Ars Magica

by Judith Tarr

  “When it is time,” said Charles.

  “Now.”

  They stood eye to eye. Charles looked away first. “As soon as I may.”

  Gerbert nodded sharply. “See to it.” He turned on his heel. His two guards followed, close as shadows, but they did not try to stop him.

  oOo

  His first concern was for the city. One night’s rape had wounded it bitterly; the pillagers were slow to come to heel, drunk even more with license than with wine. They had set fire to the coiners’ street and well-nigh burned down the whole of the quarter. The granaries were ransacked, the cattle stolen or slaughtered. If there was a chicken alive in Rheims, it was no thanks to the duke’s marauders.

  God Himself seemed minded to punish the city for its stupidity. When the reapers crept out to gather what was left of the harvest, morning sun darkened to a cold and driving rain that turned the fields to mire and rotted the grain in the ear; struck the apple from the bough; smote the vineyards with destroying hail.

  Gerbert could not even raise his magic to defend the fields. The guard which Charles had laid on him was more than the pair who were by him waking and sleeping, never the same pair for long lest he charm them into disloyalty. If charm was a word anyone would care to use of a mage without magic.

  Not that it was gone. It was there, but muted, quenched, shrunken and feeble. It was, as it were, bound in chains. Chains of air and iron. The simplest working taxed him to the edge of his endurance: the lighting of a lamp, even the reading of the stars that demanded more of the mathematician than of the magician. The great magics, he could not do at all. Not within his self; not with the tools of the mage. His chamber of power was barred against him and sealed with iron. His books were all taken away. And greatest of all, his Jinniyah enspelled in bronze, in whom was the fullest portion of his power — even she was taken away from him. It was her voice which he had heard on the night of Rheims’ betrayal, crying treachery to his deaf ears. Now he could not find her. He had no strength even to look for her.

  He never saw Charles’ mage. The trap might have set itself for all he could learn of it. The touch that bespoke Otric grew less like him the longer Gerbert lay under it. It was subtler, slipperier, more secret. It had an odor of dark and hidden places.

  It was eating him slowly. He could not stop it. He could barely stop the dissolution of his city. No more could he stop fighting with every ounce of skill and cunning and sheer cold anger. He would conquer this evil, or it would kill him. There was no middle ground. No yielding. No quarter.

  11.

  Sunlight took Gerbert by surprise. He blinked at it and tried to remember where it had come from. It had been grey afternoon; he had been overseeing the dole of grain, trying to hasten it before the early dark. He had been a little unsteady on his feet, a little warmer than the air called for. But between that and this, nothing.

  He tried to sit up, fell reeling back. An exclamation escaped him; it broke in coughing. The coughing nearly broke him in two.

  Cool hands held him. They were strong. He struggled to see. Something touched his lips; he drank before he thought: coolness, bitterness that caught at the throat through the mellowing of honey. He gasped, gagged.

  “Here,” said a voice both sharp and gentle. “Don’t fight.”

  He could barely want to. He peered through swimming eyes at Richer’s face. It looked odd. Owlish. He seemed to be trying to grow a beard.

  Slowly his scattered self crept together. He was in his own bed, as he should be, though not as far into the morning as the sun’s angle proclaimed. There was no strength in him at all, but a weight like a world in his lungs, and a smithy clanging behind his eyes. “I’m sick,” he said.

  Richer greeted that stroke of genius with admirable forbearance. “So you are.” He stopped. He was, Gerbert realized, exhausted: corpse-white under the crowding freckles, unshaven, hollow-eyed, and dismayingly slow in the wits. His face lit like a lamp. “Magister! You’re awake.”

  “I should hope so,” said Gerbert sourly.

  Richer mopped at his eyes, which had chosen that moment to overflow. “Thanks be to God and all the saints.”

  “That bad, was it?”

  “Not if you’re alive and growling at me.” Richer grinned through the tears. “And I, for once, can growl straight back.”

  “How long?”

  Richer did not want to answer. Gerbert glared at him until he did. “Not so long. Only a fortnight.”

  “A fortnight!”

