Ars Magica

by Judith Tarr

  Gerbert’s throat burned with bile. His mind was a roil. His magic clenched in his center.

  He looked at Arnulf and knew the burning sweetness that was hate. Arnulf pawed feebly at the claw that clutched his throat. Power saw him for what he was: a hollow thing, a shape of air, a mind fixed immovably upon itself.

  And yet, for all its shoddiness, it remained a man. The soul that glimmered in it was as immortal as any other.

  “I will not take his soul,” said the spirit of Gerbert’s summoning.

  It spoke truth; yet it did not. What it would take was never Gerbert’s to give. “Let him go,” Gerbert said.

  He was master. The spirit struggled, but his power bound it. It let its captive fall. It bared its white wolf-teeth and flexed its talons. “You will regret your charity,” it said.

  “So be it,” said Gerbert. “Now go, and trouble him no more.”

  The spirit paused, as if it would speak. Gerbert raised his hands and his power. The black wings boomed; the spirit shrieked as if in agony — or in laughter. It whirled away into the dark.

  oOo

  “You’ve not seen the last of it,” said the Jinniyah, cool and incongruously serene in the spirit’s wake.

  Gerbert wanted to lie down and sleep until Judgment Day. Or, if he could not do that, to burst into a storm of weeping.

  As it was, he did neither. Richer had dragged himself up. Arnulf lay crumpled where the spirit had dropped him. He breathed; there was no wound on him. His mind, taxed to its limit, had simply and sanely taken refuge in unconsciousness. He was a very sane man, was Arnulf Oathbreaker.

  Gerbert’s sanity was ensorceled in bronze. “You will yet pay the price of your summoning,” she said.

  He surprised himself with the beginnings of a smile. “At least it will be I who pay it.” He gathered her in a fold of his mantle and held out his hand to Richer. “Come, lad. It’s time we went to Senlis.”

  Richer looked from Gerbert to Arnulf and back. “You’ve forgiven him?”

  Gerbert’s teeth set. “What makes you think that?” He pulled Richer with him toward the outer door. “Come, don’t dally. There’s little enough left of the night, and we’ve a long ride before us.”

  Richer swallowed protests audibly, choking on them. The Jinniyah was quieter. Gerbert led them both into the free air.

  14.

  I, Arnulf, once by the grace of God Archbishop of Rheims, acknowledging my frailty and the burden of my sins, in the presence of my judges and my confessors the lord bishops Seguin, Darbert, Arnulf, Godesmann, Herve, Ratbod, Walter, Bruno, Milo, Ascelin, Odo, Wido, and Heribert, grant them judgment of my transgressions, and confess to them without deception. From them I seek the reparation of penitence and the salvation of my soul, wherefore I yield up the duty and office of archbishop, for which I acknowledge myself unworthy, and from which I have alienated myself through those crimes which I have confessed to these my lords in secret and which I have proclaimed in public tribunal. Thus let them bear witness, and let them have the power to set and to consecrate another in my place, who may rule worthily and serve usefully that church over which I have so unworthily presided. And that henceforward I might have no power in law either to seek or to seize what I have surrendered, by my own hand I affirm these oaths. I, Arnulf, once Archbishop of Rheims, have read and understood; I set herewith my hand and my seal.

  oOo

  Richer had to give him credit. He read the text of his own deposition in a clear and steady voice, calm before the gathered bishops, calm even before the king whom he had betrayed. There was no humility in him. He had a certain air, a little defiant, a little subdued, like a boy whose sins have found him out. Richer wondered if, in the end, they meant any more to him than that. He could have had the grace at least to pretend to be a broken man.

  The bishops seemed grimly satisfied. Ascelin of Laon, as supple a serpent as Arnulf but rather more clever, looked as if he might have been tempted to smile. Gerbert’s escape and his testimony had given the synod of Senlis the evidence it needed, but Ascelin had netted the fish. Not Arnulf alone had come to his lure of alliance and his bait of the best cook in Gaul, but Charles himself and all Charles’ sons. Their fault and their folly that they had come to the feast and found, at the end of it, men with drawn swords. They were well and truly secured in the fortress of Orleans; they would, it was hoped, die there. Ascelin’s cook, Richer had heard, had been given to the fallen rebel to console him in his captivity. Richer wondered if Charles had any taste left for the dainties of the table.

