by Judith Tarr
The news from Rheims was bad. One of Gerbert’s own masters brought it, master of magic from the inner school, Rabbi Ephraim ha-Levi looking as harmless as ever: an old man, frail and translucent, peering about with an expression of perpetual, amiable befuddlement.
That, as Gerbert well knew, was eyesight that stopped just short of blindness, and long prudence. The old man looked about him sharply enough once they were alone. He would not, as ever, drink Christian wine; he had, as ever, his own small flask, with which he kept Gerbert company.
He came directly to it, which was another of his virtues. “The inner school has voted in conclave, from novice to master, to disband itself until peace should return. The masters from Spain have returned there; there is, they tell us, a school of the Art in Toledo that may profit from what we taught in Rheims. The Christians have gone back to their kin or their cloisters, or, if they had none, to St.-Rémi with Brother Richer. The abbot is not amused, but he acquiesces.”
Gerbert allowed himself a grim smile. Milord abbot owed Gerbert rather more favors than he liked to contemplate; and he had a deep fear of magic. Fine purgatory it must be, to be compelled to give sanctuary to a nest of mages.
“We scattered none too soon,” said Ephraim. “There had been talk of a harrowing; of rooting out, at least, the Jews and the Saracens. But before those, and worse in most minds, the women.”
Gerbert’s brow went up. “Women?”
Ephraim scowled. He looked remarkably formidable. “Women. No doubt you were preoccupied, between your sickness and the growing trouble, or you would remember. You know how God has tried my soul. A tribe of strapping sons, and never a one with a brain in his head, still less a grain of magic. One late, unlooked-for daughter; and what should she be but mageborn enough for all the rest of them. Was I to waste such a gift?”
Many men might. Or might have taken care at most to mate her to a mage and breed a clan of magelings.
Ephraim, as blissfully unmindful of nature and gender and propriety as ever Ibrahim had been, went on with his tale. “She could hardly sit in classes with the novices; yet she insisted that she should. Was she not as much a mage as they? And that was not at all, as I told her, but she never heard me.
“A little after you left for Rome, God answered her prayers. He brought Sister Hathumoda and her cousin who was a new widow, and they were mages of some little accomplishment, taught by a wisewoman in their childhood but desirous of high learning. We took them in and made a class of them, women all and gifted much alike. We were circumspect, but the cousin is young and not too ill-favored, and young men will talk. It became apparent in the city that the heathen sorcerers were holding hostage a nun and her beauteous kinswoman. That, together with the quarrel against your right to the see...”
Gerbert saw it. Gerbert saw it very well indeed. On the other side of anger, he knew that if it had not been the women, it would have been the heathen sorcerers. Arnulf had honed Rheims to a nest of blades; now they had risen to hew Gerbert.
“Best you not go back,” said Ephraim. “There is that, as well: some would see you dead. Poison in the chalice, a knife in your bed — you are not safe anywhere in your see. Your enemies have cried interdict against you should you attempt to reclaim what is yours; any who aids you, comforts you, gives you meat or drink, is outcast from holy Church.”
“That much was true before I left,” Gerbert said, though his throat was raw with pain.
“Now they enforce it. Your palace is empty of servants. Your priests and monks have fled. The outer school,” Ephraim admitted, “goes on, if a little diminished; the chancery continues as chanceries will, taking no account of the man who holds the title. Whatever can thrive without you is thriving handily.”
Bitter words to hear, spoken in Ephraim’s way, without softening of the blow.
“My family and I,” the old man said, “have a mind to try the air in Italy. Naples, they say, is full of witches. My daughter may find the teaching, and the peace, that she needs.”
Gerbert’s head bowed. Suddenly he wanted to weep, or rage, or fly to Rheims on the back of the wind, and raise the power, and smite his enemies into the dust.
Therefore he bent his head. He knotted his fists until they throbbed with pain, and drew long shuddering breaths. Gone, all gone. Broken, scattered, seared with anathema. All that he had made, hoped, ruled, was torn asunder. By a traitor. By a breaker of his most sacred oath.
