Ars Magica (16 page)

oOo

Richer had schooled himself too well. He forgot that Gerbert would not know what he could not see. They both paid for that as Richer should have known they would, once Gerbert was well enough to leave his house and sit in the garden. He had always let the young imps of the town amuse themselves in its pear tree, if they broke none of its branches and left a little of its fruit for its master. On warm days, even in winter, they liked to come in through a gap in the wall which Gerbert, conveniently, kept forgetting to mend, and wage mock battles round the tree.

Richer had left Gerbert sitting on a bench in the sun with a volume of Cicero to keep him company, and gone to do some things that needed doing. When he came back, Gerbert was still there, and with him two or three children. Richer smiled. Trust the master to gain a youthful following wherever he went, even in his own garden.

Then Richer heard what one of them was asking. “Where's the teacher?”

“Silly,” his sister said with all the scorn of superior age. “This is the teacher.”

But the child was not to be deflected. “He's not, either. He's someone else. He's old.”

Richer was on them before they could have known he was there. Whether it was his size or his wrath or his habit flapping in the wind of his speed, they broke and fled.

Leaving Richer breathless and trembling, and Gerbert motionless in the sunlight. The master seemed unperturbed, even amused. Then he said, “You could have broken it to me gently.”

Richer did not know what to say.

“Let me see,” said Gerbert.

There was no point in refusing him. Richer dragged his feet a little in hunting for the mirror, but not too much. The one he found was a good one: silver, and old. It looked Roman.

Gerbert did not look long at what it showed him. He let the mirror fall into his lap, and sighed.

“It's not so bad,” said Richer.

Gerbert laughed, which was startling. “What's bad? I'm alive. These bones will pad themselves soon enough — amply enough, too, if I know this body of mine. I never had any beauty to lose. This...” He ran fingers through his hair. Nature had lent a hand with the tonsure, but the rest was thick still, its old unmemorable brown gone silver in his sickness. “I look venerable. I. Who'd have thought it?”

“Not venerable,” Richer said. “Distinguished.”

And he did. His face had never been anything but plain, but it seemed cleaner carved, the eyes larger, more brilliant. They had always been Gerbert's best feature, wide and clear, neither brown nor grey nor green but a mingling of all three. Now they were like water, both deep and clear, flecked with gold like a dazzle of sunlight.

Richer shivered, not with cold, and not with fear. Not exactly. There was magic in those eyes, chained though it might be, by wisdom and priesthood as much as by Arnulf's treachery.

They glinted, wicked as a boy's. “Venerable,” Gerbert repeated. “August. Feeble. Unthreatening. I haven't been under guard since I took sick. Have I?”

“No.” Richer said it slowly, as he began to understand. “You are devious.”

“I learn from example,” Gerbert let Richer help him up, though he insisted on walking back into the house, leaning on Richer no more than he must and rather less than he should.

“Do you know what I'd like to do?” he asked when he was in his bed again. “When this is over, when I've dealt with the wreckage that little serpent and his damnable uncle have made of my city, I'd like to go away. Become a pilgrim. To Spain, maybe. To Egypt, where the magic is oldest of all, and where they say it lives still in the hidden places. And in the end, when I'm ready for peace, to Jerusalem.”

Richer smiled, though his heart was cold. “That's something to look forward to.”

Gerbert shot him a glance. “It's moonshine. It keeps me going when I'd like to lie down and die.”

“You can't. You have too much to do.”

“Exactly.” Gerbert drew a long breath, let it go again. “And first, I have to get my magic back. I have... to...”

He was asleep. Richer drew the blanket over him and tried not to cry. Idiot, he mocked himself. Now that Gerbert was out of danger, now he broke down and bawled like a baby.

And why not?
cried the child in him. He buried his face in the blankets and let his heart wash itself clean.

12.

Poor, frail, broken Gerbert won much pity when he hobbled back to his duties. Even Richer, who knew what he was doing, was almost taken in by it. But Gerbert was too honest to lie to one who knew him well. People who believed him saw the gaunt face and the whitened hair and the frequent pauses to rest, and looked no further. They did not see what Richer saw: that his eyes were the color of thunder.

Gerbert was angry; the more so, the more he saw of what winter and a standing army were doing to Rheims. It was anger that gave him strength to do a strong man's work; for without him the city had floundered, sinking into confusion and despair. He whipped it to life again.

His guards had not come back. He was watched, but not with endless vigilance.

As soon as winter broke, staggering, starving Rheims won a reprieve: Charles divided his army and took two parts of the three to harry the king's lands. Gerbert put the remainder to work repairing what they and their fellows had broken. They did not like it, but Arnulf was giving Gerbert a free hand, and Arnulf was their lord's kinsman. They began, in some small measure at least, to earn their keep.

“And where's the king through all of this?” Richer wanted to know, querulously.

Gerbert looked up from a packet of letters. “Senlis,” he answered.

Richer blinked, diverted from his complaint. “What?”

“The king is in Senlis,” Gerbert said with remarkable patience. “Convoking his bishops. Discussing this predicament of ours.”

“
Discussing
! All he needs is cold steel.”

“Not quite. Charles, he's dealing with as a king may. Arnulf is another matter. They've excommunicated Alger, and a baron or two who helped him. His excellency, they don't seem to know of yet; or else they have no evidence. He could be acting under duress, after all; as am I.”

“Arnulf never did anything he didn't want to do.” Richer peered at the letter that had told Gerbert all of this. “Who wrote that? Ah — Archbishop Ascelin. So he's managed to get out of Laon, Carolingian captors or no. Far be it from me to speak ill of my lord Adalberon's favorite nephew, but sometimes I think that man is as slippery as Arnulf himself.”

“He is. He also knows the significance of a solemn oath, which Arnulf all too plainly does not. You won't catch him swearing on the body of Christ when he fully intends to break his oath.”

