"I know a good way, but it doesn't follow the streets," Niketas said, "and you'd have to leave your horse behind...."
"So be it," Baudolino said, with an indifference that amazed Niketas, who did not yet know at what a cheap price Baudolino had acquired his charger.
Niketas, helped to his feet, took Baudolino by the hand and furtively approached the Sweating Column. He looked around, surveyed the vast temple; the pilgrims, seen in the distance, were moving like ants, bent on dilapidation, paying no attention to the two of them. At the column he knelt and thrust his fingers into a somewhat loose crevice in a slab of the pavement. "Help me," he said to Baudolino. "If we both try, we may be able to do it." And indeed after some effort the slab was raised, disclosing a dark opening. "There are some steps," Niketas said. "I'll go first because I know where to set my feet. Then you close the stone over your head."
"Then what do we do?"
"We climb down," Niketas said. "Then we'll find a niche, and in it are some torches and a flint."
"What a fine city this Constantinople is, so full of surprises," Baudolino remarked as he descended the winding stair. "Too bad these pigs will not leave a stone upon a stone."
"These pigs?" Niketas asked. "But aren't you one of them?"
"Me?" Baudolino was amazed. "Not me. If it's this clothing you refer to, I borrowed it. When they entered the city I was already inside the walls. But—where are the torches?"
"Don't worry. Just a few more steps. Who are you? What's your name?"
"Baudolino of Alessandria—not the city in Egypt, but the one they now call Caesarea, or maybe they don't even call it that and it's been burned down like Constantinople. I'm from up in the mountains, in the north, near Mediolanum. You know it?"
"I know about Mediolanum. Once its walls were destroyed by the king of the Alamans. Later our basileus gave them some money to help rebuild them."
"Indeed, I was with the emperor of the Alamans before he died. You met him when he was crossing the Propontis, almost fifteen years ago."
"Frederick. Old Copper Beard. A great and most noble prince, clement and merciful. He would never have done what these..."
"When he conquered a city, he wasn't so tenderhearted."
Finally they were at the foot of the steps. Niketas found the torches, and the two men, holding them high above their heads, proceeded down a long passage, until Baudolino saw the very belly of Constantinople, where, almost directly beneath the greatest church in the world, another basilica extended, unseen, a forest of columns stretching infinitely into the darkness like so many trees of a lacustrine wood, rising from the waters. Basilica or abbatial church, completely upside down, because even the light, which gently licked capitals that faded into the shadows of the very high vaults, came not from rose windows or vitrages, but from the watery pavement, which reflected the moving flames of the visitors.
"The city is pierced by cisterns," Niketas said. "The gardens of Constantinople are not a gift of nature but an effect of art. You see? Now the water comes only up to our knees because almost all of it has been used to put out the fires. If the conquerors destroy the aqueducts, then everyone will die of thirst. Usually you can't move on foot here; you need a boat."
"Does this passage arrive at the port?"
"No, it stops well before; but I know other passages and stairs that connect it with other cisterns and other tunnels, so that even if we can't reach the Neorion we can walk underground to the Prosphorion. However," he added, in anguish, as if he were just remembering another errand, "I can't come with you. I will show you the way, but then I have to turn back. I have to save my family, who are hiding in a little church behind Saint Irene. You know"—he seemed to be apologizing—"my palace was destroyed in the second fire, the one in August."
"Master Niketas, you're mad. First, you bring me down here, making me abandon my horse, when—even without you—I could have reached the Neorion through the streets. Second, you believe you can reach your family before being stopped by another pair of sergeants like those I found you with. Even if you succeeded, then what would you do? Sooner or later someone will root you out, and if you do collect your family and set off, where will you go?"
"I have friends in Selymbria," Niketas said, puzzled.
