Moving Target (18 page)

“They still are,” she said softly, watching gold slide over the pages as though they breathed. “Like my scarf,” she added, touching the ancient fabric.

“Lovely.” He looked at the scarf and the elegant feminine neck it embraced. Both seemed more beautiful each time he looked. “Very unusual. But I meant being literally alive once. Vellum is animal skin, initially calfskin, but later it referred to cattle, sheep, lambs, whatever.” He picked up the small scrap and laid it on her palm. “The size and shape of the book was dictated by the size of the animal. The choir books, which had to be read by many people standing at a distance, were very big and almost always came from cattle. They used one hide folded in half to make just two facing pages. That’s one cow for a few large lines of musical notation.”

He gestured toward a nearby wall. There, framed in isolated splendor, was a page that was at least three feet by two feet. The gold capitals shimmered with each flickering of candlelight. The black squares of individual notes climbed up and down the four-line ladder of liturgical chants. The size of the manuscript page, and its clarity, meant that a single book could be read by the whole choir.

“There were books for each important mass to be sung,” Erik said, “plus Bibles and breviaries, herbals and bestiaries, and simple account books filled with details of housekeeping. Thousands of pages for just a small library. It took a wealthy monastery to support enough animals to turn into vellum, and enough monks to prepare the hides and write on the pages.”

Serena tried to imagine seeing cattle as paper on the hoof. “No wonder we went with plant fibers as soon as we had a printing press.”

“Quantity over quality,” he agreed. “Like machine weaving rather than the unique handmade cloth of your scarf. But even today, when we can make paper in any size or shape, we nearly always stick with the traditional rectangle, a shape that was dictated by the basically rectangular shape of an animal hide.”

Tentatively she lifted her hand to touch the ancient scrap of life.

“Go ahead,” he said, guiding her fingers to the vellum. “Feel. You won’t hurt it. Stroke it again with your eyes closed. The outer side, the side that once had hair, is textured.”

He rubbed her fingertips down the margin of the vellum. Then he turned it over. There was more writing on this side, but it was obviously incomplete. A column had been cut in half so that only phrases remained. Slowly he drew her fingertips down this side.

“Feel the difference?” he asked.

“Yes. Smoother, almost cool. Not soft, though. Resilient.”

“You have very sensitive fingertips. This was the flesh side. The page that faced it in an open book would also have been written on the flesh side of the vellum, because the two sides take ink very differently. A well-made book allowed for that. And since manuscripts were every bit as valuable in their time as gems, spices, and gold, extraordinary care was taken when making a book.”

She opened her eyes and found herself caught in Erik’s clear, probing eyes. Her breath stopped on a half-gasp. The heat of his fingers over hers was as intense as fire.
She had felt his touch before, in candlelight, but he had been naked then and she had worn a dress made of the same uncanny cloth that had come unharmed from her grandmother’s burned cabin and now lay around her neck.

Serena jerked so suddenly that the vellum leaped off her palm. He caught the scrap with an easy motion.

“What did I do now?” he said half wryly, half impatiently.

“What do you mean?”

“You jumped back halfway across the room.”

She didn’t deny it. She couldn’t. She was pressed against another library table as though trying to scramble backward over it. All she could think of to say was, “Your fingers are hot.”

“And yours are cold. Did I jump like I’d been bitten?”

“Surely I can’t be the first woman who has found you unnerving.”

His head tilted. He studied her like a peregrine falcon studying a particularly plump pigeon. “Actually, I believe you are.”

“They must have been blind.”

Erik thought it was a case of Serena seeing much more clearly than the others had, but he didn’t think she would be comforted to hear that. Most people—men or women—accepted his easygoing exterior, returned his smiles, and never wondered about the man beneath.

Serena didn’t wonder. She knew. Somehow she sensed the intensity he took such care to disguise from the rest of the world.

And here he was trying so hard to put her at ease.

T
he initial tells you other things,” Erik continued neutrally. “Though our scribe was a practicing Christian, the Christianity he practiced was rooted in the paganism of the Celts.”

