Ars Magica

by Judith Tarr

  He astonished himself with his own coolness. The red hate was gone with the demon that had spawned it. What remained was little more than a lingering distaste. He would never forgive, but he was coming, a little, to forget.

  “Suppose,” said Otto one evening at the gates of summer, “that I asked you to give up the fight. Would you do it?”

  Gerbert’s lips tightened. He shook his head.

  They were in an old and hallowed place: the palace at Aachen that had been Charlemagne’s. Its walls breathed forth more damp than greatness, but its splendor, though tarnished, was still enough, now and then, to catch at the heart.

  Neither noticed now, or cared, that Charlemagne had held audience in this chamber with its painted walls and its moldering bearskin flung incongruously on the floor. Otto’s toe worked itself into a rent in the skin. He stared at it as if it belonged to someone else. “You are stubborn,” he said without heat.

  “It’s mine.” Otto did not look up, but Gerbert felt his keen attention. Gerbert drew a breath, not quite a sigh. “I was young when I came there, a scholar in search of new worlds to conquer. I grew into the school, and it grew into me. I learned to love the city, and its church, and its archbishop. When he made me master of the school, I thought that I had attained the summit of my life. I had found a respectable school as these things are reckoned in Gaul, a training ground for the priests of the parishes and the laborers in the archbishop’s chancery, and such sons of kings and lords as had a hunger for learning. I made it more. Out of those scholars, and out of the cloisters in the see, I chose the best. I offered them the higher arts. For some, even, there was the Art, which I neither concealed nor revealed, simply offered in silence.

  “All that, I made. And while I made it, I made my way in the world. There was my oath to your house, which I swore before ever I went to Rheims, and which on occasion I was called on to honor. My lord archbishop availed himself of me when he had need, coming in time to share his archbishopric with me, making me part of his inner counsels. He meant me to continue when he died, as he knew he must, for even when I met him he was not young, and he was never strong.

  “When he died, I knew what I would be and do. Then the king’s policy intervened. For a few months’ peace of mind, he sold the archbishopric of Rheims. And Arnulf dealt with it as he had begun: in false coin, in treachery. I was his prisoner. I saw what he did to my city. I swore that I would free her.

  “And I did,” said Gerbert. “Whatever Rome may say, until Arnulf’s partisans swayed the Holy See to contest my claim, I gave Rheims peace.”

  Otto nodded slowly. “You did,” he said. “Have you thought that, like any good artisan, you might one day call it finished, and let it go?”

  “Of course,” Gerbert said. “When I die.”

  “What if...” Otto paused. “What if that time should come before then? What if you were called to something higher?”

  “I — ” Gerbert stopped. He had thought of that. Sometimes. Deep in the night, when his guard was down, and he could dream as any human creature may.

  But, waking, he knew the measure of what he was. Excellence enough, surely, to rise as high as he wished — or as he dared. Yet beside that, cold truth. He was a peasant’s son. No right of birth or lineage entitled him to any power in the world. Rheims...Rheims, he had loved. He had fought for her, and lost her, and gained her, and now perhaps lost her again. He could not let himself think in the daylight of aught beyond her.

  “Oh,” said Otto, hastening to fill the silence. “I didn’t mean this here. This is only a rest between labors.”

  Gerbert swallowed. “What,” he asked, “my lord, did you have in mind?”

  Otto blinked and looked guilty. “Nothing. Really. I was just thinking.”

  “Yes?”

  The boy blushed, but his eyes were angry. “Don’t do that to me, magister. I was thinking that I love this, and you; I don’t want it to end. But you are not meant to be a humble master of the chapel, even if it is the emperor’s chapel. I’m keeping you caged like a singing bird, but you are an eagle.”

  “Have you ever heard an eagle’s voice?” Gerbert asked dryly.

  “You are mocking me,” said the emperor.

  “No,” Gerbert said, “my dear lord. I’m no eagle. A lark, maybe, that sings as it soars into the sun, and sings when it falls. I’ve fallen to my own proper level. If it pleases God and the Holy Father to restore me to my old eminence, then so be it. If not...” That was hard to say, harder still to contemplate. “If not, so be it. I thought I had no life without Rheims. Now I have you. I am content.”

