Baudolino (28 page)

"And why could you tell it to me?"

"Because, now, when I tell you, all those who were connected with my story are no more. Only I remain. Now you are as necessary to me as the air I breathe. I will come with you to Selymbria."

As soon as he had recovered from the wounds suffered at Legnano, Frederick called for Baudolino, along with the imperial chancellor, Christian of Buch. If the letter of Prester John was to be taken
seriously, it was best to begin at once. Christian read the parchment that Baudolino showed him, and, clever chancellor that he was, he voiced some objections. The writing, to begin with, did not seem to him worthy of a chancellery. That letter was to circulate among the papal court, the courts of France and England, reach the basileus of Byzantium, and therefore it had to be formed as important documents are prepared throughout the Christian world. Then, he said, it would take time to make seals that really looked like seals. If a serious job was to be done, it had to be done scrupulously.

How was the letter to be purveyed to the other chancelleries? If it was sent by the chancellery of the empire, it would not be credible. What? Prester John writes you privately to enable you to find him in a land unknown to all, and you let it be known
lippis et tonsoribus,
so that someone else could arrive there before you? Rumors concerning the letter should certainly spread, not only to legitimize a future expedition, but above all to astound the whole Christian world—but all this had to happen a little bit at a time, as if a profound secret were being divulged.

Baudolino suggested using his friends. They would be agents above suspicion, scholars of the
studium
of Paris and not Frederick's men. Abdul could contraband the letter in the kingdoms of the Holy Land, Boron in England, Kyot in France, and Rabbi Solomon could see it reached the Jews living in the Byzantine empire.

So the following months were spent on these various tasks, and Baudolino found himself directing a
scriptorium
where all his old companions were at work. Frederick from time to time asked for news. He had ventured the suggestion that the offer of the Grasal be a bit more explicit. Baudolino explained the reasons why it was best left vague, but he realized that this symbol of royal and priestly power had fascinated the emperor.

As they were debating these matters, Frederick was again beset with new trials. He now had to resign himself to seeking an agreement with Pope Alexander III. Seeing that the rest of the world did not take very seriously the imperial antipopes, the emperor would agree to pay Alexander homage and acknowledge him as the sole and genuine Roman pontiff—and this was a big step—but in return the pope had to make up his mind to withdraw all support of the Lombard communes—and this was even bigger. Was it worthwhile—both Frederick and Christian asked themselves at this point—while extremely cautious plots were being woven, to provoke the pope with a renewed call for the union of
sacerdotium
and
imperium?
These delays made Baudolino champ at the bit, but he could not protest.

Indeed, Frederick removed him from his plans, sending him on a very delicate mission to Venice, in April of 1177. It was a matter of organizing with great care the various details of the meeting that, in July, would take place between pope and emperor. The reconciliation ceremony should be arranged in every detail and no untoward incident should disturb it.

"Christian was particularly afraid that your basileus might want to provoke some disturbance, to make the meeting fail. You must know that for some time Manuel Comnenius had been plotting with the pope, and certainly that agreement between Alexander and Frederick would foil his plans."

"It scotched them forever. For ten years Manuel had been proposing to the pope the reunification of the two churches: he would recognize the religious primacy of the pope and the pope would recognize the basileus of Byzantium as the sole, authentic Roman emperor, of both East and West. But with such a pact Alexander did not gain much power in Constantinople and he wouldn't get Frederick out of his way in Italy and would perhaps alarm the other European sovereigns. So he was choosing the alliance most advantageous for himself."

"But your basileus sent spies to Venice. They passed themselves off as monks...."

"Probably they were monks. In our empire the men of the Church work for their basileus, and not against him. But as far as I can understand—and remember, at that time I was not yet at court—they did not send anyone to stir up trouble. Manuel was resigned to the inevitable. Perhaps he wanted only to be informed about what was happening."

"Master Niketas, surely you know, since you were logothete of countless secrets, that when spies from opposing sides meet on the same field of intrigue, the most natural thing is for them to maintain relations of cordial friendship, each confiding his own secrets to the others. Thus they run no risk of stealing them from one another, and they look very clever to those who have sent them. And so it happened between us and those monks: we immediately told one another why we were there, we to spy on them, and they to spy on us, and afterwards we spent some delightful days together."

