The Book of Secrets

by Tom Harper

  I stood beside the press and addressed the assembled team. I do not remember what I said, and I doubt they paid much attention. The only words that mattered that day lay set in lead on the press bed. I concluded with a prayer that God would cast his blessing on our humble enterprise, which we offered in His name and to His purpose.

  As soon as I was done, Kaspar stepped forward. He did not look at his audience. He had always been capable of great concentration, in starts, but since his injury he had acquired an almost ferocious power to ignore all around him. I suppose he needed armour against the stares and mockery his deformity drew in the streets.

  He uncorked two ink bottles, a large one of black and a small of red. First, he dipped a brush in the red and carefully painted it onto the head line, the rubrication. Then he poured the black into a pool on the block beside the press. It came out thick and sticky as naphtha.

  He swirled the ink around the slab with a knife until it was evenly spread, then picked up two leather balls on sticks. He dipped one in the ink and rubbed the two together. When the brown leather was a uniform black, he rubbed them on the metal type in the press, using short round motions like kneading dough. A thin film of ink spread across the form.

  He stepped back. I breathed a sigh of relief. I had wanted Kaspar to be a part of this moment – because his painter’s hands were more deft than anyone’s with the ink balls, but also because it was right. He was my lodestar, the beginning of all that followed. Yet – as ever – I felt a drift of unease. There was something about an audience that made him unpredictable, that stoked dangerous fires inside him.

  Two young men flanked the press, an apprentice called Keffer I had brought from Strassburg, and Peter Schoeffer. Kaspar had complained about Schoeffer being accorded this honour, but I had overruled him. It was politic, with Fust watching – and deserved. Schoeffer had already proved himself the most promising of my apprentices. He had an instinct for books that none other of our crew of goldsmiths, carpenters, priests and painters could feel.

  Schoeffer laid a sheet of vellum onto a board hinged to the bed of the press. Six pins held it in place. He folded it back so that the vellum was held suspended over the inked type, then slid the tray back. It slotted home underneath the platen. He and Ruppel took the handle that drove the screw and pushed it around.

  I would have liked to pull it myself, but I was an old man and it wanted strength. The screw creaked and popped as it tightened; the platen pushed down. They held it there a moment, then turned the screw back.

  Keffer slid out the tray and folded out the flap, revealing the underside of the vellum. He loosed the pins and pulled it free, made to hold it up then handed it to me instead. The knot of men around me tightened as all vied for a view.

  Thousands of tiny letters glistened on the page, wet and black as tar.

  n the beginning God created heaven and earth. But the earth was void and empty: shadow covered the earth, and the spirit of God swept over the waters.

  It was not complete. The initial ‘I’ would be added later with Kaspar’s copper plate. Tomorrow the leaf would be printed on the reverse. Later it would be brought back for the conjugate pages, two more days, then folded, stitched, eventually bound with all the others. But in itself, it was flawless. Every letter of Götz’s new type had imprinted sharp and whole, more even than any mortal scribe could have made.

  I looked to Kaspar, wanting to share the triumph with him. He would not catch my eye. He was staring at the vellum, his face screwed up as if he had bitten a sour apple. I knew what he was looking at: the punctuation in the margin. Peter Schoeffer had been right. The image of perfection was greater if the reality was less so. I could not understand why that should be, but it was.

  I was about to go over and embrace Kaspar, to remind him that this was his victory as much as mine, when Fust appeared in front of me. His cheeks were flushed; he was holding a glass of wine. He clapped me on the shoulder.

  ‘You have done it, Johann. We will run every scribe and rubricator in Mainz out of business.’

  I forced myself to smile at him. ‘God willing, this is just the first page of the first copy. We still have almost two hundred thousand to go.’

  The true test came ten minutes later, when Schoeffer and Keffer put the second sheet of vellum through the press. Schoeffer pulled it out and hung it on a rack beside the first. I stared between one and the other, scanning every letter for the least deviation.