  The boy held him down with both hands, which was kindness of a sort. One hand would have been more than adequate. “Stop it. The city’s taken care of. My lord Arnulf himself is back, brazen as he ever was, but this I’ll say for him: he’s properly appalled. He’s been doing well enough where you left off. Gave his uncle a proper tongue-lashing, too. I’m sorry you couldn’t have been there to hear that. You’d have found it gratifying.”

  “Arnulf.” Gerbert bit off the name. He did not try to say more than that.

  Richer spooned gruel into him. He took it without grace, but he did not resist. He needed strength, and he needed it quickly. He could not at the moment remember why. Something he had dreamed, amid the long dimness of his fever. Something true.

  He was not even as well as Richer tried to pretend. Sleep wanted to take him and keep him. When he was awake, it took most of his strength simply to stay so.

  It maddened him. Even as a child he had never been sick. He tried to get up, though Richer raged at him, though he prostrated himself the longer for trying too much too soon. He had a city to look after.

  “Arnulf is looking after it,” Richer said over and over, with ever-lessening patience.

  “Arnulf is why I have to look after it!”

  The spasm of coughing crested and passed. No blood. There had been blood before. Perhaps, after all, Gerbert was beginning to heal.

  oOo

  The name, it seemed, had power to bring the man. Gerbert woke from a doze to a face that was not Richer’s, and eyes that tightened the skin between his shoulderblades. Narrow, sharp, almost cunning. Then, with a flicker of lids, they widened and softened. “Magister,” said the Archbishop of Rheims.

  “Excellency.” Gerbert could not see or hear Richer. Had they bound and gagged him and carried him away?

  Arnulf sat by the bed, smoothing his gown. He looked splendid in episcopal violet. “I rejoice to see you recovering,” he said. “Your illness has grieved us all.”

  “Has it?”

  Arnulf smiled as if Gerbert’s insolence honestly pleased him. “You sound like your old self. When you spoke gently to us at the height of the fever, we feared the worst. It’s good to hear you bark again.”

  Gerbert set his teeth. “Where is Brother Richer?”

  “Resting. Have no fear, he’s close by; but we can’t risk the physician’s taking sick before the patient is cured. He has orders to stay away until he has slept.”

  “What did you enforce them with? Chains?”

  Arnulf laughed as sweetly as a woman. “Not quite! His oath of obedience seems to have sufficed.”

  “Amazing.” Gerbert was thirsty, and he needed the chamberpot. He did not want to ask this man for anything. “Are you nursing me in his place?”

  “Alas,” said Arnulf, “no. My uncle expects me to dine with him. I simply wished to assure myself that you are, indeed, mending.”

  “Why? Is there trouble?”

  “Not at all.”

  He sat smiling, looking as innocent as a painted angel. Hard to credit that he had sworn fealty to a king by the most holy of all oaths, and handed that king’s city to an army of rebels. That he had committed that treason under the very nose of a master of magic, and never...once...

  Gerbert lay still.

  No. Treason was an earthly art, and Gerbert had not been troubling himself to look for it. This that he was thinking, that he had dreamed in his delirium, was not possible. Arnulf had no magic. Gerbert had proved that by e
very test he knew. Arnulf could not have done what the hidden mage had done. Gerbert would have known.

  So he had. Late, when all his guards were broken down, but truly.

  “You,” he said. “You did this to me.”

  Arnulf seemed shocked. “Why, master! How can you say that?”

  “You lured me away from the makings of my magic. You weakened me; you opened the way for the fever. Were you hoping it would kill me?”

  “Come,” said Arnulf, “be calm. You’ll sicken again.”

  “No. You don’t want me dead. You simply want me in your power. Who trained you? Otric?”

  Arnulf drew breath as if to protest, stopped, sighed, shrugged. “I see that there is no deceiving you, magister. Yes, Otric taught me when I was very young, and again after I left you.”

  “You spied for him.”

  “I tested my power on you. Or it tested itself. It never wanted to uncover itself to you.”

  “Remarkable,” said Gerbert. “Power that renders itself invisible. Can you do anything with it but that?”

