Baudolino

  "We're transfiguring it."

  "Yes."

  "Perhaps it was because in the chaos of those days I had lost the sense of what's right and what's wrong, perhaps I was just tired, Master Niketas. I consented. The Poet went off to trade the Sydoine, ours, or, rather, mine, or, rather, the deacon's, for the Mandylion."

  Baudolino started laughing, and Niketas couldn't understand why.

  "The trick. We learned of it that evening. The Poet went to the tavern he knew, made his infamous bargain, to get the Syrian drunk he got drunk himself, he came out, was followed by someone who was aware of his dealings, perhaps the Syrian himself—who, as the Poet said, was of his same race—he was attacked in an alley, beaten half to death, and he came home, more drunk than Noah, bleeding, bruised, without Sydoine and without Mandylion. I wanted to kick the life out of him, but he was a finished man. For the second time he had lost a kingdom. In the days that followed we had to force him to eat. I told myself I was glad that I had never had too many ambitions, if the defeat of one ambition could reduce a man to that state. Then I admitted that I, too, was the victim of many frustrated ambitions, I had lost my beloved father, I had not found for him the kingdom, I had lost forever the woman I loved ... In short, I had learned that the Demiurge had done things halfway, whereas the Poet still believed that in this world some victory is possible."

  At the beginning of April our friends became aware that Constantinople's days were numbered. There had been a very dramatic quarrel between the doge Dandolo, erect at the prow of a galley, and Murzuphlus, who rebuked him from the shore, ordering the Latins to leave his lands. It was clear that Murzuphlus had gone mad and the Latins, if they chose, could swallow him with one gulp. Beyond the Golden Horn the preparations in the pilgrims' camp could clearly be seen, and on the decks of the ships at anchor there was a great bustle of sailors and men-at-arms making ready for the attack.

  Boidi and Baudolino said that, since they had a bit of money, this was the moment to leave Constantinople, because, when it came to defeated cities, they had already seen more than enough. Boron and Kyot agreed, but the Poet asked for a few more days. He had recovered from his setback and obviously wanted to exploit the last hours to make his final coup, though what that was he didn't even know himself. He was already beginning to have a madman's look in his eyes, but, of course, there's no arguing with madmen. They contented him, saying it was enough to keep an eye on the ships to understand when the moment came to head inland.

  The Poet was gone for two days, and that was too long. In fact, on the Friday morning before Palm Sunday, he still hadn't come back and the pilgrims had begun to attack from the sea, between the Blachernae and the Evergete monastery, more or less in the area known as Petria, north of the walls of Constantine.

  It was too late to pass beyond the walls, now manned on all sides. Cursing their vagabond companion, Baudolino and the others decided it was better to lie low with the Genoese, because that district didn't seem threatened. They waited, and hour by hour they learned the news from Petria.

  The pilgrims' ships were bristling with obsidional constructions. Murzuphlus was positioned on a little hill behind the walls with all his chiefs and courtiers, and banners, and trumpeters. Despite that show, the imperials were fighting well; the Latins had assayed various assaults but had always been thrown back, with Greeklings cheering from the walls, and baring their behinds to the defeated, while Murzuphlus swaggered as if he had done everything himself, ordering the trumpets to sound victory.

  Thus it seemed that Dandolo and the other leaders had given up the idea of taking the city, and Saturday and Sunday passed quietly, even though all remained tense. Baudolino seized the opportunity to comb Constantinople thoroughly, trying to find the Poet, but in vain.

  It was Sunday night when their companion returned. His gaze was even wilder than before; he said nothing, and set to drinking silently until the next morning.

  It was at the first light of dawn on Monday that the pilgrims resumed the attack, which lasted all day; the ladders of the Venetian ships were successfully attached to some towers on the walls, the attackers entered; no, it had been only one, a giant, with a turreted helmet, who frightened the defenders and set them fleeing. Or else, some landed, found a bricked-up postern, destroyed it with blows of a pick, making a gap in the wall, yes, but they were driven back, though some towers had already been conquered....

  The Poet paced back and forth in the room like a caged animal, he seemed anxious for the battle somehow to be resolved, he looked at Baudolino as if to tell him something, then gave up, and studied with grim eyes the movements of his other three comrades. At a certain point news came that Murzuphlus had fled, abandoning his army, the defenders had lost the little courage remaining to them, the pilgrims had broken through, passed the walls: they didn't dare enter the city because darkness was falling, so they set fire to the first houses, to flush out any hidden defenders. "The third fire, in the space of a few months," the Genoese groaned, "but this isn't a city any more; it's become a heap of dung to be burned when it's too high!"

