Ars Magica

by Judith Tarr

  Gerbert closed the wide wondering eyes, and straightened. Behind him, someone gasped and began to sob. He darted a glance, quelled a sigh. Yes, it would be that one. Arnulf, the old king’s bastard, pretty as a girl with his wide blue eyes and his yellow curls, and just enough wits about him to tell a penance from a paternoster.

  If Gerbert put his mind to it, he could be fair. The boy was no great light of intellect, but it was difficult to dislike him. He did not parade his pedigree; he granted respect to the peasant’s son who, everyone knew, would be his archbishop. His trouble was simple mediocrity, and a lightness of mind that inclined him all too often to forget such niceties as truth and fidelity. In time, no doubt, he would be given high office in the Church — it would be expected of him, for his father’s sake. Gerbert hoped that, when that time came, his superiors would have the sense to supply him with a competent secretary. Then he could look magnificent in his vestments, and the secretary could run the see for him.

  Gerbert’s teeth clenched. Grief struck like that, without warning, without mercy. It could not fell him. He set a kiss on Adalberon’s cold brow. Part of it was apology. This royal offspring too had had a secretary, and looked magnificent, and been thought a puppet; but the Archbishop of Rheims had never been that. Whatever Gerbert had advised, Adalberon had chosen or not chosen, as his heart moved him. Before they were friends, they were lord and servant, and neither ever forgot it.

  Now the lord was gone. The servant, turning, saw in the crowding faces what princes must see when they became kings. The shifting, the choosing: to accept, or to refuse. The dawning of awareness that the king was dead, long live the king.

  They would do nothing until he spoke. It was not joy, that awareness of power. It was terror. His voice when it came was quiet, but they listened; they obeyed.

  When the bells began to toll, it was all in hand. Gerbert’s hand, as always. He was going to have to train a clerk or two to assist him. Richer, perhaps. A good one, that: good with words, good with numbers, passable with magic. The good ones found their way here; the power knew where to find its like.

  Yes. Work would drive out both grief and fear. Grief for what was gone. Fear of what would follow. The Greeks had had a word: hubris. Getting above oneself. Attracting the attention of the gods.

  “You let him die.”

  Gerbert stopped in the eye of the storm, and saw his conscience. Small, ancient, swathed in a vast expanse of black habit. “You let him die,” said the apparition. “You who have magic, who can master death, you let him die.”

  “No man may conquer death,” Gerbert said.

  The ancient — was it man or woman, or was it anything at all? — cackled with laughter. “Any man may, if he be mage, and strong, and armored with love. But you loved ambition more.”

  “I gave him all I had to give.”

  “Maybe,” said the creature.

  Someone called to Gerbert. When he looked back, the apparition was gone. He felt cold and strange, as sometimes he did when the magic ventured on paths that were more grey than light.

  What would an old god look like, if all his worshippers were gone, his altars cold, his youth leached away in ages of unbelief? Beautiful, deadly Apollo of the prophecies — would he have deigned to toy with an archbishop’s servant?

  Perhaps he occupied an image of bronze, and sent messengers to trick his master into prudence.

  People were pressing on Gerbert, vexing him with urgency. He made himself hear what they were saying. “The king. The king is here.”

  Gerbert wanted to groan aloud. The archbishop had sent the summons as soon as he knew that his sickness was mortal; but the king had not come quickly enough. Or slowly enough. “God in heaven,” said Gerbert. “Even a day...”

  He received a measure of sympathy. Arnulf was there still. He could weep, Gerbert noticed, without marring his prettiness. A woman would happily have killed to learn his secret. Gerbert gave him orders, twice, to be certain that he remembered them; then sent him with appropriate escort to welcome, and thereby delay, the royal company.

  “Why did you send him?”

  Gerbert still heard Richer’s voice from the region of his elbow, though the boy was a man now, and not a small one: a great deal of length and very little width, knob-kneed as a spring colt, his mop of wild russet curls barely daunted by the dignity of the tonsure. He had the face to go with the hair, long, bony, and copiously freckled, and gifted with a remarkably sweet smile. Which he knew well how to use.

