by Judith Tarr
That was desperation, and guilt, but Hatto nodded. “He will, I think. When he entrusted you to me, he left you entirely to my discretion. I may, if you wish it, free you from your vows to the abbey.”
“I don’t want to leave the Church.”
“That, never. Have you considered the priesthood?”
Often. Gerbert could not say it. He dipped his head: a nod.
“Swear no oaths now,” Hatto said. “Take time. Think. Pray. Ponder what is possible, and what is wise. Rome, first. Then we shall see. I should like you to return here, to continue what you have begun. You may choose Aurillac. Or the Holy Father may offer you other choices altogether.”
oOo
These were enough and more than enough. Gerbert wandered in a daze. Rome. Freedom. To be a priest, and not a simple monk; to stand up before the face of God, and know himself chosen. He, born in a peasant’s hut among the sheep, bred to till the earth.
He was not proud. He was terrified.
And in terror, grief. He must leave Spain. That was not a matter for choice. He must leave Master Ibrahim, and the library, and the house that was wider inside than out. He must leave Maryam.
He had known it would happen. But not so soon. Not so completely.
The mage’s house was silent. It was not yet Gerbert’s time to come there; it seemed empty even of its unseen presences. The gate opened to Gerbert’s touch; the cool stillness settled about him.
He meant to find refuge in the library, among books which asked nothing of him but his pleasure. No magic. Something simple, in Latin, to take him out of himself. Something to soothe the wildly fluttering thing that was his mind.
Because his mind could not settle, he wandered, taking a way that before had led him, if indirectly, where he wanted to go. He had not forgotten what kind of house this was; he was not dismayed to find the rooms and stairs and passages only vaguely familiar. The key here, as with magic itself, was will, and that which was both more and less than will. He would go where he wanted to go, because he wanted to go there. Because he also wanted to delay, the house offered him new faces of itself.
He had not known before, how much of the Roman villa still stood beneath and within the Moorish dwelling. It had baths that he had never seen, worn and ancient but still, from the signs, made use of. A door behind them led to a stair, unlit, to be sure, but magic had a remedy. The soft cool light followed Gerbert down into a scent of earth and age and stone. It was clean, if musty. Someone, or some magic, held dust and damp at bay.
The stair ended in a passage. It seemed like any other in the house, straight, stone-floored, its walls plastered and painted white. Here as elsewhere, and as often in the more hidden ways, the whitewash was thin. Shadows gleamed beneath, a memory of line, color: Roman work, unwelcome to good Muslim eyes.
Gerbert paused to peer. He could almost puzzle it out. A vine. A cup, scarlet and gold. A shadow figure, god or mortal. Its hand seemed to beckon him onward.
He had found his refuge, if not the one he had expected. He went almost happily where his feet led him, to a low barred door and a sudden, frozen halt.
There was power here. He had been feeling it for a long while without realizing what he felt. His lip curled at that. Journeyman, was he? Then pray God his master never knew how blind he had been, or for how long.
He laid a careful hand on the door. The power pulsed, responding. It was not inimical, nor did he sense any evil in it. Yet it was nothing he had met before. In summonings...perhaps...
He shook his head sharply, to clear it. The power called. It wanted.
“What?” he asked aloud.
He knew what danger was; what magic could do, if one were unwise, or unprepared, or unguarded. Prudence warned him. He had never been given leave to come here.
He had never been forbidden.
He drew a breath. If this was a test, so be it. He spoke a word of opening.
He did not know what he had expected. A dungeon. A hall of treasure. An enchanted princess.
It was a simple chamber, vaulted and pillared like a crypt. No one had painted over the walls here, or torn up the mosaic of the floor. The colors dazzled him. Gold, scarlet, blue and green and violet, colors of earth and sea and sky, and images of them all. Dolphins leaped in the blue wave; men hunted the stag through the green wood; the eagle flew from cloud to cloud with the lightning in his claw. An emperor sat on a high throne. A shepherd played the flute among his sheep. A nymph bathed in a river, and a faun hid in the rushes, his eagerness all too clear to see.
