Even so, these things are thought and believed by all the nations of the Orient that Cosmas visited, otherwise he wouldn’t have learned them, in those lands beyond which lies the kingdom of Prester John, and surely the inhabitants of that kingdom itself think that the universe is in the form of a tabernacle, and they measure distances, confines, the course of rivers, the extension of seas, coasts, and gulfs, not to mention mountains, according to the wondrous design of the tabernacle.”
“Once again, it doesn’t seem a valid argument to me,” Baudolino said.
“The fact that they believe they live in a tabernacle doesn’t mean they really do live in one.”
“Let me finish my demonstration. If you asked me how to arrive at Chalcedon, where I was born, I could explain it to you easily. Perhaps I measure the days of travel in a way different from you, or perhaps I call right what you call left in any case I have been told that the Saracens draw maps where the south is above and the north is below, and therefore the sun rises to the left of the lands they depict.
But if you accept my way of representing the course of the sun and the shape of the earth, following my directions you would surely arrive at the place where I want to send you, while you would never understand them if you refer to your maps. So…” Zosimos concluded triumphantly, “if you want to reach the land of Prester John you must use the map of the world that Prester John would use and not your own—mind you, even if your map is more correct than his.”
Baudolino was won over by the cogency of the argument and asked Zosimos to explain how Cosmas and, consequently, Prester John saw the universe. “Ah no,” Zosimos said. “I know very well where to find the map, but why must I give it to you and to your emperor?”
“If he were to give you enough gold to set out with a band of well-armed men.”
“Exactly.”
From that moment on, Zosimos didn’t allow one word to escape him on the subject of Cosmas’s map, or, rather, he hinted at it every now and then, when he reached the peak of intoxication, but tracing vaguely with his finger some mysterious curves in the air, then falling silent, as if he had said too much. Baudolino would pour him more wine and ask him apparently bizarre questions. “But when we are close to India, and our horses are exhausted, will we have to ride elephants?”
“Perhaps,” Zosimos said, “because in India there live all the animals mentioned in your letter, and others besides, except for horses. Still they do have some, because they bring them in from Tzinista.”
“What country is that?”
“A country where travelers go in search of worms for silk.” “Worms for silk? What does that mean?”
“It means that in Tzinista there exist some tiny eggs that are placed in women’s bosoms and, enlivened by the warmth, they produce little worms. These are set on mulberry leaves, which nourish them. When they are grown they spin silk from their bodies and wrap themselves in it, as in a tomb. Then they turn into marvelous, varicolored butterflies and they break free of the cocoon. Before flying away, the males penetrate the females from behind and both live without food in the warmth of their embrace until they die and the female dies brooding over her eggs.”
“There’s no trusting a man who wants to make you believe silk comes from worms,” Baudolino said to Niketas. “He was spying for his basileus, but he would have set out in search of the Lord of the Indies even in Frederick’s pay. Then, when he got there, we would never see him again. And yet his mention of the map of Cosmas excited me. That map appeared to me like the star of Bethlehem, except that it pointed in the opposite direction. It would tell me how to follow, backwards, the route of the Magi. And so, believing myself more clever than he, I prepared to lead him to excess in his intemperance, to make him duller and more talkative.”
“And instead?”
“And instead he was more clever than I. The next day I couldn’t find him anywhere, and some of his fellows told me he had returned to Constantinople. He left me a farewell message. It said: “As fish die if they remain out of water, so monks who linger outside the cell weaken the vigor of their union with God. These past days I have dried up in sin; let me find again the cool living water.”
“Maybe it was the truth.”
“Not at all. He had found the way to milk gold from his basileus. And to my harm.”
- Baudolino discovers that Prester John wrote to too many people
The following July, Frederick arrived in Venice by sea, accompanied from Ravenna to Chioggia by the doge’s son, then he reached the church of San Niccolò al Lido, and on Sunday the 24th, in Saint Mark’s Square, prostrated himself at the feet of Alexander. The pope raised him and embraced him with a show of affection, and all the witnesses sang the Te Deum. It was truly a triumph, even if it was not clear for which of the two. In any case it ended a war that had lasted eighteen years, and in those same days the emperor signed a six-year truce with the communes of the Lombard League.
Frederick was so happy that he decided to stay on in Venice for another month. It was August when, one morning, Christian of Buch summoned Baudolino and his friends and asked them to come with him to the emperor. Arriving in Frederick’s presence, Christian handed him, with a dramatic gesture, a parchment heavy with seals: “Here is the letter of Prester John,” he said, “as it has reached me, confidentially, from the court of Byzantium.” “The letter?” Frederick exclaimed. “Why, we haven’t yet sent it.”
“In fact, this is not ours: it’s another letter. It’s not addressed to you, but to the basileus Manuel. For the rest, it’s the same as ours.”
“So this Prester John first offers an alliance to me and then he offers it to the Romei?” Frederick was enraged.
Baudolino was dumbfounded, because the Priest’s letter, as he well knew, existed in a single draft, and he had written it. If the Priest existed, he could also have written another letter, but surely not this one. He asked permission to examine the document, and after glancing at it in haste, he said: “No, it’s not exactly the same. There are some little variants. If you will allow me, Father, I’d like to study it more closely.”
He withdrew with his friends, and together they read and reread the letter several times. First of all, it, too, was in Latin. Curious, Rabbi Solomon observed, because the Priest is sending it to the Greek basileus. In fact, it began:
The Priest Johannes, by the grace of God and power of Our Lord Jesus Christ, king of kings, greets Manuel, governor of the Romei, wishing him health and perpetual enjoyment of divine benediction.
“A second oddity,” Baudolino said, “he calls Manuel governor of the Romei, and not basileus. So it surely wasn’t written by a Greek in the imperial train. It was written by someone who doesn’t recognize Manuel’s title.”
“Therefore,” the Poet concluded, “by the real Prester John, who considers himself the dominus dominantium.”
“Let’s proceed,” Baudolino said, “and I’ll show you some words and phrases that weren’t in our letter.”
Our majesty has learned that you held in high esteem our Excellency and that you had received word of our greatness. We have also learned from a secretary of ours that you desired to send us some things pleasing and interesting, for our delight. Being human, we gladly accept the gift, and through our apocrisiary, we are sending some token, desirous of knowing whether, like us, you follow the true faith and in every way be lieve in Our Lord Jesus Christ.
For while we are well aware of our mortality, your Greeklings believe that you are a god, even if we well know that you are mortal and subject to human corruption. In the breadth of our munificence, if you need something that may procure pleasure for you, inform us, either by a word to our apocrisiary or by a testimony of your affection.
“Here the oddities are too numerous,” Rabbi Solomon said. “On the one hand he treats the basileus and his Greeklings with condescension and contempt approaching insult, on the other, for ‘secretary’ he uses the term apocrisiarius, which I believe is Greek.”
“Its precise meaning is ambassador,” Baudolino said, “but listen to this: where we said that at the Priest’s table sit the metropolitan of Samarkand and the archpriest of Susa, here it’s written that there are the protopapas Samargantinum and the archiprotopapas de Susis. And, further, among the wonders of the kingdom is mentioned an herb called assidios, which drives out evil spirits. Again, three Greek terms.”
“So,” the Poet said, “the letter is written by a Greek, but one who uses Greek very badly. I don’t understand.”
Abdul meanwhile had picked up the parchment. “There’s something else: where we mentioned the pepper harvest, there are added details. And here it says that in John’s kingdom there are few horses. And here where we merely named salamanders, it says they are a species of worm, which wrap themselves in a kind of film like the worms that
