by Tuvia Fogel
Domingo nodded. “Abbot Boson,” he murmured, “there’s a heretic of moral stature. I admire him more than most of our bishops. I’ve talked philosophy with Boson; he is an adversary worthy of respect.”
Robert looked embarrassed, but it lasted a mere instant, and he went on to relate of Arifat’s confession. Domingo couldn’t help wondering how Roberto obtained the information, but then, eager to know the movements of a major Cathar spy, he told himself it was all for the best of causes. He remained calm until Robert pronounced the words “Parchment of Circles” and then threw off his covers, jumped out of bed, and paced the room excitedly with a nun in chase, entreating him to lie down again.
“At last . . . at long last! I knew God wanted us to find it!” he kept repeating as the sister grabbed his arm and dragged him back to bed.
“Please leave us now, Sister. We have vital matters to discuss.”
Suddenly, his teacher’s voice was as Robert remembered it, at once suave and authoritative. When the nun exited, Domingo sat him down by the window and pulled up a small stool for himself.
“You must know that rumors about that parchment have circulated for three centuries. Some in Rome say it is truly ancient. According to one monk in Bologna, the circles on it were drawn by none other than Saint John the Evangelist! ¿Entiendes, Roberto?”
The Castillan was smiling the famous smile that female heretics couldn’t resist, blue eyes sparkling. He was in his element now, the quest for the parchment combining faith, politics, and books in a mix that was more irresistible to him than the smile of a pretty girl.
“Really, Roberto—verdad!—I couldn’t be happier with your work. That relic is a precious possession of the Synagogue of Satan. Even if it isn’t Saint John’s work, the church considers it a genuine ancient text. Every pope has wanted to see it for centuries, and now you, Brother Bois-Guilbert, have discovered where it is!”
“Your words are more than adequate reward for my efforts. But tell me, is it known what the parchment actually says?”
Domingo hesitated. “There are two circles, it seems, one inside the other, and writing in Greek on them, though some say it is in Hebrew.” The founder allowed himself a confidence. “You know, the vision of the Christian faith propagating itself in ever-growing circles has always intimately exalted me. . . And then of course there is the matter of the circular maps of Jerusalem.”
“What do you mean, Father?”
“Circular maps of the Holy City started appearing a hundred years ago, just when the Templar knights started digging in Solomon’s Stables. Many thought the monks found a copy of the Parchment of Circles. Why would the Parchment spawn dozens of circular maps of Jerusalem?”
“Because it was itself a map?” smiled Robert.
“Exactly! And why does one draw a map, if not to find something hidden? Do you understand now why everybody is looking for that parchment? It leads to something that was hidden in the time of our Lord Jesus Christ!”
Friar Domingo’s eyes gave out blue flashes that could have been the light of the Holy Spirit or the sign of a secret madness. He looked like his collapse of an hour earlier had never happened.
Robert sat silently by the window, considering the enormity of the quest’s prize as Domingo went to open the door and summon one of the sisters. Then he turned to his disciple.
“Go to Syria, Roberto. Whatever the excuse, have them send you to Outremer, and start looking for that parchment! Send your reports only by trusted messengers, no letters! Find that parchment; I don’t care how, just find it! Use whatever means you have to, but wrench it from Satan’s grasp. ¡Todo modo es bueno para buscar la voluntad divina!” They embraced. “May the Lord protect you and grant you success and a happy return among us!”
After the Templar left, Domingo stood at the window watching the sun set behind the crest of Fanjeaux’s hill and reflecting on what the map led to, something he could never tell Roberto, even if he should find it and deliver it.
Three years earlier Cencio Savelli emerged pope from the conclave in Viterbo with the name Honorius III and had been shown all the church’s secrets. At once, he summoned Domingo to share the disastrous news of the Confession. Honorius learned that the Templars had used the Parchment of Circles as a map and found a document with which they had been blackmailing the church since the Council of Troyes in 1128.
“What ‘document’ could possibly give them such unearthly power?” Domingo had asked, incredulous.
“The confession by the thieves who stole the body from the tomb,” the pope had answered grimly.
