A Traveler at the Gates of Wisdom

by John Boyne

  Copyright © 2020 by John Boyne

  Illustrations copyright © 2020 by Helen Adie

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United Kingdom by Doubleday, an imprint of Transworld Publishers, a Penguin Random House UK company, in 2020.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Boyne, John, author.

  Title: A traveler at the gates of wisdom: a novel / John Boyne.

  Description: First edition. | London; New York: Hogarth, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020016231 (print) | LCCN 2020016232 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593230152 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593230169 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Domestic fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6102.O96 T73 2020 (print) | LCC PR6102.O96 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2020016231

  LC ebook record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2020016232

  Ebook ISBN 9780593230169

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Simon M. Sullivan, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Christopher Brand

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Part 1: A Traveler in the Darkness

  Palestine: A.D. 1

  Turkey: A.D. 41

  Romania: A.D. 105

  Iran: A.D. 152

  Italy: A.D. 169

  Part 2: The Great Humiliation

  Switzerland: A.D. 214

  Somalia: A.D. 260

  South Korea: A.D. 311

  Part 3: A Master Craftsman

  Eritrea: A.D. 340

  Cyprus: A.D. 365

  Guatemala: A.D. 420

  Hungary: A.D. 453

  Afghanistan: A.D. 507

  Yemen: A.D. 552

  Part 4: A Face Carved in Stone

  Sri Lanka: A.D. 588

  Greenland: A.D. 623

  Peru: A.D. 665

  Bulgaria: A.D. 710

  Mexico: A.D. 752

  Egypt: A.D. 767

  Part 5: The Three Jewels

  Ireland: A.D. 800

  Nepal: A.D. 862

  Indonesia: A.D. 907

  Armenia: A.D. 944

  Part 6: Millennium

  Iceland: A.D. 999

  Mozambique: A.D. 1000

  Part 7: Plum Blossom Melodies

  Belgium: A.D. 1050

  Netherlands: A.D. 1086

  Sweden: A.D. 1133

  China: A.D. 1191

  Greece: A.D. 1223

  Part 8: The Refuge of the World

  Portugal: A.D. 1267

  North Korea: A.D. 1301

  Norway: A.D. 1349

  India: A.D. 1385

  Argentina: A.D. 1430

  Part 9: The Shadow of My Shadow

  Namibia: A.D. 1471

  Spain: A.D. 1492

  Vatican City: A.D. 1512

  England: A.D. 1599

  Part 10: A Devil’s Promise

  Brazil: A.D. 1608

  New Zealand: A.D. 1642

  Canada: A.D. 1694

  Japan: A.D. 1743

  Part 11: Good and Bad Angels

  Germany: A.D. 1790

  Scotland: A.D. 1832

  Australia: A.D. 1880

  Part 12: The Sun, the Moon and the Stars

  France: A.D. 1916

  Czechia: A.D. 1939

  Russia: A.D. 1961

  United States of America: A.D. 2016

  Epilogue

  Spearthrower Owl: A.D. 2080

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By John Boyne

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Country names in the chapter titles refer to their current designations in 2020.

  All other geographical names—cities, towns, villages—are as they were at the time of the story, or at their earliest known historical designations.

  PALESTINE

  A.D. 1

  ON THE NIGHT THAT I WAS BORN, my father, Marinus, left our home while my mother was in labor and, over the eight hours that followed, slaughtered a dozen infant boys, the sons of our neighbors and friends, each one under the age of two years.

  He owned four swords, including a pair of gladii and an ornamental sica that had been handed down through three generations of our family, but he chose the smallest weapon in his arsenal, a triangular dagger with a wooden handle and silver blade known as a parazonium, to end each of the babies’ lives. A ruby jewel of considerable value lay at the center of the quillion, its liquid blush ready to reflect the blood that spilled from the bodies of the children.

  A man of duty, he did not hesitate as he marched from door to door, searching each house for hidden nurslings before plunging his knife into the heart of every boy he found, and while mothers screamed in horror and rained curses down upon his head, fathers stood silently in corners, mute and impotent, knowing that if they dared to speak, the blade would surely find its way across their throats before their sentence came to an end. Older siblings trembled in fear as they watched Marinus go about his dark business, soiling themselves, frightened that they, too, were about to face the judgment of the gods for some unspecified crime, but no, once the babe had been dispatched from this world for the next, my father barely glanced in their direction before making his way to the next house, and the next, and the next after that, for there were more babies to discover and more lives to bring to a premature end.

