‘It’s from the Dordogne, the Perigord Noir, your stomping ground.’
Luc raised his eyebrows in mild interest.
‘Ever hear of a little village called Ruac?’
‘On the Vezere, right? I may have poked around it once or twice. What’s there?’
Hugo proceeded to tell Luc about the abbey and its fire, employing a touch of drama and showmanship, purposely building to a storyteller’s climax. After he had finished with a boastful account of the excellence of his company at manuscript restoration he said, ‘I’d like you to thumb through it and give me a first impression, okay?’
‘Sure. Let’s have a look.’
Luc held the thin light book in his calloused hands, opened the cover, took note of the fourteenth-century date on the flyleaf and started turning the pages.
He let out a low whistle. ‘You’re kidding me!’ he exclaimed.
‘I thought you’d be interested,’ Hugo said. ‘Carry on.’
Luc paused on each page only long enough to register a first impression. Although he couldn’t read the text, he could tell the scribe had a competent, practised hand. The manuscript was done in a stylistically boxy script, two columns per page, employing a rust-coloured ink that retained a lovely coppery glint. There were prickings around the edge of the pages that had been employed to keep the lines straight and true.
But it wasn’t the text that interested him. What had him captivated were the bright and bold illustrations decorating the borders of several pages.
Particularly the iconic ones, the images which were his life’s blood.
The black bulls. The roe deer. The bison.
Wildly animalistic and beautifully rendered in blacks, earthy-reds, browns and tans.
‘This is unmistakable polychromatic cave art,’ he murmured. ‘Upper Paleolithic, very similar in execution and style to Lascaux but these aren’t from Lascaux or any site I’ve seen.’
‘And you’ve seen them all, I imagine,’ Hugo said.
‘Of course! This is what I do! But you know, what’s far more incredible is the date here: 1307! The absolute first credible mention in recorded history of cave art is from 1879 at Altamira, Spain. This is five centuries earlier! I’m not saying that man hadn’t laid eyes on these caves earlier than the nineteenth century but no one ever thought to write about it or reproduce any images. Are you certain this is really from 1307?’
‘Well, I haven’t subjected it to forensic dating, but the vellum, the bindings, the ink, the pigments all cry out fourteenth century.’
‘You’re sure?’
Hugo laughed and parroted back, ‘This is what I do!’
Luc buried himself back in the book. He sought out one particular page and rotated the manuscript for Hugo to see.
Hugo snorted, ‘I knew that would interest you. It’s quite the image, quite evocative! Ever seen anything like that before?’
In the margin was a primitive outline, a standing human form, not much more than a glorified stick figure rendered in thick black brushstrokes. Instead of a head the figure had the beak of a bird and at its midsection, a long slash of ink, a huge erect phallus.
‘Yes! I have! Not identical but very similar. There’s a painting in Lascaux of a birdman just like this. Some kind of mystical figure. Complete with the cock. Incredible.’
He flipped to another page and pointed at the marginalia, lavishly rendered in rich pigments – lush greens, earthy-browns and bursting reds. ‘And look at all these drawings! These plants.’ And another page. ‘These are vines of some kind.’ And another. ‘These are grasses. It’s like a natural history!’ And finally he turned to one of the last pages. ‘And this, for God’s sake, Hugo, this is a map!’
Along the margins of the page was a winding blue line snaking through a swathe of greens, browns and greys, some apparent topography. The landscape was dotted with small painted symbols: a tan tower, a meandering blue line – surely a river – a cluster of grey-roofed dwellings, a tree with crazily angled branches, a paired array of wavy blue lines against a grey background and near it, a tiny black X, unlabelled, floating without context.
Hugo agreed. ‘It struck me as a map too.’
Luc finished his bourbon but waved Hugo away when he tried to refill the glass. ‘So, now you’d better tell me what this says. You’re the Latin scholar. I never progressed much past veni, vidi, vici.’
Hugo smiled and replenished his own glass then said with theatrical flair, ‘Well, the inscription on the flyleaf says, “I, Barthomieu, friar of Abbey Ruac, am two hundred and twenty years old and this is my story.”’
Luc wrinkled his nose in puzzlement. ‘Go on…’
‘And the first line on the first page says, “In the everlasting memory of the greatest man I have ever known, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.”’
Luc ran his finger over the saint’s halo on the cover. ‘This guy?’
‘Presumably.’
‘Any relation to the dogs?’
‘As it happens, yes, they’re named after him, but as I’ve since learned he’s a bit more famous than that.’
‘So tell me the rest.’
‘I can’t.’
Luc was losing his patience. ‘Why not?’
Hugo was enjoying himself. ‘I can’t read it.’
Luc was finished with the game. ‘Look, spit it out and don’t be a jerk. Why can’t you read it?’
‘Because the rest of it’s in code!’
FIVE
For Luc visiting the Perigord was like coming home. It was green and fertile and always seemed to welcome him like a mother’s arms. From his earliest boyhood days at the family vacation cottage at Saint-Aulaye where he spent his summers wading at the village beach along the Dronne, Luc was happiest when he was in that countryside.
The undulating terrain, the steep river gorges, the limestone cliffs, the sun-splashed terraces extending beyond the wine-producing slopes, the dense patches of woodlands, the plum trees and holm oak abundant in the sandy soil, the ancient villages and sandstone towns that dotted the winding by-roads – all these things stirred his soul and kept drawing him back. But none were as important as the ghosts of the Perigord’s distant past, faraway souls that came to him as if in a waking dream, shadowy figures darting through the forests always just out of reach.
His childhood visions of early man prowling the land, fueled by field trips to the dark painted caves of the region and the novel, Jean Auel’s, The Clan of the Cave Bear, which the precocious eleven-year-old had practically inhaled, set him on an academic path that took him to the University of Paris, Harvard and now the faculty at Bordeaux.
Luc had picked up Hugo from the main Bordeaux train station, Gare Saint Jean, and from there they headed west in his banged-up Land Rover. For Luc the route was automatic; he could almost close his eyes. The Land Rover, once dubbed the Gland Rover by a waggish English grad student, had a few hundred thousand kilometres on the clock. By day, when an excavation was running, it ferried students and equipment to the dig site on its unforgiving shock absorbers and by night, beer-stoked, hormonally charged young diggers to and from the local cafes.
They arrived before lunch at the abbey and sat with Dom Menaud in the study of his abbot house, a dusty book-filled room more resembling a professor’s apartment than a cleric’s. Hugo performed the introductions and offered a quick apology for their casual clothes. The creature of fashion he was, he was chagrined to be taking a meeting dressed for a hike.
