Ars Magica

by Judith Tarr

  “Does it? What becomes of my city? Shall I hand it over after all to the one I’ve fought against for so long?”

  Even to himself, Gerbert sounded less passionate than weary of it all. It was as clear in Otto’s eyes as in his own. He had done all that he might to ward Rheims against incompetence. Without Charles and his sons to tempt him, perhaps Arnulf would refrain from treachery. He was not a bad man, merely weak.

  Reasonableness hurt. Arnulf could have tried to kill Gerbert a dozen times over. Except once, inadvertently, in sundering Gerbert from his magic, he never had. He had simply wanted, and taken, and lost, and tried to take again. No malice in it, only selfishness.

  Gerbert was no saint, either. And he who had thought only to be the lark in his cage was offered the eagle’s portion. Beautiful Ravenna of the Byzantines, queen consort of the west, in all her honor and her power. A whole new see that had never known him, that would learn to know him.

  He stiffened his will. He would not give up the fight.

  Otto met his eyes and spoke softly, but he did not speak as a simple man does, still less a boy who is barely a man. He was an emperor, and in that title was power beyond that of any mage. “Do you love Rheims, magister? Do you love it truly?”

  “With all my heart,” said Gerbert, though his voice shook.

  “Enough to give it up?”

  Gerbert sucked in his breath. It was like a blow to the vitals.

  Otto struck again, gently, mercilessly. “Do you love Rheims enough to let her go in the name of her peace? Can you do that, magister?”

  Gerbert opened his mouth to cry a denial. He was not strong enough, or pure enough, or selfless enough. All he knew was stubbornness. He wanted Rheims. Rheims, and no other.

  Did he?

  Arnulf in the place that was his. But he in another, higher and prouder and stronger. Wise, these young Saxons, these boys raised to rule a world; and subtle; and cruel. To take away what he loved, to offer him power in its stead.

  His head shook. That was not what tempted him past even pain. It was something much simpler, and much more complex. It was the gift, and the giver of the gift, and the love that shone in them both. For pride alone he would not do it. For Otto...

  It was, in the end, hardly a choice. It made itself in the raising of his hands; in the bowing of his head. Otto’s swift brilliant smile warmed him to the marrow: even in the dim, cold places that even yet could lament his poor lost Rheims.

  19.

  The Archbishop of Ravenna contemplated the thousand small niggling nuisances of a see newly taken and long left to its own devices, and considered the consolations of the cloister. And grimaced, as much at himself as at his troubles. A week in the cloister and he would be bored to distraction. A month, and he would either have gone mad or set out to repair every small niggling nuisance in the abbey. There was no help for it. He was what he was, and that was an incorrigible meddler. Which, he reflected, was not an inadequate description of a mage.

  He sighed and stretched. His secretaries were hard at work about him. Not all of them were delighted with their new master, but they had come to an accommodation. He did not tolerate laziness, nor did he punish it. He dismissed it. Preferably to a task more onerous by far. Mending the city’s walls. Clearing its streets of refuse. Tending its sick and its poor.

  This had been a mighty city once, seat of the exarch from the east, and not even Rome kept such splendor intact as glowed at every turning in Ravenna. Byzantium itself must be like this, he thought, raising his eyes to the glittering walls. A saint stared back in great-eyed serenity, not at all perturbed to see her city fallen into the hands of a Gaulish barbarian.

  When he first came here, he had wondered if he would ever grow accustomed to the crowded walls, the colonnades with their inlays of precious stones, and everywhere the dark and staring eyes. The living people had seemed almost inconsequential amid the images: big blond Lombards like the people beyond the Alps, or, outnumbering them by far, the little people, thin and dark and quick, bred for intrigue. Now already the splendor was fading into familiarity, though the strangeness could still bring him up short, and twist his heart with longing for northern simplicity. The people...

  The people were born wary and bred wary, and he was a foreigner. They trusted him no more than he trusted them. Yet they had chosen, for the moment, to obey him. They called him lord magus to his face, signor’ strego behind his back; and he did not need to ask what that meant. Their tone implied fear but no hatred, and deep respect.

