Baudolino (59 page)

As they were about to flee, Baudolino saw one of the deacon's two acolytes coming towards him. The man was carrying a case. "It's the sheet with his features," he said. "He wanted you to have it. Put it to good use."

"Are you also fleeing?"

The veiled man said: "Here or there; if a there exists, for us it will be the same. The fate of our master awaits us. We will stay here and infect the Huns."

***

Just outside the city, Baudolino saw a horrible sight. Towards the blue hills some flames were flickering. Somehow, since morning, over several hours, a part of the Huns had begun circling the scene of the battle, and they had already reached the lake.

"Quickly!" Baudolino cried, in despair. "Over there, all of you! Gallop!" The others didn't understand. "Why over there, when they are there already?" asked Boidi. "This way, why not? Perhaps the only escape path remains to the south."

"Suit yourselves. I'm going," Baudolino shouted, beside himself. "He's lost his mind," Colandrino said, imploring the others: "We must follow him to make sure he does himself no harm."

But by now Baudolino was far ahead of them, and, with Hypatia's name on his lips, he was heading for sure death.

After half an hour's furious gallop, he stopped, glimpsing a swift form coming towards him. It was Gavagai.

"You be easy," Gavagai said to him. "I seen her. Now she safe." This beautiful news was soon to be transformed into a source of desperation, because this is what Gavagai said: the hypatias had been warned in time of the Huns' arrival, and, in fact, by the satyrs, who had come down from their hills and collected them, and when Gavagai arrived they were already leading the hypatias away, up there, beyond the mountains, where only the satyrs knew how to move, and the Huns would never be able to reach them. Hypatia had waited till the last, as her companions tugged at her arms, hoping for news of Baudolino, and she was unwilling to leave before learning of his fate. Hearing Gavagai's message, she became calm and, smiling through her tears, said to tell him good-bye for her. Trembling, she charged Gavagai to tell Baudolino to flee, because his life was in danger; sobbing, she gave him her last message: she loved him, and they would never see each other again.

Baudolino asked Gavagai if he was crazy, he couldn't let Hypatia go into the mountains, he wanted to take her with him. But Gavagai said it was now too late, and before he could get there, where, for that matter, the Huns were now masters, as everywhere, the hypatias would be beyond reach. Then, mastering his respect for one of the Magi, and putting a hand on his arm, he repeated Hypatia's last message; she would also wait for him, but her first duty was to protect their child: "She said, I forever have with me someone who recalls to me Baudolino." Then, looking up at him, Gavagai asked: "You made child with that female?"

"None of your business," Baudolino said, ungratefully. Gavagai remained silent.

Baudolino was still hesitating when his companions joined him. He realized that he could explain nothing to them, nothing they could understand. Then he tried to convince himself. It was all so rational: the wood was now conquered land, the hypatias had fortunately gained the hills where their salvation lay, Hypatia had rightly sacrificed her love of Baudolino to love of that yet-to-be-born creature he had given her. It was all so heartbreakingly sensible, and there was no other possible choice.

"I had been warned, after all, Master Niketas, that the Demiurge had done things only halfway."

"Poor, unhappy Baudolino," said Niketas, so moved that he forgot to savor the pig's head, boiled with salt, onions, and garlic, that Theophilactus had preserved throughout the winter in a little keg of sea water. "Once again, every time you happen to conceive a passion for something true, fate punished you."

"After that evening we rode for three days and three nights, never stopping, never eating or drinking. I learned later that my friends performed miracles of cleverness to elude the Huns, who could be encountered anywhere within a range of many miles. I let them lead me. I followed them, and I thought of Hypatia. It's right, I told myself, that it has gone like this. Could I really have taken her with me? Would she have adapted to an unknown world, removed from the innocence of the wood, the familiar warmth of her rites, and the company of her sisters? Would she have renounced being one of the elect, called to redeem the divinity? I would have transformed her into a slave, a wretch. And further, I never asked her age, but perhaps she could have been my daughter twice over. When I abandoned Pndapetzim, I was, I believe, fifty. To her I had appeared young and vigorous, because I was the first man she had seen, but in truth I was approaching old age. I could have given her little, while taking from her everything. I tried to convince myself that things had gone as they had to go. They had to go in a way that left me unhappy forever. If I accepted this, perhaps I would find my peace."

