Tremontaine: The Complete Season 1. Ellen Kushner
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 Governors’ 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 of a young lad with a bowl cut and the family chin.
Rafe slid down the pedestal and only remained upright by the 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