Baudolino (33 page)

Zosimos laughed boldly. "My lord, I could raise these hands of mine and the sleepers of ten thousand graves in Constantinople would rush obediently to my feet. But I have no need to recall those bodies to life. I possess a portentous object that I will use to establish more rapid contact with the world of shadows."

He lighted a firebrand at one of the tripods and held it out to the channel at the rim of the basin. The oil began to burn, and a little crown of flame, running all around the surface of the water, illuminated it with dancing glints.

"I still see nothing," the basileus said, bending over the basin. "Ask this water of yours who is the man preparing to take my place. I sense unrest in the city, and I want to know whom I must destroy to dispel any fear."

Zosimos approached the object covered by the red cloth, lying on the little column. With a histrionic gesture he removed the veil, and handed the basileus a round object he had held between his hands. Our friends couldn't see what it was, but they saw the basileus draw back, trembling, as if trying to ward off an unbearable sight. "No, no," he said, "not this! You asked it of me for your rites, but I didn't know you would have it reappear before me!"

Zosimos raised this trophy of his and was presenting it to an imaginary congregation like a monstrance, turning it towards every
part of the cavern. It was the head of a dead child, its features still intact, as if it had just been severed from the trunk: eyes closed, the nostrils of the slender nose dilated, the little lips barely parted, revealing a full set of tiny teeth. The immobility and the alien illusion of life in that face were made more hieratic by the fact that it appeared to be of a uniform gilded hue, and seemed almost to sparkle in the light of the little flames that Zosimos was now approaching.

"I had to use the head of your nephew Alexius," Zosimos was saying to the basileus, "for the ritual to be achieved. Alexius was bound to you by blood ties, and his mediation will enable you to communicate with the realm of those who are no more." Then, slowly, he immersed in the water that horrid little object, until it reached the bottom of the basin, over which Andronicus bent, as closely as the crown of flames would allow. "The water is turning murky," he said in a whisper. "It has found in Alexius the terrestrial element it was awaiting, and it is questioning him," Zosimos murmured. "We will wait until this cloud is dispersed."

Our friends couldn't see what was happening in the water, but they realized that at a certain point it became clear again and revealed, on the bottom, the face of the boy basileus. "By Hell's power," Andronicus stammered, "it is finding again its former colors, and I can read some signs that have appeared on his brow.... Oh, miracle!...Iota, Sigma..."

You didn't have to be a hydromant to understand what had happened. Zosimos had taken the head of the boy emperor, had incised some letters on the brow, then had covered them with a gilded substance, soluble in water. Now, as that artificial patina dissolved, the wretched victim was giving to the man who had hired his killer the message that obviously Zosimos, or whoever had inspired him, wanted the basileus to receive.

In fact, Andronicus went on spelling it out: "Iota, Sigma, IS ... IS..." He straightened up, twisted the hairs of his beard several times in his fingers, seemed to shoot fire from his eyes, bowing his head as
if to reflect, then raising it like a fiery horse, barely held in check. "Isaac!" he cried. "The enemy is Isaac Comnenus! What is he plotting there on Cyprus? I will send out a fleet and destroy him before he can move, the wretch!"

One of the two attendants emerged from the shadows, and Baudolino noted that he had the face of a man prepared to roast his own mother if she failed to put meat on the table. "My Lord," the man said, "Cyprus is too far away, and your fleet would have to go beyond the Propontis, passing the area where now the army of the king of Sicily is spreading. But just as you cannot go to Isaac, so he cannot come to you. I would not think so much of Isaac Comnenus, but, rather of Isaac Angelus, who is here in the city, and you know how little love he has for you."

"Stephen!" Andronicus laughed, with contempt. "You'd have me worry about Isaac Angelus? How can you think that such a broken-winded, inept, impotent good-for-nothing could even think of threatening me? Zosimos, Zosimos," he said furiously to the necromancer, "this water and this head speak to me either of one who is too far away or of another who is too stupid! What good are your eyes if you can't read in this pot full of piss?" Zosimos realized that he was about to lose his eyes, but luckily for him, that Stephen who had spoken earlier now spoke up again. From the obvious pleasure with which the man was promising new crimes, Baudolino understood this was Stephen Agiochristoforites, the evil genius of Andronicus, the man who had strangled and decapitated the boy Alexius.

