Moving Target (17 page)

She gave him a look from beneath her thick mahogany eyelashes. “Etchings, huh?” She turned on the sink faucet and began washing her hands. “They better be illuminated.”

“Will you settle for illuminating?”

“No.”

“Once more, you’re in luck.” He handed her a small towel. “They’re illuminated. But you’d be surprised at what some of those scholar-scribes thought worthy of illumination.”

“If sultans can commission instructive rugs for their seraglios, then I suppose medieval kings were entitled to amuse themselves, too.”

“Instructive rugs? Interesting.”

“Only if you read Arabic,” she said, drying her hands briskly. “Poems, not pictures.”

“Art, then, not illustration. I’m afraid the medieval scholars of Europe were more, er, direct in their description.”

“
Depiction
,” she corrected. Pornography, after all, wasn’t noted for wasting time on words.

“That, too.”

Serena snickered, then fell silent, wondering what medieval lust would look like. Probably pretty much the same-old same-old, once the clothes and hairstyles were discounted.

“That’s an odd smile,” Erik said as he led her down a hallway. “Share the joke?”

“No joke. Just that some things don’t change.”

“Like body parts?” he suggested dryly.

She shrugged. “And looking at sex as body parts. Part A goes into Part B, repeat as necessary.”

“Put that way, it sounds pretty boring.”

“Put that way, it is boring.”

He gave her a sideways glance.

She didn’t notice. She had just discovered the old photographs that lined the hall, Edward Curtis’s sepia chronology of a time and a people now gone.

Erik wondered what Serena was thinking about as she studied the weathered faces of Chumash Indians whose difficult lives were written in each wrinkle and line. When he looked at the photos, he couldn’t help thinking about what it had felt like to know that your ancestral line ended with you; no second chances, no hope, nothing but a blank stretching into the future. Extinction.

What might someone do when faced with that certainty? What would a man or a woman be capable of to ensure that there was a future other than emptiness?

He had been asking himself those questions ever since the first time he looked into the dark, intent eyes of the vanished Chumash and was old enough to realize just how final and inevitable death was. He still didn’t have any answers.

Then he thought about a recently deceased Ellis Weaver, four ancestral illuminated leaves, and a modern granddaughter who didn’t know how much trouble ancient history could cause.

“Grandmother had a photo like this,” Serena said slowly. “The oasis and the stout palms, and a woman who looked as worn and gritty as the palms themselves. G’mom said the woman’s eyes were like holes burned in eternity, letting time bleed through.”

“Cheerful woman, your grandmother.”

Serena smiled slightly. “Yes, I guess she was rather dour. But then, how does a mother feel who loses her only child?”

“Not happy,” Erik agreed. “Did she blame herself for her daughter’s death?”

“She never talked about it. But she didn’t believe in God or the devil.” Serena turned away from the photo and met Erik’s uncanny bird-of-prey eyes. “That meant she had only herself to blame.”

“Do you blame her?”

“No. I blame whatever it is that makes people so different. I love the desert. My mother loathed it. It was a prison she escaped from as soon as possible. The fact that she ran to a different kind of prison . . .” Serena shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe she loved communal poverty. I hope so. She certainly didn’t have much life to enjoy. When she died, she was almost ten years younger than I am now.”

Erik thought of his own parents, who had loved each other and their children, and would have loved their grandchildren just as much. Even though his parents had died too soon, they had left a legacy of love that grew each time their daughters laughed with their own children, kissed their hurts, and ran to their husbands’ waiting arms.

For the first time Erik wondered how he would have felt about life and trust if his parents had died when he was five and he had been raised by his mother’s mother, who was as mean-spirited a woman as had ever lived to see the far side of ninety.

No wonder Serena was reluctant to trust him. She had no reason to trust life. Fourth of July might have been an optimistic date to see the pages. Halloween, perhaps.

He just wished he didn’t have a feeling that time was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

‘
T
is useless to moan and rend garments at the graveside of past betrayal. I trusted where I should not. I doubted where I should not. I lost before I knew what I had found.”