  Here he would found anew the school which the struggle for Rheims had broken. It would fit; there would be no need to hide it, or to lie about it, or to pretend that it did not exist. The old power slept here, but it slept lightly.

  He was dreaming again, old dreams: his school, his Art accepted openly, his Church coming to see it as he saw it, the old fearful laws struck from the canons. And when it was all settled, then he would be free. He would go where he had always yearned to go: Spain, Egypt, Greece and Byzantium. And then at last, when he would rest, to the city of peace; to Jerusalem.

  But not while Ravenna needed his steadying hand. Not while his emperor had need of his strength and his teaching to raise up the new empire. Maybe they would go together, Gerbert in the evening of his life, Otto when his heir was old enough to rule as regent. An heir not even born, not even conceived; though he had sent an embassy east as his father had before him, to win for him a princess of Byzantium.

  Gerbert shook himself. He was growing old for a fact, maundering when he should be wading through the morass that his predecessor had made of Ravenna’s accounts. A man appeared in the corner of his eye, hanging about from the feel of him. “You,” said Gerbert, sharp with reproof. “What are you dangling for? Go down to the chancery; fetch me the ledger for the year before last.”

  The idler was prompt to obey. Gerbert forgot him in the intricacies of an old feud between a very minor lord and a very contentious hermit.

  The ledger appeared under his nose. For a moment he stared at it, annoyed. He raised his eyes to glare at the one who had thrust it at him so rudely, and met a broad and wicked grin.

  He leaped up with a shout that scattered blots on every parchment in the room, and felt himself swept into a bruising embrace. “Richer, you rascal!” he kept saying. “Richer!”

  His old pupil set him down with gentleness that was startling after the strength of his embrace, and held him, still grinning. His teeth were as crooked as ever, his freckles if anything more profuse, his hair as wild a thicket as it had ever been. Gerbert had forgotten how tall he was. The gangling colt had grown into a long-limbed racer, the awkwardness smoothed into rangy grace.

  Gerbert, to whom the years had been less kind, looked at him and understood how fathers felt. He stared back — bless him, without either shock or pity, in welling gladness. “Master,” he said. “Oh, master, you look splendid!”

  oOo

  He did, Richer was thinking, though he kept trying to deny it. Richer had been braced to find him cruelly aged. His youth was gone beyond recall, to be sure, but he looked as if he did not miss it. He was his old, irritable, capable self, only more so; there was a light in him, a strength and a purpose that outshone any mere vitality of few years and less wit. Tempered, that was it, like iron in the forge.

  Richer would have effaced himself as a monk should in an archbishop’s court, but Gerbert was having none of that. He freed his secretaries, to their enormous and poorly hidden relief. There were still duties to get through — an audience, a dinner, a messenger who must be received — but Gerbert disposed of them with facility that left Richer breathless.

  Then he had freed himself, and Richer remembered how he had always had that art of winning time to be alone with his pupil or his friend. Though not so alone in this strange, glittering room with its big-eyed saints and, on a table, a familiar gleam of bronze. Her features were cool and austere and not quite alive; her eyes smiled.

  “She likes
it here,” Gerbert said, a sort of explanation. She said nothing. Had she gone mute?

  Richer sat by her, folding himself on a stool, leaving the cushioned chair for Gerbert. Who did not immediately take it. He stood in front of the table and did a strange, unconscious thing: he ran a finger down the molded cheek. He caught himself, stared at his hand. “I keep doing that,” he said with no embarrassment that Richer could see, merely puzzlement, and perhaps a little self-mockery.

  “Of course you do,” said the Jinniyah, most unmute and most amused. “I’m beautiful, no? And bodiless. God mated us well, O my master.”

  Gerbert touched her again. It was not a caress. Not quite. He sat and folded his hands and smiled at Richer. Sharing the jest; being glad that he was here to share it. “Now, Brother. Tell me everything.”

