Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [144]
He turned over one of the smaller skulls, pointing out the swelling bulges on the underside, like small, thin-walled balloons.
“Here—the canal of the ear enters into these, so that the sounds echo within the skull. Hence the sharp ears of the rat, madonna.”
“Tympanic bullae,” I said, nodding.
“Ah? I have but little Latin. My names for such things are…my own.”
“Those…” I gestured upward. “Those are special, aren’t they?”
“Ah. Yes, madonna. They are wolves. Very old wolves.” He lifted down one of the skulls, handling it with reverent care. The snout was long and canid, with heavy canines and broad carnassial teeth. The sagittal crest rose stark and commanding from the back of the skull, testimony to the heavy muscles of the brawny neck that had once supported it.
Not a soft dull white like the other skulls, these were stained and streaked with brown, and shone glossy with much polishing.
“Such beasts are no more, madonna.”
“No more? Extinct, you mean?” I touched it once more, fascinated. “Where on earth did you get them?”
“Not on the earth, madonna. Under it. They came from a peat bog, buried many feet down.”
Looking closely, I could see the differences between these skulls and the newer, whiter ones on the opposite wall. These animals had been larger than ordinary wolves, with jaws that might have cracked the leg bones of a running elk or torn the throat from a fallen deer.
I shuddered slightly at the touch, reminded of the wolf I had killed outside Wentworth Prison, and its pack-mates who had stalked me in the icy twilight, barely six months ago.
“You do not care for wolves, madonna?” Raymond asked. “Yet the bears and the foxes do not trouble you? They also are hunters, eaters of flesh.”
“Yes, but not mine,” I said wryly, handing him back the age-dark skull. “I feel a good deal more sympathy with our friend the elk.” I patted the high jutting nose with some affection.
“Sympathy?” The soft black eyes regarded me curiously. “It is an unusual emotion to feel for a bone, madonna.”
“Well…yes,” I said, slightly embarrassed, “but they don’t really seem like just bones, you know. I mean, you can tell something about them, and get a feeling for what the animal was like, looking at these. They aren’t just inanimate objects.”
Raymond’s toothless mouth stretched wide, as though I had inadvertently said something that pleased him, but he said nothing in reply.
“Why do you have all these?” I asked abruptly, suddenly realizing that racks of animal skulls were hardly the usual appurtenances of an apothecary’s shop. Stuffed crocodiles, possibly, but not all this lot.
He shrugged good-naturedly.
“Well, they are company, of a sort, while I pursue my work.” He gestured toward a cluttered workbench in one corner. “And while they may talk to me of many things, they are not so noisy as to attract the attention of the neighbors. Come here,” he said, changing subjects abruptly. “I have something for you.”
I followed him toward a tall cabinet at the end of the room, wondering.
He was not a naturalist, certainly not a scientist, as I understood the term. He kept no notes, made no drawings, no records that others might consult and learn from. And yet I had the odd conviction that he wanted very much to teach me the things that he knew—a sympathy for bones, perhaps?
The cabinet was painted with a number of odd signs, tailed and whorled, among what appeared to be pentagons and circles; Cabbalistic symbols. I recognized one or two, from some of Uncle Lamb’s historical references.
“Interested in the Cabbala, are you?” I asked, eyeing the symbols with some amusement. That would account for the hidden workroom. While there was a strong interest in occult matters among some of the French literati and the aristocracy, it was an interest kept highly clandestine, for fear of the Church’s cleansing wrath.
To my surprise, Raymond laughed. His blunt, short-nailed fingers pressed here and there on the front of the cabinet, touching the center of one symbol, the tail of another.
“Well, no, madonna. Most Cabbalists tend to be rather