Bestiary

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Even in the hot air of the backyard, Beth felt a chill run down her spine. For many centuries, these words had been hidden, secretly stashed beneath an ivory and sapphire tombstone. And she — right now — was the first person to read them.

And these were the first words that she read.

The printouts from the computer translation program were designed to be read laterally, with one-third of the page on the left devoted to an actual facsimile of the original Latin in which the letter had been composed, the middle column a clear rendering of what those graphemes or characters probably were, and the right side providing the best approximate translation of the meaning. Many of the passages were asterisked and numbered, indicating that the supplemental pages at the back would include, where necessary, more extensive alternative readings — sometimes because the ancient text was faded and/or indecipherable, and sometimes because the complex structure of the passage had left too many questions for easy analysis. Computers were fine for rote work, but they had no sense of literary style.

But these words were unasterisked, unnumbered, and perfectly plain in their meaning.

Joey squealed and Beth looked up. They were outside, in the little grassed-in area that passed for a yard, with Champ on relentless patrol, sniffing at the low iron fence that surrounded them and occasionally lifting a leg to show any possible rivals who was boss around these parts. It was dusk, but the heat of the day was still strong. Beth, in her eagerness to get away from the Getty, to read these pages for the first time in the privacy of her own home, had left work early, dismissed Robin, who was delighted (“Cool — there’s a band at the Viper Room that I wanted to see tonight!”), and gone outside with her briefcase and a tall glass of iced tea, which was precariously balanced on the wobbly little garden table by her side.

Of course, what she had done was a major breach of protocol. These pages, a translation of what now appeared to be the last testament of one of the world’s most accomplished illuminators, should have been immediately revealed to the Getty authorities and of course to the owner of The Beasts of Eden. The originals should have been carefully catalogued and sealed, while a slow and deliberate plan of action — perhaps involving outside scholars and specialists — was assembled to analyze and study them. It all could have taken months, years. Beth had a somewhat greater patience with protocol than her husband did, but she did share with Carter one thing — and that was her thirst for knowledge, her passion for discovery. And this letter, which had taken many centuries to travel halfway around the world, she felt in some ineffable way was addressed to her.

Beth paused. It was difficult reading, not only because her eye was constantly coursing back and forth across the page, checking the various columns to see that the computer had indeed read the Latin as she would have, and that the translation was on point — but because the words themselves were so direct, so full of import and dire portent. Were these in fact the last words of the man who had written The Beasts of Eden, and who (she was sure of it, though she knew she’d get an argument from other scholars in the field) had also done all the illustrations? Or would he survive whatever dreadful fate awaited him the next day?

Joey was happily crawling around on the grass, assembling walls and towers out of multicolored, squeezable plastic cubes. She knew that mothers always thought their own children were especially talented and precocious, but still, she was impressed with the solidity and design of the battlements — and battlements were what they most reminded her of — that he was building. Just now he was capping another tower, which, because it was standing on the uneven ground, looked ready to topple any second. In Joey’s gray-blue eyes, she could see that he thought so, too. He looked around and, wouldn’t you know it, Champ stopped his patrolling long enough to turn, pick up a big red block in his mouth, and trot over with it. Joey added it, like a buttress, to the base of his tower.

What other infant, Beth wondered, could ever have done such a thing? Not for the first time, she thought about having his IQ checked. Could they do that with a child so young?

A fly landed on the papers in her lap, and she brushed it away. The sun was starting to set behind the Santa Monica Mountains, and the canyon below was growing dark, as if a blot of ink was slowly spreading across the thick brush and chaparral. She took a sip of her iced tea, wiped her fingers dry on the cotton shorts she was wearing, and returned to the pages in her lap.

My God, Beth thought, was this what she thought it was? Was it to be a firsthand account of a pilgrim — a Crusader? — to the Holy Land? Peter, she knew, was not meant to be St. Peter. But could it be the legendary Peter the Hermit, a bearded anchorite who had emerged in the late eleventh century to galvanize much of Europe and send them off to reclaim Palestine from the infidels? If that was true, then this scribe very likely spoke French, Peter’s native tongue and the language he used to stir up much of Western Europe. The scribe’s accomplishments continued to grow: he could compose and write exquisite Latin, he could provide illuminations that were breathtaking in their beauty and their power — and now, if she could guess where this was going, he was an adventurer, too, a man of action. More and more, she felt she was dealing with a man in the mold of a Cellini, a Caravaggio, or a Michelangelo. Not some cloistered fellow, who had seldom left the monastery’s scriptorium, but an artist of the first order, who had fully entered into the life of his time.