  Arnulf, as a prince of the Church, had fallen under the Church’s justice. It was no harsher than he deserved. Barely harsh enough, some muttered. He was stripped of his office but not of his priesthood; he would return to Rheims as a clerk of the cathedral.

  They were taking his marks of rank one by one, with ceremony: the miter, the cope, the pallium that was his mark of authority from Rome, the ring of which he had seemed so fond. He was a lonely figure amid the grim and glittering bishops, bereft of his splendor, shivering in his thin linen shirt. An acolyte clothed him in plain Benedictine black, not looking at him, handling him as if he were a lifeless thing.

  That pricked him. His lips thinned; his eyes flashed down the nave of Senlis’ cathedral. It was full to bursting; eyes stared back, avid or accusing or merely curious.

  Monks in his own habit surrounded him. He stiffened, but he neither resisted nor spoke. He let them lead him away.

  Richer’s breath left him slowly. He had not known that he was holding it. It all seemed tawdry somehow: so much pain and so much labor, so many lies and deaths and betrayals, and at the end of it, only this. A man in a black habit, led back to the life which he should never have left.

  Richer glanced at Gerbert who stood beside him. Freedom and the restoration of his magic had made the master strong again. He looked almost as he always had. Thinner, still, and grey, but no longer transparent, as if he would turn to mist and melt away. If he had pursued Arnulf’s deposition with a passion once reserved for his beloved books, Richer could hardly blame him. Gerbert was, before all else, an honest man. Lies and treachery revolted him. And Arnulf had taken his magic. That, even the most Christian magus might not forgive.

  oOo

  Gerbert was hardly thinking of Arnulf, whom once he had hated. Hate had died in the crypt of Rheims’ cathedral, when he saw the liar fallen and the spirit stooping over him. Anger had lingered yet a while, and he had tended it with care, for he needed it to face the bishops and the king, and to speak for his city. It was for Rheims that he had done what he had done. Escaped captivity in a mantle of magic, ridden until his barely mended body was like to break, faced the synod exactly as he was: unshaven, filthy, staggering with exhaustion. But even at the edge of endurance he was eloquent. Their shock at the sight of him had turned to wrath at the tale he told. They had declared Arnulf anathema; then they had summoned him to trial; then, when he took refuge with his uncle in Laon, loosed on him the one of them all who was more treacherous than he.

  That was none of Gerbert’s doing. But he had not risen to oppose it. The last of his anger had kept him silent.

  Now it was gone, and justice done. Yet he was not at peace. He had sinned in wrath, and he had sinned in pride. What he had done was not undone. His oath to Ibrahim was broken in spirit if not, precisely, in truth. He had watched with sleepless vigilance, and no shadow had stirred where he could see, no claws stretched to rend either his enemy or his friend. The spirit might truly have been driven out. Gerbert’s bones knew that it had not.

  Part of him was always on guard. The rest turned now to memory, and to comfort. The king’s hall in Senlis; the king’s face. The king’s voice admitting with grace enough, “Yes, magister. I erred. I should never have made that man Archbishop of Rheims.”

  Gerbert had said nothing.

  Hugh looked at him and shook his head. “You’ve paid high for my mistake.”

  “Rheims has paid higher,” Ger
bert said.

  The king’s brow darkened, but he did not rebuke the insolence. “I shall redress you both as I may. I’ll give you what I should have given in the beginning.”

  It was a royal apology. Gerbert bowed low, accepting it. So would he bow on the morrow when the bishops held their formal election. For form’s sake he would have to protest his unworthiness.

  And was he?

  That there were better men in the world, he had no doubt at all. That any of them was as well suited to be the shepherd of Rheims...he did not know. Was it hubris, to suspect that none of them was?

  The rite of deposition was ending, the throng beginning to disperse. He felt eyes on him. He should linger: it was known what the morrow would bring, and he would need friends if he was to rule Rheims in peace. The pope, who had blessed Arnulf’s accession but not his deposition, was not going to bear easily this action of the bishops. Rumor had it that he was sending a legate, and that the man was armed in Arnulf’s defense.

