Academic Exercises Read online

  The lease on the Squirrel ran out and somebody forgot to renew it; but the Company’s investments were all doing quite well. So, quite accidentally, were the citizens of the Republic. Every month, hundreds of people left the farms and ranches where they’d been accustomed to scrape a meagre living, and headed for the City, to work in the new foundries and factories. With the money they earned, they were able to buy the cheap goods the Company’s trading partners produced; families who’d always eaten off wooden trenchers now had fine pewter plates, and wore good broadcloth instead of homespun. Thanks to the three per cent tax and its own investments in Company stock, the Council had funds for all sorts of magnificent projects; public buildings, paved roads, a dam on the Deneipha river to drain the marshes to provide more land for more lemon trees. They also commissioned the Republic’s first fleet of publicly-owned warships, built in the Company’s yards and armed with my father’s cannon. They were reckoned to be the most advanced warships in the world, and more than a match for anything they’d be likely to meet, in our own waters or beyond. They would even—people reckoned—give the antiquated galleys and galliots of the Empire a run for their money, if it ever came to it.

  The war lasted three years. The immediate cause was the Evec peninsular. It seemed quite logical at the time. The Evec was notionally Imperial territory, but there was nothing there; just a few sheep ranches occupied by a handful of peasants, primitives (about as primitive as we’d been, before the Company came along). The Empire wouldn’t waste money and resources defending an obscure and distant outpost, it wouldn’t be cost-effective. We, on the other hand, could plant the whole lot out with lemon groves. It was the obvious thing to do.

  The first action of the war took place off Cape Acuela. Two squadrons of antiquated Imperial galliots sent the Republic’s magnificent new fleet to the bottom in just over an hour.

  When the news reached the City, it sparked off a reaction of incandescent rage. Addressing the huge crowd gathered in Aeneas Peregrinus Square, the First Citizen vowed that we would never yield, not if it took every penny, every man. The replacement fleet was ready to sail in three weeks; it was twice the size and twice as heavily armed. The third, fourth and fifth fleets were even better. But not, unfortunately, good enough.

  Once the Articles of Surrender had been signed and the Imperial fleet raised its blockade of the City harbour, the newly-appointed provisional government sat down and looked to see what was left. There wasn’t much. I have figures somewhere for the total cost of the war, in men and money. I can’t recall them offhand. Some things are too uncomfortable to store in your head for any length of time. There was a debate about whether to dissolve the Company or to leave it as a sort of midden for the national debt. They couldn’t decide, so they referred the matter to committee. That was eleven years ago. They haven’t reported yet.

  At first, I must have thought he was prodding the fire with the poker.

  That’s what the brain does. It takes images and tries to interpret them in accordance with a sane, rational view of reality. I’d seen a man poking a sluggish fire back to life a thousand times. It was something that made sense. Burning the manuscript made no sense at all.

  But I looked again and saw what he was really doing, and I froze. I’ve been over it in my mind time and time again. If I’d reacted at once, could I have pushed him out of the way and saved the manuscript? It’s almost like a game, a tennis match or something. Roughly four times out of ten, I win; I drag him back from the hearth, I wrestle the manuscript out of his hand and stamp out the fire, the damage is sometimes quite bad and sometimes minimal, but at least I save something. The other six times I don’t make it; he shoves me out of the way, or we’re struggling over it and the flames surge up and burn our hands, and I let go. It burnt surprisingly quickly, I remember that. Possibly something to do with how the parchment was originally cured, I think they may have used saltpetre back then.

  Anyway, the parchment burned. I stared at him. I couldn’t speak. He looked at me. When the flames reached his fingers, he opened them and let go.

  “Now look what you’ve made me do,” he said.

  He explained. He told me that love and hate are as similar as brother and sister, both of them forms of the same obsessive fixation on another; love and hate both lead people to do extravagant acts, to make sacrifices, to subordinate themselves to the other. He told me that when the manuscript first came into his hands, he’d more or less made up his mind to kill me, because he couldn’t bear the thought that I continued to exist. He’d had his reservations, nonetheless. In killing me he’d be giving his own life, because he would inevitably have been found out, arrested and hung. This troubled him, because in a very real sense (he said) it would have meant that I’d have won. I would be remembered as an innocent victim, he’d be condemned as a criminal, therefore he’d have handed the moral victory to me on a plate. That, he said, struck him as a gross crime against natural justice and ultimately self-defeating.

