Ars Magica

by Judith Tarr

  Frustration crouched at bay as he watched Maryam. She measured the sun’s angle with a stick and a string, recording it at intervals of the water clock which Gerbert had made as a gift to her father. In between, for an hour and more, she had been reckoning with numbers. She was good at that, as with everything; she liked the way they yielded to her will, much swifter and smoother than magic, with no price to pay after.

  The blooming of magic in his mind’s core was familiar now, if never taken for granted. Gerbert, always a little startled by what he had made, regarded the rose in rather more surprise than usual. It was indubitably a rose, a bud just unfolded, velvet-petaled, sweet-scented, perfect. But he had never seen a rose so dark. Its color made him think of darkest wine. Its center was deep and wondrous gold.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Maryam.

  “It’s you.” He blushed. “I meant — I — It’s not controlled.”

  “True,” she said. “You can’t let the magic wield you. If you should invoke a spirit of fire, and end with a succubus...”

  “I suppose you have never made a mistake in your life,” he snapped.

  “I may have made a few,” she said. “On occasion. Here and there.” She went somber suddenly, so suddenly that she startled him. “Once, badly. Very...very badly. So badly that I almost killed my magic, and myself, and anything else that touched me.”

  He would never have spoken if he had been thinking. But he was off guard, and she hurt — hurt more than he could bear to see. “Tell me,” he said.

  She did not move, and he knew that she would not speak. His will, rousing too late, was glad. Then she said, almost too soft to hear, “I was doing what I should never have done. I witched the lock of the chest in the library. I took out the books my father had never let me see, except once, when he told me what each was: which of them I could read, and which must wait.”

  Gerbert knew. Ibrahim had done the same with him.

  “I only wanted to look at them,” she said. “Not to use them, or even to read them beyond a glimpse or two. I was curious, that was all. I knew I wasn’t ready for them; I thought that that would protect me. I thought then, you see, that magic was mostly words — even though I had seen that it was more. I couldn’t read Latin, either, beyond a word or two; what I could read, I couldn’t understand, and therefore I thought it couldn’t harm me.

  “But magic is more than words, and the magic was awake in me, wanting to grow. It made me do what I did. And I let it. I let it wield me. I didn’t know the words that passed my eyes, but the magic didn’t need me to know. It only needed the words.

  “Magic is like a horse. It has a mind of its own, and a will to act, and strength beyond anything human. But, like a horse, it needs the restraint of a human will. A trained human will. I was like a child on its father’s warhorse. It carried me, but only where it chose. And when I touched it with the spur, it ran wild.

  “I don’t know exactly what it was that I did, or worked, or summoned. My memory seared itself away, and my father will never tell me. But when I came to myself, I was barely alive, and my — my mother was gone.”

  She was dry-eyed, telling it, but that tearlessness bared grief more terrible than any weeping. “She had come in in the midst of it. She was a master of the Art, older than my father, and stronger, but weakened then with carrying what would have been my brother. It had been a hard bearing, and all my father’s arts, together with her own, had hardly been enough to keep her from losing the baby. But they were winning the fight; she was a month from her time, and he was thriving, and she was even able to walk about a little, with help, if she was careful.

  “She was in the garden when she knew what I had done. She ran — she ran to the library. She raised her power to defend me. But there was my brother, who needed defending even more than I; and she was weak, and there was the law of magic which knows no breaking. The working killed her. My brother... lived a little while. Not long; and that was merciful. The magic had done something to him. He wasn’t human. He wasn’t anything that should live in this world.”

  Gerbert found that he was holding her, rocking her as if she were a child still. He wished that she would weep. It was not good for her, this tearless stillness.

  She pulled away from him with sudden, painful force. “I know what you’re thinking. You think I’m horrible. Because I went on. Because I killed two people, and one an unborn baby, and after I had done it, I didn’t cast off the magic that had done it.”

  “How could you?”

  She stared. He had surprised her.