"I don't know where that is, but to reach it you first have to get out of the city. Listen to me: you're no good to your family. On the other hand, where I will take you, we'll find some friends, Genoese who decide which way the wind blows in this city. They're used to dealing with Saracens, Jews, monks, the imperial guard, Persian merchants, and now with these Latin pilgrims. They're smart people; you tell them where your family is and tomorrow they'll bring them to where we are. I don't know how they'll do it, but do it they will. They would do it in any case for me, since I'm an old friend, and for the love of God, but all the same they're Genoese, and if you give them a little present, so much the better. Then we'll stay there till things calm down. A sack normally doesn't last more than a few days. You can trust me, I've seen plenty of them. Afterwards, you can go to Selymbria or wherever you like."
Deeply moved, Niketas thanked him. And as they resumed their way, he asked why Baudolino was in the city if he wasn't a pilgrim.
"I arrived when the Latins had already landed on the opposite shore, with some other people ... who are no longer with us. We came from very far away."
"Why didn't you leave the city? You would have had time."
Baudolino hesitated before answering. "Because ... because I had to stay here in order to understand something."
"Have you understood it?"
"Unfortunately, yes. But only today."
"Another question: why are you devoting yourself so to me?"
"What else should a good Christian do? But, actually, you're right. I could have freed you from that pair and then let you go off on your own, and instead here I am, sticking to you like a leech. You see, Master Niketas, I know that you are a writer of stories, just as Bishop Otto of Freising was. But when I knew Bishop Otto, I was only a boy and I had no story, I wanted to know only the stories of others. Now I might have a story of my own, though I've lost everything I had written down about my past and, what's more, when I try to recall it, my thoughts become all confused. It's not that I don't remember the facts, but I'm not able to give them a meaning. After everything that's happened to me today I have to talk to somebody, or else I'll go crazy."
"What happened to you today?" Niketas asked, plowing ahead in the water. He was younger than Baudolino, but his life as a scholar and courtier had made him fat, lazy, and weak.
"I killed a man. It was the man who almost fifteen years ago assassinated my adoptive father, the best of kings, the emperor Frederick."
"But Frederick drowned, in Cilicia!"
"So everyone believed. But he was assassinated. Master Niketas, you saw me wield my sword in anger this evening in Saint Sophia, but I must tell you that in all my life I had never shed anyone's blood. I am a man of peace. This time I had to kill: I was the only one who could render justice."
"You will tell it all to me. But first tell me how you arrived so providentially in Saint Sophia to save my life."
"As the pilgrims were beginning their sack of the city, I was entering a dark place. When I came out, it was nearly nightfall, an hour ago, and I found myself near the Hippodrome. I was almost trampled to death by a crowd of Greeks in flight, screaming. I ducked into the doorway of a half-burned house, to let the crowd pass, and when they had gone by I saw the pilgrims pursuing them. I realized what was happening, and in an instant this great truth flashed into my mind: that I was, true, a Latin and not a Greek, but, before these infuriated Latins could realize that, there would no longer be any difference between me and a dead Greek. No, it cannot be, I said to myself, that these men will want to destroy the great city of Christendom now that they have finally conquered it.... I reflected that when their ancestors entered Jerusalem at the time of Godfrey of Bouillon, and the city became the
irs, they killed everybody: women, children, domestic animals, and it was thanks only to a mistake that they did not also burn down the Holy Sepulcher. True, they were Christians entering a city of infidels, and even on my own journey I had seen Christians massacre each other for a word. Everyone knows how for years our priests have been quarreling with your priests over the question of Filioque. And finally, it's simple: when a warrior enters a city, all religion is irrelevant."
"What did you do then?"
"I left the doorway and, sticking close to the walls, I reached the Hippodrome. There I saw beauty wither and become dire. You know? After I arrived in the city, I used to go over there to gaze at the statue of that maiden, the one with the shapely feet, arms like snow, and red lips that smile, and those breasts, and the robe and the hair that danced so in the wind that when you saw her from a distance you couldn't believe she was made of bronze: she seemed living flesh...."
"The statue of Helen of Troy. But what happened?"