CHAPTER 8
SHAMAYIM
The Heavens
ABOARD THE FALCUS, SOUTH OF THE PELOPONNESUS, 4TH MAY 1219
The Falcus glided over small, orderly waves. After a brief stop in Corfu she sailed in sight of the coast past Modone and was now south of the Peloponnesus. Friar Vassayl set an eastern course to Rhodes that would take them past the small island of Antikythera, leaving on starboard the big island of Crete, renamed Candia by the Venetians. On her port beam could just be seen the arid, bony middle one of the three fingers that Greece stretches lustily toward Africa since time began.
Four days earlier they had docked in Corfu, where the cook loaded water and victuals while Don Sancio met the Captain of the Levant to review the temple’s commercial rights and exemptions in Candia and Rhodes. The stopover was for one night only, and pilgrims were not allowed off the cog.
That noon was the first chance Aillil had to accompany his mentor on the quarterdeck. His senses were heightened by ten days of sun, wind, and spray. Normally people grew bored trying to follow his speech, but that morning the boy’s enthusiasm charmed sailors and knights; no one minded the effort needed to understand his happy grunts. Iñigo Sanchez was engaging him in some mock fighting moves across the balcony. When he stopped, Aillil stared at him, mouth agape.
“Is it . . . is it dangerous to be a Templar?”
“Yes, young man, it is. We’re always the first into battle, and we are never taken prisoner. The infidels chop our heads off!”
Aillil swallowed. “Why . . . why did you become a Templar, then?”
“You mean why didn’t I join the Hospitalliers? Puah!” Iñigo spat on the deck and burst out laughing.
Aillil faced him, suddenly serious. “Have you killed many infidels, sir?”
Sanchez returned the serious gaze, nodding. “You know, my boy, sometimes I think they’ll all come back one day and ask me to return the limbs I chopped off, or the brains I spilled . . .”
A shiver ran down Aillil’s back as the breeze played with his blond hair. His eyes searched out the rabbi’s black sarbel. He saw Yehezkel standing at the chart table, beard ruffled by the wind.
Aillil sniffed the air like some male forest animal and let out a long, high-pitched howl of joy. The rabbi, used to his ward’s lunar expressions, went on surveying mast, sail, shrouds, and halyards. After checking the rigging for the tenth time, his gaze fell on the nuns’ niche again.
During the day, for half a watch and in groups of thirty at a time, the pilgrims in the hold were allowed on deck, where they wandered aimlessly, inebriated by the sunlight and fresh air. Few pilgrims knew Latin, and almost none could read, so most fought the tedium of the high seas by conversing with those who spoke their tongue. Others passed the time playing dice, which sparked brawls, especially between pilgrims of different lands. Galatea and Yehezkel occasionally commented on some amusing sights, like a woman putting her hands over her child’s ears when the sailors substituted scurrilous verses for the prayers they were supposed to chant with every maneuver.
For an hour Galatea and Gudrun had been subjected to the stentorian voice of an English pilgrim just outside their tent, relating unbelievable stories in a Latin that made the abbess cringe. The man’s eyes had crossed Galatea’s for an instant earlier in the day, and he was searching his memory for marvels, miracles, and wonders he’d heard of, anything that might draw the stunnin
g nun out from behind that curtain.
Four or five pilgrims sat at his feet listening to his tales with a mixture of delight and horror, when the Englishman saw Yehezkel coming toward them. The presence on board of a Jew was often the preferred topic of such gatherings—nothing new, for Yehezkel—with most pilgrims finding it a bad omen. But the Englishman had watched the Jew speaking at length, and intimately, with the Italian nun, and before Yehezkel could ask Rustico to tell the abbess he was there, he interrupted his vane prattling to introduce himself to the rabbi. Yehezkel heard the nuns fidget behind the curtain, looked around for escape routes, and then resigned himself to the fact that the pilgrim—who insulted the Latin tongue more than the Jews who refused to speak it—had cornered him, at least for a time.
