by Tuvia Fogel
“Wait a minute,” interrupted Yehezkel. “Those four constellations would be the ones presiding over the four seasons—if you hadn’t substituted Aquila for Scorpio . . .”
The moment he pronounced the name of the poisonous creature, the rabbi understood why Saint John was instead represented by the Eagle—the king of birds—which flies highest and looks straight into the sun. He changed course radically. “And have you noticed that Aquarius is the only one of the four with a human form, like the angel you use to represent Matthew?”
“Of course; why do you ask?”
“Because my teacher, Yitzhak the Blind—may his candle burn for many years—says that the sun will be in the house of Pisces for eight hundred more years, but when it then moves into the house of Aquarius . . . the Children of Israel’s exile will end, and the Messiah of David will finally arrive!”
Piero Vidoso had been trying for half an hour to get a word in in that learned sequel of stars, angels, and philosophers. But this time he was sure of the level of his contribution and made his plunge. “Those beasts are found in the heavens and on statues of the Evangelists for the same reason: because Saint John, in his Apocalypse, saw those four ‘beasts’ around the divine throne!”
Don Sancio shared a smile with Yehezkel and then turned to Vidoso in an indulgent tone. “Your knowledge of the New Testament does you proud, my man, but if you were as familiar with the Old one, you would also know where Saint John took both throne and beasts in his vision: from the book of the prophet Ezekiel!”
Galatea felt a pang of sympathy for the poor consul, caught stammering of Scriptures in the presence of two bottomless pits filled with knowledge of them. Don Sancio said, “I must go and have a rest now, my friends, and you, Rav Yehezkel, can go on talking about the stars with Arnulf here, who seems as dazzled by them as you are.”
Yehezkel scolded himself for not cornering the scribe earlier to ask him if he’d heard of the Parchment of Circles, preferring instead to prance about like a jester. “Oh, Don Sancio, may we come down with you? There’s something I’d like to ask you.”
The stunning discovery they made in a Talmud passage, that a page from the Book of Ezekiel had been hidden because it contained a prophecy fulfilled by Jesus, had shaken all three. Galatea still couldn’t believe the thousand-year-old parchment in the Paris temple really spoke—in Hebrew!—of Jesus Christ. Two nights later, she sat on deck in the dark once more, arms around her knees, listening to the two formidable exegetes compare Ezekiel’s prophecies with events in the Gospels, searching for the episode in Jesus’s life that the eccentric prophet foretold by the rivers of Babylon.
A silent bond formed between the three, for no one had ever deciphered that page of Talmud before, so they were the only people in the world to know of the as yet unidentified prophecy. The rabbi confessed he was disturbed by Elisha ben Abuya’s accusation, for Ezekiel’s book was a part of the Bible, which all Jews were intimately sure had never been tampered with. In any case, rabbi and scribe agreed that the hiding place of the page from the prophet was almost certainly in Jerusalem. Don Sancio said that the Templars, in their digs under the Temple Mount a hundred years earlier, never found anything that looked remotely like a piece of Ezekiel’s book—“Or I would know of it!”
A verse from Qoheleth brought Galatea back from her musings to the corner of the deck where they whispered in the dark and breathed in Greek air as sweet as the ambrosia of the gods must have been.
“Aah, Don Sancio! Of all people I’ve met, you’re the one who makes the most discouraging, pessimistic use of Scripture!” laughed Yehezkel. “But I like you. I know people of unassailable faith to whom I would never offer my friendship, but yours would honor me!”
“But you already have it,” said the scribe, “as does our most gracious abbess!”
“Forgive my frankness, Don Sancio,” said Yehezkel, “but by now you know how important it is for me to prove the antiquity of the Talmud. Well . . . did you ever hear talk of a Parchment of Circles?”
Don Sancio was silent for a while and then whispered, “Yes, I saw it, just once. The Old Man has it.”
Yehezkel asked with sudden urgency, “And who is the Old Man?”
