“I know why. My spies reported that, with Agiochristoforites, there was a very active monk whom Andronicus had wanted with him, after the death of Manuel, for he was an expert in necromancy. His name happened to be Zosimos, and reputedly he was able to raise the dead among the ruins of that monastery, where he had established an underground palace for himself….
So then I had found Zosimos, or at least I knew where to catch him. This happened in November of 1184, when Beatrice of Burgundy suddenly died.”
Another silence. Baudolino drank a long draft.
“I understood that death as a punishment. It was right that, after the second woman of my life, I should also lose the first. I was past forty. I had heard that in Terdona there was, or there had been, a church where those baptized lived to forty. I had passed the limit granted to the fortunate. I could die in peace. I couldn’t bear the sight of Frederick: the death of Beatrice had prostrated him; he wanted to concern himself with his older son, who was now twenty but increasingly frail, and Frederick was slowly preparing the succession of his second son, Henry, having him crowned king of Italy. He was growing old, my poor father, now he was Whitebeard….
I had returned once to Alessandria and found that my blood parents were still older. Pale, thin, delicate as those balls of white stuff that roll around the fields in spring, bent like saplings on a windy day, they spent their waking hours around the fire quarreling over a misplaced bowl or an egg that one or the other of them had dropped. And they scolded me, every time I went to see them, because I never came. I decided then to sell my life cheap, and go to Byzantium to look for Zosimos, even if that could mean ending up blinded, in a dungeon, for my remaining years.”
Going to Constantinople could be dangerous because, a few years earlier, stirred up by Andronicus himself, even before he seized power, the inhabitants of the city had revolted against the Latins living there, killing no small number of them, looting their houses, and forcing many to take refuge in the Princes Islands.
Now it seemed that Venetians, Genoese, and Pisans could again circulate in the city, because they were people indispensable to the welfare of the empire, but William II, king of Sicily, was moving against Byzantium, and for the Greeklings—Sicilian or Roman, Provençal or Alaman all were Latins, and there was scant distinction. So they decided to sail from Venice and arrive by sea, like a caravan of merchants from Taprobane (this was Abdul’s idea). Very few had any idea where Taprobane was, perhaps no one, nor in Byzantium would they know what language was spoken there.
So Baudolino dressed up as a Persian dignitary. Rabbi Solomon, who would have been singled out as a Jew even in Jerusalem, was the company’s physician, with a fine dark cloak all spangled with signs of the zodiac; the Poet looked like a Turkish merchant wearing a pale-blue caftan; Kyot could have been one of those Lebanese who dress badly but have pockets full of gold pieces, Abdul shaved his head to eliminate his red hair, and in the end resembled a eunuch of high degree; and Boron passed as his servant.
As for their language, they decided to communicate among themselves in the thieves’ argot they had learned in Paris, which they all spoke to perfection—and this says a great deal about their commitment to their studies in those blissful days. Incomprehensible even to Parisians, for the Byzantines it could well be the language of Taprobane.
After leaving Venice in early summer, they learned at a port of call in August that the Sicilians had conquered Thessalonia, and were perhaps swarming over the northern coast of the Propontis, so, having entered that arm of the sea in the heart of the night, the captain preferred to make a wide curve towards the opposite shore and head for Constantinople as if they
were arriving from Chalcedon.
To console them for that detour, he promised them an imperial arrival, because—he said that is the way to discover Constantinople, arriving there with the first rays of the sun in your face. When Baudolino and his friends went out on deck, towards dawn, they felt a moment’s disappointment, because the shore was veiled in a thick haze, but the captain reassured them: this was the right approach to the city, slowly, in that haze, which, for that matter, already absorbing the first light of dawn, would little by little be dispelled.
After another hour’s sail, the captain pointed to a white dot, and it was the top of a dome, which seemed to pierce the mist…. Soon, within the whiteness the columns of some palaces were outlined along the coast, and then the shapes and colors of some houses, spires turning pink, and, gradually, below, the walls and their towers. Abruptly, there was a great shadow, still covered by layers of vapor that rose from the top of a high plain, and strayed through the air, until you could see, harmonious and gleaming in the sun’s first rays, the dome of Saint Sophia, as if it had miraculously risen out of nothingness.
From that moment on came a continuous revelation, with more towers and more domes emerging in a sky that cleared little by little, amid a triumph of green spaces, golden columns, white peristyles, rosy marbles, and the entire glory of the imperial palace of the Bu-coleon, with its cypresses in a pied labyrinth of hanging gardens. And then the entrance to the Golden Horn, with the great chain barring entry, and the white tower of Galata on the right.
As he told the story, Baudolino was moved, and Niketas repeated sadly how beautiful Constantinople had been, when it was beautiful.
“Ah, it was a city full of emotions,” Baudolino said. “The moment we arrived we had an idea of what was happening there. We turned up at the Hippodrome just as they were preparing for the torture of an enemy of the basileus…”
“Andronicus was virtually insane. Your Latins from Sicily had put Thessalonia to the sword and fired it. Andronicus had had some fortifications constructed, then he seemed to lose interest in the danger. He gave himself over to a life of dissipation, saying their enemies were not to be feared; he put to torture those who could have helped him, he left the city in the company of prostitutes and concubines, buried himself in the valleys and forests as animals do, followed by his inamoratas like a cock by his hens, like Dionysus and his bacchantes; he had only to put on a stag’s skin and a saffron-colored dress.
He frequented only flautists and hetairai, as unrestrained as Sardanapalus, as lascivious as a polyp; he was unable to bear the weight of his own debaucheries and he ate an unclean animal of the Nile, like a crocodile, which was said to favor ejaculation…. But I wouldn’t want you to consider him a bad ruler. He also did many good things; he limited taxes, issued edicts to prevent the wrecking of ships in our ports in order to sack them; he restored the ancient underground aqueduct, and also the church of the Holy Forty Martyrs…”
“A good man, in short…”
“Don’t put words in my mouth. The fact is that a basileus can use his power to do good, but to hold on to his power he has to do evil. You too have lived at the side of a man of power, and you too have admitted that he could be noble and wrathful, cruel and concerned with the common good.
The only way not to sin is to seek isolation on the top of a column as the sainted fathers did in the past, but by now those columns have fallen in ruins.”
“I won’t argue with you about how this empire should be governed. It’s yours, or at least it was. I’ll go back to my story. We’ve come to live here, with these Genovese, because they were my trustworthy spies, as you must have sensed.
And indeed Boiamondo discovered one day that, on that very evening, the basileus would go to the ancient crypt of Katabates to perform rites of divination and magic. If we were to find Zosimos, that was our chance.”
When evening had fallen, they went towards the walls of Constantine to where there was a kind of little pavilion, not far from the church of the Most Holy Apostles. Boiamondo said that from there we would reach the crypt directly, without going through the monastery’s church. He opened a door, had them descend some slippery little steps, and they found themselves in a corridor reeking of damp.
“Here we are,” Boiamondo said. “Just keep going a bit and you’ll be in the crypt.”
“You’re not coming?”
“I’m not coming anywhere where they do things with the dead. When it comes to doing things, I prefer the people to be alive, and female.” Going forward, they passed through a chamber with a low vaulted ceiling, where they could discern couches, rumpled beds, goblets lying on the floor, unwashed dishes with the remains of some debauch. Obviously that glutton Zosimos performed here not only his rituals with the deceased