  Otto shook his head slightly, but he said nothing.

  “Now,” said Gerbert after a stretching pause, “on the subject of sesquiquartal numbers...”

  oOo

  From Aachen to the marches of the east was a royal progress. War was at the end of it, Otto’s armies drawn up already, a thin and mortal wall against the wild tribes. But he who had ridden to war since he was a child was in no haste to join in this one.

  “An emperor should lead his army,” he said on the road to Magdeburg. “But he should also know when to trust his ministers to lead it.”

  They had paused in the heat of noon, the whole long train of his court and his chancery, his household and his company of warriors that was half warband and half praetorian guard; for a little while they rested, ate, took what ease they could in a valley that was almost open. A fire had scoured it, and though it grew green again, it seemed more field than forest, pillared with the charred corpses of trees.

  Otto had found a space that must have been a meadow even before the fire bared it to the sky. His horse cropped the rich grass, a peaceful sound, made musical by the jingle of the bit.

  Gerbert was there, close as Otto wanted him, propped against a vine-grown stump. There were others: one or two of Otto’s priests and holy women, his physician buried as always in a book, a courtier or six, and the odd, restless guardsman. Most were mages, or wanted to be. Power called to power, whether its possessors willed it or no.

  It was never spoken of. There never seemed to be need.

  That meant something. Gerbert was on the edge of understanding it. Power in magic, power in the world: they belonged together. And yet...

  Otto’s voice shook him from his reflection. “See what we become,” he said. His hand took in them all, those who lived for war, those who lived for God, those who lived in and for the court. “My grandfather’s father — the Fowler, they called him, because of all things there were in the world he loved most to hunt with his falcons. He couldn’t read; he couldn’t write even his name. He was a warrior king, and he knew that he would die one. But he had dreams. He wanted more. He raised his son to be a king and not the leader of a warband: a ruler as well as a soldier. And my grandfather learned, and remembered, and knew what he wanted to be. He heard the name of Charles who found us heathen savages and made us a Christian people, Charles the Great, Charlemagne. Charles had been more than king; he had been emperor. The very pope in Rome had blessed his kingship.

  “My grandfather wanted that. He wanted to be greater than any Saxon had been before him. He took scattered, warring Germany, and he won it, and he made it all one. Then at Aachen they crowned him with the crown of Charlemagne, and the pope in Rome blessed him. But he never learned to read until he was a grown man — and in that too he was like the great one who had gone before him.

  “He raised my father to be an emperor. He had him taught by masters; he whose own father had been a rough soldier-king, made his son a civilized prince. He won for him a bride out of Byzantium that calls itself the true and only Roman Empire; he left him an empire in its own right, though feeble still, as any young thing is when it is born.”

  “Or,” said Gerbert, “as Lazarus must have been when he was raised from the dead.”

  Otto favored him with a smile, though it died quickly. “Lazarus, yes, with the grave-clothes on him still. But life under them, and growing
strong. Then, all untimely, he died. My mother ruled well, and held his empire together until I should be old enough to take it; and she dreamed his dream, the stronger for that she was true Roman, born royal in the east and learned in all the arts of Byzantium. She raised me to be more than emperor. She raised me to be Roman.”

  “Nothing for the Saxons?”

  That was a lordling whose blood was pure as far back as any could reckon; whose forebear, he was not ashamed to admit, was Wotan himself. It made him bold even in front of his emperor. Insufferable, Gerbert would have said, had the boy been a pupil of his: begging for a dose of the rod.

  Otto regarded the lordling with calm dark eyes, until he blushed and began to fidget. But he was never one to heed the promptings of prudence. “Romans,” he said angrily. “Romans, Romans, Romans. Have you forgotten where you came from? Saxony was good enough for Henry the Fowler. His son was half a Frank and all a fool. His son cast eyes east and south, and talked of Rome, Rome, Rome. And Rome killed him. He abandoned the good clean air of Saxony for the Roman fens; he ran barking at the pope’s heel. And where is he now, and all his dreams of empire? Dead and gone.”

