Bestiary

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Mr. al-Kalli has arrived,” Mrs. Cabot said excitedly, popping her head in the door of Beth’s office. “Security is showing him upstairs.”

Beth was just on the phone to Robin — who was telling her that little Joey had eaten two big bowls of applesauce — but she nodded her head in a serious fashion and continued to pretend that she was on a business call. “That’s very interesting,” she said to Robin, “and I would like to hear more about the acquisition.” Robin was used to this kind of charade and would surely catch on. “May I call you back for more details? Thanks so much.”

She hung up the phone and said, “He’s bringing the book with him? The bestiary?”

“Why else would he be here?” Mrs. Cabot said. “Are you prepared?”

Beth wondered what exactly that meant. She’d studied illuminated manuscripts, among other things, for nearly ten years. If that didn’t do it…

“I think so,” she said evenly. But then, just to show some effort, she lifted a pile of monographs off the top of her blond wood desk and put them out of the way on the window ledge. Way down below, she could see the cars on the freeway, gleaming in the hot sun.

“Perhaps we should call in one of the conservators,” Mrs. Cabot said with a look of concern.

“I think that can wait a bit,” Beth said, slanting the blinds so that no direct sunlight might fall on the manuscript when it arrived.

Mrs. Cabot pursed her lips, still debating. But by then it was too late — Beth could hear footsteps approaching, and voices in the hall.

Beth stood up behind her desk as Mr. al-Kalli stopped to greet Mrs. Cabot. He was wearing a cream-colored suit today, with a scarlet pocket square, and his right-hand man, in funereal black, stood just behind him, holding a cumbersome, antique iron box.

“Would you like to put that down?” Beth asked, indicating the broad expanse of her cleared desk. “It looks heavy.”

The man waited until al-Kalli said, “Yes, Jakob, go ahead.”

Jakob came in and lowered the box like a baby onto the desk; even so, it made a pronounced thump. The box was still closed, with huge, rusty hasps. At a glance, Beth estimated the box alone, like others she had seen, was as much as a thousand years old.

Jakob stepped back silently and hovered in the open door, as al-Kalli turned to Beth. “Just as I promised,” he said, shaking her hand across the desk. His skin was as smooth and dry as silk. He sat down in one of the guest chairs, taking care to pluck up the knee of his trouser leg, and Mrs. Cabot — a bit to Beth’s surprise — commandeered the chair beside him.

“I wanted to see where my precious one would be,” he said, surveying her office. “Is this where you do your work?”

“Some of it,” Beth replied, sitting back down. “The research library is actually in the institute, which is just across the plaza. The conservation work is done in what’s called the East Building.”

“So many different buildings,” al-Kalli observed.

“Yes,” Beth conceded, “the Getty can be confusing at first.” She remembered her own introduction to the place, and having to learn just where various collections were housed in the cluster of galleries and pavilions that made up the sprawling complex.

“But The Beasts of Eden,” al-Kalli said, “will never leave this hill?”

To Beth, his English accent made him sound like Rex Harrison on her old My Fair Lady album. “No, it will always be up here,” she said, “safe and sound.”

He appeared satisfied, and Beth could no longer contain her very genuine excitement.

“May I?” she said, gesturing at the closed, but unpadlocked, hasps.

“I thought you would never ask,” al-Kalli replied with a small smile.

Beth loosened the hasps — some flakes of rust fell onto the clean desk — and then raised the lid; the box was almost three feet square, and inside, it was lined with musty, threadbare red velvet. But in its center, neatly cradled — the box must have been built expressly to house it — rested the single most exquisite book she had ever seen.

And she had seen hundreds.

She paused, unwilling even to touch it yet, and al-Kalli noted her amazement with pleasure.

“You may remove it,” he said.

Beth still didn’t say anything, but reached in, reverently, to lift the book out. It, too, was very heavy, and it was no wonder why. As she took it out, into the light of the office — my God, she thought, it must weigh twenty-five pounds — the fantastically tooled and bejeweled cover winked and sparkled, as if happy to be seen and admired once again.

