I must disappear for a long time, and return with something that will restore my prestige and authority. You are leaving to discover the land of Prester John, and if you succeed it will be a glorious enterprise. I want to come with you. Doing so, above all, I will show you that I didn’t take the cup you speak of, because if that were the case I would remain here and use it to negotiate with someone. I know well the lands to the east, and I could be useful to you. I know that the duke has given you no money, and I would bring with me what little gold I possess. Finally and Baudolino knows this—I have seven precious relics, seven heads of Saint John the Baptist, and in the course of the journey we could sell them, one here and one there.”
“And if we were to refuse,” Baudolino said, “you would go and whisper into the ear of Frederick of Swabia that we were responsible for his father’s death.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Listen, Ardzrouni, you’re not a person I’d take with me anywhere, but at this point in this damned adventure each risks becoming the enemy of the other. One more enemy will make little difference.”
“The truth is that this man would be a burden for us,” the Poet said. “There are already twelve of us, and a thirteenth brings bad luck.” While they were arguing, Baudolino was thinking about the heads of the Baptist. He wasn’t convinced that those heads could really be taken seriously; but if they could, undeniably they were worth a fortune. He had gone down into the room where he had seen them, and had picked them up one by one to examine them carefully. They were well made, the carved face of the saint, his great eyes wide and without pupils, inspired holy thoughts. To be sure, seeing all seven of them in a row emphasized their falsity, but displayed one by one, they would be convincing. He had replaced the heads on the kneading trough, and gone back upstairs.
Three of the group agreed to taking Ardzrouni along; the others were hesitating. Boron said that, after all, Ardzrouni did have the appearance of a man of rank; and Zosimos, partly for reasons of respect for those twelve venerable persons, said he could be passed off as a squire.
The Poet objected that the Magi either had twelve servants or else they traveled on their own in great secrecy; a single squire would create a bad impression. As for the heads, the party could take them without having to take Ardzrouni. By now Ardzrouni was weeping and saying that truly they wanted him dead. In the end they postponed any decision to the next day.
It was, in fact, the next day, when the sun was already high in the sky, as they had almost completed their preparations, that suddenly someone realized that, for all that morning, Zosimos had not been seen. In the frenzy of the final two days, nobody had kept watch over him; he had also helped prepare the horses and load the mules, and had not been kept on his chain. Kyot noticed that one of the mules was missing, and Baudolino had a sudden inspiration: “The heads!” he cried. “The heads! Zosimos is the only one, besides me and Ardzrouni, who knows where they are!” He dragged everyone into the little room with the heads, and there they saw that the heads now numbered only six.
Ardzrouni dug under the trough, to see if by chance one head had fallen, and he discovered three things: a human skull, small and blackened, a seal with a “Z,” and some burned residue of sealing wax. All was now, alas, clear. Zosimos, in the confusion of the fatal morning, had taken the Grasal from the ark where Kyot had replaced it, and in a flash had gone down to
the little room, opened a head, taken out the skull, and hidden the Grasal in its place; with his seal from Gallipolis he had closed the lid, put the head back where it had been before, and gone upstairs innocent as an angel, to await the opportune moment. When he realized that the travelers would share out the heads, he knew he could wait no longer.
“It must be said, Master Niketas, that in spite of my rage at being tricked, I felt a certain relief, and I believe that all the others felt the same. We had found the guilty party, a rascal of most credible rascality, and we were no longer tempted to suspect one another. Zosimos’s villainy made us livid with anger, but it restored our reciprocal trust. There was no evidence that Zosimos, having stolen the Grasal, had had anything to do with Frederick’s death, because that night he had been tied to his own bed; but this brought us back to the Poet’s hypothesis: Frederick hadn’t been murdered.”
They gathered and held council. First of all, Zosimos—if he had fled at nightfall—by now had a twelve-hour lead on them. Porcelli pointed out that they were on horseback and he on a mule, but Baudolino reminded them that there were mountains all around them, stretching God knew how far, and on mountain trails horses move more slowly than mules. It was impossible to pursue him at top speed. He had given himself a half-day’s start, and that would remain. The only thing was to find out where he was heading, and then take the same direction.
The Poet said: “First of all, he can’t have set out for Constantinople. There, with Isaac Angelus on the throne, the air isn’t safe for him; further, he would have to cross the lands of the Seljuks, which we have just left after so many hardships, and he knows that sooner or later they would have his hide. The most sensible hypothesis, since he’s the one who knows the
map, is that he wants to do what we wanted to do: reach the Priest’s kingdom, proclaim himself the envoy of Frederick, or whoever, return the Grasal, and be covered with honors.
So to find Zosimos we have to journey towards the kingdom of the Priest, and overtake him along the way. We’ll set out, we’ll ask questions as we proceed, we’ll look for the trail of a Greekling monk, since you can tell his race a mile off, then you will allow me finally the satisfaction of strangling him, and we’ll recover the Grasal.” “Very good,” Boron said, “but what direction do we take, since he’s the only one who knows the map?”
“Friends,” Baudolino said, “here Ardzrouni should prove useful. He knows the places and, further, there are now only eleven of us, and we need at all costs a twelfth King.” And so, to his great relief, Ardzrouni was solemnly allowed to become a part of that group of fearless men. As to the right road, he made sensible proposals: if the kingdom of the Priest lay to the east, near the Earthly Paradise, then we should head for the place where the sun rises.
But in proceeding so directly, we risked having to cross lands of infidels, whereas he knew the way to advance, at least for a while, through territories inhabited by Christian peoples—also because we had to remember the Baptist heads, which couldn’t be sold to Turks.
He assured us that Zosimos would have reasoned in the same way, and he mentioned lands and cities our friends had never heard of. With his mechanic’s skill, he had constructed a kind of puppet that, in the end, resembled Zosimos, with a long, wispy beard, hair made from charred millet, and two black stones to serve as eyes. The portrait seemed possessed, like the man it portrayed: “We will have to cross lands where they speak unknown languages,” Ardzrouni said, “and to ask if they have seen Zosimos we can only show this image.”
Baudolino guaranteed that the unknown languages would create no problems, because when he had spoken with barbarians for a little while, he learned to speak as they did; but the portrait would still come in handy, because in some places there wouldn’t be time to stop and learn the language.
Before departing, they all went downstairs and each took one of the Baptist’s heads. They were twelve, and the heads now were six. Baudolino decided that Ardzrouni should refrain, Solomon surely wouldn’t want to travel with a Christian relic, Cuttica, Bonehead, Porcelli, and Colandrino were late-comers; so the heads would go to himself, the Poet, Abdul, Kyot, Boron, and Boidi. The Poet was about to grab the first immediately, and Baudolino pointed out, laughing, that they were all the same, since the only good one had been chosen by Zosimos. The Poet blushed and let Abdul choose, with a broad and polite wave of his hand. Baudolino was satisfied with the last one, and each of them put his in his knapsack.
“That’s the whole story,” Baudolino said to Niketas. “Towards the end of the month of June in the year of Our Lord 1190, we set out, twelve of us, like the Magi, even if less virtuous than they, to reach finally the land of Prester John.”
- Baudolino and the journey of the Magi
From that moment on, Baudolino narrated his story to Niketas almost
