Codex (12 page)

“He died in 1374, in his mid-thirties. It's not unusual. People didn't live as long back then. It was a plague year, and that may be what finally killed him, but again, we don't know for sure. After all, he survived it the first time.”

So far, not a lot he could use. A waiter cleared away the dishes at the next table with a clatter. Margaret finally tasted her coffee.

“It seems like a shame,” he said.

“What does?”

“I don't know. That there wasn't more to his life.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know.” He frowned. “Something more dramatic?”

Margaret shrugged unsympathetically. “Most people had it worse than he did. A lot of them lived on leftover peas and radishes they picked up from between the ruts in some lord's field after the harvest. By any reasonable standard Gervase was extremely privileged.”

“I doubt that ever stopped anybody from being unhappy.”

She shrugged again, a tiny movement of one thin shoulder, obviously uninterested in this line of speculation.

The café was now bathed in yellow sunlight pouring in through the front windows, glinting off marble tabletops and discarded spoons. A large leafy tropical plant stood in one corner, half green, half dead.

“So Gervase wrote two books, and maybe a few poems,” Edward said, “and he had a lousy job working for a minor nobleman. Why is he so important?”

Margaret arched her thin, dark eyebrows quizzically.

“What makes you think he's important?”

Edward hesitated, puzzled.

“I guess I just assumed—you're saying he's not important?”

Edward caught a faint flash of something in her eyes.

“He's a significant minor figure,” she said, calmly enough, and took another sip of coffee.

All right,
he thought.
We'll come back to that.
He wanted another glass of wine, and he signaled the waiter and tapped his glass.

“And this other book, the one I'm looking for? Where does the
Viage
fit in?” He tried to imitate her pronunciation.

“The
Viage
is another matter entirely,” she said. “If, for the sake of argument, we take seriously the possibility that it is genuine—and I suppose that doing so is one of the conditions of my employment—it would of course have real importance. There were only three really important writers in late medieval England: Chaucer, Langland, and the Pearl Poet. Together they essentially invented English literature. A fictional narrative of significant length from that period, written in English and not Latin or French, by a scholar of Gervase's general sophistication...its value would be inestimable. And of course,” she added pragmatically, “the book itself could have some monetary value, as an artifact.”

“How much?”

“Hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions.”

“Wow.” Edward was grudgingly impressed.

“All right.” He could see her visibly remind herself that she was getting paid for this. “The
Viage
purports to be the remains of a lost medieval narrative, a romance consisting of five fragments. It begins as a Grail legend. The quest for the Holy Grail involved many knights, hundreds, not just Lancelot and Galahad and the ones you've heard of, and they all had their own separate adventures along the way. Some successful, some less so. The
Viage
begins in the Grail genre, telling the story of a previously unknown knight, but it rapidly deviates into something else.

“The knight is a nobleman, never named, who leaves behind his wife and child in the dead of winter. After some preliminary wandering he stays for a while at the castle of a friendly lord who feasts him handsomely, with much boasting and swapping of stories in front of the roaring fire, while the ice-covered branches rattle outside. One night, from out of the darkness, a strange knight enters the hall. He has the body of an enormous muscular man, but his head is the head of a stag with a great branching rack of silver antlers. On the antlers is impaled the corpse of a footman who had been standing guard outside. His blood streams down over the strange knight's face.

“As you might imagine, everybody falls silent. The strange knight bows his horned head, dumping the footman's body unceremoniously onto the carpet, then straightens up and draws a long, slender sword. He speaks to them. He describes a strange chapel with stained glass walls, the place, he says, where St. Maura Troyes wept her miraculous tears. He calls it the Rose Chapel. Between here and there are great perils, he says, but it is a holy place of great power. In short, he charges them to seek it out or forfeit their knightly honor. The stag knight speaks in a high, lisping voice, apparently one of the side effects of having the head of a deer.

“When he's finished the stag knight changes shape. Instead of a knight with the head of a stag, he becomes a stag with the head of a bearded man. He winks at the company, defecates on the lord's good red carpet, drags his hoof through it a few times, and bounds away into the winter night.

“No one sleeps in the castle that night. They forget all about the Grail and unanimously swear to take up the stag knight's challenge—in part for the sake of their honor, in part to avenge the footman, who turns out to have been somebody or other's nephew. The servants are rousted out of bed and put to work packing food and strapping on armor and shoeing horses, and the knights put in some time praying for holy guidance. There's a lot of very technical discussion of the merits and demerits of various bits of armor and a fairly technical disquisition on hunting techniques—fewmets and prickers and things like that—but the gist is that they're all off and away into the forest the next morning, hounds baying, hoarfrost on steel, the bloody orb of the sun winking between the snowy trees, pennants of breath streaming from the horses' mouths. In a way, it's the high point of the story. It's certainly the happiest.

“They pick up the stag knight's scent quickly, but he turns out to be a past master at this game, and he leads them on an epic chase, in and out of streams and rivers, up and down mountains, doubling back on his tracks, laying false trails. Every time they think they have him he mysteriously vanishes, and every time they're about to give up hope he pops up again, posing cheekily on some distant promontory, and the chase is rejoined.

“At first everyone seems to be having a good time, singing round the campfire and handling little subquests on the side as they come up, slaying giants and righting local wrongs. But over time the knights start to feel run down. The chase has gone on for months now, and the strain is beginning to tell. It's worst at night. Asleep in their silken pavilions, the knights have troubled dreams. Glowing women drift out of the trees and tempt them to break their knightly vows. Grumpy hermits pop up wearing smelly hair shirts, demanding alms and posing thorny theological questions and telling them they're all going to hell. Then something truly terrible happens.”