  One or two of the guards watched Otto, alert, like hounds on a scent. The courtiers had moved away from the young fool as if from a contagion. He stood red-faced, breathing hard, and perhaps his dim brain comprehended, at last, how far he had transgressed.

  Otto smiled with honest sweetness. “Sit down, Liudolf,” he said, “and share the wine. It’s good: it’s Falernian.”

  Liudolf reared up. “Even the wine is Italian! Look at you. Greek clothes, Greek manners, Greek face. Greeks sliding and slinking around you. Romans hissing in your ear. Where are the Saxons, I ask you? What do you leave for us?”

  “My patience,” said Otto, with an astonishing measure of it. “I remember what I am. I was born to more than Saxony, queen of duchies though she be. She is but one of all the realms in the world. Think! What is a single duchy, if it knows nothing but war? War from without, from rival kings, from barbarians; war from within, as its lords do battle one against another. We of Saxony made Germany a kingdom, and taught it the first lessons of peace. Then we dared reach farther; we dared to dream. What Rome was, we could aim for. We could will it to be, we of Saxony. Therefore my grandfather looked eastward for the mother of his son’s son, to that remnant which calls itself the heir of Rome. And it yielded to him. It would not, quite, grant him his title of Emperor of the West, but it acknowledged his power. It sent him a princess who also dared to dream.”

  “A sop,” Liudolf said. “An emperor’s by-blow.”

  Otto’s eyes narrowed and began to glitter. “A princess, and royal. My mother, O son of Marburga. She brought the grace of the east into our rough west. She showed us how an empire is ruled.”

  “Why do we need an empire? The Franks have their own troubles: their old king is dead, their new one cares more for bedding his kinswoman than for ruling his kingdom. Italy is a sink of sedition. Spain is all Moors and sorcerers. Germany is enough. It should be enough.”

  “So would it be, if there were no one else in the world. Do you forget what we go to, and why? Have you forgotten how many outlanders hunger after our simple and sufficient country?” Otto’s passion had risen; he quelled it with skill almost frightening in one so young. He shrugged with careful casualness, and mustered a smile. It was a very sweet smile; but this sweetness was neither honest nor simple. “And besides, Liudolf, friend of my childhood, I want more. I am the Emperor of the Romans. I am going to make that title mean something. In Gaul, in Italy, in Spain. Even,” he said, “in Germany.”

  “It will kill you, “Liudolf said.

  Gerbert looked into those earnest blue eyes and shivered. The boy did not know what he did. In old days they would have said that a god possessed him. Now...

  “It will kill you,” said Liudolf, “as it killed your father. Rome is dead. You are no Christ, to bring it back to life again.”

  The guards moved. Otto did not stop them. One raised an armored fist. He watched in silence, steadily.

  “You’ll die,” said Liudolf with the persistence of the mad. “You’ll die, and Rome will have your bones.”

  The guard struck.

  Gerbert was there, with no memory of movement. Even with power he was barely a match for that raw, mortal strength. But surprise aided him, and astonishment, to meet such resistance from a man so old and seemingly so frail. He caught the blow and turned it, and sent the man reeling back. He did not trouble to watch him fall, but turned and spoke to his emperor. “No,” he said. “This is more than insolence. It wants blood.”

  Otto’s brows went up. He was angry, but not beyond reason. “Is it...?”

  Gerbert tensed in sudden, heart-deep dread. Paused. Shook his head. No. It was not. There was more in the world than one mage’s mistake.

  And yet this was dangerous. That a mad fool prophesied Otto’s death; that Otto’s people heard it.

  Liudolf, oblivious, glared at Gerbert. “And you! You feed it, you with your Gaulish wiles, your Moorish magics. They drove you out of your own country. Now you poison our king with lies and sleights and moonshine.”

  Gerbert spoke with utmost gentleness. “My vows and God’s law forbid me to do murder. Execution but feeds what feeds on you. Therefore I let you live.” He raised his hand. Liudolf’s eyes followed it as if they had no power to do otherwise. Gerbert’s fist snapped shut. Laudolf dropped without a sound.

