Ars Magica (20 page)

He could bind it. Not easily, not eternally, but long enough perhaps to discover its name. Then he could bid it begone.

The guilt and the shame, he would never lose. He knew no one to whom he could confess it. Mages were not often priests: the Church and the power were an uneasy mating. Gerbert knew how wary the bishops were of that side of his self; he had had to labor hard and long to convince them that it had not tainted his priesthood. This would seem to prove the opposite, though in his mind it stained not the priest but the mage. The priest was true to his vows. It was the mage who had sinned against his oath; who was forsworn as utterly as ever Arnulf had been.

No. Not quite. He had willed the breaking, but he had stopped short of acting on it. That much comfort, cold as it was, he could take. It might give him strength to do what he must do.

oOo

He blinked. With all his mind turned inward, he had not noticed where the mule was carrying him. The sun was low, dazzling his eyes. He shaded them with his hand.

The road stretched before and behind, Roman-straight beneath the mould of years. The sun slanted down it. On either side rose a scattering of trees. They were thin, but they veiled the way behind, the clearing in the great wood of the north that was Senlis.

Even a mage could be uneasy to find himself alone and weaponless in a wood at sunset. Beasts lurked in woods, and not all of them ran on four feet. Poor prey as he made in his priestly habit, his mule was fine, and her caparisons were worth a penny or two. He had been too preoccupied to notice that the lad had put on the best bridle with its inlay of gold, and the saddle with the cloth of Byzantine silk.

His magic sensed no threat but the one that never left him. He eased a little, but he gathered the reins to turn the mule about.

She resisted. She had her eye on a succulent bit of browsing just ahead, and a babble and sparkle beyond that betokened a stream. Gerbert sighed, shrugged. A moment more could make no difference. He let Alba have her head.

Beyond the stream a path wound up among the trees. It was neither wide nor high enough for a mounted man, but for one on foot it was ample. As Alba dipped her head to drink, Gerbert slid from her back, moved by what impulse he hardly knew. He tethered her loosely to a branch and laid a word of guard and binding on her, at which she gave him a look of reproach. “It's not that I don't trust you,” he said. “But someone might find you too tempting to resist.”

She snorted, unmollified. But there was grazing enough within her tether's reach, and she was a wise mule. She did not try to argue.

Gerbert kilted up his habit and eyed the path. An odd excitement quivered in him. He had forgotten how strong and hale a body could feel. He paused only long enough to sling the saddlebags over his shoulder — no need to tempt a thief more than he could help — and set foot on the path.

It was an easy ascent, no tax on his strength; it wound a little as the trees ordained. After a time it found again the stream which crossed it below, and followed that. He stopped once to drink and to bathe his face, and to wonder briefly what he was doing. But only briefly. When the magic beckoned so, a mage was wise to heed it. He crossed himself, to hallow what he did, and blessed the stream. It laughed at his caution. He smiled back, shifted his burden, went on.

He knew it when he came to it. It was older than any living thing about it: an oak that seemed as broad as a tower. Beneath its tangled roots the stream sprang, sparking like fire; for the last rays of the sun, piercing the dimming wood, fell full upon the face of tree and spring.

A little below the source, the water filled a shallow basin of stone, then brimmed and overflowed into its narrow channel. Gerbert sank down beside the pool, suddenly exhausted. For a little while he had been young again. Now age had taken him back.

As by maddening degrees his breathing quieted, he saw what the sun was showing him. The spring rose under the roots of the oak, in a hollow like a cave, its roof a vault of living wood. There beyond the bubble of water stood a figure. It was carved, he suspected, of oakwood, dark now with age and furred with moss, but its shape was clear to see. A woman; a maiden in a gown that did little to obscure her shapely young body.

No; no maiden. Her belly rounded in a way that even a priest, if he remembered mother and sisters, could recognize. One hand guarded that fruitful curve; the other held, incongruously, a cross.

Someone had been careful to make this seem a Christian shrine. But the power in it was older by far.