"These are things an astute statesman foresees, but what else should he do? If he questioned the foreign spies directly—and, for that matter, he doesn't know them—they would tell him nothing. So he sends his own spies, with secrets of scant importance to reveal, and comes to know the things he should know, which usually are known already to everyone save himself," Niketas said.

"Among these monks there was a certain Zosimos of Chalcedon. I was struck by his haggard face, a pair of eyes like carbuncles constantly rolling, illuminating a great black beard, and by his very long hair. When he spoke, he seemed to be talking with a crucified man, bleeding two palms' length from his face."

"I know the type. Our monasteries are full of them. They die very young, of consumption."

"Not him. In my whole life I have never seen such a glutton. One evening I even took him to the house of two Venetian courtesans, who, as you probably know, are specially famous among the practitioners of that art as old as the world. By three in the morning I was
drunk and I left, but he stayed on and, some time later, one of the girls told me she had never had to deal with such a demon."

"I know the type. Our monasteries are full of them. They die very young, of consumption."

Baudolino and Zosimos had become, if not friends, companions in debauchery. Their association began when, after a first and generous drinking bout together, Zosimos uttered a horrible blasphemy and said that he would have given, that night, all the victims of the massacre of the innocents for a maid of indulgent morality. Asked if that was what was taught in the monasteries of Byzantium, Zosimos replied: "As Saint Basil taught, there are two demons that can trouble the intellect, that of fornication and that of blasphemy. But the second operates briefly and the first, if it does not agitate our thought with passion, does not prevent the contemplation of God." They went immediately to demonstrate obedience, without passion, to the demon of fornication, and Baudolino realized that Zosimos had, for every situation in life, a maxim from some theologian or hermit that made him feel at peace with himself.

On another occasion they were again drinking together, and Zosimos was singing the praises of Constantinople. Baudolino was embarrassed, because he could tell him only about the back streets of Paris, full of the excrement people flung from the windows, or about the sullen waters of the Tanaro, which could hardly compare with the gilded sea of the Propontis. Nor could he tell him of the
mirabilia urbis Mediolani,
because Frederick had ordered all of them destroyed. He didn't know how to silence his companion. So, to amaze him, he showed him the letter of Prester John, as if to say that somewhere there was an empire that made Zosimos's look like a barren heath.

Zosimos had barely read the first line when he asked, suspiciously: "Presbyter Johannes? Who is he?"

"You don't know?"

"Happy is he who has attained that ignorance beyond which it is not licit to proceed."

"You may proceed. Read on!"

He read on, with eyes that became more and more fiery, then he put down the parchment and said, in a detached tone: "Ah yes, Prester John. In my monastery I read many accounts by those who had visited his kingdom."

"But before reading this, you didn't even know who he was."

"The cranes form letters in their flight without knowing the art of writing. This letter tells of a Priest named John and it lies, but it speaks of a real kingdom, which in the accounts I have read is that of the Lord of the Indias."

Baudolino was ready to bet that this rogue was guessing, but Zosimos didn't give him time to doubt sufficiently.

"The Lord asks three things of the man who is baptized: true faith of his soul, sincerity of his tongue, and continence of his body. This letter of yours cannot have been written by the Lord of the Indias because it contains too many errors. For example, it names many extraordinary creatures of those parts, but says nothing of—let me think—nothing, for example, of the methagallinarii, of the thinsiretae, and of the cametheterni."

"And what are they?"

"What are they? Why the first thing that happens to anyone who arrives in the region of Prester John is that he encounters a thinsireta and if he isn't prepared to confront it ... scrunch ... he's devoured in one mouthful. Eh, those are places when you can't just go as if you were going to Jerusalem, where at most you find a camel or two, a crocodile, a pair of elephants, and such. Furthermore, the letter seems suspicious to me because it's very odd it should be addressed to your emperor rather than to our basileus, since the kingdom of this John is closer to the empire of Byzantium than to that of the Latins."

"You speak as if you knew where it is."

"I don't know exactly where it is, but I'd know how to go there, because he who knows the destination knows also the way to it."

"Then why have none of your Romei ever gone?"

"Who told you no one ever tried to go there? I could say that if the basileus Manuel ventured into the lands of the sultan of Iconium, it was precisely to open the way towards the realm of the Lord of the Indias."