  Which he was not using now. But the question was pure Richer. The boy was no better than Gerbert at keeping his thoughts to himself, or at remembering to whom he owed respect. Richer at least could claim an excuse: he had been born a nobleman.

  “Why did you send him?” he repeated with his own peculiar variety of patience.

  “How else was I going to stop his sniveling?” Gerbert snapped. He had not meant to be so sharp; he shook his head, rubbing his aching eyes. “He was there. He has manners, which is more than I can say for some.”

  “He also has an uncle.”

  “Everyone has — ” Gerbert broke off. He knew what Richer was saying. “What do you expect? An assassin’s dagger under his gown?”

  “I don’t know,” said Richer. “He’s not as stupid as he looks; and if his father had married his mother, he could have been king. If certain great churchmen had not decided that the kingdom needed a change of dynasty, he would certainly have been the nephew of a king. He may yet be one, if he goes back to his old ways. You know what he did the last time anyone let him loose within reach of his uncle. Now that he’s within reach of his uncle’s supplanter, what could he not do?”

  “Hugh is king by right of election and by the will of the lords of Gaul,” said Gerbert. “As Arnulf himself has admitted. He’s no rebel now, whatever he was once. I can trust him to know how to talk to a king, and to know when to stop. He’s safe enough.”

  Richer did not look as if he believed it. But it was done; he shrugged, sighed, swallowed what might have been a spate of words, and found something useful to do. He stayed close, which did not surprise Gerbert. Richer seemed to labor under the conviction that Gerbert was his especial property. Since he was competent, and he was usually quiet, Gerbert allowed it.

  He was there when the king came. Hugh Capet had carried himself like a king before ever he claimed a crown; now that he was king, he seemed comfortable in it, accustomed to the splendor as to the cares with which he earned it. The result, to Gerbert’s eye, was a sort of ornate simplicity.

  The archbishop was laid out in seemly fashion, with incense burning to cover the reek of sickness and death, and a fine white candle illuminating his face. When the king had bidden farewell to the man who above all had made him king, they would bear the body away to the embalmers, and then to the cathedral where he would lie in state until he was laid in his tomb.

  Gerbert did not try to press himself upon the king. Arnulf, he noted sourly, had attached himself like a limpet to the royal side. He also noted Richer’s glance, which he did not choose to acknowledge. If Arnulf wanted to overwhelm the king with his loyalty, let him. Cursed as he was with an uncle who by birth should have been king and who by rebellion was doing his best to overturn the election, he needed all the help he could find.

  The king prayed long over the archbishop’s body. His attendants waited with the patience of courtiers. Not all were at ease in the fog of incense, among the black-robed priests. Old warrior stock, those, bowing to the power of holy Church yet subtly contemptuous of the men who wielded it. One kept glancing at Gerbert as if the priest had been a slumbering snake. Gerbert saw him shape a sign; felt the fear that lay beneath it.

  Gerbert stifled a sigh. It was nothing he had not seen before. If it was not fear of magic, it was fear of learning itself. Yet here, in the presence of death and of the king, it did not seem so little a thing.

  He shook himself. Any more of that and he would be fretting as endlessly as the Jinniyah.<
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  The king crossed himself, rose. His cheeks were damp but his eyes were hard. They paused on nothing in particular, nor did he speak, though Arnulf dithered, whispering in his ear. He walked past Gerbert without word or glance, and left the chamber.

  oOo

  Richer hardly waited for privacy before he burst out with it. “See? See?”

  “It didn’t look like assassination to me,” said Gerbert with mildness that should have alarmed Richer, if he had not been past it.

  “He’s up to something. Have you ever seen him hang on anyone like that?”

  “Yes,” said Gerbert. “Me, when he wanted to learn a little magic.”

  Richer snapped erect. “You didn’t!”

  The master raised a brow. Richer would have liked to be able to do that. “Why not? Power is dangerous without training.”

  “That puppy doesn’t have the power God gave a flea.”

