Baudolino (19 page)

Baudolino suggested: "Let's say then that he is sending a casket, a coffer, an ark; let's say
accipe istam veram arcam,
accept this true ark..."

"Not bad," Rabbi Solomon said. "It conceals and reveals at the same time. And it opens the path to the vortex of interpretation."

They continued writing.

If you would deign to come to our dominions, we would consider you the greatest and the most worthy member of our court, and you could enjoy all our riches. With these, which are abundant among us, you shall be then heaped if you choose to return to your empire. Remember you must die, and you will never sin.

After this pious recommendation, the Priest went on to describe his power.

"No humility," Abdul urged. "The Priest stands so high that he can allow himself some haughtiness."

Indeed. Baudolino had no qualms, and he dictated. That
dominus dominatium
surpassed in power all the kings of the earth, and his wealth was infinite, seventy-two kings paid him tribute, seventy-two provinces obeyed him, even if not all were Christian—and so Rabbi Solomon was satisfied, as they placed in the kingdom also the lost tribes of Israel. His sovereignty extended over the three Indias, his territories reached the most remote deserts, as far as the tower of Babel. Every month, at the king's table, seven kings were served, sixty-two dukes, and three hundred and sixty-five counts, and every
day at that same table were seated twelve archbishops, ten bishops, the Patriarch of Saint Thomas, the Protopapas of Samarkand, and the Archprotopapas of Susa."

"Isn't that too many?" Solomon asked.

"No, no," the Poet said, "we have to make the pope spit green, and the basileus of Byzantium, too. And add that the Priest has made a vow to visit the Holy Sepulcher with a great army to defeat the enemies of Christ. This will confirm what Otto said about him, and it will shut the pope's mouth if by any chance he points out that John never managed to cross the Ganges. John is ready to try again; for this reason it's worth going to find him and forming an alliance with him."

"Now give me some ideas about populating the kingdom," Baudolino said. "It has to have elephants, dromedaries, camels, hippopotamuses, panthers, onagers, white and red lions, mute cicadas, gryphons, tigers, llamas, hyenas, all the things we never see in our countries, and whose remains are precious for those who decide to go and hunt down there. And also men never seen, but spoken of in books on the nature of things and the universe...."

"Centaurs, horned men, fauns, satyrs, pygmies, cynocephali, giants forty cubits tall, one-eyed men," Kyot suggested.

"Good, good. Write, Abdul, write it down," Baudolino said.

For the rest, they had only to repeat what had been thought and said in previous years, with some embellishments. The land of Prester John dripped honey and was brimming with milk—and Rabbi Solomon was delighted to find echoes of Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy—the land knew neither serpents nor scorpions, the river Physon flowed there, which emerges directly from the Earthly Paradise, and in the land were found ... stones and sand, Kyot suggested. No, Rabbi Solomon replied, that's the Sambatyon. Shouldn't we put the Sambatyon in here, too? Yes, but later. The Physon flows from the Earthly Paradise and therefore contains ... emeralds, topazes, carbuncles, sapphires, chrysolite, onyx, beryls, amethysts, Kyot contributed.
He had just arrived and didn't understand why his friends displayed signs of nausea. (If you give me one more topaz I'll swallow it, then shit it out the window, Baudolino cried.) By now, with the countless blest islands and paradises they had visited in the course of their research, they were all fed up with precious stones.

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."

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 something 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.