  "Damn you," Boidi shouted at the Poet. "If it hadn't been for you we'd have been out of this dunghill! What now?"

  "Now you shut up, and I know why, all right!" the Poet muttered to him.

  During the night the first glow from the fire was visible. At dawn Baudolino, who seemed to be sleeping, though his eyes were open, saw the Poet approach first Boidi, then Boron, and finally Kyot, and whisper something in each ear. Then he vanished. A little later Baudolino saw Kyot and Boron conferring, taking something from their packs before leaving the house, trying not to wake him.

  Still later, Boidi came to him and shook his arm. He was aghast: "Baudolino," he said, "I don't know what's going on, but they're all crazy here. The Poet came to me and said these very words: I've found Zosimos, and now I know where the Grasal is, don't try to be smart, take your Baptist's head and be at Katabates, in the place where Zosimos received the basileus that time, by this afternoon, you know the way. What's this Katabates? What basileus was he talking about? Didn't he tell you anything?"

  "No," Baudolino said. "On the contrary, it seems he wants to keep me in the dark. And he was so confused that he didn't remember it was Boron and Kyot who were with us, years ago, when we went to capture Zosimos at Katabates, not you. Now I want to get a clear picture."

  He looked for Boiamondo. "Listen," he said to him, "remember the evening, many years ago, when you took us to that crypt underneath the old monastery of Katabates? Now I have to go back there."

  "If that's what you want. You have to reach that pavilion near the church of the Holy Apostles. Maybe you can get there without finding the pilgrims, who probably haven't got there yet. If you come back, it will mean I'm right."

  "Yes, but I should arrive there without arriving there. I mean: I can't explain it to you, but I have to follow—or precede—someone who will take that same road, and I don't want to be seen. I remember there are many tunnels underneath. Can you get there by some other way?"

  Boiamondo began laughing. "If you're not afraid of the dead ... You can enter from another pavilion near the Hippodrome, and I think you can still get there from here. Then you proceed underground for quite a way, and you're in the cemetery of the monks of Katabates, which nobody knows still exists, but it does. The cemetery tunnels lead to the crypt, but if you like, you can stop before then."

  "Will you take me?"

  "Baudolino, friendship is sacred, but my skin is even more sacred. I'll explain it all to you carefully; you're a smart boy and you'll find the way by yourself. All right?"

  Boiamondo described the road to take, gave him also two wellresinated pieces of wood. Baudolino went back to Boidi and asked him if he was afraid of the dead. Not me, he said; I'm afraid only of the living. "This is what we'll do," Baudolino said to him. "You take your Baptist's head and I'll accompany you there. You'll go to your appointment and I'll hide a bit earlier, to find out what that madman has on
his mind."

  "Let's go," Boidi said.

  At the moment they were leaving, Baudolino thought for an instant, then went back and took his own Baptist's head, which he wrapped in a rag, and put under his arm. Then he thought again, and into his belt he thrust the two Arab daggers he had bought at Gallipolis.

  38. Baudolino settles scores

  Baudolino and Boidi reached the Hippodrome area as the flames of the fire were coming closer; they forced their way through a crowd of terrified Romei, who didn't know which way to escape, because some shouted that the pilgrims were coming from this direction, others from that. The two found the pavilion, forced a door locked by a weak chain, entered the underground passage, lighting the torches they had been given by Boiamondo.

  They walked for a long time, because obviously the passage led from the Hippodrome to the walls of Constantine. Then they climbed some dank steps, and began to smell a deathly stink. It wasn't the smell of recently dead flesh; it was, so to speak, the smell of a smell, smell of flesh that had rotted and then somehow dried up.

  They entered a corridor (and could see others opening out to right and left along its course), in whose walls a series of niches opened, inhabited by a subterranean population of the almost living dead. They were dead, no doubt about that, those fully dressed beings, who stood erect in their recesses, supported perhaps by iron spikes that held their backs; but time seemed not to have completed its work of destruction, because those dry, leather-colored faces, in which empty sockets gaped, often marked by a toothless grin, gave an impression of life. They were not skeletons, but bodies apparently drained by a force that from inside had dried and crumbled the viscera, leaving intact not only the bones but also the skin, and perhaps part of the muscles.

