by Tom Harper
Written by the hand of Libellus, and illuminated by Master Francis.
He also made another book of beasts using a new art of writing.
I blinked. A second sentence had been added to the colophon, written in a hurried hand in watery brown ink. It was Kaspar’s writing. He must have come straight from the press when he wrote it, for he had dripped press ink on the card below.
‘I wondered when you would find my note.’
A tremor ran through me. Kaspar had appeared, silent as a devil, standing in the doorway and watching me with a crooked smile. I held up the book.
‘What does this mean?’
‘What it says.’
He stepped out of the shadows, revealing a slim leather-bound book in his hand. He gave it to me.
‘A gift.’
My hands trembled as I opened it.
Nick’s hand trembled as he opened the book. A second later, he felt unexpectedly deflated, an echo of how he’d felt in the hotel room in Paris, opening Gillian’s envelope and laying eyes on the card at last. The first page was utterly familiar – a cleaner, clearer version of the page the computer had stitched together for them in Karlsruhe. The bonasus with the wicked grin, spraying its fiery excrement over the men behind it: a monk, a knight and a merchant.
‘The lion is the strongest of all beasts and fears nothing.’ Gillian reached across him to turn the page, brushing against him as she did. Nick flinched away. ‘But how much braver is the worm, weakest of creatures, in constant fear he may be crushed yet humbly scavenging among the footfalls of giants and monsters. In time, he brings low even the noblest beast.’
‘That’s not how the text is supposed to go,’ said Emily.
Nick looked at the next picture. It was a lion, but not like the regal animals on the cards. It lay on its side with its crown askew. Its mangy fur had been pulled apart and a colony of maggots ate out its entrails. Its dull eyes lolled in its skull, almost as if it was still alive. A cloaked figure lurked behind it, watching, its face hidden in the shadows of its hood except for a row of giant serrated teeth.
Nick never forgot what he saw that night. It read like a monument to grotesque obsessions: bestial sex, deformed bodies, malice, torment and decay. Thanks to Bret, Nick had seen some of the most graphic images the Internet had to offer. Compared to that lurid realism, the black-and-white engravings in the book were plain, almost naïve. But even after five hundred years they maintained a savage power, a heightened truth in the anguished faces and debased bodies that shocked more viscerally than any photograph.
Each page brought new invented beasts: the monasticus, a double-jointed eunuch who spent all his time feverishly licking the scars where his genitals should have been; the equevore, a man with a horse’s head and a penis so large it required its own chain mail and helmet. A string of broken women lay behind him where he had raped them until they snapped in two. And in every picture, the cloaked figure, his savage teeth grinning in approval from under his hood.
On the penultimate page, a creature with a pig’s body and a man’s head, naked except for a hat, knelt on all fours. A dog in a crown squatted behind him and sodomised him, while another held him by his ears and thrust himself into the pig’s mouth. From the look of wild ecstasy contorting his puffed face, the pig was enjoying it. It was hard to tell if he was man or woman: he had a man’s genitals, but a woman’s breasts dangling from his distended belly to suckle the pack of wild men who bayed at his feet. Behind them all rose the cloaked figure, now swollen to three times his height, leering over them like a plume of smoke.
‘Who is that?’ said Nick.
‘The pig in the hat is the Pope,’ Emily said. ‘The dogs are the King of France and the Holy Roman Emperor of Germany. Knowing the date and the place, I’d guess it was intended as some sort of metaphor for the Armagnacken attacks of the 1440s and ’50s.’
‘What about the guy behind them?’
Gillian turned, her eyes shining with excitement. ‘Can’t you guess?’
*
The last animal in the bestiary was the rat. It seemed to have been added as an afterthought – the cloaked figure who haunted the book was absent from this page.
‘The rat follows the goose to its nest and murders its young.’
