by Tuvia Fogel
The scribe’s eyes were closed, his breaths shallow. He reflected for a while and then murmured, “This is one secret I would like to let go of before I leave this vale of tears . . .”
Rabbi and abbess both leaned forward, hanging on every word.
“The Order of the Temple has become the power it is . . . by blackmailing the popes for ninety years. The Parchment of Circles is in reality a map that leads to the hiding place of the most dangerous document the church of Peter has ever had to deal with.”
Don Sancio hesitated, but he’d known from the moment of the impact on the rocks that he would not survive for long and hadn’t said enough to break the balance of powers, so he grimaced and went on. “It is allegedly the confession by the thieves who stole Jesus’s body from the tomb . . . the Templars claimed to have found it, but I know they didn’t. Saint Bernard, ninety years ago, convinced Honorius II that they had, and they have reaped the benefits ever since.” Don Sancio let out a long sigh from both effort and relief.
Galatea’s mouth hung open, the foundations of her world teetering. “You mean . . . you mean they blackmail the church because if the body was stolen, then . . . then there was no Resurrection? But that’s . . . impossible!”
Yehezkel said nothing, a sly smile on his face. Then, “I always wondered how the temple managed to keep those hundreds of donations . . . and they answer only to the pope, eh? Now it all makes sense! But tell me, Don Sancio, who else knows of this ‘confession’?”
“The pope and the Old Man for sure, but maybe Domingo of . . .” Don Sancio was stuttering and seemed on the point of passing out.
“That’s enough, Master Ezekiel!” cried Galatea, pulling Yehezkel off the scribe by the sleeve of his sarbel. “Can’t you see he’s in no shape to answer more questions? We must let him rest!”
Yehezkel had been too excited to notice that Don Sancio’s face was the color of ash. Feeling guilty, he helped the old man into the house and onto a bed. Don Sancio felt the chill of the approaching end. He heard people shouting on the path and murmured, to no one in particular:
“Says . . . says Qoheleth, ‘People go to their eternal home, and whiners go about the streets.’”
Four days after the beaching, Don Sancio was so weak he could no longer stand. Blood had drained out of his face, and his pulse was barely perceptible. Now and then, feeling someone bustle around his pallet, Don Sancio murmured, “Why are you fidgeting so much? Just let me die in peace . . .”
That day Don Sancio wrote his testament in his own hand.
His last wishes were concerned with the division of his books among his students in Paris. Then, too weak to write more, he dictated to Yehezkel a letter to Pedro de Montaigue, his new master, who was in the Christian camp outside Damietta. In it, he heaped praise on the rabbi and the noble abbess for saving hundreds of Christian pilgrims by successfully beaching the Falcus in the middle of a storm.
His last letter was to the temple commander in Heraklion, asking him to arrange for the recovery of the Falcus by sending boat builders and carpenters to set up a yard on the beach at Gramvoussa. Yehezkel explained to him that after hauling the cog upright and propping her up, they would have to repair the planking where it was crushed and then, to put her back in her element, dig a ditch around her and let the sea into it.
Then Don Sancio prepared himself, with great decorum, for his last journey. “I’ve been preparing to die all my life, Rav Yehezkel, but now I’ve been dying for three days, and I’m already tired of it.”
There was no pain or fear in the scribe’s eyes. He hadn’t asked for a priest, not because the Greek rites of the monks in the nearby monastery didn’t agree with his Christianity, but because he’d always known that if Heaven and hell existed, one was not assigned on the basis of hurried, last-minute rituals. He knew all the tales about hell and expected that in the end it, too, would be a disappointment.
Yehezkel and Galatea had not spoken again of Don Sancio’s words on the confession. That evening, unable to vent her outrage near the dying scribe, she dragged the rabbi out of the house and said, sternly, “It’s calumny, Rabbi, and you know it! People spread denials of the Resurrection in the same way they spread rumors about Jews killing Christian children at Easter for their blood! And anyway, if that’s what the map leads to, how would it help you to prove the antiquity of your Talmud?”
Yehezkel secretly had no doubt that Jesus’s body had been stolen by his followers, or by someone paid by them, but after witnessing Galatea’s rage when he’d implied she was a pagan, there was no way he was going to let his own opinion on the matter air.