Serena wrenched her mind away from the unnerving sense of time and memory combined like a river in flood, pushing her into Erik’s arms. Instead, she thought of the histories she had read on the subject of weaving.

“How old did you say the Book of the Learned is?” she asked.

“I didn’t.” He smiled slightly. “But from the evidence of the text, the style of the calligraphy, and the choice of colors, I would be comfortable with an early-twelfth-century date despite the insistently Insular style, which belonged to earlier centuries.”

“In the twelfth century, I don’t think a mixture of paganism and Christianity was unusual,” she said. She tapped her finger slowly against her scarf as she narrowed her eyes, searching her memory. “In fact, I think there was an early papal bull on the subject. The Pope made it very clear that missionaries were supposed to fit Christianity over any existing local religion rather than insist on strict theological purity. Practice tolerance as well as preach it.”

“The Pope was a smart man. People love their customs and holidays. Holy days. Conversion is easier when it gives room for traditions to breathe.” He looked at the scrap of vellum that had passed down through the centuries. “That’s why dragons and griffins and other imaginary beasts appear in so many illuminated manuscripts. The powers they embodied in pagan times were given Christian glosses.”

“What do you mean?”

“Take the stag. In pagan times it was considered a symbol of regeneration.”

“Because of the shedding and regrowth of antlers?”

“Exactly. The stag had other qualities, too. Like the lion and the eagle, the stag wouldn’t tolerate a snake.”

“Where were they in Eden?” Serena asked dryly. “We all could have used them.”

Erik smiled and just managed not to wind a stray tendril of her hair around his finger. “In medieval times,” he said, “the stag was also used as a symbol of a pure and solitary way of life.”

“Pure and solitary, huh? Obviously the good monks had never seen a stag in rut.”

He paused. “I never thought of it that way. But who said a symbol has to make complete sense?”

“Certainly not the godlike, logical male of the species.”

“Ouch. Do I hear your grandmother speaking?”

“Probably. G’mom was a wise woman.”

“There have been a lot of them through the years. In the Middle Ages, they were renowned for their healing abilities. I think that’s another reason Erik sometimes symbolized himself by the stag—stags were supposed to be able to recognize useful plants for treating the sick. From the little I’ve seen of the Book of the Learned, Erik was obviously a skilled herbalist.”

“A well-rounded stag,” she said, deadpan. “Any other qualities?”

“Sometimes the stag is pictured with a crucifix between its horns.”

“Fully Christianized, as it were.”

“Certainly on his way there.” Erik shifted the scrap of vellum so that it caught more of the restless candlelight. “In the ancient Erik’s case, the stag’s horns support a peregrine falcon that has a crucifix dangling from its beak.”

“Meaning?”

“I don’t know. Obviously it had some meaning to Erik, because he uses a highly stylized version of that sign as a gather mark or catchword. Watching it evolve through the manuscript is one way of deciding which page came first.”

“A gather mark?”

He gave her a slanting, gold-gleaming look. “You’re going to be sorry you asked.”

“Why?”

“It’s complex.”

“So is weaving. I get by just fine. What’s a gather mark?”

Erik would rather have asked to see the original of the page that showed a flame-haired weaver watching a man with a peregrine on his arm and a staghound at his feet.

But he didn’t say a word.

His pattern sense was nagging at his mind, telling him that he knew the name of the Silverfells sorceress who had humbled the proud Learned man. There was no reason for Erik’s certainty, but he was certain just the same. It had happened to him many times in the past: a hint here, a speculation there, the sense of a pattern forming, and then certainty crystallizing in a rush. His younger sisters had joked that he was clairvoyant because he always knew they were in trouble before they did. He said he was just smart.

Smart, clairvoyant, lucky, or some other word, Erik didn’t care. He simply knew he saw patterns that a lot of people overlooked.

The name of the sorceress was Serena.

He opened his mouth to tell her about the odd coincidence. Then he shut it. Coincidences like this were entertaining as long as they happened to someone else. In full daylight.