  “I suppose,” he said, “that if the magic is there, but one doesn’t know it, or hasn’t awakened it, one can cast it off. Or never acknowledge it at all. I tried. I succeeded, for a remarkable while. But once it’s awake, there’s no denying it. You can only learn to master it. Worse by far if you had tried to kill it, and failed, and it had devoured you.”

  “It can be killed. There is away. Like cautery: burning it out.”

  “And what would have been left of you after?”

  “Enough. I would have been a maimed thing, but no more than any woman is: a servant and a bearer of children. I would have atoned for what I did.”

  “That would have been a great sin.”

  Her lip curled. “How Christian.”

  “Call it what you like,” he said. “What would you say? It was written that you be what you are. For you to kill your magic would be as black a crime as if you killed yourself. This way you honor your mother’s memory and vindicate her death, by becoming the mage she would have wanted you to be.”

  “That’s not why I do it. I do it because I can’t bear not to. I’m selfish, Brother. Selfish and a coward.”

  “Oh, come,” said Gerbert. “You’re human. You’re a better mage than I’ll ever be. Maybe not a better teacher, but you’ll do for the purpose.”

  She hit him without force, with less of anger than of unwilling laughter. Her eyes had brimmed and overflowed. She shook the tears away; they kept coming in spite of her. “Damn you, I needed that. I never told anyone before. Whom was there to tell? Father doesn’t need the pain. We’ve no family at this edge of the world.”

  “Friends?”

  “Friends.” This laughter was more bitter than the last. “Who’d befriend me? Good girls don’t read, let alone think. Slaves are slaves. Men are out of the question.”

  “What am I?”

  His bitterness shocked her out of her own. She hugged him, quickly, before he could pull away. “My friend. My brother — I think of you as that. Does it offend you?”

  His throat had closed. He shook his head.

  A little of the old wicked light had come back to her eyes. “And you’re not ugly,” she said.

  He opened his mouth. She stopped it with her hand. “You’re not. Stop thinking you are. You’ve the sort of face that ages better than any pretty boy’s. It will suit you when you need it, when you’ve risen as high as you want to rise.”

  “Who says I want to?” he might have said, but did not. He knew how sulky it would sound. Instead he said, “I know what I want to do.”

  She drew up her knees and clasped them. “Do you? What is that?”

  He had not been thinking when he said it. He had only wanted her to stop talking about himself. There were many things he wanted. What he wanted to do...

  His breath stopped in his throat. By God and all the saints, he knew. He had to stand up to get it out; he had to move, pace and turn, pace and turn, throwing off words like shots from a sling. “All this. All this magic. It’s all scattered: bits here, bits there. The heart of it, that’s one, and solid, but the ways to it are as many as there are teachers of it. Your father takes a little from Hermes, a little from the Moorish mages, a touch from Africa, a bow to Greece, Persia, the Jews, the Chaldees; he mingles them, he makes them his own. He has a system, but there is no overriding system. A way of studying them all in order, as we study the lesser arts.

  “Suppose,” sai
d Gerbert, “that I found a place, a haven, a school, not of the arts, but of the great Art. It could be part of a larger school, if need be — I know I want to bring the Quadrivium back to Gaul, that dream I haven’t forsaken. But with it, for those who have the will and the power, another and higher study.”

  “You want to found a school of magic in Gaul?”

  He stopped, spun. “Does it sound as ridiculous as that?”

  “It sounds dangerous. We’re tolerated here, but we’re here because the world has few welcomes for our kind. In Gaul, from all I’ve heard, they won’t simply drive you out. They’ll burn you.”

  “They won’t. Not if I do it as I intend to. Think, Maryam. Why are you tolerated here?”

  “Count Borel is a freehanded man. Bishop Hatto is our friend.”

  “Exactly. The count, and the bishop. That’s where to begin. Convince the lords of the world and of the Church that what we do is a high learning — and useful to them. Show them what is possible. Teach them, or their children; make them part of it.”

