Baudolino (57 page)

He understood only then why he had heard that true lovers, at their first love meeting, turn pale, tremble, and are silent. It is because, since love dominates the realms of both nature and spirit, it attracts to itself all their forces, however it may move. Thus, when true lovers meet, love disturbs and almost petrifies all the functions of the body, both physical and spiritual: whence the tongue refuses to speak, the eyes to see, the ears to hear, and every limb shirks its proper duty. This means that, when love delays too long in the depths of the heart, the body, deprived of strength, wastes away. But at a certain point the heart, in the impatience of the ardor it feels, almost casts out its passion, allowing the body to resume its usual functions. And then the lover speaks.

"So it is," Baudolino said, without explaining what he was feeling and what he was understanding, "all the beautiful and terrible things you have told me of are what the first Hypatia has handed down to you...."

"Oh, no," she said. "I told you that our ancestresses fled, having forgotten everything Hypatia had taught them except the duty of knowledge. It is through meditation that we have increasingly discovered the truth. During all these thousands of years each of us has reflected on the world surrounding us, and on what she felt in her own spirit, and our awareness has been enriched day by day, and the task is not yet done. Perhaps in what I have told you there were things that my companions had not yet understood, but I have understood them, in trying to explain them to you. So each of us becomes wise, training her companions in what she feels, and, acting as teacher, she learns. Perhaps if you weren't here with me, I would not have clarified certain things to myself. You have been my demon, my beneficent archon, Baudolino."

"But are all your companions as clear and eloquent as you, my sweet Hypatia?"

"Oh, I am the least of them. Sometimes they tease me because I can't express what I feel. I still have to grow, you see. But these days I have felt proud, as if I possess a secret they don't know, and—I can't say why—I preferred it remain secret. I don't really understand what is happening to me; it's as if ... as if I preferred to say things to you rather than to them. Do you think this is bad, that I am untrue to them?"

"You're true to me."

"With you it's easy. I think that with you I'd say everything that passes through my heart. Even if I weren't yet sure it is right. You know what has happened to me, Baudolino, in these days? I have dreamed of you. When I woke in the morning, I thought it was a beautiful day because you were somewhere. Then I thought the day was bad because I didn't see you. It's strange: we laugh when we are happy, we weep when we suffer, and now I laugh and I weep at the same moment. Can I be ill? Yet it is a very beautiful illness. Is it right to love one's own illness?"

"You are my teacher, my sweet friend." Baudolino smiled. "You mustn't ask me, also because I believe I have your same illness."

Hypatia reached out and again lightly touched his scar. "You must be a good thing, Baudolino, because I like to touch you, as I like to touch Acacios. Touch me, too. Perhaps you can waken some spark that is still in me, that I don't know."

"No, my sweet love. I'm afraid of hurting you."

"Touch me here, behind my ear. Yes, like that, again ... Perhaps, through you, something good can be called up. You must have somewhere the mark that binds you to something else...."

She put his hands under her dress, she ran her fingers over the hair on his chest. She moved closer, to nuzzle him. "You are filled with grass, good grass," she said. Then she said further: "How beautiful you are underneath here, soft like a young animal. Are you young? I don't understand the age of a man. Are you young?"

"I am young, my love, I am just born."

He was now stroking her hair and almost with violence he placed his hands behind her nape. She began giving him little flicks of her tongue on his face, licking him as if he were a kid, then she laughed, looking closely into his eyes, and said he tasted of salt. Baudolino had never been a saint; he pressed her against himself and sought her lips with his. She emitted a moan of fear and surprise, tried to withdraw, then yielded. Her mouth tasted of peaches, apricots, and with her tongue she gave his tongue little jabs, as she tasted it for the first time.

Baudolino thrust her away, not out of virtue, but to free himself of what was covering him; she saw his member, touched it with her fingers, felt that it was alive and said that she wanted it. Clearly she didn't know how or why she wanted it, but some power of the woods or the streams was prompting her, telling her what she should do. Baudolino resumed covering her with kisses, moving from her lips to her neck, then her shoulders, while he slowly slipped off her robe, baring her breasts, plunged his face between them, and with his hands continued slipping the robe down over her hips, he felt the taut little belly, he touched her navel, felt, before he was expecting it, the soft down that concealed her supreme boon. She was whispering, calling him: my Eon, my Tyrant, my Abyss, my Ogdoad, my Plerome....

