Ars Magica (5 page)

Gerbert nodded. “Master Ibrahim was hospitable.”

Hatto's eyes sharpened. “Indeed. You were gone for a very long time. Did you find one another congenial, then?”

“No!” It came out as a yelp. Gerbert drew a deep breath. “No, my lord. Not — not exactly.” Hatto said nothing. Gerbert could not meet his eyes. He scowled at his sandaled feet. “My lord, he horrified me. What he is, what he does...it was too much for me.”

“Therefore you fled him.”

“Yes, my lord,” said Gerbert, though it hurt to say it. He stiffened his spine, dragged up his eyes, put on courage that felt rather too much like defiance. “But I went back. I fetched Pythagoras. I — talked to Master Ibrahim.”

“To good purpose, I trust.”

Hatto's face was as cryptic as a page of Arabic. “We talked about magic, my lord,” said Gerbert. He paused, and let it all go at once. “He wants to teach me. I want to learn. It frightens me, how much I want it.”

“Yet still you want it.”

“I can't help it, my lord.”

“No,” said Hatto. “I suppose you cannot.” He considered his laced fingers, turning them until the amethyst of his ring caught the light and flamed. “What would you do if I forbade you?”

Gerbert was braced for that. He answered steadily, “I would tell you what I tell you now: that I must learn, and that I will learn. No one has ever been able to stop me.”

“That is arrogant.”

Gerbert bowed his head. “Yes, my lord.”

“Honest,” said Hatto, “as always. Has it occurred to you that you could deceive me and do as you will, with none the wiser?”

“I'm a terrible liar, my lord,” Gerbert said.

Hatto laughed, startling him. “You may never be a saint, Brother, but neither will you please the Lord of Lies. What would you do if I gave you leave to study magic under Ibrahim the Moor?”

It was a jest, it must be; or a test. Gerbert found that he was frowning. It was not his place to rebuke his master, but his brow would not smooth for prudence. “My lord, if indeed you gave me leave, I would thank you with all my heart, and wonder what Mother Church would say to both of us.”

“Mother Church,” said Hatto, crossing himself with honest devotion, “has no firm law against the high white Art. I know what it is, and I say that it is dangerous, but I believe that you are one whom God has given the capacity to master it.”

“You know? You've known all along?” Gerbert said it almost before he thought it. “You said to Abbot Gerald, ‘I would teach him whatever wisdom Spain may have to offer.' You didn't mean only numbers. You meant this.”

“Yes,” Hatto said.

“It was all a test and a trap. You tried me in your arts, to see if I had the wits to master another Art altogether. You sent me to the magus — knowing — ” Gerbert choked into silence.

Hatto's voice was quiet, almost gentle. “I did. But I never bound you with compulsion. I left you free to choose, if you could perceive that there was a choice. I leave you free now. You may go back to Aurillac without constraint, and with my goodwill.”

Gerbert shook his head. “I'm not free. I can't choose that, not now. And you know it.”

“No,” Hatto said, “I do not know it. You thought that you came here to learn numbers. You have learned enough of them to find your way through the rest. Magic was no part of it, nor need it be. Unless you choose.”

“I have chosen. As you knew I would.”

“As I hoped.”

“Why?” Gerbert demanded. “You're no magus. Even I can see that. Why do you offer me up like a sacrifice?”

“I have no art, but I have eyes. A magus gave them to me. They see what is there to see.”

Gerbert stared at his hands. Square hands, clever-fingered, as able with hoe or adze as with the pen, but no good at all with a sword: a peasant's hands, or an artisan's. The body beyond them was nothing to notice, neither tall nor short, neither broad nor narrow, neither weak nor exceptionally strong, simply there. He looked like what he was. A poor freeman's son in the black habit of Saint Benedict's Rule. Mages —
 
“Mages look like Master Ibrahim.”

“Mages look like anything at all. Do you judge a child's intelligence by the prettiness of his face?”

“But I don't look like anything,” said Gerbert.

“You look like yourself. To these eyes, as I see you now, a very presentable young monk, somewhat pinched with petulance. And a white light that is your spirit, that names you seeker and scholar and, if you have the strength, magus.”

Gerbert looked at him and thought that, perhaps, he understood. It had been the same with Brother Raymond. The master could see what the pupil was; could guide him, even if he went where the master could not follow.

Brother Raymond would never have expected it to end in this. “Then you give me leave? I'm to study the Art? And the Quadrivium, too — you won't take that away from me?”

“Certainly not,” said Hatto. “The Art and the arts belong together. You will have both.”

“From both of you.”

“If your excellency will permit.”

Gerbert looked down, abashed. He had been getting well above himself. Now, much too late, he remembered who he was, and who Hatto was. Hot shame burned at all he had said to his lord and teacher.

“Humility can be overdone,” said Hatto, “but a modicum thereof has been known to be useful. Remember that, Brother.” His words were stern, but then he smiled. “Or at least, remember what tact is. You'll need it if you're to deal with mages.”

“I'll try, my lord,” Gerbert said.

“Do that. Now, sir: shall we see to the singing of vespers?”

4.

Gerbert had cause to remember humility. Or perhaps the bishop had meant humiliation.

The Quadrivium had its difficulties, but those were never too great for Gerbert's wits. They were quick, quicker than anyone's, and he never tried to deny it. But they were of little use in mastering magic.

Spells, yes. Even spells in languages dead since before the Flood. Letters, words, rituals — his mind drank them all and found them sweet. Yet they were only trappings.