  "Master Niketas, we had come upon a network of catacombs where for centuries the monks of Katabates had placed the corpses of their brothers, without burying them, because some miraculous conjunction of the soil, the air, and some substance that dripped from the tufa walls of that labyrinth preserved them almost intact."

  "I thought they didn't do that any more, and I didn't know anything about the Katabates cemetery, a sign that this city still retains some mysteries that none of us knows. But I had heard tell of how certain monks in the past, to assist the work of nature, let their brothers' corpses steep among the tufa humors for eight months, then extracted them, washed them with vinegar, exposed them to the air for a few days, dressed them, and replaced them in their niches, so that somehow the balsamic air of that setting would ensure their dried immortality."

  Proceeding along that line of deceased monks, each dressed in liturgical vestments, as if they were still to officiate, kissing gleaming ikons with their livid lips, Baudolino and Boidi glimpsed faces with taut, ascetic smiles, others to which the devout survivors had pasted beards and mustaches to make them look hieratic as in the past, their eyelids closed so they would seem asleep, still others with the head now reduced to a mere skull, but with hard, leathery bits of skin attached to the cheekbones. Some had been deformed by the centuries, and appeared like prodigies of nature, fetuses clumsily taken from the maternal womb, inhuman beings on whose contracted forms unnatural, arabesqued chasubles appeared, the colors now dulled, dalmatics that you would have thought embroidered but were gnawed by the work of the years and by some worm of the catacombs. From still others the clothing had fallen, now crumbled by the centuries, and beneath the shreds of their vestments appeared scrawny little bodies, the ribs covered by an epidermis taut as the skin of a drum.

  "If it was piety that conceived that sacred representation," Baudolino said to Niketas, "the survivors were impious, as they had imposed the memory of those deceased as a constant, looming threat, in no way meant to reconcile the living with death. How can you pray for the soul of someone who is staring at you from those walls, saying I am here, and I will never move from here? How can you hope for the resurrection of the flesh and the transfiguration of our earthly bodies after the Last Judgment, if those bodies are still there, decaying day after day? I, unfortunately, had seen corpses in my life, and at least I could hope that, dissolved into the earth, one day they might dazzle, beautiful and rubicund as a rose. If, up there on high, after the end of time, people like this would be moving about, I said to myself, then better Hell that burns here and hacks there. In Hell, at least it should resemble what happens in our world. Boidi, less sensitive than I to mortality, tried to lift those vestments to see the state of the pudenda, for if somebody shows you such things, how can you complain if somebody else thinks of those other things?"

  Before the network of passages ended, they found themselves in a circular place, where the vault was perforated by an airshaft that revealed, up above, the afternoon sky. Obviously, at ground level, a well served to give air to that place. They put out the torches. No longer illuminated by the flames, but instead by that livid light diffused among the niches, the monks' bodies seemed even more disturbing. They gave the impression that, touched by daylight, they were about to rise again. Boidi made the sign of the cross.

  Finally, the corridor they had taken ended in the ambulacrum behind the columns that encircled the crypt where, the last time, they had seen Zosimos. Glimpsing some lights, they approached, on tiptoe. The crypt was as it had been before, illuminated by two lighted tripods. Only the circular basin used by Zosimos for his necromancy was missing. In front of the iconostasis Boron and Kyot were already waiting, nervous. Baudolino suggested to Boidi that he arrive, emerging between the two columns flanking the iconostasis, as if he had followed the same route, while Baudolino himself would remain hidden.

  Boidi did so, and the other two received him without surprise. "So the Poet explained to you how to get here," Boron said. "We think he said nothing to Baudolino; otherwise why all the secrecy? Do you have any idea why he wants us to meet?"

  "He talked about Zosimos, and the Grasal; he made some strange threats."

  "Us, too." Kyot and Boron agreed.

  They heard a voice, and it seemed to come from the Pantocrator of the iconostasis. Baudolino noticed that the eyes of the Christ were two black almonds, a sign that behind the icon someone was watching what went on in the crypt. Though distorted, the voice was recognizable, and it was the Poet's. "Welcome," the voice said. "You don't see me, but I see you. I am armed with a bow, I could easily shoot you before you can escape."

  "But why, Poet? What have we done to you?" Boron asked, frightened.

  "What you have done you know better than I. But we must get to the point. Enter, wretch." A stifled moan was heard, and from behind the iconostasis a groping form appeared.

  Though time had passed, though that man dragging himself forward was withered and bent, though his hair and beard had now become white, they recognized Zosimos.

