by Tuvia Fogel
On the 22nd of April, three days before sailing, they met again in the Ottones’ inn. When Yehezkel and Aillil walked in, Marciana was again being consoled by the abbess. Not only was she about to lose her only friend in the lair of weasels she considered the communities in the lagoon to be—she had just discovered Bonifacio was having an affair with a trollop from Equilio and was planning to leave her for the younger woman. If she had the courage, she’d just told Galatea, she would join her and make a new life in Outremer.
A little later, Yehezkel was explaining the harsh rules that governed a pilgrim’s passage. “It’s important—I don’t say it to boast, God forbid—that I secured passenger status for all six of us. You see, crew, merchants, and passengers, but not pilgrims, have a right to a chest, a mattress, and a supply of water, wine, and flour. You’ll be grateful, you’ll see, not to be part of the rush to the tables when the meal bell rings.”
The abbess listened, a little embarrassed by a nun’s ignorance of things every Venetian knew.
Marciana said, “If that’s the case, we must rush to the pantry and start loading enough provisions to feed you all until you reach the Holy Land!”
By a twist of fate, on reaching the pantry, Marciana realized she had the wrong key. With a suspicious glance at Yehezkel, she went back to the kitchen. Embarrassed to be alone with a nun, Yehezkel leaned against a pile of chopped wood in a corner, a good ten feet from Galatea. He had forgotten their first conversation and was startled when she suddenly addressed him differently.
“I’m a good cellar keeper, Rabbi, but you probably know better what to take on a sea passage . . .”
Her voice calling him “Rabbi” felt like he’d been kicked by a mule. He sucked in his breath, remembered he had asked her to address him that way when they were alone, and for the first time thought he might be underestimating this nun.
But what was for Yehezkel the poignant memory of his Naomi mockingly calling him “rabbi” when he hadn’t yet been one was instead, for Galatea, a kind of spiritual epiphany. Addressing him as the apostles had addressed Jesus lowered her into the Gospels with the sudden sharpness, so familiar to her, of a vision pushing out reality. She listened to Yehezkel pontificate on the maritime virtues of eggs and salted fish with a dreamy expression, only coming back to her senses when Marciana returned to the small courtyard.
Back in the kitchen, Galatea asked Yehezkel gingerly, running her hand through Aillil’s hair, already almost a habit, “Don’t get me wrong, Master Ezekiel, I don’t mean to judge the way you treat the boy, but your apprentice is baptized, and . . . ” She looked at Aillil, making an effort to speak the words clearly. “Tell me, Aillil, did you go to church on Easter Sunday?”
Aillil shook his head violently. Yehezkel told himself this had to happen sooner or later. “Ehm . . . Aillil is a Christian, madame, but . . . how can I put it? He’s not a Catholic! He professes the faith of the Cathars of Provence, whom the church has declared heretics and massacred in the thousands. I’m sure you know what I speak of . . .”
Galatea was startled. “He is an orphan of that war? I hadn’t imagined . . .” She kissed the top of Aillil’s head and gestured to Yehezkel to step aside with her. “Is it true the Cathars worship Satan?” she asked in a whisper, horror and concern in her voice.
“No, they abhor him. But they don’t consider him weaker than God,” answered Yehezkel.
“Yes, that’s right . . . they believe in an eternal war between a good God and a bad God.”
“It’s more complicated than that, madame. They think it was Satan, not God, who created this world. When we’re at sea, if you wish, I can tell you more about the beliefs of Manicheans.”
Galatea looked at Aillil again. In her eyes, Yehezkel saw the anguish for the tragedy of war exceed the outrage for the sin of heresy. He quietly thanked God for choosing a Christian, yes, but one with a soul.
Presently the group left the inn and stood by the bridge, by now impervious to the islanders’ curiosity. After arranging the rendezvous at dawn on Wednesday, they went their respective ways.
Before casting off, Yehezkel stood on the stern of the skiff, arms across his chest, watching Galatea walk toward Santa Fosca in short, determined steps, like those of an aggrieved little girl.
“Even if Satan tried to ensnare this woman, he would fail,” he thought. “She’s as stubborn as Job.”