Jakob silently came forward and took the box out of her way; Beth laid the book down again.

Although the covers of most such manuscripts were made of leather or vellum, this one was far more valuable. This one was ivory. Elephant ivory. Not whalebone or walrus tusk, with their buttery yellow color and tellingly coarse grain. Ivory. Almost white, finely grained, one of the most precious materials in the ancient world. The only cover Beth had ever seen that even approached this one in beauty had once adorned the Psalterium Latinum that belonged to Melisende, the wife of the Comte d’Anjou, who succeeded his father-in-law to become the King of Jerusalem in the twelfth century.

But this one surpassed even that. The Psalterium was decorated with garnets and turquoise; The Beasts of Eden was decorated with deep blue sapphires and glittering rubies. They studded the four corners of the cover, and marked the borders of the six roundels — the carved circles — that formed most of the design. In each of these roundels, a stunningly intricate creature had been carved. Griffins, gorgons, dragons. Beth would have to study them further to determine what each one was meant to be. In the very center, in a larger circle carved in the shape of a serpent, was a bird that looked a lot like a peacock, with an elaborately fanned tail and a high proud beak.

“Oh, it’s magnificent,” Mrs. Cabot put in, “and didn’t someone tell me the peacock is on your family crest?”

“That’s true,” al-Kalli said, though his eyes were still on Beth, “though this is not a peacock.”

The flames that curled up around its feet had already told Beth that much. This was the mythical phoenix, the bird that never died, but instead made its own funeral pyre, and then emerged, reborn, from its own ashes.

“From what I know of your family,” Beth said, still absorbed in the beauty of the cover, “the phoenix would be apt. As I understand it, the al-Kallis have survived, under difficult circumstances, for many centuries.”

“That we have done,” Mohammed admitted, though there was a surprising note of something — resignation? doubt? — in his voice. “And this book has survived with us.” He cleared his throat and looked directly at Beth. “And that is why it is so important to have the book restored… and thoroughly translated.”

“Oh, surely the book has been translated before,” Mrs. Cabot put in.

“It has,” al-Kalli said, but without even bothering to look her way. “But not reliably. The Latin is difficult, the text has faded, and the peculiar hand of the scribe makes some of it hard to decipher.”

Beth hadn’t opened the book yet, so she couldn’t comment on the text. Still, she wanted to put his mind at rest. “We have some of the most advanced computer programs here,” Beth explained, “that are capable of scanning small sections of text, breaking them down, and then extrapolating that information to the rest of the book. In other words, once we know how this scribe tends to form each letter, the computer will be able to identify all further examples of that letter, or word, or design element, wherever and whenever it appears.”

“How long would such a process require?” al-Kalli asked, with an urgency that surprised Beth. After all, the book had been around for a millennium or so — what could be the big hurry now?

“It depends,” Beth said. “But the job could probably be done in a few weeks.”

She thought he would look pleased, but his brow remained furrowed. “Not sooner?”

“It’s possible,” Beth said. Already she could see that this project — enticing and enthralling as it was — would also have its political dimensions. Al-Kalli would not be an easy taskmaster. “We have to handle every step with extreme caution. Just this binding,” she said, lifting the front cover less than an inch, “is extraordinarily fragile — and rare.”

“Of course it is,” Mrs. Cabot said, “inlaid with such beautiful gemstones.”

“It isn’t just that,” Beth said. “Something like this — what we call a treasure binding — is almost never found on the book it originally belonged to.”

Mrs. Cabot looked confused — the esoterica of illuminated manuscripts was not her forte or her field. But Beth guessed, from the expression on al-Kalli’s face, that he knew a great deal about his Beasts of Eden; she also felt that he enjoyed hearing her expatiate on it. “No, these covers were so priceless they were often recycled,” Beth continued. “They were removed from the wooden boards that were used for backing, and then reused on later books or codices. This one, however, is still wedded not only to its backing, but to the book itself. That alone makes it a near miracle.”

Al-Kalli had a half smile on his face now; he liked hearing his legacy praised. “Go ahead and open it,” he said with a tilt of his chin, and Beth, feeling a little like a kid on Christmas morning, did so.