  After each murder, he wiped the blade clean on his tunic, the fabric growing increasingly discolored as the sun began to peep over the horizon in the east, a fiery witness to unspeakable crimes, and soon the gray disappeared beneath an incarnadine coat.

  Of course, Marinus was not the only man engaged in sanguineous misadventures that night. More than thirty other soldiers had been deployed by King Herod to the towns that surrounded Bethlehem, from Ramat Rachel in the north to Rafida in the south, and from Har Gilo in the west to Juhazm in the east, until more than three hundred infant boys were put to death for the crime of being a potential King of the Jews.

  When my father returned home in the early morning, his spirit dyed with a barbaric tint that could never be erased, I was suckling at my mother’s breast and he placed a trembling hand upon my skull, resting it there for a moment as he gave me his blessing and begged forgiveness from the immortals atop Mount Olympus. When he took it away, a trace of blood was left in its wake, a deadly deposit, and I’ve always wondered whether some residue of his crimes remained indelibly upon my soul, a tattoo invisible to all but the eyes of the gods, a reminder of the massacre of the innocents that was taking place as I filled my lungs with air for the first time.
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  * * *

  • • •

  There is, of course, an unhappy irony to the fact that he dispatched a dozen babies from this world, for he would be responsible for bringing the same number into it over the course of his life, although few would survive past their infant years.

  He also saw off four wives, although none, I hasten to add, at his own hand, and while my mother, Floriana, was the last woman to marry him, she would not be the last to share either his bed or his home.

  Marinus’s first marriage took place when he was only twelve years old, a forced contract with his cousin Iunia, the ritual taking place in a stone temple in the town of Za’tara, where they were both born. The marriage was not a success. His father and uncle, greedy men with cruel dispositions, spent their lives slipping between periods of hostility and camaraderie and their children paid the price for their inconstancy. The couple being so young, it was said that all four parents stood on either side of the wedding bed on the night of the ceremony, issuing crude instructions to their naked, frightened offspring on how to achieve consummation, and when Iunia fainted in distress and Marinus burst into tears, they were soundly beaten and informed that they would not be permitted to leave the marriage chamber until the act had been completed to everyone’s satisfaction.

  Iunia died less than a year later, giving birth to a son, my brother Junius, her fragile young body so ill prepared for motherhood that it was torn apart by the trauma of childbirth. Although saddened, my father must have grown accustomed to the pleasures of matrimony, for he took a second wife almost immediately, a servant girl named Livia, who gave him a half-dozen more children, most of whom survived only a few months at most, before she was caught in a rainstorm, succumbed to a fever and died of it within a week. And then there was a third wife, Capella, who tumbled into a well while under the influence of wine and was discovered months later, her body already in an advanced state of decomposition. And a fourth, Reza, who was found hanging from a rope, a victim of her own malaise.

  Marinus had been fond of his wives and was, by all accounts, a more considerate husband than many in Bethlehem, never raising a hand to any of them in anger, but he had never truly loved them. That emotion was reserved until shortly after his twenty-second birthday, when he laid eyes on my mother for the first time. And although he would not remain faithful to her, monogamy being an unnatural concept to him, I believe that he felt a deeper emotion toward his fifth wife than he had toward any of her predecessors.

  * * *

  • • •

  My father loved women, all women, and was as indiscriminate with his favors as a dog in heat. He said that tall women excited him, but short women were good for his soul. Thin women made him joyful, but fat women made him giddy. He himself was a magnificent beast of a man, tall and broad, with virile good looks, powerful chest muscles and a set of golden curls that fell to his neck, capturing the sunlight and adding a reflective glint to the deep sapphire eyes that drew his conquests in, hypnotizing them and fooling them into believing that there was poetry hidden behind his beauty. His only blemish was a horizontal scar across his left cheek, the result of a childhood argument with another boy. But this imperfection only enhanced his splendor, for without it, women said, he would have been so exquisite that he could scarcely have been called a man at all.

  Skilled in the ways of seduction, he rarely faced opposition to his desires, taking whoever he wanted, whenever he wanted, regardless of class, age or marital status. Indeed, Marinus was as likely to be found in a virgin’s bed as her grandmother’s, and on the rare occasions when his advances were rebuffed he assumed the woman suffered from a disorder of the mind and took her anyway, for he recognized no one’s rights but his own and those of his peers within the Roman legion. He was a brute, certainly, but people adored his company, and I, like them, was desperate for him to love me, to show some added favor toward me as his son. This was a battle that I would never win.

