Standing above the circular garden, the hot sun beating down on the shoulders left bare by her summer dress, she went back to the letter in her hand. There was not much left to go, and the suspense was killing her.
While the desert air is still cool from the night, I shall be summoned to the maze. Who shall the sultan invite to observe my death? What shall they eat and drink as I strive in vain to escape the beast? The sultan has said that the game has never lasted long enough for him to finish his repast.
Beth could hardly credit what she was reading. It read as if it were a real-life account of Theseus and the Minotaur; she struggled to remember the myth. Every nine years, the Athenians were made to pay a terrible tribute to King Minos, as part of an earlier truce; they were required to send a group of young men and women — seven of each, if she recalled correctly — to be devoured by the dreaded Minotaur, half man and half bull, who lived in a labyrinth from which there was no escape. Had the Sultan Kilij al-Kalli modeled his own maze on that legendary one? And what was the actual beast who haunted, and hunted in, his own deadly theater? A Minotaur, she knew, it was not; that was only a myth. But what was it really — a lion? A tiger? Something even more exotic — and dangerous?
The prisoner at first seeks a way out, going up one narrow path and down another, but only from on high, where the sultan sits, can the design be wholly known. And only from that perch [throne] can it be seen that there is no escape. The creature sleeps at the heart of the maze, in the shade of the towering terebinth tree.
The terebinth had been mentioned earlier, too, and Beth had done some research into it — enough to reveal that it was a massive indigenous tree, better known to botanists as the Palestine pistacia, that was known to live as long as a thousand years. Though sometimes called by other names, it was prominently featured in many scriptural passages: It was under such a tree that King Saul had been buried. It was in the mighty branches of the terebinth that Absalom, great in his own eyes, had been trapped and then murdered. And it was in the valley of Elah, thick with these always green trees, that David with his sling had brought down the Philistine champion, Goliath.
But as the prisoner approaches, the beast raises its head — it has a wondrous sense of smell, and an appetite for blood that is never appeased. The prisoner has no knowledge of the monster so close, but walks deeper and deeper into the trap, unable to see beyond the dense walls of the hawthorn bushes, with their thorny branches and bright white blossoms. As he ventures into the twisting garden, so too does the monster rouse himself from his torpor and stand on its four clawed feet. The prisoner, he searches for a way out of the green enclosure [trap], while the beast seeks out his offered prey. With my own eyes, as God is my great and eternal witness, I have seen many of the sultan’s prisoners — men like me who have served him well and done him no disloyalty — thrust into the maze, there to be hunted down and torn to pieces. It is said that when the sultan has no more use for a man, there is but one use left, and that is to sustain this accursed creature, this beast he calls his manticore.
Beth let the hand holding the translation drop to her side. It was too bizarre, too unbelievable, what she was reading. And yet she did not doubt a word. It was as if the scribe were whispering these words into her very ear. And it certainly reinforced her initial feeling about the illuminations — that they weren’t simple flights of fancy, but were drawn from living models. The artist, she felt, had faithfully reproduced the evidence of his own eyes.
Impossible as that, even now, seemed.
“There you are,” Elvis called to her as he scuffed across the gravel path in his shorts and sandals. In the bright sun, he looked so pale as to be nearly transparent. “Mrs. Cabot’s looking all over for you.”
“Why?”
Elvis adjusted his wraparound shades and glanced about, as if he had never seen daylight up close like this. “Don’t know exactly, but there’s a lot of commotion. That Arab guy—”
“Mr. al-Kalli.”
“He showed up about a half hour ago, with his bodyguard, and he wants everything back.”
“The book?”
“That, and all the translation work we’ve done so far. He’s already been down to Hildegard’s lair and come back with the book itself.”
“I can only imagine how Hildegard reacted.”
“You don’t need to — I can tell you. I had to bring him down there. She wasn’t happy. But she reattached the front cover — for some reason it was still separate—”
At Beth’s request.
“—and the minute she’d put the last stitch through the binding, he had his bodyguard—”
“Jakob.”
“Right. He had him put it back in the big box it came in—”
Beth couldn’t help reflecting that Elvis made it sound like repackaging a car stereo.
“—and then they came back upstairs and started looking for you.” Having finished his summation, he removed a pebble from his sandal. “Hot out here,” he said. “The Santa Anas must be blowing.”
Beth folded up the letter, reluctantly, as there was just a small portion to go, and knew she had no choice but to reenter the lion’s den. If al-Kalli was up in her office and he wanted all the work they had done so far, she would give it to him, gladly. The computer-driven translations of the bestiary text had been interesting, no question about it, but they had also been fairly pro forma. The animals, from chimeras to leviathans, all so naturalistically depicted in the illuminations, had been summarized and described in the accompanying text in the routine, Christian-iconographic manner of the age. The fire-breathing basilisk, for instance, had been portrayed as a symbol of lust and the Devil, and the Vulgate passage—Super aspidem et basiliscum ambulabis—had been duly included. (Translated into the New Revised Standard Version many centuries later, the passage read “You shall tread upon the lion and the adder: the young lion and the serpent you will trample underfoot,” all of which Beth recognized as a standard reference to Christ’s victory over Satan.) The griffin, because it had four clawed feet but the wings of a bird, was classed, as per Leviticus 11:13–20, among the unclean creatures. The phoenix, because its flesh was incorruptible and it rose, after three days, from its own ashes, was of course a symbol of the Resurrection. And the manticore, the lethal beast that none could withstand, “hungered after human flesh most ravenously,” and, like the Devil himself, could never be sated. What was surprising was to find such Christian tropes and allegories in a book of Middle Eastern origin, but Beth attributed that to its foreign-born author.
She waited while another tour group began the climb back up the gently sloping hill toward the main museum complex, then followed them on the meandering path. The gardens of the Getty had been laid out with an elaborate plan designed to suggest no plan at all. Wooden foot-bridges crossed running streams dotted with boulders from the Sierra foothills, all arranged to create slightly different sound effects. Seemingly random collections of flowers— deer grass, dymondia, geranium, lavender, and thyme — were all strategically grouped by color and texture. Elvis said, “You want me to print out a copy of all the files for them?”
“Yes.”
“What about the completed list of the catchwords?”
It was the list of catchwords, of course, that had led her to the discovery of the scribe’s secret letter, but what, if anything, would al-Kalli be able to make of it? He’d been unimpressed when Elvis had first blurted out something about it. And even Elvis did not know about the letter; Beth had scanned the text into their laboriously constructed database on her own, after hours. Apart from Carter, the only person who knew anything about it at all was Hildegard, and Beth was confident that she had kept mum. Hildegard thought that most of the wealthy people who owned these precious artifacts were precisely the wrong custodians — and she seldom shared with them information she felt they couldn’t appreciate. Still, Beth would call her later just to make absolutely sure.