  “So he discovered. It’s best that way. If I’d told him, he would have hated me for it.”

  “How do you know he doesn’t hate you? He’s a Caroling. You helped to take the crown away from his kin.”

  “He has more reason to hate the king. Whom, on the contrary, he seems to be courting.”

  “Yes!” cried Richer. “And for what? Why wouldn’t the king talk to you? He was avoiding you, I could see it. What poison has that little snake been pouring into his ear?”

  Gerbert sighed. He looked worn to the bone. “The boy has something he wants. Now if ever is the time for him to get it.”

  “At what cost to you?”

  Now at last Gerbert frowned. “You are fretting, Brother.”

  Richer flushed, but he would not back down. “When the old king’s bastard starts making love to the new one, something smells of rat. When you add to that an archbishop dead, a rebellion smoldering, and a chestful of laws against the practice of magic, you have trouble. You, master.”

  “I’ll talk to the king,” said Gerbert. Not as if he were convinced. As if he had been going to do it for his own purposes, and now he wanted to quiet Richer’s fretting with it. “It’s my duty as the archbishop’s secretary. I’ll see that he has facts to go with the young pup’s whisperings. Whatever they are.”

  “Sedition.”

  Gerbert laughed, and for a moment he looked as young as Richer. “To the king? Go on, lad, you’re starting at shadows. Go and rest. I’ll have plenty for you to do in the morning.”

  Richer resisted, but Gerbert’s will was immovable and his magic incontestable. Gerbert could enspell him to sleep then and there; and something in his eye promised exactly that. With bitter reluctance, Richer yielded.

  But he had the last word, from the door, just before he bolted. “Carolings may be shadows, but there’s a little substance in them yet. Aren’t they the children of Charlemagne?”

  9.

  Gerbert did not find it easy to gain audience with the king. Not that he was slighted, precisely, but his majesty was much beset with business; or he was resting; or he would see the master later, but later never seemed to come.

  Gerbert knew avoidance when he saw it; he needed no lessons from Richer. Greater kings than Hugh Capet had taught him that aspect of royal behavior. They had also taught him how to deal with it.

  He was not afraid. He was barely apprehensive. Even knowing that Arnulf had access when he did not. He had Rheims, in fact if not yet in name; he had the old archbishop’s formal blessing. He did not intend to lose what he had gained.

  Therefore he forbore to force his way into the king’s presence. Let Hugh remember what Gerbert was, and what he himself would be without Gerbert’s help. Duke of the Franks was a handsome title, but King of the Franks was handsomer by far.

  Cold thoughts for a priest of God. Gerbert shivered in the warmth of his sanctum. He had been trying to pray, but the world was too much with him. The chart of the hours over which he had been laboring was losing its power to engross him. Yesterday morning, Adalberon had gone to his tomb. At his funeral feast, Gerbert had had a place near the king, but not beside him. The king had been lost in thought, or else in converse with one or another of his lords.

  He straightened his aching back. His eyes, lifting, met eyes of bronze.

  The Jinniyah had been most commendably silent. He did not flatter himself that it was obedience to his will. She only ever obeyed him insofar as it suited her.

  He could remember hating her, shrinking from her, abhorring the very thought of her presence. He was a good hater, he had discovered; a steadfast holder of grudges.

  He had tried to destroy her. Once. Thinking by then, in part, to set her free, but thinking most of casting out the memory of grief. And discovered the fullness of the price that he had paid for her.

  She was his oracle and his destiny. In that great stroke of pride and power which had felled Maryam, he had not only bought the Jinniyah; he had made her part of him. His magic was in her.

  Not all of it; nor even, in the beginning, most. Enough, only, to mean that her destruction would weaken him to death. When he knew it, in the passion of his revulsion, in his grief that would not heal, he did two things. He swore anew the oath which he had sworn to Ibrahim, to work no magic save for the gaining or the teaching of knowledge, nor ever to advance himself by it in the world or in the Church. And, when he had sworn this vow upon the altar of God, he had set the seal on it, gathered all the power that was in him, all the terrible, beautiful, demon-seductive magic, and poured it into the enchanted bronze.