“No: he'd find a way to get out of it.” Richer paused. “Maybe Arnulf meant it when he swore it.”

“He broke it.” Gerbert's voice was iron. “Are you done with that letter? Here, take this packet to the cathedral; tell Father Infirmarer it's the best I can do, he knows what the roads have been like since last autumn.”

Full of Carolingian brigands, Gerbert meant. Richer tucked the packet into his sleeve, catching its pungent herbal scent. It was not one he recalled offhand.

Father Martin the infirmarer would tell him what it was. At length, no doubt, and on the run. There had been no lack of sickness in the city, much of it born of hunger and fear.

Things were quieter now. He could almost imagine that Rheims was at peace under its proper lord, lean from a hard winter but looking to the summer with hope and gladness.

Then he remembered Gerbert and shivered. Gerbert had changed as he mended. He spoke less; he smiled seldom. With Arnulf he was icily, flawlessly correct.

Richer did not want to be in the way when Gerbert's temper slipped its chain. That calm of his when the archbishopric went to Arnulf, that was hard won and harder kept. Arnulf's oathbreaking had won the young idiot an enemy, and a bad one.

Did he even know? Gerbert had been acting like a beaten man, at least to Arnulf's face: quiet, obedient, humble. But that was the quiet of the storm building. Magic or no magic, it would break.

Soon, Richer suspected. He had seen Gerbert's face in the cathedral at the Easter Mass. It had been transfigured; and not, for all its pallor, with light. His eyes had fixed on Arnulf's hands elevating the Host, and they had blazed.

Richer hesitated, stumbling on the cathedral steps, and almost went down. Light and color flamed above the door: the mosaic wrought by artists from Ravenna, Christ enthroned in judgment, with the souls of the blessed shining white and gold on his right hand, and the damned black as soot beneath his heel. Their faces filled Richer's vision, contorted with terror.

The grimoire. The book of magic which Richer had taken the day he spoke with the Jinniyah, because she bade him; which he had laid in his clothing chest and forgotten. Forgotten, that is, until looking for help and hope in the midst of Gerbert's sickness he had hunted out the copy of Hippocrates and brought the other with it. He had remembered it again in the deeps of the winter, and because he found it comforting, had told Gerbert where it was.

Gerbert had seemed barely interested. He was still weak then, working less hard than he liked but much too hard for Richer's peace of mind. He had said what he said of the image which Arnulf had stolen: “Let be. It's not time. When Rheims has won through the winter, then we think of breaking free.”

Now he had somewhere to go: Senlis, and the synod, and the king. He had a long grievance that had festered into something appallingly like madness, and as much of his old strength as he was likely to gain. In that grimoire were spells of the white magic, good ones, strong ones. But in it also were spells which shaded to grey. Dark grey, some of them, and deadly dangerous.

The herbs which Richer carried were not all that Gerbert had bought.

Richer staggered up the steps. He barely remembered finding the canons' cloister, the infirmary, the infirmarer. He flung the packet in Father Martin's astonished face and bolted like a hare.

Hippocrates was where he belonged. The grimoire was gone.

Richer whirled to run. Halted. Collapsed in a tangle. If Arnulf had taken the book, then that was that. If it had been Gerbert, then had he not the right? It was his book. The Jinniyah had foreseen that he would need it. With its aid he might be able to work a white enchantment, an escape from this prison. He would not try for revenge. The bishops in Senlis would give him that. The king might even give him Arnulf's head into the bargain.

Richer wound his fingers in his hair and pulled it until it hurt. When had Gerbert ever relied on anyone else to pay his debts for him?

Inspiration struck like an arrow in the brain. The Jinniyah. She could talk sense into Gerbert. Richer knew she could. And she had his magic. If he had it back, it would heal him; it would make him remember his wisdom. Then they could fly from Rheims and cast their troubles into the lap of Mother Church.

And how was Richer going to win her? Walk up to Arnulf and ask him for her? Buy her from him? Steal her?

Steal her, indeed. No doubt Richer could find an excuse to wander into the archbishop's bedchamber. But the bronze was quite as large as life, and correspondingly difficult to hide even under a monk's voluminous habit. If he tucked it under his arm and walked blithely out...

He lowered his hands from his tormented hair, and stared at them as if he had never seen them before. Big, rawboned, ruddy-furred and copiously freckled: a perfect clown's.

Suppose, just suppose, he carried it off. In all senses. He was the master's dog, everyone knew that. If they noticed him at all, they looked at his gangling awkwardness and laughed. Poor, feeble Gerbert and his tame fool. Who would expect either of them to turn dangerous?

He had to do it in broad daylight. Night was no good, with Arnulf sleeping there, and half the episcopal army camped in the corridor. He was going to need all his courage and most of his store of lunacy. Then he had to hope that Gerbert would not have acted before Richer could.

“No buts,” he said aloud. “No wobbles. Just do it.”

Today he could not. It was too late. Tomorrow was Sunday. Arnulf would sing the high mass, and most of Rheims would be there to hear him. Even Gerbert. Arnulf liked people to see that his rival was now his faithful servant.
 
He was not likely to care where his servant's servant was, or what he was up to.

Which left one final dilemma. Could a thief pray that his theft might succeed?

No matter. He would pray. Let God decide whether He would listen.

oOo

Gerbert suspected that he had gone a little mad. Maybe more than a little. It was the whole of it together. Losing the archbishopric, then seeing it betrayed; enduring servitude to its betrayer; fighting for his city. And all of it with half of him torn away, the rest groping in the dark, seeking blindly to be whole again.

He should not have waited — first for the city, then for his sickness, then again for the city's sake. He should have snatched his Jinniyah and run, the moment Arnulf became archbishop of Rheims.