In the flickering intimacy of a candlelit room, coincidence could be frightening.

If he told Serena the name of Erik’s nemesis, she would probably bolt from the house and never look back. Better to stick to explaining gather marks and catchwords.

“You asked for it,” he said, smiling. “Just remember: One leaf equals two pages because a leaf is written on each side.”

“One leaf. Two pages.”

“Picture a cured animal hide that has been trimmed to a roughly rectangular shape,” he said.

“Got it.”

“Now fold it in half.”

“Which way?”

“Down the middle so that the hair side is out.”

“Which middle? Median line or waistline?”

“They did it both ways, but not in the same book. So pick one way and stick with it.”

She blinked. “Okay. It’s folded in half.”

“That’s a bifolium. Plural is bifolio. Now fold it in half again.”

“Done.”

“We’ll stop there, even though most manuscripts were folded again and yet again. How many leaves do you have now?”

“I have . . . eight pages, which means four leaves, which adds up to one hide.”

He smiled at the intent frown between her eyebrows and really wished he could kiss the lines away. “Now nest your folded hide inside another hide that has been folded in the same way.”

Her eyes half closed. “Got it.”

“Do it again.”

“A third hide?”

“Yes.”

Her eyes closed completely.

He looked at the long shadow of her eyelashes, at her skin glowing with candlelight, at her lips gleaming with the recent passage of her tongue; and he wanted to taste her with a violence that loosened his knees. Part of him wondered if it had been this powerful for his medieval namesake, if that was why the cry of pain resonated through the years.

And most of him was afraid that he would find out.

He really hated coincidences. They reminded him of just how much of his own life was beyond his control.

“Now spread them all out again,” he said. “As you figured out, one hide should make four good-sized leaves, which is eight pages, because the printing is on both sides of the hide.”

“I’m spreading them out.”

The pager on Erik’s belt vibrated. He ignored it. He wasn’t going to let anything—not even Rarities Unlimited—interfere with gaining Serena’s trust. The pattern that he sensed forming was both complex and frankly eerie, as though time was a book that could be folded and unfolded, bound and unbound, and nonsequential pages put facing each other, staring across a gap that the body couldn’t bridge.

But the mind could.

“Now write a continuous text on your unfolded hides in such a way that flesh side always faces flesh, and hair side always faces hair,” he continued, fighting to keep his voice even.

There was silence for the space of about a minute. Then, “You lost me,” she admitted.

“Lots of monks got lost, too. That’s why they marked the margins of each page to tell themselves how to gather the book in the correct manner. Some scribes used symbols. Some used words to indicate where the pages should be caught together and sewed.”

“Gather marks and catchwords,” she said triumphantly, opening her eyes.

The pager kept on vibrating. He kept on ignoring it.

“It’s a concept we still use today,” he said, “even though we’re long past the time of folded vellum. Once the manuscript was bound, the gather marks or catchwords vanished into the central seam of the book, the gutter.”

Serena opened her mouth to say something, then realized that Erik was studying her lips as though he had never seen anything quite as appealing. A curious, shivery sensation went through her, something like fear . . . but not quite. The difference was both subtle and stunning.

“I never realized making books was so complicated,” she said huskily.

He closed his eyes. When he opened them, he was looking anywhere but at her tempting mouth. What had seemed like a good idea at the time—viewing the manuscripts in the same kind of light they had been created—now seemed like the height of stupidity. Culturally speaking, for modern people candlelight and sex went together like lightning and thunder. Inevitably.

The pager finally gave up and stopped vibrating.

“That’s not the half of it,” he said. “I’ve barely touched on the complexity of the subject.”

She waited for him to continue. When he didn’t, she made an encouraging noise.

“Not this time,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Simple. I’ve shown you mine. Are you going to show me yours?”

E
rik didn’t answer,” Dana said in disgust. She pushed back in her black leather chair and glared at the phone.

Niall’s lean, muscular hip was resting on a corner of her neat—in his opinion, way too neat—desk. “Maybe he’s in the shower.”