Baudolino (61 page)

"And Isaac returned to the throne."

"Yes, but by now he was old and also blind, and the Latins reminded him he was to share the empire with his son, who had become Alexius IV. With this boy the Latins had established some pacts of which we were still ignorant: the empire of Byzantium returned to Catholic and Roman dominion, the basileus gave the pilgrims one hundred thousand silver marks, provisions for a year, ten thousand horsemen to march on Jerusalem, and a garrison of five hundred knights in the Holy Land. Isaac realized that there wasn't enough money in the imperial treasury, and he couldn't go and tell the clergy and the people that suddenly he was placing himself under the pope of Rome. Thus a farce began that lasted for months. On the one hand, Isaac and his son, to collect money, sacked the churches; their men, with axes, cut out the images of Christ, and after stripping them of their ornaments, threw them in the fire, and melted down anything they found made of gold or silver. On the other hand, the Latins, ensconced at Pera, ran freely on this side of the Horn, sat at Isaac's table, lorded it over the whole city, and did everything to delay their departure. They said they were waiting to be paid down to the last penny, and the man who was most insistent was Doge Dandolo for his Venetians, but truly I believe that here they had found Paradise, and they were blissfully living at our expense. Not content with taxing the Christians, and perhaps to justify their delay in engaging the Saracens of Jerusalem, some of them went to loot the houses of the Saracens who were peacefully living here in Constantinople, and in this conflict they set the second fire, in which I also lost the most beautiful of my houses."

"And the two emperors didn't protest to their allies?"

"At this point they were both hostages in the hands of the Latins, who had made Alexius IV their puppet. Once, when he was in their camp, amusing himself like any ordinary man-at-arms, they took the golden hat from his head and put it on their own heads. Never had a basileus of Byzantium been so humiliated! As for Isaac, he was turning into an idiot. Among gluttonous monks, he raved that he would become emperor of the world and would regain his sight.... Until the populace rose up, and elected Nikolas Kannabos basileus. A good man, but by then the strong man had become Alexius Doukas Murzuphlus, supported by the leaders of the army. So it was easy for him to seize power. Isaac died of a heart attack, Murzuphlus had Kannabos beheaded and Alexius IV strangled, so he became Alexius V."

"Yes! We arrived just in those days when nobody knew any longer who was in command, whether it was Isaac, Kannabos, Murzuphlus, or the pilgrims; and we couldn't tell, when someone spoke of Alexius, whether he meant the third, the fourth, or the fifth. We found the Genoese still living where you also found them, while the houses of the Venetians and the Pisans had been burned in the second fire, and they had withdrawn to Pera. In this unfortunate city, the Poet decided that we had to rebuild our fortunes."

***

When anarchy rules, the Poet said, anyone can make himself king. Meanwhile, we had to find some money. The five survivors were tattered, filthy, without resources. The Genoese welcomed them with good heart, but said that a guest is like fish and stinks after three days. The Poet washed himself carefully, trimmed his hair and beard, borrowed some decent clothes from our hosts, and one fine morning went out to collect news in the city.

He came back at evening and said: "Starting today Murzuphlus is basileus; he's done away with all the others. Apparently, to make himself look good to his subjects, he wants to provoke the Latins, and they consider him a usurper, because they had made their agreements with poor Alexius IV, rest in peace, young as he was, but obviously he was doomed to end badly. The Latins are waiting for Murzuphlus to make a misstep; for the present they continue getting drunk in the taverns, but they are well aware that sooner or later they will kick him out and put the city to the sack. They already know which gold objects are found in which churches, they also know that the city is full of hidden relics; however, they know that relics are not toys, and their leaders will want to seize them for themselves and take them home to their cities. But since these Greeklings are no better than they are, the pilgrims are wooing this one and that, to secure for themselves now, and on the cheap, the most important relics. Moral of the tale: the man who wants to make his fortune in this city sells relics; one who wants to make his fortune when he's back home, buys them."

"Then the moment has come for us to bring out our Baptist's heads!" Boidi said, hopefully.

