The Serpent Papers (16 page)

* * *

The Sibyl of Cumae, author of the
Libri Sibyllini
, was just one of many Sibyls circulating books in the ancient world. The Sibyl, as a symbol, as an icon, as a woman, presents a rich literary tradition, though very little of her work survives. While many confuse her with the Oracle at Delphi, the Sibyl was a lone operator, more freelance than institutional. A clairvoyant rather than a medium, she had more in common with the function of a prophet. Her soul was fundamentally different from an oracle: there were no limitations to her prophecy. No set days of the year for consultation, no clear affiliations with a single god, or priestess, or worship centres. The Sibyl alone crafted verses of original poetry as an autonomous author who addressed
the gods directly. She placed herself in dialogue with divinity, but did not succumb to its advances. She did not wait to answer questions, posed by dignitaries of state or High Priests. She lived in the ancient forest, far removed from cities and pastoral meadows. Her home? The Neolithic cave. She saw what was going to happen, and she bothered to write it down, despite the fact that nobody had asked for her opinion. In books, no less. And in her own voice. Not as the god Apollo. Not as a vehicle or a vessel, but as a woman, speaking in the authoritative first person from the vantage point of her cave.

This insistence on sovereignty has implications on a stylistic level. The Sibyl claimed a primeval heritage, an eternal watchfulness, placing herself before Troy. Before the floods, the Sibyl asserted her hegemony using the distant, unknowable past. She was critically non-denominational, unbounded by nationality or creed. She claimed she had been watching always. That she predicted all this mess. That she had seen the future from the beginning, and written it down. She said sometimes that she was from the East. That she came from the mountains of Turkey, or the hills beyond Jerusalem, or the high walls of Babylon, that she was born deep inside Libya and Egypt. Always insisting that she knew something old and powerful. In Early Medieval European mythology, this came to mean that she knew the One True God. Her influence was such that she survived through the Dark Ages, becoming a powerful prophet of monotheism, the Pagan seer who gave the word of God to Rome and a vision of Christ to the Emperor Augustus, who left the first acrostic in her poetry and knew the voice of the Infinite in the desert. She wrote Pagan Sibylline Books and later Jewish and Christian Sibylline Oracles. The Sibyl became a layered manuscript, a bridge into the past, a palimpsest of her own.

My argument to Harold Bingley has been the following: that in
The Alchemical History of Things
, the alchemist Rex Illuminatus claims he met a tongueless woman in the mountains of Mallorca who had given him a secret book. If we are to believe that this woman was indeed a Sibyl, as Rex Illuminatus suggests, then the Illuminatus Palimpsest could in fact contain surviving Sibylline oracles lost in the ancient world.

* * *

I pause, looking down at Fabregat's lines of text. Would someone kill for a secret like this?

Yes
. I grit my teeth.

Yes they have – and yes they will.

It is easy to forget how often people have died for books like these.

And you?

What will you do?

How far would you go to hold such a secret in the palm of your hand?

What would you give?

Your eyes? Your ears? Your nose? Your tongue?

VII

EVIDENCE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF THE SIBYL

from

The Alchemical History of Things

by Rex Illuminatus

The Sibyl carries on her person such a booke of parchement that answers all questions. She has called this booke the Song of the Sibyl but I calle it the Serpent or Serpentyne Papers on account of the texture of the leaves, which, when sewne together at the tip and tayl create a surface very much lyke that of the mottled scayles of a serpent. In the bynding of these leaves, the Sibyl has occupyed manie hours, forgyng meaning from the nonsensical patterns of prophecie, arrangyng words and phrases in algorithms that seemed to her lyke songs, and so the urge for order gave berth to poetry, reflectyng her secret desyre: the dream of the artist to understand the fleetyng rustle of oak leaves blowne about the floor of the cave. She has used the secrets of these leaves to give divinatorie instructions relatyng to my chartes, which I shifted to include her language, believyng that she has access to an inarticulate power which takes a shape of the serpent coyled in the base of her spyne, rumblyng and movyng in her throate when she speaks, makyng its voice heard despyte her stubbed tongue. Since takyng up her language, which I call the Utterrance of Birds
⁵
, the accuracy of my charts has expanded thryce-folde, and my alchymical experiements have been bountiefullie enriched. To learne of the success of my rosie gold, call for:

8 oz of Quicksilver

9 oz of Gold Filyngs (ground down into dust)

5 oz of Cyprian Copper

2 oz of Brass Filyngs

12 oz of clearable Alum and Calcantum

6 oz of Gold Orpiment

12 oz of Elidrium.

Mix the filyngs with the quicksilver to make a substance lyke a waxie salve. Add the Elidrium and Orpiment, then the Efflorescence of Copper – or Calcantum, the Alum and a pinch of Natron, which I recommend you to dissolve into the intermix. When it has coagulated nicelie, moon-earth will be once again requyred. Keep this in a pelican, seven times rectifyed to make the burning water or quintessence which I dailie consume. If the smell be wantyng when you open it, put it in a bolts head, stopped up with wax and burrie it in horses dung. This will warm it nicelie. There will emerge a ruddie water, made of fyre and water. Separate the elements before as with the water and ayre, so you have all four parts asunder. Calcyne the earth and rectifie the fyre as you did with the Quintessence and speak over it the words:
O Serpentarius feminina!
⁶
Soror Mystica! Constellation in the sky! Philomela! Daughter of Asclepius! Your ears licked clean by the serpent Mater who took pitie on a tongueless mouth. Now you bare the stigma of foresight!