  “You were mad,” she said.

  He heard her as much within as without, ringing in his bones. He regarded her face that was more familiar even than his own. “Yes,” he said. “I was mad. But sane enough in the heart of it. I took back only what I needed. The rest I left to you. Never again will the magic wield me. You will see to that.”

  “That’s not Christian humility. That’s pride; and cowardice. Do you think that investing your power in a creature outside of yourself is going to bring you one jot closer to escaping it?”

  “No. But it keeps me from temptation.”

  She refrained, eloquently, from comment.

  “I don’t know when I stopped dreading the sight of you,” he said. “Or how.”

  “Of course you do. When you saw the use in a tame oracle. Even if you did bind and gag me.”

  “I had to keep us both honest.”

  Her lip curled. “One of us is too honest by far.”

  “I forgive you.”

  She laughed. Someday he would invent an instrument that sang so, with such purity of tone.

  No. He did not loathe the sight of her. Nor had he, in years out of count. Either it was his damnation, or it was his salvation.

  He touched her. She was cold, as bronze must be when it is winter, even in the warmth of a mage’s chamber. She had gone still, as if neither life nor power dwelt in her. But she was alive with both, a fire beneath the cold, a pulse like blood within the shell that bound her essence.

  “You were my penance,” he said. “You became my friend.”

  “A perfect description of a wife. As I make a perfect wife for a priest. The one who enspelled me would be delighted.”

  He smiled, but briefly. “Would you like to be free?” he asked her.

  “It would kill you if you tried,” she said.

  That was like her: not quite an answer, but sufficient for the purpose. “You’re not prophesying,” he said. “You’re talking around the question.”

  “I don’t need to prophesy. I know what I would feel in my bones, if I had any. You’d have to use all your magic, and that is bound up in me; the spell’s breaking would tear you asunder. Freedom would be sweet, but not at that price.”

  “You aren’t willing to pay as I paid?”

  She could not move, but she seemed to draw herself up. “I am neither the fool nor the mage that you are. I am merely a very minor spirit. And,” she said, “your servant.”

  “Always that,” he said a little wryl
y. His hand was still on her cheek, going numb with the cold. He lowered it.

  oOo

  “Master?”

  It was one of Gerbert’s own, quiet Bruno who had been his servant since he came to Rheims. The man was no less quiet now, but his eyes were watchful.

  “A message, magister. The king will see you as soon as it pleases you.”

  Gerbert did not leap up like an eager boy. He took his time: put away the chart, gathered together the bits of parchment, the pens, the inks in their bottles. Bruno had fetched his boots and his heaviest cloak; having seen Gerbert into them, the servant produced his own and stood ready to follow.

  Almost, spitefully, Gerbert considered making it his pleasure to keep the king waiting for a day or three. But the king was the king. Gerbert snuffed the candle by which he had been working, and paused. The Jinniyah said nothing. Of course she would not, before this man who had no magic.

  He shook himself. He trusted too much in her presence, nagging, exhorting, advising; he was forgetting to do his own thinking. As he was forgetting his vow, to wield no magic in matters of the world.

  Bruno was waiting. Gerbert waved the man ahead of him, and left his oracle to her silence.

  He caught his breath as the cold of the outer air smote his face. It was close to vespers, from the look of the sun; he realized that his stomach was empty. He had forgotten to eat.

  The sooner he faced this, the sooner it would be over. And yet he paused. Seventeen years, and still it could catch in his throat: this city that was his, this island of humanity in the wilderness that still, for all the labors of kings and farmfolk and holy Church, was Gaul. There should be a wine like the light that fell on it even in winter’s snow, pale gold, effervescing in the eye like wine upon the tongue. It was cooler than the honey-warmth of Aurillac, softer than the swordlight of Barcelona, cleaner than the mists and miasmas of Rome. From the moment he saw it he had loved it, and the city on which it lay. Saint Remigius’ city at the crossing of the Roman roads, ancient and holy, where kings came to be crowned.