Minutes later the nuns emerged from their lair, and for the bored men on deck it was as if the sun just broke through after a week of clouds. To Yehezkel’s dismay, they stopped by the English pilgrim, who now had a dozen listeners and was in seventh heaven, booming like a monk preaching holy war. They heard how the bishop of Saint Alban in person pinned the red cross to his shoulder, and how he’d sworn to complete his pilgrimage on the sacred relic of Saint Peter. What, they hadn’t heard of the most potent relic in all of England? Well, it was a small silver crucifix, and inside it were iron filings from the chains that shackled the Apostle Peter!
When she stood close to them, Galatea’s nose curled at the sharp odor wafting from the pilgrims. Yehezkel smiled. The familiarity of Christians with dirt—and its companion, stink—was no longer a source of wonder and disgust for him as it had been when he’d first arrived from Egypt. He was happy to see the abbess as bothered as a civilized person should be by the smell on deck, which was growing more intense. Pilgrims were starting to feel hot under their cloaks as the sun’s brightness grew behind thinning clouds; there was no escaping the reek that came from three hundred unwashed, sweating bodies confined on a floating wooden prison in the middle of the sea.
Yehezkel had already reached the same conclusion as the crew: the pleasant westerly breeze that had blown for two days was dying. After a while Galatea, bored by the pilgrim’s tales, retired to her open-air cabin on her own, since talking philosophy with a Jew behind a curtain all day was out of the question. Gudrun instead stayed in the Englishman’s ample rhetorical embrace. Yehezkel smiled, relieved, and made off aft with Aillil hopping and skipping in circles around him.
The Falcus entered the Aegean on a sweet night, fragrant with perfumes floating on the residual breath of breeze, as befitted the waters from which Aphrodite emerged. That evening, during the pater noster, the black silhouette of Kythera—the island Venetians call Cerigo—stood out against the sunset like the tip of a sword on the coals of Vulcan’s forge. The spectacular end to the tenth day of the passage raised the pilgrims’ spirits, and the calm seas favored sleep for the mass of landlubbers, who had by now more or less adapted to life at sea.
The steadiness of the cog put the abbess in the best mood she’d been in since they left Venice, so that her smile was the most sought-after commodity on board. Yehezkel took advantage of it, convincing her to climb to the quarterdeck to enjoy the starry night away from the effluvium on deck.
“I must confess that I have a problem with heights!”
“Oh, don’t worry! Should you fall as you climb the ladder to the castle, I’ll be right below you!”
The abbess didn’t show the relief he expected. If Galatea finally found the courage to climb on the quarterdeck with the ship’s leaders, it was only because the near-total darkness prevented her from seeing the deck below.
Despite the late hour, six people were on the balcony: Friar Vassayl and his pilot, Don Sancio, Galatea, Yehezkel, and Piero Vidoso, the cog’s Venetian consul.*22 For an hour, stars and conversation sparkled as they only do on certain nights, blessedly free from mists and bad thoughts. The abbess’s presence made the men solicitous and verbose. But the balcony’s height above the deck added a greenish tinge to her pallor, and she always seemed on the point of losing interest. She was listening to Yehezkel speaking with Arnulf in a low voice about the stars.
“Of course, the constellation rising above the prow is the one you call Orion.” Yehezkel moved to the middle of the balcony and gestured for some attention from his audience. “My honorable friends, my revered Lady. Listen, if you will, to what our Talmud has to say about the constellation of Orion. Shemhazai and Aza’el are the only two names our sages give us of the rebel angels who disobeyed the Creator. They came down to earth, took wives, and generated the giants of Scripture. Aza’el was also the inventor of ornaments and perfumes women use to seduce men. After a time Shemhazai repented and hung himself upside down in the southern sky. For Jews, he is the constellation the Greeks named Orion.” Yehezkel paused before his punchline. “Aza’el, instead, never repented, and to this day, he pushes women to be the ruin of men!”
Everyone laughed heartily. Yehezkel obtained silence and went on. “Only one virgin resisted the wicked angels’ wiles and remained chaste. Her name was Istahar.” He smiled. “When they made their lewd propositions, she said, ‘All right, but first lend me your wings.’ As soon as she had them, she flew to Heaven”—Yehezkel, amid loud laughter, flapped his elbows across the balcony in an impression of a flying virgin—“and hid behind the divine Throne. God transformed her into the constellation you call the Virgin.” Yehezkel paused for effect again. “The angels, deprived of their wings, had to wait for our father Jacob to dream his ladder, so they could go home!”
