Codex

by Lev Grossman

  He stood up, put his hands on his hips, and arched his stiff back.

  “You’re awake,” Margaret said, without looking up.

  “I didn’t even know I was asleep,” he said stupidly. He cleared his throat. “What are you drinking?”

  “It’s a Tom Collins. Without the vodka. I just like the mix,” she added, sounding a little embarrassed.

  He used her bathroom—one of Margaret’s long dark hairs was pasted to the wall of the molded-plastic shower stall—and cleared away the remains of dinner, then went over to the bed to examine the pages.

  “Well,” he said, feeling giddy, “here it is.”

  There were twenty or thirty of them now, in various states of preservation and deterioration. Some, like the first one he’d seen, were almost pristine; others had been folded two or even three times to fit inside smaller books and had suffered the effects of moisture and acidity, so that they ranged in color from a too-new-looking cream to a deep burnt brown. A few were so riddled with dark, blooming mold stains that they looked like maps of the surface of the moon.

  The best parts—the only parts that meant anything to Edward—were the illuminations: an H transformed into a stony castle, or an F into a squat, sturdy tree. The animals seemed to have more personality than the people: eager whippet-like dogs; amiable sheep; serious, pious-looking horses. On one page a sinuously smiling vermilion salamander lurked along the bottom edge of the text. The pigments were so fresh and vivid they looked wet; in places the colors were laid on so thickly that the page under them was stiff and warped.

  Eventually Margaret took pity on him and stood up to look at the pages, too.

  “There’s something strange about these images,” she said. “But I can’t quite put my finger on what it is. From the penwork it looks like the scribe and the illuminator were the same person, which is unusual but hardly unheard-of. The quality is high. See that bright blue sky? The color comes from crushed lapis lazuli, imported from Afghanistan. That pigment was as expensive as gold.”

  “Can you read the writing?”

  “Of course.”

  He sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed.

  “What does it say?” he said nervously. “I mean, is it the same text as the Viage?”

  “I think so. Parts of it are the same, at least. I’ve barely had time to glance at it.”

  “What do you mean, parts?”

  She frowned. The corners of her downturned mouth dipped lower.

  “It’s too soon to say tonight.” She waved her hand, which was still holding the steel scalpel. “I’ve been reading bits and pieces as I go. There are things here I don’t recognize—things that aren’t in the modern text. In this version there’s a lot more about the lord’s child who was killed off while he was away chasing the stag knight. It goes on for pages about what a mighty hero he would have been. Sentimental stuff.

  “And here—this passage.” She pointed to one of the pages. “The lord meets a woman on his travels who gives him a seed. He thinks the woman is a holy virgin, but when he plants the seed a giant tree springs up, with demons living in its branches.”

  “But what about that secret message? The steganogram, or whatever it is?”

  She shook her head.

  “I wouldn’t even know where to begin looking for it, Edward. Even if it is real. If it’s here it could be anywhere—hidden in a drawing, or written in invisible ink, or stippled in tiny pinpricks, or in any number of medieval alphabetical codes. Each word could stand for a letter, or each letter could stand for a word, the number of letters in each word could in turn stand for a letter. Authors of medieval codes were very resourceful. And Gervase spent time in Venice. The Venetians were the master cryptographers of the medieval world.”

  Edward bent over the page with the F on it and studied it closely. At the most he could spell out a word or two at a time: ...anone...gardeyne...sprange oute...

  Margaret saw him squinting at it.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? That script was never intended for laymen. It was designed to be written as quickly as possible and to take up as little space as possible, to save time and paper. Some words are abbreviated, others are fused together—the technique is called littera textura, ‘woven words.’ It’s lovely, but it takes a lot of practice before you can decipher it. And look here.”

  Margaret picked up one page, supporting it carefully on her flat palms like a priestess making an offering. She held it up to her desk lamp so the light glowed through it, showing the texture of the parchment.

  “Look closely,” she said. “This is something I didn’t expect. I can’t read it yet, not without an ultraviolet light.”

  Edward looked. Behind the dark letters and running perpendicular to them, vertically down the page, were faint brown stripes, so light that they almost faded into the paler brown of the parchment around them. When Edward looked closer he saw that the stripes were made of letters, bands of ghostly writing floating behind Gervase’s crisp black script.

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” Margaret said dryly. “This paper has been reused. There was something else written here, an earlier text that was scraped away to make room for the Viage. Our codex is a palimpsest.”

  DESPITE HIS BEST efforts, Edward’s pitch of excitement gradually gave way to exhaustion, and he faded as the night wore on. While Margaret pushed on in an orgy of work, he slumped further and further down the wall. He closed his eyes; his shoes came off; somehow he found himself on the bed, curled up to keep clear of the precious pages, his arm flung over his eyes to keep out the light. The mariachi music had finally reached a climax and ceased for the night. He stared up at Margaret’s ugly styrofoam dropped ceiling. He’d never felt so tired. The pillow he rested his head on smelled marvelously like Margaret’s hair. He closed his eyes, and he felt the room revolving slowly around him as if he were drunk.