Beside the text was a scene of domestic devastation. The rat, wearing a square cloth cap like Fust’s, sat up on its haunches and tore the head off a downy gosling, still nestled in its egg. Its young eyes were wide with terror, staring at the mother goose, unable to understand why she did not come to help. The mother watched, helpless. Her wings had been ripped from her body and lay useless on the ground; blood poured from her breast where her heart had been gouged out. In her anguish she had not yet noticed. A rat pup with a face like Peter Schoeffer clung to her leg and gnawed it.
I confess, my first reaction was not outrage or a scandal; it was jealousy. While the quires of my Bible lan guished in the storeroom at the Humbrechthof, slowly mounting up, Kaspar had taken the first fruits of my creation. He had beaten me.
He watched me eagerly. ‘What do you think?’
‘It is…’ I slumped on the bed as the full enormity of what he had done struck home. ‘Obscene.’
‘But beautiful. Everything we dreamed of, before Fust tore it down.’ He knelt beside me and caressed the page. ‘My pictures and your words.’
‘Those are not my words.’
‘Our two arts fused as one. This is our master-piece.’ He pointed to the chapter heading. ‘I even managed to press the rubrics in red.’
I turned through the book. In one sense he was right: the book was immaculate. The proportions were pleasing, the pages precisely aligned: every drop of ink seemed to shine from the page. The illuminated images shimmered in gold, but it was the gloss of pure poison.
‘How many of these have you made?’
‘Thirty.’
‘Are they here?’
‘Not far away.’
‘Bring them to me,’ I commanded. ‘You must bring them back so they can be destroyed.’
The grin persisted, though strained. ‘Why should I destroy them? They are perfect?’
‘They are abominations,’ I cried. ‘You have taken everything about my art that was good or noble, that might have benefited the world’s salvation, and debased it. You are the tempter, the serpent in the garden.’
‘And you are a blind fool.’ In an instant a terrifying rage transformed his face. ‘A feeble-minded idiot who has stumbled on a power he does not understand. I have harnessed it to the one force in the world that deserves it.’
I sat on the bed, dumbfounded. In the silence between us, I heard the creak of footfalls on the stairs. We stared at the door, frozen in our battle like the beasts and hunters in the book.
Father Günther appeared on the landing. ‘Johann? It is almost eleven o’clock. They are waiting for you at the court.’
All my bones had turned to wax. ‘I cannot go.’
Günther stared between me and Kaspar, a witless spectator to our unfolding cataclysm.
‘You must go. Otherwise, they will make a summary judgment against you and you will lose everything.’
I fell back on the bed. The court, the judgment, Fust – they were nothing. Kaspar had unscrewed the form of my being and scattered the pieces. Everything in me, all that had meaning, was lost.
‘You and Keffer go. Report back what Fust says against me.’ He hesitated. ‘If you cannot answer him-’
‘Go.’
‘Are you ill? Perhaps I can persuade the court to delay.’ He glanced at Kaspar, imploring him for help. Kaspar played with the cover of his book and said nothing.
‘Leave me alone,’ I hissed. ‘It is done.’
With a last, bewildered glance at Kaspar, Günther hurried from the room. I heard his footsteps recede down the stairs, the bang of the door as he left the house.
Through tear-stained eyes, I looked up at Kaspar. I felt the vellum of his hateful book, smooth as a la
mb.
‘All the things that Fust accuses me of: the missing parchment and ink, the types that reappeared in the wrong place. That was you.’
‘Some – not all. The priest Günther has had a profitable sideline of supplying the scriveners of Mainz with paper for the last year. And often at night when I crept down to use the press, I found Peter Schoeffer practising his craft. Perhaps he knew this day would come.’ He laughed at me. ‘You were always a poor judge of character, Johann.’
I gazed at him, trying to hold together the shattered pieces of my heart. ‘Why did you do this to me?’
‘I did it for you. To show you the potential of what you have created. In the same way as it took the serpent to free Adam from the garden of perfection where God held him captive, I wanted to make you see what could be done.’
He pointed to the bestiary he had given me in Strassburg. ‘Do you know how much that cost the man who commissioned it? Fifty gulden. And what is it but a mirror to flatter his vanities? I gave him what he paid for. But with your press, Johann, we can change the order of things.’
