13. The Black Knight
Chapter 13
The Black Knight
“Saint George—and victory!”
The silence I had expected was broken by a man’s voice, raised in a half-hearted battle cry, and I paused in my descent down Victor’s narrow stone stair. I was purposely some thirty minutes early, thinking to arrive first this time and speak to Victor alone before class began, but it was not to be: I thought that I heard a clash of metal against metal—then another—and then the deep, brusque voice I would have known anywhere:
“No cavalry, Talbot? What happened to York and Somerset?”
“A hit, professor,” the other voice groaned, and I rounded the last turn of the stairway in time to see Forsythe on the floor, looking up with a wince of chagrin at Victor, who held the point of a narrow sword casually at his student’s throat. “A very palpable hit, admittedly.”
“So much for England,” Victor grunted as he lowered his weapon and stepped back, seeming vaguely entertained, “if a scratch like that can drop the valiant Talbot.”
“Must be some kind of damnable Continental sorcery,” Forsythe murmured, a certain affect of drama in his manner, as he picked up his rapier from the floor beside him and pushed himself to his feet. He was a tall man in perhaps his late thirties —though not so tall as Victor, and only half as broad—wearing the same black gloves he had worn the day before, the same scarf with its fine metallic threads now tucked like an old-style cravat into the space between his waistcoat and his shirt. If not for the abundance of bear grease pomade (beginning to fail though it was from activity) that held his dark hair slicked back from his clean-shaven face, I would have thought that he looked relatively more wholesome than the others from class.
“If the actor-manager ever lets you use something more suitable than that farcical toothpick, hold it like this,” Victor said as he extended his right arm toward Forsythe, turning his sword blade to show the underside of his grip. I thought that the fine swept hilt of his sword mirrored that of his long dagger, which he held now in his left hand, though the blades seemed a mismatch—the former bright, the latter dark. “Thumb on the ricasso , forefinger wrapped around it. Here: the unsharpened base of the blade above the hilt. Better feel, harder to disarm.
“Buckingham,” Victor continued, surely having sensed me; Forsythe looked up to see me, somewhat surprised, “do you have any affinity for theater?”
“A little, professor.” I picked up my skirts and let myself down the rest of the stone steps to meet Victor and Forsythe, though I kept myself somewhat apart. “I used to go to see some Shakespeare now and again, when I had the means, though oftentimes I found that I prefer to read him after all. I have never seen anyone play Lady Macbeth quite as I imagine.”
“The conventional interpretation of her character is too vicious,” Forsythe nodded, in the manner of a man who is all but certain of solidarity, “for your feminine sensibilities?”
“No.” I allowed myself a faint smile. “Too soft.”
“Then I advise you to avert your eyes—Forsythe is preparing for a production which entirely butchers the first part of Shakespeare’s Henry VI . While far too young and too tall, this,” Victor cocked his head to his student, “is the renowned war hero Lord Talbot, last great hope of the English against the forces of France, who has rather anachronistically become a Renaissance duelist. And, though Forsythe assures me it is mere coincidence rather than typecasting, he has asked me to enact for his rehearsal the Duke of Alen?on, whom the script has made a blackhearted Machiavellian villain of the Continent and the alleged paramour of a sorceress.”
I looked discretely to Forsythe, who performed a half-convincing interpretation of a straight face.
“Nonetheless,” Victor assumed a fighting stance with forceful swagger, the sword and dagger he held before him flashing in the candlelight with his steel mask, “for our purposes, the practice of any form of bladed combat can be useful preparation for the physical banishment of disprites—something in which Forsythe has shown interest and some talent—and I enjoy a sparring partner. Given up yet,” Victor turned his attention back to Forsythe, briefly clashing his blades for effect, “Talbot?”
Forsythe brandished his own weapons in a studied imitation of Victor’s stance, the rapier in his right hand and a thin dagger in his left. “Come find out, Alen?on.”
I watched them fight, distracted though I was in the flood of thoughts and impressions occasioned by the close, still air of Victor’s underground dominion; this place which once seemed so stony and cold had become now a respite from the bite of winter. It had snowed overnight in the world above, but here there was no numbing touch of ice beneath the feet, no cruel morning wind to trouble the skin. There was only the feeling of being surrounded by the inescapable sense of him, here in his lair where the doors, the candles, even the unseen roots of the trees bowed before his implacable will, extensions of his shadow and his art.