Gerbert, blushing, cast his eyes about. They caught; he started. In the fascination of walls and floor, he had never seen what occupied the center. A plinth of marble, and on it a shape of bronze. The head of a god, it might be. Or a goddess? The molded ringlets told him nothing, nor the headdress that might have been either helmet or diadem. The face was of a youth or an antique maiden, beauty too pure for gender, strength and fineness both, cast in cool serenity.
No mortal face had ever been so beautiful. Yet, in the white magelight, it seemed almost real; almost alive. The mouth seemed, almost, to smile.
The power had gathered to a center. That center. The image — “God or goddess?” he asked it, wondering aloud in his solitude.
“Jinn,” said the image. “Jinniyah.”
It was not a human voice. It was the voice one might have ascribed to bronze, if bronze could speak. Clear, melodious, higher than a man’s, lower than a woman’s. No breath animated it. It might have been a bell smitten, or a horn winded, faint and sweet.
Gerbert had not, of course, heard it. That it was a female of the race of spirits of the earth: the children of Iblis, the Muslims called them, of the infidels’ Satan, though those were hardly demons as a Christian would understand it. They could be saved; they could be Muslims. Angels of the lesser ranks, perhaps; spirits wrought of earth and fire. Of earth they had gender, and will. Of fire, magic beyond the reach of mortal men.
The image had not moved or altered. The glint of its eye was only the light, shifting as Gerbert approached.
“Jinniyah,” the image said again. Its lips moved as a man’s would. A woman’s. “What, has he never shown you one of us?”
Gerbert’s teeth clicked together. “Not — one like you.
“Lady,” he added after a pause.
The image could laugh. It sounded like a chorus of bells. “Frankish courtesy! I am slave. Or servant. Or Jinniyah. Titles are not for the geas-bound.”
“Geas?” Gerbert asked.
“Spell. Enchantment. Binding. Command. All and none; choose. I am but an oracle. You are a mage.”
Barely. He stared at the image. A spirit bound in bronze. For its — her — sins? “You hardly sound oracular.”
“My tongue is mine, unless I must prophesy. My binding is light, as such bindings go.”
“Why?”
Without shoulders, improbably, she could shrug. “Am I a mage, to tell a mage?”
“I take it back. You are an oracle. You talk in circles.”
“Arabesques,” the image said. “My nature is my nature.”
“Now I understand,” said Gerbert. “You talked the wrong man into a rage.”
“Not only talked.” That, surely, was a hint of smugness. “And not a man. A man would have given me a body.”
“Maryam enchanted you?”
“You doubt her power?”
“I doubt her pettiness.”
“It was hardly petty,” said the Jinniyah. “Nor was it she. I am older than that.”
“Her mother —?”
“Her mother’s mother’s mother. They are a strong dynasty. And passionate. Jealous, that first of them was, and with excellent cause. She knew a fine face in a man. Alas for her, she did not know a fine mind to match it. He was a beautiful idiot. Good faith was beyond his capacity; good sense was as far out of his reach as the moon. He was,” said the Jinniyah, “a most single-minded creature. But what his mind was fixed on — of that,
ah, before God, he was a master.”
“What became of him?” asked Gerbert, fascinated, though he had begun to blush again.
“He lived out his life with her. As,” the Jinniyah said,”a singing bird. It was, as she pointed out to us both, the just measure of his intelligence.”
“He died, surely. And she. Why did she never set you free?”
The Jinniyah smiled. It was not a comfortable smile: it had too little in it of humanity. “I was useful. Waste is anathema to a good housewife, or to a good mage; and wasted I would have been, had I been freed to fly where I would. She kept me while she lived, and perhaps she meant to free me at her death. That, unfortunately, was abrupt; and she had omitted to set down the spell with which she bound me. Her children were hardly minded to devote years and effort to seeking out the spell’s undoing, when by it they would lose their oracle. They have been kind, in their fashion. Have they not put me here, with these walls to occupy me, and on occasion their company?”