  In Rome, it was all very simple. Liar and traitor to his king, Arnulf might have been, but he held his see by the pope’s will. The pope had not willed that he be cast out of it. King and bishops had done that of their own accord.

  The Holy Father would surely learn to see the justice in it; but there would be a battle. Gerbert was braced for it, and he meant to win it.

  But now he was weary. He had taken no joy in his victory. It was too hard won. He was numb; he wanted only to rest, to sleep, to be free of all this clamor. He wrapped himself in shadows and slipped away.

  oOo

  He was growing old indeed: now when he would go hunting his heart’s ease, he relied not on his own legs but on those of the mule that had been Adalberon’s. Alba was indulgent of his follies. Wiser than a mare, she went at her own pace, and left him in peace to confront himself.

  He was no saint, nor ever would be. Since he had never hoped to be one, he was not unduly distressed. He had faith, to be sure. He was as good a Christian as he could be, and still be both scholar and mage. He tried to be a good priest, a good shepherd to his people.

  What he had done in illness and in anger, God might forgive. Weakness had driven him to it, and love for his city. But whether he could forgive himself...

  He still could not make himself regret that he had wanted Arnulf dead. Even yet he suspected that the viper might strike again. Its back was broken, but no one had troubled to draw its fangs.

  I could do it.

  Shadow dimmed the sunlight, whispering in his ear. His magic shuddered like Alba’s hide beneath a stinging fly.

  Every step of that conjuring was ill taken. Richer excused him with sickness, madness, desperation. Gerbert had no such charity. Madness, yes, and pride, the pride of despair. Not for him Richer’s clean simplicity: to walk in, take the Jinniyah, hide her in an altar until he could make his escape. No. Gerbert had had to do it in the worst of all ways: by sorcery. He had wanted the world — and Arnulf most prominent in it — to know beyond all doubting that, even without power, he remained a master of magic.

  The callowest apprentice would have known that that was folly. Richer had known it, and Richer was hardly noted for his prudence. If Gerbert had waited but a night, he would not have needed the spell at all; he would have been free and sinless, a mage in power as in name.

  But he had not waited, and he had botched the working. He had let his temper master him. He had made bargains which he could not fulfill; he had forgotten the words that would have dismissed the spirit beyond its power to return. And he had lost its name, by which even then he could have mastered it.

  Now it was free in the world, and it was hungry. By the law of its kind, it could not return to its own realm until it was sated; but it could not be sated save by a human life, and that life, Gerbert must give. And he would not. Could not. He had forbidden it Arnulf. He could not offer it an innocent, or even a criminal condemned to death. That was murder, and his soul rebelled.

  Therefore it was stalemate. The spirit could touch nothing while his power stood on guard. He could not relax that guard lest the spirit take what it must take.

  It haunted his dreams. It shadowed his waking. It hovered, it whispered, it tempted. Feed me and I go. One small life. One worthless soul. Then you are free of me.

  It wanted him to break and rage and set it on the prey which he had promised it. Gerbert would not. If he destroyed any man who wronged him, he would do it by mortal means; in justice, not in rancor.

  But his strength was waning slowly. He could not be Archbishop of Rheims, and master of magic, and servant of king and emperor, and still hold off this demon which he had summoned. Raw power was not enough. Formal magic could not expel it without its name.

  He could bind it. Not easily, not eternally, but long enough perhaps to discover its name. Then he could bid it begone.

  The guilt and the shame, he would never lose. He knew no one to whom he could confess it. Mages were not often priests: the Church and the power were an uneasy mating. Gerbert knew how wary the bishops were of that side of his self; he had had to labor hard and long to convince them that it had not tainted his priesthood. This would seem to prove the opposite, though in his mind it stained not the priest but the mage. The priest was true to his vows. It was the mage who had sinned against his oath; who was forsworn as utterly as ever Arnulf had been.

