Ars Magica (31 page)

“You are,” said Otto. “Take it,
magister
. It's all wasted, else.”

As was he. A husk with open eyes, and a smile of — God help him — victory. “Now you have it all,” he said. “Now you can dream the dream for both of us. Dream well, my friend, my teacher. Light the light I would have lit, that would have been Rome anew. Remember me; but don't grieve for me. I'm with you always. Always...”

His voice was gone, his breath ebbing, sinking into memory.
I feel so...light...

Gerbert was heavy, gravid, grieving. All power, and no joy. All the joy was Otto's.
Free
, he sang, down into the long dark.
Glad. Peace... oh,
magister!
I've found Jerusalem.

But it was beyond Gerbert's knowing; and Otto was gone.

Gerbert looked down at the still body. The power had burned away his tears. It surged in him, sighing like the sea, vaster than he had ever known it. And he was master of it. He had paid for it in the purest coin it knew: the life of one he loved.

The throng about the bed was like a gathering of ravens. Gerbert did not try to hold his place there. The emperor was dead. The emperor waited in Saxony to take his new crown. Rome now more than ever would need a strong hand to settle it. The world could not wait upon grief or loss or a murderer's remorse. But Gerbert had killed his emperor as surely as if he had wrought it with poison.

Don't
, he almost heard Otto say, impatient as he always was with Gerbert's foolishness.
Rome killed me, and my own stubbornness. The power is my gift and my inheritance. Use it well. Remember me.

“How could I ever forget you?”

Otto's smile was warm in Gerbert's center.
We were the two halves of God, you and I. We were too much for this poor benighted world. Someday...

“Not in our day,” said Gerbert.

He looked up into Richer's face. His sadness had lost itself somewhere, though his grief was deep, and would never leave him. “They die,” he said, “and I go on. That is the price I pay for what I am.”

Richer said nothing, but he laid a hand on Gerbert's shoulder. Gerbert let it stay, though he straightened under it, setting his jaw and his will. “Someday, my friend, I'm going to have a word with the heavenly chancery.”

“You're well placed to do it,” said Richer.

Gerbert laughed, a sharp bark, edged with pain. “Yes, after all: I am. And while I'm waiting, I'd best see to my own chancery. Come, sir. We've work to do.”

Even Richer could be taken aback at that. “Now?”

Gerbert glanced back at the bed, and to the press about it. His throat spasmed; his eyes flooded. He mastered them both. He was master of all the arts, maker of kings, prince of the princes of the Church. And he had a world to look after.

“Now,” he said.

Epilogue

Rome, A.D. 1003

Gerbert's mind was made up. Nothing that Richer could say even began to shake him. “You need her,” said Gerbert. “She wants to serve you.”

“But she's yours!” cried Richer.

The bone of their contention gleamed bronze-golden on the table, conspicuously taking no part in the debate. She had spoken already. “I choose you. I belong to you.”

Richer would not hear it. Now he tried sweet reason, somewhat frayed about the edges.”I can't do that to you,
magister
. I can't take your magic away from you.”

“You won't,” said Gerbert as serenely as Richer had ever heard him. “When my lord died” — Even after a year and more, he could not say it without a thickening of his voice —
 
“when Otto died, he gave me all he had. I'm full to bursting with magic.”

Even after a year and more, Richer could know the stab of jealousy. Grimly he quelled it. “But,
magister
. She — you — ”

“It's time,” said Gerbert. “I have all the power I need, and all the prophecies. She needs to be among young things again. To carry on what we two began. To bring the light into new places.”

“Then why don't you just set her free?” Richer demanded.

“I don't want to,” she said on her own account. Her voice sharpened. “I want what I have chosen. If you do not take me, I shall find a way to take myself.”

No doubt she would. Richer looked about for reinforcements, but there were none. Only the pope's servants come to prepare him for the morning's procession, and the pope in his white robe managing to look both sturdy and translucent, like a clay lamp filled with light. His body had grown frail since Otto died, but his magic was stronger than it had ever been. His spirit shone out of him, clear and light and joyful. He might have been going to a festival and not to one of his endless pontifical masses.

Indomitable, that was Master Gerbert. Richer loved him to the point of pain; and would happily have throttled him.

Richer threw up his hands in disgust. “What choice do you leave me? I'll take her. And on your head be it.”

They had the same smile, bronze and man. Damn it, he loved them both. He embraced Gerbert suddenly, to the servants' horror. Gerbert grinned up at him, wicked as a boy. “Come, lad, don't fret. You know I won't die till I've sung mass in Jerusalem.”

“And a good long while from now may that be,” said Richer, letting him go.

He did not linger over farewells. He laid his palm against the Jinniyah's cheek, briefly; that was all. She did not speak. Her face had gone still.

The servants bore him away to be pope.
Pontifex Maximus; Pontifex Magicus.

Richer stood forsaken, trembling a little. He could not bring himself, yet, to touch the Jinniyah. His, now, insofar as she ever belonged to anyone. He felt as shy as a new bridegroom.

Slowly he stretched out a hand. She was cool, smooth, lifeless; yet his fingers tingled. She was full to bursting with magic, and filling higher as he tarried.

“Take me,” she said.

His hands moved for him. Wrapped her in the cloth which waited beside her, and lifted her, cradling her against his chest. His body thrummed with the power of her. She was too strong. He could not — he dared not —

“Take me,” she said again, relentless. “Take me home.”

oOo

The pope's procession had wound chanting through the gate. A tang of incense lingered still, an echo of the hymn, a servant or two idling in the master's absence. As Richer paused, dizzy with the power in his arms, beginning very dimly to understand what Gerbert and the Jinniyah had done to him, he heard the servants' voices, faint but bitterly clear.