“Madame, in truth I’m as surprised as you that five or six popes have given credence to a rumor—for without seeing the document it is just a rumor—to the point of making the temple what it is today. But I beg you, let us suspend judgment—at least between ourselves—on the existence of this confession until we see the famous Parchment of Circles: if God helps us find it, that is.”
“The church giving it credence is what makes it so frightening,” murmured the abbess to herself.
At nightfall, Don Sancio became convinced that his Averroism would cost him salvation of his soul and panicked. Garietto ran off to fetch a monk, and the old man confessed himself, but his fear did not abate. Only Yehezkel, sitting at his deathbed the whole night, somehow managed to calm him down a little. At one point, a half-asleep Galatea heard the rabbi whisper in the dark:
“You really believe the Almighty is that mean?”
At dawn the scribe asked to be laid on the ground, as is the custom for dying Christians. First light was seeping into the house when Don Sancio, with a last sigh, passed away.
His body lay in the widow’s house for the whole day as the monks arranged funeral rites worthy of a temple official. There was no wake for Don Sancio, and that night the curtain didn’t spare the women from the sickly smell wafting from the one among the five men on the other side who had been dead for twenty-four hours. Everyone was oppressed in the spirit by the presence of the corpse and dazed by the fragrance of the big candles around it.
Iñigo Sanchez, before going on to Chania, had told Yehezkel that if Don Sancio should succumb to his injuries, he was to be buried in the monastery two leagues from Kaliviani. Yehezkel fished out six silver grossi to ensure the monks would erect, in the tiny wildflower garden that was their cemetery, a stone cross with the name and dates of Sancio de la Palmela. Galatea was moved by the gesture, considering it was made by a Jew. “It’s true, as they say,” she thought, “that nobility is in one’s actions, not in one’s blood.”
With the exception of Aillil’s sobs, the six pilgrims stood silently in the sun as the monks lowered Don Sancio into the hard Cretan earth. During the brief ceremony, Yehezkel and Galatea felt the hand of fate pushing them toward the Holy City. They hadn’t talked about the confession any more, but it was clear to both that Don Sancio had been the bearer of clues to the enigma their journey was all about. There was no denying it: some kind of Holy Grail lay at the end of their Quest. They were looking for something that no one, monk, pope, or emperor, had so far been able to find.
The nun and the kabbalist, without having to say it, shared the certainty that if “Deus vult” meant God wills it to all pilgrims, in their case God in his unfathomable wisdom had more elaborate plans.
KALIVIANI, 13TH MAY 1219
Yehezkel wanted to go alone, but Galatea wouldn’t hear of it. They had to find a passage to Acre, and she was responsible for Gudrun. Not that she didn’t trust the rabbi—she would have been an ingrate—but she wasn’t in the habit of letting others make traveling arrangements for her, so she would accompany him to Heraklion. She asked the widow where they could find horses. Yehezkel rolled his eyes.
“This island is all steep, rocky hills, madame, and a horse is a shy, moody animal, frightened by narrow paths. Its health is fragile and its value such that one is chained to it as to a galley mate. Believe me, what you and I need are two sm
all, sturdy beasts; tranquil, tenacious, and cheap. In a word, two donkeys!”
“I shall never be seen astride a donkey, sir! At least, not while I’m alive,” huffed Galatea.
She was instead seen sitting composedly across the saddle of one for a good quarter of the island’s perimeter. As a girl, she’d learned to kick a horse in the belly so it would draw in its breath and allow her to tighten the saddle one last notch. When she tried it on a Cretan female donkey, she discovered why the reputation of those animals, despite their humble appearance, is so rotten.
For the whole way to Heraklion—a one-hundred-league, three-day ride—wherever the odd couple was sighted, villagers rushed out of their homes, pointing out the donkeys with a nun and a Jew, as if that very scene was a prophesied sign of the imminent end of the world.
On the afternoon of the third day, less than two weeks after the beaching, they entered the walls of Candia, as the Venetians had been calling Heraklion for seven years to no effect. They rode fifty feet from each other to avoid giving scandal in a city. It was Thursday, which Albacara had said was market day, but their plan to arrive in the morning was sabotaged by Galatea’s donkey, a specimen worthy of being called stubborn even by other donkeys.