  “A little.” Arnulf was not being modest. Gerbert doubted that he knew how. “It tends to negate itself. A pity, I’ve always thought. Else the possibilities would be endless.”

  “Thank God they’re not.”

  “Perhaps. Too much power is dangerous. I do regret that I could do so little for you. I only meant to keep you from working spells to set yourself free. I didn’t know that so much of your self was bound up in the workings.”

  “Now that you do, why not give them back?”

  Arnulf looked regretful. “Alas, I can’t. I need you here, lending your name, however reluctantly, to our cause. I can’t let you escape. But I can take more care to preserve your strength.” He frowned slightly. “It wasn’t wise, you know, to entrust so much of your magic to anything outside of yourself.”

  “What makes you think I had a choice?”

  “Ah,” said Arnulf, as if he understood. “It’s the way your power runs. Unfortunate for you. Most fortunate for us, now that I see you’ll live.”

  In that instant, Gerbert hated him with a perfect hate. A monster, one could comprehend, and even forgive: one could see that a devil had possessed him. This flawless selfishness was beyond endurance.

  Gerbert did not know what he would do if Arnulf lingered much longer. He let his eyelids fall over the burning of rage, let his body slacken as if in weariness.

  As he had hoped, Arnulf tired soon enough of his own unaided company. When he was well gone, Gerbert lay with his eyes closed, but his mind was as clear as it had ever been. It had much to ponder. And one comfort. Arnulf did not, it seemed, know the whole of what he had done to Gerbert’s magic. While he thought that it resided in a chest of books and oddments, there might be some hope of winning free.

  Then, thought Gerbert, there would be a reckoning.

  oOo

  Richer had not been idle while Gerbert worked himself into a fever. His magic was as useless as Gerbert’s own, but he had bled none of it into another vessel; he was sound enough in body. Nor had his mind suffered for the time to think. He had marked Arnulf some while since for what he was.

  He did not brag about it. “I’m not worth noticing. Therefore I’m given more chances to notice things.”

  Gerbert snorted. “You’re also a shade brighter than you look. Have you happened to notice whether his excellency is collecting antique bronzes?”

  Richer’s cheeks were flushed. Logically enough: he was turning the mattress while Gerbert lay on the floor in a nest of blankets. He smoothed a lump in the ticking, reached for a sheet. “Actually,” he said, “I have. He’s keeping it next to his bed.”

  Gerbert laughed himself into a coughing fit.

  When he could speak again, he was in his clean bed, in a clean shirt, grinning like an idiot. “God’s bones! I needed that.” Richer was scowling at him. He yielded to compunction. “That particular bronze, my friend, is rather more than it seems. And Arnulf is rather less a mage than he thinks, or he would now better than to keep it where he does.”

  Richer bit his lip. He was struggling, Gerbert realized, not to succumb to laughter. He gave up the fight, for a moment, before he sobered. “Your magic is in it.”

  Gerbert nodded.

  “Why?”

  It was the inevitable question. Gerbert did not want to answer. But to Richer, he owed at least as much as he had given Arnulf. “It was a price I paid for the way in which I acquired the image. I killed with magic to gain it. Therefore my magic surrendered its freedom. It became a part of what I had taken. I... encouraged it.”

  “We have to get it back,” said Richer.

  He looked ready to stride straight into the archbishop’s bedchamber and seize the image. Gerbert caught his sleeve. “No. We know where it is. He doesn’t know what it is. Let it be for a while. When I’m back on my feet, have no fear, we’ll act.”

  That was sensible. Richer yielded to it, not happily. If he had heard Gerbert’s confession of murder, he had not let it trouble him. Gerbert could envy such serenity.

  oOo

  Richer was hardly serene. Guilt was eating at him. This, he reflected, must be how adulterers felt when they faced the men they had cuckolded. He could not bring himself to confess that he knew what the bronze was. All of it. Oracle, ensorceled spirit, friend.

  She would be frantic, trapped where she was. Unless she had turned traitor. Arnulf was very good to look at; and she would have seen all there was to see. A female, even a bodiless spirit, would be vulnerable to such things.