"Boidi, you're just talking because you have a mouth," the Poet said. "First of all, in a single city, you could sell one head at most, because then the news spreads. In the second place, I've heard there's already one Baptist's head in Constantinople, and maybe even two. Suppose we'd already sold both, and we turn up with a third: they'll cut our throats. So, as to Baptist's heads: nothing doing. But looking for relics takes time. The problem isn't finding them: it's making them, identical to those that exist, though no one has yet discovered them. As I was moving around I heard some talk of Christ's purple cloak, the reed and the pillar of the flagellation, the sponge soaked in gall and wormwood that was offered to Our Lord as he died, only now it's dry, and the crown of thorns. A case which once contained a piece of the bread consecrated at the Last Supper, some hairs from the Lord's beard, the seamless garment of Jesus that the soldiers diced for, the mantle of the Madonna..."

"We have to imagine which are the easiest to counterfeit," Baudolino said, pensive.

"Exactly," the Poet said. "You can find a reed anywhere, a pillar is best forgotten because you can't sell it quietly."

"But why risk copies, when somebody might find the real relic, and our buyers of the fakes would want their money back?" Boron said sensibly. "Think how many relics could exist. Think for example of the twelve baskets from the multiplication of the loaves and fishes; breadbaskets can be found anywhere; you just have to dirty them a bit, to make them look old. Think of the axe with which Noah built the ark; there must be an axe around here that our Genoese have thrown away because the blade is chipped."

"Not a bad idea," Boidi said. "Go to the cemeteries and you'll find the jawbone of Saint Peter, and the left arm—not the head—of Saint John the Baptist, to say nothing of the remains of Saint Agatha, of Lazarus, or the prophets Daniel, Samuel, Isaiah, the skull of Saint Helen, a fragment of the head of Saint Philip Apostle."

"If it comes to that," Pevere said, attracted by the wonderful prospect, "we only have to rummage around a bit in the cellar, and I'll easily find you a fragment of the Bethlehem manger, very tiny, so there's no telling where it really came from."

"We'll make relics whose like they've never seen before," the Poet said, "but we'll remake the ones that already exist, because they're the ones everybody's talking about, and the price goes up every day."

***

For a week the house of the Genoese was transformed into a humming workshop. Boidi, stumbling in the sawdust, found a nail from the Holy Cross. Boiamondo, after a night of horrible pains, tied some string to a rotten tooth, pulled it out easily, and there was a tooth of Saint Anne. Grillo dried bread in the sun and put some crumbs into certain boxes of aged wood that Taraburlo had just fashioned. Pevere had convinced them to give up the notion of the loaves-and-fishes baskets because, he said, after a miracle like that the crowd would have surely divided them up, and not even Constantine would have been able to put them back together. Selling just one, they wouldn't make a great impression, and it was in any case difficult to pass them, secretly, from hand to hand, because Jesus had fed so very many people, and he can't have used a little basket you could hide under a cloak. Well, so much for the baskets, the Poet said, but you've got to find me Noah's axe. Of course, Pevere replied, and one appeared, its blade now resembling a saw, the handle all charred.

After which our friends dressed up like Armenian merchants (the Genoese by now were prepared to finance the venture) and began roaming slyly among taverns and Christian camps, dropping a hint, referring to the difficulties of the matter, raising prices because they were risking their life, and things like that.

Boidi came back one evening saying that he had found a Monferrato knight who would take Noah's axe, but he wanted a guarantee that it was the real thing. "Oh, of course," Baudolino said, "we'll go to Noah and ask him for a certificate with his seal."

"And did Noah know how to write?" Boron asked.

"Noah knew only how to down bottle after bottle of the best," Boidi said. "He must have already been drunk as a skunk when he loaded the animals onto the ark; he overdid it with the mosquitoes but forgot the unicorns; that's why you don't see any more of them."

"Oh, you can see them still," Baudolino murmured, suddenly losing his good humor.

Pevere said that in his travels he had learned a bit of the Jews' writing, and with a knife he could carve one or two of their curlicues on the handle of the axe. "Was Noah a Jew, or not?" He was a Jew, yes, a Jew, the friends confirmed: poor Solomon, it's just as well he's no longer here; otherwise God knows how he would suffer. But Boidi then managed to sell the axe.

