by Judith Tarr
Who would not, Richer devoutly hoped, put in an appearance tonight. He was not in the mood for high magical heroics. He was simply and insatiably curious.
oOo
The stake was there, unmolested as far as Richer could tell. The moon was coy, now staring down, now veiling herself in cloud. Gerbert, refreshed by an hour’s prayer and an hour’s sleep after a day of ruling Ravenna, moved lightly in his mantle, like a shadow himself. The walls about the square were blank, blind. If anyone lived there, he slept deep, and kept no dogs to cry the alarm. A shadow flitted across Richer’s feet, startling him nigh into a fit; it mewed its contempt round a mouthful of mouse and went to consume its prey in peace.
Gerbert approached the statue and the stake, silent, his power drawn close about him. It was he now who carried the Jinniyah; Richer had a lantern, unlit, and an empty bag. Gerbert only wanted to see what was there. Richer’s ambitions were slightly more solid. Maybe there would be books; or a relic; or something magical.
The statue loomed much larger from below than from above. Its pedestal was carved with a word: either the Greek for Strike here, as the Jinniyah said and the book agreed, or — she allowed and Gerbert believed more likely — the name of some forgotten emperor or nobleman. Richer could not tell, blurred as it was, and hacked apparently with axes. The upraised hand pointed pointlessly wallward.
Not so pointless if the Secret History told the truth. Richer followed Gerbert to the stake, which pierced a crack in the paving. The wards blurred and frayed with the master’s coming, and melted away. The moon was suddenly very bright; the image’s shadow stretched, groping toward the interlopers. Gerbert bent as if in homage, laying his palms flat on the stone. Just as the shadow-finger seemed to touch him, he spoke a single word.
After the word was silence absolute. Even the wind had stilled.
Under his hands the stone shifted and sank. The world moved again; the wind resumed its restless wandering. Monk and archbishop regarded the mouth that had opened in the earth. Richer’s hands were astonishingly steady as he lit the lantern and directed its thin beam downward. The shaft seemed as deep as a well, but behind his fear, where power was, he sensed that it was not so formidable. He set the lantern on the rim, and before Gerbert could stop him, slid over and down.
For an appalling instant he knew that he would fall without end or hope. Then he struck bottom. His hands, stretched to their fullest, could almost have touched the rim. “It’s not far,” he called up, his voice echoing in the shaft. “Here, master. Lower yourself down; I’ll catch you.”
It was done almost before he finished speaking. Gerbert was more solid than he looked, and stronger. He hardly needed Richer’s hands, dropping down almost with a young man’s lightness, one arm about his middle to protect the Jinniyah. When he was firm on his feet, he freed her from her wrappings and held her facing forward. “Come,” she said with barely suppressed impatience. “What are we waiting for?”
The shaft opened on a passage just high enough for Gerbert, uncomfortably low for Richer. An overpowering odor of damp wafted out of it.
“Well?” the Jinniyah demanded. Well enough for her: bronze and not fastidious flesh, and protected in the fold of her master’s cloak.
Richer could not even sigh: he would have gagged. He raised his lantern, bent his back, and braved the damp and the stink. It was revenge of a sort. Whatever there was to see, he would see it first. Even if it were nothing. He had already lost his hope of books. They would have rotted away long ago.
Before he had gone a furlong, he knew that he should never have begun. But Gerbert was close behind him, uncomplaining; and he had his own store of stubbornness. He set his jaw and went on. Step and step and aching, crouching step. Dark beyond the lantern’s beam, foul-sheened walls, air which he breathed as shallowly as his body could bear. He began to think of going on all fours, though the floor was no more savory than the walls.
It began to slope downward; or perhaps he had merely noticed what had been so from the first. As soon as he noticed it, as if to mock him, it leveled. Richer nearly collided with a wall, swayed, stumbled, all but fell down a flight of steps into sudden, dizzying space.
The lantern had fallen from his hand and rolled clanking away. He neither needed nor heeded it. Light flared blindingly bright, so sudden that he tripped and fell, and lay on his face, trying to breathe.