“A Learned man is no different from other men. When a pitiless truth stands before us, we hide our eyes. When a beguiling lie sighs to us, we race toward it.

“No, not we. I. I and I and I . . .”

“Fool, to love the lie and flee from the loving truth.”

“Mother of God, pity me as I stand naked by the graveside of what might have been, my clothes rent around me, my soul bare and shivering, moaning the name I loved too late.

“Does she stand naked by a different grave?

“Does she call my name in Hell?

“Or does she live, and in living, curse my very soul?”

Erik’s low voice seemed to shiver like black flame in the room as he laid aside the page he had been reading aloud from.

An unreasonable sadness gripped Serena, sinking through her rational mind like talons. She turned away from him and forced herself to focus on the room, on the walls, on anything but the written words, echoes of an agony that was almost a thousand years old.

Except for an efficient ventilation system that removed candle smoke from the air, she could have been in a medieval library. The windows were high and shuttered. Carved wooden chests filled with leather-covered books stood open around the room. High wooden tables held other volumes. Some were open. Some were buckled or strapped tightly closed to prevent the thick vellum pages from curling. There was no light but that shed by candles whose flames quivered and dipped with every invisible current of air, as though the candles lived and breathed in slow rhythms. It was the same for the open books, light shimmering across them so that pages with golden letters and designs seemed to breathe.

Time was in the room, surrounding them, and it was alive.

“That’s one of the pages from the Book of the Learned that I’ve resurrected,” Erik said.

Blindly she nodded, unable to speak.

“The original page is in a private collection in Florida,” he continued, looking at her back, wondering at her visible tension. “It’s a palimpsest. They were kind enough to let me photograph the page under ultraviolet light so that I could read the text beneath.”

Not really hearing anything but a dead man’s living cry of despair, she nodded again. Her hair burned red-gold in the candlelight with each tight movement she made.

“Do you know what a palimpsest is?” he asked quietly.

She shook her head.

“Do you want to know?”

She nodded.

“It’s taken from a Greek word that means twice-scraped or scraped again. That’s how scribes erased mistakes or reused vellum; they scraped off the original lettering and wrote over the newly blank space. Vellum was very expensive.”

Serena gave a sigh that sent the candle flames to swaying. “How did they do the erasing?”

“If you were working with papyrus, you just washed away the ink. Vellum was more difficult, but more durable. Scribes scraped off small errors with a penknife. You could do a whole page that way, but it was quicker and easier to use a rough stone. Pumice was a favorite. I use it myself.”

Slowly she turned around, one arm crossed defensively across her chest, one hand open on her neck as though to hold her unusual scarf in place. He kept wanting to touch it. Or her. Then he saw the shadows in her rare violet eyes and he felt like there were bands around his own lungs, squeezing.

“Still worried that I’ll hurt you?” he asked quietly.

“I . . .” She lowered her arms and let out another breath that made flames sway. “There’s something about what you just read. His pain.
I could feel it.
” She rubbed her palms against her arms as though she was cold and looked past him at the page lying so innocently against polished oak. “It’s crazy, but I felt it just the same. Poor man. What did he do to earn such pain?”

“I don’t know. It’s one of the reasons I’ve been seeking the Book of the Learned or whatever fragments I can find. I’m curious. I’ve always been that way.”

“Where did that page come from?” she asked. “I mean, before the people in Florida?”

“A small Chicago dealer.”

“And before that?”

“A large auction house.”

“Warrick’s?” she asked sharply.

“Christie’s.”

She let out a broken breath. “And before that?”

“A private individual, now dead.”

“And before that? When did it first come on the market?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you find out?”

“Rarities is searching now,” he said.

“Why now? Why not whenever you first found the sheet?”

“Then it was a hobby, and I only asked for the recent provenance of the sheet. The Florida couple gave me the three owners listed on their bill of sale.”

“Only three? Even if there were more?”

