Baudolino (29 page)

"What I say is that my Prester John knows nothing of the topography of your Cosmas."

"You told me yourself that the Priest is a Nestorian. Now the Nestorians had a dramatic argument with other heretics, the Monophysites. The Monophysites held that the earth was made like a sphere, the Nestorians like a tabernacle. Cosmas was also known to be a Nestorian, or in any case a follower of Nestor's teacher, Theodore of Mopsuestia, who all his life fought against the Monophysite heresy of John Philoponus of Alexandria, who followed pagan philosophers like Aristotle. Cosmas a Nestorian, Prester John a Nestorian: both cannot but believe firmly in the earth as a tabernacle."

"Just a moment. Both your Cosmas and my Priest are Nestorians:
no argument there. But since, as far as I know, the Nestorians were wrong about Jesus and his mother, they could also be wrong about the shape of the universe, couldn't they?"

"This is where my finest reasoning comes into play! I want to demonstrate to you that—if you want to find Prester John—you must in any case stick with Cosmas and not the pagan topographers. Let us suppose for a moment that Cosmas wrote things that are false. Even so, these things are thought and believed by all the nations of the Orient that Cosmas visited, otherwise he wouldn't have learned them, in those lands beyond which lies the kingdom of Prester John, and surely the inhabitants of that kingdom itself think that the universe is in the form of a tabernacle, and they measure distances, confines, the course of rivers, the extension of seas, coasts, and gulfs, not to mention mountains, according to the wondrous design of the tabernacle."

"Once again, it doesn't seem a valid argument to me," Baudolino said. "The fact that they believe they live in a tabernacle doesn't mean they really do live in one."

"Let me finish my demonstration. If you asked me how to arrive at Chalcedon, where I was born, I could explain it to you easily. Perhaps I measure the days of travel in a way different from you, or perhaps I call right what you call left—in any case I have been told that the Saracens draw maps where the south is above and the north is below, and therefore the sun rises to the left of the lands they depict. But if you accept my way of representing the course of the sun and the shape of the earth, following my directions you would surely arrive at the place where I want to send you, while you would never understand them if you refer to your maps. So..." Zosimos concluded triumphantly, "if you want to reach the land of Prester John you must use the map of the world that Prester John would use and not your own—mind you, even if your map is more correct than his."

Baudolino was won over by the cogency of the argument and asked Zosimos to explain how Cosmas and, consequently, Prester
John saw the universe. "Ah no," Zosimos said. "I know very well where to find the map, but why must I give it to you and to your emperor?"

"If he were to give you enough gold to set out with a band of well-armed men."

"Exactly."

From that moment on, Zosimos didn't allow one word to escape him on the subject of Cosmas's map, or, rather, he hinted at it every now and then, when he reached the peak of intoxication, but tracing vaguely with his finger some mysterious curves in the air, then falling silent, as if he had said too much. Baudolino would pour him more wine and ask him apparently bizarre questions. "But when we are close to India, and our horses are exhausted, will we have to ride elephants?"

"Perhaps," Zosimos said, "because in India there live all the animals mentioned in your letter, and others besides, except for horses. Still they do have some, because they bring them in from Tzinista."

"What country is that?"

"A country where travelers go in search of worms for silk."

"Worms for silk? What does that mean?"

"It means that in Tzinista there exist some tiny eggs that are placed in women's bosoms and, enlivened by the warmth, they produce little worms. These are set on mulberry leaves, which nourish them. When they are grown they spin silk from their bodies and wrap themselves in it, as in a tomb. Then they turn into marvelous, varicolored butterflies and they break free of the cocoon. Before flying away, the males penetrate the females from behind and both live without food in the warmth of their embrace until they die and the female dies brooding over her eggs."

"There's no trusting a man who wants to make you believe silk comes from worms," Baudolino said to Niketas. "He was spying for his basileus, but he would have set out in search of the Lord of the
Indies even in Frederick's pay. Then, when he got there, we would never see him again. And yet his mention of the map of Cosmas excited me. That map appeared to me like the star of Bethlehem, except that it pointed in the opposite direction. It would tell me how to follow, backwards, the route of the Magi. And so, believing myself more clever than he, I prepared to lead him to excess in his intemperance, to make him duller and more talkative."