  "Yes, it's Zosimos," the Poet's voice said. "I came upon him yesterday, by pure chance, while he was begging in a lane. He's blind, his limbs are bent, but it's Zosimos. Now, Zosimos, tell our friends what happened to you when you fled from Ardzrouni's castle."

  Zosimos, in a whining voice, began his narration. He had stolen the head in which he had hidden the Grasal, he had fled, but he had not only never possessed but had never seen any map of Cosmas, and he didn't know where to go. He wandered until his mule died, dragged himself through the most inhospitable lands of the world, his eyes—seared by the sun—now made him confuse east with west, and north with south. He happened upon a city inhabited by Christians, who succored him. He said he was the last of the Magi, because the others had achieved the peace of the Lord and lay in a church in the distant West. He said, in hieratic tone, that in the reliquary he was carrying the Holy Grasal, to be delivered to Prester John. His hosts had somehow heard tell of both, they prostrated themselves before him, carried him in solemn procession into their church, where he began sitting on an episcopal seat, every day dispensing oracles, giving advice on the handling of things, eating and drinking his fill, surrounded by the respect of all.

&nbsp
; In short, as the last of the most holy Kings, and keeper of the Holy Grasal, he became the maximum spiritual authority of that community. Every morning he said Mass, and at the moment of the elevation, besides the sacred host, he displayed his reliquary, and the faithful knelt, saying they could smell celestial perfumes.

  The faithful also brought lost women to him, so he could lead them back to the straight path. He told them that God's mercy is infinite, and he summoned them to the church when evening had fallen, to spend with them, he said, the night in continuous prayer. Word spread that he had transformed those lost souls into so many Magdalenes, who devoted themselves to his service. During the day they prepared for him the choicest foods, brought him the most exquisite wines, sprinkled him with scented oils. At night they kept vigil with him before the altar, Zosimos said, so the following morning he appeared with his eyes hollow from that penitence. Zosimos had finally found his Paradise, and decided he would never leave that blessed place.

  Zosimos now heaved a long sigh, then passed his hands over his eyes, as if in that darkness he could still see a most painful scene. "My friends," he said, "whatever thought that comes to you, you must always ask it: are you on our side or do you come from the enemy? I forgot to follow that holy maxim, and to the entire city I promised that, for Holy Easter, I would open the reliquary and finally display the Grasal. On Good Friday, alone, I opened the case, and in it I found one of those disgusting death's heads that Ardzrouni had placed there. I swear I had hidden the Grasal in the first reliquary on the left, and that was the one I took before running away. But some-one—surely one of you—had changed the order of the reliquaries, and the one I took didn't contain the Grasal. A man who is hammering an iron bar first thinks what he wants to make of it: a sickle, a sword, or an axe. I decided to remain silent. Father Agatone lived for three years with a stone in his mouth, until he was able to practice silence. So to all I said that I had been visited by an angel of the Lord, who had told me there were still too many sinners in the city, hence no one was yet worthy to see that holy object. The evening of Holy Saturday I spent, as every honest monk must, in mortifications, excessive, I think, because the next morning I felt exhausted, as if I had passed the night, God forgive me even the very thought, amid libations and fornications. I officiated, staggering, and, at the solemn moment when I was to display the reliquary to the devout, I stumbled on the top step of the altar, tumbling down. The reliquary slipped from my hands, and as it struck the ground, it opened, and all could see it contained no Grasal, but, rather, a dried-up skull. There is nothing more unjust than the punishment of the just man who has sinned, my friends, because the worst of sinners is forgiven the last of his crimes, but the just man is not even forgiven his first. Those devout people felt they had been defrauded by me, who until three days before, God is my witness, had acted in perfect good faith. They fell upon me, tore off my clothes, beat me with clubs that broke my legs forever, and my arms and back, then they dragged me into their tribunal, where they decided to tear out my eyes. They drove me out of the gates of the city, like a mangy cur. You don't know how much I suffered. I wandered, begging, blind and crippled. And crippled and blind, after long years of wandering, I was picked up by a caravan of Saracen merchants who were coming to Constantinople. The only pity I received was from the infidels, may God reward them and not damn them as they would deserve. I returned a few years ago to this my city, where I have lived by begging, and luckily a good soul one day led me by the hand to the ruins of this monastery, where I can recognize the places by touch, and since then I have been able to spend the nights without suffering the cold, the heat, or the rain."