Baudolino (16 page)

"No, no. Otherwise the emperor of the Orient will want to know how we took them away from him," said Abdul.

"Never fear," said the canon. "If they were in the basilica of Sant'Eustorgio, surely that sainted man had brought them there, when he set out from Byzantium to occupy the bishop's seat in Milan at the time of the emperor Mauritius, and long before Charlemagne lived in our land. Eustorgio couldn't have stolen the Magi, so he must have received them as a gift from the basileus of the empire of the Orient."

With such a well-constructed story, Baudolino returned at the year's end to Rainald, and reminded him that, according to Otto, the Magi were surely ancestors of Prester John, whom they had invested
with their dignity and function. Whence came the power of Prester John over all three Indias, or at least over one of them.

Rainald had completely forgotten those words of Otto, but on hearing mention of a priest who ruled over an empire, a king with priestly functions, pope and monarch at the same time, he was now convinced he had put Alexander III in difficulties: the Magi kings and priests; king and priest John: what a wondrous figure, allegory, augury, prophecy, herald of that imperial dignity that Rainald, step by step, was creating around Frederick!

"Baudolino," he said at once, "I'll deal with the Magi now; you must think about Prester John. From what you tell me, for the moment we have only rumors, and that's not enough. We need a document that will attest to his existence, that says who he is, where he is, how he lives."

"And where will I find that?"

"If you can't find it, make it. The emperor has allowed you to study, and this is the moment to put your talents to use. And to win yourself knighthood, just as soon as you have ended your studies, which, if you ask me, have gone on too long."

"You understand, Master Niketas?" Baudolino said. "Now Prester John for me had become a duty, not a game. And I was to seek him no longer in memory of Otto, but to obey an order of Rainald's. As my father, Gagliaudo, used to say, I've always been contrary by nature. If I'm ordered to do something, I promptly lose any desire to do it. I obeyed Rainald and went immediately back to Paris, but it was to avoid having to encounter the empress. Abdul had resumed writing songs, and I noticed the pot of green honey was now half empty. I talked to him again about the adventure of the Magi, and he strummed his instrument and chanted:
Let no one be amazed if I, you know—love her who will never see me—my heart knows no other-love—except for what I have never seen—nor can any other joy make me
laugh—and I know not what good will come to me—ha, ha.
Ha ha, I gave up arguing with him about my plans and, as far as Prester John was concerned, for about a year I did nothing more."

"And the Magi?"

"Rainald took the relics to Cologne two years later, but he was generous. Some time back he had been provost of the cathedral of Hildesheim, and so before sealing the remains of the kings in their box in Cologne, he had a finger cut from each one and sent them, as a donation, to his old church. However, in that same period, Rainald had to resolve other problems, and not small ones. Just two months before he could celebrate his triumph in Cologne, the antipope, Victor, died. Almost everyone heaved a sigh of relief: this would automatically put things back in order, and perhaps Frederick would have a reconciliation with Alexander. But it was that schism that kept Rainald alive. You understand, Master Niketas? With two popes he counted for more than with one pope. So he invented a new antipope, Paschal III, organizing a parody of a conclave with a few ecclesiastics he collected practically off the street. Frederick wasn't convinced. He said to me—"

"You had gone back to him?"

Baudolino sighed. "Yes, for a few days. In that same year the empress had borne Frederick a son."

"What did you feel?"

"I realized I had to forget her definitively. I fasted for seven days, drinking only water, because I had read somewhere that it purifies the spirit, and in the end provokes visions."

"Is that true?"

"Very true. But the visions were of her. Then I decided I had to see that baby, to establish the difference between the dream and the vision. So I went back to court. More than two years had gone by since that magnificent and awful day, and since then we had never seen each other. I told myself then that, even if I couldn't resign myself to loving Beatrice as a mother, I would consider that child a
brother. But I looked at that little thing in the cradle, and I couldn't dispel the thought that, if matters had gone just a little differently, he could have been my son. In any case I still risked feeling incestuous."