  Nevertheless (he said) he’d resolved to go through with it, to make the ultimate sacrifice—his reputation, his moral soul; to give his life and his honour, greater hate hath no man than this—when quite suddenly and out of a blue sky, the manuscript arrived, along with a load of other junk, from his uncle. It could only have been, he said, a sign, sent by the Invincible Sun, in Whom he’d never believed until then.

  It was particularly significant because at that precise moment he had my dissertation open on his desk. He read the manuscript and my dissertation side by side. At first, he was crushed. The manuscript proved that I was right, had been all along—in which case, I was right, a better scholar, I was the more worthy, I had prevailed and beaten him. But then (he said) the Invincible Sun’s true design slowly revealed itself to him, and he understood why the manuscript had come to him at exactly that moment.

  I was, after all, a scholar. Unsatisfactory and unworthy in every respect, but a scholar. Nothing mattered more to me than my work, science, the truth, to be proved right. What better punishment, therefore, than for me to know I was right, know beyond any shadow of a doubt, and never to be able to prove it. He and I would know; we two only, joined inseparably by our shared bond of mutual obsession. But the definitive proof, which I would have seen and read, would be lost for ever. When in due course, as was inevitable given the nature of scholarship, some other scholar came along with the mental strength and agility to cast doubt on my research and question my findings, I would have no defence. I would know the truth, but not be able to prove it.

  And that, he said, was why he’d done it. It was, of course, entirely up to me what I did next. I could kill him in an excess of entirely justified rage. He wouldn’t mind that in the least; because then I’d be the one dragged through the streets on a hurdle and pushed off a stool with a rope round my neck, to die with the jeers of common people in my ears. No? Ah well. In that case, I could go to the faculty and denounce him, tell them exactly what he’d done. He hoped I’d do that. He would deny it strenuously, I’d have no proof, and (given the history between us) my accusations would be dismissed as a deranged attempt to blacken his name, I’d be disgraced, and all my work would be discredited with me. And if I did neither—well, then, I’d have to spend the rest of my life reflecting on how he’d beaten me, out-thought me, used his superior intellect to devise the perfect snare; which thought would gradually eat me up over the years, like a tapeworm, growing commensurately bigger and stronger as I faded and became weak.

  I said nothing. There was nothing to say. I drank my tea, which had gone cold, and went home.

  Once I met an old man who told me he reckoned he was happier in his eighties than he’d ever been in his youth. I told him that was hard to believe. He grinned at me. I’m free, he said, of my worst enemy. Myself. My past (he explained). All the stupid things I’ve done and said, all the lies I told, everything that makes me cringe or weep when I think of it. You see, everyone I ever knew is dead, so there’s no witnesses. Only I k
now the truth, and my memory’s so bad these days, I can’t rely on it worth a damn. So, all the bad things, for all I know, they may never have happened. And that (he said) is freedom.

  History, science, scholarship; the art of extracting the truth from unreliable witnesses. Nine times out of ten, the best you can hope to do is make out a case that convinces on the balance of probabilities. Your jury—fellow-scholars, minded and motivated just like you—will be persuaded by the most plausible argument, the most probable version. Thus we create a model of the past governed by common sense, rational thought, considered actions, reasonable motives. Now think about the decisions you’ve made and some of the things you’ve done over the years.

  History, therefore, will have every right to be sceptical about my account of the destruction of the Aeneas manuscript. No sane man, history would argue, would do something like that for such a reason. Logically, therefore, Carchedonius could only have done such a thing if he was insane. Indeed; and it’s proverbial among historians that if your argument depends on such and such a key player being insane, it’s probably untrue or at least deeply unsound. Go away and think of a more plausible explanation, we say. Insanity just isn’t that common.

  We’ve now reached the point in this narrative at which I can justifiably start talking about myself. From now on, my actions and their consequences are significant enough to be worth recording. I am, of course, an unreliable witness, simply because most of what I’m about to assert can’t be proved by reference to external sources. You’ll have to form your own judgement of my professed motives and the credibility of my account. That doesn’t bother me unduly. I invite an appropriate degree of healthy scepticism. Besides, I’m presumably dead by now, and out of it, and so I couldn’t really give a damn.