  There was not much to tell, but somehow it made a great deal of telling. The outer school went on. The inner, of course, was gone. Arnulf had made a move or two in its direction, but he was not the mage that Gerbert was, nor ever the teacher. “He’s lost his looks,” Richer said. “He’s thickened; his hair has thinned. He’s had to learn to get by on more than prettiness.”

  “And has he?” Gerbert asked.

  He seemed calm, interested, without malice. Richer shrugged. “He tries. I think he wants to do well. He’s shallow, but he asks advice, and generally he takes it. He seems,” Richer admitted grudgingly, “to have become a good enough archbishop.”

  “Amazing,” mused Gerbert, “how little that hurts. Do you know how much I hated him?”

  Richer nodded.

  Gerbert shook his head and smiled. “Of course you do. You were closest of all. And now it’s gone. Or mostly,” he added, with an air of wanting to be fair. “I never was a very good Christian. A much better Ciceronian, I. Or Magian.”

  “You’ll do for the purpose.”

  Gerbert laughed. He had always had a wonderful laugh, rich and free, as if he had not a care in the world. “Ah, lad! It’s good to see you.” He leaned toward Richer, still smiling. “Now tell me. What brings you all the way to Ravenna, in winter, without a word of warning?”

  Richer squirmed a little. He had expected the question. He had prepared a fistful of answers. The truth slipped through them, irresistible as always, especially in front of the master. “I wanted to see you. My history is finished, or mostly; I wanted you to see it. Rheims isn’t Rheims without you. And — and — ” He let it out. “I was hearing — I heard — you’ve found the other half of you.”

  There it was. Sea-green jealousy, naked and unlovely.

  Gerbert did not laugh or scowl or even deny it. “That’s a year and more old.”

  “It’s taken me this long to face it.” Richer glared down at his twining fingers. “I of all people ought to know what I am. I am your rough, stumbling Peter. He is your John, whom you love.”

  Gerbert was not appalled by words so close to blasphemy. He said, calm and unruffled, “I’d been about to send for you. My school won’t be my school without you to teach in it.”

  “‘On this rock—’” Richer could not keep it up. Even envy sat badly on him. It kept showing him its backside and making him want to laugh. “God’s bones, magister! I was going to beg you.”

  “You know you’d never need to.” That was love; Richer felt it. His stunted soul wanted to clutch it and whine, Only for me. Say it’s only for me. His brain, wiser perforce, told him to be glad; to smile; to clasp the hand held out to him. It was only a hand, thin and dry, a little cold, an old man’s hand; but the power in it rocked him to his foundations.

  “Master,” Richer whispered. “Master, you’ve grown strong.”

  Gerbert shrugged slightly. It was the Jinniyah who said, “Awed? You? Come now, be sensible. It’s only Gerbert.”

  “Only!” Richer was outraged. “He is only the greatest mage in all the world.”

  “Maybe,” she said, as if she pondered it. “There may be one or two...a master in Ch’in...an adept in Africa...Toledo, perhaps...Cairo...”

  She did it to madden him. He growled at her, and she growled back, preposterously, like water in a sea-bell, and that made him laugh; and it was like old days again.

  oOo

  Richer found his place waiting as if Gerbert had been keeping it for him, close by, doing what needed doing, running his master’s errands, beginning the labor that would flower, in a little while, into the new school of the Art. Otto’s name was not mentioned except where it must be, in matters that related to the empire.

  Richer did not ask about him, though people were eager enough to tell. They all knew how much love was between their archbishop and their emperor. They fed on it as lesser souls always did, snatching crumbs from the tables of the great.

  Maybe Otto was the other half of Gerbert. Richer was here, and meant to stay; and no court or war or empire would call him away. Possession, as the Jinniyah would have told him, was nine points of the law.

  Gerbert was Gerbert, which meant that if he ever slept, his servants did not know it. Perhaps it was a mage’s malady. Richer, who was both mage and monk, would often find him in his library at improbable hours, fiddling with yet another of his odd and ingenious contraptions, or buried in a new book. There were many of the latter here; that most were Greek did not deter him. The Jinniyah could read them, and did, translating them into her Moorish-accented Latin.

