The Book Of Secrets Part 49

Mainz, 6 November 1455

Fog came down in the night. When day dawned, the city had disappeared. From my bedroom window I could not even see the house opposite, except for the tip of its roof looming from the mist like a ship's prow. I pulled on my fur-trimmed coat and remembered the youth who had dressed in this same room thirty-five years earlier, waiting for a court to tell him he was insufficiently well born to inherit his father's estate.

The house was empty. I had told the others, those who stayed with me, not to come to work today. Even the servants were gone. I had not asked Kaspar to leave, but when I looked in his room he was not there. Part of me was disappointed, another part relieved. I drifted around the lonely house, too dispirited even to rouse a fire. I should have been working on some sort of defence for my trial, but each time I thought of it a great dread crushed my soul.

I went into the workshop and looked at the press. It stood in the middle of the room like a gallows, the platen raised, the ink tables dry, blank piles of paper stacked beside it. I ran my hand over the rugged frame. I pressed my fingers against the type in its bed and looked at the red indentations it left in my skin. I felt as I had that morning in Paris void. I had stared into the flames and conjured the rainbow. Now all that remained was ash.

But I also remembered that day in Paris was when I first encountered Kaspar's art. I went to my bedroom and took down his bestiary from its shelf. I leafed through the well-thumbed pages, marvelling again at his skill. Many of the beasts looked almost human: the shy deer with its chin tucked against its breast; the lovelorn unicorn who stared at the virgin maid and did not see the hunter's net behind him; the bonasus who roasted his pursuers with fiery dung and mischievous glee.

I turned to the last page to look at the card, the four bears and four lions who had led me so far.

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 st.i.tched 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 n.o.blest 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: b.e.s.t.i.a.l s.e.x, 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 naive. 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 p.e.n.i.s 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 n.o.ble, 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 Gunther 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.'

Gunther 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, Gunther 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 lamb.

'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 Gunther 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 G.o.d held him captive, I wanted to make you see what could be done.'

He pointed to the bestiary he had given me in Stra.s.sburg. '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 G.o.d. 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 ill.u.s.trations 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.'