“Mmh . . .” Don Sancio smiled, a little disappointed. “I thought you might enlighten me about that. The fact is none knows who he really is. Everyone calls him the Old Man. He must be over ninety, and today he is the chaplain of the new fortress of Château Pélerin. But rumors have it that he was once a famous man, a theologian, an adviser of kings.”
Yehezkel thought, “The head of the secret cabal in the Temple! The man who Rav Eleazar said staged his own funeral!”
Don Sancio went on. “He certainly advised Guillaume of Chartres, my master who died last year.” He hesitated. His companions thought he was going to quote Qoheleth, but he didn’t. “I might as well tell you the reason I’ve been summoned to Damietta is to find out if the new master, Pedro de Montaigue, will keep me as his secretary or give the position to someone else. . . .”
Ignoring Sancio’s personal drama, Yehezkel leaned forward, pressing. “But what about the parchment? If you did see it once, what did it say?”
“Oh, I just saw it for an instant, in the Old Man’s hands. I remember two concentric circles with Greek writing at certain points on both circles.”
Yehezkel leaned back, excited and disappointed at the same time. “And I suppose you don’t know who drew those circles, do you?”
Don Sancio smiled wistfully. “Qoheleth says, ‘That which is far off and exceeding deep, who can find it out?’ Who drew them? Who knows? The Old Man says it was Saint John the Evangelist. . . .”
At dawn on the 5th of May, the boatswain shouted his repetitive auspices. It started blowing a little after dawn. For two hours it blew from the northwest, and the Falcus took on an exhilarating pace. Friar Vassayl set a course a little north of Rhodes so they wouldn’t drift too close to Candia. But in the second watch the wind turned from the north and freshened. The north seas were not yet formed, so Friar Vassayl decided to keep his course, lowering the mainsail a little and sailing eastward as close to the wind as the fat-bellied Falcus was capable.
From the quarterdeck, Yehezkel’s gaze fell on the nuns’ niche just as Gudrun emerged. As she raised the curtain, he glimpsed the sweat-soaked face of the abbess and, even from that distance, knew she must be going through hell.
Galatea, by now, was only afraid that she might not die. Her first thought when the wind picked up had been that it would blow away the fetid smell, but as the waves grew, the cog’s movements confined her to the mattress, her will crushed. Now and then, she thought to end her suffering through sheer willpower: simply get up, splash some water on her face, brush her hair. But the thought dissolved almost immediately, and she fell back helplessly.
The first time she had to vomit she realized she didn’t have the strength to call for help. “I’ll wave a hand,” she thought, but it wouldn’t move. Her arm across the bucket supporting her forehead, she felt her gut contract and opened her eyes wide, shocked by the loudness of the retch. She stared at the remains of her last meal, unable to even move her head to escape the spectacle. The acrid smell brought on another retch. Her last thought was that she should chew her food longer, as Sister Marianna had always told her as a child. The lumps of bread in the bucket were surprisingly big.
Everyone who walked past her bucket glanced into it, to see if it needed emptying overboard. She thought, “Do they think I wouldn’t do it myself? I’m not an animal!” But when she tried, Rustico took it from her hand. “Leave it, Madre, I’ll take care of it!” She tried to insist but fell back in her corner, drained, on the point of crying from humiliation.
“I’ve become like a baby again, I can’t even look after my physical needs . . . God must be punishing me for pride. Maybe Mother Elisabetta was right that pilgrimages are just vanity!”
She turned on her side. “For which sin, I wonder, is the punishment to
be seasick in eternity?” The very thought made her shiver, imagining herself wandering around hell with a bucket, like a Christ with his Cross. The image gave her some relief, though, for she thought, “After all, what is all this when compared with our Lord’s suffering on the Cross?”
During her passion on the high seas, passersby gave Galatea well-meaning advice. She appreciated their concern, but her attempts to smile were distorted grimaces. “May you be cursed for the humiliations you inflict on me!” she thought every time. “Leave me alone; do you not understand that the worst of this ordeal is the loss of my dignity?”
Gudrun by now didn’t feel much better and had spent time draped over the gunwale with Garietto hanging onto her. When she asked Galatea if she needed anything, her abbess answered in a whisper: “No, my child . . . no one ever died of seasickness. Master Ezekiel said so . . . just leave me here with my bucket and forget about me.”
