Ars Magica (28 page)

oOo

Richer would gladly have slunk into the marshes and become a hermit for his shame, but Gerbert was having none of it. In the clear light of morning he was exactly as he always was, even in the midst of the most outlandish sorcery. He had taken a bruise or two in his flight, to which he was paying no attention. He had an archbishopric to look after, and a prodigy to be told of: how a forgotten square near the walls had been riven in the night by a demon's passing, and the ancient image had fallen, uncovering its golden treasure. Of shaft and passage there was no sign. The pavement had buckled over them. The magic that had endured so long was gone, shattered by one fool's helpless panic.

“Enough of that,” said Gerbert with utter lack of sympathy. People were taking the statue's fall for an omen, though whether of good or ill they could not agree. Gerbert forbore to listen to them. The gold, he had decreed, would go to feed the poor of Ravenna. His chancellor thought him mad. His more pious servants were blessing his sainted generosity.

Richer was put to work overseeing the weighing and the stowing of the fragments, once Gerbert himself had sanctified them with his blessing and gone away to be archbishop. The archbishop's guard kept the people at bay, watching narrowly for thieves. Rut none was so bold as to lay impious hands on a miracle. They merely watched and whispered, and backed away when the wagon came through with Richer perched atop the wrapped and labeled shards.

oOo

When it was done, though Richer still burned inwardly with the shame of it, he had begun to think that he might not want to forsake the world after all. Not, at least, for a hut in the marshes of Ravenna. He washed his face and put on a clean habit. His stomach was entertaining thoughts of dinner: a prodigy in itself. He had been certain that he would never want to eat again, if it meant swallowing shame with every bite.

Men had suffered worse, he supposed, and lived to tell of it. He took a deep breath and went to face the world.

The archbishop's palace was always alive with people and voices, comings and goings. Richer was not surprised to see new faces — monks, priests, men-at-arms wearing badges which he did not recognize. Another embassy, no doubt, to the second most powerful prelate in Christendom. He could be proud of that, even after that prelate had seen him revealed as the rankest of cowards.

Gerbert was holding audience, as Richer had expected. He saw a pair of bishops, mitered and haughty, and a flock of babbling courtiers. He was in no mood to linger; the night's exploits had burned curiosity out of him. He merely sighed, for dinner would not begin until the archbishop was ready for it; and Richer was not ready to coax the archbishop's irascible cook to feed him out of turn. He took refuge in the library, which had the virtue of quiet, solitude, and a hypocaust which kept it blissfully warm.

Augustine was strong medicine for anything that ailed a man. Richer swam out of the
Confessions
to stare, blinking, at Gerbert. The archbishop was dressed still for high audience. His face was as white as the silk that lined his cope.

Richer forgot shame, guilt, even Augustine. He leaped up, catching Gerbert as he swayed.

Gerbert shook him off, steadying with an effort that wrenched at Richer's own body. “I'm not sick,” he said sharply. But his eyes were dark, staring at something far beyond Richer. “I'm — ” He swallowed. This time he let Richer lay hands on him, though he would not sit. “Pope Gregory is dead.”

Richer gaped. He could not say that he grieved. Surprised, yes — he was that. “Dead? So soon? But he was young. He wasn't even as old as I.” And, belatedly: “God rest his soul.”

Gerbert seemed not to have heard him. “Pope Gregory is dead. I,” he said, “am summoned by my emperor. To Rome. To accept — ” He was breathing like a runner in a race; like a man smitten in the vitals. “To accept election as his successor.”

20.

“I can't,” said Gerbert. “My lord, I can't.”

Otto would not hear him. He was all emperor tonight, even in the solitude which Gerbert had begged for and, more or less, received. There was an attendant or three. And Richer, who had not left Gerbert's side since they left Ravenna.

Richer looked at the Emperor of the Romans and tried to like what he saw. A youth whom an empire had brought early to manhood; a mingling of Greek and Saxon in the shape of his face, the set of his eyes, the reddish fairness of his beard. He pulled at it now and then: for tension, Richer suspected, though his expression was as calm as an icon's. His hands and his face were thin and pale. Too thin and too pale. Richer's eyes, trained to see such things, narrowed and sharpened.

“You must,” Otto was saying. “No one else is so perfectly fit for it.”

Gerbert threw up his hands. “Anyone is better fit than I! My lord, can't you, won't you see? An archbishopric is one thing. Ravenna can bear it, even knowing what I am: peasant's brat, Moor's pupil, master of more arts than any decent Christian should lay claim to. But to take the Chair of Peter...”

“That is exactly why you must take it. Because of what you are. All of it. And because — ” Otto lowered his eyes. It was not humility. “Because I need you.”

There, thought Richer. That would snare him.

He did not go down easily. “You need a young man who can rule your empire with you.”

“I had one,” Otto said. “He died. God took him; God showed me who must take his place. Do you question God's will?”

Strong medicine, that. Otto had a gift: he managed not to sound mad, or obsessed, or blasphemous. He said it as a simple truth.

He held out his hands to Gerbert and softened his voice. “
Magister
. I knew what you would say. I tried to think of someone else. I prayed; I fasted. And all it came to was this. You are the one who must be Bishop of Rome. There is no better man for it. There will be none. Only you.” He caught Gerbert's hands in his own, his face alive now, eager. “Can't you feel it? Can't you see what I see? All your life you've been preparing for this. Aurillac, Spain, Rheims — Rheims above all. God took it from you to bring you to me; to free you, to set you in the place He made for you.”

Gerbert's head shook, but he did not try to pull away. “My lord — ”

“Surely you knew. Surely you expected it, when I made you highest but one, of all the bishops in the world.”

“But — to expect—to know that one is old, and one's pope is young — and then to know — to be —
 
My lord, I can't!”