"You weren't tempted to turn back?"

"Every moment, after those first three mindless days. But we had lost our way. The path we had taken wasn't the one by which we had arrived; we made infinite twists and turns, and crossed the same mountain three times, or perhaps they were three different mountains but we were no longer able to distinguish them. The sun alone wasn't enough to orient us, and with us we had neither Ardzrouni nor his map. Perhaps we had circled the great mountain that occupies half of the tabernacle, and we were at the other end of the land. Then we were left without horses. The poor animals had been with us since the beginning of the journey, and had aged with us. We hadn't been aware of this, because in Pndapetzim there were no other horses with which to compare them. Those last three days of precipitous flight exhausted them. Little by little they died, and for us it was almost a blessing, because they had the good sense to leave us, one after the other, in places where we found no food, and we ate their flesh, what little remained clinging to their bones. We continued on foot, and our feet were covered with sores. The only one who never complained was Gavagai, who had never needed horses, and who had on his foot a callus two inches thick. We literally ate locusts, and without honey, unlike the sainted fathers. Then we lost Colandrino."

"The youngest..."

"The least experienced of us. He was looking for food among the rocks; he thrust his hand into a treacherous crevice, and was bitten by a snake. He had just enough breath to tell me good-bye, whispering that I should remain faithful to the memory of his beloved sister, my most beloved wife, so that I would at least make her live in my memory. I had forgotten Colandrina, and once again I felt an adulterer and a traitor, both to Colandrina and to Colandrino."

"And then?"

"Then all goes dark. Master Niketas, I left Pndapetzim, according to my calculations, in the summer of the year of Our Lord 1197. I arrived here at Constantinople last January. Between those dates there were then six and a half years of emptiness, an emptiness in my spirit and perhaps in the world."

"Six years wandering in deserts?"

"One year, or two: who could keep track of time? After the death of Colandrino, months later perhaps, we found ourselves at the foot of some mountains we didn't know how to scale. Of the twelve who had set out, six of us remained, six men and a skiapod. Our clothes in tatters, our bodies wasted, burned by the sun, we had nothing left but our weapons and our knapsacks. We said to ourselves that perhaps we had reached the end of our journey, and it was our fate to die there. Suddenly we saw coming towards us a squad of men on horseback. They were sumptuously dressed, bearing shining arms, with human bodies and dogs' heads."

"They were cynocephali. So they do exist."

"By God's truth. They questioned us, barking; we didn't understand; the one who seemed their leader smiled—it may have been a smile, or a snarl, that bared his sharpened teeth—he gave an order to the others, and they bound us, in single file. The made us cross the mountain along a path that they knew; then, after some hours' march, we descended into a valley surrounded on all sides by another mountain, very high, with a powerful fortress circled by birds of prey that, even from a distance, seemed enormous. I remembered Abdul's old description, and I recognized the fortress of Aloadin."

So it was. The cynocephali made them climb tortuous steps dug into the stone up to that impregnable refuge, then brought them into the castle, where, amid towers and keeps, they could glimpse hanging gardens, and catwalks barred by sturdy gratings. They were handed over to other cynocephali, armed with scourges. Moving along a corridor, Baudolino caught sight, through a window, of a kind of courtyard amid very high walls, where many young men were languishing in chains, and he remembered how Aloadin trained his henchmen to crime, bewitching them with the green honey. Led into a sumptuous hall, they saw an old man, who seemed a centenarian, seated on embroidered cushions: he had a white beard, black eyebrows, and a grim gaze. Alive and powerful when he had captured Abdul, almost half a century earlier, Aloadin was still there controlling his slaves.

He looked at the newcomers with contempt, obviously realizing that these wretches were not good enough for enrollment among his young assassins. He didn't even speak to them. He made a bored gesture to one of his servants, as if to say: Do as you please with them. His curiosity was aroused only by the sight of the skiapod behind them. He motioned him to move, gestured to him to raise his foot above his head, and laughed. The six men were taken away, and Gavagai was left with him.

