Kaab grinned back, and out the door she went.
Her beer remained on the table, untouched.
• • •
The light streaming into the lecture hall from the high, leaded-glass windows dimmed, thank the gods, as it made its way down toward the students, and Rafe, fortified by sausages, found himself more than equal to it. There was Doctor de Bertel, waving his arms, eyes wide, stalking to this side of the podium and then that. “I see he’s being subtle today,” Rafe said as he walked in with Joshua and Micah, Thaddeus having preferred, wisely, to stay abed.
“Why don’t you shout a little louder, pet?” said Joshua. “I don’t think they can hear you in Chartil.”
“What are you talking about?” said Micah, exasperated. “They wouldn’t hear him in Chartil no matter how loud he talked.”
“I don’t know where you picked this one up,” said Joshua to Rafe, who was failing to suppress a grin, “but I like him.”
“Ah, well,” said Rafe, but he said it more quietly. “At least de Bertel is enjoying himself, the poor dear.” The three settled themselves onto a sparsely populated bench in the back of the hall.
De Bertel, meanwhile, whose reputation as an entertaining lecturer not even Rafe could discredit, had worked himself into such a state he hadn’t noticed their entrance. “. . . and thus the learned Chickering enters into a disquisition on the failings of Rastin—Rastin, of all people! This from a man who almost murdered his mother because of his grief over the death of his dog.”
“There is another appropriate response,” murmured Rafe, “to the death of one’s dog?”
Alas, the snicker this elicited from Joshua finally caught de Bertel’s attention, and his smile when he saw Rafe was uncomfortably reminiscent of something hungry. Rafe met his gaze long enough to communicate insolent disdain and then set about ostentatiously examining his fingernails.
De Bertel, for his part, seemed to be considering something. “But I think we shall depart from our intended subject,” he said finally, “and discuss instead a set of even more extraordinary claims Chickering makes: that the earth itself, rather than being a fixed object at the center of the firmament around which the heavenly bodies rotate—that the earth itself moves.” His voice was tinged with false wonder. “Now, after reading the second book of Rastin’s Considerations, what might you say to a person who averred such a thing?” He nodded at a young man in the front row. “Master Pike?”
Pike, tall and gangly in his front-row seat, had already stood. “I should say, sir, that he was barking mad.”
“And what proof might you offer, Pike, as demonstration of his lunacy?”
Rafe clucked his tongue. “Poor Pike. He couldn’t even get through Book One of the Considerations.”
“Now, now, pet. Pike could have hidden depths.”
Rafe sighed wearily. “I am in a position to be able to tell you with the utmost confidence, Joshua, that there is far less to Pike than meets the eye.”
“We know, as a first principle,” said Pike, apparently unaware of the spray of contumely behind him, “that a larger object falls more quickly than a smaller one.”
Rafe snorted. “Yes, because we’ve investigated the question so closely.”
“If the earth had the same kind of movement as other bodies,” Pike continued—why, oh, why must he insist on speaking through his nose like that?—“then it would fall out of the heavens, leaving all other objects that rest and move on it, heavy and light, animals and humans, floating in the air.”
De Bertel looked as pleased as if his dog had performed a trick correctly. “Quite so. But it pains me to have to say that the moving-earth crowd are hardly the worst offenders against the legacy of Rastin.” Ah, so this was where he was heading. “Of late, an idea has arisen that makes Chickering look like Fontanus.”
“And here we go,” Rafe muttered.
“With what?” said Micah.
A few more of Rafe’s classmates looked back at him to catch his expressive eye roll. “Those who espouse this new idea,” continued de Bertel, “suggest not only that the earth moves, but that it moves around the sun—and that it therefore cannot be the center of the world.” Gods, how thick was he going to lay the naïve amazement on?
De Bertel turned, of course, back to Pike. “What, Pike, are we to make of their claims?”
Pike said nothing; hardly surprising, as he hadn’t read the answer in a book. But de Bertel was in a generous mood. “Don’t worry, Pike, I won’t keep you on the hook. I’d be disappointed, in fact, if you’d devoted enough time to such nonsense to be able to answer my question.”
“No matter how well the scorned lover knows that scorn returned will avail him nothing,” sighed Rafe, “he still finds himself powerless not to strike back.”
“Someday you’ll be a scorned lover, pigeon, and then you’ll sympathize.”
Rafe rolled his eyes. “On the day the sun declines to rise.”
“Of course, such a notion is preposterous”—finally de Bertel was looking directly at Rafe, as were, for that matter, most of the others in the room—“an insult to thinking men everywhere, and its benighted adherents dreamers lost to reason who make mock of true scholarship.”
“Oh, pigeon.” Joshua’s voice combined sympathy and regret. “I should have insisted Anselm try harder to stop your oration in the tavern.”
“I would have just bitten him harder.”
“I am grieved to know,” de Bertel went on, looking more and more like a cockatrice with raised hackles, “that there is one among us who has so abandoned his senses as to subscribe to this feculence.”
“Gods, how long is he going to take with this?”
Joshua patted his hand. “Come, now, pigeon, you’ve had far worse beatings than this.”
“Yes, and enjoyed them far more. I think I shall have to move things along at a somewhat quicker pace.”
Joshua was a mother hen solicitous of her wayward chick. “Rafe . . .”
But there was Micah to consider. The boy didn’t deal well with unpleasantness, and Rafe had no wish to unsettle him. “Remember how upset you got two days ago,” he said, touching Micah’s shoulder, “when Matthew and I fought about his absolutely ridiculous theory of circular motion?”
“Well,” said Micah, “your theory was ridiculous, too. But Matthew got really mad.”
“The fight I’m about to have is going to be much worse.”
“I’d better go, then.” Like a shadow, Micah’s small form moved along the wall and down the stairs.
De Bertel ignored him, caught up in his oration against the unnamed “one” who espoused such absurd notions of
