Ars Magica (21 page)

“Well,” said Herluin, fluttering. “I wouldn't go so far as to say — ”

Notker rode over him. “The man is a sorcerer. He practices his arts in the very cathedral of Rheims. He frequents the company of Jews and Saracens, and worse than that, Holy Father, worse by far — he teaches the arts of the devil to the youths of his school, and he does so openly, flagrantly, with no vestige of shame.”

Gregory straightened on his throne. He had heard the charge before.

“Simon,” the bishop of Liege was thundering. “Simon Magus is born again. The devil — the Antichrist — ”

What, Gregory wondered, had Gerbert done to earn such detestation?

“Really,” Herluin babbled. “Really, Notker, just because he's blunter than you like — ”

It was past time to put an end to this. Gregory's guards restrained Notker before he could do murder; a chamberlain saw to Herluin, who was almost weeping with distress.

“I shall,” said Gregory in the echoing silence, “give thought to this matter.”

oOo

This audience was considerably quieter, and although summer was considerably more advanced, rather cooler. Gregory had set it for the morning, before the day's heat was at its fullest. Unfortunately, it was no more pleasant than its predecessor had been.

Not that he disliked the man who stood in front of him. Herluin was a weakling and Notker a bully. Gerbert was neither. A little brusque, a little impatient with the demands of ceremony, but honestly respectful of the office and of the man who held it. He had not insulted Gregory with archepiscopal regalia. He looked well in the simplicity of a priest's gown, not a handsome man but a distinguished one, with his strong blunt face and his clear grey eyes — or were they brown, or green? — and his silvered hair. He had a beautiful voice, which he knew how to use. Once, when he smiled, his face lit like a lamp; and for a moment Gregory was dazzled.

But all the charm and all the eloquence and all the competence in the world could not alter one essential fact. “You hold your see without sanction from Rome,” said Gregory. “You have held it in defiance of your vow of obedience. I cannot confirm you in what was never rightly yours.”

Gerbert's anger was plain to see: his eyes went pale, his lips tightened. Yet he spoke softly. “Holy Father, I believe that I am the rightful archbishop of Rheims. My lord Adalberon chose me to be his successor. My king, though for a while he went awry, came in the end and through suffering to the same conclusion. Arnulf is and was an invader and a breaker of his oath.”

“He was,” said Gregory, “duly elected. Rome granted him the pallium. Rome never stripped him of it.”

“Rome was suborned by the serpents in his pay!” Gerbert controlled himself with a visible effort. “My lord, we did what we had to do. He had laid waste to his see; he had handed it over to the enemies of the king, in defiance of the vow he swore on the Eucharist itself.”

“Still,” said the pope, “he was judged by those who had no right or power to judge him.”

Gerbert was speechless. Gregory almost pitied him. He could not but know that he was in the wrong, and yet he had done it out of the conviction that he must. There was a dilemma for an honest man.

This honest man had made and broken kings. And no kingly blood in him; none at all. Gregory, who was the kinsman of emperors, stiffened his back and his will. “I see one recourse,” he said. “I will judge your case, in full.” Gerbert stood rigidly still; in his eyes was a dawning of hope. “On one condition. You will restore Arnulf to his see.”

Gerbert's mouth opened.

Gregory went on, implacable. “Restore him, and I will judge him. If I determine that his crimes merit his deposition, then I will depose him.”

“And if not?” Gerbert demanded. “If you decide that he is more convenient mitered than unmitered? What then? Shall I see my people torn again out of the few years' peace which I have won for them? Must my king fear anew the threat to his crown?”

“The pretender is dead,” said Gregory. “His sons are dead or powerless. There is only Arnulf to consider. He can claim no kingship. If he has sinned as grievously as you allege, then he will lose the archbishopric. What have you lost but a few months' uncertainty?”

“Rheims,” said Gerbert, as if he could not help himself.

Gregory set his teeth and straightened his back. “It has been said that you are ambitious; that you abetted Arnulf in his treachery until you saw greater advantage in the king's cause.” Gerbert erupted in protest; Gregory silenced him with a lifted hand. “This is not a trial. I simply warn. Your friends are many and your fame great. Yet, like any man who would dwell in high places, you have enemies; and men who are neither, but who strive to perceive you for what you are. Some might propose that the petty treachery of your rival is as nothing to the multiplicity of your sins.”

“One of those accusers being, perhaps, the Bishop of Liège?”

Gregory had smiled before he thought, a swift, mirthless grin. “You are, by all accounts, an honest man. Surely you can understand what force constrains me. I am the Vicar of Christ. I must administer the laws which I and my predecessors have made. To begin this trial, I must demand that Arnulf be restored. Then and only then may I judge him.”

Gerbert's head bowed, but not in submission. “Holy Father — ”

“No,” said Gregory.

It was flat, and it was final. Gerbert made obeisance with excruciating correctness, and left.

Gregory took off the tiara and rubbed his aching brow, and glared. Servants scattered. He barely noticed. He rose. “Enough of this,” he said. “By God, enough!”

One brave idiot dared to remonstrate. “Holy Father, the Margrave of — ”

“A plague on the margrave!” Gregory cast off his cope in the face of assembled shock, and bared his teeth, shocking them further. Why they should be so appalled after the godless fools who had gone before him, he could not imagine. He turned his back on them all and went in search of a moment's peace.

oOo

“May God preserve us from an honest pope.” Gerbert had been pacing for a good hour, simmering. The words burst out of him all at once. He stopped, spun to face the Jinniyah.

She met his glare with a level stare. “He's in the right, as he sees it. How can he help but refuse you?”

“He refuses to see what stares him in the face.”

“How can he see it? He wasn't there. All he knows is that the king and the bishops of Gaul are contesting his power to sanction a bishop's election. That's striking at the heart of the papacy itself.”

