“In fact, Agiochristoforites did hate Isaac Angelus, and obviously had arranged with Zosimos to make him fall out of favor,” Niketas said. “But serving his own rancor did not do his master good, because as you must know, he hastened the basileus’s ruin.”
“I know,” Baudolino said, “but actually, on that evening it mattered little to me that I understand what was going on. It was enough for me to know that now I had Zosimos in my grasp.”
As soon as the sound of the royal visitors’ footsteps had died away, Zosimos heaved a great sigh. The experiment, after all, had succeeded. He rubbed his hands, with a little smile of satisfaction, drew the boy’s head from the water and laid it where it had been before. Then he turned, to examine the crypt, and began laughing hysterically, raising his arms and shouting: “I have the basileus in my power! Now I won’t be afraid even of the dead!”
No sooner had he spoken than our friends slowly came out into the light. Those who perform magic, it so happens, finally are persuaded that, even if they don’t believe in the devil, the devil surely believes in them. Seeing a band of lemurs arising as if it were Judgment Day, Zosimos, scoundrel though he was, at that moment behaved with exemplary spontaneity. Without trying to conceal his feelings, he fainted.
He came to as the Poet was sprinkling him with some divinatory water. He opened his eyes and found himself confronted by a Baudolino fearsome to see, more than if he were returning from the other world. At that moment Zosimos realized that, worse than the flames of an uncertain Hell, the certain vengeance of his former victim awaited him.
“I did it to serve my master,” he hastened to say, “and to do you, too, a service: I’ve spread your letter more than you could ever have—” Baudolino said: “Zosimos, I don’t want to sound mean, but if I were to obey the inspiration I receive from Our Lord, I would smash your ass.
But since that would be hard work, as you see, I am restraining myself.” And he gave him a slap with the back of his hand that made his head spin around twice.
“I am a man of the basileus. If you touch a single hair of my beard, I swear—”
The Poet seized him by the hair, pulled his face to the flames that were still flickering around the basin, and Zosimos’s beard began to smoke. “You are all mad,” Zosimos said, trying to elude the grip of Abdul and Kyot, who had grabbed him and were twisting his arms behind his back.
And Baudolino, with a slap on the nape, pushed him headlong, to extinguish the beard’s fire in the basin, preventing him from raising his head until the wretch, no longer fearing the fire, began to fear the water, and the more he feared it, the more he swallowed.
“From the bubbles you’ve made,” Baudolino said serenely, pulling him up by the hair, “I can predict that tonight you will die not with your beard but with your feet toasted.”
“Baudolino,” Zosimos sobbed, vomiting water, “Baudolino, we can still come to some agreement…. Let me cough, I beg you. I can’t escape. What are you going to do, all of you against one lone man? Have you no pity? Listen, Baudolino, I know you don’t want to take revenge for that moment of weakness on my part; you want to reach the land of that Prester John of yours, and I told you I have the very map to get you there. If you throw dust on the fire of the hearth it will go out.”
“What does that mean, you bandit? Enough of your pronouncements!” “It means that if you kill me, you’ll never see the map. Often fish, playing in the water, leap out beyond the confines of their natural dwelling. I can enable you to go far. Let us make a pact, like two honest men. You let me go, and I will lead you to the place where the map of Cosmas the Indicopleustes is. My life for the kingdom of Prester John. Doesn’t that seem a fair bargain to you?”
“I’d rather kill you,” Baudolino said, “but I need you alive to get the map.”
“And afterwards?”
“Afterwards we’ll keep you well tied up and wrapped in a carpet until we find a reliable ship that will take us far from here, and only then will we unroll the carpet, because if we let you go at once you will immediately have every killer in the city on our heels.” “And you’ll unroll it in the water…”
“Enough! We’re not murderers. If I wanted to kill you later, I wouldn’t be slapping you now. And—you see?—I do it for a good reason, personal satisfaction, since I don’t plan to do anything worse.” And he began calmly dealing out blows, first with one hand, then with the other, one blow swinging the head to the left, another swinging it to the right, twice with the palm hard, twice with tensed fingers, twice with the back of the hand, twice with the edge, twice with the fists, until Zosimos became purplish and Baudolino had almost dislocated his wrists. “Now it’s beginning to hurt me,” he said, “and I’ll stop. Let’s go see this map.”
Kyot and Abdul dragged Zosimos by the armpits, for by now he could no longer stand on his own feet, and could barely point out the way with a trembling finger, as he murmured: “The monk who is despised and bears it is like a plant that is watered every day.”
Baudolino said to the Poet: “Zosimos once taught me that anger more than any other passion upsets and troubles the soul, but sometimes helps it. When in fact we use it calmly against the wicked and sinners to save them or confound them, we give the soul sweetness, because we are proceeding directly towards the ends of justice.” Rabbi Solomon commented: “As the Talmud says, there are punishments that cleanse all the iniquities of a man.”
- Baudolino and the sweets of Byzantium
The monastery of Katabates was in ruins, and everyone now considered it uninhabited, but at ground level some cells still existed, and the old library, now without books, had become a kind of refectory. Here Zosimos lived with two or three acolytes, and only God knew what their monastic rites were. When Baudolino and the others emerged from underground with their prisoner, the acolytes were sleeping, but, as was clear the following morning, they were sufficiently stupefied by their excesses that they did not represent a danger. The group decided it was best to sleep in the library. Zosimos had troubled dreams as he lay on the ground between Kyot and Abdul, who had now become his guardian angels.
In the morning all sat around a table, and Zosimos was invited to come to the point.
“The point is,” Zosimos said, “that the map of Cosmas is in the Bucoleon palace, in a place known to me and where only I have access. We will go there late this evening.”
“Zosimos,” Baudolino said, “you are beating about the bush. First of all, explain to me clearly what this map says.”
“Why, it’s quite simple, isn’t it?” Zosimos said, taking a parchment and a stylus. “I told you that every Christian who follows the true faith must agree to the fact that the world is made like the tabernacle of which the Scriptures speak. Now listen carefully to what I say: in the lower part of the tabernacle there was a table with twelve loaves of bread and twelve fruits, one for each month of the year; all around the table ran a plinth that depicted the Ocean, and around the plinth there was a frame one palm wide that depicted the land of the beyond, where to the east the Earthly Paradise is situated.
The sky was represented by the vault, which rested entirely on the extremities of the earth, but between the vault and the base extended the veil of the firmament, beyond which lies the celestial world that only one day will we see face to face. In fact, as Isaiah said, God is he who is seated above the earth, whose inhabitants are as locusts. He who like a thin veil has unfurled the sky and spread it out like a tent. And the psalmist praises him who spreads out the sky like a pavilion. Then Moses placed, below the veil, south of the candelabrum that illuminated all the expanse of the earth, seven lamps to signify the seven days of the week and all the stars of the sky.” “But you are explaining to me how the tabernacle was made,”
Baudolino said, “not how the universe is made.”
“But the universe is made like the tabernacle, and so if I explain to you what the tabernacle was like, I am explaining what the universe is like. Why can’t you understand something so simple? Look…” And he made a drawing.
It showed the form of the universe, exactly like a temple, with its curving vault, whose upper part remained concealed from our eyes by the veil of the firmament. “Below the ecumen extends, that is, all the inhabited earth, which, however, is not flat, but rests on the Ocean, which surrounds it, and rises through an imperceptible and continuous slope towards the extreme north and towards the west, where a mountain
