Bestiary

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“That’s a g,” her assistant said.

“It’s a q.”

“No way.”

“Way,” Beth said wearily. “Just put it in the Q file.”

Beth pushed the chair back from her desk and rubbed her eyes with her fingertips. How long, she wondered, had they been at it? She glanced at the clock, nestled between the framed photos of Carter and Joey, and realized it had only been an hour. But such close work made the time crawl by.

Not that Elvis seemed to mind. He was twenty-three, she’d been told, but he looked like he was about twelve. And he also looked like he had never been out in the daylight. His skin was dead white and smooth as marble, his hair was jet black, and he had long, narrow sideburns running halfway down his cheeks. She suspected that Elvis was a name he had adopted on his own.

“That makes three variations in the Q file,” he said.

“It wasn’t uncommon for medieval scribes to do slightly different, more or less ornate versions of each letter, often in the same manuscript. One might be used as a large initial to signal the beginning of a chapter or section, one might be simply a capital, one might be in the lowercase. And sometimes they just got fancy.”

“Must have made it tough to read,” Elvis said, entering the letter in question into his database.

“Now you see the problem.”

For days they had been hunched in front of the computer screen, going over scanned pages of The Beasts of Eden and laboriously picking out and entering each variation they could find of each letter or numeral — each grapheme — and then cataloguing it in the master concordance. The idea was, once they had a solid and broad enough selection of the letters and numbers, the computer program would be able to immediately identify all the characters; after that, all you had to do was let the program run and it would translate the entire manuscript in a lot less time than it would take Beth, armed with a magnifying glass and a Latin dictionary, to do the same.

But before you got there, you had to stay here for at least a few more days.

“You want a caffè latte?” Elvis asked. “I’m going to get one.”

For a second, she wondered if he should risk it; it meant going outside, in the sunlight.

“Sounds great. Charge it to the conservation department.”

“In that case,” Elvis said, “can I get some other stuff, too?”

“Go to town.” She hoped he’d get something healthy. He looked like he lived on candy bars and soda.

While he was gone, she stood up, did some stretches, then phoned home. The nanny picked up, and in the background she could hear Champ barking.

“Anything wrong?” Beth said.

“No, no,” Robin said with a laugh. “I think a bird had the nerve to land on Joey’s windowsill.”

“Guess we don’t need a security service after all.”

“Long as you’ve got Champ, you don’t.”

Joey, it turned out, was upstairs in his crib for nap time. But would he be sleeping? Beth wondered. Sometimes she had the feeling he just lay there, thinking deep thoughts he wasn’t yet able to express. But with all quiet on the home front, she could turn her attention back to the work at hand.

Which was coming along. At first she’d debated how to go about it, then decided that the best way might be to focus on what were known in medieval manuscripts as the catchwords — words that were written at the bottom of each gathering, or quire, and then repeated as the first words at the top of the page in the next quire. It was a technique used to make sure that the separate sections, when they were all illuminated and ready to be bound together into the actual book, were placed in the right order. It was also a convenient handwriting test, a good way for her to see the scribe writing the same words twice, in close proximity.

But it was grueling work, not only because the dense script was extremely difficult to decipher, but because portions of the book had faded, or been worn away. Most of it, it was true, was still remarkably well preserved and vibrant, the colors leaping off the page, the metallic gold glinting in the light. But after nearly a thousand years, nothing could be expected to remain entirely intact and undamaged.

Elvis came back with two caffè lattes and what looked like a grocery bag filled with sandwiches, fruit drinks, yogurt cups, cookies, and who knew what else. “I think I went a little crazy,” he said.

Beth couldn’t have cared less. Elvis was considered the boy genius of the Getty’s computer world, and whatever it took to keep his motor running was well worth it. And it was nice to hear his boyish enthusiasm as she showed him page after photocopied page of the ancient book and explained what it all meant. Or at least what she thought it all meant.

Even the catchwords, she’d noticed, were a little strange. The text occasionally seemed to end a little short, or run a little long, all in order, as best she could surmise, to make sure that certain words appeared naturally at the bottom of the page. And although they weren’t the words she might have expected to land there, she had the distinct impression that the scribe had gone to some trouble to see that they did.

While Elvis went about eating with one hand and maneuvering icons all over the screen with the other, Beth began to look idly at the list of preliminary catchwords, in the order that they showed up in the book so far. And something funny struck her. The first two catchwords, which closed out the first quire, neatly matched up to the three words that closed out the second one. They started to make a sentence, which, roughly translated from the medieval Latin, said, Brought here / to this land.

“Huh,” she said, under her breath.

