Ars Magica (6 page)

It was an odd house, this one. From any one place it seemed solid enough, but the longer Gerbert studied in it, the larger and stranger it seemed to be. He would pass rooms that reminded him of others he had seen before, but that were subtly different. Corridors multiplied; doors appeared where he remembered walls, and walls where he could have sworn were doors. And always there were things that he could not quite see. Maryam's servants, which were invisible, but which his bones kept telling him that he could see if he tried. Other things less tangible yet: twinges in his bones, flickers on the edge of vision, nigglings like memories that would not, quite, come clear.

But strangest of all was that he knew no fear. He had never had night terrors as other people did: even as a little child he loved the dark, and took delight in what it showed him. Yet here, in this place half out of the world, he should have been stark with terror, and he knew it; and he was only fascinated.

Fear was something that he saved for the great matters. Learning. Loving. Wanting.

He found Master Ibrahim by the prickling of his nape, by the shifting of a shadow, by a whisper in the air. The magus sat in a room gone dim with evening, lamplit and quiet. He wore his wonted black, but he had laid aside his turban. A cap covered his shaven skull; a jewel glowed in his ear, a moonstone waxing with its mistress the moon.

Gerbert bowed as had become his custom, and sat at the mage's feet. He had learned not to speak until Ibrahim gave him leave. He was allowed to fidget, judiciously.

Tonight he was not moved to. His head was full to bursting with names; he was tired. He did not know if, after all, he wanted to see magic. Had he not seen it already, just in coming here?

Effects only, Hatto would have said. Of causes he had seen nothing.

What use, if he could not do it himself?

He swallowed a yawn. Ibrahim seemed lost in contemplation. The lamp flickered. It globed them both in light; it made all the world without, a featureless darkness.

Gerbert did not know why he moved. He wanted to, that was all. He reached, and the light was in his hands. It was cool, like fishes' breath. It rested pulsing in his palms. There was something that one could do with it, could will, could wish...

It quivered and went out.

Ibrahim's voice came soft in the darkness. “Bring it back.”

“But I don't — ” Gerbert broke off, began again. “I don't know how.”

I can name every one of the Jinn,
he wanted to say.
I can recite the rolls of all the orders of angels. You never taught me to make a light that sleeps in my hands.

He did not say it. “You know how,” said Ibrahim.

How? With names? None of them seemed to fit, except for Lucifer, and Gerbert was not minded to invoke that one. Not quite yet.

With will? He strained until the sweat broke out on his brow. He willed until his ears buzzed and his eyes went dark. Nothing.

With words? Which ones? They ran through his head, all tangled, all useless.

He slumped, exhausted, growing angry. This was all nonsense, all of it. “
Fiat
,” he said, “damn it.
Fiat lux
.”

Inside him, something shifted. Something swelled; something bloomed. He stared dumbfounded at his fingertips. To every one clung a spark of light.

The moment he thought about them, they flickered. He pulled his mind away from them, and they flared up. They coalesced; they settled, round and cool and blinding-bright, in his trembling palm.

Master Ibrahim's smile gleamed out of the night. Gerbert blinked at him, half dazzled, half bewildered. “Was that an incantation?”

Ibrahim laughed. “Hardly! And yet it served its purpose. Now do you see?”

“I see...” Gerbert found that he could close his fingers about the light, and it would shrink; then it would swell again, if he not quite willed it to. It was delicately improbable, like walking a tightrope with an egg balanced on one's nose. “But if this is what it is, what are all the rites and rituals?”

“Guides,” the magus answered. “Protections. Defenses against the ignorant.”

Gerbert's head had begun to ache. The light pulsed. It wanted to float free. He did not want to know what it would do if it escaped. He willed it to go out.

It only swelled larger.

His brows knit. “Words and will are simple. This is hard.”

“It is,” said Ibrahim.

Gerbert glared at the magic he had made. It had grown again. The ache in his head was fiercer. He had lost the way of it; he could not do it.

Half out of temper, half out of despair, he willed it to grow larger still. It quivered and sighed and dwindled to nothing.

Somehow Gerbert had lain down on the carpet. Perhaps he had fallen over. He was not interested, much. “I know children like that,” he said. “Contrary.”

“It is a child,” said Ibrahim, “but it will grow.” He seemed pleased; God knew why. He cradled Gerbert's head with serene and physicianly competence, and poured into him something cool and bitter-sweet.

Gerbert was too far gone to be wary. He merely blinked at the magus and tried to decide whether he liked the taste. He thought that perhaps he did.

“Here is the secret,” Ibrahim said, “and the price. Magic is not wrought without consequence. The greater the working, the greater the cost.”

“This was great?”

“For you, yes. Were letters easy, when first you learned them?”

“Arabic isn't,” Gerbert muttered.

“Surely,” said Ibrahim. “Now, sleep, and be content. You have power; you have it in you to master it. I shall take joy in teaching you.”

You haven't till now?
Gerbert would have asked. But his body was far away, and sleep was near, and sweet. He fell into its arms.

5.

There was more to it than that, of course. If Gerbert had not been aware of it, Maryam would have been sure to remind him. Having proven her fitness as a trial to his soul, she advanced to an eminence even more alarming: that of his teacher.

She was skilled, he had to grant her that. She could madden him as no one else could, and goad him into succeeding in spite of both of them. Sometimes he would happily have killed her. Others...

He could talk to her. She knew less of the Quadrivium than he had thought she did; oddly enough, he was not too strongly tempted to gloat over it. Somehow and another, he found himself exchanging lessons with her. Arts for the Art. There was a certain symmetry in that.