But Yehezkel’s attentions touched her. Twice the rabbi had come down from the balcony, felt her pulse, and offered some bitter leaves to suck on. Having a “real seaman”—as she heard Arnulf call him—by her side, gave a sense of safety and raised her morale a little. If Master Ezekiel said she would survive, Galatea refused—despite all evidence to the contrary—to doubt it.
The northerly went on freshening until it whistled in the shrouds with the unmistakable voice of a storm. Yehezkel climbed down again and asked the almost senseless abbess for the key to her chest. He stowed some bags and satchels inside, keeping the astrolabium in his pocket, then used some rags to caulk the edge of the lid. As he worked, it occurred to him that if the Falcus—God forbid!—should capsize, the trunk would have to be untied, lest it sink with the cog. Perhaps he could put Aillil and the women in it, if they survived. Suddenly, he had a vision of survivors struggling in the water for possession of the chest.
Yehezkel felt a sudden sensation of danger and turned. A crowd of pilgrims, their faces warped by panic for the gathering storm, were advancing on him from both the bow and the mast. Yehezkel guessed that they had convinced themselves that the Jew was the cause of the storm, and that only throwing him overboard would save them from certain death.
Galatea, who had somehow reached the gunwale with her hands and dragged herself up, was watching, outraged and powerless, the menacing gestures of the approaching cloaks. The pilgrims, soaked by spray and always on the point of slipping on the wave-splashed deck, threw curses at the rabbi, and some of them clutched short belay pins in their hands.
One of the Bible books Yehezkel loved best, for the unabashed irony of the story, was Jona’s. He said to himself grimly, “This is the opposite of Jonah’s story, where the prophet asked to be thrown in the sea! This is where Don Sancio would quote Qoheleth: ‘What advantage have the wise over fools?’”
He started breathing the folded breath. What was he going to shout to stop the terror-stricken pagans? He let his rib cage fall, expelling every last pocket of air in his lungs and holding them empty, eyes closed. A few moments before the pilgrims reached the shroud closest to where he stood, Don Sancio appeared beside him out of nowhere and bellowed over the wind, “The Jew is under the protection of the master of the temple! Whoever pulls a hair of his beard will answer for it to Pedro de Montaigue in person!”
The four Templars formed a wall around Yehezkel, swords drawn, and the pilgrims retreated right away. But one of them, eyes on fire, lunged between two knights, belay pin raised in the air. André de Rosson would have pierced him like a pig, if Yehezkel hadn’t grabbed his wrist first and dragged him in a long slide down the foamy deck.
A few minutes later, twenty pilgrims were in irons and the rabbi was safely back on the balcony.
When the Meltem declared itself in the late morning, the Falcus had been forced to run before the wind, which had now turned slightly to the northeast and formed seas the Falcus could no longer defy.
Friar Vassayl ordered the mainsail lowered to a strip of canvas along the boom and the Falcus took the wind from port side, almost full in the stern. In its gallop south, the cog threw its prow first to port and then to starboard, like a horse trying to throw its mount. In the gallery below the stern castle, where two helmsman normally handled the tillers connected to the cog’s two rudders, three men now did their best to contrast each tiller, the strain on them showing. For all that, conditions on board with the Falcus running before the sea improved; the storm’s howl lessened and a strange calm prevailed, even among the pilgrims.
The balcony swung obscenely with the cog’s every roll, the wind turned every mantle into a whip, but despite that it was crowded, for it was where the fate of the Falcus would be decided. Only three men up there had full comprehension of charts and winds, of loadstones and hull weaknesses. Friar Vassayl, Arnulf, and Yehezkel knew that if they made the right choices, perhaps the Falcus could be saved, but if they made one wrong decision, even an apparently irrelevant one, more than three hundred lives would be lost.
“On this tack, with the wind from port, the stone says we’re heading exactly south,” said Arnulf, who in such circumstances acquired almost more authority than the patron himself. “In other words, if when sailing due east, before the north wind started, we had already passed the beginning of Candia, we now run the risk of sailing into it, and with this gale behind us.” The pilot, red mane in the wind, looked each man around the table in the eyes in turn and concluded, “Which would be a disaster.”