“Where is he singing mass today?”

“Santa Croce.”

“Holy Cross? Where's that?”

“What, Roman born and you don't know it? But there — they call it something else round about. It's a famous sanctuary.
Visio Pacis
, that's the name of it. Vision of Peace.”

“Ah,” said the Roman with an air of great enlightenment. “I know it now. It has another name in our part of the city.

“We call it Jerusalem.”

Author's Note

Gerbert of Aurillac
(ca. 945-1003)

All events in the life of Gerbert of Aurillac, except those which relate to his use of magic, are portrayed essentially as they happened. I have taken authorial license in a number of instances, most notably in the location of Bishop Hatto's see. He was bishop not of Barcelona (of which Count Borel was in fact lord) but of Vich, somewhat north and inland of the count's city. Gerbert did indeed study the Quadrivium under his tutelage, although the majority of his three years in Spain were probably spent in the monastery of Santa Maria de Ripoll, the library of which was justly famous.

The struggle for Rheims is based closely on the account of Richer of St.-Rémi in the
Historia Francorum
, and on the letters of Gerbert himself (available in Harriet Pratt Lattin's English translation, New York, 1961). Richer was not in fact in Rheims at the time of its betrayal to Duke Charles, but was tracking down his copy of Hippocrates in Chartres. It was Arnulf and not Gerbert who was found and captured atop the tower, to which Arnulf had ascended not to make astronomical observations but to barricade himself against his uncle's soldiers. I have simplified the quarrel over the archbishopric considerably, streamlined the very confusing sequence of events, and omitted the part played by Hugh Capet's son and heir, Robert, who had in fact been crowned co-king with his father — and who had indeed been Gerbert's pupil in the cathedral school of Rheims. Arnulf's deposition at the beginning of chapter 14 is translated verbatim from Richer's history.

Gerbert's misfortunes in Rheims after Arnulf's deposition were, in turn, considerably more complicated than I have shown them to be. After his meeting with the Emperor Otto III in Pavia, he did in fact return to Rheims, to face the interdict and to be driven out by the ostracism which it entailed. He rejoined his emperor in Germany, was given an estate near Sasbach which brought him nothing but trouble, and stayed with Otto until the resolution of the conflict over Rheims by the naming of Gerbert to the archbishopric of Ravenna.

His relationship with his emperor was much as I have portrayed it; likewise the dream which they shared. Lattin's volume includes a very touching pair of letters (pp. 294-97) in which Otto invites Gerbert to become his teacher and encloses a rather clumsy but quite appealing verse of his own composition, and Gerbert responds with Ciceronian eloquence. Otto is always addressed as Caesar, as Emperor of the Romans.

The details of Gerbert's election and coronation as Pope Sylvester II are as accurate as possible; I am indebted to Nikolaus Gussone,
Thron und Inthronization des Papstes von den Anfangen bis zum 12. Jahrhundert
(Bonn, 1978). Election of the pope by the College of Cardinals in secret conclave was first prescribed in the latter half of the eleventh century. At the time of Gerbert, election was officially by the clergy and the notables of Rome, actually by the will of the Holy Roman Emperor; or by whichever strongman was currently ruling Rome. The office itself was as much secular as spiritual, and Gerbert's actions during his reign, in accepting from his emperor a number of fiefs in southern Italy, laid the foundation for the Papal States of the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Gerbert was probably not present at Otto's deathbed in Paterno, thirty miles from Rome.

The custom of a pope's taking a new name on election was very recent in Gerbert's time — he was in fact the second pope to do so as a matter of course. He refers to himself in his letters and papal privileges as “Sylvester, who is also Gerbert, bishop.”

oOo

The magical elements in this novel are, of course, invented — but not, in general, by myself. The legend of Sylvester Magus is almost as old as Sylvester himself. It seems that a certain schismatic cardinal, an enemy of the great Pope Saint Gregory VII (1073-85), attempted to prove in polemic that all the popes since Gregory V were unworthy of their position. The charge against Sylvester II was that of sorcery and of service to the devil, and of founding and supporting a school of the black arts in Rome. William of Malmesbury in the twelfth century, in a long digression in his
Gesta Regum Anglorum
(“Deeds of the English Kings”), brings the legend to its fullest flower. Here is the Saracen magician and his daughter, the head of bronze with its oracular gifts, the magical golden treasure — of Octavian, William attests, and discovered not in Ravenna but in Rome — and the death of the pope after singing mass in the Roman church called Jerusalem.

I have translated almost verbatim William's wonderful description of the treasure as Gerbert found it, all gold and lit by the great carbuncle. The oracular head, it is said, was passed down through the Middle Ages to the Franciscan alchemist and experimental scientist, Roger Bacon.

The magic which Gerbert is alleged to have practiced would have been the high learned magic of the medieval scholars. The incantation with which he summons the spirit, in chapter 13, is taken (somewhat facetiously) from the Grimoire of Pope Honorius III, quoted in E. M. Butler,
Ritual Magic
(Cambridge, England, 1949, rpt. 1980).

The Year 1000

Contrary to popular belief, there was no exceptional outpouring of millennarian fervor at the end of the tenth century. Gerbert, who was pope in the year 1000, seems to have regarded it as simply another year; likewise the secretaries of the imperial chancery. There was no apparent expectation of the end of the world. Gerbert at least was much too preoccupied with establishing his papacy, reforming a Church which stood in sore need of it, and playing Sylvester to Otto's Constantine. If they dreamed of any Second Coming, it was that not of Christ but of the Roman Empire.

Publication Information

Ars Magica

First published by Bantam Books

Copyright © 1989
Judith Tarr

oOo

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Copyright © 2010 Judith Tarr
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