Even though the centuries had indeed taken their toll, the book was still resplendent. The ink had faded, the colors had dimmed, the vellum leaves were creased and cracked, but Beth had never seen such a vibrant, rich, and original work. As she carefully turned each page, it crackled in her hand, and once or twice, she felt a tiny grain of sand… a gritty reminder of the book’s Mesopotamian provenance.

The text was inscribed in gold ink, on what had once presumably been an imperial purple background; now it was a very faint lavender. The script was so intricate and compacted that it was impossible for Beth, without much closer inspection, to pick out more than a word here and here, but what she did see confirmed her opinion that the book dated from the eleventh or perhaps twelfth century; the style of the script was somewhere between the Carolingian — promulgated by the emperor Charlemagne hundreds of years before — and the Gothic, which gradually came to the fore in Western Europe thereafter. Even with the help of the advanced computer programs that the Getty employed, decoding the densely inscribed and miniscule writing — much of it entwined or overlaid on elaborate drawings and illustrations — would be extremely difficult and time-consuming. Al-Kalli, Beth knew, was not going to be happy about that.

“Have you ever seen anything like it?” al-Kalli murmured now, leaning forward in his chair. Beth picked up a scent of expensive cologne.

“Yes,” she said, to be perfectly professional, “it reminds me of the Vienna Coronation Gospels and the Xanten Gospels in Brussels.”

He looked deflated. Mrs. Cabot looked annoyed.

“But this is, if anything, more exquisite.”

Both al-Kalli and Mrs. Cabot appeared mollified. “What I am particularly struck by,” Beth said, thinking aloud, “are the illuminations.” Indeed, she was trying to come to terms with her own opinion of them; they were not quite like anything she had ever seen before, especially in a work of this age. While many such manuscripts displayed artwork that was finely controlled — almost mathematical in its precision — these illustrations were bolder, more impressionistic. They were executed with bold, blotchy swatches of color, and imparted to the animals they depicted a cunning sense of movement and life and reality.

Which, given that this was a bestiary — largely a catalogue of mythical creatures, unseen by anyone, ever — was particularly impressive.

Beth turned another heavy page of the book, and was greeted by the baleful glare of a manticore, a legendary creature with the head of a man, the body of a lion, and the scaly tail of a serpent. In most such illustrations, the creature was shown in a static pose — often while being skewered by a party of equally static hunters — but not in this one; here, the manticore was in motion, leaping from a stand of palm trees, its head turned to the reader. Below its claws, drenched in vermilion, lay the remains of its prey — what might have been a camel, perhaps. It was surprising, even shocking in a way, to see such a fluid, powerful rendering in a manuscript so old. Most of the pictures from this era were drawn and colored by monks who worked from other, previous versions. And even when they depicted an actual creature, one that the illuminator might conceivably have seen — a crocodile, a whale, even an elephant — the work was formal and postured.

But in this book, the manticore, the chimera — a fire-breathing goat with a serpent’s tail — the unicorn — a horse with the horn of a rhinoceros — all were drawn in a style that seemed far more sophisticated, more expressive, than anything else from their time. It was as if, Beth thought, the creatures in the al-Kalli Beasts of Eden had been drawn from life.

And she said so.

Mrs. Cabot beamed, pleased to see Beth pay their guest such a compliment, but al-Kalli didn’t smile, budge, or react in any way. His lack of reaction was in itself puzzling; he looked to Beth as though he were suddenly filled with too many feelings to sort through, too many thoughts to express just one. He looked as if his mind had traveled to some far distant place… perhaps the desert that his family had inhabited — and ruled — for so many centuries.

“It will be my honor to work on this book,” she said. “It’s simply magnificent.”

But he still said nothing; he just offered a small, cryptic smile.

And when she closed the book — very carefully, and using both hands — on her desk she saw a fine silt of white sand glinting in the overhead light. Even the sand she wanted to preserve and keep with the book. It was as if it had come, like the strange beasts depicted in the illuminated pages, from a place as old as Eden.