“Magic is deeper than words,” Ibrahim told him. “Magic goes down to the heart of things. Reason and logic help to define it, but beneath reason and logic, magic is. Your mind must learn it all, names, spells, powers, workings of will in heaven and earth. Then it must forget them. Only by forgetting may it master them.”

oOo

“That is nonsense!”

Ibrahim had set Gerbert to work recording and remembering the names of the Jinn under the earth and the Afarit of the air, and gone away on business of his own. He often did that. It was a method of his: giving the pupil free rein, he called it. He simply pointed Gerbert to his library, set him a task, and left him to it.

He had a library. Oh, indeed. In Gaul the word could encompass half a dozen books in a locked chest in an abbey's closet. This was wealth unimaginable: a whole room fun of books. Gerbert had been set to count them once, and to mark the resting place of each. There were a hundred and forty-four. Not all or even most were books of magic — those were locked in the chest in the corner, under the seal of Solomon woven in a rug worth nigh as much as the books themselves. The rest lay on shelves built to their measure, and there were wonders among them. When Gerbert had fulfilled his task to his master's satisfaction, his reward was to read whatever he liked. He was limited, in that he knew no Greek and little Arabic, and barely enough Hebrew to pick his way through the names of the archangels. But there was Latin enough to last a while, and some of the others were beautiful with gold and jewel-colors.

Gerbert's outburst found him in the midst of this, hunched over a table laden with books and scrolls, cramping hand and eye and mind with a name of the utmost unpronounceability.

“What use is it?” he cried to the air. “Why bother to learn it at all, if my only purpose is to forget it?”

He received an answer, soft and much amused. “Not to forget, except with the consciousness. Your bones will remember.”

Now there was another thorn in his side. The lady of the gate was not Ibrahim's sister, she was his daughter. She was younger than Gerbert, and not only could she read all the languages which he had barely begun, she was well advanced in study of the Art itself.

It was not that he had any illusions about feminine fragility, of body or of mind. He did not even mind that she was infidel as well as learned. What he could not bear was that she was better at it than he.

She never tried to deny it. “I began younger,” she once, “and I grew up with it. And I have a talent for it.”

More than he. And much more patience. She could sit for hours, reckoning every characteristic of every herb ever deemed useful for either magic or medicine, and never do more than frown with the tedium.

“Discipline,” she said. And if she wanted to drive him wild: “Women are better at that. Especially young ones. Their humours aren't always in a roil, pricking at them to run about and kill one another.”

Discipline, he had responded icily, did not preclude impertinence. Maryam only laughed.

She had decided that he was family: she no longer wore her veil in front of him. She was not hideous, but neither was she pretty. She was too foreign; too much like her father. Of her mother she never spoke. There was a sadness there, and perhaps a smolder of anger.

Now he saw none of that, only her wickedly solemn expression as she sat across the table and opened a book. He could not see which it was. “I know what you want,” she said. “You want to cast off all your drudgery and work an honest spell.”

That was true, but it was none of her affair. He scowled at her. “Even I know that it never does to be hasty in a high art. When I'm ready to work magic, I'll be allowed to work it.”

“But you would give your heart's blood to see a little of it before that.”

“So I'd like to see a working or two. Is that a sin?”

She shrugged. “I wouldn't know. I'm not a Christian.”

“Have you worked magic?” he demanded.

“Of course,” she said.

She was baiting him. He breathed deep, twice, and resolved not to succumb. Grimly he turned back to his crabbed and illegible scroll, seeking out the next name in the sequence. It kept blurring in front of his eyes. He kept hearing Ibrahim's voice. “To name a spirit is to master it. Yet have a care that your strength suffice for the mastery, or the spirit will suborn you, and win back its name, and exact due punishment for your temerity.”

To name a spirit is to master it.

There was more to it than that. Rites, rituals. Invocations of power. Gerbert was ready for none of them.

He looked up under his brows. Maryam was deep in her book. “What kind of magics have you done?”

She did not start, which meant that she had been waiting for him to ask. He was learning to read her; he was mildly proud of that. “Magics,” she said, nonchalant. “The servants are mine.” The soundless, bodiless hands that labored in the house, on occasion, when it suited them. “And the garden, how it flourishes. We have roses in winter.”

“That's simple,” Gerbert said. “One grows them under glass.”

He had pricked her, though she barely showed it. “I made the glass. I persuade the roses to grow.”

“The sun can do that,” said Gerbert.

“You are mocking me,” she said, but her coolness had heat under it. “Is that why you're here and not in Frankland? Did you drive them to distraction, until they drove you out?”

“Not unless they did the same to me.”

“Ah,” she said. “Blame them for your own shortcomings. You'll hardly make a mage while you persist in that.”

He set his teeth on the hot words. This was Master Ibrahim's doing, he had begun to suspect: setting this needle-tongued minx on him, to see if he would crack.

To name a thing is to master it.

He actually smiled as he went back to his drudgery.

“Would you like to see magic?”

His smile shriveled and died. He had all he could do not to throw his book at her head. “Yes, I'd like to see magic. No, I'm not going to steal a glimpse before I'm ready! Will you go away, or do I have to chase you?”

“What if I say you're ready?”

“I'd say you were mocking me.”

“So I would be,” she said. “But Father says you are. He says to come when you finish here.”

Gerbert gaped. Then he growled. Then he threw the book, but not at her head.

oOo

He had his own kind of temper. He finished as he was commanded, and he did not count the hours. Then and only then would he go to find his master.

Maryam was long gone. Even she could not stand against the perfection of peasant obstinacy.