Jester Leaps In: A Medieval Mystery (31 page)

Aglaia had brought our information about the conspiracy to Philoxenites while I was spending the night in the Tower of Anemas. We believed that he would appreciate the usefulness of keeping Isaakios alive in case the Crusaders followed his son to Constantinople. Always good to have options. The two Imperial Guards who allowed Simon entry to the prison disappeared that same night. A few more residents of Swabian origin quietly vanished over the next few months. When I mentioned this to the Imperial Treasurer, he shrugged, and the two Varangians in his office looked studiously out the window.

My wife and I decided to take a set of rooms south of the Blachernae wall, the better to give us the run of the entire city. Palaces are so confining. We continued to entertain our royal clients on a daily basis, but also performed in the various markets, just to keep in touch.

A letter by way of a sympathetic merchant reached Fat Basil in Thessaloniki. A month later, I saw a stripling youth in muddied motley juggling six rings while balanced on one foot. What made the trick even more remarkable was that the foot was on top of a six-foot pole. His name was Plossus. He was a new graduate of the Guild, and quickly learned the ins and outs of this vast city. He settled near the Hippodrome, and became a great favorite of the factions there.

A few weeks after that, I heard a commotion as I sat on a low wall, eating some figs. A crowd of children appeared, skipping and dancing alongside a small cart pulled by a pair of brown donkeys. The driver was a dwarf who shouted foul and abusive taunts at the children while hurling handfuls of sweets to them. He noticed me as he passed and nodded slightly.

He called himself Rico, and his surly exterior was matched by a facility for invective unrivaled in my experience. I liked him immediately. When I introduced him at court, the Emperor took one look at him and virtually bleated with delight, a noise Rico would take and imitate hilariously on many an occasion.

Rico became the Emperor’s favorite, a position I gave up gratefully. I preferred roaming the squares and taverns, poking around the dark alleyways, making friends in the unlikeliest of places, cultivating my sources of information. One day would find me gossiping with Niketas Choniates on the goings-on in the Senate, another dining at midnight with Father Esaias, trading useful rumors and speculations.

The Emperor set the dwarf up in Niko and Piko’s miniature palace. We pitched in to clean it up. Aglaia took a deep breath, and vanished with Rico into the escape tunnel with some blankets. They collected the remains of our little colleagues, and we buried them secretly that night. A few days later, we did the same for Zintziphitzes.

A new troubadour, a Bolognan who called himself Alfonso, began riding the circuit from Thessaloniki to Constantinople. Thanks to him, Viola finally managed to send a letter to her children, assuring them that she was alive and well.

“But not safe,” she told me.

“I never promised you safety,” I said.

“No, you didn’t,” she agreed.

A few months later, Alfonso returned with letters from both Mark and Celia, and Viola read them to herself at every spare moment.

Not that we had many. It was a constant whirl of performing and spying, maneuvering and occasionally ducking. On the occasion of the New Year’s games, we devised a special group performance, finishing with the five of us—Rico, Plossus, Alfonso, Aglaia, and myself—standing at the five points of a giant silver pentangle in front of the Kathisma, with all of the nobility of Constantinople, the Senate, the various armies, the factions, and the people watching.

What they could see was five fools juggling clubs. What no one in the entire Hippodrome but us could hear was how we began.

“For Ignatius,” said Alfonso as he started.

“For Demetrios and Tiberius,” said Plossus as he joined him.

“For Niko and Piko,” said Rico, tossing his clubs high over his head.

“For Thalia,” said Aglaia, for the two of us had agreed that the Guild need not know that she had survived.

“For Zintziphitzes,” I said, bringing the old fellow back into the fold at last.

“For the Guild!” we cried as one, and the clubs leapt across the center in a star pattern, so that each club eventually was touched by all of us. So we remembered those who were gone.

And I often wondered where she went, and how she managed, but Thalia was never seen in Constantinople again.

The seasons passed as we continued on. One day, just past the summer solstice, Alfonso showed up and with a bland expression handed me a small scroll. I read it with delight, and looked up to see him grinning broadly.

“Tell the others,” I said. “We’ll celebrate at our place tonight.”

I had an appointment to meet my wife that afternoon. We had taken, on those rare occasions when we had free time together, to wandering around the city like tourists, seeing the sights. We had arranged to meet at the top of the Pillar of Arkadios, fulfilling a wish she had expressed our second day here. I made a few purchases, then shouldered my bag and hurried along the Mese up the Xerolophon. The pillar stood on an immense base, and was constructed of giant, hollowed-out blocks placed one upon another, with windows carved out of the sides providing a variety of views as you climbed the spiral steps to the top.

It was at the summit of this great tower that I found my beloved, gazing out to sea, as the sun ambled down the Via Egnatia toward Greece, Rome, and beyond.

“A beautiful sight, isn’t it?” she said.

“Yes, it is,” I agreed, and she smiled when she saw I was looking at her, not the sunset.

“There are a lot of fishing boats out there,” she observed. “We shall eat well tomorrow.”

“We shall eat well later,” I said. “I have some good news.”

“Oh?”

I pulled out the scroll and read from it.

“From Father Gerald: ’In light of your apprentice’s successful completion of a variety of tests under your tutelage, and in
view of her prior noteworthy accomplishments and sheer worth, it has been decided to accept her as a member-in-full of the Fools’ Guild. She will henceforth be given the rank of Jester, and shall be known within the Guild as . . .’ ”

“Let me guess,” she said. “Claudius.”

“No,” I said. “Claudia. They’ve decided to let you continue being a woman. Congratulations, my love.”

“Thank you, Master. Must I still call you Master?”

“Never again. I’ve brought you something.”

I handed her a bulky item in a soft, cloth sack. She reached inside and pulled out a lute.