  Arnulf endowed with an oracle was an appalling prospect. Richer could only hope that he fretted for nothing. Gerbert would recover, they would steal back the image, they would escape from this trap.

  He put on his bravest face, and schooled himself not to see what sickness had made of his master. Gerbert had not, mercifully, asked for a mirror; he seemed untroubled by the gauntness of his body. “I’ve been rather thicker in the middle than a good ascetic should be,” he said. “Now I look more as I ought.”

  Richer swallowed his objections. Gerbert ate, and ate well, which was what mattered. He seemed to have made up his mind to be sensible.

  He worked at it with commendable zeal. He no longer tried to push himself past the edge of endurance. He slept as he was told, ate all that he was fed, and rose when Richer would let him, easing himself back into the labor of living.

  oOo

  Richer had schooled himself too well. He forgot that Gerbert would not know what he could not see. They both paid for that as Richer should have known they would, once Gerbert was well enough to leave his house and sit in the garden. He had always let the young imps of the town amuse themselves in its pear tree, if they broke none of its branches and left a little of its fruit for its master. On warm days, even in winter, they liked to come in through a gap in the wall which Gerbert, conveniently, kept forgetting to mend, and wage mock battles round the tree.

  Richer had left Gerbert sitting on a bench in the sun with a volume of Cicero to keep him company, and gone to do some things that needed doing. When he came back, Gerbert was still there, and with him two or three children. Richer smiled. Trust the master to gain a youthful following wherever he went, even in his own garden.

  Then Richer heard what one of them was asking. “Where’s the teacher?”

  “Silly,” his sister said with all the scorn of superior age. “This is the teacher.”

  But the child was not to be deflected. “He’s not, either. He’s someone else. He’s old.”

  Richer was on them before they could have known he was there. Whether it was his size or his wrath or his habit flapping in the wind of his speed, they broke and fled.

  Leaving Richer breathless and trembling, and Gerbert motionless in the sunlight. The master seemed unperturbed, even amused. Then he said, “You could have broken it to me gently.”

  Richer did not know what to say.

  “Let me see,” said Gerbert.
>
  There was no point in refusing him. Richer dragged his feet a little in hunting for the mirror, but not too much. The one he found was a good one: silver, and old. It looked Roman.

  Gerbert did not look long at what it showed him. He let the mirror fall into his lap, and sighed.

  “It’s not so bad,” said Richer.

  Gerbert laughed, which was startling. “What’s bad? I’m alive. These bones will pad themselves soon enough — amply enough, too, if I know this body of mine. I never had any beauty to lose. This...” He ran fingers through his hair. Nature had lent a hand with the tonsure, but the rest was thick still, its old unmemorable brown gone silver in his sickness. “I look venerable. I. Who’d have thought it?”

  “Not venerable,” Richer said. “Distinguished.”

  And he did. His face had never been anything but plain, but it seemed cleaner carved, the eyes larger, more brilliant. They had always been Gerbert’s best feature, wide and clear, neither brown nor grey nor green but a mingling of all three. Now they were like water, both deep and clear, flecked with gold like a dazzle of sunlight.

  Richer shivered, not with cold, and not with fear. Not exactly. There was magic in those eyes, chained though it might be, by wisdom and priesthood as much as by Arnulf’s treachery.

  They glinted, wicked as a boy’s. “Venerable,” Gerbert repeated. “August. Feeble. Unthreatening. I haven’t been under guard since I took sick. Have I?”

  “No.” Richer said it slowly, as he began to understand. “You are devious.”

  “I learn from example,” Gerbert let Richer help him up, though he insisted on walking back into the house, leaning on Richer no more than he must and rather less than he should.

  “Do you know what I’d like to do?” he asked when he was in his bed again. “When this is over, when I’ve dealt with the wreckage that little serpent and his damnable uncle have made of my city, I’d like to go away. Become a pilgrim. To Spain, maybe. To Egypt, where the magic is oldest of all, and where they say it lives still in the hidden places. And in the end, when I’m ready for peace, to Jerusalem.”