  As it happens, I don’t remember much about the week after Carchedonius burned the manuscript. People tell me I was wandering around in a sort of daze, either not answering or biting people’s heads off when they spoke to me. Everyone assumed there’d been a death in the family.

  No such luck. For what it’s worth, I hadn’t spoken to my mother since my father’s trial. She seemed to think that I could’ve done something. I have no idea what she had in mind. Perhaps she thought I could pull Essecuivo out of my sleeve like a conjuror. The last I heard of my brother, he was in Mescarel, trying to sell diamonds and small, high-value works of art in a seriously flooded market. Either of them, or any of my relatives—I’d have shed a tear, of course, but life would have gone on. The True Discovery, on the other hand, was another matter entirely.

  The eighth night after the burning, I was sitting in my rooms. I had a copy of Vabalathus’ Late Voyages open on my desk; I was chasing down an obscure reference that might be taken as evidence to support the view that Essecuivo’s climate was temperate enough to support olive trees. Ridiculous; I knew they had olives in Essecuivo, because Aeneas had written about them in the book. But the garbled fragment in Vabalathus was open to at least two other interpretations, which meant I couldn’t substantiate my hypothesis, which meant that I had no solid foundation for my assertion that Essecuivo must lie below 62 degrees, the upper limit of cultivation of the olive. I was tempted to throw Vabalathus on the fire, except that for some reason I hadn’t lit one for the past eight days. Stupid; it was just starting to get cold.

  That made me realise that I couldn’t go on. It was as though I’d reached an impassable barrier; a river in spate, a ravine, the sea. I could see where I wanted to go all too clearly. I could smell the woodsmoke, and hear the voices of children playing. But, having come so very far, I couldn’t cross the last hundred yards. I didn’t have enough provisions to go back the way I’d come. I was stranded.

  The hell with that. I poured myself a large dose of brandy and made myself think long and hard about the nature of truth.

  Take, for example, the concept authenticity. It’s crucial, seminal, to the business of scholarship. However, like, say, brandy, it can tolerate a certain degree of dilution. A translation, for example; the words you read aren’t the words the author wrote, but a translation can be allowed to possess qualified authenticity. Quotation and reporting; a substantial part of what we do is picking out nuggets of lost texts from the works of later authors who’ve quoted from them. Source-hunting, a favourite academic pastime; read a historian and try and figure out which of his facts and assertions were copied out from the earlier authority A (held to be accurate and reliable) and which were taken from B, who’s generally believed to have made it up as he went along. Manuscript tradition; we have very few very old manuscripts. Most of the works of the great authors of classical antiquity exist only in the form of later editions, copies of copies of copies of copies of the original. As soon as a page is translated, quoted, edited, it ceases to be truly authentic. But the snippet of Archelaus I’d been looking for in my relatively modern edition of Rocais’ translation of Vabalathus’ New Voyages was, by all relevant criteria, authentic enough; and if only it had said what I wanted it to say, I’d have adduced it as proof of my assertions without a moment’s hesitation.

  Well, then.

  First, I needed something to write on. That wasn’t too hard. There’s plenty of three-hundred year old parchment around, if you know where to look. Fortuitously, I have a cousin who’s a lawyer. In the cool, dry cellar under his place of business there are thousands of packets of title deeds, many of them so old as to have lost any semblance of relevance years and years ago. I made up some story and he gave me a Deed of Rectification—something to do with sorting out a boundary dispute between two neighbours who subsequently both sold out to a third party, rendering the Deed entirely obsolete—which bore the countersignature of a Council official who’d been in office the year after Aeneas Peregrinus came back from Essecuivo. Perfect. How much more authentic can you get?

  Back then, they used soot and oak-apple gall, ground fine, for ink. It comes off quite cleanly if you damp the parchment slightly and rub it down with a pumice stone. Naturally, you lose a tiny amount of thickness, but that’s not a problem; six out of ten old documents you come across have been written on pumiced-off parchment. The stuff cost money, after all, and people were thriftier back then. In fact, it was entirely in keeping with what we know about Aeneas that he’d have used second-hand parchment. He didn’t, in fact, but he could have. Should have, even.