Frederick meanwhile was troubled by quite different problems. He said to Rainald that half a pope was scant guaranty of his rights, that the Magi were all well and good, but they weren't enough, because having found the Magi did not necessarily mean being descended from them. The pope, lucky man, could trace his origins back to Peter, and Peter had been designated by Jesus himself, but what could the holy and Roman emperor do? Trace his origins to Caesar, who was, after all, a pagan?

Baudolino then pulled out the first idea that came into his head, namely, that Frederick could have his origins date back to Charlemagne. "But Charlemagne was anointed by the pope: so we're back where we started," Frederick replied.

"Unless you have him made a saint," Baudolino said. Frederick admonished him to think before he uttered nonsense. "It's not nonsense," replied Baudolino, who had not so much thought as visualized the scene that his idea could engender. "Listen: you go to Aix-la-Chapelle, to Charlemagne's tomb, you have his remains exhumed, you put them in a fine reliquary in the midst of the Palatine Chapel and, in your presence, with a suite of loyal bishops, including Master Rainald, who as archbishop of Cologne is also the metropolitan of that province, and with a bull from Pope Paschal that legitimizes you, you proclaim Charlemagne saint. You understand? You proclaim saint the founder of the holy Roman empire, once he is a saint he is superior to the pope, and you, as his legitimate successor, are of the race of a saint, freed from any authority, even that of one who claims to excommunicate you."

"By Charlemagne's beard!" Frederick said, the hairs of his own beard bristling with excitement. "Did you hear that, Rainald? As always, the boy's right!"

And so it happened, even though not until the end of the following year, because certain things require time if they are to be prepared properly.

Niketas observed that as an idea it was insane, and Baudolino answered that, nevertheless, it had worked. And he looked at Niketas with pride. It's only natural, Niketas thought; your vanity is boundless, you have even made Charlemagne a saint. From Baudolino anything could be expected. "And after that?" he asked.

"While Frederick and Rainald were preparing to canonize Charlemagne, little by little I realized that neither he nor the Magi were enough. All four of them were safely in Paradise; at least the Magi surely were, and we could hope for Charlemagne as well, otherwise at Aix-la-Chapelle we'd made a fine mess. But still it took something more, here on this earth, where the emperor could say, Here I am, and this sanctions my power. And the only thing the emperor could find on this earth was the kingdom of Prester John."

On the Friday morning, three of the Genoese—Pevere, Boiamondo, and Grillo—came to confirm what could very clearly be seen even from a distance: the fire had gone out, as if by itself, because nobody had taken much trouble to fight it. But this did not mean they could now venture into Constantinople. On the contrary, enabled to move more easily through the streets and squares, the pilgrims had intensified their search for wealthy citizens, and amid the still-warm ruins they demolished what little remained standing, searching for those treasures that had eluded the first looting. Niketas sighed, disconsolate, and asked for some Samos wine. He also wanted them to toast for him, in just a hint of oil, some sesame seeds that he could chew slowly between sips, and then he asked also for some walnuts and pistachios, the better to follow the story that he invited Baudolino to continue.

One day the Poet was sent by Rainald on some mission to Paris, and he took advantage of the occasion to return to the delights of the taverns with Baudolino and Abdul. He also met Boron, but those fantasies about the Earthly Paradise seemed to hold little interest for him. The years spent at court had changed him, Baudolino noted. He
had hardened; he never ceased clinking cups gaily, but he seemed to control himself, to shun excess, to remain on his guard, like someone lying in wait for his prey, ready to spring.

"Baudolino," he said one day, "you are wasting time. What was to be learned here in Paris, we have learned. But all these great doctors would shit in their pants if tomorrow I presented myself at a dispute in full ministerial regalia, with a sword at my side. At court I have learned a few things: if you are with great men, you also become great; great men in reality are very small; power is everything, and there is no reason why one day you could not seize it yourself, at least in part. You must know how to wait, of course, but not let your opportunity escape."