"My lord, do not scorn portents. You yourself have seen how on the boy's face signs have appeared that were surely not there when he was alive. Isaac Angelus may be a petty weakling, but he hates you. Others, smaller and weaker than he, have made attempts on the life of men great and courageous as you, if ever there have been such.... Give me your consent, and this very night I will go and capture Angelus and tear out his eyes with my own hands, then I will hang him from a column of his palace. The people will be told that you received
a message from heaven. Better to be rid at once of someone who does not yet threaten you, than leave him alive so that he may threaten you one day. Let us strike first."

"You are trying to use me to satisfy some grudge of your own," the basileus said, "but it may be that in doing evil you may also be favoring good. Get rid of Isaac for me. I only regret..." and he gave Zosimos such a look that he shivered with fear, "for, with Isaac dead, we will never know if he really wanted to harm me, or if this monk has told the truth. But in the end he has aroused in me a just suspicion, and if you think the worst, you are always right. Stephen, we are obliged to show him our gratitude. See that he has what he may ask." He made a gesture to the two attendants and went out, leaving Zosimos to recover slowly from the terror that had petrified him beside his basin.

"In fact, Agiochristoforites did hate Isaac Angelus, and obviously had arranged with Zosimos to make him fall out of favor," Niketas said. "But serving his own rancor did not do his master good, because as you must know, he hastened the basileus's ruin."

"I know," Baudolino said, "but actually, on that evening it mattered little to me that I understand what was going on. It was enough for me to know that now I had Zosimos in my grasp."

As soon as the sound of the royal visitors' footsteps had died away, Zosimos heaved a great sigh. The experiment, after all, had succeeded. He rubbed his hands, with a little smile of satisfaction, drew the boy's head from the water and laid it where it had been before. Then he turned, to examine the crypt, and began laughing hysterically, raising his arms and shouting: "I have the basileus in my power! Now I won't be afraid even of the dead!"

No sooner had he spoken than our friends slowly came out into the light. Those who perform magic, it so happens, finally are persuaded that, even if they don't believe in the devil, the devil surely
believes in them. Seeing a band of lemurs arising as if it were Judgment Day, Zosimos, scoundrel though he was, at that moment behaved with exemplary spontaneity. Without trying to conceal his feelings, he fainted.

He came to as the Poet was sprinkling him with some divinatory water. He opened his eyes and found himself confronted by a Baudolino fearsome to see, more than if he were returning from the other world. At that moment Zosimos realized that, worse than the flames of an uncertain Hell, the certain vengeance of his former victim awaited him.

"I did it to serve my master," he hastened to say, "and to do you, too, a service: I've spread your letter more than you could ever have—"

Baudolino said: "Zosimos, I don't want to sound mean, but if I were to obey the inspiration I receive from Our Lord, I would smash your ass. But since that would be hard work, as you see, I am restraining myself." And he gave him a slap with the back of his hand that made his head spin around twice.

"I am a man of the basileus. If you touch a single hair of my beard, I swear—"

The Poet seized him by the hair, pulled his face to the flames that were still flickering around the basin, and Zosimos's beard began to smoke.

"You are all mad," Zosimos said, trying to elude the grip of Abdul and Kyot, who had grabbed him and were twisting his arms behind his back. And Baudolino, with a slap on the nape, pushed him headlong, to extinguish the beard's fire in the basin, preventing him from raising his head until the wretch, no longer fearing the fire, began to fear the water, and the more he feared it, the more he swallowed.

"From the bubbles you've made," Baudolino said serenely, pulling him up by the hair, "I can predict that tonight you will die not with your beard but with your feet toasted."

"Baudolino," Zosimos sobbed, vomiting water, "Baudolino, we
can still come to some agreement.... Let me cough, I beg you. I can't escape. What are you going to do, all of you against one lone man? Have you no pity? Listen, Baudolino, I know you don't want to take revenge for that moment of weakness on my part; you want to reach the land of that Prester John of yours, and I told you I have the very map to get you there. If you throw dust on the fire of the hearth it will go out."

