Abdul then proposed, since the kingdom was in the East, to name rare spices, and they chose pepper. Of which Boron said that it grows on trees infested with snakes, and when it is ripe you set fire to the trees and the snakes escape and hide in their lairs. Then you approach the tree, shake it, the pepper falls from the branches, and you cook it in some process that nobody knows.
"Now can we put the Sambatyon?" Solomon asked. "Oh, go ahead," the Poet said, "then it's clear that the ten lost tribes are on the other side of the river. Yes, let's mention them explicitly, so Frederick can also find the lost tribes and add another gem to his crown." Abdul observed that the Sambatyon was necessary because it was the insuperable obstacle that thwarts the will and heightens desire. In other words: jealousy. Someone proposed also mentioning an underground stream rich in precious stones, but he refused to pursue the idea, for fear of hearing someone say topaz again. On the testimony of Pliny and Isidore, they decided instead to place salamanders in those lands, snakes with four legs that live amid flames.
"It only has to be true and we'll include it," Baudolino said, "so long as we're not telling fairy tales."
The letter continued, insisting for a while on the virtue that reigned in those lands, where every pilgrim was welcomed with charity, no one was poor, there were no thieves, predators, misers, or flatterers. The Priest then declared that he believed there was no monarch in the world so rich or with so many subjects. To offer proof of these riches, which for that matter Sindbad had seen at Sarandib, there was then the great scene where the Priest described himself as he went to war against his enemies, preceded by thirteen crosses studded with jewels, each on a chariot, each chariot followed by ten thousand horsemen and a hundred thousand foot soldiers. When, on the contrary, the Priest rode out in peacetime, he was preceded by a wooden cross, recalling the passion of the Lord, and by a golden pot filled with earth, to remind everyone—and himself—that dust we are and unto dust we shall return. But so no one would forget that he who was passing was still the king of kings, here was another silver pot filled with gold. "If you put in any topazes, I'll smash this jug over your head," Baudolino warned. And Abdul, that time at least, omitted topazes.
"Write also that, down there, no adulterers exist, and no one can lie, and that anyone who lies dies that instant, or it's as if he died, because he is outlawed and no one pays any further heed to him."
"I've already written that there are no vices, no thieves...."
"That's all right. Insist. The kingdom of Prester John must be a place where Christians succeed in keeping the divine commandments, while the pope has not managed to achieve anything similar with his children; indeed he himself lies, and worse than others. Anyway, insisting on the fact that nobody lies there, we make it self-evident that everything John says is true."
John continued, saying that every year he paid a visit, with a great army, to the tomb of the prophet Daniel in deserted Babylon, that in his country fish were caught whose blood was the source of purple, and that he exercised his sovereignty over the Amazons and the Brahmans. The Brahman idea seemed useful to Boron because the Brahmans had been seen by Alexander the Great when he reached the most extreme Orient imaginable. Hence their presence proved that in the kingdom of the Priest was incorporated the very empire of Alexander.
At this point nothing remained but to describe his palace and his magic mirror, and on this score the Poet had already said everything some evenings earlier. But he remembered it, whispering into Abdul's ear, so that Baudolino would hear no more talk of topazes, which clearly were required in this case.
"I believe that a future reader," Rabbi Solomon said, "will wonder why such a powerful king had himself called only Priest."
"True, and this allows us to arrive at the conclusion," Baudolino said. "Abdul, write":
Why, O most beloved Frederick, our sublimity does not grant us an appellative more worthy than that of Presbyter is a question that does honor to your wisdom. To be sure, at our court we have ministers on whom are conferred duties and names far more worthy, especially where the ecclesiastical hierarchy is concerned. Our dispenser is primate and king, king and archbishop our wine steward, king and archimandrite our blacksmith, king and abbot our chief cook. So then our own highness, unwilling to be designated with these same titles, or to receive the same orders in which our court abounds, in humility determined to be called by a less important name, of a lower rank. For the moment suffice it for you to know that our territory extends in one direction a distance of four months' march, whereas in the other direction no one knows how far it reaches. If you could number the stars of the sky and the sands of the sea, then you could measure our possessions and our power.
It was almost daybreak when our friends finished the letter. Those who had taken the honey were still in a state of smiling stupefaction; those who had drunk only wine were tipsy; the Poet, who had again tasted both substances, could hardly stand. They walked, singing, through the narrow streets and the squares, touching that parchment with reverence, now convinced that it had just arrived from the kingdom of Prester John.
"Did you send it at once to Rainald?" Niketas asked.
"No. After the Poet left, we reread it for months and polished it, scraping and rewriting many times. Every now and then someone would suggest a little addition."
"But Rainald was expecting the letter, I imagine...."
