Tales of the Old World (105 page)

“I intend to explain, magister,” said the young man, quietly, “and I beg you
to forgive my clumsiness in going about it. You will remember, I am sure, that I
was not the best of students. I was, after all, one of those sent by a
pretentious father to acquire the merest veneer of culture and learning, not one
intended to learn the skills of a scrivener or the training of a priest. I was
something of a noble fool in my early days, and although Magister Chazal taught
me in the end to be less of a fool than I was, still my wisdom is of a very
narrow kind. Let me tell you my story in my own way, so that we may mourn
together the passing of a great and generous man.”

Kalispera had to admit that this was a pretty speech, and he believed that he
could hear within its phrases the influence of his friend Lanfranc Chazal. But
there was another thought echoing its derision inside his head:
Who mourns a
necromancer?

Could it be, he wondered, that the world had been right after all, and he the
lone fool?

“I am sorry, my lord,” he said, however, with honest but troubled humility.
“Please say what you have come to say. I will listen patiently.”

“Thank you, sir,” Cesar Barbier said, relaxing again in his turn. He paused
for a moment, collecting his thoughts, and then he proceeded to tell his
story.

“You know my name,” Barbier began, “and I assume that you know whose son I
am. Perhaps you remember my father from his own student days, when I am sure he
impressed you with his command of those aristocratic virtues befitting a man
whose service to our king has been of the military kind. He is now as he
undoubtedly was then: bold in word and deed, with a will and stomach of iron.
Neither wine nor passion has the power to disturb his firmness of mind, and I
dare say that you found his head quite impregnable to wisdom or sophistication.

“When I first became a student here I set out to do my best to be like my
father, and I think that for a while I succeeded well enough to convince almost
everyone that I was a perfect example of that kind, save only for Magister
Chazal. He saw through my facade of reckless intolerance to the, well, the
gentler soul within. He knew what a creature of dishonesty I was, and helped me
to use my years here to become a better man.

“In public he never gave evidence by word or gesture that he knew what a
poseur I was, but in private he talked to me in a different way. He taught me to
trust him, and be honest in what I said to him. With him and him alone I was my
true self: full of doubt, full of passion and tender of sentiment—all traits
which my father despised, and despises still. Magister Chazal never advised me
to break down my public pretence, but was content to give me an opportunity to
lay it aside. I cannot tell you how much it meant to me to have that relief.

“When the time came for me to leave Gisoreux and take up the business of
accepting the responsibilities of my position, I quickly began to use the gift
of lettering—which was one of the valuable things which I had learned within
these walls—in the writing of letters to Magister Chazal. I was his guest here
in Gisoreux on numerous occasions. He was the one and only person to whom I
confided my true feelings, and by degrees I won his confidence too, so that he
began to say to me those things which he dared not say to people of his own
kind.

“It was from Magister Chazal that I learned about your beliefs, Magister
Kalispera. He told me that you had drawn conclusions about the nature of disease
which were, if not openly heretical, at least unorthodox. He told me about your
sceptical attitude to the medicines and treatments established by custom. He
told me too about your insistence that disease and suffering make no
discrimination between the guilty and the innocent, and are far less often the
result of magic or divine intervention than we are prone to believe. He
respected you for holding those beliefs, and for setting what you believed to be
the truth over the advantages to be gained by conformity. He thought that you
might respect his own opinions, but hesitated to burden you with anymore
unorthodoxy than you had already accepted.”

Alpheus Kalispera had begun to see where this account was leading, but he
kept silent while Barbier paused, and looked at him very gravely.

“It is the common belief,” the younger man continued, “that any magic but the
pettiest is inherently good or evil. Any magic which involves trafficking with
the dead or the undead is held to be supremely wicked. Magister Chazal was
prepared to doubt that. His view was that although any knowledge might be used
for evil ends by evil men, knowledge as such is always good. Ignorance, he used
to say, is the greatest evil of all.”

Kalispera nodded his head then, for he had certainly heard Chazal say that on
many an occasion.

“For that reason,” Barbier went on, “Magister Chazal had studied the arcane
language of necromancy and had read books written in that language. His
intention in so doing was not to become a master of necromantic magic, but to
learn more about the mysteries of death—to enhance his understanding. He was
not a man to play with the conjuration of ghosts or the reanimation of corpses;
for him, the written word was enough. He valued enlightenment far more than
power.

“The story of these researches he confided to me by degrees, over a period of
more than a year. In return, I talked to him about my own very different
problems, which arose from friction between myself and my father as to the
managements of our estates and our lives.

“I found myself in disagreement with my father on many matters of principle—on the matter of the unhappiness which he caused my mother and my sisters, for
instance, and on the matter of the relentless tyranny which he exerted over his
tenants and his bondsmen. But I could not successfully oppose him because I was
still forced by convention and circumstance to pretend to be like him. I had
begun to hate my father, and in so doing had begun to hate myself too, for being
so obviously his son.

“Then, quite out of the blue, disaster struck me. I fell in love.

“Love was not a factor in my father’s calculations of advantage, and he had
already contracted marriages for my two sisters on the basis of his commercial
interests. It would have been bad enough had I fallen in love with a woman of my
own class, had it not been the one which he considered most useful to the family
interest, but in fact I fell in love with a commoner, who was very beautiful but
of no account whatsoever in my father’s scheme of things.

“To my father, the very idea of love is bizarre. He has not an atom of
affection in his being. I, by virtue of some silly jest of the gods who
determine such things, am very differently made, and my honest passion for the
girl—whose name was Siri—was quite boundless. I could not envision life
without her, and life itself came to depend in my estimation upon my possession
of her. By possession I do not mean mere physical possession—my father would
have raised no word of objection had I been able simply to rape and then discard
the girl—but authentic union. That, of course, my father would never tolerate,
and yet it was what I had to have.

