Ars Magica

by Judith Tarr

“Yet you came to me?”

  “I obeyed my lord’s command.”

  The mage leaned back on his elbow, all at ease. “Perfect obedience! Would it comfort you to know a truth? I am no servant of Iblis, whom your people call Satan. My art is the white art; my allegiance is to the light.”

  “That can’t be,” Gerbert said. “Sorcery is evil. God forbids it.”

  “Sorcery,” said Ibrahim, “yes. I am not a sorcerer.”

  “But isn’t it all the same?”

  “Hardly.” Ibrahim straightened and tucked up his feet. He had a look which Gerbert knew well: eager, intent. A teacher’s look. “Magic has its orders and its divisions, as does any other branch of learning. Most simply, there are three: the white and the black, and the broad realm between. In the learned magic, the distinction lies somewhat in method, but chiefly in purpose. To heal is of the light; to destroy is of the dark.”

  “Like prayers and curses.”

  Ibrahim nodded, pleased. “Very like. But a prayer beseeches the aid of a saint or of God Himself; it cannot compel. The will of the one who prays is subject to the will of divinity. A white spell differs. It does not presume to command God, Who is above all compulsion. Yet it seeks to work the mage’s will on the powers of heaven and earth. The magus masters them; he shapes them to his ends.”

  “How can that be anything but evil? It goes against the law of God.”

  “God’s law ordains that a spell worked in His name be fulfilled by His will.”

  Gerbert frowned. “I don’t see... It’s arrogant. To assume that one knows what He intends.”

  “Any of His priests assumes exactly that, in everything he does.”

  Gerbert’s frown deepened. The man was right, damn him. And Gerbert should have seen it. And yet... “Why then do they bid us shun all works of magic?”

  “Fear,” answered Ibrahim. “Ignorance. Confusion of the high learned Art with its black shadow. The power in itself is neither good nor evil; it simply is. The mind of the magus shapes its purpose.” He paused, a breath only. “I have heard that in your country the same fear and ignoranee have banned the arts of the Quadrivium.”

  “Not banned them,” Gerbert said. “Let them slide into neglect. But numbers can’t call up devils.”

  “Can they not? The art magic grounds itself in the seven liberal arts. The three arts of language and its use; the four sciences. It is all one in the face of God.”

  Gerbert’s head shook of itself. “No. No, it can’t be that simple. Or — or that beautiful.”

  “Why should it not be? It is part of God’s creation. He has not given it to every man, that is true; it is too strong for that, and too perilous. So likewise is any knowledge. In the wrong hands, even the words we speak can destroy a reputation or a life.”

  “Surely something must be safe,” Gerbert said.

  “Silence. Perhaps. The mute existence of the beast.”

  Gerbert shuddered. “God save me from that. And from the snares of the devil.”

  “May He favor your prayer.”

  Gerbert looked at Ibrahim. His eyes, he knew, were wild. “You believe in Him.”

  The magus bowed his head. “I am the lowest of His servants.”

  “But,” said Gerbert. “But it’s — not — ” He had risen without knowing it. “How can they all have lied to me?”

  “They did not know.”

  “God in heaven!” Gerbert spun about. The words were in his mind: Get thee behind me, Satan! But he had a little sense left. He did not say them. He managed a travesty of a bow, a babble that passed for farewell. The sun was fierce on his throbbing head, the city a blessed, numbing clamor. Blessed because it was simple, human earth. Because there was no magic in it.

  3.

  Any sensible Christian would have taken refuge in the cathedral, or in any shrine or chapel in a city full of them. Gerbert came to himself down by the quays, in the shadow of the Mount of the Jews. His back was to the city; his face was to the blue splendor of the sea. A ship disgorged treasures out of the east, its master bellowing to his crew in the bastard Latin of Catalonia, while the merchants chattered in a tongue that might have been Arabic. They were Muslims, certainly: bearded, turbaned, robed and foreign. None was as dark as Master Ibrahim.

  Gerbert sat on a coil of rope and drew up his knees. He wanted, foolishly, to cry. If he had been only a little younger, he would have hit something.

