The Bestiary Read online

  “No, sir.”

  He handed me the book. “You have now,” he smiled.

  It was an old facsimile edition—much older than the Revesby facsimile—bound in faded green cloth, with a leather spine. I hadn’t expected this, and when he saw how pleased I was, his smile widened. The book was heavy, the pages thick. I opened it to a woodcut of an animal with the body of a lion, a man’s head, and a scorpion’s tail; the facing page was covered with two columns of dense medieval script, beginning with these words: Manticora, ab India leo saeva astutusque…

  “‘The manticore,’” I translated aloud, “‘a ferocious and cunning lion from India…’”

  “Very good, Atlas.” He leaned forward, laying his palms on the desk. “I’ve learned a few things since we last met. I spoke with a friend who’s a curator at the Folger Library in Washington, then corresponded with a friend of his who’s a medievalist at Yale. Listen carefully now. Through the Dark Ages, monasteries were the repositories of Western knowledge. The Renaissance began when that knowledge was disseminated. I knew that several dozen bestiaries had been produced in England around the time of the Revesby. I knew that they were fairly similar. But the Hereford took me by surprise. Until last week, I too had never heard of it. It was compiled at a remote monastery on the Welsh border around 1390. It’s unique and exciting, not because of the main text, or the fine woodcuts, but because of its short, astonishing prologue. The prologue begins solemnly enough, reiterating the dogma to be found in every bestiary: the Holy Ghost authored two books, the Bible and the first bestiary, and because the latter was lost long ago, all subsequent bestiaries are fragments of the original.” His eyes lit up. “But then the monks veer off, spouting outright heresy. Apparently these fellows were Gnostics who had severed their ties with the Church. They believed that the Bible, too, was incomplete, missing large pieces—‘secret books’ like the Gospels of Thomas and Philip, and the Book of Jubilees. More importantly, they asserted that the complete Bible and the intact original bestiary comprise a universal history which is, in fact, the only true history of the world; if read in tandem, in their entirety, they would offer up the same knowledge a man could otherwise acquire only by reading all the other books ever written.”

  My head was whirling. “But that’s impossible.”

  “One would think.” He opened his arms. “We are, however, in the realm of the miraculous. A leap of faith is required, Atlas. In this case,” he added ruefully, “one that can never be tested.”

  “Why not, sir?”

  “The Hereford monks allude to a bestiary far more valuable than their own. They call it the Caravan Bestiary, without whose contents the original bestiary, and therefore that universal history, can never be complete.” He paused, good teacher that he was, to let this sink in. “This fugitive bestiary was an incendiary work, at one time known only to the powerful—princes and churchmen—who believed in its latent power, and to scholars who secretly passed it among themselves. Whatever its implications for them, it was, first and foremost, a compilation of the animals lost in the Great Flood.”

  A chill ran through me. “The ones that didn’t make it onto Noah’s ark,” I interjected, recalling the story my grandmother told me when she was dying.

  “That’s right,” he said, bemused that I would pick up on this so quickly. “Over the centuries, many hands contributed to this book, enlarging and refining it, until it disappeared in the thirteenth century. Many conventional bestiaries were lost or destroyed, but because they overlapped so heavily with surviving bestiaries, their contents were not lost. But the Caravan Bestiary was one of a kind. Its contents were irreplaceable. Insofar as I could discover, many scholars continued to search for it—some as recently as the 1920s. None of them found it. The most serious were Niccólo Cava, a philologist at the University of Bologna in the mid–nineteenth century; Michael Brox, an Austrian theologian who was murdered in 1891; and Amanda Faville, a French art historian (and, briefly, the fiancée of Oswald Spengler) and an expert in illuminated books after the First World War.”

  “But why is it called the Caravan Bestiary?”

  “The monks don’t say. They indicate that, earlier in its history, it may have had other names, or no name at all.”

  “Was the theologian murdered because of this book?”