Ephraim, having delivered his message, did not tarry. His wife and his sons and his splendid little witch of a daughter were waiting down the river. They had never approved his practicing of his Art within the very cathedral of terrible, priestly Rheims. Royal Pavia would be little more to their liking.
“Am I a monster,” Gerbert asked the air, in the sweet clarity behind madness, “for that I suffer the presence of him and his kind? Worse than that. I take pleasure in it. In seeing how a mind can work, when other ways and other gods have shaped it.”
That was heretical. He retreated from it to the refuge of wrath. “Arnulf,” he whispered. “Always Arnulf.”
Somewhere in the black-red darkness, he found himself in his innermost chamber, sitting as if transfixed, in his scarred right hand a jewel like a coal. The shadow stirred in its heart, twisting slowly. The faintest whisper of a whisper tantalized his ears. Free me, it seemed to beseech him. Feed me.
Oh, indeed, at last. What were vows and pride and honor at the end of all that he had made? When he made this jewel he had thought this battle won, all but the final skirmish. And that had burgeoned into war.
Arnulf, dead, would put an end to it.
The jewel winked out. A narrow hand covered Gerbert’s; the sleeve to which it was attached was stiff with gold.
Gerbert stared blankly at Otto. The emperor was, indeed, emperor. He was arrayed for high court: the stifling splendor of Byzantine imperial dress, from buskins to heavy layered vestments like a priest’s to the crown with its pendant pearls. His face in that luminous frame was thin and sallow and very young, but his eyes were royal eyes, dark and burning. “No,” he said.
The fingers over Gerbert’s were cold but steady, and surprisingly strong. Gerbert watched them draw his hand over to the box with its sheathing of iron, and tip the jewel into it, letting fall the lid with a sharp, decisive click.
“I know that it is news to drive any man mad,” said Otto, “but you will not go mad. I forbid it.”
“That,” Gerbert’s tongue said for him, speaking of the spirit in the jewel, “that will feed; nor shall I ever have peace until it does. That peace is peace for Rheims. Yet...what profit if I gain the world, and lose my own soul?”
“Then why,” asked Otto, “do you cling to Rheims?”
Even he could ask that; even Otto.
The emperor pressed harder. “There is another peace; mortal peace. Fair judgment for the see; end of this war by the pope’s decree. Rheims is barred to you until the quarrel is settled. Stay with me, teach me, go where I go; wait with me for his holiness’ decision.”
Gerbert’s head shook of its own accord. His hand fell on the box; the scar burned as it had when first he won it. “This will find another way. It will see that Arnulf wins my place; it will hone my hate. Then it will strike.”
There was fear in Otto’s eyes. Not of him or of the incubus; for him.
Otto had discarded the crown. His hair was tousled, boylike and vaguely comical above the glittering robe. He spoke, as it seemed, to the air. “How badly is he beset?”
The air answered in a voice of shaken bronze. “Badly. It lairs like a spider in his mind. It eats at his body’s defenses.”
That was Gerbert they were speaking of. He drew breath to rebuke their insolence.
The Jinniyah overran him. “I do what I can, but my power is hardly infinite. And the spirit is growing stronger.”
“Surely it’s not omnipotent,” said Otto. “It couldn’t have done all that he says it has.”
“Arnulf is a mage,�
� the Jinniyah said.
Otto stood still. His eyes were wide, comprehending. “He feeds it. But it can’t...feed. And my master in the middle. Mother of God!”
As they spoke together, they seemed to forget that Gerbert was there. His hand darted. The carbuncle filled the hollow it had made for itself, the livid scar. It sang of freedom, of feeding, of peace.
“What shall I do?” cried Otto. His voice cracked and soared upward like a child’s.
The Jinniyah said nothing, though the air was thick with frustration. His words, however indirectly, had invoked her geas.
He seemed to know. Which interested that minute fraction of Gerbert which was inclined to notice. Gerbert’s familiar was keeping a secret or two; or failing to keep one.
Again Otto tugged at Gerbert’s hand. This time Gerbert resisted. He would set the spirit free. He would win them peace. His soul was no great matter.
“Advise me,” gasped Otto. “Help me!”