First he was startled that he could. Then he was startled that he lay on dry stone. No damp here. No stink, perhaps, beyond his much-befuddled nose. His skin prickled with what he recognized as magic, though nothing like it had ever touched him.
Gerbert helped him up. The light was the color of blood; it gave the master’s face a demonic cast. He had no eyes for Richer; they were all for this that must be the Treasure of Justinian.
“Not his Christian and orthodox majesty, I don’t think,” mused Gerbert. He was still holding Richer’s arm, his Jinniyah set on the floor to stare her fill.
It was not so large a space except in the wake of the passage. As large perhaps as a side chapel in a great cathedral, round, with a domed roof. It was empty, its floor plain, paved with smooth pale stone. The walls were its treasure.
At first Richer took them for paintings. Then he decided that they were mosaics of wondrous subtlety. But no; were they carved in relief, painted and gilded, or — ?
It was another chamber all about them, a dozen chambers, a hundred, a palace all of gold. Walls of gold, ceilings paneled with gold, everything all gold; golden guardsmen dicing with golden dice; a king of gold at table with his queen, food set beside them, servants standing about, all gold; and in the heart, in the center of them all, a great blood-red carbuncle that put the dark to flight. Across from it, facing it, stood a youth of gold, an archer with strung bow, arrow nocked, poised to loose. His eyes glittered in the stonelight.
“Illusion.” Richer’s voice was appallingly loud.
“Magic,” Gerbert agreed, calm, but under it a swelling delight. “He was a great mage who did this, simply for the sake of doing it.”
“Or she,” said the Jinniyah. The ruddy light worked strangely on her, so that she seemed made not of bronze or gold but of living flesh. “You see the truth, master. This is no Christian thing. Justinian, says our historian? Not even Octavian, say I. This is older by far.”
Truly, thought Richer, insofar as he could think at all. The guards wore strange armor; the courtiers and the servants observed no fashion that he had ever heard of. It was, now that he looked at it, shockingly immodest, men and women both wasp-waisted, kilted or skirted below, brazenly bare above.
There were beasts. Dogs; slender haughty cats; serpents wound like ornaments about wrists, arms, necks; a great looming bull with which a company of youths and maidens seemed to dance, leaping over its horns.
“This is old,” said the Jinniyah, and in her voice was awe and even, perhaps, a flicker of fear. “Can you feel it? Pride; joy. See, it sings. See what my magic can do. And yet...sadness, too. Gone, it laments. All gone. All lost. All dead, forgotten, forsaken, sunk beneath the sea. Only I remember. Only I.”
“And we, now,” said Gerbert softly.
The light was changing. Not dimming, not brightening, but paling to earthly gold. Unearthly gold altered with it. Colors flickered into clarity. Metal warmed to flesh, cloth, wood painted and unpainted, food such as mortal man might think of tasting. Only the plates and bowls remained gold, and the ornaments of the king and his white-breasted queen. They smiled at one another, she fondling a jeweled serpent at her throat, he reaching for a cup.
Terror reared over Richer and fell, drowning him. Alive — they were alive. And if they moved, if they spoke, if they turned their great kohl-darkened eyes on him, oh, surely, he would go mad.
He turned about, stumbling. Gerbert was rapt in wonder. Beyond him was a garden, a green hill, a sea so blue it hurt the eyes. No stair, no reeking, blessed, mortal passage. No escape. They were trapped. The magic had taken them. The air wa
s warmer than March in Ravenna could ever have been. He scented grass, thyme, the sea.
“Mary, Mother of God!” he wailed, and bolted.
He hardly cared where he went. Out, only. Out. The table, the king, the lovely, wanton queen, loomed before him. His hands flailed. Cold stone. Warm air. Painted wall. Real and solid table, plates that scattered, a knife in his hand, cool hilt, white flame of magic.
The earth rumbled. The air shrieked like a woman. The archer bared white teeth in his sun-bronzed face, and loosed. The arrow flew as swift as sight; pierced the carbuncle; shattered it.
Darkness fell, abrupt and absolute. The world was a drum, and God’s hand beating on it. Hands seized Richer, dragging him. His body yielded. His mind gibbered. Someone was shouting. It might have been himself. It might have been Gerbert, or the Jinniyah, or the outraged, violated magic.
