Being changed was sure not like she’d thought it would be. Jackrabbit was always frightened and always alone. Nothing was wonderful. Not at all.
SKIN
By Helen Marshall
Helen Marshall is pursuing a PhD in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, for which she spends the majority of her time in the libraries of London, Oxford, and Cambridge, examining 14th-century manuscripts. Her poetry has been published in ChiZine, NFG and the long-running Tesseracts anthology. “Mist and Shadows”, published originally in Star*Line, appeared in The 2006 Rhysling Anthology: The Best Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Poetry of 2005 and her poem, “Waiting for the Harrowing”, has been nominated for a 2011 Aurora Award. Her poetry chapbook, Skeleton Leaves, was released by Kelp Queen Press in 2011 and her collection of short stories, Hair Side, Flesh Side, is forthcoming from ChiZine Publications in 2012.
COLLEAGUES, AS MANY of you know, I have been at some pains over the last months to complete the research which your very kind donations have made possible. If it has taken a toll on me—if you can detect something of a dreary languor in my demeanour—I beg your indulgence. The archives can be an unkind place and History, herself, the cruelest of mistresses.
But I must tell you that it is more than the simple rigours of study that send a wild light to my eyes; it is far more than that. As you know, I have been engaged for some time in a study of a certain manuscript come to light recently in Biblioteca Estense in Modena, a small volume written on a fine vellum, much-damaged by fire, but still clearly one of the earliest copies of a Latin work thought to be attributed to Aristotle. Recent research has indicated—and my colleagues in Harvard have verified the results, checked transcription after transcription and traced both dialectal and paleographical evidence—that the book can be reliably placed near Heliopolis in origin, and may once have been housed in the lost Library of Alexandria.
The ramifications of such a find are far-reaching and will require far more study than I myself in a lifetime could ever hope to achieve, even with such generous donations as you may wish to give toward the endeavour. Nevertheless, it is not the contents themselves that disturb my composure. No, it is the parchment—the stretched and tattered skin, barely readable, discoloured by fire, yet still beautifully resilient after all these years.
In May, I departed for Cairo at the request of this esteemed governing board. My passport was stamped, my visa checked in triplicate, and the manuscript eyed hairily by authorities who neither understood its value nor my own purpose. “Where is the usstaz? The professor?” they would ask, ignorant of my protestations that I was the professor.
Finally, a small, svelte man with immaculate English arrived to take me to the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. ‘Khaled Nassar’, he said his name was and he was a godsend, though, no doubt, he’d dispute the term bitterly.
It was at the university that my true work began, and an intoxicating blend of excitement and curiosity drove me forward, even as exhaustion threatened to drag my mind from those soaring pinnacles of knowledge that we have glimpsed in the gelid mists of our studies. I was alone, utterly alone, but for my rescuer who—it appeared—was to be my liaison. He helped me negotiate the streets of that wretched city, sweat crawling down my spine, and taught me the few words of Arabic that helped me survive. In the evening, he would bring a strong, sweet coffee, which we drank to the dregs together, discussing the struggles of research, the petty bureaucracies that exist in all universities. Between us, there was that flash of friendship that comes when two minds strike against each other, flint on steel; it was a friendship that would bring many rewards.
Mister Nassar, you see, had a brother in Giza who worked as a phylogeneticist with a team of French scientists. He had agreed to sample the manuscript and perform the necessary tests to verify its authenticity.
It took five days for the results to arrive from Giza, five days of the breath of Hades on my neck as I tried to fill my time reviewing my students’ Michaelmas papers in a hotel infected by fleas and Americans, five days of cryptic responses from my liaison: “Soon, usstaz, it will be soon.” The paper, when it came, was heavily worn and bore many official stamps. I opened it carefully, reverently, and it is that which I found inside—the words Mister Nassar translated for me from Arabic—that I present to you today. For indeed, I learned that this book had been housed in the Alexandrina Bybliothece—and there must have been many others like it—but even this, colleagues, members of the governing board, is not why I come before you.
The fateful words of dear Mr. Nassar are burned into my mind forever: “The skin,” he said, “the skin, sahib. It is not sheep.” And then he touched my hand. “Human.”
A chill still runs up my spine when I think on it. I have been a scholar for some years, and I have given all of my career and most of my eyesight to the study of books. When I sleep, I smell the musty scent of their pages; when I wake, my fingers explore them, probe their bindings, the threads that stitch them together. I know the soft velvet of the flesh side and the smooth, oiled surface of the hair side. I have studied the pattern of follicles, traced the network of veins that undergirds our most precious documents, the records of Western civilisation, the rise and fall of human knowledge. I have devoted my life to recovering the irrecoverable and rebuilding what was lost, searching out its ghosts and giving them flesh within monographs and articles.
But to learn that the skin I touched was human skin, the network of veins cousin to mine, and that the knowledge I had sought to reinscribe in the hearts of my students was written on the fleshly fabric of their would-be ancestors….
It was a shock whose subtle charge still haunts my nights.
I looked to Mister Nassar, and he to me, and in our blank, uncomprehending gazes, we knew we shared a secret that would shake the foundations of the Academy.
That was six months ago and it could have been six years. He and I, joined by the strange bonds of discovery, left Cairo that day, clutching the codex, but shuddering at the weight of its presence, for we knew, deep in our hearts, that it was not just one book.
Indeed, Mister Nassar’s connections were invaluable. Discretely, we were able to obtain samples of manuscripts from across the country—from Plato, Pythagoras, Aristophanes of Byzantium, Apollonius of Rhodes. For one and all, the answer was the same. “The skin, the skin,” he had said. “Human.” The Great Library of Alexandria was a charnel house whose secrets had been hidden in the fire that immolated all those stretched, disfigured bodies.
In the intervening months, we have visited many archaeological sites, studied the ancient midden heaps of Heliopolis, Sharm El-Sheikh and Aswan. Beneath the layers of refuse were bones, bones, bones, so many of them that it sickened me. Whole villages had been wiped out, their inhabitants sacrificed to the altar of the great gods of our civilization. A single codex could have required as many as three hundred hides and it was becoming increasingly clear that those of the young were valued most highly for their smoothness, their freedom from blemish. Children. A seven-year-old child could provide enough for twelve folios; an adult, perhaps sixteen, though the quality would suffer for it.