"You could say it, but you haven't."

"Because our glorious army was defeated in those very lands, at Myriocephalum, two years ago. And now, before our basileus can mount a new expedition, it will take some time. But if I had great funds at my disposal, and a band of well-armed men capable of facing a thousand difficulties, with an idea of which direction to take, I would have only to set out. Then, along the way, you inquire, you follow the advice of the natives ... There would be many signs, and once you were on the right road you would begin to see trees that flourish only in those lands and to come upon animals that live only down there, like the methagallinarii, in fact."

"Three cheers for the methagallinarii," Baudolino said, raising his glass. Zosimos invited him to join in a toast to the kingdom of Prester John. Then he challenged him to drink the health of Manuel, and Baudolino agreed provided Zosimos drink the health of Frederick. Then they drank to the pope, to Venice, to the two courtesans they had met a few evenings before, and in the end Baudolino collapsed first, asleep, with his head on the table, while he could still hear Zosimos's laborious muttering: "This is the monk's life: never act with curiosity, never walk with the unjust, never snatch with your hands...."

The next morning Baudolino said, his tongue still thick, "Zosimos, you're a rascal. You haven't the slightest idea where your Lord of the Indias is. You want to set out on instinct, and when somebody tells you he saw a methagallinarius over there, you go off in that direction and in no time you come to a palace all of precious stones,
you see some character and you say good morning, Father John, how are you? You can tell this sort of thing to your basileus, not to me."

"But I happen to have a good map," Zosimos said, opening his eyes.

Baudolino objected that, even with a good map, everything would still remain vague and hard to decide, because everyone knows that maps are not precise, especially for places where, at most, Alexander the Great has been, and no one else after him. And he made a rough sketch of the map drawn by Abdul.

Zosimos burst out laughing. Of course, if Baudolino followed the most perverse and heretical idea that the earth is a sphere, he couldn't even begin the journey.

"Either you trust the Holy Scriptures, or else you're a pagan who still thinks the way they thought before Alexander—who, for that matter, was incapable of leaving us any map. The Scriptures say that not only the earth but the whole universe is made in the form of a tabernacle, or, rather, that Moses built his tabernacle as a faithful copy of the universe, from the earth to the firmament."

"But the ancient philosophers..."

"The ancient philosophers, not yet enlightened by the word of the Lord, invented the Antipodes, while in the Acts of the Apostles it says that God from one man devised our humankind to inhabit the entire face of the earth, its face—not the other side, which doesn't exist. And Luke's Gospel says that the Lord gave the apostles the power to walk on serpents and scorpions, and to walk means to walk above something, not below. Anyway, if the earth were a sphere and suspended in the vacuum, it would have neither an above nor a below, and so there would be no sense, no direction in the walking. Who thought the heavens were a sphere? The Chaldean sinners from the top of the tower of Babel, insofar as they were able to erect it, misled by the feeling of terror that the looming sky inspired in them! What Pythagoras or what Aristotle has been able to announce the resurrection of the dead? And would ignoramuses of that stripe have understood the shape of the world? Would this world shaped like a sphere have served to predict the rising or setting of the sun, or the day on which Easter falls, whereas most humble people, who have studied neither philosophy nor astronomy, know very well when the sun sets and when it rises, according to the seasons, and in different countries they calculate Easter in the same way, without deceiving themselves? Is it necessary to know a geometry other than the one a good carpenter knows, or an astronomy different from what a peasant observes when he sows and when he reaps? And besides, what ancient philosophers are you talking to me about? Do you Latins know Xenophanes of Colophon, who, while asserting that the world was infinite, denied that it was spherical? The ignoramus can say that, considering the universe like a tabernacle, you can't explain eclipses or equinoxes. Well, in the empire of us Romans, centuries ago there lived a great sage, Cosmas Indicopleustes, who traveled to the very confines of the world, and in his
Christian Topography
demonstrated in irrefutable fashion that the earth truly is in the form of a tabernacle, and that only thus can we explain the most obscure phenomena. Could you say that the most Christian of kings—John, I mean—would not follow the most Christian of topographies, which is not only that of Cosmas, but also that of the Holy Scriptures?"