"In the space of a few seconds I saw the column on which she stood bend like a tree sawed at the root, and fall to the ground in a great cloud of dust, the body shattered, the head a few steps from me, and only then did I realize how big that statue was. The head—you couldn't have embraced it with both arms, and it was staring at me sideways, like a person lying down, with the nose horizontal and the lips vertical, which, forgive me the expression, looked like those lips women have between their legs; and the pupils had fallen out of the eyes, and she seemed suddenly to have gone blind, Holy God, like this one here!" And he leaped backwards, splashing in all directions, because in the water the torch had suddenly illuminated a stone head, the size of ten human heads, which was propping up a column, and this head was also reclining, the mouth even more vulvular, half-open, with many snakes like curls on the head, and a mortiferous pallor of old ivory.
Niketas smiled: "That has been here for centuries. These are Medusa heads, from I don't know where, and they're used by builders as plinths. It doesn't take much to scare you...."
"I don't scare. The fact is: I've seen this face before. Somewhere else."
Seeing Baudolino upset, Niketas changed the subject: "You were telling me they pulled down the statue of Helen—"
"If only that were all.... Everything, every statue between the Hippodrome and the Forum—all the metal ones anyway. They climbed on top of them, wound a rope or a chain around the neck, and from the ground, pulled them down with two or three pairs of oxen. I saw all the statues of charioteers come down, a sphinx, a hippopotamus and a crocodile from Egypt, a great she-wolf with Romulus and Remus attached to the teats, and the statue of Hercules—that, too, I discovered, was so big that the thumb was like the chest of a normal man.... And also that bronze obelisk with those reliefs, the one topped by the little woman who turns according to the winds...."
"The Companion of the Wind. What a disaster! Some works were by ancient pagan sculptors, older even than the Romans. But why? Why?"
"To melt them down. The first thing you do when you put a city to the sack is melt down everything you can't carry off. They've set up melting pots everywhere, and you can imagine—with all these fine houses in flames, they're like natural foundries. And you also saw those men in the church; they can't go around showing they've stolen the pyxes and the patens from the tabernacles. Melt everything down: and quickly! A sack," Baudolino explained, like a man who knows a trade well, "is like a grape harvest: you have to divide the tasks. There are those who press the grapes, those who carry off the must in the tuns, those who cook for the others, others who go to fetch the good wine from last year.... A sack is a serious job—at least if you want to make sure that in the city not a stone remains on a stone, as in my Mediolanum days. But for that you'd really want the Pavians; they knew how to make a city disappear. These men here have everything to learn. They pulled down the statue, then sat on it to have a drink, then another man arrived dragging a girl along by the hair and shouting that she was a virgin, and they all had to stick in a finger to see if it was worth it.... In a proper sack you have to clean the place out immediately, house by house, and the fun comes afterwards; otherwise the smartest get all the best stuff. Anyway, my problem was that with people like this I didn't have time to explain that I too was born in the Monferrato region. So there was only one thing to be done. I crouched behind the corner until a knight came into the alley, so drunk he seemed not to know where he was going and was letting his horse carry him. I had only to yank his leg, and he fell down. I took off his helmet, and I dropped a stone on his head...."
"You killed him?"
"No. It was friable stone, barely hard enough to leave him unconscious. I took heart because he began vomiting up some purplish liquid. I took off his coat of mail and his shirt, his helmet, weapons, I took his horse, and rode off through the streets until I arrived at the portal of Saint Sophia. I saw them going in with mules, and a group of soldiers passed me carrying off the silver candelabra with their chains as thick as your arm, and they were talking like Lombards. When I saw that destruction, that wickedness, that greed, I lost my head, because the ones wreaking that ruin were men from my land, devout sons of the pope of Rome...."
Their torches were sputtering as the two of them talked, but soon they climbed from the cistern into the dead of night and, by way of deserted alleys, they reached the tower of the Genoese.
They knocked at a door, and someone came down; they were welcomed and fed with rough cordiality. Baudolino seemed to be at home among these people, and he promptly recommended Niketas to them. One man said: "That's easy, we'll take care of it. Go and sleep now." He said this with such confidence that not only Baudolino but Niketas himself passed a serene night.