How strange it felt to exchange even those first few words with him face to face; how strange, in watching him fight, to be reminded of his physicality, the warming scent of him, his tangible presence in the world as a man of flesh and blood, when my most recent experience of him was to spend a long afternoon with his specter: as a spirit in a tree, a phantom in the cold wind, a ghost in the depths of my mind. Like meeting in person after a long exchange of private letters and no longer knowing where to begin—nor what secret sensations of the mind, once half-disclosed, are proper now to unearth and reanimate with speech—this was an unsteady intimacy, its reciprocation untried, unknown. I thought that I was glad, after all, that Forsythe and his rapier had preceded me down the stone stairway, and given me reason to watch with little comment.
The matter of the book, the tree, and the phantom would have been strange enough, even if not for the dream. I did not know how to speak of the first three—I did not know even why I should hesitate thus to speak of them, as they were after all in the course of my apprenticeship—but I knew that I would not speak of the last. The dream did not bear mentioning, I told myself, being no more than an aftereffect of his art having merged for so long with my perception as we read his old grimoire together. No wonder, then, that in the sleeping fantasies of my exhausted mind I should imagine myself in his body: by some means which still partially eluded me—as present and as ephemeral as his phantom in the winter wind—Victor had, in a sense, already been with me in mine.
“Too mannered, Forsythe,” Victor’s voice broke my reverie as the dark flash of his dagger easily caught and trapped his student’s rapier blade; another flash of reflected candlelight, brighter this time, and Forsythe’s dagger dropped to the floor as the point of Victor’s swift sword came to a sudden rest over the other man’s heart. Forsythe looked down and shook his head, conceding the loss; Victor grunted a faint acknowledgement as he stepped back again to let his student collect himself. “Less practiced convention, more sprezzatura ; that is the soul of the Renaissance. Effortless virtuosity. And if you are no virtuoso yet,” he turned both blades toward Forsythe with a sharp nod for him to come, “you prove yourself by sheer audacity: if you cannot yet overwhelm by art, you force through by raw will .”
Forsythe waited, feinted, and then broke toward Victor, bolder than before, but there was no contest—the outcome was never in enough question to even call the process a game. Forsythe was competent, and competence was no rival to Victor; even concealed beneath the rippling darkness of his cloak and wielding such weapons of finesse there was no mistaking the solid, brutal strength of Victor’s body in every deft thrust and clash, though his speed was unusual for his size and something in his stance was touched with a young man’s bravado, a subtle arrogance in the way he shifted his weight. Once he had seemed to me a preternatural ghoul, crouched ravening over the helpless throat of his human prey, but I thought that I envisioned now a kind of black knight every time he rushed in, outstripping fools and angels in his fearless pride, the earthy savagery of his muscle and bone never quite overtaking some shadowy chivalry half-remembered.
I liked to watch him, in the way that I liked to watch a fire in the hearth inevitably consume its fuel: not because I took any particular pleasure in Forsythe’s futility against him, but because, here underground below the dreary fog of the city and its mindless mills of modernity, there was a strange comfort in knowing that the heart of the world was still wild: that the bridled, the civilized, and the staid, in all their dull and teeming power, were never a match for the unknown and unknowable forces of the earth and the human soul.
Forsythe sank to his knees, eyes briefly rolling in his head while he swallowed deeply, as if his body— tired from the fight and weakened to the effects of Victor’s art—could not decide whether to faint or to retch. Weapons still in his grip somehow, he fell forward onto his hands before Victor’s black boots, and I felt the same shock of sorcery through my mind and my marrow. I blinked, staggered a step backward—but I did not fall.
“ She handles it well,” Forsythe managed with some effort, mild suspicion in his mumbled voice, as he laid down his blades in gesture of defeat.
“Indeed.” I watched Victor’s dark eyes drift to me before returning to Forsythe, and I thought I caught a kind of satisfaction in his gaze. “A poor trick on my part, admittedly, to employ magic after your initial surrender—but not without purpose. You may, perhaps, relax your guard on stage, trusting in your fellow player not to take undue advantage, but against a real foe I advise against such luxuries. Disprites bent on your defeat will take every opportunity, and the sensation of their magia intrinseca will not be so comfortable as I have made mine. More than a mere passing vertigo.”
I saw Forsythe draw a deep breath, steadying himself.