  “Arabic,” Gerbert corrected absently, plucking the thought out of the air as he all too often could. “Her accent is Arabic.”

  “Is there a difference?” Richer bent to peer at the book. It was, indeed, Greek. He knew the letters and a word or two — less than Gerbert. “Where did you find this?”

  “In a box in a lumber-room,” Gerbert answered. “It’s old.” Which Richer could see, and smell, for himself. “It seems to have been written by a servant of the general Belisarius himself. A Secret History, see. It’s full of scandals.”

  He should have looked censorious, venerable prelate that he was. He looked more nearly mischievous. “Some of it is even making my Jinniyah blush.”

  “I am incapable,” she said with dignity, “of any such thing.” She paused. “What I am is envious. Even at my most wanton, I was barely a match for the Empress Theodora.”

  Richer’s brows went up. “Am I supposed to be the voice of Christian chastity?”

  “God forbid,” said the Jinniyah. “Here, master. Turn the page. I want to know what she did after she—”

  “Nothing, apparently.” Gerbert had turned the page, which was blank. The next began a new heading. He puzzled it out for himself. “‘On the—On the Emperor Justinian’s—Treasure’?”

  “Treasure,” agreed the Jinniyah. “Symbolic, surely. A little closer, if you please.” Her lips moved as she read, but silently. Her brow raised. Richer had not known that she could do that. Probably she had learned it from Gerbert.

  “Well?” they asked, both at once.

  “Well.” She sounded richly satisfied. “Listen, my masters. Listen very well indeed.”

  oOo

  Richer did not know whether to feel furtive or absurd. Here he was at high noon as near the equinox as curiosity would let him come, trying to look like a portion of the ramparts of Ravenna. Behind him lay the grey and lonely marshes that stretched to the sea; in front and below, a tiny littered square like a cul-de-sac. It was not at all a logical place for either a square or a statue, but statue there was, so marred and scarred by age and human hands that he could not even tell whether it was wrought of bronze or of iron.

  “Iron,” said the bulge under his cloak. She could see through it, she had told him. It was not magic, unless it was a magic of every veiled woman in Islam.

  Now that she had spoken, his scattered wits came together; the throb in his power, not quite pain, that he had taken for a warning against the guards who walked the walls, centered on the image below. Its shape was that of a man with arm uplifted, finger pointing toward the wall on which Richer huddled. Someone had st
riven nobly to strike off the head, or perhaps only its crown or helmet, but the iron had withstood the blows.

  The square was empty but for a lone stooped figure in black, doing something indistinguishable just beyond the statue’s shadow. There was nothing in it to mark it as the spiritual lord of Ravenna.

  Gerbert seemed unmoved by so much iron, so close. Just as the sun came to its zenith, he set his stake in the earth where the shadow’s finger pointed, measuring a careful distance with plumbline and string. Richer felt the tug of the spell that both warded and concealed the mark. The iron twisted it, but Gerbert was its master. He sealed it with a sign of the cross and without ado, and made his cowled and anonymous way across the square.

  Richer met him at the joining of alley and wider street, one monk meeting another for a slow progress toward the cathedral. “No one saw from above,” said Richer, “and none that I could detect from below.”

  “Good,” said Gerbert. His voice was sharp. Richer, jostled against him as a troop of bravos swaggered past, felt his weariness.

  “Damned iron,” Gerbert muttered. “They knew what they were doing, those old pagans.”

  “Then should you even try to — ”

  “How can I not?”

  Indeed, thought Richer. It was not greed for treasure that moved Gerbert. It was another avarice altogether. Richer had his fair share of it. Simply to know what was worth hiding in such fashion, so subtly and yet so blatantly, with so much iron forged so clearly to twist magic into uselessness.

  “The moon is full tonight,” said Gerbert. “The better for us. A transformation of the eye: iron into silver, power’s converse into an illusion of power. I’ll confuse the iron till it hardly knows what it is.”

  Richer grinned in his cowl. Now there was sophistry. A mage was a perilous beast, but a mage who was also a logician and a theologian was deadly enough to outface the devil himself.