"The fact is that meantime Frederick had removed Rainald from the position of chancellor of the empire, which he gave then to Christian of Buch. To be sure, Rainald, as archbishop of Cologne, was also arch-chancellor of Italy, and he remained very powerful, so much so that it was still he who organized the canonization of Charlemagne; but that replacement, at least in my view, meant that Frederick had begun to feel Rainald was too aggressive. So how could we present to the emperor a letter that, after all, had been desired by Rainald? I was forgetting: in the same year as the canonization, Beatrice had a second son, and so the emperor had other things on his mind, also because, according to rumors I heard, the first child was always sickly. So, what with one thing and another, more than a year went by."
"Rainald didn't insist?"
"At first he also had other things on his mind. Then he died. While Frederick was in Rome to expel Alexander III and put his antipope on the throne, a pestilence broke out, and the plague takes the rich and the poor alike. So Rainald died. I was shaken, even though I had never really loved him. He was arrogant and rancorous, but he had been a bold man and had fought to the end for his master. Rest his soul. But at this point, without him, did the letter still make any sense? He was the only one sufficiently clever to know how to profit by it, having it circulate among the chancelleries of all the Christian world."
Baudolino paused. "Besides, there was the question of my city."
"What city? You were born in a swamp."
"That's true. I'm going too fast. We still have to build the city."
"At last you're telling me about a city that's not destroyed!"
"Yes," Baudolino said, "it was the first and only time in my life that I would see a city's birth, and not its death."
13. Baudolino sees the birth of a new city
Ten years had gone by since Baudolino came to Paris. He had read everything that could be read, had learned Greek from a Byzantine prostitute, had written poems and amorous letters that would be attributed to others, had practically constructed a kingdom that now no one knew better than he and his friends, but he had not completed his studies. He consoled himself with the thought that studying in Paris had in itself been a great feat, considering that he had been born among cows. Then he recalled that in all likelihood students would be penniless youths like him, and not lords' sons, who had to learn to make war and not to read and write.... In short, he didn't feel entirely satisfied.
One day, Baudolino realized that in a month or so he would be twenty-six, for he had left home at thirteen, and it was exactly thirteen years that he had been away. He sensed so
mething that we would call homesickness for his native land, only he, who had never experienced it, did not know what it was. So he thought he was feeling a desire to see his adoptive father again, and he decided to join him in Basel, where he had stopped as he was once more returning to Italy.
Baudolino hadn't seen Frederick since the birth of the first son. While he was writing and rewriting the Priest's letter, the emperor had done all sorts of things, slipping like an eel from north to south, eating and sleeping on horseback like his barbarian forefathers, and his palace was simply the place where he happened to be at that moment. In those years he had returned to Italy another two times. The second time, along the way, he had suffered an insult at Susa, where the citizens rebelled against him, obliging him to flee in secret and in disguise, because they were holding Beatrice hostage. Then the Susani let her go, having done her no harm, but he had cut a sorry figure, and had sworn an oath against Susa. Nor did he rest when he came back across the Alps, because he had to make the German princes see reason.
When Baudolino finally saw the emperor, he found him with a very grave expression. Baudolino understood that, on the one hand, Frederick was more and more concerned about the health of his older son—also named Frederick—and, on the other, about the situation in Lombardy.
"Agreed," he admitted, "and I say this only to you: my governors and my viceroys and my tax collectors were not only demanding what was my due, but seven times that; for every hearth they exacted every year three solidi of old coinage, and twenty-four old dinaria for every mill that operated on navigable waters; from the fishermen they took away a third of the catch; and if someone died without children the inheritance was confiscated. I should have paid attention to the complaints that reached me, I know, but I had other things on my mind.... And now it seems that some months ago the Lombard communes formed a League, an anti-imperial League, you understand. And what was their first decision? To rebuild the walls of Milan!"
The Italian cities were turbulent and disloyal, yes; but a League was the formation of another res publica. Naturally, that League could not endure, given the way one city in Italy hated the next; it was not even to be thought, and yet it was still a vulnus for the empire's honor.
Who was joining the League? According to rumor, in an abbey not far from Milan there had been a gathering of delegates from Cremona, Mantua, Bergamo, and perhaps also Piacenza and Parma, but that was unsure. The rumors did not stop there, however; they spoke of Venice, Verona, Padua, Vicenza, Treviso, Ferrara, and Bologna. "Bologna! Can you believe that?" Frederick cried, pacing up and down in front of Baudolino. "You remember, don't you? Thanks to me, their damned professors could make all the money they wanted with those double-damned students of theirs, without accounting to me or to the pope, and now they're joining up with that league? Could anything be more shameless? And Pavia! That's all we need!"
"And Lodi," Baudolino interjected, to say something outrageous.
"Lodi? Lodi!" Barbarossa yelled, his face red as his beard, as if he were about to have a stroke. "But according to the news I'm receiving, Lodi has already taken part in the meetings. I gave my heart's blood to protect them, that flock of sheep; without me the Milanese would have leveled them to the ground every new season, and now they're hand in glove with their own murderers and plotting against their benefactor!"
"But, dear Father," Baudolino asked, "why do you say 'it seems' and 'according to rumor'? Don't you receive reliable news?"