That was a soldier’s mind, to think so clearly in the midst of a battle. “You have to free the spirit,” the Jinniyah said, clear as a bell ringing. “Free it utterly; dismiss it. Ban it from this earth for all of time.”
“How?”
Clear, that. Innocent. Gerbert almost laughed.
“Listen,” said his devious Jinniyah, “and do as I shall tell you.”
Now, she meant, Now, Otto quite obviously meant to do it. He called in his power, and it came, all the scattered faces of it. Gerbert had never known he had so much.
He was no callow novice. He knew what he did. He knew how to marshal that multitude; he gathered it as in a single hand, and held it, waiting.
The Jinniyah was silent for an endless moment. Had even she been astonished to find a master where she had expected an apprentice?
She was cool when she spoke, unstartled. “Now, mage. Break the stone.”
Gerbert would do it for them. Easily. Simply.
“He must not,” the Jinniyah cried, high and piercing, “or it has him! Quick, strike!”
Otto struck with all his force. Flame roared up. Night roared in its heart.
Two throats, one voice, flesh and bronze together, thundered words in no tongue that earth had ever known. Crying a name — ah, traitor, she had known! — crying it in tones that shook the sky.
The shadow trembled in that tempest, frayed and shredded and scattered. The power sang its paean. They had won; they had destroyed the enemy.
They had not. Gerbert smote with all the force of thwarted rage.
What caught the blow, what tore aside his madness in a bitter light of sanity, he never knew. Maybe a little good was left in him. Maybe the incubus had not mastered him as utterly as it had thought. He saw the Jinniyah whom he had purchased with death, to whom he had entrusted the treasure of his power; he saw the young mage who was an emperor, to whom he had sworn fealty, whom he loved. They were all caught up in gladness. They never knew what had risen up to shatter them.
What he had done to Maryam, he had done in ignorance, with the inescapable swiftness of instinct. This, he knew in its fullness. The power gathered, poised to fall. The black rage; the shadow with its avid eyes, rent asunder by the force of the spell, yet clinging, hungering. It had left enough of itself in Gerbert to gain a hold on mortal being; and the Jinniyah and the emperor had withdrawn their power before the spirit was all cast out.
Like Arnulf whose sins had begotten it, it was never defeated until it was truly dead.
No. It was hardly a word. It was pure will. Gerbert turned the whole of it to the turning of the stroke. Away from its targets. Toward what had roused it. It twisted, fighting. Grimly he held to it. It showed him treachery incarnate: Arnulf, Otto, the Jinniyah with her lying prophecies. It beckoned with the sweetness that was hate.
The shadow sang to him. Free me, feed me, give me joy. Joy that swelled in his own heart, soared and bloomed and sang.
He smote it down. “No,” he said aloud. “Not again.” The name that he had heard was heavy on his tongue. He set it free. “In the name of God, by the six names, by the nine names, by the ninety-nine names, by the Name of names that is hidden till the earth be made anew, I adjure and command thee, I enjoin thee, I ban thee. Go forth for all ages of ages. Go, thou spirit of the nether pit. Go, and trouble us no more.”
The echoes rang. The shadow wailed, long and lost and all betrayed. Mortal faith! Mortal faith!
His hands swept the air of it, and cast it forth. “Begone!”
It scattered, melting, wailing into nothingness.
And then was silence.
The candle flickered low in its sconce. The Jinniyah glimmered, bodiless beauty staring blankly into the dark. Otto had fallen to his knees. His jewels flashed and flared as he struggled for breath, like a runner at the end of a race, like a warrior who comes alive from battle.
He barely flinched from Gerbert’s hand. Under the glittering robes his shoulders were as thin as a bird’s.
“Whelp,” Gerbert growled. “Don’t you know enough to hold on until the spirit is gone?”
Otto lifted his face. It was like parchment, bloodless, empty of aught but eyes. Deep within them, a single claw of shadow flexed and tore. Otto crumpled without a sound.
With a harsh, terrible cry, Gerbert lashed out. The last tenacious remnant of shadow flicked away, dwindling. As it dwindled, it laughed.
Gerbert clung to the lifeless body and cried like a child.
“Come,” said Otto, struggling weakly. “Come, don’t cry.”