  He imagined the pages of the codex floating all around him, like limp brown leaves on the glassy surface of a pond in which he lay face up in a dead man’s float, or a backyard swimming pool that was going to seed in those first early weeks of September. Those were punishing weeks in the Maine of his childhood, when the weather reminded you that summer was a temporary anomaly, not to be gotten used to, and that Bangor, while it appeared to be superficially civilized, shared its chilly latitude with such northern fastnesses as Ottawa and Halifax. Later he would have vague, stillborn memories of Margaret not reading but talking to him—lecturing him? pleading with him?—shaking her head in disapproval, or disbelief, or disappointment. But he could never remember what she was talking about, or even whether it was real or just a dream.

  He woke up to find her clearing away the rest of the pages from around him on the bed and stacking them on her desk. He crawled under the covers without opening his eyes, like a baby. After a while he heard the light click off and felt her climb into bed next to him.

  In the darkness, in her narrow twin bed, it was like Margaret was a different woman: warm, soft, nuzzling, both comforting and needing comfort, nothing like the dour, difficult day-Margaret he was used to. Her long legs were bare and stubbly. She turned over on her side, away from him, and he rolled up against her and snuffed the warm nape of her neck. She was still wearing panties and a T-shirt, but the bareness of her legs made her feel naked. Her cold bare feet mingled with his warm socks. Then she turned over to face him.

  She kissed him, and he felt again, as he had that night at the Chenoweth, the urgent need inside her, just underneath her placid surface. She bit his shoulder, scratched at him fiercely like an angry little girl. He helped her slip her T-shirt up over her head, and the world shrank to the tiny tropical island of bed that sheltered them and bore them up in the middle of a dark, rocking sea.

  MARGARET WAS shaking him. He looked at the clock radio. It was four in the morning.

  “Jesus,” he said. He rolled over and put a pillow over his head. “Don’t you ever sleep?”

  “Edward,” she said. Ther
e was an unfamiliar, urgent note in her voice. “Edward, you have to wake up. I need you to look at something.”

  Edward opened his eyes. He was warm and tired and comfortable, but the novelty of Margaret asking for his advice did have some appeal to it. He sat up. The glare from her desk lamp was painful. In the half light he thought she looked frightened.

  Margaret had a magnifying glass in one hand—it reminded him of when the Duchess compared her to Nancy Drew—and a stack of pages from the codex stood on her desk. She’d changed into a plain gray sweatshirt of no particular affiliation and put on a pair of uncharacteristically hip rectangular glasses he’d never seen before. She must wear contacts during the day, he thought. She smelled delightfully like minty toothpaste.

  “Edward,” she said melodramatically, looking him in the eye. “I found it.”

  “What did you find.”

  “I found it. I found the steganogram, the hidden message. The Duchess was right: It’s real.”

  Edward’s stomach tightened. The final glaze of sleep vanished.

  “What? What are you talking about?” he said. “It can’t be real.”

  “I know it can’t. But it is.”

  He stared at her, wanting to share her enthusiasm, but instead he felt only cold. He realized he hadn’t really wanted the message to be real. His victory was already complete. They had the codex. He didn’t want all the rest of it: the secret message, the intrigue, the alarums and excursions and revelations. They could only lead to more problems.

  “What does it say?”

  “Wait. I’d rather show you.”

  She took the first page from the stack of pages on her desk. Edward went over and stood behind her, letting his hands rest on her shoulders.

  “You remember,” she said, “something was bothering me about these historiated initials—the large illuminated letters.” Her voice gradually found its way back to her calm, lecturing tone. “If you look at them, you’ll see that there’s nothing very unusual about their placement, or their execution. This O, for example, which forms a frame around a mother and child.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s not the picture that doesn’t make sense, it’s the context. The subject of a historiated initial usually follows from that of the text around it, but here I can’t see any connection at all. The passage doesn’t have anything to do with a mother and child, it’s about the hero crossing the ocean in a boat.”

  “Right. Okay, well, maybe it’s a metaphorical connection,” he said glibly. “Ocean as mother, something like that.” He shaded his eyes as they got used to the light.

  She frowned.

  “I don’t think so. It would be anachronistic to—”

  “Fine, fine! Hurry up, you’re making me nervous. Just tell me what it means.”

  “It means nothing in itself. But I checked the other illuminations, and the same thing is true of them. None of them has any real relationship with the text around it.

  “After I stared at them for a while, I decided to make a list of all the letters that the scribe had chosen to illustrate. I was thinking of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, in which the author spelled out a love letter using the first letters of each chapter. He was a monk, and no one noticed until after he was dead. But that’s not what happened here. The codex has thirty-four historiated initials, but they don’t spell anything at all. Look, I wrote them out in order.”

  Margaret showed him a page from her notebook with the letters copied out in order:

  W M H G E G O M E O A Y N O D S L O D E D E C F R H R M E A V N I O

  “I kept turning them over and over in my head, playing with them, trying different combinations. I don’t know why. It took me a long time, but eventually I came up with this.”