Sometimes he wondered at the magus' willingness to leave him alone with her. Even in Gaul, young women were not entrusted to the mercies of very young men, even monks who wanted to be priests. In Spain, in a Muslim house, it was unheard of.

There were the unseen servants, to be sure. And he was not tempted. Much. Even after he had decided that while she was not pretty at all, she was beautiful. Much too beautiful for the likes of him, like the Shulamite of that great Song which might have been written for her:
I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem....

When he was a little foolish with lateness and hunger and too-long working, he had sung it to her. Not all of it. Even the little had made him blush. She had saved him with laughter and a bowl of lamb in spices, and with not saying what they both knew very well. She was not for him.

Friendship was enough. They had that, slow though he was to comprehend it. When he was not fretting over being young and male and sworn to vows which he had never meant to break, he knew how precious rare it was.

oOo

It was there in the center of his thought, as they sat in the garden in the still and dreaming heat of noon. She had conjured a breeze to cool them; he had been sensible and laid aside his habit for a light Moorish robe. The back of his mind, and his magic with it, labored to coax a rose to bloom on a bare branch. The rose was recalcitrant, but he had raised an impressive crop of thorns.

Frustration crouched at bay as he watched Maryam. She measured the sun's angle with a stick and a string, recording it at intervals of the water clock which Gerbert had made as a gift to her father. In between, for an hour and more, she had been reckoning with numbers. She was good at that, as with everything; she liked the way they yielded to her will, much swifter and smoother than magic, with no price to pay after.

The blooming of magic in his mind's core was familiar now, if never taken for granted. Gerbert, always a little startled by what he had made, regarded the rose in rather more surprise than usual. It was indubitably a rose, a bud just unfolded, velvet-petaled, sweet-scented, perfect. But he had never seen a rose so dark. Its color made him think of darkest wine. Its center was deep and wondrous gold.

“It's beautiful,” said Maryam.

“It's you.” He blushed. “I meant — I —
 
It's not controlled.”

“True,” she said. “You can't let the magic wield you. If you should invoke a spirit of fire, and end with a succubus...”

“I suppose you have never made a mistake in your life,” he snapped.

“I may have made a few,” she said. “On occasion. Here and there.” She went somber suddenly, so suddenly that she startled him. “Once, badly. Very...very badly. So badly that I almost killed my magic, and myself, and anything else that touched me.”

He would never have spoken if he had been thinking. But he was off guard, and she hurt — hurt more than he could bear to see. “Tell me,” he said.

She did not move, and he knew that she would not speak. His will, rousing too late, was glad. Then she said, almost too soft to hear, “I was doing what I should never have done. I witched the lock of the chest in the library. I took out the books my father had never let me see, except once, when he told me what each was: which of them I could read, and which must wait.”

Gerbert knew. Ibrahim had done the same with him.

“I only wanted to look at them,” she said. “Not to use them, or even to read them beyond a glimpse or two. I was curious, that was all. I knew I wasn't ready for them; I thought that that would protect me. I thought then, you see, that magic was mostly words — even though I had seen that it was more. I couldn't read Latin, either, beyond a word or two; what I could read, I couldn't understand, and therefore I thought it couldn't harm me.

“But magic is more than words, and the magic was awake in me, wanting to grow. It made me do what I did. And I let it. I let it wield me. I didn't know the words that passed my eyes, but the magic didn't need me to know. It only needed the words.

“Magic is like a horse. It has a mind of its own, and a will to act, and strength beyond anything human. But, like a horse, it needs the restraint of a human will. A trained human will. I was like a child on its father's warhorse. It carried me, but only where it chose. And when I touched it with the spur, it ran wild.

“I don't know exactly what it was that I did, or worked, or summoned. My memory seared itself away, and my father will never tell me. But when I came to myself, I was barely alive, and my — my mother was gone.”

She was dry-eyed, telling it, but that tearlessness bared grief more terrible than any weeping. “She had come in in the midst of it. She was a master of the Art, older than my father, and stronger, but weakened then with carrying what would have been my brother. It had been a hard bearing, and all my father's arts, together with her own, had hardly been enough to keep her from losing the baby. But they were winning the fight; she was a month from her time, and he was thriving, and she was even able to walk about a little, with help, if she was careful.

“She was in the garden when she knew what I had done. She ran — she
ran
to the library. She raised her power to defend me. But there was my brother, who needed defending even more than I; and she was weak, and there was the law of magic which knows no breaking. The working killed her. My brother... lived a little while. Not long; and that was merciful. The magic had done something to him. He wasn't human. He wasn't anything that should live in this world.”

Gerbert found that he was holding her, rocking her as if she were a child still. He wished that she would weep. It was not good for her, this tearless stillness.

She pulled away from him with sudden, painful force. “I know what you're thinking. You think I'm horrible. Because I went on. Because I killed two people, and one an unborn baby, and after I had done it, I didn't cast off the magic that had done it.”

“How could you?”

She stared. He had surprised her.

“I suppose,” he said, “that if the magic is there, but one doesn't know it, or hasn't awakened it, one can cast it off. Or never acknowledge it at all. I tried. I succeeded, for a remarkable while. But once it's awake, there's no denying it. You can only learn to master it. Worse by far if you had tried to kill it, and failed, and it had devoured you.”

“It can be killed. There is away. Like cautery: burning it out.”

“And what would have been left of you after?”