Kingdom of the Grail by Judith Tarr Page B

and that was a fair number of years ago.
    It was a test, Pepin thought. Surely he was not expected to perform duties given an infant who had never set pen to parchment. Pepin could write. He could read. He was no great scholar but he was well enough taught. He knew how to scrape a finely tanned hide to write on, and how to make the ink, too, and sharpen the quill, and write the letters one by one in a fair round hand.
    They were very ordinary letters, too: the king’s correspondence, no more and no less. Pepin, it was all too clear, was not to be entrusted with secrets.
    Not yet.
    He endured it with gritted teeth. There was no magic in evidence here. Yet this was the same tent in which he had seen that vision of a garden. There was nothing inside but what one might expect to find in a priest’s dwelling: a narrow and ascetic cot, a small chest for belongings, a table and a lamp and a box of inks and pens, and two heaps of parchment, one rough and one scraped clean.
    No magical apparatus. Nothing at all that could be taken for such. There was not even a cross, as one might expect of a priest.
    Pepin had to trust. He had to cling to memory, and to knowledge that set in his bones. There was magic here, in this man. He knew it. He would find it, learn it. He had promised himself. He had sworn an oath in his heart.
    â€œWanting is not enough,” said Ganelon.
    Pepin looked up in startlement. It was only the second day. He had expected it to be much longer before he was spoken to again. He had been scraping parchment and mixing ink, until he was given a new task: to copy a letterof rather stupefying banality, addressed to the priest of a village that Pepin had never heard of.
    Ganelon’s voice startled him out of it. He had been thinking of nothing, just then, but the shape of the letters, writing each one fair, and none wrong or out of place.
    â€œYou must do more than want,” said Ganelon as if from the midst of a conversation. “You must will it with your whole heart.”
    â€œAnd how many eons will that take?” Pepin asked him.
    â€œYou have an insolent tongue,” said Ganelon, but calmly.
    â€œI am a king’s son,” Pepin said.
    â€œYou must forget that,” said Ganelon. “You must forget everything but desire. And when all is desire, forget that also, and become pure will.”
    â€œNo spells? No incantations?”
    â€œThose come after,” said Ganelon.
    â€œBut—”
    â€œThat is the secret,” Ganelon said. “That is the truth.”
    â€œAnd you tell it to me now?”
    â€œI tell you that you may begin to know.”
    â€œThen you will teach me.”
    â€œI have been teaching you,” said Ganelon.
    Pepin’s heart swelled. “Then I will have it. I will have it all.”
    â€œIf you are strong enough.”
    â€œI will be.”
    â€œMaybe,” said Ganelon.
    Pepin did not let himself grow angry or fall into doubt. He was sure. The magic was there for him to take. He would take it. And then . . .
    â€œFirst you must know how to begin,” Ganelon said. “Here, on the page. Ink on parchment. Letters. Words that signify nothing and everything. When you know what the words mean, then you have begun.”
    â€œSpells?”
    â€œChains that bind the world. In the beginning,” said Ganelon, “was the word. That is truth.”
    Pepin shivered. This was nothing holy, his bones knew it, though the words came from Scripture. It was all the more alluring for that. “And can you unbind the world?” he asked.
    â€œThat is what we do,” said Ganelon, “we who make magic.”
    â€œBut are there not two sorts of magic? The dark and the light?”
    â€œThey are all one,” Ganelon said.
    â€œBut—”
    â€œNo more questions,” said Ganelon. “Listen, and learn.”
    Pepin listened. He was not always certain what he learned, but that was the way of