“By Charlemagne’s beard!” Frederick said, the hairs of his own beard bristling with excitement. “Did you hear that, Rainald? As always, the boy’s right!”
And so it happened, even though not until the end of the following year, because certain things require time if they are to be prepared properly. Niketas observed that as an idea it was insane, and Baudolino answered that, nevertheless, it had worked. And he looked at Niketas with pride. It’s only natural, Niketas thought; your vanity is boundless, you have even
made Charlemagne a saint. From Baudolino anything could be expected. “And after that?” he asked.
“While Frederick and Rainald were preparing to canonize Charlemagne, little by little I realized that neither he nor the Magi were enough. All four of them were safely in Paradise; at least the Magi surely were, and we could hope for Charlemagne as well, otherwise at Aix-la-Chapelle we’d made a fine mess. But still it took something more, here on this earth, where the emperor could say, Here I am, and this sanctions my power. And the only thing the emperor could find on this earth was the kingdom of Prester John.”
- Baudolino constructs a palace for Prester John
On the Friday morning, three of the Genoese—Pevere, Boiamondo, and Grillo—came to confirm what could very clearly be seen even from a distance: the fire had gone out, as if by itself, because nobody had taken much trouble to fight it. But this did not mean they could now venture into Constantinople. On the contrary, enabled to move more easily through the streets and squares, the pilgrims had intensified their search for wealthy citizens, and amid the still-warm ruins they demolished what little remained standing, searching for those treasures that had eluded the first looting.
Niketas sighed, disconsolate, and asked for some Samos wine. He also wanted them to toast for him, in just a hint of oil, some sesame seeds that he could chew slowly between sips, and then he asked also for some walnuts and pistachios, the better to follow the story that he invited Baudolino to continue.
One day the Poet was sent by Rainald on some mission to Paris, and he took advantage of the occasion to return to the delights of the taverns with Baudolino and Abdul. He also met Boron, but those fantasies about the Earthly Paradise seemed to hold little interest for him. The years spent at court had changed him, Baudolino noted. He had hardened; he never ceased clinking cups gaily, but he seemed to control himself, to shun excess, to remain on his guard, like someone lying in wait for his prey, ready to spring.
“Baudolino,” he said one day, “you are wasting time. What was to be learned here in Paris, we have learned. But all these great doctors would shit in their pants if tomorrow I presented myself at a dispute in full ministerial regalia, with a sword at my side. At court I have learned a few things: if you are with great men, you also become great; great men in reality are very small; power is everything, and there is no reason why one day you could not seize it yourself, at least in part. You must know how to wait, of course, but not let your opportunity escape.”
However, he promptly pricked up his ears when he heard that his friends were still talking about Prester John. When he had left them in Paris that story still seemed a fantasy of bookworms, but in Milan he had heard Baudolino speak of it to Rainald as of something that could become a visible sign of the imperial power, at least as much as the rediscovery of the Magi. The enterprise, in that case, would interest him, and he began taking part in it as if he were constructing a war machine. The more they talked about it, the more it seemed to him that the land of Prester John, like an earthly Jerusalem, was being transformed from a place of mystical pilgrimage to a land of conquest.
So he reminded his comrades that, after the Magi business, the Priest had become far more important than before: he had to be presented truly as rex et sacerdos. As king of kings he had to have a palace compared to which those of the Christian sovereigns, including the basileus of the Constantinople schismatics, would seem hovels, and as priest he had to have a temple compared to which the churches of the pope were shacks. He had to be given a worthy palace.
“There is a model,” Boron said, “and it is the Heavenly Jerusalem as the apostle John saw it in the Apocalypse. It must be girded by high walls, with twelve gates, like the twelve tribes of Israel, to the south three gates, to the west three gates, to the east three gates, and to the north three gates….” “Yes,” the Poet jested, “and the Priest enters one and goes out the other, and when there is a storm they all slam at once; I can imagine the drafts. In a palace like that you would never find me, not even dead….”
“Let me continue. The foundations of the walls are of jasper, sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, sardonix, sard, chrysolite, beryl, topaz, chrysoprase, hyacinth, and amethyst; and the twelve gates are twelve pearls, and the forecourt is pure gold, transparent as glass.”
“Not bad,” Abdul said, “but I think the model must be the Temple of Jerusalem, as the prophet Ezekiel describes it. Come with me tomorrow morning to the abbey. One of the canons, the learned Richard of Saint Victoire, is trying to reconstruct the design of the Temple, since the text of the prophet is at times obscure.”
“Master Niketas,” Baudolino said, “I don’t know if you’ve ever studied the measurements of the Temple.”
“Not yet.”
“Well, don’t, because it’s enough to drive you crazy. In the Book of Kings it says that the Temple is sixty cubits wide, thirty high, and twenty deep, and that the porch is twenty wide and ten cubits deep. In Chronicles, however, it is said that the porch is one hundred twenty cubits high. Now, if it were twenty wide, one hundred twenty high, and ten deep, not only would the porch be four times higher than all the Temple, but it would also be so flimsy that it would fall down at a mere breath. The problem, however, arises when you read the vision of Ezekiel. Not one measurement holds up, and so a number of pious men have admitted that Ezekiel had indeed had a vision, which is a bit like saying he had drunk too much and was seeing double.
Nothing wrong with that, poor Ezekiel (he also had a right to his fun), but then that Richard of Saint Victoire reasoned as follows: if everything, every number, every straw in the Bible has a spiritual meaning, we must clearly understand what it says literally, because it’s one thing to say, for the spiritual meaning, that something is three long and another’s length is nine, since these two numbers have different mystical meanings.
I can’t describe to you the scene when we went to hear Richard’s lecture on the Temple. He had the Book of Ezekiel before his eyes, and he was working with a tape to demonstrate all the measurements. He drew the outline of what Ezekiel had described, then he took some sticks and little slabs of soft wood, and, with the help of his acolytes, he cut them and tried to put them together with nails and glue…. He tried to reconstruct the Temple, and he reduced the measurements proportionally. What I mean is that where Ezekiel said one cubit, he had a finger’s width cut…. Every two minutes the whole thing collapsed.
Richard became angry with his helpers, saying they had let go of the stick, or hadn’t put on enough glue; they defended themselves, saying that he was the one who had given them the wrong measurements. Then the master corrected himself, saying that perhaps the text said porta, but in this case the word meant porch, otherwise there would be a door almost as big as the whole Temple; at other moments he reversed himself, and said that when two measurements didn’t agree it was because the first time Ezekiel was referring to the dimension of the whole building and the second to the measurement of one part.
Or else sometimes it said cubit but it meant geometric cubit, which is equal to six ordinary cubits. In other words, it was amusing for a few mornings to follow that sainted man as he racked his brains, and we burst out laughing every time the Temple came apart. To keep him from noticing, we pretended to pick up some fallen object, but then a canon realized we were always dropping things, and he sent us away.”
In the days that followed, Abdul suggested that, as Ezekiel after all belonged to the people of Israel, perhaps others of his faith could shed some light. When his companions, shocked, said that it was not right to read the Scriptures while asking advice of a Jew, since notoriously that treacherous race altered the text of the sacred books to remove
