Baudolino (42 page)

"My lord and friend," Ardzrouni said, "I do not desire your ruin; I want to avoid my own. The emperor died in my land, after eating my food and drinking my wine. From the imperials I can expect no favor, or protection. I'll have to thank them if they leave me unharmed. Here, however, I am in danger. Once I received Frederick as my guest, Prince Leo realized that I wanted to draw the emperor to my side, against him. As long as Frederick was alive, Leo could do nothing to me—and this is an indication of how that man's death has been for me the greatest of misfortunes. Now Leo will say that, through my fault, he, prince of the Armenians, was unable to assure the life of his most illustrious ally. An excellent opportunity to put me to death. I have no escape. I must disappear for a long time, and return with something that will restore my prestige and authority. You are leaving to discover the land of Prester John, and if you succeed it will be a glorious enterprise. I want to come with you. Doing so, above all, I will show you that I didn't take the cup you speak of, because if that were the case I would remain here and use it to negotiate with someone. I know well the lands to the east, and I could be useful to you. I know that the duke has given you no money, and I would bring with me what little gold I possess. Finally—and Baudolino knows this—I have seven precious relics, seven heads of Saint John the Baptist, and in the course of the journey we could sell them, one here and one there."

"And if we were to refuse," Baudolino said, "you would go and whisper into the ear of Frederick of Swabia that we were responsible for his father's death."

"I didn't say that."

"Listen, Ardzrouni, you're not a person I'd take with me anywhere, but at this point in this damned adventure each risks becoming the enemy of the other. One more enemy will make little difference."

"The truth is that this man would be a burden for us," the Poet said. "There are already twelve of us, and a thirteenth brings bad luck."

While they were arguing, Baudolino was thinking about the heads of the Baptist. He wasn't convinced that those heads could really be taken seriously; but if they could, undeniably they were worth a fortune. He had gone down into the room where he had seen them, and had picked them up one by one to examine them carefully. They were well made, the carved face of the saint, his great eyes wide and without pupils, inspired holy thoughts. To be sure, seeing all seven of them in a row emphasized their falsity, but displayed one by one, they would be convincing. He had replaced the heads on the kneading trough, and gone back upstairs.

Three of the group agreed to taking Ardzrouni along; the others were hesitating. Boron said that, after all, Ardzrouni did have the appearance of a man of rank; and Zosimos, partly for reasons of respect for those twelve venerable persons, said he could be passed off as a squire. The Poet objected that the Magi either had twelve servants or else they traveled on their own in great secrecy; a single squire would create a bad impression. As for the heads, the party could take them without having to take Ardzrouni. By now Ardzrouni was weeping and saying that truly they wanted him dead. In the end they postponed any decision to the next day.

It was, in fact, the next day, when the sun was already high in the sky, as they had almost completed their preparations, that suddenly someone realized that, for all that morning, Zosimos had not been seen. In the frenzy of the final two days, nobody had kept watch over him; he had also helped prepare the horses and load the mules, and had not been kept on his chain. Kyot noticed that one of the mules was missing, and Baudolino had a sudden inspiration: "The heads!" he cried. "The heads! Zosimos is the only one, besides me and Ardzrouni, who knows where they are!" He dragged everyone into the little room with the heads, and there they saw that the heads now numbered only six.

Ardzrouni dug under the trough, to see if by chance one head had fallen, and he discovered three things: a human skull, small and blackened, a seal with a "Z," and some burned residue of sealing wax. All was now, alas, clear. Zosimos, in the confusion of the fatal morning, had taken the Grasal from the ark where Kyot had replaced it, and in a flash had gone down to the little room, opened a head, taken out the skull, and hidden the Grasal in its place; with his seal from Gallipolis he had closed the lid, put the head back where it had been before, and gone upstairs innocent as an angel, to await the opportune moment. When he realized that the travelers would share out the heads, he knew he could wait no longer.

"It must be said, Master Niketas, that in spite of my rage at being tricked, I felt a certain relief, and I believe that all the others felt the same. We had found the guilty party, a rascal of most credible rascality, and we were no longer tempted to suspect one another. Zosimos's villainy made us livid with anger, but it restored our reciprocal trust. There was no evidence that Zosimos, having stolen the Grasal, had had anything to do with Frederick's death, because that night he had been tied to his own bed; but this brought us back to the Poet's hypothesis: Frederick hadn't been murdered."