“Since when,” gritted Gerbert, “have you been an authority on papal politics?”

“Since my master involved himself in them.”

He snarled and went back to his pacing. It was his privilege as an archbishop from Gaul — however hotly contested his right to that title — to lodge in a room of his own in a hostelry not excessively far from the papal palace. It was a tiny cell of a room, airless and indifferently clean, but its door was solid. He could be reasonably certain that no one heard his colloquy with his antique bronze.

At the moment he did not care if the entire papal curia knew that he had a heathen spirit for a familiar. “Everything,” he said. “Everything I do withers on the branch. First Rheims is snatched from me by a king's misguided policy. Then I win it at no little cost to body and soul; but can I keep it? Arnulf and his allies spew their poison wherever they go. They turn my bishops against me. They hiss in the ear of the pope himself. They smite me with the cold hammer of the law; they teach my people to hate me. No one in Rheims will dine with me or attend my mass. I am sick of it, I tell you. Sick, sick, sick!”

He broke in a torrent of coughing, cursing through it, until the room filled with frightened servants. He could not even drive them out; he had no voice left. They put him to bed, hovering and fluttering, maddening him with their worry.

He had to feign sleep before they would leave him. Then in truth, for a little while, he did sleep. He dreamed that Richer was there, fretting but being bearable about it.

He woke with a start. He was alone. Richer was in Rheims, looking after the inner school and writing a history of the Franks. The two went together with an odd logic. Gerbert, as Richer liked to say, was in both. They had not kept the idiot from all but packing himself in Gerbert's baggage. Gerbert had had to trap him with a threat: to set over the school of the Art no less a master than Arnulf himself. That was a low blow; but it won Richer's submission.

Gerbert would never admit that he had misjudged. He had been ill at intervals since the year began. He had seemed to be better when he left in haste for Rome, hoping against hope to arrive before Herluin could win his case and his pallium. Now the sickness was back and Herluin had his sanction from the pope's own hand, untainted by Gerbert's intercession; and Gregory would not hear Gerbert's defense unless he surrendered his see.

“And that,” he said into the airless dark, “I will not do. Rheims belongs to me. I have paid for it. I will not give it up.”

16.

Gerbert clung to the saddle of his mule and tried to peer through the dazzle of sunlight. His eyes were full of water; his ears rang; his lungs labored against the weight of sickness. He thought he saw walls, towers, a blurred banner. “Rheims?” he tried to ask.

“Pavia,” someone said. And in a different tone, which perhaps he was not meant to hear: “Can we move any faster? He's about to drop.”

“Better not,” said someone else. “Stubborn old bastard. If he'd let us put him in a litter...”

“No,” Gerbert said clearly. Or he thought he said it clearly. Of course this was not Rheims. This was the royal city, Pavia that was queen of Lombardy, set like a jewel in the richness of the plain, and far away on the edge of the world, the march of mountains. The Alps that had defeated Hannibal would hardly slow Gerbert, sickness or no. His city was beyond them, his school of the arts and of the Art, his poor beleaguered archbishopric which he did not intend to give up.

Alba, scenting a stable, speeded her amble slightly. As long as he could cling to her back, he was not a useless old man.

He drew himself up. The pope had not guessed that he was ill. He would be damned if Pavia would.

Someday magic would find a way to banish fever. One or two of the students in Rheims had a gift in that direction. Richer —

Richer was not going to learn that his master had needed his potions and his power. Else Gerbert would never hear the end of it.

“You won't tell him,” said Gerbert earnestly. “Promise me.”

“I promise,” said the shadow at Alba's head. Sometimes it had Bruno's face. Sometimes it had wolf's teeth; or its cloak unfurled into wings. Then it would grin, and Gerbert would know where his sickness had come from.

oOo

His servants turned on him. They faced him to a man, and refused to leave Pavia until the doctors judged him well. “Quacks!” he raged. “Charlatans!” And to his traitor servants: “Mutiny!”

His body, alas, rebelled most treacherously of all. It could barely stand. When he drove it toward the stable, it fell and lay prostrate until the rebels laid him in bed again.

In the end, perforce, he yielded. He lay and seethed, but he did not try to get up. Often.

He was not grateful to discover how quickly he mended, once he gave his body time to rest. It had simply been worn out. The spirit's malice had been a dream, a delusion of his fever. It was safe in its prison, trapped and powerless.

While he lay ill but not unconscious, he learned that he had indeed seen a banner over the city: the golden eagle of the emperor. Otto, third of that name, was in residence, though likely soon to forsake the fogs and fevers of Italy for the cleaner air beyond the mountains. Outland blood never prospered in this pestilential country.

Some part of Gerbert that was not lost to sickness recalled that he had hoped to find the emperor here. At first he could hardly care. But as his body began, too slowly, to mend, his mind shook itself free of the fogs that beset it. It was awake again and thinking — scheming, his enemies would say. It focused on this young emperor with the fixity of a mind that had little else to occupy it; it gathered all that it might, of what Otto was, and who, and what he might portend to a mage who had been an archbishop and who was now little more than carrion. But carrion with a flicker of life in it yet.

Otto would be out of boyhood now and into youth. His father had died, leaving him the empire, when he was barely out of infancy; his mother, who had been a princess in Byzantium, had ruled as regent until she died, not so long ago. Italy had killed them both. The boy was interesting, people said, half a Greek and half a Saxon, but all a Roman.

Gerbert had known his mother and his father, and his grandfather whom people called the Great. This third Otto, Gerbert had never seen. He was pious, rumor had it; he had the family fondness for men of learning, and not a little of that himself. Remarkable in a youth who had been emperor at three, who had led armies to war at seven.