“How unspeakably dull.”
“Better dull on earth than chained in hell.”
“There is that,” said Gerbert.
There was a silence. Gerbert had time to comprehend the strangeness of it: that he stood here, at his ease, conversing with a bodiless head.
“Take me,” said the Jinniyah.
He was speechless, staring.
“Take me with you,” she said. “I am an oracle. I am meant for the high places. This is prison, and a waste. They use me almost never. They speak to me only when they must. Take me where I can be what I was meant to be.”
“Steal you?”
“Free me.”
“I don’t have the spell for that.”
Emotion could not twist that graven face, but the voice rang like iron smitten on iron. “Take me with you!”
“You are not mine to take.”
“I choose you. I name you master. I will serve you, amuse you, prophesy for you. I prophesy. I have waited here until you should come. I am your servant and your destiny. Through me you shall fulfill your dream.”
He gasped like a runner in a race. “You are a devil. You tempt me. You lure me to my destruction.”
“I am a Jinniyah and your slave. You go to Rome; the prince of your faith will honor you; he will give you as gift to a king. Princes will learn wisdom at your feet; kings will owe their thrones to you. Your Church itself will bow before you.”
“No,” said Gerbert, half-strangled. “You lie to win your freedom.”
“I never lie. I tell you what will be. If,” said the Jinniyah, “you take me with you.”
“I am not a thief!”
“You are not. You take what chooses to be yours.” The sweet inhuman voice softened, throbbing in his bones. “Take me with you.”
His hands had stretched of their own accord. The bronze was smooth, cool, neither alive nor unalive. Magic sang in it.
“Take me,” it whispered. “Take me .”
It was theft; it was betrayal.
Could one betray an infidel?
He bit his tongue until it bled. That thought was worse than dishonorable; it was vile.
His fingers tensed to pull away. The head came with them. It weighed astonishingly little, as if it were hollow: full of air and fire.
His magic swelled and trembled, magic meeting magic, willing what must be. All that he had labored for, all the paths he had followed, from his father’s fields to the tower of St.-Géraud to the mage’s house in Barcelona, all had come to one single end: an end that was purest beginning.
This. He breathed a prayer. The image did not burst; the Jinniyah did not take flight in a stench of brimstone. “God is great,” she said.
He clutched her to his chest and fought the urge to bolt. Walk, yes. Walk swiftly, but walk steadily. He was no thief. He had gained a servant.
At what price?
His stride lengthened. Out, he must get out. The corridors stretched endlessly. Stairs rose and fell without logic or sense. He could not drop what he held. His arms had convulsed about it. He was bound to it, irrevocably.
Never let the magic wield you.
It was not even his own magic.
At last, a place he knew, a door that opened on light, air, the streets of Barcelona. He fell toward it.
A shadow barred it. Obstacle — obstacle with power, reaching to hinder, halt, take what he carried. Must carry. Could not cast away. The magic uncoiled, lashing. Some last desperate remnant of sanity clutched at it, to beat it aside. Useless. It was its own power now, master of him who was barely a journeyman. What stood in its way, what was power also, raised up against it, rival and enemy, would fall, must fall.
He was strong. That was the horror of it, that he could exult in it: a black and swelling joy, shot with lightnings. No magic in this world was stronger than his.
No little power, this that stood against him, yet it was no match for him. What madness was in it, that it dared to try?
As easily, as contemptuously, as a child slaps at a fly, he smote it down.
The shadow fell. The voice that cried protest was mortal, human, a woman’s.
The black exultation of power sank and died. He was empty; emptied. The magic, having wielded him, had abandoned him to cold and stillness and swelling horror. As he saw what he had done. As he saw what he had felled.
Maryam.
The veil had slipped, baring her face. It was waxen grey. Its eyes were wide, astonished. She had had no time to be afraid.
Dead. It rang like a gong. Dead.
The magic killed her. Magic — his magic — he —
He howled like a beast.
