Bestiarium · De Dracone Dormiente · Folio XC
You hold no candle to this leaf, only a glass, and a glass is a small and portable sun. The scribe set this hand deliberately small — a hand no wider than a hair — so that the page keeps its counsel from the hurried eye and yields it only to the eye that is willing to stoop. Bring the lens down. Watch the letters stand up and take their breath.
Under the glass the ink is not black but the brown of old galls and iron, gathered from the swellings on an oak where a wasp has laid her egg, boiled with rainwater and a little wine and bound with gum of the almond tree. It is wetter than you supposed. It sits on the skin of a calf that was scraped and pounced and rubbed with chalk until it would take a line finer than a thought, and it has held that line, unhurried, all this while.
In the belly of the first letter a dragon lies coiled, wound through the stem like a serpent asleep in an orchard. Cold vellum keeps him. But glass gathers heat, and heat is the one word he answers to. Hold the lens upon him and his eye unshutters; a thread of smoke climbs the ascender; the gold along his spine remembers that it was once fire. Move on, and he settles. He is patient. He has kept this page six hundred years and is in no hurry for the next six.
The margins are not empty, whatever the room would tell you. Here a hare has taken up a sword and stands against a hound thrice its size, for the man who ruled these lines had a small revenge in him and no better place to spend it. Here a hand — only a hand, in a cuff of Sunday linen — points across the gutter at a single word and will not say why until you ask. None of this was made for the room. It was made for you, and for the small coin of warmth you carry across the line.
Where the letter is gold it is not paint but hammered leaf, laid over a cushion of gesso and a bole of red earth, breathed upon until it clung and burnished with a wolf’s tooth until it threw the candle back. That is why it stirs when your glass crosses it: it was made to catch a light and return it, and your lens is only the latest light to ask.
You think yourself the reader and the page the thing read. Under the glass it is not so plain. This leaf has been lit ten thousand times by ten thousand small suns and has learned the shape of attention; it knows a glance from a gaze. Give it the second and it gives you the gloss, the drollery, the joke the scribe hid inside a capital. Give it only the first and it keeps them, as it has kept them from every hurried eye since.
The man who wrote this complained as he went, in a smaller hand still, down at the foot of the page where he trusted no lens would ever reach: that his candle was a stub, that the ink ran thin, that the parchment was hairy and his fingers cold and the night long. Find him there. He has waited a great while for someone to agree with him.
This is the ninth leaf of the ninth gathering, folded once from a single skin and sewn to its fellows through the spine with a thread of gut. Turn it, and the dragon would lie on the far side of the same animal as the hare — which is to say the two are nearer than either supposes. Thirty-eight lines were ruled with a hard point and a straight edge, and the hand kept, more or less, to every one.
Read, then, the only way this leaf allows: a word at a time, a warmth at a time, the dark all around the bright coin of your attention. This is not a slower way to read; it is the true speed of it. Everything you are not looking at is still here, waiting, exactly as small as before — the hare mid-swing, the hand mid-point, the dragon with his eye not quite shut, watching the glass go by.
Here ends the leaf. Carry the glass gently — it is the only light the page will take.