flies in spring around a horse turd, struck his head with their clubs, stuffed ox excrement in his nostrils, squeezed sponges soaked in cow piss over his nose, thrust skewers into his legs; the milder threw stones at him, calling him rabid dog and son of a bitch in heat.
From a brothel window, a prostitute emptied a pan of boiling water over him. Then the crowd’s fury increased further; they pulled him down from the camel and hanged him by his feet from the two columns beside the statue of the she-wolf giving suck to Romulus and Remus.
Andronicus behaved better than his tormentors, not emitting a moan. He confined himself to murmuring “Kyrie eleison. Kyrie eleison,” and asked why they were breaking a chain already shattered. Once he was strung up, a man with a sword neatly cut off his genitals, another stuck a spear in his mouth, impaling him to his viscera, while still another impaled him through the anus.
There were also some Latins present, who had scimitars and moved as if they were dancing around him, slashing away all his flesh, and perhaps they were the only ones entitled to vengeance, given what Andronicus had done to those of their race a few years before.
Finally the wretch still had the strength to raise to his mouth his right stump, as if he wanted to drink his blood, to make up for the blood that he was losing in great spurts. Then he died.
Having fled that spectacle, our friends tried to reach the Bucoleon, but when they were near, they quickly realized that it was impossible to gain entry. Isaac, disgusted by all the looting, had now set his guards to protect it, and anyone attempting to pass that defense was executed on the spot.
“You can get by in any case, Zosimos,” Baudolino said. “It’s simple: you enter, get the map, and bring it to us.”
“What if they cut my throat?”
“If you don’t go, then we’ll cut it.”
“My sacrifice would make sense if the map were in the palace. But, to tell you the truth, the map isn’t there.”
Baudolino looked at him as if unable to comprehend such shameless behavior. “Ah,” he roared, “and now at last you’re telling the truth? Why have you continued to lie until now?”
“I was trying to gain time. Gaining time isn’t a sin. For a monk, wasting time is a sin.”
“We’ll kill him here on the spot,” the Poet said. “This is the right moment, in this massacre nobody will notice. Let’s decide who strangles him, and it’s over.”
“One moment,” Zosimos said. “The Lord teaches us how to abstain from the deed that is not profitable. I lied, true, but for good reason.” “What good?” Baudolino said, exasperated.
“My own,” Zosimos answered. “I had every right to protect my life, since you meant to take it from me. Monks, like cherubim and seraphim, must be all covered with eyes, or—this is how I interpret the saying of so many of the desert fathers—they must exercise wit and cleverness in the face of the enemy.”
“But the enemy those fathers of yours were talking about was the devil, not us!” Baudolino cried.
“The stratagems of devils are different: they appear in dreams, they create hallucinations, they conspire to deceive us, they transform themselves into angels of light and they spare us to make us feel a false security. What would you have done in my place?”
“And what will you do now, you filthy Greekling, to save your life once again?”
“I will tell you the truth, as is my habit. Cosmas’s map does really exist, and I have seen it with these eyes. Where it is now, I don’t know, but I swear that I have it in my head as if it were printed there….” And he tapped his brow, now free of hair. “I could tell you, day by day, the distances that separate us from the land of Prester John. Now, obviously, I cannot remain in this city, and you have no reason to stay here either, since you came for me and now you have me, and for the map, which you don’t have. If you kill me, you’ll have nothing. If you take me with you, I swear by all the holy apostles that I will be your slave and I will devote my days to tracing for you an itinerary that will lead you straight to the land of the Priest. Sparing my life costs you nothing, except a mouth to feed. Killing me, you lose everything. Yes? Or no?”
“This is the most shameless of all the shameless creatures I’ve met in my life,” Boron said, and the others agreed. Zosimos waited, composed, in silence. Rabbi Solomon ventured to say: “The Holy One, be his name always blessed…” but Baudolino wouldn’t let him finish: “No more proverbs; this rogue says enough of them. He’s a rogue, but he’s right. We have to take him along. Otherwise Frederick will see us return empty-handed and will think we’ve spent his money wallowing in Oriental orgies. We’ll at least return with a prisoner. But you, Zosimos, swear: swear that you won’t try some other trick on us….”
“I swear by all twelve of the holy apostles,” Zosimos said. “Eleven! Eleven, you wretch,” Baudolino shouted at him, seizing his clothes, “If you say twelve, you’re including Judas!”
“All right then, eleven.”
“And so,” Niketas said, “this was your first journey to Byzantium. I wouldn’t be surprised, after what you saw, if you considered what’s happening now a purification.”
“You see, Master Niketas,” Baudolino said, “purification, as you call it, has never appealed to me. Alessandria may be a miserable town, but where I come from, when someone in command arouses our dislike, we say goodbye to him and choose a new consul. And even Frederick, choleric as he may have been, when his cousins bothered him, he didn’t castrate them, he gave them another duchy. But this isn’t the story. I was aleady at the extreme confines of Christendom, I could have continued towards the east, or to the south, and I would have found the Indias.
But by then we had spent all our money, and to be able to go to the Orient, I had to return to the Occident. By then I was forty-three. I have been on the trail of Prester John since I was sixteen, or even younger, and once again I was forced to postpone my journey.”
- Baudolino loses his father and finds the Grasal
The Genoese sent Boiamondo out with Theophilus to make a preliminary inspection of the city, to see if the situation was favorable. It was, more or less, they reported on their return, because a great number of the pilgrims were in the taverns, and the rest seemed to have gathered in Saint Sophia, to gaze with greedy eyes on the hoard of relics that had been accumulated there.
“It was enough to blind you!” Boiamondo said. But he added that the accumulation of loot had turned into a filthy game. Some pretended to deposit their prey, putting a bit of gimcrackery in the pile, while covertly they slipped a saint’s bone into their tunic. Since nobody wanted to be caught with a relic on his person, immediately outside the church a kind of market had grown, with still-wealthy citizens and Armenian traders.
“And so,” Boiamondo snickered, “the Greeks who saved a Byzantine coin, shoving it up a hole, have pulled it out to trade for a shin-bone of Saint Somebody. Which maybe had been in the church next door all along. Maybe they then will sell it back to the church, because the Greeks are smart. It’s all a big feeding trough, and then they say we Genoese are the ones who think only of cash.”
“What are they bringing into the church?” Niketas asked. Theophilus gave him a more precise account. He had seen the casket containing the purple cloak of Christ, a piece of reed used in the flagellation, the sponge held up to Our Lord on the cross, the crown of thorns, a case containing a piece of the bread consecrated at the Last Supper, the one Jesus offered to Judas. Then a glass box arrived with hairs from the beard of the Crucified, torn out by the Jews after the deposition from the cross, and the case was wrapped in the Lord’s garments, which the soldiers had gambled over at the foot of the cross. And then the flagellation stake, intact.
“I also saw them bring in a piece of the Madonna’s mantle,” Boiamondo said.
“How sad!” Niketas sighed. “If you saw only a piece that means they have already divided it up. It existed whole, in the Blachernae palace. Long, long ago two men named Galbius and Candidus went on a pilgrimage to Palestine and in Capernaum they learned that the Virgin’s pallion was preserved in the house of a Jew. They made friends with him, spent the night with him, secretly took the measurements of the wooden case that contained the garment, then in Jerusalem they had an identical case made, went back to Capernaum, switched the cases at night, and brought the cloak to Constantinople, where the church of Saints Peter and Mark was built to house it.”
Boiamondo also reported a rumor that two Christian knights had taken, and not yet handed over, two heads of Saint John the Baptist, one each, and all were wondering which one was the good one.