But Elvis, sitting right next to her at the desk, said, “Huh what? I do something wrong?”

“No, nothing’s wrong,” Beth said. “I just noticed something kind of funny.”

“Share,” Elvis said, taking another big bite out of a sandwich that smelled like it had pesto in it.

“Could you make a quick list of all the catchwords we’ve translated so far, in the order they appear?”

“Not a problem.”

His fingers flew across the keyboard, and a minute later he said, “It’s printing out now. Want me to go get it?” The printers were in a central station down the hall, something Beth usually found to be a total nuisance. But right now, if it meant getting away from that blast of pesto, she’d happily walk a few steps.

“You eat. I’ll go.”

She got up and went out into the hall. She could hear Mrs. Cabot haranguing someone in an office down the hall. Why, she thought, did God create bureaucrats? Ducking into the printer room, she found her sheet, still warm, waiting on top of a stack of other, legal-looking documents in the tray. She didn’t have to study them to know what they were about. The word “provenance” jumped out three times on the top page alone; the Getty, like all major museums, had to be scrupulously careful about where its acquisitions came from, and whether or not the seller, or donor, had legal title in the first place.

Fortunately, The Beasts of Eden was just a loan, in for conservation and study, the way you might bring in a car for a thirty-thousand-mile tune-up. So that was one paperwork blizzard Beth had not had to slog through. Not yet.

Elvis had printed out each set of catchwords on a separate line, first in Latin, then with the English translation (these would have to be refined later on) right after it.

Reading down the page, Beth could easily put them all together, and what they said, as she stood there between the sleek machines, which had already begun to work on other jobs that had been remotely transmitted, was either a fantastic coincidence or a game of some sort.

Or — a third possibility, and one she should not rule out — a startling discovery that had waited almost a thousand years to be made.

Right now, reading through just what they had so far, the combined catchwords said: Brought here / to this land / honored guest / now prisoner / laboring in obscurity / my name to sleep (or was it really “to vanish”?).

Beth just stood there, reading the words over and over again, as if to convince herself that they really did fall together in such a neat and logical order. And as she did, the notion of a coincidence was discarded altogether. Which left the other two alternatives: On the one hand, it might be just a little prank. Monks and scribes were prone to such things, often including what was called a colophon at the end of a manuscript, in which they thanked their patron, boasted about what arduous work they’d done, and sometimes hinted that they hoped to be handsomely paid. In some Italian manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the scribes went so far as to suggest what they were planning to use the money for — wine and women.

But this message, cobbled together from catchwords, was nothing like that. It wasn’t boastful, it wasn’t light-hearted, it wasn’t meant to be read by anyone but an initiate — a fellow writer, who knew his Latin. Beth knew that many manuscripts were produced, as this one might well have been, for patrons who could not themselves read the actual text. The book was a treasure, a measure and sign of their wealth and sophistication, and if it was read, it was read to them by an educated retainer. The Beasts of Eden, created for a rich and powerful Eastern dynasty, was even more likely to have been such a work.

But what did the rest of the catchwords say and how would they complete the message?

Beth turned on her heel and hurried back to her office. Elvis had polished off the sandwich and was working on an oatmeal cookie the size of a Frisbee.

“I’ve brought the letter catalogue up to date,” he said. “Go ahead — ask for a letter, any letter.”

“Not now.”

Elvis looked hurt. The danger, Beth thought, of working with kids…

“I need you to bring up the list of catchwords.”

“We just did that.”

“No, not just the ones we’ve already deciphered and catalogued; I want the ones that are still remaining. All of them in the exact same order that they show up in the quires.”

“Aren’t we kind of getting ahead of ourselves? Didn’t you say that the way to do this—”

“Forget what I said, okay? This is more important.”

Suddenly Elvis looked stoked. “Hey, you look like you’re on to something.”

Beth didn’t reply; she was riffling through the pile of photocopies on her desk, removing all the sheets that had, as a result of completing a quire, been embellished with two or three catchwords in the lower right corner.

“Aye, aye, Captain Kirk.” Elvis crammed the rest of the cookie into his mouth and began to correlate the printouts Beth handed him with the same images on the computer screen. Then he highlighted the catchwords and moved them onto the master list. “You know that you’re only going to have the Latin for these, right? We haven’t completed the lexicon or the graphemical database yet, so we can’t do the simultaneous translation.”

“That’s okay,” Beth said, still not looking up from her work. “I’ll muddle through somehow.”

Elvis went back to his keyboard. “That is so cool,” he said under his breath. “You’re a total babe and you can read ancient Latin.”

Even in the midst of this potentially huge discovery, the words “total babe” were not entirely lost on Beth.