Ars Magica

Judith Tarr

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Chapter 1

To Varda and Chris

as a gift:

A little something that I made myself

Acknowledgments

To Professor Jaroslav R. Pelikan, who, in the course of a seminar on the medieval papacy, suggested that Pope Sylvester II and I might find one another congenial;

to Brother Richer of St.-Rémi, for the history;

to William of Malmesbury, for the legend,

and to Gerbert himself, for the letters which so clearly reveal the man–

with a bow to all the friends and associates who put up with me during the writing of this novel.

Acknowledgments for the New Edition, 2010:

To Gwyndyn and Michael, again, without whom this edition could not have existed, and to my fellow habituées of the Book View Café, where the coffee is always on, the entertainment is often free, and the spirit of cooperation never fades.

oOo

The night is far spent, the day is at hand; let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light.

-ROMANS 13:12

PROLOGUE

Aurillac, A.D. 965

The monks’ chanting had long since faded into silence. There was only wind keening about the stones of the tower, and the mighty stillness of the stars. But in that stillness, if one had ears to hear, was a thin high singing.

Gerbert shivered without noticing that he did it. That was only his body. His mind was afire. “But don’t you see? It rises in the east. It travels up the sky. Then it turns and retraces its steps. Then it turns again and goes on as before.”

“Wherefore,” intoned his companion, “planetes, as the Greeks would say: ‘wanderer’.”

“Of course it wanders!” Gerbert stopped short. Brother Raymond was laughing at him, and not trying to hide it. “You are hardly dignified,” he said severely, “magister.”

His teacher grinned and stretched. “Dignity is for overaweing farmers’ sons when they fidget over their grammar. Not for perching on towers at high midnight, when God and the abbot know we should be sensibly asleep.”

“What’s more sensible than astronomy?” Gerbert dropped back on the tiles and filled his eyes with stars. “If I could just show people how it works ... if they could feel with their own hands, see how it all moves, how it sings...”

“That’s heretical,” said Raymond.

This time Gerbert did not fall into the the trap. Not quite. “Theory is excellent in its place. But it’s practice that one remembers. You taught me that.”

“It was born in you. I merely let it grow.”

There was a silence, with music in it. No one else admitted to hearing it; and yet it was there. Gerbert knew that, as he knew that he was Gerbert. Brother Gerbert of the abbey of St.-Géraud in Aurillac, in the county of the Auvergne, in the duchy of Aquitaine, in the kingdom of the Franks, in the faded and crumbling Empire of the West, in this world that God had made.

He lay on his back atop Saint Gerald’s tower and opened his arms to the sky. “I want ...” he said. “I want to know. There is so much–so much–”

“I’ve taught you all I know,” said Raymond.

Gerbert sat up so quickly that his head spun. “Brother! I didn’t mean–”

“You didn’t,” Raymond agreed,serene “You’ll fly higher than I. I’m but a master of grammar. You’ll be ...who knows what? Anything you want to be.”

“I want to matter.” Gerbert paused. Suddenly he laughed. “Listen to me! Abbot Gerald’s charity, Richard the farmer’s youngest cub, the one who was born asking questions. There’s wool in my head and earth between my toes, and never a drop of noble blood to excuse my arrogance.”

“There’s this,” said Raymond, rapping Gerbert’s tonsured crown. “This sets you level with kings: this, and what is under it. Never forget that. Nor ever forget that it also sets you level with slaves. There is only one nobility where we are, and that is twofold: of God and of the mind.”

“Therefore you are my master, because you stand before me on all my paths.”

“Except astronomy.”

Gerbert drew breath to argue. He could see Brother Raymond’s face in the bright starlight, round and comfortable, much less apt for dignity than for sudden laughter. The laughter was winning now.

“Look!” said Raymond suddenly, his mirth melting into wonder. “A shooting star. And out of the eye of the Eagle. That’s an omen.”

This time Gerbert knew that he shivered. For me, he thought, but did not say. Another star fell as he stared, and another, and another: a shower of stars. The great music quivered with the power of it.

In that quivering came a new note, a thrill as of laughter, a thrumming that was not quite discord. It was alien, inhuman, yet perfectly a part of night and sky and stars.

They came out of the north, riding up the arch of the sky, singing in high sweet voices, laughing, gathering and scattering and gathering again in a whirling, skyborne dance. Some rode mounts of air and darkness. Some flew on wings of light. Their beauty smote Gerbert’s heart.

Raymond murmured beside him, words of shock and of sanctity. The shock came late to Gerbert, and then unwillingly. That wild beauty, that music that was all of earth and nothing of Christian man, was the child of old night: the witches in their Sabbat, worshiping their black Master in starlight and in wickedness.

They were all naked. They had no shame. The women–not all of them were young, not all were good to look at, and yet they were splendid in their magic. They swooped laughing over the huddled darkness that was Saint Gerald’s abbey; they circled the tower–Gerbert shuddered deep, and told himself that it was horror–thrice, widdershins, chanting in no tongue he knew. Their power hummed in his bones.

Brother Raymond lay flat on the tiles, cowl pulled over his head, gasping out fragments of psalms.