  He put a match to his pipe. “Brox was murdered at the time he was searching for the book. The circumstances may be totally unrelated. He may have been killed in the course of a robbery or a quarrel. I only know that he was murdered in Istanbul, Turkey. Most of his papers that were published posthumously dealt with Near Eastern religion, his specialty. But in several letters he mentioned the Caravan Bestiary. He believed it had been burned by the Inquisition in Seville, Spain, in 1191. Among his unpublished works is an essay on the bestiary that can only be read in the library stacks at the University of Vienna. Niccólo Cava was a more obscure scholar. He was convinced the book was in Italy, in the hands of the Catholic Church. He searched for ten years, antagonizing a lot of people. First he believed it was hidden in the cathedral at Ravenna, then Orvieto, and Naples, before settling on the Vatican itself. He spent the rest of his life battling the authorities for access to the papal vaults, which of course was never granted. In the end he accused the Pope of ordering the book’s destruction and was promptly excommunicated. He was also fired from the university. Finally, there is Madame Faville, the most interesting of the three and the most successful.”

  “Did she come close to finding it?”

  “Hard to say. She did fill in a huge gap in the book’s history, tracing its whereabouts from 950 until its disappearance on Rhodes in the thirteenth century. Those are the centuries of the eight Crusades, during which the book was spirited around the Mediterranean, from Gibraltar to Cyprus, by pirates, soldiers, smugglers, and scholars. Madame Faville was a cautious and meticulous researcher. Yet she grew so confident she would find the bestiary that in 1921 she began a book documenting her search. She never finished it. Rhodes was a dead end. She was sure that the bestiary never left the island intact. So, you see, they all concluded that the Caravan Bestiary had been destroyed, but each had a different explanation for how and where it happened.”

  “What was Madame Faville’s explanation, sir?”

  “I wish I knew. I found out as much as I could for you, Atlas. It’s an incredible subject, deserving of the time and energy you’re giving it. But now you’re on your own.” He started packing his briefcase. “And I have a class in five minutes.”

  I stood up reluctantly; I had so many questions. “Thank you for your help, sir.”

  “It was my pleasure.”

  I held up the facsimile of the Hereford bestiary. “I’ll return this as soon as I can.”

  “No, you won’t.” He opened the door for me. “It’s a gift, from me to you.”

  I was very moved. Not since Evgénia had anyone taken such a close interest in me.

  “I know you’ll make good use of it,” he said, starting down the hall.

  “I will, sir. Thank you.”

  This was a fateful encounter for me. Mr. Hood’s generosity and encouragement would carry me a long way—to places he could never have anticipated.

  THRILLED BY ALL I’d heard, I was determined to undertake my own quest for the Caravan Bestiary. I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but later realized it was one of those rare instances in which a youthful enthusiasm that could have evaporated instead grew more powerful each year. Even the fact I was a schoolboy with no credentials ended up working to my advantage: who else in his right mind would have had the hubris even to contemplate such a project—searching for something that had disappeared seven hundred years before I was born—undaunted by the failures of expert predecessors and ignorant of the obstacles before him? I now know how fortunate I had been, not just to have a man like Mr. Hood come into my life, but to have learned of the Caravan Bestiary when I was so young, equipped with vast stores of energy and little knowledge o
f the world.

  I began reading more voraciously than ever. By way of their bibliographies, indices, footnotes, and appendices, each author led me to other authors—and other creatures. For example, in Mythical Monsters, published in 1884, Charles Gould, the Royal Geological Surveyor of Tasmania, refers to the geographer Strabo’s description of “nocturnal serpents with bat wings” then to Strabo’s source, the Greek naturalist Megasthenes; and, in a footnote, to a chapter on flying snakes in Folk Lore of China by Dr. N. P. Dennys of Singapore, who in turn credits a monograph on fantastic herpetology by Hans Spuyfel, a Dutch professor in Jakarta. Though I would learn more formal research methods as my education progressed, I never abandoned the eclectic approach that seemed to suit my subject matter. Perhaps the more rigid, academic mind-set of those who preceded me had helped to doom their efforts. They were professionals, trained to be skeptical, while I was an enthusiastist, open to all possibilities and unencumbered by obligatory doubts. I was bound to make a lot of errors, but, by taking chances, and following even the most far-fetched leads, I was also liable to get lucky. As Mr. Hood had pointed out, when it came to the Caravan Bestiary, the miraculous ought to be embraced, not discounted. Pursuing such an elusive prize, you walked a road bound on the one side by history and on the other by a luminous, shifting terrain defined by faith as well as facts.