“Three is the accepted number to prove provenance,” Erik said. “Many artifacts don’t have even that. Lengthy, detailed provenance is a relatively modern concern growing out of Nazi thefts and, more recently, looted archaeological sites.”

Serena bit the inside of her lower lip and wondered how much she could risk in pursuing her heritage . . . and, probably, her grandmother’s murderer. She didn’t want to trust anyone, but she had to start somewhere.

“Do you have other pages from the Book of the Learned?” she asked finally.

“A handful.”

“Do you know anything more about where they ultimately came from?”

“Ultimate provenance.” He smiled thinly. “No. Do you want to see them?”

“Are they all like that one?”

“Some are illuminated. Some have exquisitely rendered miniatures. Some have columns of treaty alliances in Latin and pithy summaries of allies in vulgate marginalia.”

She smiled despite the ice prickling beneath her skin. “I meant are all the pages so bleak?”

“No. And even that page isn’t completely despairing.”

“You could have fooled me.” The torment in the words still made her shiver.

Erik held out his hand. “Come over to the table. I’ll show you another way to look at what I just read to you.”

She took his hand and let him lead her to the page he had just put down. It looked so cool and elegant, all stylized black lines and colorful geometries hidden inside capital letters. Bits of gold foil flickered across the face of the page like a haunting wail.

“The lines I read out loud are here,” he said, pointing.

Serena followed his fingertip as he traced lightly down one of the two columns on the page.

“This”—his fingertip shifted to the facing column—“talks about the uses of various fruits and vegetables to relieve imbalances in the ‘humors.’ Even as he laments whatever he did that brought such pain, he writes about eating less leeks and turnips and more barley soup.”

“Why?”

“Leeks and turnips were believed to encourage sperm production and enhance sex. Barley soup was believed to cool hot temperaments.”

“The medieval equivalent of a cold shower?”

He laughed. “Yes. The placement of the lament and the wry advice was Erik’s way of telling himself to cool off.”

“Erik?”

“Erik the Learned. He’s the scribe who wrote the Book of the Learned.”

“How do you know?”

He opened a shallow belly drawer. Inside was a ragged sheet of vellum that could have been cut—or hacked—from a larger page. No bigger than his hand, the partial page was quite beautiful in a spare, black-and-white way. The calligraphy was stylish, yet somehow more personal than the illuminated writing on the other page.

“It’s a letter E,” Erik said. “It’s also a name, a prayer, and a brief description of the man who created it.”

Serena stared at the intricate drawing. “I can see the E.”

“The prayer is here,” he said, pointing to a stylized mark at what would have been the margin of the original page. “Christ’s symbol, the fish, superimposed against the sign that wards off the evil eye. The scribes blamed errors on a particular demon.”

“Handy.”

“I’ve been thinking about doing it myself. But essentially Erik was praying for Christ’s protection of this manuscript against sorcery. As a sign of respect and importance, the stylized fish is painted in red against a solid gold foil backdrop. As a sign of his own humility, Erik’s initial is in black, unadorned in any way.”

“How do you know the E stood for Erik?”

“The rest of the name is spelled out within the capital letter itself. See? The r runs along the upper bar, the i down the spine, and the k is part of all the letters.”

Serena stared for a moment, then let her eyes unfocus slightly, just enough to lose the decorative details. “Erik.”

“Yes?”

“No, I meant the name. Erik.” Sadness twisted through her, echoes of a life she had never lived, never known. She brushed the scrap of vellum with her fingertips and then snatched back her hand. “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t mean to touch it.”

“No problem. There’s a school of thought that says all vellum should be handled regularly so that it can absorb the oil from your hands and stay flexible.”

“But doesn’t oil attract dirt?”

“Spoken like a true twenty-first-century American.”

She shot him a cool look. “And who told me to wash my hands before I played with the leaves?”

“Guilty as charged. But I don’t wear gloves to handle my vellum manuscripts. Neither did previous owners. Life isn’t lived in a vacuum, and these pages were once alive.”