And the Secret of Secrets shall be yours.

VIII

FOUNDATION

Worry grips me. I hide from myself. A shadow of a woman seeking a shadow of a book.
You have no place here, and yet you have made the right decision.
Not long ago now. The knots turn in my stomach. Anxiety sets in.
Late November.
I practise thinking. Of the real. The unimagined.
Where had you been?
I play memories out in front of me – live through them.

Francesc and I walk in the mountains, he wearing sweater and green slacks, scarf unusually formal. The breeze is sharp and teases at his hair.
Look up!
he says, and I watch an osprey flit across the open sky, scattering a cloud of birds, hunting little yellow-breasted serin. Following the river back to Valldemossa, we talk softly.
Harold Bingley is coming for dinner.
Fresh from London.
I clamber up rocks.
He will make his way up from the airport at Palma and we will sit outside on the veranda of our cottage
.
Dark red wine. Cured olives in sea-brine. Wrinkled tomatoes and sweet jasmine.
Tension building.
Bruised basil crumbled between fingers and rubbed into garlic. Charred meat. Baked almonds. Warm leek soup to salve parched throats. Bingley’s eyes barely move from me. The man is not happy. I can tell. But then I wonder, is he ever happy? Does happiness spill into him in the library, or amidst the archives of the British Museum?

The man is spectral. Skin sallow. Bare wire-rimmed spectacles perch on a wraith-like nose, enlarging little flaps for eyes. He wears a dark suit and a crisp shirt. The colours wash him out until he is almost nothing. Dust of grey hair about his ears intensifying the bald patch on his skull, making a shape like a tonsure. White flakes of scalp drop to his shoulders. He asks too many questions. And I have too few answers.

* * *

In the morning we form a small crowd. Francesc sits in the hard desk chair round the table. His assistant, two PhD students, the head of the Conservation Department and an adjunct professor join us for the discussion. Harold Bingley stands on the sidelines of the university conservation wing, adjacent to the Special Collections library. Arms crossed in front of his chest. Back to the wall. Eyes glued to my face.
What will my divination be?
Underneath the manuscript, categorized as MS 409, a large, grey pillow supports the book so that the spine will not break on the table. Two sister books sitting side by side. Roughly the same dimensions.
150
×
125 mm.
The first – MS 409 – was very old, decaying binding. Beech boards covered in sheepskin rinsed in water. The pages are of rough vellum, made of calf hides soaked in lime until the hairs come loose and are burnished away. The skin is left in the lime solution, then cleaned in running water and stretched between frames and left out in the sun to dry. The hides are beaten and pummelled with pumice, smoothed and stretched, dried under tension. The heft of parchment follows the bulk of a calf’s body. Thicker at the neck and along the spine, thinner over the belly and stomach. These hides were rough, castaways, full of holes.
The cheapest quality.
The scribe had taken each calfskin and cut the parchment clean, folding each sheet in half, four consecutive times, to make repeated gatherings of sixteen leaves – thirty-two pages.
A book built to fit a woman’s palm. Small enough to stow in a pouch or a purse. Small enough to hide.

I open the book. Take in the contents. Each parchment skin has two sides, two colours. The facing page tan and rough, coarse where the hairs had sprouted and formed the glossy coat of the animal.
The underside is whiter, smooth to the touch, where the skin had met muscle and flesh. The origami folds of a medieval book create an effect whereby white always faces white, and yellow always faces yellow
.
This makes for continuity on the double facing page. Traditionally, the first side to greet the reader would be the hair side, the rough yellow, opening up to reveal the neat smooth whiteness of the inner folia. The gathering would end again with the flesh side, matched to the second set of pages, until the full book of quires was bound.
Fur to fur. Flesh to flesh.

I select a page relevant to Bingley’s interest. Skin pockmarked with black flecks of hair follicles. Touch the waxy flesh side with my bare finger.
Best for applying minium. An earthy red pigment of roasted white lead.
A kind of alchemy. ‘Come closer’,
I tell him.
‘Lean in and breathe. Smell the stillness. The earth. The animal. The mercuric sulphide and lime.’
The scent of a parchment book is unique, as are the feel and texture of the leaves. There is nothing in the world quite like it. Raised on hard graft, they are born to be sturdy. To survive careless hands and fading monasteries, to last for thousands of years.

Unless, of course, they are abused.

As in the case of the work before me.

I found MS 409 in an abandoned farmhouse in Artà, near the Ermita de Betlem on Mallorca. The Abbey Librarian helped me greatly in this venture, granting me access to the closed wings of the ruined farmhouse, where the greatest treasures often hide. I found the book, along with several others, in the storerooms of the granary. When I opened the parchment pages of this battered volume, my eyes lit on a minuscule colophon, a device used by medieval scribes to claim authorship. ‘
I, most miserable of mutes, have written this book to appease my ghosts.
’ This colophon contained a seal of a seated, robed woman, holding a book in her left hand. Encircled by a serpent biting its tail. Bird singing on her right shoulder.
A nightingale.