Gerbert shivered, yet not — strangely — with revulsion. The dark goddess, or Blessed Virgin if it pleased her to be reckoned so, bore no evil in her. Power, yes, great enough to be perilous, and not all of the light; but darkness had no great part in it. Before she bore a cross, he knew in his bones, she had borne a blossom. A dark rose?

She seemed to smile as the sun faded.
See
, she seemed to say.
See what I keep for you.

Gifts lay at her feet. Whoever brought them, brought them often, for what purpose Gerbert could not guess. For luck? For the bearing of a child? He saw a withered garland, a cake much nibbled by mice. But most notably a small still shape that, not so very long ago, had been alive. It glimmered in the dimness: a white dove with the snare still on its neck, its body barely stiffened in death. The one who had left it must have heard Gerbert and fled.

Gerbert's shadow quivered, drawn to the scent of new blood.

And he knew.

He could not sing hosannas. He could not even, yet, thank the power that had led him to this place. He moved with great care, as if the image and the bird were nothing more to him than curiosity. He set the saddlebags on the ground by the pool and took the packet of bread and cheese, and as if on a whim, carried it into the shrine and laid it at the feet of the image. The prayer he murmured was genuine. He crossed himself, bowed, let his hand find the dove. “A pity to waste tender meat,” he said to the air.

It trembled with hunger.

Sunset blazed in his face. Above his head, trapped amid the branches of the oak, shone a single star. The moon glowed above it, pale still but brightening as the light faded. It was waning, but it was strong enough yet for what he intended.

This was not a magic that came easily to a man, still less to a priest of the God Who denied all divinity but His own. But that priesthood gave Gerbert one small edge of strength. Given to the monks in childhood, sworn to the threefold vows before his blood began to burn with the beginnings of manhood, he had never known a woman. He did not reckon it truly purity — that was for angels, and for saints whose faith freed them from any bodily temptation. But to the moon and the old magic, it was enough.

It was as heady as wine. He firmed his will against the madness in it, focused his mind on the cool and ordered paths of his mastery. The wild magic struggled, but he was strong, and skilled in his strength. For a moment he remembered a Sabbat over Aurillac, a choice made, a path taken; he smiled.

He took from his bag the four white candles for the four corners of heaven; the white stole with which he would sanctify his working; and, slowly, the athame in its wrappings of dark wool. The shadow took no notice. It yearned toward the dove which he had laid beside the pool.

He kissed the stole and laid it over his shoulders, bowing for a moment under the weight of sanctity. He set each candle in its place about the pool, naming it as it must be named. Michael of the flaming sword at the gates of the south; Gabriel the trumpeter in the vaults of the west; Raphael whose healing power warded the east; and Uriel the watchman of the north. As he spoke each name, its candle burst into flame, round and white and steady though a little wind had come to whisper in the branches.

The water was dark, still as a mirror. Gerbert bent over it. Deep within, something glimmered. His hand slipped through numbing cold to close about a hard round smoothness. A stone a little smaller than an egg, shaped like an egg, white as the moon, polished smooth. It was heavy in his hand. With as much care as if truly it had been an egg, he laid it on the moss by the pool's edge.

He took up the body of the bird. In one swift, encompassing motion, he gathered his power, freed the athame, opened the limp white throat. Blood trickled from it onto the stone.

The shadow swooped. The athame glittered athwart its path. It reared back. Eyes as pale as moons fixed on the falling blood. But the whisper of its voice said, “No.”

Gerbert said nothing. The dove's body emptied slowly. The stone lost its last glimmer of whiteness. He laid the bird down; he raised the stone. In the pool's center, like an eye, glowed the moon. Gerbert's hand eclipsed it. Where the moon had been was the shadow of the stone. He trembled. The power was like the surge of the tide, pulling at him, straining the bonds of his mastery.

“Come,” he said. “Drink.”

The spirit stretched toward the bird. Again the athame halted it. It hissed. The bloodstone drank the moon. Deep in its heart, a red light grew.