Gerbert could have. He could have done anything he willed to do. He crossed himself, to prove it. The witches swept in closer. Their eyes were burning bright. They called to him. “Come, brother. Come! Cast off your chains and fly with us!” 

He was on his feet, with no memory of movement. His habit was like iron, binding him to the earth. His body in it was air and fire.

One of the witches came down close enough to touch. She was young; her body was full and sweet; her hair was bronze, her wings were gold. She did not speak. She beckoned; she smiled.

Gerbert’s hands were on his habit. The magic was wild in him. His shoulders itched wondrously where wings strained to swell and bloom.

“I want,” his tongue said, clumsy now, with his mind all fixed on that lovely, laughing face. “I want to know.

“To know.” His hands dropped to his sides. The itch in his shoulders turned to pain. “Not simply to be, and to be wild. To know.” He met the witch’s eyes. They burned. He did not flinch. He spoke quite calmly, though his heart thudded under the coarse black habit. “Your way is never mine.”

Her hand stretched. Almost, almost, she touched him. Almost he swayed into that touch.

“No,” he said. It was the hardest thing he had ever done.

Be with us, the witches sang. Be.

“No,” he said again. Again he signed himself with the cross. Not for any power it might wield against them. For its power over himself. He could all but see the chains it wrought, that bound him more tightly than ever to robe and vows and cloister. They were too strong for any witch to break. Even for the one who lingered though the rest had abandoned him to his idiocy; who yearned still, who dared to hope that he would yield.

He turned his back on her. He knelt; he clasped his cold and shaking hands. He began, painfully, to pray.

He would not, dared not look back. And yet he knew when she surrendered, when she turned from him and fled to the company of her kind. Once he had seen an arrow torn out of a man’s side. It was like that: a rending from the heart of him.

He should have been glad of his victory. But all that was in him was pain. 

Part One

THE NOVICE

Barcelona, A.D. 967

1.

Bishop Hatto surveyed his newest acquisition with a critical eye. The acquisition stood straight and resisted the urge to fidget. He was not, after all, a raw boy fresh from the fields. His hands were clean, his tonsure tended, and his habit almost new. His face, he could not help. “Plain as a post,” his sisters had judged it when he was younger and more inclined to fret over it. “But honest,” they had added, meaning to be charitable.

Sisters could be a very great trial.

He swallowed. Probably he would never see them again. Brother Raymond had seen his star rising, the night before he left Aurillac, but that star had risen far from the Pleiades, in the realms between Mars and Jupiter. Not for him the small sunlit spaces, the rounds of the cloister and the fields, the moments parceled out one by one of trying to understand and be understood by the flock of his kin. He had wanted to matter in the world. Now it had begun, and he was here in this far country, before this lord of the Church, being measured and, no doubt, found wanting.

The bishop had been speaking for a while before the words took on meaning. “–of Spain?”

Gerbert blinked stupidly. “What–” His brain floundered, steadied, gave him what he had not been heeding.

“What do I think of Spain? My lord, I hardly know; it’s so soon.” He stopped, began again. “The light is different.” 

Bishop Hatto had a prelate’s face: clean-carved, princely, and readable only when he chose to permit it. Gerbert’s learning had been in other languages. This could have been anything from disdain to amusement.

Well then, he thought. Let it be the latter. “In Aurillac,” he explained, “the light falls softly, slantwise, but bright for all of that. It has green in it, and gold, and something like honey and amber. Here in Barcelona, the sea changes it. And Spain. It’s wider; it’s whiter. It has edges. I think...my lord, I think it could cut, if one let it.”

The bishop said nothing. Gerbert’s fists ached with clenching. There, now. It was out. Aurillac’s shining prodigy was mad, and quite openly and guilelessly so. And back he would go with the next riding of pilgrims, with a message for his abbot, coldly and regally polite, but most uncompromising. The primate of the Spanish March had neither time nor charity to spare for a witling who saw knives in sunlight.

The primate of the Spanish March nodded calmly and said, “Indeed, it cuts. This is the edge of Christendom. Beyond us is the sword of Islam. We live between blade and blade; our light is the light on forged steel.”

Gerbert looked hard at that still and priestly face. Were the deep eyes glinting?

“And yet,” said the bishop, “you are here. That is bravery.”

“I’m not a fighting monk, my lord.”

The bishop glanced from the nondescript body to the square clever hands, and almost smiled. “There is more than one kind of battle. What is it that you look for here?”

That, Gerbert could answer. “Knowledge, my lord. To know, and then to teach...but you know that.”

“Suppose that I did not. What would you say?”

“Why, my lord, I would say–I would tell you that the West is sadly fallen. What men knew once, they know no longer, nor want to know. It is all iron and edged blades, and lord smiting lord for a fistful of power. They dream of empires, and they kill for a furlong of wasteland.