  “Implicate them in it,” she said. “Can they even conceive of it?”

  “Why not? Where I come from, numbers are as close to magic as makes no matter. If I can give them both, in ordered sequence, who’s to fault me?”

  “Everyone.”

  “Or no one.” He dropped down in front of her. “I want to give magic the order and the honor of the lesser arts: set it beside theology, consort to her queen, crown and scepter of the world that is and was and is to be. I’ll teach it to kings. I’ll lay it at the feet of the very pope in Rome.”

  “Why not be pope, if you’re aiming as high as that?”

  He sat on his heels and laughed a little, at himself, at absurdity. “Now that is nonsense. A schoolmaster is what I’ll be. Master of the arts. That’s high enough for a farmer’s brat from Aurillac.”

  “That’s a dream worth having,” said Maryam.

  She had surprised him again. Her eyes were bright, resting on him, but they did not mock him.

  “When you have your school,” she asked him, “will you let me teach in it?”

  “Let you? I’d beg you!” He paused. “You really would?”

  She nodded gravely. “We’ll be old then. And august. People might not mind so much, that I’m not a man.”

  “I don’t mind,” he said; and for honesty’s sake, “any longer.”

  “Well. I’m younger than you. When we’re old it won’t matter. I’m going to be a terrible old woman, Gerbert. That’s fair warning.”

  “Very fair. I suppose you’ll want to teach women as well as men.”

  “Of course. The magic doesn’t care what shape its body is. Should I?”

  “Never.” Gerbert drew a breath. “Imagine,” he said. “Imagine it. No more ignorance; no more fear. No more burnings. Magic will be like any great art, honored, respected, welcomed for the good it can do. We’ll make a whole new world.”

  “God willing,” said Maryam.

  6.

  Gerbert had thought that he knew what he was born for. Now he knew it surely. This was better by far than the old, selfish dream: the wanting to know all there was to know, for his own glory, for his own contentment. Now he wanted to know it in order to teach it. To enlighten not his single narrow self, but the whole broad world.

  It was like the rose which he had made when his mind was on Maryam. It was not what he had intended, a simple, common, scarlet rose; it was infinitely more beautiful. It bloomed unwearying, and where it had begun, on the bare dead bush, sprang green leaves. and buds that swelled into wine-dark splendor.

  “See,” he said to Maryam. “The magic knows. It gives me a sign.”

  His mind had never been as clear as it was now, as swift to learn, to master, to remember. Almost of itself it began to set in order what Master Ibrahim taught, and what Maryam added, and even what Bishop Hatto had never ceased to teach him. He pleased them all; he was proud, he could not help it, but it was a clean pride. He was — yes, he could admit it: he was happy.

  Even in simple things, things with which a man of nobler birth would never sully his hands. This one was even excusable: he could call it part of his study of music. The bishop had had a new organ made for the cathedral; it was of a design he had never seen before, that one could play with the hands, and no need to leap about like a mad bellringer, hauling with all one’s strength on levers and stops. The master artisan had been glad enough of hands that knew what they were about, and a mind that could take in a command the first time, and without mangling it besides.

  Gerbert came up out of the bowels of the organ, dusty, oil-stained, and whistling, with an unidentifiable bit in his hand. “Joachim, what in the world is this?”

  The master artisan glanced at it. “Harness buckle,” he said.

  “In an organ?”

  Joachim shrugged. “That’s the foundry. They like to have their little jokes.” He caught the buckle as Gerbert tossed it to him, shook his head, thought visibly about spitting. He did not always remember that he was in the cathedral. Work, as he said, was work, wherever one did it.

  The sanctity of the holy place was safe for the nonce. Joachim swallowed abruptly and bowed. Gerbert grinned wide and white in his blackened face. “My lord! Look, we’ve almost got it together.”

  Hatto returned the smile, though his glance about was slightly skeptical. “You have?”