However, he promptly pricked up his ears when he heard that his friends were still talking about Prester John. When he had left them in Paris that story still seemed a fantasy of bookworms, but in Milan he had heard Baudolino speak of it to Rainald as of something that could become a visible sign of the imperial power, at least as much as the rediscovery of the Magi. The enterprise, in that case, would interest him, and he began taking part in it as if he were constructing a war machine. The more they talked about it, the more it seemed to him that the land of Prester John, like an earthly Jerusalem, was being transformed from a place of mystical pilgrimage to a land of conquest.

So he reminded his comrades that, after the Magi business, the Priest had become far more important than before: he had to be presented truly as
rex et sacerdos.
As king of kings he had to have a palace compared to which those of the Christian sovereigns, including the basileus of the Constantinople schismatics, would seem hovels, and as priest he had to have a temple compared to which the churches of the pope were shacks. He had to be given a worthy palace.

"There is a model," Boron said, "and it is the Heavenly Jerusalem as the apostle John saw it in the Apocalypse. It must be girded by high walls, with twelve gates, like the twelve tribes of Israel, to the south
three gates, to the west three gates, to the east three gates, and to the north three gates...."

"Yes," the Poet jested, "and the Priest enters one and goes out the other, and when there is a storm they all slam at once; I can imagine the drafts. In a palace like that you would never find me, not even dead...."

"Let me continue. The foundations of the walls are of jasper, sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, sardonix, sard, chrysolite, beryl, topaz, chrysoprase, hyacinth, and amethyst; and the twelve gates are twelve pearls, and the forecourt is pure gold, transparent as glass."

"Not bad," Abdul said, "but I think the model must be the Temple of Jerusalem, as the prophet Ezekiel describes it. Come with me tomorrow morning to the abbey. One of the canons, the learned Richard of Saint Victoire, is trying to reconstruct the design of the Temple, since the text of the prophet is at times obscure."

"Master Niketas," Baudolino said, "I don't know if you've ever studied the measurements of the Temple."

"Not yet."

"Well, don't, because it's enough to drive you crazy. In the Book of Kings it says that the Temple is sixty cubits wide, thirty high, and twenty deep, and that the porch is twenty wide and ten cubits deep. In Chronicles, however, it is said that the porch is one hundred twenty cubits high. Now, if it were twenty wide, one hundred twenty high, and ten deep, not only would the porch be four times higher than all the Temple, but it would also be so flimsy that it would fall down at a mere breath. The problem, however, arises when you read the vision of Ezekiel. Not one measurement holds up, and so a number of pious men have admitted that Ezekiel had indeed had a vision, which is a bit like saying he had drunk too much and was seeing double. Nothing wrong with that, poor Ezekiel (he also had a right to his fun), but then that Richard of Saint Victoire reasoned as follows: if everything, every number, every straw in the Bible has a spiritual
meaning, we must clearly understand what it says literally, because it's one thing to say, for the spiritual meaning, that something is three long and another's length is nine, since these two numbers have different mystical meanings. I can't describe to you the scene when we went to hear Richard's lecture on the Temple. He had the Book of Ezekiel before his eyes, and he was working with a tape to demonstrate all the measurements. He drew the outline of what Ezekiel had described, then he took some sticks and little slabs of soft wood, and, with the help of his acolytes, he cut them and tried to put them together with nails and glue.... He tried to reconstruct the Temple, and he reduced the measurements proportionally. What I mean is that where Ezekiel said one cubit, he had a finger's width cut.... Every two minutes the whole thing collapsed. Richard became angry with his helpers, saying they had let go of the stick, or hadn't put on enough glue; they defended themselves, saying that he was the one who had given them the wrong measurements. Then the master corrected himself, saying that perhaps the text said
porta,
but in this case the word meant porch, otherwise there would be a door almost as big as the whole Temple; at other moments he reversed himself, and said that when two measurements didn't agree it was because the first time Ezekiel was referring to the dimension of the whole building and the second to the measurement of one part. Or else sometimes it said cubit but it meant geometric cubit, which is equal to six ordinary cubits. In other words, it was amusing for a few mornings to follow that sainted man as he racked his brains, and we burst out laughing every time the Temple came apart. To keep him from noticing, we pretended to pick up some fallen object, but then a canon realized we were always dropping things, and he sent us away."