“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.”
“I can’t see
