Groping, he who knew those places from memory, had slipped off, while we had quite different matters to occupy us. He had done all sorts of things, but he had been punished. Let him continue begging in the streets, and may the Lord have mercy on him.
And so, Master Niketas, I retraced my way along the corridor of the dead, stepping over the corpse of the Poet, and I climbed back into the light of the fire near the Hippodrome. What happened to me immediately afterwards you know: it was immediately afterwards that I met you.”
- Baudolino stylites
Niketas was silent. And Baudolino, too, was silent, seated with his hands open on his lap. As if to say: “That’s all.”
“There is something in your story,” Niketas said at a certain point, “that doesn’t convince me. The Poet formulated imaginary accusations against your companions, as if each of them had killed Frederick, and then they were false. You believed you could reconstruct what happened that night but, if you have told me everything, the Poet never said that was how things really went.”
“He tried to kill me!”
“He had gone crazy, that is clear: he wanted the Grasal at any price, and to have it he had convinced himself that its possessor was the murderer. All he could think of you was that, having it, you had kept it hidden from him, and this was enough for him to pass over your dead body to take that cup from you. But you never said that he was the murderer of Frederick.”
“Well, who was it then?”
“You all went on for fifteen years thinking that Frederick’s death was a pure accident….”
“We stuck to that belief so that we wouldn’t have to suspect one another. And then there was the ghost of Zosimos: we had a guilty party.”
“That may be. But, believe me, and I am a man who in imperial palaces has witnessed many crimes. Even if our emperors always enjoyed showing foreign visitors strange machines and miraculous automata, I never saw anyone use those machines to kill.
Listen: you will remember that when you mentioned Ardzrouni to me the first time, I said I had known him in Constantinople, and that one of my friends from Selymbria had been to his castle once or twice. He is a man, this Paphnutius, who knows much about Ardzrouni’s diabolic tricks, because he himself has constructed similar things for the imperial palaces.
And he knows well the limitations of these deviltries, because once, in the days of Andronicus, he promised the emperor an automaton that would spin in place and unfurl a banner when the emperor clapped his hands. He constructed it, Andronicus displayed it to some foreign envoys during a banquet, he clapped his hands, the automaton didn’t budge, and Paphnutius’s eyes were gouged out. I’ll ask him if he would like to come and pay you a visit. Actually, exiled here in Selymbria, he is bored.”
Paphnutius came, led by a boy. Despite his misfortune, and his age, he was a keen and lively man. He conversed with Niketas, whom he hadn’t seen for some time, and then asked how he could be of help to Baudolino. Baudolino told him the story, first summarily, then in greater detail, from the Gallipolis market to the death of Frederick.
He couldn’t avoid referring to Ardzrouni, but he concealed the identity of his adoptive father, saying he was a Flemish count, very dear to him. He didn’t even mention the Grasal, but spoke only of a goblet studded with precious stones, to which the murdered man was greatly attached, a thing that could arouse the envy of many. As Baudolino narrated, Paphnutius interrupted him every now and then.
“You’re a Frank, aren’t you?” he asked, and explained that his way of pronouncing certain Greek words was typical of those who lived in Provence. Or: “Why do you keep touching that scar on your cheek, while you talk?” And to Baudolino, who by now believed his blindness was counterfeit, he explained that at times his voice lost its sonority, as if he were passing his hand before his mouth. If, as many do, he were touching his beard, he wouldn’t have covered his mouth. Therefore he must be touching his cheek, and if someone touches his cheek it’s because he has a toothache, or has a wart or a scar. Since Baudolino was a man of arms, the scar hypothesis seemed the most rational.
Baudolino completed his tale, and Paphnutius said: “Now you would like to know what really happened inside the locked room of the emperor Frederick.”
“How do you know I was talking about Frederick?”
“Come now, everyone knows the emperor drowned in the Calykadnus, a few feet from the castle of Ardzrouni, who, for that matter, then immediately disappeared, because his prince Leo wanted to chop off his head, holding him responsible for not having guarded adequately that most illustrious guest. I had always been amazed that your emperor, so accustomed to swimming in rivers, as everyone said, had let himself be swept away by the current of a trickle like the Calykadnus, and now you are explaining many things to me. So then, let’s try to see this clearly.” He spoke without irony, as if he were truly following a scene that was unfolding before his spent eyes.
“First of all, we can eliminate any suspicion that Frederick died because of the machine that creates the vacuum. I know that machine; first of all, it acted on a small windowless room on the upper floor, and not surely in the room of the emperor, where there was a flue and God knows how many other apertures where air could enter at will. In second place, the machine itself couldn’t work.
I tested it. The inner cylinder didn’t occupy perfectly the outer cylinder, and there, too, air could come in all over the place. Mechanics more expert than Ardzrouni tried, centuries and centuries ago, experiments of the kind, without results. It was one thing to construct the sphere that turned or the gate that opened thanks to heat: these are tricks known since the times of Ctesibius and Hero of Alexandria.
But the vacuum, dear friend: absolutely not. Ardzrouni was vain, he liked to amaze his guests, and that’s all there was to it. Now we come to the mirrors. The burning of the Roman ships by the great Archimedes is consecrated by legend, but we don’t know if it’s true. I’ve touched Ardzrouni’s mirrors: they were too small, and crudely ground. Even assuming they were perfect, one mirror sends solar rays of some power at high noon, not in the morning, when the sun’s rays are weak. Moreover, the rays would have had to pass through a window with colored panes, and so you see that your friend, even if he had trained one of those mirrors on the emperor’s chamber, would have achieved nothing. Are you convinced?”
“Let’s move on to the rest.”
“Poisons and antidotes … You Latins are truly ingenuous. Could you imagine that in the Gallipolis market they could sell potent substances such as even a basileus can manage to possess only through trusted alchemists, paying their weight in gold? Everything sold there is false; it serves for the barbarians who come from Iconium, or the Bulgar forest. In the two phials
they showed you was fresh water, and whether Frederick drank the liquid from the phial belonging to your Jewish friend or from the one belonging to your friend called the Poet, the result would have been the same.
And the same can be said for the portentous cordial. If such a cordial were to exist, every strategist would stock up on it, to animate and drive his wounded soldiers back into battle. For that matter, you told me the price at which they sold you those marvels: it was so ridiculous that it was hardly worth the trouble to take the water from the fountain and fill the phials.
Now let me tell you about the Dionysius ear. I have never heard that Ardzrouni’s device worked. Tricks of this kind can succeed when the distance between the aperture into which you speak and the one from which the voice emerges is very short, as when you cup your hands around your mouth, to make yourself heard a bit farther away. But in the castle, the passage from one floor to the next was complicated, twisting and winding, between thick walls. … Did Ardzrouni allow you to test his device?”
“No.”
“You see? He showed it to his guests, he boasted of it, and that’s all. Even if your poet had tried to speak with Frederick, and Frederick had been awake, he would have heard at most a vague mumbling from the Medusa’s mouth. Perhaps sometimes Ardzrouni used this artifice to frighten someone he had sent to sleep up there, to make him believe the castle housed ghosts, but no more than that. Your Poet friend can’t have sent any message to Frederick.”
“But the empty cup