And if she was right about Peter the Hermit, then that time could now be neatly pinpointed — it was 1095 when Peter, newly returned from his first trip to the Holy Land, traveled to Rome to beseech the aid of the Pope. Everywhere he went, Peter stirred up religious fervor and, in an almost equal degree, bloodlust. Riding on a mule and wearing a long frock girded with a thick cord, he regaled the crowds that came to see him with terrible tales of the atrocities visited upon Christians journeying to Jerusalem. He called upon the angels to testify to the truth of his words, and as he spoke he wept and beat his own breast with a rude crucifix until he bled. He extolled the glories of Mount Zion, the rock of Calvary, the Mount of Olives, and Pope Urban II accepted him, as did thousands of others, as an anointed messenger from God.

Beth had to smile; her man was running true to form. Had he, like those other hot-blooded artists, committed some crime?

If he had run afoul of the law, it must have been in a pretty bad way. But the scribe had secured his own protection; like so many others, he had enlisted in God’s army, and anyone who interfered with him now risked anathema — or excommunication. For some, no doubt, the Crusades had been a divine calling, but for many others, the war on the Muslims had provided a kind of medieval Get Out of Jail Free card.

Beth glanced up; Joey was toddling after Champ, who had a bright blue block in his mouth. Joey was laughing, and Champ’s tail was wagging, and Beth thought how strange it was that here, now, she should be reading what was probably a condemned man’s final confession. Caught up in the tale, she began to skip over the alternative readings and notes and let the narrative unfold.

We were led by several noble lords, among them Robert, Duke of Normandy, Stephen, Count of Chartres and Troyes, and Godfrey de Bouillon, descendant of the great Charlemagne himself. He went on to recount many more barons and princes who rode with this first crusade, all in the same cramped, precisely executed style in which the entire letter had been written. Under what conditions, Beth wondered, had it been composed? Clearly, he had had only a few spare sheets of parchment to work with, because the words were very closely spaced, the lines very narrow. And where was he at the time — confined to a dungeon cell, writing by the light of a torch, or in the attic of a prison tower, huddled in the moonlight that penetrated the bars of his window? Was he resigned to his fate, or had he some hope, or some plan, of escape?

Our journey, though favored by divine providence, was a difficult one, and we were often besieged and attacked. Beth knew the history of the First Crusade — some of the illuminated manuscripts she studied would allude to it — and she had read the standard historical accounts in grad school. But she had never read a first-person rendering like this — had anyone? — and she quickly lost herself in it. Between the frontiers of Austria and the walls of Constantinople, the pilgrim horde, which, according to most accounts, numbered several hundred thousand, devoured everything in its path, and the inhabitants of Hungary, Bulgaria, and Greece proved less and less receptive, and finally hostile. At a trumpet blast from the King of Hungary, a legion of archers and mounted horse was unleashed upon us. Even Peter was forced to flee to the Thracian Mountains, and it was there we hid in misery until the Emperor Alexius granted us safe conduct to his mighty fortress on the shores of the Bosporus.

The sun had dropped another few degrees behind the Santa Monica Mountains, and the words were becoming difficult to read. Beth put the transcripts down in her lap and looked up at Joey, who had knocked down his walls and towers and was sitting surrounded by the fallen blocks. He was chattering gibberish to himself — he just had to be way ahead of the usual learning curve, Beth thought for the umpteenth time — with his head tilted up toward the bedroom window. “Da,” she thought she heard him say — had he? — and she followed his gaze to the same window, where she could see, through the slats of the Venetian blinds, Carter’s dark silhouette as he moved back into the room. He was home earlier than she’d thought he’d be. Still, it would have been nice if he’d come outside to say hello before going upstairs to change out of his work clothes. She’d picked up some swordfish steaks at the market and she was sort of hoping he’d be up for a barbecue.

“Want to go inside and say hello to your daddy?” Beth said to Joey. “Can you say that — daddy?” Joey looked at her with a big grin but said nothing. “I think you just did, ten seconds ago.” Beth got down on her knees and crawled across the grass toward him. This made Joey laugh, and his loose blond curls shook in the evening air as Champ ran around them both, barking, in a big, wide circle.