Baudolino thrust his hands under the robe still concealing her, and felt that the down that had seemed to herald her sex grew thicker, covered the beginning of her leg, the inner part of the thigh, extended towards the buttocks....

"Master Niketas, I tore off her robe, and I saw: from the belly down, Hypatia had goatlike forms, and her legs ended in a pair of ivory-colored hoofs. Suddenly I understood why, concealed by her robe that touched the ground, she didn't seem to walk like someone putting down feet, but moved lightly, as if she didn't move on the earth. And I realized who the fecundators were: they were the satyrs-who-are-never-seen, with horned human heads and ram's body, the satyrs who for centuries had lived in the service of the hypatias, giving them the females and rearing their own males, the latter with their same horrible face, the former still recalling the Egyptian loveliness of the beautiful Hypatia, the ancient, and of her first pupils."

"How horrible!" Niketas said.

"Horrible? No, what I felt wasn't horror. Surprise, yes, but only for one instant. Then I decided. My body decided for my soul, or my soul decided for my body: what I saw and touched was very beautiful, because it was Hypatia, and even her ferine nature was part of her grace; that pelt, soft and curly, was the most desirable thing I had ever desired; scented of musk, those limbs of hers, hidden at first, had been designed by an artist's hand, and I loved, wanted that creature with her forest balm, and I would have loved Hypatia even if she had had the features of a chimera, an icneumon, a cerastes."

So it was that Hypatia and Baudolino were united, until sunset, and when they were exhausted, they lay one beside the other, stroking each other and calling each other by the most tender appellatives, heedless of all that surrounded them.

Hypatia said: "My soul has fled like a gust of fire. ... I feel as if I were part of the starry vault...." She could not cease exploring the body of her beloved: "How beautiful you are, Baudolino. But you men are also monsters," she teased. "Your legs are long and white, without fur, and your feet are as big as two skiapods! But you are beautiful all the same, indeed, more beautiful...." He kissed her eyes in silence.

"Do the females of men also have legs like yours?" she asked, frowning. "Have you felt ... ecstasy beside creatures with legs like ours?"

"I didn't know that you existed, my love."

"I don't want you ever again to look at the legs of the females of men." He kissed her hoofs in silence.

It was growing dark, and they had to separate. "I believe," Hypatia whispered, grazing his lips again, "I will tell my companions nothing. Perhaps they wouldn't understand; they don't know that there exists also this way to rise higher. Until tomorrow, my love. Did you hear? I have called you as you called me? I will wait for you."

"In this way several months went by, the sweetest and purest of my life. I went to her every day and, when I couldn't, the faithful Gavagai acted as our go-between. I was hoping the Huns would never arrive and that this waiting at Pndapetzim would last until my death, and beyond. But I felt as if I had defeated death."

And then, one day, after many months had passed, when she had given herself with the usual ardor and they were calm again, Hypatia said to Baudolino, "Something is happening to me. I know what it is, because I've heard the confidences of my companions when they came back from their night with the fecundators. I believe I have a child in my belly."

At that moment Baudolino was filled only with an ineffable joy and kissed that belly of hers, blessed by God or by the Archons, he didn't much care which. Then he became worried: Hypatia wouldn't be able to conceal her condition from the community; what would she do?

"I will confess the truth to the Mother," she said. "She will understand. Someone, something decided that what the others do with the fecundators I would do with you. It was right, according to the good part of nature. She won't be able to reproach me."

"But for nine months you will be held by the community, and afterwards I will never be able to see the infant that is born."

"I will come here for a long time still. It will take many days before my belly is very swollen and everyone realizes. It's only in the last weeks that we won't see each other, when I will tell the Mother everything. As for the child, if it's a male it will be given to you, and if female, it will be none of your concern. So nature wills."

"So wills that asshole of a Demiurge of yours and those half-goats you live with!" Baudolino cried, beside himself. "The child is mine, female or male as may be!"