On certain days it was hard to find buyers, because the city was in an uproar, and the pilgrims were suddenly recalled to their camp, in a state of alert. For example, there was a rumor that Murzuphlus had attacked Philea, down the coast, the pilgrims had intervened in compact formations, there had been a battle, or perhaps a skirmish, but Murzuphlus had taken a good beating and they conquered his standard with the Virgin, which his army carried as its banner. Murzuphlus returned to Constantinople, but told his men not to confess this shame to anyone. The Latins discovered his reticence, and then one morning they sailed a galley of theirs right in front of the walls, with the banner in full view, as they made obscene gestures to the Romei, such as jabbing fingers or clapping their left hand on their right arm. Murzuphlus cut a sorry figure, and the Romei sang rude songs about him in the streets.

In short, between the time it took to make a good relic and the time it took to find the right gull, our friends had gone from January to March, but, what with the chin of Saint Eobanus today and the tibia of Saint Cunegonde tomorrow, they had put together a goodly sum, refunding the Genoese and refurbishing themselves properly.

"And this, Master Niketas, explains the presence, over these past days, of so many duplicate relics in your city, until only God Himself knows which are genuine. On the other hand, put yourself in our shoes: somehow we had to survive, between the Latins, always ready to steal, and your Greculi, excuse me, your Romans, ready to defraud them. Basically, we defrauded the defrauders."

"Ah well," said Niketas, resigned, "perhaps many of these relics will inspire holy thoughts in barbarianized Latins, who will find them again in their barbarian churches. Holy the thought, holy the relic. The ways of the Lord are infinite."

At this point they could be calm and could set out again for their homelands. Kyot and Boron by now had renounced the recovery of the Grasal, and of Zosimos with it; Boidi said that, with this money, in Alessandria he would buy some vineyards and end his days like a gentleman. Baudolino had fewer ideas than any of them: now that the search for Prester John had ended, and Hypatia was lost, living or dying mattered little to him. But not the Poet: he had been seized by fantasies of omnipotence, he was distributing the things of the Lord through the world universe, he could start offering something not to miserable pilgrims, but to the mighty who led them, gaining their favor.

One day he came to report that in Constantinople was the Mandylion, the Face of Edessa, an inestimable relic.

"What's this mandolin?" Boiamondo asked.

"It's a little cloth to wipe your face with," the Poet explained, "and it has the face of Our Lord impressed on it. Not painted, impressed, by virtue of nature: it's an image,
acheiropoieton,
not made by the hand of man. Abgar V, king of Edessa, was a leper, and he sent his archivist Hannan to invite Jesus to come and cure him. Jesus couldn't go, so he took this cloth, wiped his face, and left his features imprinted on it. Naturally, on receiving the cloth, the king was cured and was converted to the true faith. Centuries ago, while the Persians were besieging Edessa, the Mandylion was flown over the walls of the city, and it was saved. Then the emperor Constantine acquired the cloth and brought it here, where it was first in the church of the Blachernae, then in Saint Sophia, then in the chapel of the Pharos. And this is the true Mandylion, even if they say others exist: at Camulia in Cappadocia, at Memphis in Egypt, and at Anablatha near Jerusalem. Which is not impossible, because Jesus, in his life, may have wiped his face several times. But this one is surely the most wondrous of all because on Easter day the face changes according to the hour: at dawn it takes on the features of the newborn Jesus, at the third hour those of Jesus a boy, and so on, until at the ninth hour it appears as Jesus adult, at the moment of the Passion."

"Where did you learn all these things?" Boidi asked.

"A monk told me. Now this is a genuine relic, and with an object like this we can return to our homes and receive honors and prebends, we have only to find the right bishop, as Baudolino did with Rainald for his three Magi. Up till now we've sold relics, now's the moment to buy one—the relic that will make our fortune."

"And who are you going to buy the Mandylion from?" Baudolino asked wearily, nauseated by now at all this simony.

"It's already been bought by a Syrian I spent an evening drinking with; he works for the duke of Athens. But he told me that this duke would give the Mandylion and God knows what else besides, if he could acquire the Sydoine."

"Now you'll tell us what the Sydoine is," Boidi said.

"They say it might have been in Saint Mary's in the Blachernae, the Holy Shroud, the one with the image of the whole body of Jesus. They talk about it in the city, they say it was seen by Amalric, the king of Jerusalem, when he visited Manuel Comnenius. But others told me that it had been left in the keeping of the church of the Blessed Virgin at the Bucoleon. But nobody has ever seen it, and if it was there, it disappeared, nobody knows how long ago."