He touched the scars on his face. ‘You know how I got these. Because a king, an emperor and a pope – Christians all – raped their lands in the name of God. But in my torments, the Armagnaken taught me there are other powers that hold sway over this earth. I learned things from them – secrets that even the Church fears.’
‘Secrets?’ I echoed.
‘This book is just the beginning. With your press, we can write things and make so many copies that the rich and the Church can not stop it. We will sweep them away in a torrent of fire and paper. Do you know why churchmen are slavering over your Bible. Because they think that if they control the art they will control the world.’
I almost wept with frustration. ‘That is what I wanted. Perfect unity.’
‘How could a man like you, of all people, want such a thing?’ He clenched his fist in fury. ‘Obedience to a Church which bleeds the poor while its bishops wear gold and fur? A Church which would rather collect fees than baptise souls? Which will sell you a receipt to expunge the same sins its priests commit tenfold? They do not deserve this invention, Johann. With the powers we can summon up, we will use it to destroy them.’
He took the book away from me. ‘I did not invent the beasts in this book. I drew them from life. I thought you of all men would see that.’
I buried my face in my hands. I heard a soft thud as he dropped the book on the bed beside me, then the creak of a floorboard. Perhaps I felt the soft touch of a kiss or a caress on my forehead; perhaps it was only a spasm. When I looked up, Kaspar was gone.
*
‘I can see why the Church wanted to keep this secret.’
Nick closed the book. His skin itched, as if the maggots had crawled out of the book and started to devour him. It had been a long time since he had felt so dirty.
Emily looked bruised by the encounter. Her face had gone so pale it was almost translucent. ‘It’s brutal. So much hatred in it. It’s hard to imagine it coming from the same man who printed the Gutenberg Bible.’
‘The typeface proves it.’
‘Do you think that’s why they hid it?’ said Nick. ‘To protect Gutenberg’s reputation?’
Gillian gave him a scornful look. ‘Did you even look at the book? It isn’t just satire. Look in the margins.’
Reluctantly, Nick opened the book again and peered at the decorated borders. The moment he saw the pictures, he knew he would never forget them. If anything, they were worse than the illustrations they framed, images he could barely describe.
‘It’s sick.’
‘Sicker than you think. It’s not just ornamentation. It’s an instruction manual.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The figure in the cloak? Why do you think he gets bigger in every picture? He’s getting closer. There’s a secret hidden in the pictures in this book, just like in the old alchemical texts. It’s a book of power.’
Nick stared at her. As always with Gillian, he couldn’t tell what she was really thinking.
‘You don’t really believe it works?’ But he could see in her face that she wanted to.
‘Somebody does,’ was all she said.
Nick didn’t know what to say. He looked at the picture and thought of the playful, witty beasts in the book they’d rescued from Brussels. ‘It’s so different from the other bestiary.’
Gillian stiffened. ‘The bestiary from Rambouillet? You found it? Can I see?’
Nick pulled it out of his bag and laid it beside its partner. They looked almost identical. He opened the back cover and looked at the inscription over the card.
Written by the hand of Libellus, and illuminated by Master Francis.
He also made another book of beasts using a new art of writing.
‘Which is hidden in the Sayings of the Kings of Israel.’ Emily supplied the invisible words.
Gillian frowned. ‘You know, I never figured out exactly what that meant. I suppose it must be something to do with this place – all the lost books.’
Nick looked up at the shelves towering over him. How many more secrets lurked among the old leather and rotting parchment? How many other terrible visions and diabolical rituals from men who had sought out the darkest powers of the earth?
A draught caught the back of his neck. The chill reminded him they couldn’t afford to linger.
‘How do we get it out of here?’
‘You don’t.’
Nick spun around. The double doors were open. For a moment, he almost believed that the incantations in the book had worked. A man with snow-white hair and eyes like coals stood watching them. His long coat flapped around his ankles in the breeze.
‘I think you have something for me.’