“But enough, Forsythe, for today. Talbot has lost England a dozen times over, and class begins soon. I have greater confidence in your sorcery than your Shakespeare.”
With a weak, lopsided smile, Forsythe sheathed his blades and took Victor’s offered hand, pulling himself to his feet. “Suppose I don’t need to ask, professor, if you wanted a ticket to opening night.”
“Later in the run, if circumstances allow.”
“You’ll hate what we do to the summoning scene in Act Five.”
“I do not doubt.” No sooner had Victor’s rumbling voice faded into the close air of the underground than his head turned unconcernedly to the empty staircase, candlelight flickering across the engraved steel of his mask. “Here are two who will be surprised not to be first this morning.”
A few moments later, Ashcroft and Walker emerged from the last turn of the stair, the former’s fastidious chinstrap beard circumferencing an expression of smug surprise, the latter’s dark visage concealed almost entirely by the shadow of his hood.
“Gentlemen, welcome,” Victor said; they replied each with a good morning, Doctor D’Arco and a respectful nod of the head. “The hall awaits, if you have no questions or pressing business before we begin.”
With polite variations on none today, professor they passed slowly by and into the hallway toward the great doors, though I thought that Walker’s regard lingered in interest for a time on Forsythe’s rapier and Victor’s sword.
I wondered if they truly had no questions, and whether Victor meant truly to answer if they had, or if the exchange had been a mere formality—though I had not known Victor to suffer empty courtesies for long. I could not imagine, then, being entirely without questions, as Walker and Ashcroft seemed now to be: an unthinkable condition for any woman or man, let alone for a sorcerer, whose practice balances on the precipice of the mysteries of the world. By means of the Order’s pat hierarchy I was meant to understand, I am sure, that a Sorcerer of the Second Degree of the Order of Magisophists (the rank which both had attained) was a being of wisdom immensely superior to a First Degree Sorcerer like Greycliff or Forsythe, and therefore incalculably above a Novice Sorceress like myself. Yet it rather seemed to me that the ranks had little more real significance than a polite exchange of good-mornings, and that Ashcroft and Walker had become mired in a routine of complacency.
But even as I decided so, I was struck by a third possibility: had they any questions, they may have been reluctant to voice them in my presence , as I hesitated to voice mine in theirs. Had the time been right, and had we been alone, I would have asked Victor about a thousand things—the Talisman of Thoth, my husband’s demonic demise; why Victor wore the mask, and who he was and from whence he came, and how he learned his art, and why he seemed sometimes so single-mindedly intent that I should learn mine?—
“Questions, Buckingham, about what you have seen this morning?” He was watching me, his dark eyes keen. “Something you had meant to ask when you came early down my stair? You have grown a rather expectant look.”
“One question, professor, if I may,” I replied, broken from my abstraction and buying fractions of moments to consider my choice. One question, I had said. But which one?
Forsythe straightened his slicked hair.
I would not touch in Forsythe’s presence something so personal as the mystery of my husband, nor something so momentous as the Talisman. I could not ask Victor to divulge anything of himself, a notion reinforced by my own response to my indiscretion before Iris.
Yet I could ask Victor about his own words to Forsythe, and frame this as if it were my question all along. “ Magia intrinseca , professor,” I pronounced, and I wondered if I imagined the faint flicker of humor in his gaze. “I should like to have a better grasp of its theory and definition, and to better understand why it… feels the way it does.”
“Well-asked, Buckingham. And well-timed. That is, as it happens, the topic of today’s class: magia esterna versus magia intrinseca . A consideration, in part, of our recent class’s impromptu banishing practicum, now that all have had time reflect and recover.”
I wondered whether that had always been his intended topic, or whether I should presume that he had only chosen it now—that he would in any degree mold his class to me.
“Doctor D’Arco,” Forsythe interjected, “you don’t think that, if that’s brought up again, some faerie or other would come back today for?—”
“No, Forsythe, I do not,” Victor growled with a sudden force: a deep, ominous sound lent a half-hollow resonance by his mask. “I have made additional arrangements. She is safe.” His burning eyes flashed to me, holding my gaze before returning to Forsythe again. “So, incidentally, are you.”
“ Incidentally ,” Forsythe breathed with a resigned smile and a sigh.
