by Tuvia Fogel
“So it will only cost you ten gold bezants . . .” concluded Spiridione.
“But that’s daylight robbery!” cried the rabbi.
Spiridione retorted, offended, “It is not robbery, but the right price to take six people to Limassol!” He glared at the rabbi, a menacing glint in his eye. “And watch your tongue, Jew! You’re in here now, and Spiro will decide if you go out on your own two feet.”
Yehezkel had an idea. “Meet me half way, as civilized businessmen do. You want ten gold bezants? Then you’ll have to take on eight passengers, and all the way to Acre.”
The abbess didn’t look at the rabbi, pretending to know about the two extra passengers. Spiridione grabbed a wine jug and filled his mug, ignoring everyone else’s. “Who are the other two?” he asked after swallowing a long gulp.
“A Frankish knight and his squire,” answered Yehezkel evasively.
“Ha! Your champion, is he? All right, then! Eight passengers, but only as far as Limassol, take it or leave it! Five bezants on sailing and five on landfall. I’ll provide sweet water and ship’s biscuits; if you want other provisions, it’s your problem. We sail next week, at dawn on Sunday!”
“No,” said Yehezkel quietly, “in ten days. We need more time; one of the pilgrims isn’t coming back.”
“Oh, see the Jewish knight looking after his pilgrims like a hen after her chicks! If you’d accompanied those infants in the summer of 1212, they might have reached the Holy Land!” Spiridione laughed so hard he turned crimson. “He, he! But if you ask me, we would have sold them anyway. Ha, ha!”
“What infants are you referring to?” asked Galatea, horrified, speaking for the first time since sitting down. “Not the innocents who took the cross?”
Seven years earlier, Spiridione took part in the tragic ending of what was already being called a massacre of the innocents. Some incensed boys convinced a few thousand naive Frank and German children between seven and thirteen that only Christian children, innocent of the Kingdom of Jerusalem’s corruption and debauchery, could free the Holy Sepulchre. The infants, fed by charitable people on the way, walked for months until they reached Marseille.
They expected the sea to open up for them as it had for Moses and the Israelites, but alas, the Lord had other plans. Most turned around and went home, but hundreds believed unscrupulous adventurers and boarded cogs to Syria, only to be cynically sold into slavery to the Saracens. Those rogues, of whom Spiridione was an example, thanked God for the children’s credulity just as fishermen thank Him for a generous passage of tuna and built themselves new cogs with the profits.
Spiridione related, chuckling, of the day they sold the children. The Frank and German children, convinced they’d just arrived in the Holy Land, stared in horror at the irons that were their prize. Galatea’s eyes filled with tears, and her resolve not to sail on the ruffian’s boat became ironclad.
Meanwhile, the room had slowly filled up with the curious. Sailors pretended to drink as they watched the scandalous couple spewed by the sea west of Kaliviani. The pilgrims on the Falcus only muttered about the nun’s unfortunate choice of traveling companion, but the Greeks in the inn quickly produced a more dramatic scenario. The nun defied public shame because she was already a slave to the Jew’s animal sensuality—capable, as everyone knew, of awakening the moral turpitude of Eve even in a nun.
The whispered certainty had become that the poor nun, clearly under a spell cast by the Jewish wizard, was unaware of her fate: the Jew was selling her to Spiro, who would deliver her to his Saracen clients. Outrage grew among the sailors—not directed at Spiro, of course, who after all was just earning a living, but at the perfidious Jew who conceived the whole scheme.
“They should hang every Jew on the island!” cried a docker from a corner of the room.
“If we don’t stop them now, they’ll decide everything about our lives,” said another voice.
Two of them drew closer to the table. Spiro smiled, looking forward to the moment when, defending his clients and threatening the more aggressive thugs, he would reaffirm authority over both. He was startled when the nun suddenly rose from her stool—she was taller than half the men in the room—and turned toward the crowd. In Latin, and in the tone nobles have always used with plebs, she said, “Get back to your pastimes! I am Galatea, countess of the Ardengheschis of Monte Alcino, and this is Master Ezekiel of Lunel, my personal physician. I am on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and, for an unusually high consideration”—here her voice nearly cracked—“Master Masarakis will provide his services to us.”
The mariners dispersed, but far from expressing relief for the danger the nun had escaped, their faces were those of children forbidden from playing a favorite game because adults find it too noisy or muddy or smelly. Yehezkel and Spiro stared at Galatea’s smoldering eyes, still as dangerous as live embers, both clearly impressed by that lioness disguised as a nun.
She warned Yehezkel right from the alley that climbed up from the port, “You’ll sail with that Greek barbarian by yourself, Rabbi! Gudrun, the armigers, and I will look for a ship owner who can be called a Christian, in the sense I attribute to the word!” Yehezkel had not yet seen her face quite so flushed.
“And if you’ll consent to it, we’ll take Aillil with us, too!”
He muttered under his breath, made a joke about Spiro, and generally avoided answering.
“And anyway, who is this Frank with a squire, uh?” she asked, still fuming, just outside the city walls.