  All my reading served a single purpose: I was keeping a notebook in which I recorded all the beasts I thought might be in the Caravan Bestiary. Inclusive to a fault, I tried to keep my entries short and precise, focusing—in the spirit of bestiaries—on the animals’ most unique characteristics. Unable as yet to venture into the world, I decided that one way of searching for the bestiary was by attempting to re-create it.

  In my juvenile script, in red ink, my initial notebook entry read:

  THE PHOENIX

  A large bird with feathers the color of fire.

  Like fire, it is sustained by air alone, and neither eats nor drinks.

  It lives in paradise, and every thousand years dies and is reborn.

  And is known by many names. The Bird of the Sun. Of Fire. Longevity. Resurrection.

  The Bird of Assyria, Arabia, the Ganges.

  A bird with iridescent wings and eyes blue as the seas it could cross, flying for nine days and nights without rest.

  The Bird of Incense. Spices. Music.

  With a song so beautiful it was the basis for the first musical scale.

  Its journey always ended in Egypt—in Heliopolis, the City of the Sun, atop a golden temple.

  The Egyptians deified it, with a grand title: the Lord of the Long Cycles of Time. They chose as guardians of the temple pilgrims that had followed the bird from India.

  Over the years I filled twenty-eight notebooks with descriptions and drawings of other such animals. Different sizes and colors, some of these notebooks were bleached by the sun, others warped by rainfall. Their pages were stained with tea and whisky. One was charred in a hotel fire in Corsica. Another barely survived a flooded basement in Siena. That very first notebook, which I bought at a general store in Maine, had a green marbled cover and unlined pages.

  Meanwhile, my everyday life at school continued. Few of my fellow students were from blue-collar families. I may as well have hailed from one of the outer planets. I divulged little about my family outside the fact my father lived abroad, which was intended to explain why I was one of the few students who never received a visitor on homecoming weekend. After that first train trip, my father hadn’t set foot on the school grounds again. (Even on my graduation day, years later, I would leave immediately after the ceremony; I couldn’t bear to sit alone, or attach myself to one of my classmates’ families, for a last celebratory luncheon.) My tuition checks arrived on time and my account in the school bank remained balanced. And every so often I received the usual three-line postcard from some far-flung port—but never a letter.

  I had to follow a rigid schedule: wake-up bell at six, chapel, breakfast, first class at eight, lunch, more classes, phys ed, dinner, study hall, and bed. We wore jackets and ties at all times; were required to address faculty members as “sir” were not allowed to speak to other students during class. And so on. I rebelled by isolating, much as I had in elementary school, where I had been lucky to find a real friend like Bruno. At boarding school I had many acquaintances, but no close friend. I gained the respect of my classmates by remaining silent and detached. Because of my childhood, this was not a difficult niche for me to carve out. Required to participate in a sport, I joined the archery team, which felt more like a collection of solitary competitors. I used to think solitude was my natural element, from the moment my mother simultaneously deposited me in the world and abandoned me to it.

  I only knew my mother’s image from that handful of snapshots which I now kept in my grandmother’s silver music box, along with the white whisker. Many times I had studied my mother’s face with a magnifying glass. I failed to identify the shadow of the bird on her shoulder. One day I took the snapshots to Jones Beach and tried in vain to determine their exact location using some blurred landmarks—shrubs, a bench, a lamppost—in the background of each. What did I expect to find? My grandmother had preached to me that the spirit of every creature to walk the earth was still among us. I felt my mother was nearby when I was most alone—lying awake at night, riding in a darkened train, descending an empty stairwell at school.

  In Mr. Hood’s ancient history class he had us memorize passages out of Livy and Herodotus. I was entranced with the latter: his incredible descriptions of animals such as the giant silver ants that fought elaborate wars in the Libyan desert; and in Book IV, the catalog of Scythian tribes like the Melanchlaeni, who all wore black cloaks, and the Budini, whose entire population had red hair and gray eyes. I also chose Mr. Hood as my adviser. I was a regular visitor—maybe the only visitor—during his office hours. His other advisees were assigned to him because they hadn’t gotten their first or second choices. In addition to helping with my bestiary research, he actually offered me real-life advice, culled from philosophers like Diogenes: “To be saved from folly, Atlas, you need either kind friends or fierce enemies.”