  Soot-and-oak-apple-gall ink is no trouble to make, if you happen to have read Theogenes’ On Various Arts; it’s two centuries earlier than Aeneas, but nothing much changed in the intervening time. There’s a fine old oak in the Studium grounds that’s been there for at least two hundred and fifty years. It still drops acorns. Attention to detail, you see. Authenticity. For soot, I climbed up onto the leaded roof of the Old Hall and scrabbled around inside the chimney-cowls. I mined deep and came up with a rich vein of soot that could well have been there since Aeneas was a lad. I’m not sure I needed to go that far, but if a thing’s worth doing—

  Style and handwriting. No problem. After all, I’m the world’s leading authority. If someone wanted to authenticate a piece of writing attributed to Aeneas, they’d come to me. Also, I’ve always had a gift for copying other people’s handwriting. Because my father was less than generous with my living allowance when I was an undergraduate at the Studium, I was forced to make ends meet by reproducing his signature on Company bills of exchange. Now my father’s handwriting was so bad that occasionally his bills were questioned by the clerks, but all of mine were cleared without question.

  I made a trip to Corytona, where they’ve got two of the surviving Aeneas letters, and studied them carefully. I knew for a fact that Aeneas had written his book using a pen with a new-fangled (at that time) steel nib. But most authorities agree that steel nibs didn’t come in to general use for another twenty years or so, so I used an ordinary goose-quill.

  Carmine, for the red illuminated capitals, was a serious headache. Back then, they made it by crushing dried beetles—not just any beetle, but
a special kind only found in Maracanto, which is why it was expensive, which is why it was so fashionable as a decoration in manuscripts. These days we get carmine from grinding up a sort of rock they find at certain levels in the mines. Everyone says you can’t tell the difference. I can’t. But by that stage I was in no mood to take chances. Also, I felt a sort of obligation. If what I was doing was justified and right, it had to be done properly. As luck would have it, in the chemistry stores in the East Building, where nobody goes any more, I found a tiny, dusty old bottle containing six shrivelled, desiccated carmine beetles. For all I know, they could well have been there for three hundred years. With Theogenes open in front of me on the bench, I pounded them very carefully in a pestle, added the other bits and pieces, and came up with a beautiful deep red paste. Genuine authentic carmine ink.

  Unfortunately, authentic genuine carmine ink fades over time. The colour I’d seen in the manuscript that Carchedonius had burned was more a sort of reddish-pink. As far as I know, there’s no way of artificially fading the stuff. In the end, I had to mix in finely-ground barley flour and a few drops of aqua orientalis, which gave me precisely the colour I wanted. It wasn’t right, of course. It was an entirely authentic, genuine and period-correct reddish-pink (the recipe is in Theogenes) and therefore, inevitably, a lie. I felt very bad about that, but really, I had no alternative.

  As for the words themselves; once again, I was in the invaluable position of being the acknowledged expert. I’ve read every surviving word Aeneas wrote, many times. I know his turns of phrase, his verbal eccentricities, the rhythms and cadences, the pet phrases. That, and I have a really good memory for the written word; if I read something through once, I can usually regurgitate large chunks of it weeks or even months later. From my reading of the True Discovery I guess I could remember about a third of it word-perfect. I got that down on paper straight away, then set about filling in the gaps. As far as content goes, I was on pretty firm ground, since so much of what I’d seen in the manuscript was little more than a pre-emptive paraphrase of my own various papers, essays and dissertations. There were one or two things in the original that I couldn’t recall clearly or accurately enough to feel safe about including them, so, reluctantly, I left them out. I resisted the temptation to put in stuff from my own research that Aeneas had somehow neglected to include. I was proud of myself for that. I can see how easy it must be for a diplomat, say, or a commercial agent to overstep his authority in the heat of negotiations. I’d have loved to have put in my pet theory about the little cedarwood box full of crumbly red dust preserved in the archives of the Serio-Beselli at Anax; the family tradition says it was brought back by Aeneas’ ship’s doctor, and I’m convinced it’s a sample of rottenstone (whose properties were unknown until shortly after Aeneas’ return). It’d have been so easy to drop a casual mention of rottenstone, and how my friend the surgeon brought some home with him in a small box. That’s just the sort of throwaway anecdote Aeneas goes in for. But no. That would’ve been wrong, I’d never have forgiven myself.