“What?” Edward asked. He caught himself listening raptly, with his mouth open.

“One morning, early, the lord and his men pick up the stag knight's trail.” Margaret took another sip of coffee. “It's fresh, and for once they actually seem to have a chance to catch it. They decide to herd it toward a blind canyon in the foothills of some mountains. They see the stag enter the canyon. The knights move in behind it to guard the entrance and settle in to wait. They sit there for several hours, till the sun is up and they're baking in their armor. The wind dies. Insects stop chirping. In spite of the bright sun the entrance to the canyon is dark and shadowy. In fact, it's black as midnight. For an instant the forest is still.

“Then the brush crackles, and the stag comes flying out of the dark canyon at enormous speed. Its eyes are rolling wildly in its human head. ‘Gyve over!' it shouts back over its shoulder. ‘Gyve over! For God's sake leave this place, if you value your lives!' There's something in the canyon that even the stag knight is terrified of. It runs straight at the crescent of armored knights, and the lord gives it a deep slash on the shoulder as it passes, but it breaks through and disappears back into the forest.

“This is the kind of situation knights live for. With typically short attention spans they forget all about the magic stag and the Rose Chapel and swear another mighty oath to brave the adventure of the blind canyon. They dismount and march shoulder-to-shoulder into the darkness.

“The next page of the book is entirely covered with black ink.”

E
DWARD BLOTTED HIS
forehead with his wrist. It was hot in the café, though Margaret didn't seem to feel it. She looked very cool and very still. She continued in her professional lecturing voice.

“No words, no pictures, just a solid page of blackness. It's an unusual device, very literary, even innovative—it's been written about quite often. Sterne probably borrowed the idea for the black pages in
Tristram Shandy,
though I don't think anybody's ever proved conclusively that he read the
Viage
himself. No one knows what it means, if it means anything, and there aren't many clues: That's where the first fragment ends.

“The second fragment is very short. It begins with the lord returning home. We don't know what happened to him on the black page, or what happened afterward, only that time has passed. His companions are now gone, presumed dead, and his quest for the Rose Chapel appears to have failed. As for the Holy Grail, he's forgotten all about it. He is a shell of his former self, a skeleton rattling around in his full-chested armor.

“What's more, his castle has been razed in his absence. When he left, one of his enemies apparently saw an opportunity and besieged it. It's nothing but a field of rubble, scorched earth and tumbled stones. His wife and child are dead. The invader was preparing to ravage the lord's wife when an angel appeared and slew her.”

“What?” Edward practically did a spit-take with his wine. “Why?”

“To spare her from sin.”

He swallowed. “That's insane. What about killing the invaders? That would have been a little more helpful.”

“The medieval God is mysterious.”

Edward snorted. “That's one word for it. What happens next?”

“The lord gears up for an extravagant display of grieving, but we're spared the details, because the fragment ends there.

“Part three picks up on the theme of divine judgment. It's the most academic and theoretical of the five fragments, and it's also the longest, longer than the other four put together. It's similar in some ways to Dante's
Paradiso
—it's less a narrative than an attempt to sketch the outlines of the author's
Weltanschauung.
The fragment begins with the lord wandering the countryside, homeless and penitent. He believes himself cursed by God. He has been living outside, sleeping on pine needles and swimming in cold rivers. He is joined in his wanderings by the stag knight, of all people, who is still limping from the wound the lord gave him. This time the two get along like old friends. They're like two old soldiers who served with opposing armies in the same war. Now that the war's over, they're the only ones who really understand each other.

“They retire together to a hermit's hut on top of a mountain, where they keep the dialogue going in quasi-Socratic mode. There's a long excursus on the proper interpretation of dreams, largely quoted wholesale from Macrobius's
Commentary on the Dream of Scipio
—medieval writers didn't have any real scruples about plagiarism. As they talk the stag knight changes form at will, from stag knight to knight stag and back again as the mood strikes him. They cover a lot of ground: cosmology, theology, hermeneutics, and in particular eschatology, the theoretical discourse that deals with the end of the world. If the world were to end, how would we know it had ended? Is it possible that the world has already ended, and we are living in the aftermath? Is this hell? Or worse, is this heaven? The stag knight is the authority here, being something of a mystical entity, but the lord gets in some good licks of his own. At one point he remarks—bitterly, but with a very eighteenth-century wink at the reader—that if he were a character in a romance he wouldn't care how his story ended, because no ending, not even the final reward of heaven, could recompense him for the loss of his wife and his child.”

Edward was starting to enjoy watching her talk. It was all so different from what he was used to: This was somebody who spent all her time just reading and thinking about what she read. In a way it seemed like a ridiculous waste of time; and in another way it seemed so much more urgently important than what he did all day. Or used to do.

“The fourth fragment is the most problematic, and the most written about, although I don't think the commentaries have done much to make it clearer. The tone is different from the rest of the
Viage.
It's more like a dream, or a hallucination, or one of Bosch's grotesques. It hardly seems to be by the same person—its repetitions and violence seem to reflect the mind of an infant, or a pathological grown-up. If an adult wrote this, he or she was very close to mental illness.

“The lord resumes his adventuring, though no longer with any quest at all in mind. He's just lost...” Margaret broke off, apparently at a loss as to how to continue coherently. She sighed and puffed aside her bangs, an uncharacteristically girlish gesture. “The text becomes very repetitive, almost obsessively so: The lord slays one monster after another, giants, demons, dragons, on and on, over and over again. Sometimes he seems to kill the same monster twice or three times. Time circles around and doubles and triples back on itself. In places the verse degenerates into nothing more than a catalog of who or what the lord has fought or killed or saved, simple lists, stripped of any narrative or meaning.