He had no memory of the passage. Only of scrambling into blessed, mortal moonlight, and falling, and rising again, and being dragged anew. Behind him, in the rocking of the earth, the statue fell and shattered. Richer, who had quite lost his wits, laughed and clapped his hands like a child. Iron, oh, yes, indeed, but within it, pallid under the moon, the gleam of lovely, deadly, pagan gold.
oOo
Richer would gladly have slunk into the marshes and become a hermit for his shame, but Gerbert was having none of it. In the clear light of morning he was exactly as he always was, even in the midst of the most outlandish sorcery. He had taken a bruise or two in his flight, to which he was paying no attention. He had an archbishopric to look after, and a prodigy to be told of: how a forgotten square near the walls had been riven in the night by a demon’s passing, and the ancient image had fallen, uncovering its golden treasure. Of shaft and passage there was no sign. The pavement had buckled over them. The magic that had endured so long was gone, shattered by one fool’s helpless panic.
“Enough of that,” said Gerbert with utter lack of sympathy. People were taking the statue’s fall for an omen, though whether of good or ill they could not agree. Gerbert forbore to listen to them. The gold, he had decreed, would go to feed the poor of Ravenna. His chancellor thought him mad. His more pious servants were blessing his sainted generosity.
Richer was put to work overseeing the weighing and the stowing of the fragments, once Gerbert himself had sanctified them with his blessing and gone away to be archbishop. The archbishop’s guard kept the people at bay, watching narrowly for thieves. Rut none was so bold as to lay impious hands on a miracle. They merely watched and whispered, and backed away when the wagon came through with Richer perched atop the wrapped and labeled shards.
oOo
When it was done, though Richer still burned inwardly with the shame of it, he had begun to think that he might not want to forsake the world after all. Not, at least, for a hut in the marshes of Ravenna. He washed his face and put on a clean habit. His stomach was entertaining thoughts of dinner: a prodigy in itself. He had been certain that he would never want to eat again, if it meant swallowing shame with every bite.
Men had suffered worse, he supposed, and lived to tell of it. He took a deep breath and went to face the world.
The archbishop’s palace was always alive with people and voices, comings and goings. Richer was not surprised to see new faces — monks, priests, men-at-arms wearing badges which he did not recognize. Another embassy, no doubt, to the second most powerful prelate in Christendom. He could be proud of that, even after that prelate had seen him revealed as the rankest of cowards.
Gerbert was holding audience, as Richer had expected. He saw a pair of bishops, mitered and haughty, and a flock of babbling courtiers. He was in no mood to linger; the night’s exploits had burned curiosity out of him. He merely sighed, for dinner would not begin until the archbishop was ready for it; and Richer was not ready to coax the archbishop’s irascible cook to feed him out of turn. He took refuge in the library, which had the virtue of quiet, solitude, and a hypocaust which kept it blissfully warm.
Augustine was strong medicine for anything that ailed a man. Richer swam out of the Confessions to stare, blinking, at Gerbert. The archbishop was dressed still for high audience. His face was as white as the silk that lined his cope.
Richer forgot shame, guilt, even Augustine. He leaped up, catching Gerbert as he swayed.
Gerbert shook him off, steadying with an effort that wrenched at Richer’s own body. “I’m not sick,” he said sharply. But his eyes were dark, staring at something far beyond Richer. “I’m — ” He swallowed. This time he let Richer lay hands on him, though he would not sit. “Pope Gregory is dead.”
Richer gaped. He could not say that he grieved. Surprised, yes — he was that. “Dead? So soon? But he was young. He wasn’t even as old as I.” And, belatedly: “God rest his soul.”
Gerbert seemed not to have heard him. “Pope Gregory is dead. I,” he said, “am summoned by my emperor. To Rome. To accept — ” He was breathing like a runner in a race; like a man smitten in the vitals. “To accept election as his successor.”
20.
“I can’t,” said Gerbert. “My lord, I can’t.”
Otto would not hear him. He was all emperor tonight, even in the solitude which Gerbert had begged for and, more or less, received. There was an attendant or three. And Richer, who had not left Gerbert’s side since they left Ravenna.
