“Damn you,” Boidi shouted at the Poet. “If it hadn’t been for you we’d have been out of this dunghill! What now?”
“Now you shut up, and I know why, all right!” the Poet muttered to him. During the night the first glow from the fire was visible. At dawn Baudolino, who seemed to be sleeping, though his eyes were open, saw the Poet approach first Boidi, then Boron, and finally Kyot, and whisper something in each ear. Then he vanished. A little later Baudolino saw Kyot and Boron conferring, taking something from their packs before leaving the house, trying not to wake him.
Still later, Boidi came to him and shook his arm. He was aghast: “Baudolino,” he said, “I don’t know what’s going on, but they’re all crazy here. The Poet came to me and said these very words: I’ve found Zosimos, and now I know where the Grasal is, don’t try to be smart, take your Baptist’s head and be at Katabates, in the place where Zosimos received the basileus that time, by this afternoon, you know the way. What’s this Katabates? What basileus was he talking about? Didn’t he tell you anything?”
“No,” Baudolino said. “On the contrary, it seems he wants to keep me in the dark. And he was so confused that he didn’t remember it was Boron and Kyot who were with us, years ago, when we went to capture Zosimos at Katabates, not you. Now I want to get a clear picture.”
He looked for Boiamondo. “Listen,” he said to him, “remember the evening, many years ago, when you took us to that crypt underneath the old monastery of Katabates? Now I have to go back there.”
“If that’s what you want. You have to reach that pavilion near the church of the Holy Apostles. Maybe you can get there without finding the pilgrims, who probably haven’t got there yet. If you come back, it will mean I’m right.”
“Yes, but I should arrive there without arriving there. I mean: I can’t explain it to you, but I have to follow—or precede—someone who will take that same road, and I don’t want to be seen. I remember there are many tunnels underneath. Can you get there by some other way?”
Boiamondo began laughing. “If you’re not afraid of the dead … You can enter from another pavilion near the Hippodrome, and I think you can still get there from here. Then you proceed underground for quite a way, and you’re in the cemetery of the monks of Katabates, which nobody knows still exists, but it does. The cemetery tunnels lead to the crypt, but if you like, you can stop before then.”
“Will you take me?”
“Baudolino, friendship is sacred, but my skin is even more sacred. I’ll explain it all to you carefully; you’re a smart boy and you’ll find the way by yourself. All right?”
Boiamondo described the road to take, gave him also two wellresinated pieces of wood. Baudolino went back to Boidi and asked him if he was afraid of the dead. Not me, he said; I’m afraid only of the living. “This is what we’ll do,” Baudolino said to him. “You take your Baptist’s head and I’ll accompany you there. You’ll go to your appointment and I’ll hide a bit earlier, to find out what that madman has on his mind.”
“Let’s go,” Boidi said.
At the moment they were leaving, Baudolino thought for an instant, then went back and took his own Baptist’s head, which he wrapped in a rag, and put under his arm. Then he thought again, and into his belt he thrust the two Arab daggers he had bought at Gallipolis.
- Baudolino settles scores
Baudolino and Boidi reached the Hippodrome area as the flames of the fire were coming closer; they forced their way through a crowd of terrified Romei, who didn’t know which way to escape, because some shouted that the pilgrims were coming from this direction, others from that. The two found the pavilion, forced a door locked by a weak chain, entered the underground passage, lighting the torches they had been given by Boiamondo.
They walked for a long time, because obviously the passage led from the Hippodrome to the walls of Constantine. Then they climbed some dank steps, and began to smell a deathly stink. It wasn’t the smell of recently dead flesh; it was, so to speak, the smell of a smell, smell of flesh that had rotted and then somehow dried up.
They entered a corridor (and could see others opening out to right and left along its course), in whose walls a series of niches opened, inhabited by a subterranean population of the almost living dead. They were dead, no doubt about that, those fully dressed beings, who stood erect in their recesses, supported perhaps by iron spikes that held their backs; but time seemed not to have completed its work of destruction, because those dry, leather-colored faces, in which empty sockets gaped, often marked by a toothless grin, gave an impression of life.