  She turned a few more pages, all of them densely covered with letters and scribbles and erasures. At the bottom of the last page, underlined twice, was this sentence:

  GOD SAVE MYN OWNE GOODE CHILDE FROM HARME

  Edward looked at the page, then at her, then back at the page again. He relaxed. His chest filled with a warm puddle of relief.

  “Margaret,” he said gently. “You don’t understand, this could just be by chance. You could make any number of words by rearranging those letters. It’s like a Rorschach blot—it doesn’t prove anything. And even if it did, what would it prove?”

  “I thought of that,” she said. “But there’s something else, something I need to show you. I tried to think of a way to test the theory, so I went back to the illustrations. I reordered the pages of the codex so that the illuminated letters spelled out the words I came up with. I want you to look at what I found.”

  She stood up and indicated that Edward should sit down in her place. He did so, reluctantly, and she put a stack of pages in front of him; given their condition, it was more of a heap. He began to read through them in order, ignoring everything except the illuminated letters.

  His resistance crumbled. He saw what she saw, and what she saw was real. Arranged in their new order the pictures formed a coherent, recognizable narrative—a story. The first illustration was of a young man with short wavy hair and a fringe of reddish beard, standing by himself inside the arc of a giant red G. He had the simple cartoon eyes that faces in medieval paintings have, plain but expressive—he looked a little apprehensive, as if he had a fair idea of what was in store for him and he wasn’t all that happy about it. He was dressed humbly, and he held a quill pen in one hand and a small knife in the other. On a table beside him lay an open book. Its pages were blank.

  “G for ‘Gervase,’” whispered Margaret.

  He shushed her.

  “I get it.”

  The second letter—an O—introduced a noble couple. They were posed like figures in a cameo, the woman pretty and slender, with a becomingly weak chin, the man very erect, with dark ringletty hair and a long, sharp nose. He wore a navy blue doublet and a weird floppy hat. He regarded Edward from the page with dignity.

  Over the next few pages the same three characters recurred again and again, alone and in groups, posed in a variety of settings. Sometimes there was a miniature castle behind them, waist-high like a doghouse and hopelessly nonperspectival; once the nobleman was alone, hunting, surrounded by a circle of whippet dogs. The young man joined the couple, apparently in the capacity of a high-ranking servant. He was shown laboring at clerical tasks, treating with merchants and counting stacks of coins. Sometimes he wrote with his pen in the book, and sometimes the noblewoman read from the book. The whole effect was like seeing a montage of still frames from a movie. Time passed. The sun rose and set. Seasons changed. After a while the husband with the ringlets appeared less and less often.

  Edward knew what he was looking at. It was an Easter Egg, just like the Artiste’s, but hidden inside the codex for him to find. It reminded him of something the Duchess had written in that bizarre letter—hadn’t she said something about getting her pages properly sorted, getting them back in order? How much had she known? At least, he thought, this proves she wasn’t crazy. Halfway through the story there were two especially lavish and realistic paintings set inside the twin Os in the word GOODE. In the first the young servant and the pretty, weak-chinned noblewoman were posed alone together. Her hand rested protectively on his chest. In the second she was nursing a child, her hand supporting a neat hemispherical tit like a Madonna’s. As if the point needed any further clarification, the child had wavy red hair.

  Edward paged through the rest of the codex quickly. The remaining pages recapitulated a similar sequence of images, but in reverse order: The young man was seen less and less often, and when he appeared he was alone, writing. The film was running itself backward. The Duchess was pictured more often with her husband, or reading by herself. The penultimate image showed the noble couple together, with the growing child between them. The very last initial, a lavish golden E, showed the young man alone again, quill in hand. His eyes were the same as before: hooded, unhappy, penetrating. The sky behind
him had darkened to an inky blue-black, swarming with bright white stars. The book open on the table next to him was now full of writing.

  EDWARD LOOKED at the last picture for a long minute. The blank eyes of Gervase of Langford looked back at him, and their gazes met across the centuries. Edward folded his arms and stared back at the page. So? he thought. What do you expect me to do about it?

  Or maybe Gervase wasn’t asking him for something, maybe he was trying to tell him something. Maybe he was trying to warn him. Despite the lateness of the hour, Edward made an effort to concentrate. After all, this was the great secret that they’d rescued from within so many other nested secrets within secrets—from a game within a game, then a book within a book, then another book hidden inside that one. Gervase had tried to escape out of his own world with the Duchess, and in the end he’d finally done just that. And look what it had gotten him. The eyes just looked blank now, but there was darkness there, black misery, Edward recognized it—misery was still misery, and six hundred years of history hadn’t done anything to improve it. The more he stared the more the blackness in Gervase’s eyes frightened him, like the darkness of that blind canyon in the Viage that the knights had plunged into, never to return. Pain was there, Edward thought. And death. He shifted uncomfortably on Margaret’s hard chair. Gervase knew about escape, he knew about trying to live out a fantasy life, and all he’d gotten for it were loss and hurt and an early grave. He’d wandered off the straight path, and he’d fallen on the sharp hungry rocks that waited below. There was danger there for him too, for Edward, and it was close, very close....