“Trust in your own power of defense,” Victor replied, allowing the surge of his wrath to ebb, “and understand your position of ease and bounty. You belong to a secret society of the esoteric arts. You have a class, a professor, a thrice-warded classroom in the living bones of the earth.” He paused, and in the touch of his shadow I sensed his defiant pride. “I walked alone.”
Forsythe nodded in deference, but did not apologize; Victor waited and then inclined his head, seemingly satisfied.
“Forsythe. Buckingham. Take your seats at the table with Walker and Ashcroft, and await me,” Victor gestured toward the hallway. “The others will arrive soon.”
Rapier still swinging awkwardly at his hip, Forsythe walked at my left shoulder down the corridor. “He likes to give me a hard time, sometimes,” he whispered, facing ahead. “But he’s worth it. He’s real. Deadly dangerous, of course—you might think I had a death wish,” he murmured, too hopeful of sounding somewhere between brave and suave, “to spar with him like that.”
I said nothing. Rather than his attempted flirtation—if that was indeed what it was—my interest was drawn to the door of Victor’s so-called parlor as we passed it. The sign of protection he had traced on it in my presence seemed darker now, more permanent. Perhaps this was one of his additional arrangements.
The gargoyle over the lintel remained frozen in his leering watch, candlelight from the wall sconces casting shadows across the grotesqueries of his form. I wondered if I smelt sulfur, fresher yet softer somehow, or if it was only Forsythe’s failing pomade and a trick of memory.
“Well—do you?”
I half-turned to Forsythe as we approached the open iron-clad doors at the hallway’s end, careful to show nothing he could mistake for interest. “Do I think you came here to die?”
“And do you think it,” he raised his brows with a slow smile, “strange?”
“Not really.” I approached the doors first, without his invitation, forcing him to follow if he wished to enter. “I think you’re like all the others here.”
“How so?”
“I think you came here to live.”
We said no more to each other, walking separately toward the table.
Why did I so abhor Forsythe’s attention?
At least, I thought to myself, he put my promise of strict chastity—a condition of my apprenticeship—into no danger.
Never did I imagine I would be so relieved to see Reinhardt enter after us through those heavy Gothic doors. As I took my seat, I watched him perform an overly theatrical bow inside their arch and then saunter casually down the aisle of empty suits of armor to pull out his chair between Forsythe's and my own.
“ Guten Morgen ,” Reinhardt offered me with a sly smile as he sat down, smelling as ever of cigar smoke. Though I could not help but grin inwardly at his only passing resemblance to his own playbill, I contained my amusement and replied politely in kind.
And yet, beyond such brief pleasantries, I found myself in little mood to speak. I contented myself to gaze forward, neither to the three men on my left nor to Walker on my right; my eyes came to rest on the hulking form of Victor’s carved wooden throne, empty now, waiting. Though the golden chandeliers were lighted overhead, his Hellmouth hearth was quiet, its fiendish jaws a gaping darkness. If the stalactites yet dripped in the corner, raising stalagmites like the slow tusks of the earth, I could not hear them for the voices of my fellow students.
“The Marvelous Manfredini strikes again,” I heard Forsythe chuckle from the other side of Reinhardt. “Were you behind us for long?”
“I came down the stairs when the professor told you to take your seats, wished him a good morning, and caught up to you about halfway down the hallway.”
“Well, you did a fine job of it this time. I didn’t notice you until just now.”
“You were preoccupied,” Reinhardt shrugged. “Less attention on Buckingham, and you might—I say this to be polite—you might have noticed me. But the smarter ones are usually preoccupied with something, and the stupid have not thought to heighten their senses. As I told Doctor D’Arco: until I can walk truly unseen , I will master the art of walking unnoticed , as the end result is all the same.”
“Distraction,” Walker muttered at my right, taking back his hood to look at me as if he had broken from some dark reverie to impress upon me this single point, “is not magic. Common sleight of hand.”
“Forgive him, Buckingham, he is a purist,” Reinhardt replied, calmly oiling the word into an imperious insult. “An idealist.”
Walker’s lip twitched. He leaned slowly forward, looking past me to the left. “And you, illusionist , are neither.”
“I have made no secret of my art, Walker.”
“Your trade, you mean.”
“My trade in this particular performance art, which brought in enough money for the Order that the likes of you were able to continue your noble work uninterrupted, never asked to tell fortunes for pennies at Witch’s Corner. Of course, now that you got us both expelled,” another shrug, a dismissive wave of his thick hand, “that’s all water under the bridge.”