“It’s lovely,” she exclaimed, and kissed me. She immediately tuned it and began playing.

I dug into my bag and produced another instrument, a large, triangular wooden frame with strings of varying lengths. I took a pair of soft mallets and started tapping them on it, producing a pleasing sound.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“A local instrument,” I said. “They call it a cembalum. I’ve been meaning to learn how to play it. After all, when in Rome . . .”

We started improvising a duet.

“Oh, did I mention that I am with child?” she asked me in the middle of it.

“No, you didn’t mention that,” I said, and we played on for a bit. Then I put down my mallets and held her close.

“Is it all right?” she asked.

“It’s wonderful,” I said.

“I do like this city,” she said. “Do you think we can stay here?”

“I suppose that’s up to the Guild,” I said. “But we’ll be together, wherever we are. I promise you that.”

“That’s fine,” she sighed.

I held her, watching the sun set, seeing so many miles out the fishing boats returning. So many.

Too many.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, as I stood to get a better look.

“Those aren’t fishing boats,” I said. “That, my dear, is the Venetian fleet.”

But the disadvantage with sources, however truthful they try to be, is their lack of precision in matters of detail and their impassioned account of events, we refer to a certain internal faculty of contradictory germination which operates within facts or the version of those facts as provided, sold, or proposed, and stemming like spores from the latter, the proliferation of secondary and tertiary sources, some copied, others carelessly transmitted, some repeated from hearsay, others who changed details in good or bad faith, some freely interpreted, others rectified, some propagated with total indifference, others proclaimed as the one, eternal and irreplaceable truth, the last of these the most suspect of all.

THE HISTORY OF THE SIEGE OF LISBON
, JOSE SARAMAGO

I
n my continuing efforts to verify the chronicles of Theophilos the Fool, I have searched every contemporaneous historical source I could find. Alas, the Fools’ Guild succeeded in suppressing almost every reference to its existence. What little I could find consists mostly of passing references to individual fools.

However, there certainly were fools in Constantinople, and I can think of no better start for the aspiring Byzantine or foolish scholar than to turn to the works of Niketas Choniates, a contemporary of Theophilos. And I can think of no better introduction to this remarkable historian than
O City of Byzantium, Annals of Niketas Choniates
, as superbly translated and annotated by Harry J. Magoulias. It was published by Wayne State University Press, and I add my voice to those who would see it reprinted, at least in paperback form.

Choniates, unusual for historians of his era (and ours), reported what he knew objectively. He had no particular axe to grind, although he had a healthy mistrust of superstition, gleefully recording every instance in which someone relied upon omens to his or her detriment. He had a sly wit and was deft with an insult, usually well deserved. It is not surprising to find that he and Theophilos were acquainted, although Theophilos rates no mention in the
Annals
. At least, not under that name.

It is from Choniates that we hear of Chalivoures and Zintziphitzes, and that the Emperor Isaakios “delighted in ribaldries and lewd songs and consorted with laughter-stirring dwarfs . . . he did not close the palace to knaves, mimes, and minstrels.” He even reports an actual jest made by Chalivoures, one of the few surviving examples from any jester:

Once at dinner Isaakios said, “Bring me
salt
.” Standing nearby admiring the dance of the women made up of the emperor’s concubines and kinswomen was Chalivoures, the wittiest of the mimes, who retorted, “Let us first come to know these, O Emperor, and then command
others
to be brought in.” At this, everyone, both men and women, burst into loud laughter; the emperors face darkened and only when he had chastened the jester’s freedom of speech was his anger curbed.

Now, to get the joke, you have to recognize, as Professor Magoulias does in a helpful footnote, that the Greek words for
salt
and
others, halas
and
allas
, are homonyms. You see, it’s a pun. Okay, so it doesn’t really work in English, but if you were a twelfth-century Greek, you would be on the floor right now. I mean, it just killed back then.

You now see why translation is such a difficult art.

I am still working my way slowly through the manuscripts preserved at the Irish abbey I mentioned in my note on the translation to
Thirteenth Night
, the first of these accounts. In that note, I speculated that some of Theophilos’s manuscripts made their way from the abbey to Shakespeare by way of Will Kempe, an actor in Shakespeare’s troupe. However, an alternative route has been proposed by Peter Tremayne, author of the entertaining and meticulously researched Sister Fidelma mystery series. Tremayne, who is a much better historian than I am, has kindly consented to my quoting from his letter:

[Shakespeare] could have made the connection through Edmund Spenser (1552–1599), the English poet (
The Faerie Queen
), who went to Ireland as part of the Elizabethan conquest. Spenser was rewarded with 3,000 acres of land confiscated from the Irish, some of which was confiscated from my direct ancestor. Spenser was given Kilcolman Castle in north County Cork, near Doneraile. Kilcolman Castle stands a few miles north from the townlands of Ballyellis. My ancestor . . . was hiding out at the time in the guerrilla band led by Donal, the illegitimate son of Donal IX . . .

If I recall,
Twelfth Night
was written by Bill Shakespeare around 1600. In 1598 my redoubtable ancestor took part in the attack on Kilcolman Castle. It was burnt down . . . [as] part of a concerted plan to drive the English back out of Cork. Spenser had to flee for his life with his family and followers . . . He arrived back in London where he died shortly thereafter “for lack of bread” as Ben Jonson reported.

I could envisage the ailing Mr. Spenser, having fled from
Ireland, selling the manuscripts, which he had plundered from the Irish abbey during the conquest, to Shakespeare in 1598 to raise money to buy some food!

Very possible, Mr. Tremayne, very possible. And as the Bard himself said, “And thereby hangs a tale.”

Of course, Shakespeare stole that line from Theophilos.