The Bestiary (33 page)

Lena sensed my disappointment. “Let’s look around some more,” she said.

“Not many more places to look,” I replied, shining the flashlight over the heaps of debris that covered the pews.

Just then, the double doors in front were flung open. Sunlight flooded in, blinding us. A man was silhouetted in the doorway. He was shorter than Sampson and wore a top hat. Stepping inside, he closed the doors behind him and lit a candle. “Can I help you?” he called out, starting up the aisle.

Only when he reached the first pew could we see him clearly. He had a white moustache and long white hair. He was about seventy. His face was creased, his throat wrinkled. Though his clothes were rough, his outfit was far more elaborate than Sampson’s: striped pants, a black cutaway with satin lapels, and high black boots. His elbows were patched and the top hat was dented now.

“Your light…” he said, and I lowered the flashlight. “I speak English. Are you English?”

“American.” And I told him our names.

“I’m Rumen. What is it you want?”

His directness was disarming. Though I could have told him any number of things, I chose the truth. “We were looking for the grave of a man named Adolphus Sarkas.”

“The cemetery is in back,” he said drily. “It’s all one grave now.”

“I thought we might find some sign of his paintings in here.”

“Paintings?”

“He painted icons and murals.”

“These?” he said, pointing behind the altar.

“No, these aren’t his. He also painted animals.”

His eyebrows went up. “Oh?”

“Lost animals. Most no longer exist, some never did. Sarkas had a book I’ve been searching for, filled with such animals.” I took out my notebook. “I’ll show you.”

He walked up to us, and to my surprise smelled, not of goats, but spices. Cinnamon, rosemary, myrrh.

Lena held the flashlight over the notebook and I showed him a drawing I’d done on the
Makara
when we passed the Straits of Messina: the Greek sea monster Scylla: six-headed, with three rows of teeth, and from the waist down composed of barking dogs.

Rumen studied the drawing.

“Scylla devoured sailors whose ships strayed near the whirlpool Charybdis,” I said. “Once she was a beautiful Nereid, but in a fit of jealousy Circe used witchcraft to turn her into a monster.”

He looked up with a small smile. “These islands are filled with witches.”

I turned a few pages and showed him the opinicus, a griffin with the usual lion’s torso and eagle’s wings, but also an unexpected camel’s tail. “And here is the simurgh,” I said, flipping to the Persian phoenix, with its lion legs. “An immortal bird.”

Rumen lingered over this image. “Like the
famash,
” he said, the candlelight carving shadows into his face. “That’s what my people call it.” He held out his wrist, and tugging at the cuff, revealed a tattoo: a red bird with rainbow wings and sea-blue eyes.

“A phoenix,” I said, peering at him in amazement.

“So you’re searching for a lost book with lost beasts,” Rumen said.

“Have you ever seen such a book here?”

“No.”

“Adolphus Sarkas brought the book to Xaniá.”

“How did he come by it?”

“He was a monk. His abbot ordered him to carry the book to another monastery. Instead, he stole it and fled.”

“A monk.” Rumen looked at Lena and me as if he were seeing us for the first time. In a measured voice he asked, “Why do you want this book, mister? To sell it? To keep it for yourself?”

“Neither. If someone else hasn’t claimed it, I would give it to a library or museum so other people could see it.”

He studied our faces, scratching his cheek with his little finger. Finally he seemed to make up his mind.

“Now let me show you something,” he said, gesturing for us to follow him.

Lena and I exchanged glances and my mouth went dry as he led us back into the sacristy. He went up to the gutted cabinet and, handing Lena his candle, gripped the cabinet on either side and slid it away from the wall. At first I saw nothing. Then he took back the candle and held it close to the wall, revealing a door about four feet high by two feet wide. Thinking it must be a closet, I wondered if the
Caravan Bestiary
could have survived in this place after all. I sucked in my breath as Rumen took a key from his pocket and unlocked the door. It swung open without a sound. He thrust his candle into the doorway, and we saw, not a closet, but a small landing from which a flight of stairs disappeared into a well of darkness.

Neither Lena nor I scared easily, but for several seconds we stood frozen.

“Come,” Rumen said, stepping through the doorway and starting down the stairs.

