Bestiary

his head sadly over the pillaged drawer. “But let’s not give the bastards too much time to make their getaway.”

“I won’t,” Carter said, though if what Del believed was true, the bones could be buried anywhere by now, never again to be found.

“And let’s keep these,” Del added, referring to the bones of the La Brea Man, “somewhere they can’t find ’em.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

There is light in the eastern sky; my time draws near. The door is guarded; the window is barred, and even if it were not, the tower is high and the ground below is rocks and sand.

My hand grows tired; I must sharpen another quill.

Beth could picture him all too well. Sitting by the narrow window at dawn, shaving the nib of a fresh quill (goose feathers were most commonly used, but for such close work as this he might have employed a crow or raven feather), then returning to his work for as long as he would be allowed, before the sultan’s guards came inside to lead him to his death.

I know what awaits me, for I have seen it with my own eyes. I have seen the prisoner, his hands unbound, his feet free, led into the arena, where al-Kalli and his guests sit on high. Below them lies the maze, with its many pathways and great high walls, fashioned from the green leaves and thorny branches of the hawthorn bush. The maze is vast and intricate — the game would be over too soon if it were not — and the prisoner at first rejoices. He is free to run and to defend himself and there is no sign of his foe — though foe there is, for the snake that is Satan haunts this unholy garden.

For Beth, reading the English rendering of the secret epistle, it was like looking a thousand years into the past, like glimpsing a scene no one else even knew had taken place. A scene whose truth, she believed, was undeniable. When she had first discovered the letter, and begun to read its fantastic tale, it had certainly crossed her mind that it was an elaborate game or ancient ruse. But there was no written record of any such equivalent performance from the eleventh century; writing at all, and the mastery of Latin, were such rare achievements that its practitioners were loath to use them for anything but the most practical, and well-paid, tasks. Vellum wasn’t cheap, the work wasn’t easy — the sheer physical labor of mixing inks, stretching skins, preparing pens, hand- lettering each exquisite character — was immense, and the skills of the consummate craftsman were considered a kind of divine gift which it would have been sacrilegious to defile. No, the letter was real.

The slave Salima still attends me and weeps now in the bed. Beth had read of Salima earlier — a concubine whom al-Kalli had permitted the scribe to choose from among the many in his private seraglio. But was she weeping at the plight of the scribe, or was she, too, doomed?

It will be her charge to take this letter to my accomplice that he may place it in its secret grave. May she be spared to do this deed. Knowing no more than this, Beth could only assume that the slave girl had survived — at least long enough to convey the letter.

Someone was suddenly talking right in front of her. “The bowers that you see here are made of steel and covered with three different varieties of bougainvillea,” said the tour guide as a dozen visitors stopped in front of the one Beth was sitting under. It was a hot, bright day, but here, in the shadow cast by the flower-draped sculpture, she had been able to read in comfort and, best of all, seclusion. Out here, she ran little risk of being interrupted by Mrs. Cabot; only Elvis, her assistant, knew where she was holed up.

“Let me get out of your way,” Beth said as several tourists raised their cameras.

“No, no, you’re fine,” the guide, an older man, said. “These bowers should always look so good.”

Beth smiled, but she got up anyway, clutching the pages in her lap, and walked over to the lip of the Central Garden below. It was made up of concentric circles, gravel paths winding around and around and culminating in a reflecting pool adorned by banks of azaleas. It was, it occurred to her, a kind of maze of its own. How strange that she should have found herself reading the scribe’s letter in just such a place. The plantings here were not so tall or so thick as to obscure where you were, or how you could get out, but the design was unquestionably inspired by the classical maze.

And, now that she thought of it, it was here that she had first encountered Mohammed al-Kalli, when he’d come to the party to inaugurate her show of illuminated manuscripts. Though she didn’t for one minute believe in such stuff, it was almost as if things were unfolding according to some plan.

Standing above the circular garden, the hot sun beating down on the shoulders left bare by her summer dress, she went back to the letter in her hand. There was not much left to go, and the suspense was killing her.

While the desert air is still cool from the night, I shall be summoned to the maze. Who shall the sultan invite to observe my death? What shall they eat and drink as I strive in vain to escape the beast? The sultan has said that the game has never lasted long enough for him to finish his repast.

Beth could hardly credit what she was reading. It read as if it were a real-life account of Theseus and the Minotaur; she struggled to remember the myth. Every nine years, the Athenians were made to pay a terrible tribute to King Minos, as part of an earlier truce; they were required to send a group of young men and women — seven of each, if she recalled correctly — to be devoured by the dreaded Minotaur, half man and half bull, who lived in a labyrinth from which there was no escape. Had the Sultan Kilij al-Kalli modeled his own maze on that legendary one? And what was the actual beast who haunted, and hunted in, his own deadly theater? A Minotaur, she knew, it was not; that was only a myth. But what was it really — a lion? A tiger? Something even more exotic — and dangerous?

The prisoner at first seeks a way out, going up one narrow path and down another, but only from on high, where the sultan sits, can the design be wholly known. And only from that perch [throne] can it be seen that there is no escape. The creature sleeps at the heart of the maze, in the shade of the towering terebinth tree.

The terebinth had been mentioned earlier, too, and Beth had done some research into it — enough to reveal that it was a massive indigenous tree, better known to botanists as the Palestine pistacia, that was known to live as long as a thousand years. Though sometimes called by other names, it was prominently featured in many scriptural passages: It was under such a tree that King Saul had been buried. It was in the mighty branches of the terebinth that Absalom, great in his own eyes, had been trapped and then murdered. And it was in the valley of Elah, thick with these always green trees, that David with his sling had brought down the Philistine champion, Goliath.

But as the prisoner approaches, the beast raises its head — it has a wondrous sense of smell, and an appetite for blood that is never appeased. The prisoner has no knowledge of the monster so close, but walks deeper and deeper into the trap, unable to see beyond the dense walls of the hawthorn bushes, with their thorny branches and bright white blossoms. As he ventures into the twisting garden, so too does the monster rouse himself from his torpor and stand on its four clawed feet. The prisoner, he searches for a way out of the green enclosure [trap], while the beast seeks out his offered prey. With my own eyes, as God is my great and eternal witness, I have seen many of the sultan’s prisoners — men like me who have served him well and done him no disloyalty — thrust into the maze, there to be hunted down and torn to pieces. It is said that when the sultan has no more use for a man, there is but one use left, and that is to sustain this accursed creature, this beast he calls his manticore.

Beth let the hand holding the translation drop to her side. It was too bizarre, too unbelievable, what she was