They gathered and held council. First of all, Zosimos—if he had fled at nightfall—by now had a twelve-hour lead on them. Porcelli pointed out that they were on horseback and he on a mule, but Baudolino reminded them that there were mountains all around them, stretching God knew how far, and on mountain trails horses move more slowly than mules. It was impossible to pursue him at top speed. He had given himself a half-day's start, and that would remain. The only thing was to find out where he was heading, and then take the same direction.

The Poet said: "First of all, he can't have set out for Constantinople. There, with Isaac Angelus on the throne, the air isn't safe for him; further, he would have to cross the lands of the Seljuks, which we have just left after so many hardships, and he knows that sooner or later they would have his hide. The most sensible hypothesis, since he's the one who knows the map, is that he wants to do what we wanted to do: reach the Priest's kingdom, proclaim himself the envoy of Frederick, or whoever, return the Grasal, and be covered with honors. So to find Zosimos we have to journey towards the kingdom of the Priest, and overtake him along the way. We'll set out, we'll ask questions as we proceed, we'll look for the trail of a Greekling monk, since you can tell his race a mile off, then you will allow me finally the satisfaction of strangling him, and we'll recover the Grasal."

"Very good," Boron said, "but what direction do we take, since he's the only one who knows the map?"

"Friends," Baudolino said, "here Ardzrouni should prove useful. He knows the places and, further, there are now only eleven of us, and we need at all costs a twelfth King."

And so, to his great relief, Ardzrouni was solemnly allowed to become a part of that group of fearless men. As to the right road, he made sensible proposals: if the kingdom of the Priest lay to the east, near the Earthly Paradise, then we should head for the place where the sun rises. But in proceeding so directly, we risked having to cross lands of infidels, whereas he knew the way to advance, at least for a while, through territories inhabited by Christian peoples—also because we had to remember the Baptist heads, which couldn't be sold to Turks. He assured us that Zosimos would have reasoned in the same way, and he mentioned lands and cities our friends had never heard of. With his mechanic's skill, he had constructed a kind of puppet that, in the end, resembled Zosimos, with a long, wispy beard, hair made from charred millet, and two black stones to serve as eyes. The portrait seemed possessed, like the man it portrayed: "We will have to cross lands where they speak unknown languages," Ardzrouni said, "and to ask if they have seen Zosimos we can only show this image." Baudolino guaranteed that the unknown languages would create no problems, because when he had spoken with barbarians for a little while, he learned to speak as they did; but the portrait would still come in handy, because in some places there wouldn't be time to stop and learn the language.

Before departing, they all went downstairs and each took one of the Baptist's heads. They were twelve, and the heads now were six. Baudolino decided that Ardzrouni should refrain, Solomon surely wouldn't want to travel with a Christian relic, Cuttica, Bonehead, Porcelli, and Colandrino were late-comers; so the heads would go to himself, the Poet, Abdul, Kyot, Boron, and Boidi. The Poet was about to grab the first immediately, and Baudolino pointed out, laughing, that they were all the same, since the only good one had been chosen by Zosimos. The Poet blushed and let Abdul choose, with a broad and polite wave of his hand. Baudolino was satisfied with the last one, and each of them put his in his knapsack.

"That's the whole story," Baudolino said to Niketas. "Towards the end of the month of June in the year of Our Lord 1190, we set out, twelve of us, like the Magi, even if less virtuous than they, to reach finally the land of Prester John."

From that moment on, Baudolino narrated his story to Niketas almost continuously, not only during their stops at night, but also in the daytime, as the women complained of the heat, the children had to stop to make water, the mules every now and then refused to go on. So it was a story broken up, as their journey was, where Niketas guessed at the gaps, the unfinished spaces, and the very long duration. And it was comprehensible because, as Baudolino continued narrating, the journey of the twelve lasted almost four years, between moments of bewilderment, bored delays, and painful vicissitudes.