At dawn on the 25th of April, Saint Mark’s Day, the six pilgrims sailed on a roscona to Santi Pietro e Paolo, on the eastern edge of Venice. They walked along fondamenta reeking of tar and rotten fish lined with chandlers, boatbuilders’ yards and sailmakers’ lofts, huge warehouses looming behind them.
The abbess and Gudrun marched along the Riva degli Schiavoni feeling like children on Christmas Eve. Galatea wore a new habit, white as snow with light-blue borders. Three steps behind them, muttering under short breaths, the armigers carried the chest, while twenty steps farther back, with no apparent link to the other party, came Yehezkel and Aillil. The rabbi couldn’t get the boy to walk next to him; Aillil hopped and skipped back and forth between his tutor and the nuns, wondering about that curious game.
Finally they came out on the Canal Grande. Their departure day was consecrated to Saint Mark, evangelist and patron saint of Venice, and the city was celebrating unprecedented power and wealth. Never in the previous ten years had lighthouses, columns, and standards in the Mediterranean seen such a proliferation of winged lions. With the possible exception of the Golden Horn in Constantinople, Saint Mark’s Square, with its basilica nearing completion, was the most breathtaking sight in the world.
Shafts of sunlight shone down between the clouds, turning portions of canal to bright silver, the ships inside them screaming out their identities in the colored standards flapping on their masts. There was no end to them: ships of the Doge, of Venetian Constantinople, of Cyprus, of Acre, of the Hospitallers, of the Templars. What with the flags ashore, Venice on Saint Mark’s Day looked like the venue of a gigantic jousting tournament.
They stood on the edge of the bedlam, by the Doge’s palace, not far from the quay where pilgrims embarked. Before them stretched a vociferous sea of faces from all corners of the world: Franks, English, Germans, Normans, Spaniards, Magyars; but also darker complexions and higher cheekbones: Saracens, Turks, Slavs, Tartars. Even Yehezkel, who knew the markets of al-Kahira, had never seen such a variety of features, or for that matter of dresses and headgear. Venetians in floppy woolen hats, oriental merchants in silk turbans, monks in habits, beggars in rags, whores with painted eyes, penitents both barefoot and bareheaded. The crowd heaved, shouted, laughed, sang hymns.
Suddenly four Templar knights, preceded by their squires, crossed the square like the prow of a ship cleaving the waves. Yehezkel, realizing it must be their companions on the passage, gestured to Galatea and slipped in right behind them. At the sight of the white cloaks with the blood-red croix pattèes,*18 the crowd opened up like the Red Sea before the Israelites. The warrior monks, members of an order founded to protect pilgrims, looked down on them as nobles look on plebs, with ill-disguised contempt.
Galatea noticed a whore coming toward them, so scantily dressed that a nipple had escaped the edge of her dress. Used to men twisting their necks to follow such sights, she was surprised to see that not only the rabbi but all four knights paid no attention to her. Sobered by the sight, she reflected that it would be a mistake to underestimate these brothers of the Temple.
Within moments they were at the Falcus. She no longer resembled the ship Yehezkel boarded a few days earlier, every flag hoisted and a platform as wide as a street where the greasy plank had been. The queue of pilgrims stretched down the quay as far as they could see. The knights ignored the clerks at the foot of the gangplank and marched straight on board, Yehezkel one step behind them. The official registering pilgrims’ names chased him up the gangplank, but when he caught up, Yehezkel had already reached the Cypriot scribe at the base of the quarterdeck, who wave
d the clerk away, “These are passengers, not pilgrims. They’re none of your business!”
The abbess mentally congratulated the rabbi on his presence of mind. She’d heard that Jews never seemed in awe of anyone, as if they were all of noble birth. She looked around. The deck was huge, yet she wondered how the hundreds of pilgrims waiting ashore could possibly fit. Then she saw a few vanish down the hatchway just forward of the mast and understood there would be room for all because most of them would spend almost a month belowdecks where goods were normally stowed, lying on planking laid on the gravel ballast in the hold. Yehezkel whispered to her, “Now you see why it’s important to be a passenger and not a pilgrim, madame. We’ve been assigned a small portion of the deck where we can sleep under the stars.”
Galatea noticed that almost all the men had let their beards grow and asked Yehezkel the reason. He said they’d almost certainly been told that being clean-shaven among Saracens, especially for blond men, was rife with unmentionable dangers. Embarrassment froze the abbess.