  Mr. Hood was considered a loner himself among his more convivial colleagues. He lived alone in one of the faculty cottages by the river. Every morning he canoed or kayaked six miles. When the river was frozen, he used the rowing machine in the gym. For relaxation, but with a kind of religious fervor, he built and refurbished bark canoes, working out of a shed on the riverbank. One morning when I visited him there he explained how to construct a twelve-foot canoe.

  “First, you strip bark from a silver birch,” he said. “Unlike elm or hickory bark, birch bark doesn’t waterlog. For the frame, you use spring cedar. I choose to work only with the tools available to the Malecite Indians who lived around here: an ax, a peeling tool, and, most importantly, a crooked knife.” He handed me a knife with a bulbous grip and a V-shaped blade. “Ever seen one before?”

  “No, sir.” I balanced it in my palm and touched the tip, sharp as a scalpel.

  “It was peculiar to Maine. That bent tip is for carving and shaving the rib boards and planking. My canoes don’t contain nails or tacks. I pitch them with sap from a black spruce. Then I decorate the prow with porcupine quills. The Malecites considered a canoe incomplete, unprotected, without an insignia. I’ve used a fox and a lynx. Their favorite was a rabbit smoking a pipe.”

  I laughed. “It sounds like a cartoon.”

  “It was supposed to demonstrate their calm in the face of adversity.”

  Most afternoons after his last class, Mr. Hood retreated to the rocking chair on his porch, a pipe clamped between his teeth, a book in hand, and his white bulldog at his feet. Blind in one eye, Polyphemus was named after the cyclops in The Odyssey.

  My own dog had died a month after I went away to school. In his cramped hand, Bruno reported Re’s last days to me:

  He didn’t want to leave Lena’s room. But he got s
hort of breath climbing the stairs. We took him to the animal hospital, and saw two vets, and they said, “He’s just old.” They wanted to keep him there, but I said no. He didn’t want to stay, and I knew you wouldn’t have wanted him to. The next night he stopped eating. We brought food upstairs, but it was no use. He stayed in Lena’s room, and she never left his side. In the morning, he went over and stretched out by the window, watching the snow fall. He fell asleep like that, and then Lena saw he had stopped breathing. I’m sorry he couldn’t be with you, Xeno. We did all we could. Lena’s been crying ever since.

  Lena wrote me her own letter:

  My mother says the best way to die is in your sleep. It’s because she’s afraid my father will die in a fire. I don’t believe there is a good way to die. I hate that Re died. But he was peaceful in the end. I know how much he loved the snow….

  Two weeks later, Bruno sent me Re’s ashes. I opened the package in the bathroom, away from the other boys, tears flooding my eyes. The ashes were in a tight gray packet the size of a brick. I couldn’t believe my dog’s bodily self had been reduced to that. Bruno also sent along Re’s leather collar and the medallion imprinted with his name, my name, and my old address. I placed them and the ashes alongside my grandmother’s music box in the trunk under my bed. Now Re’s spirit had joined hers and my mother’s.

  Throughout my stay at that school, I felt his presence, not as a shadowy mist, but a weight that shifted gently at the end of the bed, or a rustle in the shadows, or a brushing against my leg when I walked in the woods.

  IN MY SENIOR YEAR, just before I turned seventeen, Gina Moretti’s worst fear came true when her husband was killed in a fire.

  One December morning Frank Moretti’s engine company responded to a four-alarm blaze at a Bushwick paint factory. He was the first man in, off the truck ladder through a top-floor window. Some beams gave way and the ceiling fell, trapping him behind a wall of flames. Two other firefighters recovered his body and got out just before the floor collapsed. Bruno phoned me at school, as distraught as I’d ever heard him. “Xeno, my father’s gone,” he said hoarsely, then broke down. It was during exam period, and I was in a daze that afternoon, going through the motions on my physics final.