Moving Target

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Trust no man with your heritage. Your life depends on it.

  Silently Serena wondered just how stable her grandmother had been when she wrote the letter. Yet caution and distrust were almost as deeply ingrained in the granddaughter as in the grandmother.

  “Thank you,” Serena said, “but I’ll take care of it myself.”

  “As you wish. I took the liberty of making color copies of these sheets myself.” He emphasized the last word slightly, assuring her that the matter had been conducted with great discretion. “While the pages don’t appear to be fragile . . .” He shrugged. “Surely being hauled around in a suitcase can’t help them. A competent appraiser should be able to tell from a few color copies whether it is worth the trouble and expense of having the entire block of eight originals appraised.”

  “Again, thank you. You’ve gone to a great deal of effort for someone you don’t even know.”

  He smiled faintly. “It was worth it to see Lisbeth’s eyes again.”

  Serena didn’t know what to say, or if she could say anything at all past the sudden tears in her throat. Without thinking, she picked up the ancient scarf and wrapped it around her throat. It soothed her like a caress. She touched the cloth in return, gently.

  Then she collected her surprising inheritance and left Morton Hingham to his memories. She needed to go somewhere and think, hard, about what she wanted to do.

  Or not do.

  Trust no man. Your life depends on it.

  Be a moving target.

  Chapter 3

  PALM SPRINGS

  WEDNESDAY MORNING

  Erik North sat in a lounge chair in his walled backyard. Sun brought out every bit of blond in his thick, golden-brown hair. Barefoot, naked to the waist of his worn hiking shorts, he waited for his morning visitor and thought about the manuscript page he was translating.

  Not since Eve has a woman been so deceitful. I was trapped in the cloth woven by her own hand, spellbound cloth, unclean, wrapped in her plans like an insect in a web; and I thought all the while that she loved me. She did not. She loved only her own clan, needed nothing of me but my seed.

  Cursed sorceress. I dream of her still.

  I yearn.

  I need.

  I see her bright hair in every hearth fire. I see her eyes in every violet. I smell her scent in every summer garden.

  God spare me from the torment of the Devil.

  The modern Erik almost smiled but didn’t disturb his stillness. No doubt about it, Erik the Learned had been one unhappy camper when he wrote those lines. The elegance of the script couldn’t disguise the savagery of his emotion. At a distance it was hard to tell whether hate, love, or some unholy combination of the two drove the Learned scribe. One thing Erik North knew for certain. Internal evidence in the design of the illuminated capital letters indicated that the page belonged toward the front of the Book of the Learned. The design, like the gather marks along the margin, became increasingly complex through the years of the book’s creation.

  Despite the comfortable surroundings and sun-warmed January day, Erik didn’t slouch carelessly beside the swimming pool. Instead, there was an uncanny stillness to his body, the stillness of a predator. Beneath a tawny thatch of hair, his chest barely moved with each slow breath he took.

  Most people shift position or fiddle with a button or pick at their clothes or scratch their nose or drum their fingers. He didn’t do any of those things. Even his eyes were narrowed so that he could blink with almost no movement of his eyelids. It was a hunter’s trick.

  A roadrunner appeared on top of the castle wall as though teleported there. Round, glass-bright eyes examined every bit of the large yard with its vine-covered arches and rosebushes whose lineage traced back to the Middle Ages. The bird’s black crest flared and settled like a nervous heartbeat. In the desert, water and sex were the only things an animal risked its life for. The pool’s turquoise allure was irresistible.

  No matter how long and hard the roadrunner peered, it saw nothing but a breeze moving among the bougainvillea vines, jacaranda and citrus trees, and medieval herb garden. Satisfied that it was safe, the brownish hawk-size bird dropped seven feet to the interior flagstones and zipped over to the curving edge of the spa that was attached to the pool. In the center of the curve, water only a quarter-inch deep sparkled and murmured over a small ledge leading from spa to pool. Daintily the roadrunner waded to the precise center of the ledge and began dipping water from the pool with quick, oddly graceful jerks of its head.