As long as it was on a path, it proceeded in a straight line, but the moment it entered a meadow or a field, it was gripped by a kind of dementia and started to walk in circles with uncanny single-mindedness. All of Galatea’s strength barely sufficed to force it back onto the path each time.
They had missed the recruiting of sailors for local boats, a market-day event Yehezkel counted on to find out about vessels due to sail east. They left the donkeys in a stable by the gate and headed to the port to make inquiries. As they descended a narrow alleyway—which, judging by the donkey traffic, must have been one of Heraklion’s main thruways—Yehezkel saw a Jewish boy running head down, dodging everything and everyone. He stopped the boy with his belly and asked in Hebrew, “Where are you running like that, to study?”
“There’s a rabbi among the slaves they disembarked half an hour ago!” the boy gasped.
Galatea saw Yehezkel’s eyes narrow. He said, “Follow me, madame!” and dashed down the alley as the boy ran off to alert the Jewish authorities. Galatea lifted the hem of her habit and ran after him. In a few moments they were in the opening where the harbor’s quays converged. Yehezkel grabbed her hand and dragged her through the crowd toward the cries of the slave auction.
In those years, slaves were sold right on the quay where the boat that captured them—usually pirates pretending to be merchants—was moored. The readiness of Jewish communities in the Mediterranean to ransom Jewish prisoners made Jews the favorite prey of pirate ships.
Galatea surveyed a scene similar to Rialto: fish stalls, mutilated veterans, obscenely painted prostitutes. But the abbess, who had grown up in the quarrelsome city-states of Tuscia, also recognized the palpable tension of a city occupied by strangers.
She heard the salesman shout that all the girl slaves—Circassian, Bosnian, Georgian, Bulgarian, Tatar—most between twelve and fourteen, were “healthy and without blemish, in their hidden parts as well as in the visible ones!” She felt impotent anger at the poor girls’ fate.
The Jewish slave on sale was about Yehezkel’s age, but scrawnier; in fact, almost skeletal. His haunted, expressive face stood out among the other prisoners. The owner of the lot was in the ample tent behind the auction stage. Yehezkel and Galatea watched him without leaving the anonymity of the crowd.
It was a sun-baked, stout Greek around fifty. He had a fleshy, olive-skinned face with few yet deep wrinkles and a thin moustache on the top lip, giving him a classic Levantine look. When he laughed he squeezed his eyes in a porcine way and turned a bright, strawberry red. He was dressed in local fashion, but with a black waistcoat covered in medals and crosses. Yehezkel whispered in Galatea’s ear, “He looks like something halfway between a court jester and a fake relic.”
Galatea watched the Greek drink wine and tell dirty jokes, slapping a client’s shoulder or a slave’s buttock with the same gusto. His gestures made his dialect comprehensible to anyone, but now and then he switched to an atrocious Latin, blaspheming in an oriental cadence. She heard him shout, “Saracens may get seventy-two virgins, Iannis, but when Venetians and Templars go to Heaven, they get to bugger the saints!”
She whispered to Yehezkel, “The man combines the most depraved aspects of two races and two civilizations in one person.”
Yehezkel laughed loud, always amused by how the abbess left no stone standing of what she criticized. Hearing him laugh, the merchant saw his black sarbel and decided this must be the emissary of the Jewish community, come to ransom the prisoner. Waving his short arms, he invited Yehezkel under the tent. The abbess followed as the Jew made his way around the platform, causing a murmur in the crowd.
The merchant introduced himself with an ironic half bow. “Spiridione Masarakis, servo vostro.*28 Ha, ha! Get it? Servo vostro, ha, ha, ha!”
“How much do you want to free the prisoner?” Yehezkel had no intention of spending more time than strictly necessary in the company of this individual.
“A while ago, a Jewish shopkeeper offered me a measly two hundred dinars for him. Parasite! But it was strange; usually the physical condition of a Jewish slave doesn’t influence your offers.”
The prisoner’s lips curled in an ironic smile. Yehezkel reflected, breathing deeply, and then plunged his hand in his pocket and brought out a leather pouch, smaller and softer than the one with the astrolabium. He turned his back to the Greek and poured out the contents into the palm of his hand. When he turned to face Spiridione, he held between his thumb and forefinger a ruby the size of a pigeon’s egg, and the exact color of the two drops of blood that roll out of that bird’s nostrils when it exhales its last breath.