Gerbert’s head flew up. His fists were knotted in silk. Otto’s breast heaved under them; his eyes were open, aware. He looked as if he could not choose between a scowl and a smile.
“I’ve killed you,” Gerbert said with the simplicity of despair.
Otto’s lips quirked. “Not quite yet, I think.” Gerbert’s hand had loosened; Otto sat up. His breath caught. “Ah! I’ve the mother of all aching heads. You’re strong, magister.”
“You—” For once, Gerbert could find no words. His hands reached, touched. Warm flesh, life pulsing undiminished, weariness that was the aftermath of great magic. A wonder, a miracle, a blessing beyond hope.
Maryam had been caught off guard. Otto had been smitten in the midst of his power; and Gerbert had turned the blow. He was dizzy and sick and his head, he said, was like an anvil under a hammer, but he was very much alive. He suffered Gerbert’s cry of gladness and his sudden, bruising embrace; he returned the latter with good enough will. “There,” he said. “There. Don’t you know I’m used to this? It’s what a king does. He casts out devils.”
“That is a figurative expression.”
Otto laughed, though he winced. “Then I am a figurative king, with a figurative power.”
Gerbert glared at him. “Power. Indeed. You told me you were a novice.”
“I am,” said Otto.
“You are not. You are a journeyman of some years’ standing. You have glimmers of mastery.”
The boy blinked. “I don’t.”
“Then what do you call what you just did?”
The force of it rocked Otto; he clapped his hands to his ears. “All I did was cast out a demon!”
“All,” Gerbert said. “All.” He did not know whether he wanted to laugh or to howl. He seized Otto and pulled him close. “Naif. Innocent. Idiot. You are not a novice. Believe me, you are not.”
Otto’s arms went round him. Emperor the whole of his life, and still he could trust as a child did, utterly. His voice was soft with wonder. “I never thought I was anything. But if you say so... Oh, magister! Shall I really be a mage?”
“You are one,” said Gerbert.
Otto shivered. “No. I’m not ready. Let me get the feel of this, first: of being the beginnings of one.”
Gerbert held him without speaking. After a little while he stiffened; Gerbert let him go. He rose shakily, catching himself on the table’s edge. Gerbert, who was no more steady, clutched in fear; he waved away both fear and hands.
“I’m well. Or will be, once I’ve slept. As you should, magister. We’ve taxed ourselves sorely with all this magic.”
That was youth, to speak so lightly of such horrors. He smiled at Gerbert and accorded him a soldier’s salute. “To victory, magister!”
He went under his own power. That was almost more than Gerbert could do. But pride had its uses. It brought Gerbert to his bed, and laid him unhastily in it. He sighed once, for all that he had done, and not done, and almost done; for that Otto was alive, well, unwounded, and Gerbert, at last, was free.
On the edge of sleep, a shadow laughed.
18.
Gerbert yielded to necessity and to his own treacherous heart. He followed his emperor to Germany. There in the country of his fathers, far from the mists and miasmas of the south, Otto thrived and grew strong. His pallor faded; he broadened a very little, flesh creeping to cover the sharp, fragile bones.
There were troubles. Winter, which was always cruel. War in the east. The cares of an empire that was still a frail and cobbled thing, more dream than solid fact.
“I’ve a whole long life to make it whole,” Otto said. In the clear cold air of his northern forests, he was irrepressible. And he wanted, passionately, to learn; to know, as once Gerbert had done.
As Gerbert learned anew to do. He felt — by all that was holy and miraculous, he felt young again. His sickness passed unregarded. Striding behind his young emperor, riding with him, resting with him, teaching him, pausing on occasion to attend to the music of his chapel, Gerbert remembered what it was to be young and glad and tireless.
When Ephraim came to Pavia, he had brought some of Gerbert’s cherished instruments: his spheres of the heavens, his globe of the earth, his abacus, his monochord with which he taught the mathematics of music. He had his books; he had a pupil worthy of them. He lacked for nothing that befitted a scholar; not even happiness.
The palace in Rheims was empty of an archbishop. Arnulf had not moved to claim it. He was practicing humility, people said; awaiting humbly the judgment of the Holy See. Gerbert called it playing for sympathy.