  The bird was within reach of Erik’s hand. If he wanted a feathered snack, the roadrunner was lunch.

  Motionless he watched the bird, storing up each nuance of its movements, the subtle pattern of light across the mottled brown and cream feathers, the elegant balancing act of wings and neck, feet and long tail. The chaparral cock was uneasy, but not nearly so nervous as it had been four days ago when Erik had first sat in the yard and waited for the thirsty bird to gather its courage to drink. During this winter’s unusual drought, the pool had become a daily stop on the roadrunner’s rounds.

  In another week, two at most, Erik would have the bird eating from his hand. Animals of all kinds accepted him. They always had. Maybe it was his stillness. Maybe it was simply that he respected them for what they were: independent, blissfully self-centered, and completely alive in the moment.

  The roadrunner’s throat fluttered rapidly as it drank one last time. Then its narrow tail jerked like a conductor’s baton. An instant later the bird turned, ran lightly across the flagstones, and half leaped, half flew up to the top of the high wall. There was a rustle, a flirt of black tail, and the chaparral cock vanished into a cascade of deep-pink bougainvillea.

  “So much for my coffee break,” Erik said to the empty yard.

  Nothing answered him, not even a stirring of shadows.

  He stood, stretched, and headed back for his workshop, which was in the tallest of the estate’s fanciful turrets. He had inherited the land and the Scottish stones that had been collected at an ancient ruin, shipped, and reassembled in the desert. It had been an expensive indulgence, but in those days there had been money—new money—from Erik’s great-grandfather, who had swashbuckled with Errol Flynn across a lot of movie screens. Like many other Hollywood denizens, Great-grandfather Perry had made enough to indulge himself in a Palm Springs fantasy getaway.

  A love of the medieval had always been part of the family. Erik’s paternal grandfather and his wife were both well-known medievalists when they met. His father had been a medieval scholar and children’s book writer. His mother’s drawings had been as enchanting as the stories they illustrated.

  Stretching one last time, Erik sat down on a tall, beautifully made cherry-wood stool that had once been his mother’s. He leaned over a steeply tilted drafting table of ancient design which had, like “North’s Castle,” undergone a few modern renovations.

  Even though it was ten o’clock and there were windows all across the north side of the big turret room—Perry had drawn the line at gloomy authenticity—there was barely enough daylight to meet the demands of Erik’s work.

  “I really am going to have to cut back that old bougainvillea,” he muttered.

  He needed good light, but he hated to curb the vine’s cataract of blazing pink blooms. Sooner or later a rare freeze would come to the desert and take care of the exuberant bougainvillea. Until then, he would enjoy the flowers.

  And squint.

  He tilted the table slightly to catch the north light better, then tilted a little more. There were two sheets of paper on the table. One was vellum, blank except for the carefully ruled lines waiting to be written upon. The other sheet was a photograph taken in ultraviolet light of a very faded old Celtic manuscript that dated back to twelfth-century Britain. In ultraviolet light, the original manuscript showed through, despite having been erased so that more spectacular—and far more modern—illumination could cover ancient vellum. It was a monk’s way of reusing exp
ensive vellum, by replacing a secular text with the sacred word of God.

  It was also a forger’s trick to cover plain, pious text with something more flashy to catch a rich collector’s eye. A carpet page of bright colors and figures was a lot more saleable than sixteen or twenty lines of text in a language the buyer couldn’t read.

  As always, the voice of the man known as Erik the Learned seemed to vibrate in his modern namesake’s mind as he read the faded lines of the glossy photograph:

  I stood at the boundary today, the year-day of my “marriage.” Through the cursed mist I heard the bells of Silverfells ringing out the birth of a clan daughter, the first such birth in memory.

  And the mist held me back like chain mail.

  My horse refused the trail. My peregrine was blinded by sorcery’s light. My staghound’s nose was like unto stone. I was the most helpless of all. There was no means for me to pick a way through the mist, thus to get my hands on the source of my undoing.