“But I, my lord, I want to know what the world is. In Aurillac they gave me all they had. Grammar. A little rhetoric. A great vacancy where all the rest should be. Dialectic, the high logic–that’s known, a little, in Gaul. But the greater arts, the arts I yearn for, those are lost. Arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music. The quadrivium: the fourfold path. No one knows it; no one can teach it. Do you know what I’ve heard folk say–folk who should know better, monks and priests with a claim to learning? They say that the lesser way, the threefold way, is endurable–just–in that it teaches one to read Scripture. The greater arts serve no purpose other than to lead men astray; they should be banned, as magic is banned, for magic is what they are.”

“No,” said the bishop. “No. Magic is another thing altogether.”

Gerbert realized that he was gaping. He shut his mouth, searching for words. Words without magic in them. Safe words. “I want–I want the greater arts. I want to master them; I want to take them home and teach them, and kindle a light where the darkness is deepest. It’s pride, I know, my lord. But my abbot seemed to think  that what I wanted was worth reaching for.”

“And that you were capable of reaching for it.”

“Well,” said Gerbert. “It’s the wanting. It stretches the fingers. Sometimes it stretches them enough.”

Suddenly, astonishingly, the bishop laughed. “Indeed, Brother! Sometimes it does. We begin in the morning. Simple arts first. Do you know anything of numbers?”

“I did the abbey’s accounts for five years, my lord.” It struck Gerbert late, and the harder for that. “We? You, my lord?”

“I.” The bishop was stern again, his mirth gone. “I have some slight store of learning.”

“But,” said Gerbert. “I thought–I a farmer’s son, and you so great a lord, and all your servants, and some so learned–”

“Even the Lord of Heaven deigned to dwell for a space as a carpenter’s son. Should I be more haughty than He?”

Gerbert stared at his feet, shamed for once into silence.

“Tomorrow,” said the bishop. “Here in my study, after the first mass. We shall see where you need to begin.”

oOo

“Well?” said Bishop Hatto when the young monk was gone.

“Perhaps,” said a shadow by the wall. It did not move, but what had seemed only darkened air had become substance. Human substance: a man in black, black-bearded, with eyes that glittered as he rose. Shadow slipped back like a veil, drawing into itself; neither the stranger nor the bishop took notice.

Bishop Hatto’s brows were raised. “As uncertain as that, my friend?”

“Nothing is certain but the will of Allah.” But the man in black was smiling, settling himself opposite the bishop, studying the chessboard laid out on the table. Lightly, almost absently, he shifted an ebony imam to face an ivory bishop.

“Ah,” said Hatto, half in dismay, half in admiration. “There I think you have me.”

“In four moves,” the Moor agreed.

“Five,” said Hatto. “The young Gaulishman, now. If he should be even half of what I think he can be...”

“Between can and should is a width of worlds. There is a boy–”

“A man, if a young one. He’s past twenty.”

“A boy,” the Moor repeated, gentle but immovable. “Bursting with eager ignorance, and quite as perfectly Christian as ever a monk should be. If I had let him see me, and know what I was, he would have been appalled.”

“My dear friend, you hardly look–”

The Moor smiled whitely in a face that had rather more in it of Ethiopia than of Arabia, and swept a long hand from turbaned head to slippered foot. “A heathen, your most Christian excellency. A black and literal Saracen. Need that babe see more than that, to know that I am all he must abhor?”

“You wrong him, I think,” Hatto said. “In all my years I doubt I’ve met a mind to equal his. That passion of his, to know–”

“But to know what? In his country even simple numbers are a branch of the forbidden arts. As for what I would wish to teach him...”

“He did not cross himself when I spoke of that Art.”

The Moor paused. Then he shook his head. “That is no proof.”

“Well, then,” said Hatto with the air of one who saves the greatest persuasion for the greatest necessity. “I say that he has the power in him. I say that as one who sees it. You know what eyes I have, Master Ibrahim. You know how I came by them.”

The dark eyes lowered, but never in humility. “My fault, my Christian friend. I healed your eyes’ affliction. I fear I healed it all too well.”

“I was hardly glad of it when first I woke to it. But now, I see God’s will in it. It showed me a great light in a darkened chapel. It led me to an abbot’s hope and pride.”

“Such hope as this?” asked Ibrahim.

Hatto sighed. “The Art is all forgotten there, if it was ever known. The power resides in the black tribe, the old pagans with their demons and their Sabbat. Good Christians shun it with all their hearts and souls. But,” he said, “this boy has it. I think he has the strength to accept it.”

“But should he?”

The bishop threw up his hands. Suddenly he laughed. “Listen to us! I should be protesting; you should be doing battle for so promising an apprentice. He could be quite perfectly content in what he thinks he has come here to learn: numbers, music, the study of the stars. All those, I can teach him. And yet he has so much more in him; and there is the debt I owe you and your Art. I would offer him, if you would take him.”

“Would he permit it?”

Hatto quelled the spark of triumph. It was not yet–not quite–won. “Would you ask?”

Ibrahim stroked his long silken beard. “You tempt me, clever infidel. Oh, you tempt me. True power is as rare as rubies. If he can bear to face its presence...if he can master all our bitter disciplines...what a mage he would be!”

At last the bishop allowed himself to smile. “Will you ask?”

The Moor’s brows met, but his eyes bore no anger. “I will ask,” he said. “I will never compel.” 

Hatto nodded. “That is enough,” he said.