Perhaps, traveling like that under blazing suns, eyes sometimes assailed by sandy gusts, listening to new tongues, the travelers spent moments in which they lived as if burned by fever, others of somnolent waiting. Countless days were devoted to survival, pursuing animals inclined to flight, bargaining with savage tribes for a loaf of bread or a piece of lamb, digging, exhausted, for springs in lands where it rained once a year. Besides, Niketas told himself, traveling under a sun beating down on your head, through deserts, as travelers tell, you are deceived by mirages, you hear voices echoing at night among the dunes, and when you find some bush you risk tasting berries that, rather than nourishing the belly, prompt visions.

This was not to say, as Niketas knew very well, that Baudolino wasn't sincere by nature; and if it's difficult to believe a liar when he tells you, for instance, that he has been to Iconium, how and when can you believe him when he tells you he has seen creatures that the most lively imagination would be hard pressed to conceive, and he himself is not sure of having seen?

Niketas had determined to believe in a single thing, because the passion with which Baudolino spoke of it bore witness to its truth: that, on their journey our twelve Magi were drawn by the desire to reach a goal, which became increasingly personal for each of them. Boron and Kyot wanted only to recover the Grasal, even if it hadn't ended up in the Priest's kingdom; Baudolino wanted that kingdom with increasingly irrepressible passion, and with him, also Solomon, because there he would find his lost tribes; the Poet, Grasal or not, sought any kingdom; Ardzrouni was interested only in escaping the place where he had come from; and Abdul, as we know, thought that, the farther he went, the closer he was coming to the object of his chaste desires.

The Alessandrians were the only ones who seemed to advance with their feet solidly on the ground; they had made a pact with Baudolino and they followed him out of solidarity, or perhaps greed, because if a Prester John has to be found then he has to be found, otherwise, as Aleramo Scaccabarozzi, also known as Bonehead, insisted, people wouldn't take you seriously any more. But perhaps they went on also because Boidi had got it into his head that, reaching the goal, they would stock up on wondrous relics (and not fakes like the Baptist's heads) and take them back to their native Alessandria, transforming that city, still without history, into the most celebrated shrine in Christendom.

Ardzrouni, to evade the Turks of Iconium, had immediately led them over certain passes where the horses risked breaking a leg, then for six days he guided them along a stony waste sown with corpses of huge lizards a palm long, dead from sunstroke. Thank God, we have provisions with us and don't have to eat those disgusting animals, Boidi said, with great relief, but he was mistaken, because a year later they would catch lizards even more repellent and, skewering them on twigs, they would roast them, as their mouths watered, waiting for them to be done.

Then they passed through some villages, and in each they displayed the effigy of Zosimos. Yes, one man said a monk just like that came this way, stayed for a month, then ran off because he'd got my daughter pregnant. But how could he have stayed a month when we'd been traveling only two weeks? When did it happen? Eh, maybe seven Easters ago: you see that boy, the one with scrofula over there, he's the fruit of the sin. Then that wasn't the man; all these pigs, these monks, look the same. Or else they said: yes, he looks right, with a beard just like this, maybe three days ago, a likable little hunchback ... But if he was a hunchback, then it isn't our man. Baudolino, could it be that you don't understand the language and are just translating what comes into your head? Or they said: yes, yes, we've seen him, it was him—and they would point to Rabbi Solomon, perhaps because of the black beard. What was this? Were they maybe questioning the village idiots?

Farther on, they encountered some people who lived in circular tents, who greeted them, crying: "
La ellec olla Sila, Machimet rores alla.
" They replied with equal politeness in Alaman, since one language was worth as much as another. When they displayed the Zosimos puppet, the people burst out laughing, all talking at once, but from their gestures it could be deduced that they did recall Zosimos: he had passed through here, had offered the head of a Christian saint, and they had threatened to stick something up his behind. When our friends realized they had happened on a band of Turkish impalers, they went off with great gestures of farewell and smiles, baring all their teeth, while the Poet dragged Ardzrouni by the hair, pulled his head back, saying: Good, good for you, who know the road; you were leading us right into the jaws of the Antichrists. And Ardzrouni gasped that he hadn't got the road wrong; these men were nomads, and you never know where nomads are.