"And instead?"

"And instead he was more clever than I. The next day I couldn't find him anywhere, and some of his fellows told me he had returned to Constantinople. He left me a farewell message. It said: "As fish die if they remain out of water, so monks who linger outside the cell weaken the vigor of their union with God. These past days I have dried up in sin; let me find again the cool living water."

"Maybe it was the truth."

"Not at all. He had found the way to milk gold from his basileus. And to my harm."

The following July, Frederick arrived in Venice by sea, accompanied from Ravenna to Chioggia by the doge's son, then he reached the church of San Niccolò al Lido, and on Sunday the 24th, in Saint Mark's Square, prostrated himself at the feet of Alexander. The pope raised him and embraced him with a show of affection, and all the witnesses sang the
Te Deum.
It was truly a triumph, even if it was not clear for which of the two. In any case it ended a war that had lasted eighteen years, and in those same days the emperor signed a six-year truce with the communes of the Lombard League. Frederick was so happy that he decided to stay on in Venice for another month.

It was August when, one morning, Christian of Buch summoned Baudolino and his friends and asked them to come with him to the emperor. Arriving in Frederick's presence, Christian handed him, with a dramatic gesture, a parchment heavy with seals: "Here is the letter of Prester John," he said, "as it has reached me, confidentially, from the court of Byzantium."

"The letter?" Frederick exclaimed. "Why, we haven't yet sent it."

"In fact, this is not ours: it's another letter. It's not addressed to you, but to the basileus Manuel. For the rest, it's the same as ours."

"So this Prester John first offers an alliance to me and then he offers it to the Romei?" Frederick was enraged.

Baudolino was dumbfounded, because the Priest's letter, as he well knew, existed in a single draft, and he had written it. If the Priest existed, he could also have written another letter, but surely not this one. He asked permission to examine the document, and after glancing at it in haste, he said: "No, it's not exactly the same. There are some little variants. If you will allow me, Father, I'd like to study it more closely."

He withdrew with his friends, and together they read and reread the letter several times. First of all, it, too, was in Latin. Curious, Rabbi Solomon observed, because the Priest is sending it to the Greek basileus. In fact, it began:

The Priest Johannes, by the grace of God and power of Our Lord Jesus Christ, king of kings, greets Manuel, governor of the Romei, wishing him health and perpetual enjoyment of divine benediction.

"A second oddity," Baudolino said, "he calls Manuel governor of the Romei, and not basileus. So it surely wasn't written by a Greek in the imperial train. It was written by someone who doesn't recognize Manuel's title."

"Therefore," the Poet concluded, "by the real Prester John, who considers himself the
dominus dominantium.
"

"Let's proceed," Baudolino said, "and I'll show you some words and phrases that weren't in our letter."

Our majesty has learned that you held in high esteem our Excellency and that you had received word of our greatness. We have also learned from a secretary of ours that you desired to send us some things pleasing and interesting, for our delight. Being human, we gladly accept the gift, and through our apocrisiary, we are sending some token, desirous of knowing whether, like us, you follow the true faith and in every way be
lieve in Our Lord Jesus Christ. For while we are well aware of our mortality, your Greeklings believe that you are a god, even if we well know that you are mortal and subject to human corruption. In the breadth of our munificence, if you need something that may procure pleasure for you, inform us, either by a word to our apocrisiary or by a testimony of your affection.

"Here the oddities are too numerous," Rabbi Solomon said. "On the one hand he treats the basileus and his Greeklings with condescension and contempt approaching insult, on the other, for 'secretary' he uses the term
apocrisiarius,
which I believe is Greek."

"Its precise meaning is ambassador," Baudolino said, "but listen to this: where we said that at the Priest's table sit the metropolitan of Samarkand and the archpriest of Susa, here it's written that there are the
protopapas Samargantinum
and the
archiprotopapas de Susis.
And, further, among the wonders of the kingdom is mentioned an herb called
assidios,
which drives out evil spirits. Again, three Greek terms."