3. Baudolino explains to Niketas what he wrote as a boy
The next morning Baudolino collected the cleverest of the Genoese: Pevere, Boiamondo, Grillo, and Taraburlo. Niketas told them where his family could be found, and the men set off. Niketas then asked for some wine and poured a cup for Baudolino. "See if you like this. It's a resinous wine that many Latins find disgusting; they say it tastes of mold." Assured by Baudolino that this Greek nectar was his favorite drink, Niketas settled down to hear his story.
Baudolino seemed eager to talk, as if to free himself from things he had been keeping inside since God knows when. "Here, Master Niketas," he said, opening a leather bag he carried around his neck and handing him a parchment. "This is the beginning of my story."
Niketas tried to decipher the words, and though he could read Latin letters he could understand nothing.
"What is this?" he asked. "I mean—what language is this written in?"
"I don't know what language. Let's begin this way, Master Niketas. You have an idea of where Ianua is—Genoa, I mean—and Mediolanum, or Mailand, as the Teutonics or Germanics say, the Alamans, as your people call them. Well, halfway between these two cities there are two rivers, the Tanaro and the Bormida, and between the two there is a plain that, when it isn't hot enough to cook eggs on a stone, there is fog, when there isn't fog, there's snow, when there isn't snow, there's ice, and when there isn't ice, it's cold all the same. That's where I was born, in a place called the Frascheta Marincana, which is also a swamp between the two rivers. It's not exactly like the banks of the Propontis."
"I can imagine."
"But I liked it. The air keeps you company. I have done much traveling, Master Niketas, maybe even as far as Greater India...."
"Are you sure?"
"No, I don't really know where I got to. It was the place where I saw some men with horns and others with their mouth on their belly. I spent weeks in endless deserts, on plains that stretched as far as the eye could see, and I always felt like a prisoner of something that surpassed the powers of my imagination. In my parts, when you walk through the woods in the fog, you feel like you're still inside your mother's belly, you're not afraid of anything, and you feel free. Even when there's no fog, when you're walking along and you're thirsty, you break of
f an icicle from a tree, and you blow on your fingers because they're covered with gheloni—"
"What are these ... these gheloni? Something that makes you laugh?"
"No, no, I didn't say gheloioi! Here in your country there isn't even a word for it, so I had to use my own. They are like sores that form on your fingers, and on your knuckles, because of the great cold, and they itch, and if you scratch them, they hurt."
"You talk as if you had a pleasant memory of them."
"Cold is beautiful."
"Each of us loves his native land. Go on."
"Well, once upon a time the Romans were there, the ones from Rome, who spoke Latin, not the Romans you claim to be today, you Greek-speakers, that we call Romei or Greculi, excuse the term. Then the empire of those Romans disappeared, and in Rome only the pope was left, and all through Italy you saw different people who spoke different languages. The people of Frascheta speak one language, but in Terdona, nearby, they speak a different one. Traveling in Italy with Frederick, I heard some very sweet languages, compared to our Frascheta language, which isn't really a language, more like a dog's yawping. But nobody writes in that language, because they still do that in Latin. So when I was scrawling on this parchment, I was maybe the first to try to write the way we talked. Afterwards I became a man of letters and I wrote in Latin."
"But ... what are you saying?"
"As you can see, living among educated people, I knew what year it was. I was writing in Anno Domini 1155. I didn't know my age: my father said twelve; my mother thought it was thirteen, maybe because all she had gone through, trying to bring me up in the fear of God, made the time seem longer to her. When I started writing I was certainly going on fourteen. Between April and December I'd learned how to write. I applied myself ardently, after the emperor had taken me away with him, setting myself to work in every situation: in the camp, under a tent, leaning against the wall of a destroyed house. On slabs of wood mostly, once in a great while on parchment. I was already becoming accustomed to living like Frederick, who never stayed in the same place more than a few months, always and only in winter, and for the rest of the year on the march, sleeping every night in a different place."