  The merchants’ chatter had risen in pitch. The ship’s master, as if to counter them, had lowered his voice to a roar. A horse burst out of the hold and plunged down the gangplank. It was a handsome beast, one of those the Arabs bred. It looked more like a stag than a horse, with its great eyes and its delicate muzzle and its slender legs; but Gerbert had heard that its kind were wonderfully strong.

  It was a black bay, and spirited. Something in it made Gerbert think of the magus. Maybe it was only the way its nostrils flared, drinking the wind.

  Gerbert glared at the defenseless air. There was no getting away from it. The world had infidels in it. That was no harm to his soul. But magic...

  It terrified him. Because it tempted him. He should not even think of it; he wanted it.

  He straightened, stiff. There. It was out. “I want it,” he said. “I want to know what it is.”

  He knew what it was. Forbidden.

  Why?

  Because it was evil.

  Master Ibrahim had said that it was not. Priests in Gaul condemned the study of the stars as sternly as they condemned the study of the art magic. Gerbert had sworn in boyhood to do battle against that first kind of ignorance.

  And the other?

  “How can I know?” he cried aloud. “Who can help me?”

  No one. Brother Raymond atop the tower, babbling psalms as the witches rode on their Sabbat — that was how the world would bid him be. But he had not wanted to. Not then. He had seen beauty in it. He had yearned for it. And, yearning, fled.

  It had been a different kind of flight. That had been wild magic, with darkness in it. He had wanted more. Light; learning. Reason and knowledge, where the witches could offer only instinct.

  Suppose that all of this was the devil’s trick, a clever snare for his vaunted cleverness.

  Suppose that it was not. For all that he could do, he found in Bishop Hatto no taint of evil. Nor — he made himself admit it — could he find any in Master Ibrahim. Power, yes. Passion. But of evil, nothing.

  Gerbert turned his stiff and aching face to the sky. The sun had passed its zenith, but its strength had barely waned. It had no answer for him.

  He had choices. Leave; go back to Aurillac; refuse all hopes of glory. Stay, but turn his back on magic. Stay, and face it, and accept the truth: that he wanted it. Had wanted it since first he heard its name.

  He could burn for that.

  He breathed deep, shuddering. He could burn or he could teach. Mathematician or magician or both, he would be a prodigy in Gaul. Why not embrace it all?

  His heart hammered. He had wanted to know. Now he could know more than he had ever dreamed of. It was here, in Barcelona. In the bishop who knew the four high arts. In the infidel who knew the one great Art.

  “God,” he whispered. “God in heaven, guide my feet.”

  He rose. He had to go back. He had forgotten Bishop Hatto’s Pythagoras.

  Terror rocked him. Tomorrow. He would go for it tomorrow.

  No. It must be today. Tomorrow he would have no courage left.

  oOo

  The gate was shut. For all his hammering and shouting, he gained only silence. No one came. When fist and throat were both a single ache, he turned away, God’s mockery or the devil’s, what matter? He had been offered the choice. In his folly he had fled it. Now it was lost.

  Slowly he began to walk. His feet dragged. He was ready truly, now, to weep.

  “Brother. Brother Gerbert.”

  It was a woman’s voice. He looked up dully.

  It was she: the woman who had let him i
n. She had a basket on her hip; savory scents wound out of it. “I saw you knocking,” she said. Her voice was young, her Latin startling. Did she smile under the veil? “I was fetching our dinner; I cry your pardon.”

  “Have you no servants?” Gerbert asked her.

  Her eyes glinted. “Sometimes. Sometimes not. They have caprices.”

  She had begun to walk again, toward the house. Without thinking, he followed her. A woman speaking Latin, and she not a nun. Astonishing.

  She seemed to have no fear of him. Maybe, to a Moor, a monk did not count as a man. It piqued him a little. He was still new enough to manhood to want it to matter.

  The gate was unlocked, rather to Gerbert’s chagrin. The woman led him past it, and waited while he closed it behind him. “The master is waiting for you,” she said. “He has your book.”

  She meant him to find his own way onward. Clearly she had duties; he was keeping her from them. But he said, “I thought women of your people had no learning.”

  “Did you?” She sounded amused. “You will find him where you left him.” She bowed, all grace. “Salaam.”