“Drink,” said Gerbert. “Drink deep.”

The spirit mantled like a hawk. Its eyes raged.

“Come,” said the mage, soft and deep. “Drink.”

The spirit howled. Gerbert stiffened, but his hand did not move. The stone glowed like a coal, beat like a heart. Moon and madness filled it; life pulsed in it. The spirit swayed as by no will of its own. Its wings fluttered wildly, now driving it back,
 
now casting it forward. Its claws raked toward Gerbert's face. He did not flinch.

With a cry of anguish and of resistless desire, the spirit fell upon the stone. It flared with heat more terrible than any fire. It swelled; it bloomed; it engulfed the shadow that had seized it.

oOo

Gerbert knelt by the pool's edge, gasping, cradling his hand. Before him, between his knees and the water, lay the stone. A carbuncle a little smaller than an egg, red as blood, luminous as a coal, with a darkness in its heart.

His shadow was free under the moon. He turned his face to the cold light; and for all the agony of his charred and blistered hand, his heart swelled with purest joy. “Now,” he said. “Now I shall be healed.”

Part Three

Pontifex Magicus

Rome, A.D. 996

15.

His Holiness, Gregory, fifth of that name, Bishop of Rome,
Pontifex Maximus
, servant of the servants of God, shifted on the cushions of his throne and throttled the urge to yawn. The tiara was an aching burden on his brow; the vestments were a torment in this ghastly Roman heat. Briefly he considered hating his royal cousin for condemning him to it. He might have had a blessed, simple, unvexing bishopric in a climate suited to human habitation. Hungary, perhaps. Poland. Even the people there...a horde of heathen Magyars, man for man, was rather more genteel than the populace of Rome.

For a gratifying moment, he considered the prospect of a match, Roman against Magyar, bare-handed. He would wager on the Roman. Magyars drank mere bull's blood. Romans imbibed sedition with their mothers' milk.

He was not, God be thanked, a Roman. He was a royal Saxon; and he was, at the moment, displeased.

Rheims again. It was always Rheims. The Franks were as quarrelsome as Romans, and as stubborn in their rebellion. He had the tale of it from his predecessor's chancery, which it had vexed to no perceptible end. A man of dubious lineage and uncertain loyalty, but duly elected and duly endowed with the pallium, that bit of linen embroidered with crosses and blessed by his properly ordained superior, that was sign and seal of his right to hold his office: that was Arnulf whose partisans clamored in the curia. A man of no lineage at all and proven loyalty to the imperial dynasty, but elected in dubious circumstances and unsanctioned with the pallium: that was Gerbert who had displaced him. The Frankish king — himself an interloper with no blood right to the crown — and the bishops convened in synod without papal sanction had presumed to resolve the matter to their own satisfaction, despite protests from Rome. The papal legate himself, Abbot Leo of legendary probity and monumental obstinacy, had interdicted all who took part in that second election, and removed the interloper from his see. To no visible effect. Arnulf had not been permitted to take back his place. Gerbert had continued in it, administering it with — of that, Gregory had been assured — exceptional competence.

Damn the man, thought Gregory, regardless of his sacred office. Which man he meant, he hardly cared.

The one in front of him was voluble if hardly eloquent. “And so you see,” said Herluin, “when my lord Rothard died, unworthy though I am, the bishops elected me to succeed him in the see of Cambrai. But I feared, Holy Father, to accept consecration from hands themselves unconsecrated by the approbation of the Holy See. Hands that — if I dare say it — ”

He floundered to a halt. The man with him took up the gauntlet. Notker, his name was, Bishop of Liège. His eyes glittered; he fairly foamed at the mouth. “Yes, brother, dare to say it!” He faced the pope. “The man, Holy Father, is a liar and an interloper, a lowborn grasper after power. Any power, Holy Father. The whole world knows that he sojourned in Spain in his youth; half the world knows what he studied there. Sorcery, Holy Father. Necromancy. All the black arts.”