“
Magister
. Believe me. You can.”

Gerbert sank down. He was crying like a child. Richer, appalled, lurched forward. Otto turned on him with cold words and colder magic. “Out. All of you, out.”

He was strong. Richer could not even begin to muster resistance, though he burned and seethed.
 
He was commanded. He obeyed.

When with a mighty effort he looked back, Otto was holding Gerbert, tender as a mother. But his eyes were steady, fixed on the dark beyond the lamplight, set on this course which his royal will had chosen.

oOo

Gerbert's storm passed quickly enough, once he had let it have its way. When it was gone he felt light and empty, hollow, almost serene.

He raised his head, drew a breath. Otto watched him in silence. He straightened; what little dignity he had left, he put on. “My lord,” he said. “I'm not afraid that I'm not fit. I'm afraid I am. I want it with all that is in me; I know that I can hold it as well as any man living. And that is why I am afraid.”

He met Otto's stare. It was dark, still, waiting. “I've always been prey to two great sins. The sin of pride, and the sin of despair. This is too high. It's too far to fall.”

“That,” said Otto, “is why I chose you. You know the price as well as the power. You won't fall prey to either.”

“No?” Gerbert asked.

“No.” Otto did not move, and yet he took it all in: the palace in which they sat, which he was building still, raw yet with newness, glittering with eastern splendor; the courtiers endowed with titles out of Byzantium; the rituals as intricate as the pope's high mass, through which they all moved from waking to sleeping, and he most of all, its center and its focus. He took it all in, and he made it as nothing. They were man and man here, master and pupil, friend and friend.

And, if Gerbert accepted this that was gift and burden and terror all at once, equal and equal, high priest and high king.

“I told you the truth,” Otto said. “I need you. Ever since I sent you to Ravenna — ” He rubbed his face. He looked tired to desperation, thinner and whiter than Gerbert had ever seen him, worn with endless labor. “I missed you,
magister
. I missed you with all my heart. It was like losing half of myself. And the things I did...”

He was going to break, as Gerbert had, helplessly. Gerbert reached for him.

But he had been a prince since he was born, an emperor since earliest childhood. He welcomed the steadying hands, but he did not weaken into tears. “Necessity is cruel,
magister
. The anger of a king — that is crueler yet. I was angry. I had had enough of war, rebellion, endless, poisonous, rankling sedition. Rome turned against me. It turned to Byzantium; it drove out the pope who was my cousin, calling him outlander and interloper and false priest, and set up a pope of its own who truly was all of those things, and defied me.

“I conquered that defiance,” said Otto. “I cast out the antipope; I gave him into the hands of the Church. It proclaimed him anathema. It reft him of his eyes; it took his nose, his lips, his tongue; it bore him through the streets of this whore of cities, that horrible face turned to the tail of his donkey, and on his head the head of an ass. Then he stood trial, and I sat before them all, and I watched them strip him of all that had made him pope and priest and even human man, and shut him up in prison. He lives there yet, they tell me. He refuses to die.

“And I was glad,
magister
. Glad to see what my servants had made of him, because he turned against me. I fed — I fed on his torment.”

His grip on Gerbert's hands was tight to pain, but the pain that was in him was infinitely greater. “And when I had fed, I was not satisfied. I laid siege to the lord of Rome in his stronghold of Sant'Angelo. I haled him out; I had him killed; I hung him where all his city could see what price he paid for his transgressions.”

“That was justice,” Gerbert said.

Otto shook his head wildly. “It was not! It was gluttony. It was power freed to raven where it would. It was the devil's claws sunk in me, tempting me to sin and sin and sin again. Even now, it wants — it hungers — ”

Gerbert shook him until he fell silent. “Stop it! You're driving yourself mad. I know, my lord. I know.”

Anger sparked, that anyone should dare speak so to the emperor. Then shame, and reluctant acceptance; though there was a little resistance left. “The power — ”

“The greater the power, the greater the price. You failed, yes. But you repent. This is not canonical confession, and yet I grant you absolution.”

“And penance?”

“You've walked barefoot to Saint Michael's shrine, and done penance there: the whole world knows it. Isn't that enough?”

“That was for the earthly sin: the torture of a priest of God. I never confessed the sin of power.”

“Then let your empire be your penance. Rule it well, in mercy and in justice. Use your power for good as you used it for harm.”

Otto bowed his head. Gerbert signed him with the cross. What sang between them was more than sanctity, more even than magic.

Gerbert laid his hand on his emperor's head. The amethyst of his ring, catching the light, flared suddenly, eerily red.

Otto leaped up, laughing for pure gladness, and kissed Gerbert on both cheeks. “Oh,
magister
! Now I have all I ever wanted. Between the two of us, we'll make a whole new world. You from Peter's throne, I from the throne of Charlemagne — no, greater: from the throne of Constantine, who laid the world under God's law, and ruled it hand in hand with Sylvester who was his pope; you in the spirit, I in the flesh — what can we not do?”

Make an old man young again, Gerbert wanted to answer. Mend a vessel broken under the heel of time and war and the world's waning.

And yet, as their eyes met, Gerbert tasted that joy and that hope. Maybe it could be. If they were strong; if they wielded their conjoined power.

“Without you I could never do it,” Otto said. “With you I can move the world.”

Gerbert's heart was cold. In the moment of his blessing, he had seen what no upwelling of joy or hope or sheer white power could deny. The spirit which he had summoned, to his long grief, was gone; but it had left its token. It was in Otto, a fleck of shadow like the mark of a claw, consuming him slowly from within.

There was death in him, and Gerbert's doing had set it there.

No, he swore to himself. Not while he lived; not while he had power. If he must take Peter's throne to defend the one who sat on Constantine's, then so be it.