  One could learn, Gerbert decided, to hate the custom of the veil. It let a woman read his every thought, while she hid behind it, secure in her secrecy. He could not even know what she looked like.

  Probably she was hideous. He glanced about to get his bearings, and set off across the courtyard. It was not the direction she had taken. He thought he was glad of that.

  Master Ibrahim seemed not to have moved. The bishop’s chest was gone, likewise the cakes and the cup. The magus had a book in his hands and a smile of greeting for Gerbert, calm as if the monk had never left him.

  “Sir,” said Gerbert, “I forgot — ”

  “Here,” said the magus. “I kept it for you.”

  Gerbert took the book, remembering to bow, to murmur thanks. He should have dismissed himself then. He did not. He stood mute, blank. What he had meant to ask was all scoured away.

  From somewhere, words came. “Sir. Sir, do you teach?”

  He had startled the magus. Or delighted him? Dismayed him? All of them. “I teach,” said Ibrahim. “What would you learn?”

  “Whatever I can. If,” Gerbert said, “there is no evil in it.”

  Ibrahim’s lips twitched. “You are a difficult pupil, I see. You set conditions on my instruction.”

  “Only if they’re needed, sir.”

  The magus nodded. “Wise enough, for a beginning.” He drew himself up. Suddenly he was stern. “Only a little while ago you fled in horror of all that I was. Now you come back and ask to learn what I can teach. Why? Do you think to trap me?”

  Gerbert’s wits were coming back, if slowly. “I don’t set traps, sir. It’s only...I was afraid.”

  “And now you are not?”

  Cold, that, and hard. Gerbert faced it as steadily as he could. “Oh, I am. But now I know why. Ignorance. And wanting it, and not wanting to want.” He paused. “Is it like that for you? It always is for me. I was a farmer’s son. I should never have been able to want more, but I did. I wanted what the priest had, when I saw him in church on holy days: his Latin; his wisdom. I was afraid, but I asked. He gave me what he had. Then he told me that there was more, but that I could only have it if I went into the abbey. That was terror. How could I leave all that I had ever known — my mother, my sisters, everything? I was only nine years old. I couldn’t do it. But I had to. It was God calling me, Father Abbot said. He still calls me. He called me to Spain. Now He calls me here.

  “I’m always afraid,” Gerbert said. “There’s always something higher to aim for, and every time there’s farther to fall. What can I do but reach and pray?”

  “Nothing,” said Ibrahim.

  “Exactly!” said Gerbert. “But I can’t. I’ve always been one for doing. I’ve never been able just to be.”

  “If you would be a mage, you will have to learn.”

  “Mages act. Mages make.”

  “And they know when to do neither.” Ibrahim fixed him with a black and burning stare. “If it is power you desire, and power alone, then I am no fit teacher for you. Go rather to kings, or to a master of the black art. I do not traffic in ambition.”

  “I’m not — ” Gerbert stopped. He watched his fingers clench and unclench in his lap, rapt as if he had never seen them before. “No. That’s not so. I am. But that’s not what I want magic for. Power in the world will come or not, as God pleases. I won’t use your Art to win it.”

  “So you say now.”

  “What oath will you accept?”

  “None,” said Ibrahim. “Yet. There will be time later, and vows which you must take, if you would master the Art.”

  “Then,” said Gerbert, breathless. “Then you’ll teach me?”

  Ibrahim bowed his head, raised it.

  The child in Gerbert, which was altogether too much of him, wanted to leap up and sing. The man kept him still, held his smile a fraction short of a grin. Nothing could keep him from shaking. He did not trust his voice at all.

  “Your bishop must give you leave,” said Ibrahim, “and time. You are, after all, his pupil and his servant.”

  Gerbert went cold. He had forgotten. His memory for duties was never worth much when he had better things to think of.

  “Ask him,” said the magus. “If he assents, I will teach you.”

  oOo

  Gerbert did not bolt back to the bishop’s palace. He plodded, head down, numb with all that he had felt since he heard Rodolfo’s story. Now he would face reality again. The bishop would forbid him to imperil his soul with the study of magic, and he would acquiesce, because he must.

  Or he would run away and become a magus, because that was what he was born to be.

