The Bestiary (7 page)

Mrs. Moretti insisted on driving me home. In her station wagon she was a good driver, fearless on the icy streets. She had the radio on low. Nat King Cole was singing.

Mrs. Moretti was not yet forty. But, having had two children so close together, combined with the stresses of her husband’s profession and Bruno’s health, she seemed decades removed from the slender young woman in the wedding pictures that adorned her mantelpiece. Her blonde hair was streaked gray, her eyes radiated wrinkles. Still, I could see Lena’s pretty features in her own.

While she concentrated on her driving, I stared out my window at the dark flakes spinning past. I felt my throat close up, not just on account of Re and Lena; or the fact I was going away; or that I wished Mrs. Moretti could be my mother, too; but because I kept thinking that if my mother had lived I would not be taking this train into the night. I would not have had to endure my father, accompanying me in a double-breasted suit and expensive shoes (he had real money now: I was not even a scholarship student), unusually talkative, even upbeat, insisting this was the best thing that had ever happened to me. He seemed in a hurry. He hastened my farewell to Evgénia, not comprehending, apparently, that I wasn’t saying goodbye to hired help, as he was, but to a person dear to me, and with her, an entire portion of my life. Someone who had seen to my daily needs, escorted me to the doctor, taken me shopping for my clothes; who had taught me, by example, to prize my dignity and never pretend I didn’t know right from wrong. While he tramped upstairs for our suitcases, I hugged Evgénia by the street door, feeling the rough wool of her coat on my cheek for the last time, and her cool fingers in my hair, and though I wasn’t crying, I saw that she was—the only time I ever saw her cry. Then she kissed my forehead and was gone. And two hours later my father and I were rushing north, with the same snowstorm following us, from Boston to Portland to the Canadian border, the wind howling, the darkness deepening, and the temperature dropping below zero at our destination. At a desolate, windswept train station we got into an overheated taxi and rode through a forest to the all-boys boarding school where I would spend the next five years. By the following afternoon, my father was gone and I was ensconced in my dorm room gazing over that vast forest. The trees were glazed with ice. Crows huddled on the upper branches. Isolated in wilderness, the school felt like a prison. Stone buildings with Gothic spires and slate roofs, Spartan dormitories, antiseptic classrooms, immaculate grounds. I hated it. But I learned some hard lessons there that would serve me well, and that I would fully appreciate only after I had departed.

Mrs. Moretti pulled up before my building and switched off the radio. Drifting snow had buried the fire hydrant at the curb.

“Take care of yourself, Xeno,” she said, leaning over and kissing my cheek.

I smiled at her, thinking of Lena kissing my lips.

Then I got out and waved, watching her taillights disappear in the dense static of the storm.

2

I
FIRST HEARD OF THE
Caravan Bestiary
when I was fifteen years old, and it changed the course of my life.

It was my history teacher, Mr. Cletis Hood, who told me about it in his office one afternoon in my third year at school. That meeting came about because of a lesson several months earlier in which he had mentioned the mythological phoenix in passing, during a discussion of Henry VIII.

Tall and fit, with a wasplike waist, crew cut, and cropped beard, Mr. Hood was at the blackboard rocking lightly on his heels, as was his custom. He always wore a bow tie and a vest. His shoulders were so straight that if a level were laid across them the bubble would be perfectly centered. His voice was equally measured, deep enough at times to sound as if it was echoing within him. He was telling us about Henry’s only son, Edward, on whom I became fixated. Known as the “boy-king,” Edward was ten years old when he inherited the English throne in 1547. Guided by a regency council, he ruled for six years, and was coming into his own when he died of tuberculosis. His father had been a large man. Tyrannical and secretive. Brooding. Often absent. Though my father fit that description nicely, it was the fact Edward’s mother, Jane Seymour, had died in childbirth that made him feel like a kindred spirit. Queen Jane was a great beauty, vivacious, and much younger than her husband. Edward was her only child.

“English monarchs had elaborate crests,” Mr. Hood intoned. “Queen Jane’s was of a phoenix, a bird reborn from the flames of its own pyre. After his coronation, Edward added a motto to his mother’s crest:
THAT ANOTHER MAY BE BORN
.”

My hand shot up. “Sir, were there other imaginary animals that became important in mythology and history?”

“Dozens of them,” he replied, glancing at me over his glasses, for he was not used to being interrupted.

“Where can I find them?” I persisted.

“In the library,” he replied tartly.