"So," the Poet said, "the letter is written by a Greek, but one who uses Greek very badly. I don't understand."

Abdul meanwhile had picked up the parchment. "There's something else: where we mentioned the pepper harvest, there are added details. And here it says that in John's kingdom there are few horses. And here where we merely named salamanders, it says they are a species of worm, which wrap themselves in a kind of film like the worms that produce silk, and the film is then washed by the palace women to make royal cloths and dress which are washed only in a violent fire."

"What? What?" Baudolino asked, alarmed.

"And finally," Abdul went on, "in the list of creatures that inhabit the kingdom, among the horned men, the fauns and satyrs, the pygmies, the cynocephali, there also appear methagallinarii, cametheterni, and thinsiretae—all creatures we didn't name."

"By the Virgin Mother of God!" Baudolino exclaimed. "That worm story was told me by Zosimos! And it was Zosimos who also told me that, according to Cosmas Indicopleustes, in India horses don't exist! And it was Zosimos who told me of methagallinarii and those other beasts! Son of a whore, pot of excrement, liar, thief, hypocrite, trimmer and counterfeiter, adulterer, glutton, coward, voluptuary, sodomite, usurer, simoniac, necromancer, sower of discord, cheat!"

"Why, what did he do to you?"

"Haven't you realized that yet? The evening that I showed him the letter, he got me drunk and made a copy of it! Then he went back to that shit of a basileus of his, told him that Frederick was about to reveal himself as friend and heir of Prester John, and they wrote another letter addressed to Manuel, sending it off before ours! That's why he appears so haughty towards the basileus, to ward off suspicions that the letter might have been produced in his chancellery! That's why it contains so many Greek terms, to show that this is the Latin translation of an original written by John in Greek. But it's in Latin because it's meant to convince not Manuel but the chancelleries of the Latin kings and the pope!"

"There's another detail that escaped us," Kyot said. "You remember the story of the Grasal, which the Priest was to send to the emperor? We wanted to remain reticent, speaking only of a
veram arcam
.... Did you say anything about this to Zosimos?"

"No," Baudolino said. "I kept quiet about that."

"Here, your Zosimos has written
yerarcam.
The Priest is sending the basileus a
yerarcam.
"

"And what's that?" the Poet wondered.

"Zosimos doesn't know that himself," Baudolino said. "Look at our original letter. At this point Abdul's writing isn't very legible. Zosimos didn't understand what it was, he assumed it was some strange and mysterious gift, which only we knew about, and so that word is explained. Oh, the wretch! All my fault: I trusted him. How shameful! What can I say to the emperor?"

It wasn't the first time they told lies. They explained to Christian and to Frederick the reasons why the letter had obviously been written by someone in Manuel's chancellery, precisely to prevent Frederick from circulating his, but they added that probably there was a traitor in the chancellery of the Holy Roman Empire, who had sent a copy of their letter to Constantinople. Frederick vowed that if the man was found he would have everything protruding from his body torn off.

Then Frederick asked if they shouldn't worry about some initiative from Manuel. What if the letter had been written to justify an expedition to the Indias? Christian wisely pointed out that just two years earlier Manuel had moved against the Seleucid sultan of Iconium, in Phrygia, and had suffered a dramatic defeat at Myriocephalum. Enough to keep him away from the Indias for the rest of his life. Indeed, when you thought about it, that letter was a specific if slightly puerile way to regain a bit of prestige just when he had lost a great deal.

Still, did it make sense, at this point, to circulate the letter to Frederick? Wasn't it perhaps necessary to alter it, so that nobody would believe it had been copied from the one sent to Manuel?

"Were you aware of this story, Master Niketas?" Baudolino asked.

Niketas smiled. "In those days I was not yet thirty, and I was collecting taxes in Paphlagonia. If I had been counsellor to the basileus, I would have advised him not to recur to such childish machinations. But Manuel lent an ear to too many courtiers, to those who shared his bed,
cuniculari,
and the eunuch attendants of his chambers, even to servants, and often he succumbed to the influence of some visionary monks."