  Cursed be all of Silverfells!

  I could taste the dark clan’s joy even as I raged against the foul sorceress who had charmed me into being her willing slave.

  Erik winced as he had the first time he translated the passage. His namesake had been well and truly pissed off, so enraged that it radiated up through time from the faded letters, so furious that he never even wrote the name of the sorceress; at least, he hadn’t in any of the seven pages Erik had managed to find over the years.

  “Poor son of a bitch,” Erik muttered. “She really stuck it to you, didn’t she. Or maybe you stuck it to her. A birthing bell, hmmm? Well, unless they conceived babies differently in twelfth-century Britain, I suspect you were willing enough in the saddle. Wonder what went wrong . . .” His mouth turned down. “The usual, I suppose. She wanted more than you could give her and still call yourself a man.”

  It had happened that way to Erik North. His fiancée had wanted his undivided attention. She hadn’t wanted to be “stepmother” to two teenage girls who happened to be his younger sisters. There were plenty of second or third cousins, weren’t there? Let them raise the girls.

  End of engagement.

  Beginning of single parenting.

  Carefully Erik put away the tools he had used to mark lines on the vellum. Because this particular client was exceptionally fussy—to put it politely—he had used a bone stylus with an embedded metal tip for marking on the vellum, just as had been done for more than a thousand years. Now the lines were waiting to be filled with calligraphy. All he had to do was see the ancient text well enough to copy from it.

  It would have helped if he could have worked with the original vellum longer, but the owner was understandably possessive of his treasure. Works by the Spanish Forger were in high demand in the twenty-first century. Erik had been lucky to get permission to put the leaf under UV and photograph it, thus reclaiming the original text.

  Slowly he tilted the wooden drafting table until what had been merely a hint of thin shadows just beneath the surface of the original vellum condensed into a photograph of elegant yet spare calligraphic lines. He made a deep, rough sound of approval that was rather like a growl. The sound went quite well with his tawny blond hair and predatory golden eyes.

  “Gotcha!”

  Humming a chant passed down from medieval times through generations of men, he fixed the table at the proper angle. Only then did he select a quill from a rack bolted to the edge of the drafting table. As he was left-handed, the quills he preferred using came from the right wing of the bird—usually a turkey, sometimes a goose when he was copying a page down to the last finicky historical detail.

  Today he was using goose quills. His client was himself; when it came to the Book of the Learned, he was the fussiest client on earth. If a total re-creation of the original meant finding goose quills in Palm Springs, then by God he found goose quills.

  The ancient monks and scribes had no problem getting good feathers. Old World medieval monasteries had never heard of New World turkeys, but the monks had kept flocks of geese to supply their pantry and their calligraphers.

  Erik hadn’t been driven to that extreme yet. He had chatted up some organic turkey farmers and a woman who raised European graylag geese for restaurants specializing in unusual foods. Once he had worked past the farmers’ disbelief, they were glad to give him the pick of the feathers.

  As expected, Thanksgiving was best for getting bushels of turkey feathers. Christmas was best for geese. Just a few weeks ago he had prepared hundreds upon hundreds of goose quills, plunging each shaft into hot sand to “cure” the quill, then peeling away the frail, slippery skin, and finally scraping out the soft core. After that a few practiced strokes of his penknife transformed a feather into a writing instrument.

  It had taken incense to chase the smell of processed feathers from the old castle he had inherited from his grandfather. In fact, Erik suspected that monks had used incense for the same reason. Wet, scorched feathers had a smell that ranked right down there with skunk.

  Automatically he held the quill up against the daylight and inspected the tip. Perfect. It wouldn’t last long, but that was why he had a sharp penknife always at hand. Literally. He had picked it up in his right hand even as he reached for the quill with his left. In the twelfth century, all church-taught scribes were right-handed. The fact that this calligrapher was left-handed explained his choice of text as well: a secular history of the Learned clan as seen through the eyes of their greatest scholar rather than ruminations on the nature of God.