The abbess loved the explanation of the traffic of angels up and down Jacob’s ladder. Her crystalline laugh rung out in the night, to everyone’s delight.
A little later, Yehezkel and the pilot were discussing a reddish star low on the horizon which Arnulf called Arcturus. The rabbi sunk his hand inside his sarbel, excited as a boy, and brought out a small, heavy-looking pouch. At long last he would use the astrolabium*23 forged for him in his Narbonne laboratory by the nephew of the ibn-Tibbons!
Yehezkel ben Yoseph had always loved maps—of cities, of desert trails, or of the sky at night—and could travel inside them with the excitement that others only experienced in the real places they represented. Winding rivers, jagged coastlines, the haphazard stretch of constellations held an irresistible fascination for him. And what he always found most intriguing about maps were place names. Kabbalah taught him that when playing with names, men stumble on mysterious truths. Yehezkel knew there were no coincidences in that game.
As a child, he liked giving things his own secret names. Instead of asking an adult what a thing was called, he would rename it in his mind with a secret name. He’d often asked himself as an adult if playing that game into adolescence would have resulted in his inventing a grammar for his private vocabulary and developing a whole secret language in which he would only have spoken to himself.
A visceral attachment to words over images—in memories, in abstractions, even in emotions—was the salient characteristic of Yehezkel’s mind. He was, in effect, a natural kabbalist. His memory was exceptional but almost never relied on images. He remembered numbers and names effortlessly but confused faces in sometimes embarrassing ways. He talked to himself, even debated himself, and invented new words if he couldn’t find one, in any of the six languages he spoke, that expressed what he meant.
When he’d started learning Torah, he’d been struck by how living creatures received their names. The Creator brought them before Adam one by one, “to see what he would call them,” and whatever name Adam chose for them, that would be their name. The Hebrew words hu shemò do mean “that is its name,” but because of the lack of a present tense in the Hebrew verb “to be,” they also mean “the animal is its name,” in the sense that the name Adam chose contained the essence, the secret nature, of that animal. The similarity with his childhood game flattered him. After all those years, he still felt a boyish complicity with Adam, as if they were old nursery mates.
&
nbsp; The predictability of the paths that stars followed through the heavens was another thing he found divine. His love of the night sky was born on the roof of his teacher’s house in Fustat. Moshe ben Maimon, the greatest Jewish thinker in generations, treated Yehezkel, the orphan of a friend from his childhood in Cordoba, like a grandson. When Yehezkel declared his love of astronomy, Maimonides—as his mentor was known to Latins—taught him the rules of the heavens, the names of stars, and the celestial alignments he should use to find them. After a year of those lessons, Yehezkel became so expert that one night his teacher—not a man generous with compliments—told him that not even a Persian Gulf pilot could recognize more stars. That night, the boy felt as if he were the only possessor of the keys to the heavens.
Yehezkel extracted the astrolabium from its soft pouch and handed it to Arnulf. The pilot couldn’t read the Hebrew names or numbers on the instrument but appreciated the superb workmanship, the precision of the 360 graduations, the soft movement of bronze on bronze, and the simplicity of the curled pointers indicating the positions of major stars. He expressed admiration for the man who forged the precious object.
Don Sancio stretched his hand out impatiently. “Qoheleth says, ‘What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?’ You, rabbi, toil under the stars, but the result is the same. I have little time for strange contraptions that measure God’s universe as if it were ours, and not his . . .”
Galatea intervened with mock seriousness. “I am just a poor lagoon abbess, Don Sancio, but if that instrument helps sailors find their way home again, I feel sure God himself inspired its conception.”
“Well said, madame!” exclaimed Friar Vassayl.
Arnulf began explaining to Yehezkel the way Christian astronomers and mariners order constellations. Three great crosses are drawn by the twelve constellations, four of them at the extremities of each cross. “The cross we call ‘fixed’ is formed by Taurus, Leo, Aquarius, and Aquila,” said the pilot. “I guess you know that those are the symbols of the four Evangelists: Luke, Mark, Matthew, and John.”