  “The worst of it’s done. The rest is only niggling. And tuning, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Hatto, drawing back as Gerbert clambered through the heaped flotsam, but offering a hand when the young monk slipped. Gerbert found his balance unaided, somewhat to the bishop’s relief. He would wash, one could hope, but the smock he wore was beyond redemption. He wiped his hands on it, to little enough effect, looked apology at his bishop, shrugged.

  “I think,” said Hatto, “that a bath should engage you before I begin. Go; find me after.”

  oOo

  Scrubbed clean, in his clean habit, and still somewhat damp about the edges, Gerbert presented himself in the bishop’s workroom. The secretaries were hard at it. Hatto himself had taken up pen and parchment, something he was not above doing, if need demanded it.

  Gerbert waited in patience, though he burned to know what was important enough to bring the bishop himself with the message. He looked about for something that needed doing, did it. He had copied half a charter before Hatto called to him.

  The bishop set down his pen and stretched. He looked tired, Gerbert thought. Gerbert was not sure that he ever slept. He always seemed to be awake when Gerbert was, and Gerbert hardly slept at all. There was too much to be awake for.

  Hatto spoke abruptly, without preliminary. “What do you think now of Spain?”

  Gerbert was less surprised by the question than he had been once, with three years’ custom behind him. “It’s splendid,” he said.

  “Does the light still cut?”

  Gerbert answered smile with smile. “Like a fine Toledo blade.”

  Hatto nodded. “You have the eyes to see: more now than ever. Have you been pleased with your learning here?”

  “Well pleased,” Gerbert answered, “with all of it.”

  “Your masters are pleased with you. All of them. I’ve written to your abbot in Gaul, and told him so. He need have no shame of the hawk he cast into the sky.”

  Gerbert’s heart had stilled. “It’s time,” he said. “It’s time to go back.” He did not know what he felt. Gladness, it should be. He was going home. “But I’m not ready!” he cried.

  “You are well grounded in all that I can teach.”

  “The other,” said Gerbert. “The other — isn’t — ”

  Hatto frowned. “Master Ibrahim tells me that such studies last lifelong. But an apprentice, you are no longer. He judges you ready to be reckoned a journeyman.”

  And journeymen...journeyed.

  “He never tested me.”

  “Did he not?” In Gerbert’s quenched
silence, Hatto folded his hands, eyes upon them, brows knit still. “You know that I, with my lord count, have been seeking to raise the Spanish March in the estimation of the world; to prove that our realm is, indeed, worthy to stand level with any in the heart of Christendom. To that end we have agreed that the Church in the March should enjoy a greater eminence. I am, by courtesy and by the fact of my position, primate of the realm. My lord has convinced me that we should seek the blessing of Rome: that we petition for the raising of my see to an archbishopric, with all the authority that that entails. Therefore, when the month is out, we go to Rome to lay our petition at the feet of His Holiness himself.”

  Gerbert swallowed through an aching throat. They would go, and he would have escort at least as far as Gaul. He should be honored.

  It was not over. It could not be over. Green-girdled Aurillac, drowsing in the sun — no edges in that light, no gleam of strangeness.

  Hatto looked up. “You will accompany us. My lord pope, they tell me, has some store of learning, and a great love of its practitioners. I should like him to see what Gaul and Spain together have wrought.”

  Gerbert had not heard aright. He was being sent back to Aurillac. He had not heard this, that he would go to Rome. To the lord pope. To Christendom’s very heart and center. That was for his august age, when he was worthy of it.

  “Unless,” said Hatto in the stretching pause, “you do not wish it. You may choose to honor your vows to the abbey of Aurillac. They were not intended to stretch past these years in Spain.”

  Gerbert’s head was shaking before his mind had taken it in. “I don’t — I don’t want — If my lord offers me Rome, I would be a fool to refuse him.”

  Hatto’s face was grave, but his eyes glinted. “The hawk flies high,” he said.

  “Abbot Gerald will understand.”