Ars Magica Read Online Free

Hatto’s punishment could not harm his soul. A magus’ presence most surely could.
    Harm? Or tempt?
    The world was a blur about him. The sun was a featureless dazzle. People passed like flotsam in a flood: a babble without sense, a jostle of bodies. Some of them must have been infidels. Gerbert neither saw nor cared.
    Sense flooded in, all unwelcome, and all too soon. Here was the street. The fountain that marked it trickled endlessly into its basin. A woman drew water from it: dark, veiled, Saracen.
    Gerbert’s throat was dry, but he could not drink where an infidel had drunk.
    This, said the cool voice of logic, is ridiculous. Here was he, armored in his habit and his faith, with his bishop’s trust for shield. There was the house, a colonnaded wall that spoke of old Rome, a gate wrought in iron with Arab intricacy. No dragons crouched within.
    Oh, indeed, no. Worse than dragons.
    Folly, said logic.
    He gathered his scattered wits and clenched his trembling fists. “God guard me,” he muttered in peasant dialect.
    And laughed, sharp and short, because both the words and the tongue were so perfectly fitted to his cowardice.
    The servants were carefully oblivious to it all. He led them to the gate and raised his hand to beat on it.
    Soundlessly it swung back, leaving him standing like a fool, hand raised to strike the air. In the shadow behind was a darker shadow, a sudden shimmer: the movement of a hand, beckoning. With the valor of the lost, Gerbert passed within.
    Sudden coolness, echoing night; sudden blinding light. His mind, independent of his will, made sense of it: a brief vaulted passage, a turn, a courtyard smitten with sunlight. There was nothing sorcerous in it, unless there were magic in the trees that bloomed in basins all about, filling the air with sweetness.
    His guide came clear before him. It was, he saw with a shock, a woman, and veiled. Her eyes were large and very dark; her brow and her hand amid the veils were the color of a marten’s pelt. A demon? A Nubian?
    He crossed himself. The great eyes glinted with mockery. The woman turned with flowing grace and led him through the court.
    It was all most ordinary, for Spain. The woman walked like a woman, if a young and remarkably graceful one; her scent was fleeting but earthly, and it was one he knew: attar of roses. The servants walked as they had through the streets, stolid, unafraid. No wonders unfolded about them, save what one expected in the house of a wealthy man in Barcelona: a man who seemed less inclined to opulence than to a studied simplicity. One of Hatto’s secretaries fancied himself a judge of elegance; he had seen fit to teach Gerbert a few of its many degrees. Therefore Gerbert recognized quality in the plainness of the woman’s robe, and in the carving of a lintel, and in the hanging of a rug on a whitewashed wall. The only magic in it was the alchemy of taste.
    Gerbert’s stride broke. He should have been glad. He was not. He was disappointed.
    So much dread, and all for naught. He would have laughed if he had been alone.
    He was almost calm when he came to the end of it: a chamber like any of the others, plain, with a rug and a table and a low divan. The woman’s gestures bade him sit. She brought him cakes, fruit, a cup of something cold and sour-sweet. Shame of his fears had made him bold. He nibbled a cake, sipped from the cup. No bolt of lightning struck him; no poison knotted his vitals. The cakes were pleasant. The sherbet was excessively odd. He tasted nothing in either that could have been sorcery.
    When he had thus accepted the hospitality of the house, the woman bowed with glinting eyes and went away. She left the cakes and the cup. Gerbert took up another of the former, wondering what it was made of. He knew almonds, but the rest was strange. One could learn to like it. He tried the sherbet again, and grimaced. Too sour, and yet too sweet. Its undertaste was bitter.
    â€œYes,”