They were not skeletons, but bodies apparently drained by a force that from inside had dried and crumbled the viscera, leaving intact not only the bones but also the skin, and perhaps part of the muscles.
“Master Niketas, we had come upon a network of catacombs where for centuries the monks of Katabates had placed the corpses of their brothers, without burying them, because some miraculous conjunction of the soil, the air, and some substance that dripped from the tufa walls of that labyrinth preserved them almost intact.”
“I thought they didn’t do that any more, and I didn’t know anything about the Katabates cemetery, a sign that this city still retains some mysteries that none of us knows. But I had heard tell of how certain monks in the past, to assist the work of nature, let their brothers’ corpses steep among the tufa humors for eight months, then extracted them, washed them with vinegar, exposed them to the air for a few days, dressed them, and replaced them in their niches, so that somehow the balsamic air of that setting would ensure their dried immortality.”
Proceeding along that line of deceased monks, each dressed in liturgical vestments, as if they were still to officiate, kissing gleaming ikons with their livid lips, Baudolino and Boidi glimpsed faces with taut, ascetic smiles, others to which the devout survivors had pasted beards and mustaches to make them look hieratic as in the past, their eyelids closed so they would
seem asleep, still others with the head now reduced to a mere skull, but with hard, leathery bits of skin attached to the cheekbones.
Some had been deformed by the centuries, and appeared like prodigies of nature, fetuses clumsily taken from the maternal womb, inhuman beings on whose contracted forms unnatural, arabesqued chasubles appeared, the colors now dulled, dalmatics that you would have thought embroidered but were gnawed by the work of the years and by some worm of the catacombs.
From still others the clothing had fallen, now crumbled by the centuries, and beneath the shreds of their vestments appeared scrawny little bodies, the ribs covered by an epidermis taut as the skin of a drum.
“If it was piety that conceived that sacred representation,” Baudolino said to Niketas, “the survivors were impious, as they had imposed the memory of those deceased as a constant, looming threat, in no way meant to reconcile the living with death. How can you pray for the soul of someone who is staring at you from those walls, saying I am here, and I will never move from here? How can you hope for the resurrection of the flesh and the transfiguration of our earthly bodies after the Last Judgment, if those bodies are still there, decaying day after day? I, unfortunately, had seen corpses in my life, and at least I could hope that, dissolved into the earth, one day they might dazzle, beautiful and rubicund as a rose.
If, up there on high, after the end of time, people like this would be moving about, I said to myself, then better Hell that burns here and hacks there. In Hell, at least it should resemble what happens in our world. Boidi, less sensitive than I to mortality, tried to lift those vestments to see the state of the pudenda, for if somebody shows you such things, how can you complain if somebody else thinks of those other things?”
Before the network of passages ended, they found themselves in a circular place, where the vault was perforated by an airshaft that revealed, up above, the afternoon sky. Obviously, at ground level, a well served to give air to that place. They put out the torches. No longer illuminated by the flames, but instead by that livid light diffused among the niches, the monks’ bodies seemed even more disturbing. They gave the impression that, touched by daylight, they were about to rise again. Boidi made the sign of the cross.
Finally, the corridor they had taken ended in the ambulacrum behind the columns that encircled the crypt where, the last time, they had seen Zosimos. Glimpsing some lights, they approached, on tiptoe. The crypt was as it had been before, illuminated by two lighted tripods. Only the circular basin used by Zosimos for his necromancy was missing. In front of the iconostasis Boron and Kyot were already waiting, nervous. Baudolino suggested to Boidi that he arrive, emerging between the two columns flanking the iconostasis, as if he had followed the same route, while Baudolino himself would remain hidden.
Boidi did so, and the other two received