  He could be calm, contemplating it. He was far enough gone for that. He would take what Ibrahim offered; or if Ibrahim would not do it against the bishop’s will, then another magus would. There were others in the world. There must be.

  So far he had come in a night and a day. If this would damn him, then he was lost already.

  Impetuous, his elders had always judged him. And headstrong. And once his mind was made up, not heaven itself could shake him.

  Why, he thought as he passed the guards at the bishop’s gate, he was growing into wisdom. He knew himself. He laughed, startling a gaggle of nuns from the cloister on the garden’s edge. Their disapproval quelled him, a little. He dipped his head and murmured a blessing; they had perforce to do the same. As he left them, one clear cold voice followed him. “Levity,” it said, “has no place in the house of God.”

  Nor did magic. But he would have both. He straightened his shoulders and went to face his master.

  oOo

  Hatto did not keep him waiting long. It was almost time for vespers; the bishop was ending the day’s round of audiences. He received Gerbert in the quiet of his study, taking Ibrahim’s book only to hand it back to its bearer. “This is yours,” he said.

  Gerbert looked at it and at the bishop, and swallowed. A book was the most precious thing in the world, and now he had two: the psalter which Abbot Gerald had given him when he left Aurillac, and this. “My lord,” he said. “I’m not — I’m — There aren’t words enough. How can I thank you properly?”

  “You can look after your book,” said Hatto, “and study it. Master Ibrahim will have added a reflection or two of his own on the work of Pythagoras; you may find it useful.”

  Gerbert clutched the book and bowed. He was all at a loss. After such a gift, how could he tell the giver what he had decided to do?

  The bishop regarded him in concern. “Come, Brother, are you well? Have you eaten at all today?”

  Gerbert nodded. “Master Ibrahim was hospitable.”

  Hatto’s eyes sharpened. “Indeed. You were gone for a very long time. Did you find one another congenial, then?”

  “No!” It came out as a yelp. Gerbert drew a deep breath. “No, my lord. Not — not exactly.” Hatto said nothing. Gerbe
rt could not meet his eyes. He scowled at his sandaled feet. “My lord, he horrified me. What he is, what he does...it was too much for me.”

  “Therefore you fled him.”

  “Yes, my lord,” said Gerbert, though it hurt to say it. He stiffened his spine, dragged up his eyes, put on courage that felt rather too much like defiance. “But I went back. I fetched Pythagoras. I — talked to Master Ibrahim.”

  “To good purpose, I trust.”

  Hatto’s face was as cryptic as a page of Arabic. “We talked about magic, my lord,” said Gerbert. He paused, and let it all go at once. “He wants to teach me. I want to learn. It frightens me, how much I want it.”

  “Yet still you want it.”

  “I can’t help it, my lord.”

  “No,” said Hatto. “I suppose you cannot.” He considered his laced fingers, turning them until the amethyst of his ring caught the light and flamed. “What would you do if I forbade you?”

  Gerbert was braced for that. He answered steadily, “I would tell you what I tell you now: that I must learn, and that I will learn. No one has ever been able to stop me.”

  “That is arrogant.”

  Gerbert bowed his head. “Yes, my lord.”

  “Honest,” said Hatto, “as always. Has it occurred to you that you could deceive me and do as you will, with none the wiser?”

  “I’m a terrible liar, my lord,” Gerbert said.

  Hatto laughed, startling him. “You may never be a saint, Brother, but neither will you please the Lord of Lies. What would you do if I gave you leave to study magic under Ibrahim the Moor?”

  It was a jest, it must be; or a test. Gerbert found that he was frowning. It was not his place to rebuke his master, but his brow would not smooth for prudence. “My lord, if indeed you gave me leave, I would thank you with all my heart, and wonder what Mother Church would say to both of us.”

  “Mother Church,” said Hatto, crossing himself with honest devotion, “has no firm law against the high white Art. I know what it is, and I say that it is dangerous, but I believe that you are one whom God has given the capacity to master it.”

  “You know? You’ve known all along?” Gerbert said it almost before he thought it. “You said to Abbot Gerald, ‘I would teach him whatever wisdom Spain may have to offer.’ You didn’t mean only numbers. You meant this.”