From the landing, we couldn’t see the floor below. Cool air rose up to us. And silence. The stairs were steep and narrow, but less rickety than I expected. Lena was several steps behind Rumen, and I was just behind her. There was no banister, so we descended gingerly. Rumen’s candle and my flashlight lit the way down many steps. We were in a room with a high ceiling.

At the foot of the stairs, Rumen’s candle revealed the emblem of a phoenix chiseled into the stone wall, identical to the phoenix on his wrist. He lit two more candles in holders that flanked the stairway. The stone floor was swept clean.

Walking beyond the candles’ glow, Rumen struck a match and raised it to the wall and an instant later a kerosene lantern bathed him in light. We were in a cavernous chamber, larger than the church above. It felt like a separate entity, a church within a church.

“Originally this was a hiding place from pirates,” Rumen said. He saw I was studying the emblem on the wall. “The old Christians called Christ ‘the Phoenix’ because he was resurrected. But the Egyptians worshiped the phoenix long before that.”

“At the golden temple in Heliopolis.”

“You know, then,” he said, proceeding along the left-hand wall and lighting another lantern. “Sentinels guarded the temple. Members of a brotherhood, from India, who wore the sign of the phoenix. They were Romany. They used to have many members,” he added ruefully. “Now, just a few.” He continued on, lighting one lantern after another, nine in all. “There are no books here,” he declared, and my spirits sank. “There is only this.”

He pointed to the opposite wall, now fully illuminated, on which Lena and I became riveted, trying to take in an enormous mural, at least fifteen feet high and sixty feet long. It made me dizzy at first. But I knew at once that it was the work of Adolphus Sarkas. I had never seen anything painted quite like it, except the murals on San Lazzaro.

“My people have always called this ‘the monk’s mural,’” Rumen said. “It has been good luck for us. For nearly one hundred and sixty years, we have watched over it.”

“And you didn’t know Sarkas was the artist?”

“I didn’t know his name.” He shrugged. “That makes no difference to me.”

It made a difference to me, for this was “Sarkas’s church” after all. He had left behind the mural. It was surely the reason he had been buried there. Whatever their final arrangements, Nicanor Simonides had provided Sarkas with this space where, on a grand scale, he could transpose images from the
Caravan Bestiary.
I couldn’t imagine what I saw before me originating anywhere else.

In those first moments I felt the way I always thought I would if I ever had the bestiary open before me. A mixture of joy and exhilaration—and trepidation that, after all those years, the bestiary could not possibly fulfill my expectations. Many people were standing beside me just then—my grandmother and Evgénia, Mr. Hood and Madame Faville—but, most importantly, Lena, who was there in body as well as spirit.

“It’s so beautiful, Xeno,” she said, taking my arm.

As our eyes adjusted to the lanterns’ light, the mural came alive. Colors brightened. Forms deepened. It seemed three-dimensional. It was as if we were gazing through a vast window into another world, as fresh as the day Sarkas painted it, as shimmering as the world itself must have appeared at the time of the Great Flood.

The mural was a broad seascape flanked by two shores: on the right, beneath a ghostly moon, a desert dense with cactus; on the left, a sunlit orchard encircled by gardens. The sea, emerald green with blue wavelets, stretched away to a silver horizon. The sky was filled with tattered red clouds. Powerful winds were blowing.

At the center of the mural, a phoenix with spectacular plumage was flying high into the sky. Its wings trailed streams of fire. Directly below the phoenix were not one, but two arks, filled with animals, sailing in opposite directions.

One was Noah’s ark, overflowing with familiar members of the animal kingdom in pairs: bears and oxen, snakes and lizards, falcons, pigeons, turtles, and bees. Mermaids and dolphins swam nearby, helping guide the ark to shore.

The second ark stunned me. I could barely take it in at first. It was crowded with animals from the
Caravan Bestiary.
I recognized most of them: manticores, griffins, hippogriffs, basilisks, perytons, rukhs, a variety of dragons, the chimera, and a number of creatures I had never seen before.

Was this second ark the bestiary’s great secret? It would explain why Sarkas used the Flood to animate, and backdrop, the creatures he had seen in the book. But I was amazed that, in all my research, of the concrete and the apocryphal, from D’Épernay’s letter to Zetto’s diary, I had never encountered a reference to a second ark.