I rushed through my dinner that evening and went to the library. I hadn’t spent much time there before. It was impressive, for a secondary school: a huge room with high rows of bookshelves on both the ground floor and the mezzanine, where a faculty monitor sat at a small desk. Despite the grim oil paintings of retired headmasters and the darkly curtained windows, the silence and solitude made it one of the more welcoming places on campus. On the walnut tables, brass lamps cast a succession of amber pools. It was at one of those tables that I began my journey.

First, I pored over every book I could find about Edward, skimming the central issues of his brief reign—war with France, the publication of the first Book of Common Prayer—and searching in vain for additional information about his mother’s crest. By the time I moved on to the phoenix, it was ten o’clock and the library was closing.

I carried a satchel of books back to my dormitory:
Zoological Mythology, Mythical Monsters, The Phoenix the Dragon,
and
A History of the English Bestiary.
Lights-out was strictly enforced at eleven-thirty, and this was the first of many times I got into trouble when the floor monitor caught me reading with a flashlight. I was reading about the phoenix. From my grandmother I knew that there was only one phoenix in the world at any given time. But that was all I knew.

Soon I was discovering countless other imaginary animals—more than I ever expected. Some were obscure, others more visible than we know, all of them vivid. Over time they had passed in and out of our human reality—like the ghosts in folk tales that retreat into mirrors and, when light strikes the glass just so, can be glimpsed.

In the years since my grandmother’s death, my connection to the world of animal spirits continued to ebb—as if its source of energy were gone. There had been no apparitions like the griffin for some time. The subject of imaginary animals had been an essential part of my childhood, my earliest perceptions, and suddenly I was finding books devoted to it—books which clued me to the fact that it was a subject at all.

Bestiaries, they are called. I learned that a bestiary is a compilation of real and imaginary animals, the categories frequently blurred. The animals are described in words and pictures, and often framed in allegorical terms for the virtues and vices they supposedly share with human beings. The first formal bestiary, a kind of scholarly scrapbook, was assembled by monks in the tenth century. They drew on many sources, but primarily the
Physiologus,
written in Greek by an anonymous third-century Egyptian. Soon he was known by the same name as his book, for “Physiologus” in Greek means “naturalist.” His book contained forty-nine animals. He himself was part of a line that stretched back through Aristotle, Ctesias, and centuries of anonymous chroniclers to the caves of the earliest men, whose gods and myths were inspired by the beasts they encountered daily, as hunters and hunted—and in their dreams. The first bestiary also drew on the fantastical miscellanies of Physiologus’s contemporaries, Aelian and Saint Ambrose (except for Aristotle, all of these names were new to me), and the seventh-century encyclopedist, Saint Isidore of Seville, who devoted the twelfth book of his
Etymologiae
(which I discovered in translation in the library) to animals. In short, the bestiary was in constant flux, layered with Ethiopian, Syriac, Anglo-Saxon, and, especially, Armenian additions until the original text had been absorbed beyond recognition. From the eleventh century on, the bestiary’s offshoots were copied by hand, translated from language to language, ever expanding, until they contained hundreds of entries. The last such copy was made in Iceland in 1724. After that, scholars worked to recover and preserve manuscripts around Europe. A few scoured the mythologies of other cultures—Polynesia, South America, the Far East—and uncovered similar compilations, even more remote in time and composition. A handful searched for undiscovered bestiaries and unknown beasts, fabulous and otherwise.

I discovered that the phoenix originated in Heliopolis, where it was called
benu—
the Egyptian word for “date palm.” The Greek word is
phoinix.
It was atop the date palm that the bird built a nest of cassia, spikenard, and cinnamon in which it immolated itself and was reborn from the ashes. Or, as the Egyptians observed: the bird’s tomb became its cradle.

The Christians believed the phoenix was granted immortality because it was the only creature that did not eat of the forbidden fruit. The Greeks declared its life span to be a Great Year, the time required by the sun, moon, and five planets to orbit the cosmos: 12,994 common years; after each such cycle, the history of the world repeats itself to the last detail under the planets’ influence. The phoenix mirrored this process, with comprehensive images of human history encoded in the intricacies of its plumage. (As if those feathers held the data of a million computer chips.)

This was heady stuff, unlike anything I had ever encountered. During those first weeks, I stayed in the library every night until the lamps were extinguished. Returning to my dorm, drunk on these words and images, I felt as if the animals I’d just read about were peering down at me from the evergreens and steeples and the darkened classroom windows.