I lay on my bed and wept. I was betrayed. Fust and Kaspar between them had taken everything.
I fell into a sort of sleep, a dazed nightmare of ravenous beasts, crazed men and debauched women who came alive from the pages of Drach’s book. A diabolical mill swallowed men in its mouth and ground them to dust. A pope with cloven hooves sat on a throne and passed terrible judgement on me.
A vigorous pounding on the front door woke me. Was it over so soon? Had the court decided? I did not know how long I had been unconscious, and when I looked to the window all I saw was fog.
The front door crashed open. Footsteps pounded on the stairs, heavier than Günther’s. Too late, like a remorseful suicide in mid-air, the scales fell from my eyes and I felt the full, breathtaking scope of what I had lost. I wished I had not been so careless of it.
Two men burst through the door. They were not bailiffs, but armed soldiers in the archbishop’s livery. They shouted at me but I was too dazed to understand. They hauled me off my bed; one held me up while the other punched me in the face. I wondered if this was another nightmare, until I tasted blood in my mouth and decided it must be real.
They bound my hands and picked up my bestiary without looking at it. The other book, Drach’s abomination, had slipped behind the mattress where they could not see it. Then they tied a sack over my head and took me away.
LXXXIII
The old man was alone. Nick made to charge him, but Gillian grabbed his arms and held him back.
‘Don’t.’
As she spoke, another man came through the door, the Italian with the broken nose, the man Nick had fought in Strasbourg. He aimed his gun at Nick and grimaced.
The old man advanced into the room. The closer he came, the more Nick noticed his eyes. Pitted deep in his waxy face, they glinted as hard and pure as diamonds.
‘Father Nevado?’ he guessed.
‘Cardinal,’ the old man corrected him. ‘I have moved up in the world.
‘I wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition.’
A chilling smile. ‘We call it by another name now. But, broadly speaking, yes. You are very well informed.’
‘I spend a lot of time in libraries.’
It must be
nerves, Nick thought, adrenalin stringing out his battered mind before he collapsed. How else to explain how he could stand there trading wisecracks with the man who would kill him.
At least I found Gillian. It was a comforting thought.
‘If this is the Devils’ Library, who does that make you?’
‘The angel who guards the pit where lost works are cast out.’
Emily looked around. ‘Are all these books lost? I’m sure I’ve seen some of them before.’
Nick looked at her in surprise. Did she care? Even at the end, was the scholar in her curious? Or was it just a basic human instinct to keep talking, to delay the inevitable as long as possible?
Nevado seemed happy to humour her. ‘Some of the books here do not exist outside this room, but many more are in the world. Some have even had influence. Contrary to ignorant supposition, this library is not merely a prison for condemned books. It was established by Pope Pius II as a school against error, where those who fought in the vanguard against sin and the devil could study their foes more closely.’
‘That’s funny,’ said Nick. ‘I looked in one of those books and all I saw was the Pope.’
‘The first book in this library was the Liber Bonasi in front of you. Not the oldest, but the first. It had personal significance to Pope Pius. He knew Johann Gutenberg; he championed him because he believed that the printing press would beget a more perfect faith. The Church had many wounds at that time. He thought the press would cleanse them. Instead, it proved more suited to spreading lies and error.’
‘Malware,’ said Nick. ‘The book’s a virus. The press spreads it quickly – much faster than before. People read it and get infected. Eventually you end up with a whole network of infected people who you can use to launch attacks.’
‘The Reformation,’ said Emily.
‘I doubt that Pope Pius would have thought of it so – but yes. Truly, there is nothing in the world the Church has not seen before. Pius knew that if Gutenberg’s monstrosity became known, the printing press would have been condemned as an agency of the devil. He suppressed all trace of the Liber Bonasi and left a decree that every copy should be wiped from the earth. Thirty copies were made. One remains here as an exemplar. Twenty-eight more have been hunted down over the centuries, dug out of the libraries and collections where they lay buried, and destroyed. Only one remains outstanding. And now you have brought it to me.’