Don Sancio unnecessarily jutted out his chin. “Arnulf, we all understand the danger of Candia being downwind. Even I know that most cogs are lost because they can’t sail upwind and are thrown on the rocks. What we want to know is if you think we should seek the other tack, the more westward one, now, lest the Falcus plunge onto Candia’s rocks like . . . like an angel falling after thinking the unthinkable!”
Friar Vassayl answered in Arnulf’s place, announcing what everyone already knew, “But if Candia was not downwind for long, and we drifted further west than we think, then if we tack now we’ll be blown south right past it . . .”
“Which would mean reaching Cirenaica*24 within a day,” Arnulf finished for him.
It was Don Sancio’s turn to comment, the pessimism in his voice more appropriate than usual. “Indeed, Cirenaica. Where those who survive the fury of the infidels will spend the rest of their days on earth as mamluk†3 slaves.”
Iñigo knew that slavery might be in store for pilgrims but that a different fate awaited the Templars should the Falcus make landfall in Africa: martyrdom. But not before sending a hundred infidels to hell! He murmured the first words of the Templar battle cry under his breath. “Non nobis, Domine, non nobis.”
At dawn on the same 5th of May, before the storm that struck the Falcus began to blow, a noble knight rode into the Christian camp that stretched over leagues of desert, just south of the city of Damietta.
The huge red sun was just above the sandy horizon, the metal fittings topping tents and pennants shone like mirrors. Thin threads of smoke rose from scores of bivouac fires smoldering outside the tents. The camp was slowly waking, and already the knight heard a chorus somewhere intoning a sad funeral litany. Funerals, like everything else in the delta, had to be held early before the blanket of heat came down. Bells called crosswearers to morning Mass. Pages ran to fetch water to cook breakfast. Soldiers led horses to the water troughs, the poor animals rearing and whinnying when they crossed each other, unsure if this was already battle.
The breeze brought a sickly stench of death from inside the city walls, together with the muezzins’ voices. After a fruitless year-long siege, the whiny sound angered and discouraged the Christians. There was the fortress, leading its usual, infidel life. Some thought it would never fall. Those mighty walls and square towers burned their eyes; they could no longer bear the sight.
The rider approached the two biggest tents, in the east of the encampment, surmounted by the fiery-colored standards of John of Brienne, king of Jerusalem, and Cardinal Pelagius
Galvani, papal legate a latere. He asked to be announced to the legate and a minute later crossed the purple-bordered entrance of the tent. Cardinal Pelagius received him while consuming a frugal breakfast. He was a short, intense cleric, rigid and snooty as only certain military and monastic types can be, accustomed as they are to passing judgment with the wave of a sword or a cross.
“Leopold has left!” announced the count.
Pelagius stood up with a start, toppling the wine jug. “The Duke of Austria ran off in the night, like a common thief?” he cried, slamming a fist on the table.
“He’d been secretly embarking his personal guard on two Frisian cogs for a day, it seems,” reported the nobleman. “They sailed an hour ago . . .”
“Just when the sultan lost a thousand men in fifteen days!” cried Pelagius, crushing something in his hand. “I hope his cog is pulverized on the rocks!” He was struck by a fit of coughing, and his valet patted him timidly on the back.
“I’ll write to Honorius!” spluttered the legate. “His soul won’t get away with this, you’ll see!”
CHAPTER 9
VA-TERA’E HA-YABASHA
And the Dry Land Appeared
ABOARD THE FALCUS, SAILING WEST OF CANDIA, 5TH MAY 1219
With every small increase in the wind’s strength, the cog seemed smaller to Yehezkel’s eyes compared to the seas around it. The things he looked at assumed an unnatural clarity, as if he could see their secret internal pulsing, that quid of life present even in canvas, wood, or iron. But his other senses seemed to have also sharpened as the gusts grew more violent. Despite the wind’s howl, he could hear the creaking of the tillers.