"What does that mean, you bandit? Enough of your pronouncements!"

"It means that if you kill me, you'll never see the map. Often fish, playing in the water, leap out beyond the confines of their natural dwelling. I can enable you to go far. Let us make a pact, like two honest men. You let me go, and I will lead you to the place where the map of Cosmas the Indicopleustes is. My life for the kingdom of Prester John. Doesn't that seem a fair bargain to you?"

"I'd rather kill you," Baudolino said, "but I need you alive to get the map."

"And afterwards?"

"Afterwards we'll keep you well tied up and wrapped in a carpet until we find a reliable ship that will take us far from here, and only then will we unroll the carpet, because if we let you go at once you will immediately have every killer in the city on our heels."

"And you'll unroll it in the water..."

"Enough! We're not murderers. If I wanted to kill you later, I wouldn't be slapping you now. And—you see?—I do it for a good reason, personal satisfaction, since I don't plan to do anything worse." And he began calmly dealing out blows, first with one hand, then with the other, one blow swinging the head to the left, another swinging it to the right, twice with the palm hard, twice with tensed fingers, twice with the back of the hand, twice with the edge, twice with the fists, until Zosimos became purplish and Baudolino had almost dislocated his wrists. "Now it's beginning to hurt me," he said, "and I'll stop. Let's go see this map."

Kyot and Abdul dragged Zosimos by the armpits, for by now he could no longer stand on his own feet, and could barely point out the way with a trembling finger, as he murmured: "The monk who is despised and bears it is like a plant that is watered every day."

Baudolino said to the Poet: "Zosimos once taught me that anger more than any other passion upsets and troubles the soul, but sometimes helps it. When in fact we use it calmly against the wicked and sinners to save them or confound them, we give the soul sweetness, because we are proceeding directly towards the ends of justice." Rabbi Solomon commented: "As the Talmud says, there are punishments that cleanse all the iniquities of a man."

The monastery of Katabates was in ruins, and everyone now considered it uninhabited, but at ground level some cells still existed, and the old library, now without books, had become a kind of refectory. Here Zosimos lived with two or three acolytes, and only God knew what their monastic rites were. When Baudolino and the others emerged from underground with their prisoner, the acolytes were sleeping, but, as was clear the following morning, they were sufficiently stupefied by their excesses that they did not represent a danger. The group decided it was best to sleep in the library. Zosimos had troubled dreams as he lay on the ground between Kyot and Abdul, who had now become his guardian angels.

In the morning all sat around a table, and Zosimos was invited to come to the point.

"The point is," Zosimos said, "that the map of Cosmas is in the Bucoleon palace, in a place known to me and where only I have access. We will go there late this evening."

"Zosimos," Baudolino said, "you are beating about the bush. First of all, explain to me clearly what this map says."

"Why, it's quite simple, isn't it?" Zosimos said, taking a parchment and a stylus. "I told you that every Christian who follows the
true faith must agree to the fact that the world is made like the tabernacle of which the Scriptures speak. Now listen carefully to what I say: in the lower part of the tabernacle there was a table with twelve loaves of bread and twelve fruits, one for each month of the year; all around the table ran a plinth that depicted the Ocean, and around the plinth there was a frame one palm wide that depicted the land of the beyond, where to the east the Earthly Paradise is situated. The sky was represented by the vault, which rested entirely on the extremities of the earth, but between the vault and the base extended the veil of the firmament, beyond which lies the celestial world that only one day will we see face to face. In fact, as Isaiah said, God is he who is seated above the earth, whose inhabitants are as locusts. He who like a thin veil has unfurled the sky and spread it out like a tent. And the psalmist praises him who spreads out the sky like a pavilion. Then Moses placed, below the veil, south of the candelabrum that illuminated all the expanse of the earth, seven lamps to signify the seven days of the week and all the stars of the sky."

"But you are explaining to me how the tabernacle was made," Baudolino said, "not how the universe is made."