The pilot of the first ark was a thin man with a weathered face. Despite navigating the ark for one hundred and fifty days and nights, he looked calm. His eyes were wide and bright. He stood on the bridge beside a tall, imposing old man in a blue cloak who gazed straight ahead, his white hair blowing out wild. A master of sea and land, he held a trident in one hand, a pruning hook in the other. This was Noah, and his ark was on course for the lush shore. The animals that swarmed the three lower decks and craned their necks through the many windows were also looking to shore.

On the bridge of the other ark there appeared to be a second, identical Noah. But when I looked closely, I saw only a bright shadow, a play of light in the paint which, from certain angles, took Noah’s shape momentarily, then dissolved. The pilot standing erect beside him remained palpably visible, a fearsome figure wearing a black, high-collared robe. In the manner of Anubis and Horus, he had a panther’s head atop a human body. His bloodless hands gripped the wheel. His topaz eyes scanned the desert shore. Rather than being a stowaway on Noah’s ark, here Satan was the pilot of the second ark, charting his own course. Certainly his passengers were more unruly, swarming the decks and roof, howling into the wind. The fiercest of them—dogs like Cerberus and harpies with outsized talons—were confined to the brig, clawing at the barred windows, gnashing their teeth.

To see all these creatures at once, intermingling, when I was used to studying them singly, made them all the more monstrous. Especially the unfamiliar ones: a cyclops bull with a leopard’s tail; a crocodile with centipede’s legs; an eyeless bird with four sets of wings; a burly ape with transparent hands and feet. I would have loved to know their names and origins, but Sarkas had only copied images, not text. He had portrayed many of the animals on the second ark as agitated, verging on violence. Rightly so, considering their destination, and the fact they looked more like prisoners than passengers.

Of course the notion of a second ark would have appealed to the compilers of the
Caravan Bestiary:
how else could these fantastic, exiled beasts have survived the Flood? I felt, however, that the moonlit desert with its cactus maze was Sarkas’s contribution, his conception of the limbo they inhabited before entering the human imagination.

Rumen, who had been watching us all this time, pointed to the second ark with a dry laugh. “Some say the first Romany were on board with the mongrels and outcasts, beings of mysterious origin who feared neither God nor the Devil and believed there was no difference between the two.”

“What do you believe?” I asked.

He gave us a sly look. “I believe that, as a chosen people, the Romany must have been on both arks.”

“Have you shown this mural to anyone else?”

“Before you, no one ever asked about paintings or knew about the monk. He and his friend the priest did a good job of keeping it secret. The few people who come to this island never pay attention to the church. They have heard it is a shambles, and nothing they see on the outside makes them think otherwise. Isn’t that what you heard in Xaniá? Sampson has been down here, of course, and my brother, Neptune. And before us, my father was the caretaker, and before him, his uncle. When I am gone, my eldest son, Noah, will take over.” He smiled and drifted across the room. “Noah is a popular name among the Romany, you know.”

Lena turned to me. “If they knew the bestiary wouldn’t be here, why were Sarkas and Simonides so secretive?”

“Heresy, for starters. A second ark, with that cargo…if the Church had known of this mural, they would have destroyed it. The real question is why Sarkas painted it in the first place.”

I thought of several possibilities. I knew Sarkas had lived in Xaniá for three years. Considering the mural’s scope, he must have worked on it right up until the end. I could only assume that sometime before November 1819, when Giorgio Zetto first saw the mural, Sarkas had decided to take the
Caravan Bestiary
to Ani. He may have painted the mural in order to preserve the bestiary’s essence, an homage of sorts, in the way he knew best, images, not words. Another, cruder possibility is that the mural was his advance payment to Simonides after the latter agreed to transport the bestiary to Ani. At that point, Simonides may have fully expected to return to Xaniá. Or perhaps there was another explanation too tortuous for me to intuit with the little I knew about both men. What seemed indisputable was that these two churchmen had taken great pains to conceal a remnant of the bestiary in a place where they could savor it with impunity.

“How could this mural have remained undiscovered?” Lena asked.

“Up the coast, Knossos was buried for four thousand years,” I said. “This country is filled with ruins, statuary, frescoes that were hidden for millennia. What are a couple of centuries compared to that? And it isn’t really undiscovered, is it. The Gypsies have known about it for a long time.”