  They were indistinguishable. Perfect copies.

  Sunlight shone through a bubble in the windowpane, splaying a fan of colour across the opposite wall. A new covenant. I remembered an old man in Paris.

  In the moment of perfection it casts a light like a rainbow. That is the sign.

  I drank in my moment of perfection and wished it would never end.

  LXXI

  Mainz

  He was too famous to be doing this. Not that he’d sought it. He despised his colleagues who preened themselves on television, publicising arguments that should have stayed behind the doors of Mother Church. Those men often returned from the studios to find Nevado waiting for them, informing them they had found new vocations in remote dioceses in far-off continents. He enjoyed breaking them, like a gardener pruning branches that disfigured the shape of a tree.

  But now he was near the summit of his profession. At such heights, the glare made it impossible to lurk in shadows completely. He became visible. When the last pope died news papers had printed photographs of Nevado, among others. Ignorant commentators wrote ignorant articles for their ignorant readers, breathlessly speculating whether or not he might be papabile. He had read the articles, then used them to light the fire in his Vatican apartments. He’d been burning that sort of waste all his life. It was no more than it deserved.

  But error, once it escaped into the world, could not be uprooted entirely. Perhaps fifty years earlier, when he began: not now. Even so, he knew he had to do this. Some men would have called it fate, or destiny; to Cardinal Nevado it was simply God’s purpose.

  He pulled the scarf up so that it covered his mouth, and stepped into the church.

  They turned down the hill, towards the old town and the river. The houses in Mainz seemed to have been built to a different scale: their high walls dwarfed Nick and Emily as they walked hand in hand down the snowbound street.

  The archives were housed in a modern building overlooking a main road, with a park and the Rhine beyond. A passenger ferry sat docked at a wharf opposite.

  They were just in time. The archives were about to close for the day, the archivist evidently hoping to get home early in the snow. But she let them in with a scowl, and led them down to the basement, a maze of sagging shelves lit by naked bulbs. In a far corner, she extracted a flat cardboard box from under a pile of files. She put it down on a table shoved against the wall under a heating duct.

  ‘The reading room is closed already. You can work here.’ She looked at her watch. ‘We give you one hour. Then we lock you in.’

  Olaf sat in the church contemplating the angels. Sometimes, when his old eyes blurred out of focus, he enjoyed the illusion that the angels had escaped their glass prison and soared free through the blue heaven above. He imagined Trudi, his first wife, playing among them, and hoped she was happier now than he had ever made her.

  The wheelchair jolted forward. Someone had knocked into it from behind. Olaf lifted his wrinkled hand to anticipate the apology – he was used to such things – but none came.

  He turned, and looked up into the face from his nightmares.

  There were twelve pages, single columns of closely spaced writing. Over the centuries the catalogue had been subject to many revisions. Ruled lines eliminated many of the entries, while the margins had become a parallel narrative of names, dates and scribbled numbers.

  ‘What are we looking for?’

  ‘Whatever Gillian was looking for when she found the reference to the Devils’ Library. Probably something from the fifteenth
century. Maybe a bestiary, or a title we haven’t heard of before.’

  Nick tried deciphering the first line of the catalogue. Medieval handwriting and Latin defeated him.

  ‘How’s it organised?’

  ‘Chronologically.’

  ‘It shouldn’t be too hard to find the fifteenth-century books, then.’

  ‘Chronologically by the date that the monastery acquired the books,’ Emily corrected him.

  Nick stared at her incredulously. ‘What sort of way to organise information is that?’

  Emily laid a protective hand on the page. ‘Card catalogues weren’t invented until the eighteenth century. Until then, all they could do was write down the books as they came into the library. When they were sold, or lost, they crossed them out. You can see why librarians were so important to monasteries.’

  She leaned over to examine the first page. ‘A lot of these books will have been Bibles or prayer books. We can probably discount those.’

