“Baudolino, do you believe what this clod is saying?”
“I’m only translating what he says. As far as I recall from my infancy, I’m not sure that cows like to eat wheat, but this one was surely full of the stuff, and the evidence of your eyes can’t be denied.”
Frederick stroked his beard, narrowed his eyes, and took a good look at Gagliaudo. “Baudolino,” he said then, “I have the impression that I’ve seen this man before, only it must have been a long time ago. You don’t know him?”
“Father, I know more or less everybody around here. But the problem now isn’t to ask who this man is, but whether it’s true that in the city they have all these cows and all this wheat. Because, if you want my sincere opinion, they could be trying to deceive you, by stuffing their last cow with the last of their wheat.”
“Good thinking, Baudolino. That hadn’t occurred to me.”
“Most Holy Majesty,” the marquess of Monferrato spoke up, “we must not credit these peasants with more intelligence than they possess.
It seems to me we have a clear sign that the city is better supplied than we had supposed.”
“Oh, yes, yes,” all the other lords said with one voice, and Baudolino concluded that he had never seen so many people of bad faith, all together, each clearly recognizing the bad faith of the others. But it was a sign that this siege was by now intolerable for all.
“And so apparently it must seem to me,” Frederick said diplomatically. “The enemy army is pressing us from behind. Taking Roboreto wouldn’t save us from having to face the other army. Nor can we think of conquering the city and shutting ourselves up inside those walls, so ill made they’d be an insult to our dignity.
So, my lords, we have come to this decision: we’ll abandon this wretched town to its wretched cow herders, and prepare ourselves for quite different conflict. Have the appropriate orders issued.” And then, coming out of the royal tent, he said to Baudolino: “Send that old man home. He’s surely a liar, but if I had to hang all liars, you would have left this world long since.”
“Hurry home, Father. You’ve been lucky,” Baudolino whispered, removing Gagliaudo’s irons, “and tell Trotti that I’ll be waiting for him this evening at the place he knows.”
Frederick did it all in haste. There was no need to remove any tents,
those tatters that now constituted the besiegers’ camp. He lined the men up and ordered everything to be burned. At midnight the vanguard of the army was already marching towards the fields of Marengo. In the background, at the foot of the Tortona hills, some fires were glowing: in the distance the army of the League was waiting.
Asking leave of the emperor, Baudolino rode off in the direction of Sale, and at a crossroads he found Trotti waiting for him with two consuls of Cremona. They rode together for a mile, until they reached an advanced post of the League. There Trotti introduced Baudolino to the two leaders of the communal army, Ezzelino da Romano and Anselmo da Dovara.
A brief council followed, sealed by a handshake. Having embraced Trotti (it’s turned out fine, thanks to you; no, no, thanks to you), Baudolino went back as quickly as possible to Frederick, who was waiting at the edge of a clearing. “It’s settled, Father. They won’t attack. They have neither the desire nor the nerve. We will pass, and they will hail you as their lord.” “Until the next fight,” Frederick murmured, “but the army’s tired. The sooner we’re quartered in Pavia, the better. Let’s go.”
It was the early hours of the feast of Easter. In the distance, if he had turned around, Frederick would have seen the walls of Alessandria shining with tall fires. Baudolino turned and saw them. He knew that many flames were those of the war machines and the imperial lodgings, but he preferred to imagine the Alessandrians dancing and singing to celebrate victory and peace.
After a mile they came upon a vanguard of the League. The squad of horsemen separated and formed two wings, between which the imperials passed. It was not clear if this movement was a greeting or if the troops were drawing aside as a precaution; you never can tell. Some of the League men raised their weapons and this gesture could have been interpreted as a salute. Or perhaps it was a show of impotence, a threat. The emperor, frowning, pretended not to see them.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I feel as if I were retreating, and these men are showing me the honor of arms. Baudolino, am I doing the right thing?”
“Yes, you are, Father. You are no more surrendering than they are. They don’t want to attack you in the open field out of respect. And you must be grateful for this respect.”
“It’s my due,” Barbarossa said stubbornly.
“If you think they owe it to you, then be happy that they are giving it to you. What are you complaining about?”
“Nothing, nothing. As usual, you are right.”
Towards dawn they glimpsed in the distant plain and on the first hills the main body of the opposing army. It blended with a light mist, and once again it wasn’t clear whether they were moving away from the imperial army out of prudence, or simply gathering around, or if they were pressing closely, and menacingly. In little groups the people of the communes were moving, sometimes accompanying the imperial process for a stretch, sometimes posting themselves on a hillock to watch the army pass. At other times they seemed to flee it.
The silence was profound, broken only by the sound of the horses’ hoofs and the tread of the soldiers. From one peak to the next they occasionally glimpsed, in the very pale morning, slender threads of smoke rising, as if one group were sending signals to another, from the top of some tower concealed in the green, up there on the hills.
This time Frederick decided to interpret that perilous passage as occurring in his own honor: he had the standards raised and the oriflammes, and he marched past as if he were Caesar Augustus, who had put down the barbarians. However it was, he passed, father of all those unruly cities that could, that night, have annihilated him.
By now on the road to Pavia, he called Baudolino to his side. “You’re the usual rogue,” he said. “But after all I did have to find some excuse to leave that mud puddle. I forgive you.”
“For what, dear Father?”
“I know what. But you mustn’t think I’ve forgiven that nameless city.” “It has a name.”
“It doesn’t, because I haven’t baptized it. Sooner or later I’ll have to destroy it.”
“Not immediately.”
“No, not immediately. But before then, I imagine you’ll have invented another of your tricks. I should have understood, that night, that I was taking a rascal home with me. By the way, I’ve remembered where I saw that man with the cow before!”
But Baudolino’s horse seemed to rear up, and Baudolino, pulling on the reins, had been left behind. So Frederick could not tell him what he had remembered.
- Baudolino at the battle of Legnano
With the siege over, Frederick, relieved at first, withdrew to Pavia, but he was not content. A bad year followed. His cousin Henry the Lion was giving him trouble in Germany, the Italian cities continued to be unruly and turned a deaf ear every time he demanded the destruction of Alessandria.
By now he had few men, reinforcements failed to arrive, and when they did arrive, they were insufficient.
Baudolino felt somewhat guilty because of the cow trick. To be sure, he hadn’t deceived the emperor, who had simply gone along with his game, but now both of them felt some awkwardness looking each other in the eye, like two children who have devised a prank and are then ashamed of it. Baudolino was touched by the almost childish embarrassment of Frederick, who was now beginning to go gray, and it was, in fact, his handsome copper beard that first lost its leonine glints.
Baudolino was more and more fond of that father, who continued to pursue his imperial dream, risking more and more the loss of his lands beyond the Alps, to keep control over an Italy that was eluding him on all sides. One day it occurred to Baudolino that, in Frederick’s situation, the letter of Prester John would have allowed the emperor to extract himself from the Lombard swamps without seeming to renounce anything.
In short, the Priest’s letter was a bit like Gagliaudo’s cow. He then tried to talk to Frederick about it, but the emperor was in a bad mood and told Baudolino he had far more serious things to concern himself with than the senile fancies of Uncle Otto, rest his soul. Then he gave the youth some other missions, sending him back and forth across the Alps for almost twelve months.
At the end of May of the year of Our Lord 1176 Baudolino learned that Frederick was installed in Como, and he decided to join him in that city. In the course of his journey he was told that the imperial army was now moving towards Pavia, so then he turned southwards, hoping to meet it halfway.
He met it along the Olona, not far from the fortress of Legnano, where a few hours earlier the imperial army and the army