"Do you people who study in Paris lose all sense of how things proceed in this world? If there's a league, there's a conspiracy; if there's a conspiracy, those who used to be on your side have turned traitor, and they tell you the exact opposite of what they are doing down there, so the last to know what they're doing will be the emperor, like husbands who have an unfaithful wife that everyone in the town knows about except them!"
He could hardly have chosen a worse example, because at that very moment Beatrice entered, having learned of dear Baudolino's arrival. Baudolino knelt to kiss her hand, without looking at her face. Beatrice hesitated a moment. Perhaps it seemed to her that, by showing no sign of intimacy and affection, she would betray embarrassment; therefore she placed her other hand maternally on his head, mussing his hair—forgetting that a woman just over thirty could no longer act this way towards a man only a little younger than she. To Frederick it all seemed normal, he the father, she the mother, even if both adoptive. The one who felt out of place was Baudolino. That double contact, her nearness, which enabled him to catch the perfume of her dress as if it were that of her flesh, and the sound of her voice—luckily in that position he could not look into her eyes, for he would immediately have blanched and fallen senseless to the floor—filled him with unbearable joy, but it was poisoned by the sensation that with this simple act of homage he was once again betraying his father.
He would not have known how to take his leave if the emperor had not asked a favor of him, or given him an order, which was the same thing. To have a clearer view of the situation in Italy, trusting neither official messengers nor messenger officials, Frederick had decided to send down there a few trusted men, who knew the country, but were not immediately identifiable as imperials, so that they could sniff out the atmosphere and gather information not vitiated by treason.
Baudolino liked the idea of escaping the embarrassment he felt at court, but a moment later he felt something else. He felt extraordinarily moved by the idea of seeing his old places, and he realized finally that this was the reason he had undertaken his journey.
After moving through various cities, one day Baudolino, riding on and on—or, rather, bumping along on his mule, because he was passing himself off as a merchant, peacefully going from town to town—was attracted by those heights beyond which, after a good stretch of plain, he ought to be able to look at the Tanaro and reach, between stony fields and swamps, his native Frascheta.
Even though in those days, when you left home, you left without thinking of ever returning, Baudolino felt at this moment a tingling in his veins, as, all of a sudden, he was seized by an eagerness to know if his old parents were still alive.
Not only that. Suddenly faces of other boys of the neighborhood came into his mind: Masulu Panizza, with whom he used to set traps for hares; and Porcelli, known as Ghino (or was it Ghini, known as Porcello?), with whom, at first sight, they had thrown rocks at each other, Aleramo Scaccabarozzi, known as Bonehead, and Cuttica of Quargnento, from the days when they fished together in the Bormida. Good Lord, he said to himself, surely I'm not dying now, though they say that on the point of death you remember the things of your childhood so well....
It was the eve of Christmas, but Baudolino didn't know that, because in the course of his journey he had lost track of the days. He was trembling with cold, on his equally frozen mule, but the sky was clear in the sunset light, clean, with a smell of snow already in the air. He recognized these places as if he had passed by the day before. He remembered how he once went into these hills with his father, to deliver three mules, toiling up paths that could wear out the legs even of a boy, so you can imagine driving reluctant animals up them. But they enjoyed the return, looking at the plain from above and taking their time on the way down. Baudolino remembered that, not very far from the flowing river, the plain for a short stretch humped into a hillock, and from the top of that knoll one time he had seen, piercing a milky shroud, the spires of some towns: Bergoglio along the river, then Roboreto, and, farther on, Gamondio, Marengo, and the Palea, the area of marshes, of gravel and scrub, at whose edges perhaps there still stood the hut of the good Gagliaudo.
But when he was on the hillock, he saw a different view, as if all around, on the hills and in the valleys, the air was clear, and only the plain before him was murky with foggy vapors, those grayish, misty clumps that every now and then assail you on the road, enveloping you until you can see nothing, then they pass you, and off they go whence they came—so now Baudolino said to himself: Why, look at tha
t, it could be August here, but over Frascheta the eternal fog rules, like the snow on the peaks of the Alps—nor did this displease him, because one who is born in fog always feels at home in it. Gradually, however, as he descended towards the river, he realized that those vapors were not fog, but clouds of smoke that allowed glimpses of the fires that fed them. From the smoke and fires, Baudolino now understood that, in the plain beyond the river, around what had once been Roboreto, the town had overflowed into the countryside, and everywhere there was a sprouting, mushroomlike, of new houses, some of stone, others of wood, many still only half-built, and to the west you could make out the beginning of a girdle of walls, such as there had never been in those parts. And on the fires, in the freezing cold, pots were boiling, heating water, for, farther on, men were pouring it into holes filled with lime or perhaps mortar. Baudolino had seen the beginning of the construction of the new cathedral in Paris, on the island in the middle of the river, and now he recognized the machines and the scaffoldings that master masons use: judging by what he knew of cities, he realized that over there people were about to bring one into existence from nothing, and it was a sight that—if you're lucky—you see once in a lifetime.