  Gerbert very nearly followed him. But there were eyes all about, and awe, and the tang of fear. A breath brought back a little of the strength that had flooded out of him. He sat down steadily enough, and addressed the soldier nearest the fallen boy. “Bundle him in a cart and let him sleep it off. He’ll wake by evening with a head like a three-days’ debauch, and a distinct disinclination to argue with his emperor.”

  The man was startled enough to obey. The others were taken aback. “Do you mean he isn’t dead?”

  “Weren’t you listening?” Gerbert was more irritable than he might have liked, but he was tired, and they were being ridiculous. “Haven’t you ever seen a jealous child before? He’s been listening to the wrong masters; he’s had his chastisement. He’ll hold his tongue hereafter.”

  The awe did not abate, but the eyes found other things to stare at. When Gerbert went to retrieve his mule, the others were not long in following suit.

  oOo

  “I know what you did,” Otto said.

  Gerbert considered pretending that he had forgotten. It was days past now, and the talk had begun to fade. Otto was ready, in a day or three, to take the field with his armies. But for this hour they were master and pupil as always; Otto, having struggled through a thicket of figures to an answer Gerbert would accept, was taking a quiet revenge.

  “What I did,” said Gerbert, “was silence an envious infant. He’s behaved himself since, I notice.”

  Otto laughed. “I doubt he’ll ever dream of rebelling again. You put the fear of God in him.” He sobered. “That’s not all you did, magister. Do you believe in omens?”

  Cold small feet walked down Gerbert’s spine. He said, “I am a Christian and a priest.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  No; and Gerbert did not intend to give him one. “I believe that you have enemies who would gladly see you displaced by a weaker king, or by one more amenable to Saxon browbeating. I believe that these set Liudolf on you, knowing how far his folly would take him, hoping that you would have him disposed of. Then they would have had a martyr for their cause. Instead, they have a fool who suffered just and ignominious punishment, and who has become a conspicuously loyal servant.”

  Otto scowled. Gerbert would not give way. Otto sighed, sharp with frustration, and said, “Now they all forget what he said, and talk endlessly of what you did. Did you know that you called lightning out of a blue sky, and that a legion of angels came down to smite the idiot for his insolence?”

  “Angels?” asked
Gerbert. “I’d have thought it would be devils.”

  “Not where I can hear them. It’s odd; now you’re more popular instead of less. As if people were relieved to know for certain what everyone has always suspected. They’d rather an open and acknowledged mage than one who keeps it a secret.”

  “I never did. I didn’t trumpet it from the rooftops, either.”

  “Exactly,” Otto said. He paused, eyes on Gerbert, not quite smiling. His flash of temper was gone. Suddenly he looked very young, and almost mischievous; but solemn, too, as if he cherished a secret. “Magister, do you remember when we talked about Rheims?”

  Gerbert could not help it. He always stiffened at that name; his eyes always darkened, his reason swayed and fell, and he remembered rage and loss and bitter humiliation. It was a dimmer memory than it had been. Otto’s face kept getting in the way.

  Its owner went on with quiet persistence. “I asked you if you would consider giving it up, if something higher were offered you.”

  “And I said no,” said Gerbert, short and harsh.

  “So you did,” said Otto. He paused. “I’m asking you again.”

  “You know what I’ll say.”

  “Suppose,” Otto said, “that I had an alternative. Suppose...that an archbishopric was vacant, and no one would contest your claim to it.”

  Gerbert’s breath caught in spite of himself. But he was too old for hope, or for games of what-if-there-were. “Am I such a trouble to you? Do I seem so badly to need a sop to my pride?”

  “Why? Are you so proud that you would scorn Ravenna?”

  The silence rang. Gerbert’s ears were going. He had not heard that. Ravenna — “But only Rome is higher!”

  “Just so,” said Otto. His brows were knit. “I can’t give you Rome. I’m sorry for that. I’d have liked...” He shook his head. “What am I saying? Bruno — Gregory — is my cousin. He’s young, he’s strong, he’ll live long and rule well.”

  “Would he approve your setting me in the place second only to his?”

  “He already has.” Otto laughed at Gerbert’s expression. “He doesn’t hate you, magister. He believes in upholding the law, that’s all. This resolves the problem of Rheims, gives you what you richly deserve — ”