Some three hundred pilgrims boarded the Falcus that day. Galatea noticed that some men were women in disguise, the dress-up so superficial it was obvious money had changed hands so the scribe would close an eye as some pilgrims took their wives along. She had to laugh at those who, seeing the sailors climb the rigging, thought they had just sighted the famous “monkeys” of pilgrim lore.
The group installed themselves by the port gunwale, a little aft of the small forward castle. With the help of the armigers, Yehezkel secured Galatea’s chest with nails and lines so it wouldn’t budge in rough seas and then set up a curtain falling from lines stretched between the gunwale, the chest, and the nearest shroud of the foremast. He placed a mattress behind the curtain and stood back to survey the result. The abbess naively imagined pleasantly watching the sea from the privacy of that lair as they waited for the Holy Land to appear and shot him a grateful smile. Then her eye fell on Rustico, and she smiled, remembering his expression when he’d first set eyes on the chest he and Garietto would drag all the way to Jerusalem.
On the roscona taking them to Venice, Galatea had introduced her bodyguards to the rabbi. The older one, Rustico Bobizo, was a lanky Torcellan named after one of the islanders who’d stolen Saint Mark’s body, and proud of it. His ear bore the unmistakable sign of a convict who had survived the rowing benches of Venetian galleys. That he’d grown up without the benefit of an education was clear from the austere simplicity with which he stuck to the male gender.
The younger one was Garietto Zanin from the island of Costanziaco, almost as big as Yehezkel and with hair as wild as Samson’s. A rich mane of chestnut curls fell to the middle of his back, and he wore big, soft moustaches like people in the far north. His Viking appearance and a winning smile made women’s eyes follow Garietto, so much that on the roscona Yehezkel glimpsed the stern look with which the abbess had fulminated Gudrun when she’d caught the younger nun staring dreamily at Garietto’s curls.
At last, to the sound of trumpets and drumrolls, the great adventure began. All the pilgrims came out on deck. Relatives and friends on the quay waved banners and shouted blessings that mingled with the boatswain’s orders directing the maneuvers. Some sailors hauled in the mooring lines as others hoisted a small foresail, the Falcus lacking oars for maneuvers in a harbor. Yet other men weighed anchor, all of them shouting as they pulled, so that hearing the people ashore above the din was impossible.
Then the boatswain cried toward the bow, “Is your work done?” When he heard that the anchor was on board and the ship free, he turned to the pilgrims, “Let the clerics come forward!”
A few priests and monks advanced through a gap in the crowd, bearing big crosses of dark wood.
“In the name of God, sing!”
Every pilgrim knew the ritual by heart and three hundred voices—at first hesitantly and then growing to a roar—joined in the hymn it had become customary to sing at the start of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem by sea.
We sail in the name of God, To obtain His grace.
May He be our strength and the Holy Sepulchre our shield.
Kyrie Eleison!*19
When he saw enough free water in all directions, the boatswain gave the final command, “In the name of God, make sail!”
As the red-crossed mainsail was hoisted, flapping lazily in the breeze, only the hardened sailors weren’t weeping openly at the spectacle of sunshine and standards, crosses and spray.
The third day of the Falcus Templi’s passage began with the kind of gray dawn that the sleeping watch claims is still nighttime, while for the waking one the day has clearly started. The boatswain, whose voice would ring in the pilgrims’ ears for years to come, climbed the mast to the crow’s nest and shouted the verdict of the hourglass to the four winds.
Blessed be the light, and the Holy Cross,
The one God of Truth and the Holy Trinity!
Blessed be our soul and the Lord who gave it to us,
Blessed be this day and the Lord who sends it to us!
A sleepy murmur rose from the deck, quickly turning into the pilgrims’ ritual response, their voices groggy but still full of enthusiasm.
Pater Noster, Ave Maria, Amen!
May God grant us a good day and a good passage!
The abbess spent most of the night gazing at the stars. That morning, for the first time, she feared that her illness of spirit might be raising its ugly head again. “Maybe the velvety black of these two nights,” she thought, “or the water all around . . . something stirred up the humid melancholic humor that plagued me. I am again indifferent to everything around me, and all I want to do is lie where I am . . .”