“Oh, take it upstairs,” the heretofore silent Ashcroft groaned from the left end of the table, “both of you.”
“Shall we, Reinhardt? I’ll leave my blade here,” Walker unsheathed a long, hooked knife and laid it on the table, beginning to rise, “but you can bring your magic wand?—”
“Greycliff’s here,” Forsythe observed, and it was that, rather than Ashcroft’s complaint, which seemed to settle the gathering heat of Walker and Reinhardt’s feud back to darker embers. The curiosity was irresistible; every head turned with mine: there for the first time in weeks was Greycliff coming through the arch, exhibiting no particular signs of malaise beyond the silver waistcoat that emphasized his pallor, and behind him (as if for contrast) walked Lloyd, clad in shades of charcoal with a dark, feral beard.
Walker sat down again in his chair, sliding the knife back into its scabbard on his belt.
“Good to see you among the living,” Reinhardt said, though the hint of tension did not entirely leave his voice.
“For now, at least,” Greycliff replied with a smile as he passed behind my chair to the right, “thanks to D’Arco—and Buckingham. Credit where it’s due. And to all of you, of course.”
I thought Greycliff winked at me as he pulled out his chair and sat down at the table’s right end, though Lloyd soon obscured my view.
“Buckingham,” Forsythe repeated with interest. “I shouldn’t be surprised. D’Arco shot a spell through me while Buckingham wasn’t far away, and I think she scarcely flinched.”
“When was this?”
“Few minutes ago. I was sparring with him while she watched. Practice for the new play.”
Why indeed did his attention so vex me? And why did Greycliff’s as well, albeit perhaps not as strongly? Any sense of impropriety had no relation to my widow’s weeds; whatever duty I had felt to enact the mourning of my husband was long since passed. In truth I had mourned for myself—the loss of the life that I thought I had wanted, the loss of security, all that was duly mine and taken from me by the poor document of his will—but scarcely for him, and for our loveless marriage not at all. I was not naive to the knowledge of what men understood at the sight of black crepe and bombazine, or even of the softer black silk I now wore: I had seen the paintings of the Young Widow in her deathly grace, her veiled voluptuous secrets hidden in chaste black brushstrokes; I had read the stories in the magazines; I was witness to the change in men’s eyes as they looked, and looked away, and looked again. To a man, the Young Widow was loyal, proper, virtuous; and she was experienced, unleashed, alone. All that society prescribed for him to desire; and all that desire, freed from society, hunted by its own beacon light. He did not need to discern the shape of her body through the stiff crepe of First Mourning to know these aspects of her. He did not need even to see her face behind the veil.
All this I understood. I did not speak of it, having no occasion for the necessity of doing so, but it seemed to me a part of nature, and nature did not appall me.
Why then—again—did Forsythe? Perhaps a matter of timing, I thought to myself, at a loss for how aught else in him could chafe me so. He had not offended me (I forgave him for Lady Macbeth—he did not know me yet); he was indeed reasonably brave to spar with Victor, if not as impressively so as he thought himself; he was tolerably handsome; had I been in a more receptive frame of mind, I think his advances should have amused me, and I liked that better than strict propriety. Greycliff, better still: here was a man who attempted to defend me at distance from a disprite, after all, and at cost to himself, and who credited my novice art with more effect in his recovery than it likely deserved. He was landed, titled; indifferent to the law, perhaps, but I was no longer a safe judge of such matters, whose former material life was sinking in the quicksand of investigations and lawyers and courts. I could call him John as he had wanted, and ask after his curse, and make him elixirs of his own white-blond hair, and trust that—unlike S.R. Buckingham and his locked strongbox—he would not hold me back from the hidden world.
But it was not to be. It could not be. I resented Forsythe and Greycliff not for themselves, but for being too late. The time had passed. They were too late, because already I?—
No.
No—I forced myself to still the sudden shiver that threatened to thrill my spine. I could endure to press no deeper into the thought. The time had passed, and to know that much was enough for now, for my heart. I sensed the rest only dimly, with a warm and distant dread: there was an obscuring fog I let linger, and dared not dispel.
For the first time in my study of sorcery, the world’s forbidden wisdom unfolding at my fingertips, the sweet savor of the fruit of Paradise grew tart. I wondered if I did not wish to know, buried in my breast, this impossible thing I sensed—I feared—that I knew.