Ars Magica (24 page)

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 It had left enough of itself in Gerbert to gain a hold on mortal being; and the Jinniyah and the emperor had withdrawn their power before the spirit was all cast out.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.

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.