She chewed listlessly on a biscuit, only because Master Ezekiel told her to put something dry in her stomach. She decided to react, drank a swig of water, tidied her hair, and got up. She bent a knee in the general direction of the sun and crossed herself. Then, pushing aside the curtain, she left Gudrun sound asleep and ventured on the deck alone for the first time.
She headed forward, mindful of Master Ezekiel’s injunction, “One hand for yourself and one for the boat, madame. Always!” She had to bend to go through the passage under the forecastle and emerged at the bow of the ship, where a short bowsprit stuck out a few feet. Raising her eyes, she suddenly saw a man standing on the base of the bowsprit, his back to her, tied to the forestay like a human figurehead. She gasped in horror, thinking it must be a pillory for pilgrims who’d broken ship’s rules. Then she leaned out, first from one gunwale and then from the other, and noticed a thin black leather strap wrapped around a bare left arm. Finally, she saw the blue twine and recognized the rabbi.
In order to pray undisturbed on a ship full of pilgrims, Yehezkel had started putting on his phylacteries and tying himself to the forestay. Galatea stared at him, mouth open. She instinctively stretched out a hand to touch the fringed edge of his prayer shawl but couldn’t quite reach it.
From amidships, pilgrims’ voices intoned the first responses to Mass. She hurried, with due caution, to the foot of the mast for the rite. Afterward, she found Yehezkel leaning on the gunwale next to her chest, and he confirmed he had been praying on the bowsprit.
The ship’s bell rang, announcing the first shift of the morning meal, and the bedlam of the first two mornings was unleashed again. The nuns pulled the curtain against the beastly spectacle, but not before Yehezkel had time to notice that the abbess hadn’t touched the previous day’s food. He deduced the ship’s motion must be starting to affect her. Gudrun, meanwhile, was wolfing down the equivalent of both armigers’ rations. After the meal the watch changed, and the boatswain once more climbed to the crow’s nest to deliver his shouts, which reminded Yehezkel of the muezzin’s calls.
The hours that just passed were good ones,
Let the coming ones be even better!
As they go by, may our passage be a good one!
Eyes open ahead, and a good watch to all!
Yehezkel was delight
ed to be at sea again. The sailors soon noted that unlike pilgrims and other landlubbers, the Jew’s gaze was constantly in the air checking sails, sheets, and rigging in a way that is second nature to seafaring folk. For the second day, clouds made it impossible to measure the sun’s height. Yehezkel wondered if the ship’s pilot possessed a loadstone like the one he had. In any case, it was time to attempt to speak with the Doctus, so after asking the nuns to keep an eye on Aillil, he walked aft.
The quarterdeck, atop the castle at the extreme stern of the cog, was a square balcony surrounded by a parapet of elegantly turned wooden columns. Yehezkel climbed the ladder and found five men, all slightly bothered by the Jew’s arrogance, going where he wanted without asking for anyone’s permission. When he bowed and introduced himself, Don Sancio de la Palmela, a sharp-looking white-haired old man, dressed in a black overcoat not unlike Yehezkel’s sarbel, crossed the quarterdeck toward him with a welcoming smile.
“So you’re the rabbi I was told would be on board. Glad to make your acquaintance, Rav Yehezkel.”
“Thank you, Your Excellency. I bring you the greetings of Rav Yehiel the Parisian, whom I met in Torcello. He was coming from Outremer, and I was headed there!”
Don Sancio often consulted Rav Yehiel in Paris, both on matters of scriptural exegesis and on relations between the temple and King Philip Augustus.
“Please don’t call me ‘Your Excellency’; plain Don Sancio will suffice. I hope you found Rav Yehiel in good health! ‘Youth and vigor are meaningless,’ says Qoheleth. And tell me, what news was he bringing from Outremer?”
“Oh, nothing you wouldn’t already know, unless you’re not aware of why al-Kamil had to abandon his camp in al-Addillyiah two months ago . . .”
“No, by the Blessed Virgin! I was traveling and didn’t receive a full report.” He took Yehezkel’s arm and walked him across the balcony. “You’ll have to tell me everything, but first let me introduce everyone. This is the master of the Falcus, the renowned Templar skipper Friar Vassayl of Marseille.”