  ‘Unless the monks pulled the same trick Gillian did here,’ Nick muttered. ‘If the book was so controversial, maybe they misfiled it.’ He pointed to an entry in the middle of the page. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘ITEM: DE NATURA RERUM.’

  ‘When does that date from?’

  ‘Originally? Probably about 300 BC.’ Emily couldn’t help smiling. ‘It’s Aristotle.’

  Olaf hadn’t properly believed in God since he was fifteen. But he believed in destiny, and at his age he had seen enough to recognise it when it arrived. He didn’t resist Cardinal Nevado taking the handles of his wheelchair and wheeling him out. After the blue womb of the church, a foul yellow light drenched the world outside.

  ‘You hid yourself well,’ said the voice in his ear. ‘We have been trying to find you for a week.’

  ‘I always assumed you would.’

  ‘But you did not really believe it.’ The wheels skidded as he turned a corner. ‘For such a cunning race, humanity is badly adapted for deceit. We trust too much to experience. If we have got away with something once, we assume it will always be so. But the more often we risk something, the more likely we are to fail. You betrayed us once with the American girl and escaped. You should not have met in the same place a second time.’

  Olaf stared ahead. ‘I like to look at the angels.’

  ‘I hope you enjoyed them. They will be the last you see for some time.’

  Olaf suddenly became agitated. He craned around, but all he could see of his captor was a long black coat, a wall of darkness billowing behind him.

  ‘What do you want me to tell you?’

  ‘Nothing. We know everything.’

  Cardinal Nevado reached in his pocket and pulled out a heavy fisherman’s knife. He hooked it around the wheelchair’s brake cord. With a twitch of his wrist, the blade severed it.

  ‘God pardon you whatever sins or faults you have committed,’ he murmured. He placed a gloved hand benevolently on Olaf’s head and held it there for a moment in blessing. Then he pushed.

  The hill was steep and smooth as glass. Olaf flapped his arms and tried to grab the wheel rims, but on the hard snow it made no difference. It careered down the street and skidded out onto the road at the bottom – a two-lane stretch of ring road.

  From the top of the hill, Nevado actually saw the wheelchair pop into the air as a truck hit it front on. It flew into the next lane, bounced, and disappeared under the wheels of an oncoming car.

  There wasn’t much Nick could do. He paced the basement reading labels on boxes, wondering what other secrets they might hide. When that got boring, he turned on his laptop to play solitaire. When he’d lost three games in a row, he went back to Emily at the table.

  ‘Any luck?’

  Emily frowned. ‘It’s hard to tell. A lot of these titles are unfamiliar. I can’t pin down dates at all.’

  The clock on the computer showed half an hour had passed already. Without much hope, Nick activated the laptop’s wireless card. To his surprise, it found a network almost at once.

  ‘Maybe I can help.’

  He dragged a cardboard box to the table and used it as a makeshift stool. As Emily read out titles he ran them through a search engine, gradually circling in on the section of the catalogue that seemed to have been written in the mid-fifteenth century. In the bottom corner of the screen, minutes ticked past.

  ‘Here’s one,’ she said. ‘No details at all, just a title. Liber Bonasi.’

  Nick typed ‘Bonasi’ into the search engine.

  Did you mean: Bonsai?

  Underneath, a list of links offered him various services to do with bonsai trees.

  ‘Nothing coming up.’

  ‘Strange.’ She pored over the catalogue. ‘Try “Bonasus”. That might be a more common form.’

  Japanese nurseries disappeared. Nick scrolled through the new results and tried to make sense of them.

  ‘Bonasus seems to be the Latin name for some kind of Polish bison. Apparently they piss on wild grass which they use to flavour vodka. Gross, huh?’

  He looked up from the screen, wondering why she’d gone so still. ‘That’s what it says here.’

  ‘Try “Bonnacon”.’

  She spelled it out for him. Nick entered it and clicked on the first result that came up. Emily stood and walked round the table to look.

  ‘That’s it.’

