an extensive familiarity with those institutions of higher learning. At the very least.”
Rafe felt dizzy. The lackey smelled of a light perfume: apricots and some darker spice—cloves or myrrh. His fingers were long and blunt at the ends, the nails meticulously clipped but not manicured. Blue ink lingered in the soft folds beneath the second and third joint of his index finger.
Rafe took a step forward. They stood only a hand apart now. “Just whose man are you?” His voice trembled.
Those fingers reached out again. They brushed back a long, dark curl, which had fallen slantwise across Rafe’s face. The man’s expression was unreadable, but the lips smiled. Rafe felt a sigh come through him like a summer storm.
“I am in the service of the Tremontaine family,” the man said quite softly.
Rafe knew. As he had known he would be a scholar from the moment he first listened to de Bertel’s lectures on the ascendance of man. As he had known he would follow evidentiary science when he had first read of the observations that proved the curvature of the earth.
This man, as beautiful as heartbreak, was the Duke Tremontaine himself. One of the most meddlesome members of the Board of Governors.
Rafe wiped his hands on his pants. “Oh hell’s bells,” he said. “Get the devil away from here before they hang you.”
The cornflower eyes snapped up to scan the crowd behind Rafe again. “But you won’t?”
“My name is Rafe Fenton, and I disagree with you in all the ways that matter. I expect you’ll be hearing my name more often, if you insist on dictating the path of our intellectual pursuits. Because I will oppose you with everything I have in me. But I do not”—Rafe wiped his hands again—“approve of physical violence. So get out before you meet someone who does.” His voice rasped. It was hard to hear over the running beat of his heart.
“Thank you, Rafe,” said the duke. “I honor your passion and commitment. And I hope you’ll see that we share the same goal, in the end.”
Rafe felt bleak, looking up at that earnest face that honestly believed what it was telling him. He was sure the conservative deans and department chairs, so eager to squash the new philosophies, had presented their terms in quite the flattering light.
“Go,” Rafe said. “Redrun Alley will take you straight to Chambers Street. I don’t know if anyone else might recognize you, but keep your head down just in case.”
He turned to walk away, but the duke reached out and caught him by the shoulder. The fissure spreading through his middle split wider. He could have cried.
“Perhaps you might be persuaded to see the other side of the argument? By the time we meet again?” said the Duke Tremontaine.
“The sun is more likely to rise in the north than anyone succeed in persuading me of that. I doubt we shall see each other again, dearest Tremontaine.”
An endearment wielded as an insult cuts sharpest of all. Rafe
had made himself an expert in the technique. And yet, with this man, even sarcasm seemed to have turned on him. He felt sick.
The duke winced. “I suppose not. I . . .” He shook his head. “Good-bye, Rafe.”
Rafe stared as the tall man threaded his way carefully through the crowd. He could follow his progress longer than he should have been able to: a head as bright as a new-minted coin—and a mind, and a heart.
Rafe had been gone for nearly half an hour before Kaab decided to look for him. The girl, Micah (she had asked her directly, and Micah had seemed quite sure she was a girl, which made Rafe’s confusion distinctly odd), seemed happy to climb the tall base of the statue of an old man with a broad cape and a fist in the air. He was three times human size and more than high enough to give them a good view of the main University square.
“I like it up here,” Micah said when they had settled beside each other on the statue’s shoulder and cape. “I can breathe better. There’s lots of things in the City, but it doesn’t smell good.”
“No,” Kaab agreed, still scanning the people surging below for a young man with a broad forehead and a mane of curling, ink-black hair. The students were still waiting by the closed wood-and-iron doors of the hall, but Kaab doubted they would get any satisfaction. If she were any judge, the guilty parties had long since escaped through one of several back entrances.
“How does it smell where you come from?” Micah asked.
“Like jacaranda flowers and cool springs and wet stone. Like tortillas on a comal.”
“What are those?”
“A kind of pancake and a kind of stove. We eat tortillas at every meal.”
“Does it taste good?”
“It’s the food of the gods,” Kaab said simply.
“And you’re from very far away? I’m also from far away . . . well, a day’s driving in the cart, but Rhubarb isn’t a very fast horse. But you’re from farther away than that.” She sounded very sure.
Kaab thought she glimpsed Rafe, at the far edge of the square, near a retaining wall that backed onto some kind of garden.
Tremontaine Season 1 Saga Omnibus Page 8