Spiridione’s eyes shone almost brighter than the stone. He looked at the Jew, wondering how many more stones were in that pouch, and then glanced around to check how many people had seen the ruby, every thought crossing his mind as legible as the statues on a cathedral.
Galatea glanced at the prisoner to take her eyes off the slave trader. The man’s smile now said he thought the Lord was the best of storytellers.
The ruby was clearly worth more than what Heraklion’s Jews could have collected for the ransom, so Spiridione waited to hear what further pretences the big Jew would have. Yehezkel kept turning the stone in his fingers before the Greek’s eyes, smiling, until Galatea thought he was overdoing it. Then, suddenly, in a deep voice that silenced everyone around them, he boomed, “I want a passage to Acre for six people!”
The abbess bent down and pretended to straighten the hem of her habit to recover from the fright the rabbi’s voice just gave her. Her bones—nay, her very soul—reverberated with those everyday words as if she’d just heard a divine revelation. Suddenly, she remembered his voice when he had spoken Jesus’s words that night in Torcello. At first she’d thought it was God himself, come to take her soul to Heaven. Now she understood that he had just used the same, unearthly skill.
Spiridione was also struck by the surge of power unleashed by the Jew. He swallowed slowly, already thinking which boat he would use for the pilgrims. He had to be the one to carry the Jew, the beautiful nun, and above all the precious stones eastward, at least for a portion of the way.
They struck a deal. The rabbi declined to tell Spiridione where they resided, saying only they would be back on the first Sunday in June. The salesman removed the prisoner’s irons as the Greek lifted the ruby to the light, happy as a child. The prisoner embraced Yehezkel, a broken blessing on his lips, “May God bless you, my brother . . . I would not have lived much longer.”
Yehezkel realized the other Jew was worse off for the ordeal than had seemed at first. He’d thought of entrusting him to the local community, but something in the man’s dark eyes, he couldn’t have said what, made him decide to take him back to the widow’s house and look
after him himself. They had to find another donkey for the ride back and were slowed by the condition of the ransomed prisoner, who was so weak he was often close to falling off his animal.
He was a Spanish itinerant rabbi called Shlomo del Medigo. Talking with Yehezkel in Hebrew during the journey, he expressed surprise that a rabbi should be traveling with a nun, but when he heard of the circumstances of their meeting and her role in the beaching of the Falcus, he agreed Divine Providence was undoubtedly at work.
The slave market had shaken the abbess; she was silent for most of the first day of the ride back to Kaliviani. Then, thinking back to the unearthly roar into which Master Ezekiel transformed his voice, she began interrogating him.
“It was really nothing special, madame,” said Yehezkel.
“I’m not a child, Master Ezekiel. You must explain exactly how you draw that thunder from your chest, or I won’t give you a moment’s rest about it from here to the Holy Sepulchre!”
“Oh, dear me! God protect me . . .” laughed Yehezkel.
The Spanish thirty-year-old’s resilience and Yehezkel’s herbs ensured a quick recovery, and soon the two were studying together in the middle of the night—the best time for kabbalists for attempts to “raise the heavens”—whispering as they commented on one of the codices Yehezkel stowed in Galatea’s chest.
Galatea could watch Aillil snoozing for hours, motherly love in her eyes. The widow noticed the way the abbess looked at the boy. At one point, seeing her moved to tears, she came close and took her hand. “He is so beautiful, like a young angel,” said Galatea, as if to justify her emotion.
“Yes, he is graceful and pure, but fragile. Born from too young a mother,” said the widow.
Galatea changed the subject. Albacara, to survive after the death of her Vidal, had to sell her skill as a weaver, so for a while they talked about fabrics. Then Galatea tried to tell her about Hildegard but soon realized that the widow’s faith was as simple as the centurion’s. She listened as the other woman quoted Saint Bruno, fear making her voice tremble, “‘Careful! Satan is in the air, in the dust that hangs in every sunbeam. He is in the sudden breeze, in the gust that topples men in the field and ruins the crop. All these things are the devil whistling.’ Do you see what I’m trying to say, Mother Galatea?”