  Erik settled in to begin work. Calligraphy in the medieval style required two hands, one to hold the quill, one to hold the penknife. The quill did the writing. The penknife did everything else: keeping the sleek vellum in place on the slanted table, sharpening quills at the bottom of every page, and erasing any errors by scraping off the ink before it could dry.

  Holding the pen in a way which seemed odd to a modern man—so that the quill was at a right angle to the vellum, and the whole arm rather than the hand provided the motion—he reached out to dip the point into a pot of ink which he had made following a recipe that was older than the chant he hummed. Though he preferred lampblack as a personal matter when he was replicating ancient manuscripts, the stubborn client had insisted on the ancient combination of iron sulfate and ashes of oak gall. The resulting ink was pleasing enough to work with but faded to brown as years piled up like autumn leaves.

  That wouldn’t be Erik’s problem. When the ink began to fade, he would be long dead. At least now that he was no longer working for the Security side of Rarities Unlimited, he had a better chance of living long enough to collect most of the Book of the Learned.

  Before he could touch virgin quill to ink, the phone rang.

  Chapter 4

  Erik was tempted to ignore the ringing demon, but didn’t. It might be a paying client. It might be a medieval scholar wanting to discuss some arcane aspect of calligraphy or mixing paints for illumination.

  It might be Rarities Unlimited.

  He set aside the quill and picked up the portable hand unit that was fixed to the side of his drafting board. As soon as the unit left its charging cradle, the ringing stopped.

  “North,” Erik said curtly.

  “Niall.”

  Adrenaline kicked. S. K. Niall—rhymes with kneel, boyo, I’m not a bleeding river—was the cofounder of Rarities Unlimited, which wasn’t so much a business as a collaboration of international talents held together by a shared reverence for the best that human culture had to offer. Some of Erik’s most interesting assignments had begun with that low-voiced growl or Dana Gaynor’s soothing, feminine tenor. Niall’s specialty was Security, which covered a multitude of operations, some of them quite private.

  “How’s life in Smog City?” Erik asked.

  “Up yours.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “You’re just jealous. L.A. is all clean from the last rain and you’re stuck in Palm Springs with dusty sidewalks and bars full
of bad Elvis imitators.”

  Erik waited. The other man hadn’t called to talk about the weather and they both knew it. The dark, highly trained head of Security had more work than he had time to handle. On the other hand, Niall and Erik were rock-climbing buddies as well as professional allies. Friends, in a word.

  “I have a question for you from Factoid,” Niall said.

  Erik blinked. Factoid, aka Joseph Robert (Joe-Bob) McCoy, was the Rarities computer expert and the completely wired twenty-first-century man. Due to the peculiarity of his mind, with or without benefit of computer, Joe-Bob McCoy had command of a staggering number of unconnected facts.

  “You still there?” Niall asked.

  “I’m speechless. What do I know that Factoid can’t find in his databases or his terrifying brain?”

  “The mind of a woman.”

  “Sorry, you must have called the wrong number.”

  Niall laughed. “He figures that anyone with shoulders like yours must have the secret of the feminine psyche.”

  “Better he should ask you,” Erik said dryly. “You’re the original tall, dark, and handsome. Hell, I’ve never even been married.”

  Niall gave a crack of laughter. “That’s just it. He figures you’ve got it wired. Women chasing you and none catching.”

  “The boy has a great fantasy life,” Erik said. “Tell him to keep on dreaming. It beats the hell out of my reality. Anything else on your tiny little mind?”

  “Gently, boyo. This is your boss you’re insulting.”

  “I work for Dana.”

  “The Fuzzy side,” Niall said in disgust, referring to the Fine Arts side of Rarities, as opposed to the Security side, which he ran. “When are you going to come back to the real side? I could use you.”

  “I’m a born-again Fuzzy.”

  “Balls.”