Richer looked at the Emperor of the Romans and tried to like what he saw. A youth whom an empire had brought early to manhood; a mingling of Greek and Saxon in the shape of his face, the set of his eyes, the reddish fairness of his beard. He pulled at it now and then: for tension, Richer suspected, though his expression was as calm as an icon’s. His hands and his face were thin and pale. Too thin and too pale. Richer’s eyes, trained to see such things, narrowed and sharpened.
“You must,” Otto was saying. “No one else is so perfectly fit for it.”
Gerbert threw up his hands. “Anyone is better fit than I! My lord, can’t you, won’t you see? An archbishopric is one thing. Ravenna can bear it, even knowing what I am: peasant’s brat, Moor’s pupil, master of more arts than any decent Christian should lay claim to. But to take the Chair of Peter...”
“That is exactly why you must take it. Because of what you are. All of it. And because — ” Otto lowered his eyes. It was not humility. “Because I need you.”
There, thought Richer. That would snare him.
He did not go down easily. “You need a young man who can rule your empire with you.”
“I had one,” Otto said. “He died. God took him; God showed me who must take his place. Do you question God’s will?”
Strong medicine, that. Otto had a gift: he managed not to sound mad, or obsessed, or blasphemous. He said it as a simple truth.
He held out his hands to Gerbert and softened his voice. “Magister. I knew what you would say. I tried to think of someone else. I prayed; I fasted. And all it came to was this. You are the one who must be Bishop of Rome. There is no better man for it. There will be none. Only you.” He caught Gerbert’s hands in his own, his face alive now, eager. “Can’t you feel it? Can’t you see what I see? All your life you’ve been preparing for this. Aurillac, Spain, Rheims — Rheims above all. God took it from you to bring you to me; to free you, to set you in the place He made for you.”
Gerbert’s head shook, but he did not try to pull away. “My lord — ”
“Surely you knew. Surely you expected it, when I made you highest but one, of all the bishops in the world.”
“But — to expect—to know that one is old, and one’s pope is young — and then to know — to be — My lord, I can’t!”
“Magister. Believe me. You can.”
Gerbert sank down. He was crying like a child. Richer, appalled, lurched forward. Otto turned on him with cold words and colder magic. “Out. All of you, out.”
He was strong. Richer could not even begin to muster resistance, though he burned and seethed. He was commanded. He obeyed.
&nb
sp; When with a mighty effort he looked back, Otto was holding Gerbert, tender as a mother. But his eyes were steady, fixed on the dark beyond the lamplight, set on this course which his royal will had chosen.
oOo
Gerbert’s storm passed quickly enough, once he had let it have its way. When it was gone he felt light and empty, hollow, almost serene.
He raised his head, drew a breath. Otto watched him in silence. He straightened; what little dignity he had left, he put on. “My lord,” he said. “I’m not afraid that I’m not fit. I’m afraid I am. I want it with all that is in me; I know that I can hold it as well as any man living. And that is why I am afraid.”
He met Otto’s stare. It was dark, still, waiting. “I’ve always been prey to two great sins. The sin of pride, and the sin of despair. This is too high. It’s too far to fall.”
“That,” said Otto, “is why I chose you. You know the price as well as the power. You won’t fall prey to either.”
“No?” Gerbert asked.
“No.” Otto did not move, and yet he took it all in: the palace in which they sat, which he was building still, raw yet with newness, glittering with eastern splendor; the courtiers endowed with titles out of Byzantium; the rituals as intricate as the pope’s high mass, through which they all moved from waking to sleeping, and he most of all, its center and its focus. He took it all in, and he made it as nothing. They were man and man here, master and pupil, friend and friend.
And, if Gerbert accepted this that was gift and burden and terror all at once, equal and equal, high priest and high king.
“I told you the truth,” Otto said. “I need you. Ever since I sent you to Ravenna — ” He rubbed his face. He looked tired to desperation, thinner and whiter than Gerbert had ever seen him, worn with endless labor. “I missed you, magister. I missed you with all my heart. It was like losing half of myself. And the things I did...”