The first bestiary I studied was a well-thumbed facsimile edition. The original, illustrated with woodcuts, had been compiled by thirteenth-century monks at the Abbey of Revesby in the north of England. Like the
Etymologiae,
it was kept in the library’s restricted room, which I could only enter with the head librarian’s permission. The library also contained a battered Oriental bestiary—part of a collection of Oriental texts bequeathed by an alumnus. Its first entry was the three-tailed Chinese fox that lives a thousand years, like the phoenix, and mounts to heaven after sprouting six more tails. I was excited to learn that, during its long life, this fox can assume any human or animal form by striking fire from its nine tails, bowing to Ursus Major, and balancing a human skull on its head. I also read about six-legged antelopes, an eight-legged horse (similar to the Norse Sleipnir that could gallop on clouds and ocean), an ostrichlike bird with three hearts, and a dog like Cerberus, with one hundred heads and a serpent’s tail.

Every night I took copious notes, yet struggled to comprehend the context of what I was reading. I knew something about animals, but not much about history. I threw myself into the latter with a passion, to the detriment of my other studies. In science, math, English, my grades dipped; but in history—and Latin and Greek, which had become essential to my study of it—I went to the top of my class. I also excelled in zoology, a sparsely enrolled elective.

After three months in which I had used all my free time to read up on bestiaries, I approached Mr. Hood one day after class. I thought I had gone as far as I could on my own, and I wanted his advice. He was grading papers, but after I told him what I was doing, and what I wanted, he studied me with new interest.

Capping his red pen, he asked, “Why are you doing this, Atlas?”

“It’s something I want to know about, sir.”

“I can see that. But why?”

Now my palms were sweating. “I just can’t get it out of my head.”

“Since I mentioned the phoenix?”

“Before that, sir. I just feel like it’s taking me somewhere.”

This answer seemed to surprise him. But I saw he approved of it, even if he didn’t yet know what to make of me. “All right, Atlas, I’ll do some digging and see if I can come up with any suggestions.”

A few weeks later, he asked me to come by his office after lunch.

A former Marine captain, Mr. Hood had been at the school for six years. He was known as a blunt taskmaster, outwardly humorless, hard on students foolish enough to come to class unprepared. Needless to say, he wasn’t popular, but he was respected as a good teacher. An inspired one, if you ignored his outer shell and listened to what he was saying. He taught ancient and modern European history and the advanced Latin class, including medieval Latin. Rumors about him abounded: that, grievously wounded in Korea, he had two artificial limbs; that he was once married to a South American dictator’s daughter who committed suicide; that his two children were killed in an automobile accident; that he was independently wealthy and taught on a whim.

His office was spare, with few of the personal touches evident in other faculty offices. Instead of family photographs, he had pictures of historical figures he admired: Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Captain James Cook. The only mementos were a tomahawk and his Marine battalion’s flag, a black eagle ringed with red stars. The bookshelves contained only the texts for his courses, not his personal library. The ashtray cradled a meerschaum pipe. Out the lead-paned window, on the main athletic field, a groundskeeper was laying down yard lines for a football game.

On this day Mr. Hood wore a yellow bow tie and a brown herring-bone suit.

“Sit down, Atlas,” he said, by way of greeting. “And tell me about yourself.”

It was an obvious request, but I hadn’t expected it. I assumed he would be all business, as he was in class.

“I guess I’m interested in history.”

“You guess? There doesn’t seem to be much doubt about it.”

“No, sir.”

“What have you read recently?”

“I’m reading Solinus’s
Gallery of Wonders
.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Not in Latin?”

“No, sir. I tried, but I’m not ready for that.”

He sat back in his swivel chair, and I thought maybe I’d gone up another notch in his estimation. “I read Solinus a long time ago,” he said. “I remember that he drew a great deal on Pliny.”

“I didn’t know that. I’ve never read Pliny, sir.”

“I expect you will by the time you reach my Latin class,” he said drily. “Now, the last time we spoke you told me your interest in all of this is long-standing.”

“Yes, sir. Not in bestiaries—I didn’t know about them.”

“I understand that. In animals, and animal lore. Why?”

How could I tell him that, on one side of my family, I was descended from a wood nymph; that birds perched on her shoulders and wild beasts grew tame beneath her touch; that my grandmother could channel animals’ spirits. “My grandmother,” I said. “She used to tell me stories about animals.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Including phoenixes and the like?”

“Especially those animals, sir.”

He mulled this over, then said, “You’re from New York.”

“The Bronx, sir.”

“And your father is a seaman. Navy?”

“No, sir. He sails on freighters.”

“Any brothers or sisters?”

I shook my head. “My mother died when I was born.”

Now it was he who was caught off guard. His eyes softened, but without missing a beat he said, “I know you’ve studied the Revesby bestiary. I have something for you.” He took a large green book from the desk drawer. “In your explorations, have you come across the Hereford bestiary?”

“No, sir.”

He handed me the book. “You have now,” he smiled.