"How beautiful you are, Baudolino, when you fly into a rage, even though you never should," she said, kissing his nose.

"Don't you realize? After a hypatia has given birth, she never sees the fecundator again. Isn't this, in your hypatias' view, what nature wants?"

She had realized as much only at this moment, and she began to cry, with little moans, as when she made love, her head bowed on the chest of her man, as she clasped his arms and he felt her throbbing breast against him. Baudolino caressed her, spoke tender words into her ear, and then made what seemed to him the only sensible suggestion: Hypatia should flee with him. At her frightened look, he told her that, in doing so, she wouldn't be betraying her community. She had simply been designated with a different privilege, and her duty became different. He would take her to a distant kingdom, and there she would create a new colony of hypatias, she would simply have made more fertile the seed of their remote mother, she would carry her message elsewhere, except that he would live at her side and would found a new colony of fecundators, in the form of man, as the fruit of their viscera would probably be. In running away you're not doing anything evil, he told her; on the contrary you are spreading good....

"Then I will ask permission of the Mother."

"Wait. I don't know yet what sort of person this Mother is. Let me think. We'll go to her together. I'll be able to convince her, give me a few days to think up the right way."

"My love, I don't want never to see you again." Hypatia was sobbing. "I'll do what you wish, I will pass as a female of men, I will come with you to that new city you have told me of, I will behave like the Christians, I will say that God had a son who died on a cross. If you are not here I don't want to be a hypatia any more!"

"Calm yourself, beloved. I'll find a solution, wait and see. I had Charlemagne made a saint, I rediscovered the Magi, I'll find a way to keep my bride!"

"Bride? What's that?"

"I'll teach you in time. Go now, it's late. We'll see each other tomorrow."

"There was no tomorrow, Master Niketas. When I went back to Pndapetzim, they all came rushing towards me: they had been seeking me for hours. All doubt was gone: the White Huns were arriving, at the far horizon you could glimpse the dust cloud raised by their horses. They would reach the edge of the plain of ferns by the first light of dawn. So we had only a few hours left to organize our defense. I went at once to the deacon, to announce that I was assuming command of his subjects. Too late. Those months of anxious waiting for the battle, the effort it had cost him to remain standing and participate in the undertaking, perhaps even the new vigor that I had infused into his veins with my stories: all had hastened his end. I was not afraid to remain close to him as he was breathing his last, indeed, I clasped his hand as he bade me farewell and wished me victory. He told me that, if I were to win, I would perhaps be able to reach the kingdom of his father, and therefore he begged me to do him a last service. As soon as he was dead, his two veiled acolytes would prepare his corpse as if it were that of a priest, anointing his body with those oils that would imprint his image on the linen in which he would be wrapped. I was to take that portrait to the Priest, and pale as he might seem, he would show himself to his adoptive father less destroyed than he was. He died a little later, and the two acolytes did what had to be done. They said the sheet would require some hours to become impregnated with his features, and they would then roll it up and place it in a case. They shyly suggested I inform the eunuchs of the death of the deacon; I resolved not to do so. The deacon had invested me with the command and thanks to that distinction the eunuchs would not dare disobey me. They had somehow to collaborate in the war, preparing the city to receive the wounded. If they were to know immediately of the deacon's death, at the very least they would have troubled the spirit of the fighters, spreading the fatal news, and distracting them with funeral rites. At most, treacherous as they were, they might immediately assume supreme power and at the same time upset all the Poet's defense plans. To war then: I said to myself. Even though I had always been a man of peace, now it was a matter of defending the child that was to be born."

They had studied the plan for months, down to the slightest detail. If the Poet, in training his troops, had proved himself a good captain, Baudolino had revealed gifts as a strategist. Immediately, at the edges of the city, rose the tallest of those hills like heaps of whipped cream, which they had observed on arriving. From up there you dominated the entire plain, as far as the mountains to one side, and beyond the expanse of ferns. From there Baudolino and the Poet would direct the movements of their warriors. Beside them, a select troop of skiapods, trained by Gavagai, would allow rapid communication with the various squads.