  A new picture filled the screen: a strange beast with muscular flanks, curled horns and cloven hoofs. Three knights were pursuing it with spears, but had been thrown back by a forked blast that shot out from the beast’s rear end like lightning.

  Nick read the caption. ‘Bonnacon, also known as Bonasus. A fabulous beast with a horse’s mane, a bull’s body and horns that curve back and so are useless for fighting. When attacked, it runs away, while emitting a trail of dung that can cover two miles. Contact with the dung burns its attackers like fire.’

  Half-listening, Emily pulled the reassembled printout from the bag and laid it next to the computer. Nick looked between them: screen to paper, paper to screen.

  The animals were the same. Not identical, but clearly the same fantastical species. What Nick had taken for a bushy tail was actually a cloud of fiery excrement spraying behind it.

  ‘Napalm shit,’ said Nick. ‘Glad I never walked behind one.’

  ‘Liber Bonasi means the Book of Bonasus. It could be a pseudonym, like Libellus or Master Francis.’

  Nick moved around the cluttered table to look at the catalogue again. ‘So does it mention the Devils’ Library there?’

  ‘No.’ Emily pointed to the entry. The title had been ruled through, struck out, but unlike the other books there was no date or description of where it had gone. The margin was empty.

  ‘Olaf said Gillian found the reference here.’

  ‘If you were going to send a dangerous book to a secret library, you probably wouldn’t record it in the catalogue.’

  ‘Not so people could see.’ Nick pulled out his cellphone and turned it on – the first time he’d touched it since he left Paris. Blue-white light glowed from the screen.

  ‘It’s not ultraviolet, but it might give us an idea.’

  He laid the phone flat against the medieval catalogue. Light spilled across the page. With tiny movements, he angled the phone back and forth, trying to catch any sign of hard-point writing.

  ‘What’s that?’

  He just caught it: a faint scar in the paper, almost invisible in the weak light. He turned up the brightness on the screen, tracing the indentations like an archaeologist sifting through sand. He had to spell it out letter by letter; several times he realised he’d got one wrong and had to go back.

  Bib Diab. Portus Gelidus.

  Footsteps rang on the steel stairs. Nick jumped, but it was only the archivist. Emily swept up the catalogue and put it back in the box.

  The archivist tapped her watch. ‘Time you must go.’

  They followed her back up. On the stairs Nick asked, ‘Does the name Portus Ge
lidus mean anything to you?’

  The archivist frowned, surprised.

  ‘Portus Gelidus is the name in historical times for Oberwinter. It is a village on the Rhine, in the mountains.’ She pushed through the door into the lobby and pointed through the front windows. Across the busy road, limp flags hung over a gangway on the pier. ‘You can go by the ferry.’

  Nevado checked the street – still empty. His hat would have hidden his face from anyone watching from the windows above, and any CCTV cameras. He doubted the police would even bother to check: it was plain enough what had happened. An old man had lost control of his wheelchair on the ice, skidded and died. A tragedy. He walked briskly away until he found a street down the hill where the pavements had been shovelled clear. In the distance, he could hear sirens.

  A vibration in his coat pocket reminded him his work wasn’t finished yet. He snapped open the phone and listened for a moment.

  ‘Do nothing. Wait for me.’

  *

  Once, Mainz had been protected by stone; now its walls were ramparts of snow, ploughed to the sides of the two-lane highway that divided the riverfront from the rest of the city. Traffic was at a standstill, the cars pulled over so that an ambulance could nose its way through. Someone must have skidded – easy enough, in this weather. Nick looked for the accident but couldn’t see anything.

  They weaved between the stationary cars and came out on a wide concrete promenade over the Rhine. A biting wind hit them; out on the river it whipped the water into serrated white-capped teeth. By the flagpoles, a sailor in a blue boiler suit unwound a rope from the gangway. They hurried over.

  ‘Does this boat go to Oberwinter?’ Nick asked.