  When Marinus and Floriana first met, my mother was promised to another man and only a week from her wedding. She was not in love, of course, but a woman who felt any emotion other than gratitude toward the man who had chosen her would have been regarded as an eccentric. The marriage had been brokered by her father, Naevius of Bethlehem, who accompanied her to the marketplace that morning to negotiate with one of the street vendors over the price of his raisins. While the men haggled, Floriana slipped away, making her way toward one of the textile stalls, where she ran her hand along some dhakai cloth that the trader claimed had been imported from the kingdom of Vanga at great expense.

  “Very beautiful,” he assured her, placing his hands together, as if in prayer, to convince her of his honesty. “In that distant place, women make their dresses from these fabrics and their husbands fill their bellies with many babies.”

  It was while Floriana was inspecting the man’s wares that my father emerged from the doorway of a nearby house and caught sight of her for the first time. He’d spent the morning in bed with the wife of a local tax collector, ravaging her three times in quick succession as payback for the percentage of his wages that he was forced to return to the imperial purse, but his erotic spirits were ignited once again when he saw the great beauty standing on the other side of the street. He observed the sensual manner in which her fingers stroked the material, her tongue running across her upper lip in pleasure as she caressed the cloth, and felt a longing inside him different to the basic desire for sex that stalked his every waking moment. Here was a new emotion, igniting in the pit of his stomach before coursing through his veins and stimulating every nerve ending. Sensing his gaze, my mother turned and glanced in his direction, flushing immediately, for she had never looked upon so handsome a man before. For her, too, something that had lain dormant inside began to stir. She was only sixteen years old, after all, and the man to whom she was betrothed was almost three times her age and so corpulent that he was known to all as the Great Elephant of Bayt Sahur. They had met only once, when he came to inspect her at her father’s home, as one would scrutinize a brood mare, and I imagine that she was anticipating the wedding night, if she even knew what it involved, with a mixture of dread and resignation. Now, it took an act of will on her part to turn away from Marinus and, unsettled by such alien and disquieting emotions, she made her way from the stall in search of a quiet place to catch her breath.

  Before she could go too far, however, he had crossed the street and was standing before her.

  “You would walk away from me?” he asked, smiling, barely cognizant of the musk of perspiration and sex that emanated from his body. He visited the bathhouse only once every few weeks, when the stink from his pores became too much even for his own nostrils, but somehow his aroma often proved an intoxicating perfume.

  “Do I know you?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” he replied, breaking into a wide smile that allowed the dimple on his right cheek to reveal itself and the scar on his left to whiten. “But that’s easily remedied.” He took a step back before bending at the waist to offer a polite bow. “Marinus Caius Obellius. A member of the Roman garrison stationed here in Judea. And you are?”

  “The daughter of Naevius of Bethlehem,” she said, casting a quick look to the other side of the market, where her father was still lost in negotiations.

  “The merchant?” asked my father.

  “Yes.”

  “But you have a name of your own, too, I suppose?”

  “Floriana.”

  “I’m surprised that such a man would allow his daughter to walk the streets alone.”

  “I’m not alone,” she said, daring to play with him a little. “I’m with you.”

  “But I’m a very dangerous man,” he replied, leaning forward and lowering his voice. “I have a reputation.”

  My mother blushed. Already, he had gone too far for her. “In fact, he’s just over there,” she said, nodding
in her father’s direction. “Perhaps you should continue on your way. He may not take kindly to you addressing me.”

  Marinus shrugged his shoulders. He’d never cared for such niceties before and had no intention of starting now. Permission, after all, was for common men, not for Roman legionnaires who looked as if they might name Jupiter and Venus as their progenitors. “You come to the marketplace with your father,” he asked speculatively, “instead of your husband?”

  “I have no husband.”

  “My heart rejoices.”

  “But I will. A week from today.”

  “My heart grieves.”

  He looked away, considering the probable chain of events that lay over the days ahead, and as he considered various options for ridding her of her betrothed, my grandfather marched over to protest against the young man’s insolence at addressing his daughter in a public place. Floriana drew her veil across her face and took a step backward as Naevius stood before them, insisting that he would summon the Roman Guards if this stranger dared to behave in such a disrespectful fashion ever again.

  “But I am of their number,” said my father, smiling in a friendly manner, for he was free of his duties on that particular day and dressed in the informal style of any Judean citizen, although he had barely pulled his clothes together from his encounter with the tax collector’s wife. “Marinus Caius Obellius,” he added, offering another bow, hoping that his manner would suggest that he was a man of good character and not some opportunistic predator wandering the market in search of virgins to seduce.