Ars Magica

Judith Tarr

Chapter 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.

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.

What happens next?

DRM-free formats: EPUB/Nook/Sony, Mobi/Kindle, PDF, prc/Palm

Buy the eBook: $3.99