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Gerbert had fulfilled his task to his master’s satisfaction, his reward was to read whatever he liked. He was limited, in that he knew no Greek and little Arabic, and barely enough Hebrew to pick his way through the names of the archangels. But there was Latin enough to last a while, and some of the others were beautiful with gold and jewel-colors.
    Gerbert’s outburst found him in the midst of this, hunched over a table laden with books and scrolls, cramping hand and eye and mind with a name of the utmost unpronounceability.
    â€œWhat use is it?” he cried to the air. “Why bother to learn it at all, if my only purpose is to forget it?”
    He received an answer, soft and much amused. “Not to forget, except with the consciousness. Your bones will remember.”
    Now there was another thorn in his side. The lady of the gate was not Ibrahim’s sister, she was his daughter. She was younger than Gerbert, and not only could she read all the languages which he had barely begun, she was well advanced in study of the Art itself.
    It was not that he had any illusions about feminine fragility, of body or of mind. He did not even mind that she was infidel as well as learned. What he could not bear was that she was better at it than he.
    She never tried to deny it. “I began younger,” she once, “and I grew up with it. And I have a talent for it.”
    More than he. And much more patience. She could sit for hours, reckoning every characteristic of every herb ever deemed useful for either magic or medicine, and never do more than frown with the tedium.
    â€œDiscipline,” she said. And if she wanted to drive him wild: “Women are better at that. Especially young ones. Their humours aren’t always in a roil, pricking at them to run about and kill one another.”
    Discipline, he had responded icily, did not preclude impertinence. Maryam only laughed.
    She had decided that he was family: she no longer wore her veil in front of him. She was not hideous, but neither was she pretty. She was too foreign; too much like her father. Of her mother she never spoke. There was a sadness there, and perhaps a smolder of anger.
    Now he saw none of that, only her wickedly solemn expression as she sat across the table and opened a book. He could not see which it was. “I know what you want,” she said. “You want to cast off all your drudgery and work an honest spell.”
    That was true, but it was none of her affair. He scowled at her. “Even I know that it never does to be hasty in a high art. When I’m ready to work magic, I’ll be allowed to work it.”
    â€œBut you would give your heart’s blood to see a little of it before that.”
    â€œSo I’d like to see a working or two. Is that a sin?”
    She shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I’m not a Christian.”
    â€œHave you worked magic?” he demanded.
    â€œOf course,” she said.
    She was baiting him. He breathed deep, twice, and resolved not to succumb. Grimly he turned back to his crabbed and illegible scroll, seeking out the next name in the sequence. It kept blurring in front of his eyes. He kept hearing Ibrahim’s voice. “To name a spirit is to master it. Yet have a care that your strength suffice for the mastery, or the spirit will suborn you, and win back its name, and exact due punishment for your temerity.”
    To name a spirit is to master it.
    There was more to it than that. Rites, rituals. Invocations of power. Gerbert was ready for none of them.
    He looked up under his brows. Maryam was deep in her book. “What kind of magics have you done?”
    She did not start, which meant that she had been waiting for him to ask. He was learning to read her; he was mildly proud of that. “Magics,” she said, nonchalant. “The servants are mine.” The soundless, bodiless hands that labored in the house, on occasion, when it suited them. “And