“When I said all this to Magister Chazal, he did not presume to tell me what
to do, but he gave me every assistance in dissolving my confusion and seeing
clearly what kind of choice I had to make. He helped me to understand that the
time had come when I must either break completely with my father or utterly
destroy the secret self which I had so carefully preserved for many years. I
could not cut out and burn my own heart. And so I eloped and married Siri in
secret, resolving never to see my father again.

“I anticipated that my father would disown me and forbid my name ever to be
mentioned again in his house or his estates. That was what I expected, and was
prepared to accept. But I had underestimated him. Perhaps it would have been
different had he had another heir to put in my place, but I had no brother and
nor had he. He could not face the thought of allowing his lands and his titles
to become subservient to another name in being diverted to one of my sisters.

“He sent his servants to search me out, and then to bring me home by force,
my… my young wife with me.”

Cesar Barbier paused again in his account—but not, this time, to measure
the attitude of his listener. Until now he had been quite calm and very
scrupulous in his speech, as befitted a nobleman of Bretonnia, but now his
breathing was clotted by emotion, and there were tears in his eyes: tears of
anguish, and of rage.

When it seemed that the young noble could not go on, Alpheus Kalispera said,
very quietly: “He had her killed?”

“Had her killed?” answered Barbier, as though the words had been forced out
of him with a hot iron. “Oh no, he did not have her killed! You do not know what
manner of man my father is! He killed her with his own hands, while his servants
forced me to watch.

“He destroyed her, and the unborn child she carried within her, without any
trace of feeling—not because he hated her, but simply because she stood in the
way of his calculations. He felt no guilt, nor any fear of retribution. Had she
killed him it would have been a fearful crime, for which she would have been
burned alive as a petty traitor, but for him to kill her was merely a matter of
business, for her father was his bondsman, and she an item of inconvenient
property. I saw her die, Magister Kalispera—I saw her
die!”

Kalispera did not know what to say. He could not imagine that Lanfranc Chazal
had known what to say, when the poor man had run to him with the same dreadful
tale, four or five years earlier.

“I wanted to kill him,” Cesar Barbier said, when he was capable of continuing
his tale. “And the folly of it all is that if I had been what he wanted me to
be, I would have killed him. With a sword or a cudgel or a poisoned cup I would
have snuffed out his vile existence, and sent our title to oblivion by
surrendering myself to the law and going gladly to the gallows. If his way had
been the right way, I would have taken my revenge, and happily so.

“Perhaps I would have done it, had it not been for Magister Chazal—for he it
was who persuaded me that I must not waste my own being in destroying my
father’s, on the two accounts that it would be both futile and false to my own
true nature. He implored me to find a better way—and in my turn, I implored
him to show me one.”

Kalispera drew in his breath, deeply and painfully. It was all too obvious to
him what the result of this mutual imploring must have been. Barbier saw that he
had guessed.

“Would you tell me that it was unlawful?” said the young man angrily. “Would
you tell me that it was lawful and just for my father to murder my wife and
unborn child because they did not suit him, and a horrid crime to undo the act,
as far it could be undone? Will you tell me that Magister Chazal was evil, and
my father’s soul quite stainless? Tell me then, Magister Kalispera. Tell me, in
so many words, where the right of it lies.”

Kalispera shook his head. The darkness in the corners of the room seemed to
close in around them. “Tell me,” he countered in a steely voice, “what it was
that Lanfranc did, and what its consequence has been.”

“I had not dared to bring the body of my wife into the precincts of the
university,” Barbier said, “nor even through the gates of Gisoreux. I had taken
her instead to the house in Rondeau which I had bought, intending that we should
live there when we returned from the Empire—for we did not expect to spend our
whole lives in exile from our homeland. Magister Chazal accompanied me there and
begun his work.

“He had told me that he could not bring my Siri back to life, for if such a
thing could be done at all it was beyond his skill. He could not restore her
flesh to me, but her spirit was a different matter; he believed that he had
knowledge enough to bring back her ghost from the realm of the dead, and protect
it from the dissolution which ordinarily overtakes such beings.

“Spectres, he told me, are often bound to our world in consequence of curses,
doomed to haunt the spot where they died. What he intended to do was to summon
Siri as a ghost, and ask her whether she would be bound of her own free will,
not to the place where she had died but to the place where she had hoped to
live. If she consented, he said, then he would try to bind her to the house in
Rondeau.

“He was not sure that he had knowledge enough to accomplish more, but he
promised that he would try firstly to give her a voice that she might speak to
me, and secondly to allow her to take on at intervals a certain frail substance
which would allow us to touch. For this latter purpose he required to combine
together something of her substance and something of mine, and I allowed him to
remove from my left hand that finger upon which I had placed my wedding ring.”

Barbier held up his left hand, and Kalispera saw for the first time that the
finger next to the smallest had been neatly cut away.

“He bound that finger to hers before we laid her in a tomb beneath the
house,” continued Barbier, his voice hushed. “And he used my blood to write the
symbols which he used in his conjuration. When I first saw her ghost I was
overtaken by such a terror that I nearly cried out to him to stop, to send her
back where she belonged, but I bit my tongue. And when he asked her whether she
would rather go to her appointed place, or be bound to this world with me, I
felt a tremendous surge of joy which overwhelmed my terror on the instant—for
her answer was yes.

“Her answer was
yes.

“I could not tell what powers Magister Chazal drew upon in order to complete
what he had begun. I know that he sacrificed more than I, for I only lost a
finger and a little blood, while he seemed to draw upon his own inner life and
strength in such a way as to leave them forever depleted.