And are there other manuscripts like this one?
How are they arranged?
On their backs? Or stood up in stacks?
As though she has willed it into existence, a tendril of fog comes trickling over the roofline.
* * *
Again she slips past the watchman and descends the twisting lanes to the harbor. She finds Himerius asleep beside his skiff and when she wakes him he frowns as if trying to resolve multiple girls into one. Finally he wipes a hand across his face and nods and urinates a long time onto the rocks before dragging the boat into the water.
She stows the sack and rope in the bow. Four gulls pass overhead, crying softly, and Himerius peers up at them, then rows to the priory on the rock. This time she is more determined. With each movement up the wall, her fear thins, and soon there is only the movement of her body and her memory of the holds, her fingers keeping her against the cold brick, her legs sending her up. She reaches the scupper, crawls through the mouth of the lion, and drops into the big refectory. Spirits, let me pass.
A three-quarter moon sends more light filtering through the fog. She finds the stairs, ascends, travels the long corridor, and steps through the door into the circular room.
It’s a ghostland, brimming with dust, little ferns growing here and there from clumps of damp paper, everything moldering to pieces. Inside some of the cupboards are vast monastic records so big she can hardly lift them; in others she finds tomes whose pages have been conglutinated by moisture and mildew into a solid mass. She fills the sack as full as she can and drags it down the steps and lowers it to the skiff and walks one pace behind Himerius as he carries it through the misty lanes to the house of the Italians.
* * *
The clubfooted servant gives a jaw-cracking yawn as he waves them into the courtyard. Inside the workshop, the two smaller scribes are collapsed on chairs in the corner, sound asleep, but the tall one rubs his hands as though he has waited for them all night. “Come, come, let’s see what the mudlarks have brought.” He upends the sack onto the table between an array of lit tapers.
Himerius stands with his hands to the fire while Anna watches the foreigner go through the manuscripts. Charters, wills, transcriptions of orations; requests for requisitions; what appears to be a list of personages who attended some long-ago monastic gathering: the Grand Domestic; His Excellency the Vice-Treasurer; the Visiting Scholar from Thessalonica; the Grand Chancellor of the Imperial Wardrobe.
One by one he leafs through the mildewed codices, tipping his candelabra this way and that, and Anna notices things that she missed the first time: his hose are torn on one knee, and his coat is tarnished at the elbows, and ink is spattered up both of his sleeves. “Not this,” he says, “not this,” then murmurs in his own language. The room smells of oak gall ink and parchment and woodsmoke and red wine. A looking glass in the corner reflects the candle flames; someone has pinned a series of small butterflies to a linen board; someone else is copying what looks like a navigational chart on the corner table—the room overflows with curiosity and ardor.
“All useless,” the Italian concludes, rather cheerfully, and stacks four silver coins on the table. He looks at her. “Do you know the story of Noah and his sons, child? How they filled their ship with everything to start the world anew? For a thousand years your city, this crumbling capital”—he waves a hand toward a window—“was like that ark. Only instead of two of every living creature, do you know what the good Lord stacked inside this ship?”
Beyond the shuttered window the first cocks crow. She can feel Himerius twitching beside the fire, all his attention on the silver.
“Books.” The scribe smiles. “And in our tale of Noah and the ship of books, can you guess what is the flood?”
She shakes her head.
“Time. Day after day, year after year, time wipes the old books from the world. The manuscript you brought us before? That was written by Aelian, a learned man who lived at the time of the Caesars. For it to reach us in this room, in this hour, the lines within it had to survive a dozen centuries. A scribe had to copy it, and a second scribe, decades later, had to recopy that copy, transform it from a scroll to a codex, and long after the second scribe’s bones were in the earth, a third came along and recopied it again, and all this time the book was being hunted. One bad-tempered abbot, one clumsy friar, one invading barbarian, an overturned candle, a hungry worm—and all those centuries are undone.”
The flames of the tapers flicker; his eyes seem to gather all the light in the room.