  No. Not quite. He had willed the breaking, but he had stopped short of acting on it. That much comfort, cold as it was, he could take. It might give him strength to do what he must do.

  oOo

  He blinked. With all his mind turned inward, he had not noticed where the mule was carrying him. The sun was low, dazzling his eyes. He shaded them with his hand.

  The road stretched before and behind, Roman-straight beneath the mould of years. The sun slanted down it. On either side rose a scattering of trees. They were thin, but they veiled the way behind, the clearing in the great wood of the north that was Senlis.

  Even a mage could be uneasy to find himself alone and weaponless in a wood at sunset. Beasts lurked in woods, and not all of them ran on four feet. Poor prey as he made in his priestly habit, his mule was fine, and her caparisons were worth a penny or two. He had been too preoccupied to notice that the lad had put on the best bridle with its inlay of gold, and the saddle with the cloth of Byzantine silk.

  His magic sensed no threat but the one that never left him. He eased a little, but he gathered the reins to turn the mule about.

  She resisted. She had her eye on a succulent bit of browsing just ahead, and a babble and sparkle beyond that betokened a stream. Gerbert sighed, shrugged. A moment more could make no difference. He let Alba have her head.

  Beyond the stream a path wound up among the trees. It was neither wide nor high enough for a mounted man, but for one on foot it was ample. As Alba dipped her head to drink, Gerbert slid from her back, moved by what impulse he hardly knew. He tethered her loosely to a branch and laid a word of guard and binding on her, at which she gave him a look of reproach. “It’s not that I don’t trust you,” he said. “But someone might find you too tempting to resist.”

  She snorted, unmollified. But there was grazing enough within her tether’s reach, and she was a wise mule. She did not try to argue.

  Gerbert kilted up his habit and eyed the path. An odd excitement quivered in him. He had forgotten how strong and hale a body could feel. He paused only long enough to sling the saddlebags over his shoulder — no need to tempt a thief more than he could help — and set foot on the path.

  It was an easy ascent, no tax on his strength; it wound a little as the trees ordained. After a time it found again the stream which crossed it below, and followed that. He stopped once to drink and to bathe his face, and to wonder briefly what he was doing. But only briefly. When the magic beckoned so, a mage was wise to heed it. He crossed himself, to hallow what he did, and blessed the stream. It laughed at his caution. He smiled back, shifted his burden, went on.

  He k
new it when he came to it. It was older than any living thing about it: an oak that seemed as broad as a tower. Beneath its tangled roots the stream sprang, sparking like fire; for the last rays of the sun, piercing the dimming wood, fell full upon the face of tree and spring.

  A little below the source, the water filled a shallow basin of stone, then brimmed and overflowed into its narrow channel. Gerbert sank down beside the pool, suddenly exhausted. For a little while he had been young again. Now age had taken him back.

  As by maddening degrees his breathing quieted, he saw what the sun was showing him. The spring rose under the roots of the oak, in a hollow like a cave, its roof a vault of living wood. There beyond the bubble of water stood a figure. It was carved, he suspected, of oakwood, dark now with age and furred with moss, but its shape was clear to see. A woman; a maiden in a gown that did little to obscure her shapely young body.

  No; no maiden. Her belly rounded in a way that even a priest, if he remembered mother and sisters, could recognize. One hand guarded that fruitful curve; the other held, incongruously, a cross.

  Someone had been careful to make this seem a Christian shrine. But the power in it was older by far.

  Gerbert shivered, yet not — strangely — with revulsion. The dark goddess, or Blessed Virgin if it pleased her to be reckoned so, bore no evil in her. Power, yes, great enough to be perilous, and not all of the light; but darkness had no great part in it. Before she bore a cross, he knew in his bones, she had borne a blossom. A dark rose?

  She seemed to smile as the sun faded. See, she seemed to say. See what I keep for you.

  Gifts lay at her feet. Whoever brought them, brought them often, for what purpose Gerbert could not guess. For luck? For the bearing of a child? He saw a withered garland, a cake much nibbled by mice. But most notably a small still shape that, not so very long ago, had been alive. It glimmered in the dimness: a white dove with the snare still on its neck, its body barely stiffened in death. The one who had left it must have heard Gerbert and fled.