“Take me,” said the demon in his arms. “Take. Take. Take.”
He wept. He cursed her lying soul to deepest hell. He obeyed her. What else was left to him, save to go mad?
7.
Gerbert lay before the altar of the bishop’s chapel. The thing that had betrayed him lay on the altar itself, silent now, but not for any awe of sanctity. It would not speak where any but Gerbert could hear. Perhaps it could not.
The bishop’s servants reckoned him mad. Rightly. They had not tried to drag him away, nor to do more than watch him, and keep their distance when he tore at himself, and eye the graven image with deep distrust.
He clawed at unyielding stone, welcoming the pain of flesh worn to bleeding rags. “I killed her,” he said, his voice raw with weeping. “I killed her.”
Robes whispered. He felt in his bones the one who knelt beside him, not touching him. “What have you done?” Hatto asked him, soft yet stern.
He rolled onto his back. Tears dried cold on his cheeks, stinging where his nails had rent them. “I killed Maryam,” he said, simply, like a child.
Hatto’s breath hissed as he caught it, but his face did not change. He glanced at the altar and its burden. “For that?”
“For my soul’s damnation.”
“Yet you came here. You do penance. Have you hope of atonement?”
“I want to die.”
“Had that been true, you would have stayed to face her father.”
Gerbert drew in upon himself, trembling in spasms. “He will hunt me down. He will not let me die. Oh, no. He will want me to atone, and atone, and atone, and — ”
Hatto slapped him, hard. “Enough! You are not the first man ever to do murder. Even murder of magic. Get up.”
There was power in that voice, if no magic. It drove Gerbert to his feet. It brought men in armor, whom he welcomed with open arms. “Seize me, bind me, chain me. Make me pay.”
They did none of his bidding. They only guided him. Back through the bishop’s palace. Back to his own small cell, with his books in it, and his pens, and his spare habit. They bade him stay there; they mounted guard.
It was enough. It would have to be. The damned could not pray. The mad could not read. The murderer could only lie on the hard cold floor and let his soul gnaw itself into nothingness.
Or try to. Great passions were al
ien to peasants’ sons, even peasants’ sons whose lust for learning had destroyed them. Reason kept wanting to intrude. Grief, yes, that was fitting. And guilt. But hysteria shamed her memory.
“I’m sorry,” he said to it. “I’m — so — sorry.”
It was not even pitiful. It was too feeble.
His weeping was saner now. He could think around it. They were no thoughts he would ever have wanted to think, but they were necessary. To face what he had done. To set it deep, where he could never forget it, or excuse it, or argue it away. Deep enough even, God willing, to touch his magic.
He shuddered on the stone. Magic. Oh, God, he hated it. If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out.
Pluck. Out.
His body knotted. Simple, yes. Easy. Simpler and easier than facing it. Naming its name. Mastering it.
Master it?
She had. She had killed no one so distant as a sister of the heart. Her magic had destroyed her mother.
Was this how, in the end, she paid? How then would he pay? Who would love him, and fell him unthinking, because he was in the way?
He had an oracle now, to tell him. For all the good it had done Maryam, who had had it before him.
“Maryam,” he said, grieving. “Maryam.”
oOo
They brought him food and drink. He touched neither. He welcomed the pain of hunger and thirst, the ache of a body left too still, too long, on unyielding stone. Pain was a punishment.
How long he lay there, he neither knew nor cared. When they came for him, he went without either will or resistance. He felt light, hollow, emptied of aught but bare being.
Bishop Hatto waited for him. Hatto in his private chamber, with the image of bronze on the table before him, and across the table, still as the image, Ibrahim.
Gerbert’s knees gave way. No one moved to help him. He knelt and stared at the magus’ face. In this little while, it had grown old.
There was nothing Gerbert could say. They were cold, both of them, and stern. They had tried him, judged him, sentenced him. He knew better than to hope for mercy.
After an endless while, Ibrahim spoke. “Have you anything to say?”