Thus began the long imprisonment of Baudolino, Boron, Kyot, Rabbi Solomon, Boidi, and the Poet, their feet always bound by a chain, which ended in a stone ball. They were employed in servile tasks, sometimes washing the tiles of the floors and walls, sometimes turning the wheels of the mills, sometimes bidden to carry quarters of ram to the rocs.

"They were flying beasts," Baudolino explained to Niketas, "as big as ten eagles put together, with a hooked, sharp beak that in a few instants could strip away the flesh of an ox. Their claws had talons that seemed the prow of a warship. They moved restlessly in a huge cage set on a turret, ready to attack anyone, except one eunuch, who seemed to speak their language and who kept them in order, moving among them as if he were among the chickens in his coop. He was also the only one who could send them out as Aloadin's messengers: he would place on one of them—at the neck and along the back—some sturdy thongs that he ran beneath their wings, to the thongs he attached a basket, or another weight, then he opened a shutter, issued a command to the bird thus equipped, and only that one could fly out of the tower and vanish in the sky. We saw them also return. The eunuch let them in, and detached from their harness a bag or a metal cylinder that apparently contained a message for the lord of the place."

At other times the prisoners spent days and days in idleness, because there was nothing to do; sometimes they were assigned to serve the eunuch who carried the green honey to the young men in chains, and with horror they saw those faces, devastated by the dream that consumed them. If not the dream, then a subtle listlessness devoured the prisoners, who whiled away the time constantly telling one another the vicissitudes they had shared. They recalled Paris, Alessandria, the lively markets, the serene stay among the Gymnosophists. They talked about the Priest's letter, and the Poet, more gloomy every day, seemed to repeat the deacon's words as if he had heard them: "The suspicion that consumes me is that the kingdom does not exist." Who spoke of it to us, in Pndapetzim? The eunuchs. To whom did the messengers, sent to the Priest, return? To them, to the eunuchs. Had those messengers really gone out? Did they really return? The deacon had never seen his father. Everything we learned, we learned from the eunuchs. Maybe it was all a plot of the eunuchs, who were mocking the deacon, and us, and White Huns existed...." Baudolino told him to remember their companions who had died in battle, but the Poet shook his head. Rather than remind himself that he had been defeated, he preferred to believe he had been the victim of a spell.

Then they went back to the death of Frederick, and each time they invented a new explanation to make that inexplicable death comprehensible. It had been Zosimos, that was clear. No, Zosimos had stolen the Grasal, but only afterwards: someone, hoping to gain possession of the Grasal, had acted beforehand. Ardzrouni? Who could know? One of their slain companions? What a ghastly thought. One of the survivors? But in such misfortune, Baudolino said, must we also suffer the torment of reciprocal suspicion?

"As long as we were traveling, excited by the search for the kingdom of the Priest, we were not seized by these doubts; each helped the other in the spirit of friendship. It was captivity that made us snarl; we couldn't look one another in the face, and for years we hated one another in turn. I lived withdrawn into myself. I thought of Hypatia, but I was unable to remember her face. I remembered only the joy she gave me; at night my restless hand might stray to the hair of my sex, and I dreamed of touching her fleece that wafted the scent of moss. I could arouse myself because, if our spirit was delirious, our body was gradually recovering from the effects of our peregrinations. Up there they did not feed us badly, we received abundant food twice a day. Perhaps this was the way that Aloadin, who never admitted us to the secrets of his green honey, kept us calm. In fact, we had regained strength but, despite the hard tasks we were forced to perform, we were growing fat. I looked at my prominent belly and said to myself: You're beautiful, Baudolino; are all men beautiful like you? Then I would laugh like an idiot."

The only moments of consolation were when Gavagai visited them. Their excellent friend had become Aloadin's jester, amusing him with his unpredictable movements, performing little services for him, flying through rooms and corridors to carry out his orders. He had learned the Saracen language, he enjoyed great liberty. He brought his friends some delicacies from the lord's kitchen, kept them informed about the events of the fortress, or the dogged struggles among the eunuchs to gain the favor of the master, or the murderous missions on which the young dreamers were dispatched.