With the transcripts tucked under one arm, Beth hoisted Joey up off the lawn and, together, they stood for a moment, watching the sun dip below the mountaintop. The ravine below their house fell into deep shadow; a flock of birds suddenly burst from the brush and flew off toward the ocean.

Beth nuzzled Joey’s cheek — why had no one explained to her how sweet a baby could smell? — and turned toward the house. Carter hadn’t turned on the lights yet.

In the kitchen, Beth flicked the switch and called out, “How would you feel about a backyard barbecue?”

But Carter didn’t answer; he must be in the bathroom.

She put Joey into his high chair, turned on the local news — another forecast of hot and dry weather — and gave him his dinner. Champ sat on his haunches, expectantly, until Joey was done and she could feed him, too. The news was following a freeway chase somewhere down near Redondo Beach. That was one thing you could say for New York, Beth thought: traffic was so bad no highway chase could last more than a few hundred yards.

When the newscast ended, she turned off the TV and lifted Joey out of his chair. “Uh-oh,” she said, “somebody needs a new diaper.”

And it didn’t look as if Carter was going to be in the mood for a barbecue. He must have flopped onto the bed and fallen asleep.

As she carried Joey upstairs, she noted that Carter still hadn’t turned on any of the lights. She went into Joey’s bedroom, changed him, and left him in his crib, then crossed the hall to the master suite.

“Carter?” she said softly, stepping into the darkened room. She’d expected to see him lying on the bed, damp from a shower. But no one was there. And there was a fragrance in the air — the scent of a forest, after a heavy rain — that made her stop in her tracks. It was the scent she remembered from New York, from the terrible and difficult days preceding Joey’s birth. The days when their lives had been shadowed, even endangered, by the malevolence of a creature who went by the name of Arius.

She fumbled for the light switch and turned it on. The bed was unrumpled, the room was empty.

But the bathroom door was closed.

She put her ear to it and, holding her breath, listened for any sound within. There was a low swishing sound, of the plastic shower curtain crackling. “Carter?” she said, still hoping against hope that she would hear him answer.

But there was nothing.

She tried the handle; the door was unlocked. She opened it slowly, and yes, the shower curtain was billowing in the breeze from the open window. At dusk, a wind often came up off the valley below. But no one was in the stall.

Only the scent of wet leaves — more powerful here than it had been in the bedroom — suggested that someone might have been in here.

Someone who might even have exited, moments before, by the open window.

Downstairs, she could hear the sound of the front door opening.

“Honey?” Carter called out; she could hear his backpack hitting the floor of the foyer. “Guess who I brought home for dinner?”

“You decent?” Del called out. “’Cause if not, come on down!”

Beth closed the bathroom window tight, then stepped back into the bedroom.

“She must be upstairs with Joey,” she heard Carter saying to Del. “There’s beer in the fridge; help yourself.”

Carter came up the steps two at a time, and when Beth turned to him, she knew he could tell something was wrong.

And then the scent must have hit him, too, because he quickly took her in his arms and looked all around. “You alright? Joey alright?”

She nodded.

Then he ran to the nursery, and came back with Joey nestled against his shoulder.

“When did this happen?” he asked. “Just now?”

“Yes. Right before you came home.”

“Did you… see him?”

“No.” She shuddered involuntarily. “It was only that smell.”

He didn’t have to ask how Arius might have gotten in. They both knew that he could come and go wherever he pleased. And now they knew something more — that whatever their hopes, and their suspicions, had been, he was still a presence in this world. And in their lives.

“You mind if I have one of the expensive foreign brews?” Del shouted up from the foot of the stairs. “I don’t normally drink a beer that had to come all the way from Holland.”

“Have whatever you want,” Carter answered, still holding the baby and looking deep into Beth’s eyes; they didn’t have to say a word for each of them to know exactly what the other was thinking.

Little Joey looked from one to the other, with his usual expression — so incongruous for a toddler — of placid understanding.

“I should have called ahead,” Carter murmured. “To tell you about Del.”

Beth shrugged; she was used to Carter bringing home his buddies. At one time it had been Joe Russo — the baby’s namesake. Now it was Del.

“And when do I get to see the kid?” Del called out. “God knows I didn’t come all the way up here just to hang out with Carter some more.”

Carter put his free arm around Beth’s shoulders and shepherded his family toward the stairs.

Del was waiting at the bottom, one hand on top of Champ’s head and the other holding a Heineken. “Now you’re talkin’,” he said.