Ars Magica by Judith Tarr Read Free Book Online

the garden, how it flourishes. We have roses in winter.”
    â€œThat’s simple,” Gerbert said. “One grows them under glass.”
    He had pricked her, though she barely showed it. “I made the glass. I persuade the roses to grow.”
    â€œThe sun can do that,” said Gerbert.
    â€œYou are mocking me,” she said, but her coolness had heat under it. “Is that why you’re here and not in Frankland? Did you drive them to distraction, until they drove you out?”
    â€œNot unless they did the same to me.”
    â€œAh,” she said. “Blame them for your own shortcomings. You’ll hardly make a mage while you persist in that.”
    He set his teeth on the hot words. This was Master Ibrahim’s doing, he had begun to suspect: setting this needle-tongued minx on him, to see if he would crack.
    To name a thing is to master it.
    He actually smiled as he went back to his drudgery.
    â€œWould you like to see magic?”
    His smile shriveled and died. He had all he could do not to throw his book at her head. “Yes, I’d like to see magic. No, I’m not going to steal a glimpse before I’m ready! Will you go away, or do I have to chase you?”
    â€œWhat if I say you’re ready?”
    â€œI’d say you were mocking me.”
    â€œSo I would be,” she said. “But Father says you are. He says to come when you finish here.”
    Gerbert gaped. Then he growled. Then he threw the book, but not at her head.
    oOo

    He had his own kind of temper. He finished as he was commanded, and he did not count the hours. Then and only then would he go to find his master.
    Maryam was long gone. Even she could not stand against the perfection of peasant obstinacy.
    It was an odd house, this one. From any one place it seemed solid enough, but the longer Gerbert studied in it, the larger and stranger it seemed to be. He would pass rooms that reminded him of others he had seen before, but that were subtly different. Corridors multiplied; doors appeared where he remembered walls, and walls where he could have sworn were doors. And always there were things that he could not quite see. Maryam’s servants, which were invisible, but which his bones kept telling him that he could see if he tried. Other things less tangible yet: twinges in his bones, flickers on the edge of vision, nigglings like memories that would not, quite, come clear.
    But strangest of all was that he knew no fear. He had never had night terrors as other people did: even as a little child he loved the dark, and took delight in what it showed him. Yet here, in this place half out of the world, he should have been stark with terror, and he knew it; and he was only fascinated.
    Fear was something that he saved for the great matters. Learning. Loving. Wanting.
    He found Master Ibrahim by the prickling of his nape, by the shifting of a shadow, by a whisper in the air. The magus sat in a room gone dim with evening, lamplit and quiet. He wore his wonted black, but he had laid aside his turban. A cap covered his shaven skull; a jewel glowed in his ear, a moonstone waxing with its mistress the moon.
    Gerbert bowed as had become his custom, and sat at the mage’s feet. He had learned not to speak until Ibrahim gave him leave. He was allowed to fidget, judiciously.
    Tonight he was not moved to. His head was full to bursting with names; he was tired. He did not know if, after all, he wanted to see magic. Had he not seen it already, just in coming here?
    Effects only, Hatto would have said. Of causes he had seen nothing.
    What use, if he could not do it himself?
    He swallowed a yawn. Ibrahim seemed lost in contemplation. The lamp flickered. It globed them both in light; it made all the world without, a featureless darkness.
    Gerbert did not know why he moved. He wanted to, that was all. He reached, and the light was in his hands. It was cool, like fishes’ breath. It rested pulsing in his palms.