“André de Rosson,” answered Yehezkel with a straight face.
Yehezkel had bumped into the young Templar on Shabbat. The knight was left in Candia with the garrison but would have given anything to be with his brothers at Damietta. Thinking of the company’s security, the rabbi had asked Rav Tofefloià to speak to the island’s Templar commander, and to only do so after giving him don Sancio’s last letter.
Galatea imagined Spiro’s face when he saw the white mantle. The girlish—nay, impish—smile that spread on her face slowly turned into a full-throated laugh.
Galatea never told anyone why she’d taken her vows at age fifteen. Her marriage to old Fulk, who left her a widow at fourteen, was, as Qoheleth said, “far off and exceeding deep,” practically unreachable. Then hearing the rabbi’s voice pronounce words in Hebrew started giving her a fleeting languor, a kind of light-headedness. Her body’s reaction to his proximity became a source of fear. As she moved around the house dreamily, his voice would cause the hairs on the back of her neck to stand in terror, as if she were being charged by a bear. Buried memories, as of someone else’s life, floated up like bubbles in a still pond, and Lupo’s voice echoed in fiery Cretan dreams.
She’d guessed that something in her soul was about to either heal or snap. One night, after breathing in the way Master Ezekiel was teaching her to do, she made silence in her thoughts and set out to end seventeen years of disorderly flight. She would face the dark pool inside her, her very own visio secunda. Moaning out loud from the pain, she searched for the details of that day. All that was left in her guarded waking memory was the silence of Castel Romitorio in the summer afternoon, the dust suspended in shafts of sunlight filtering between the curtains.
Lupo’s raspy voice called her from the floor above. She followed that memory step by step as the young girl climbed the stairs. Her stepfather had taken her roughly, snorting like an animal. She had fallen pregnant and lost the baby. Right away she had known, both in her heart and from the midwives, that she could not risk another pregnancy. A year later, she took her vows.
Albacara reminded her of Bonarina, her nanny, the only person, including her mother Blanche, who had known her terrible secret. Since the first night in her house, Galatea had been moved by the widow’s quiet desperation. Albacara learned to live on the memories of Vidal, and the abbess was filled with admiration for the silent, tenacious way she got on with life, without complaining.
The day after digging her fingers in the wound in he
r soul that started bleeding again, Galatea was walking with the widow along the cliff ’s edge, when she suddenly felt the need to throw that weight off. Sitting on the grass before the waves that crashed viciously on the rocks below them, she told Albacara the little that sufficed for the other woman to understand.
“The horror, the pain,” she sighed, “were no less than what one must feel being born . . . or dying!”
Galatea raised her eyes, and for a moment the sea itself seemed to draw back, appalled.
The widow was too discreet to speak of what Galatea confided, yet in the following days, having been chosen as a kind of confessor by the abbess gave her an air of self-importance that soon got on Gudrun’s nerves. After all, Albacara had only just joined the company. Her demands on the mother’s attentions were, literally, out of order.
Finally, the Monday of departure arrived. It was the 10th of June, and the little caravan of seven pilgrims and a trunk rode between lines of chagrined villagers. Every urchin in Kaliviani knew the rabbi’s name by now, though not a living creature there could have pronounced it. The widow, still troubled by superstitious fear of the Jew, hid amulets and magical roots in every corner of her scant baggage. But even so, who was to say the infidels didn’t possess more powerful charms than hers?
At dawn four days later, on the 14th, the company stood on the quay in front of Spiro’s tareta. Behind them, on the rocks above the port, Spiridione stood searching the sea’s face, trying to decide if the accord between wind and waves was favorable for their intended course.
For over five weeks of forced stopover in Candia, Galatea kept her distance from any kind of floating timber. She even wondered if her new fear of seasickness and storms would turn her into a recluse once back in the lagoon. Then she’d laid eyes on the tareta. At first sight, there could not have been a more neglected, derelict vessel in the quarter-and-a-half of the sea dominated by Venice.
Less than a third the size of the Falcus and much more slender, it could carry ten horses in its hold and had a single mast, three oars on each side, and two small castles fore and aft for defense against pirates. Yehezkel’s expert eye noticed that under the chaos and dirt, standing and running rigging looked well maintained, and the hull seemed sturdy and well caulked. The air of abandon, thought the sailor rabbi, was probably intended to make the tareta look less appetizing to pirates.
“To other pirates,” he corrected himself.
It took all the rabbi’s loquaciousness, as well as the trust the abbess by now accorded him, to convince Galatea that a few days’ sailing on that boat involved no danger and could even be quite pleasant.
At last came the sight the abbess had been waiting to see since the day in the tavern. André de Rosson and his squire walked up and calmly stepped onto the tareta without asking her master’s permission and bringing two horses with them. Spiridione tried to look nonplussed, but the sight of the big red cross shook him more than he let on.
The company took their modest baggage on board—modest, that is, except for the chest. Stepping on deck from the gangplank, Galatea handed Spiro the widow’s bundle, as if he were a servant. He turned it in his hands and then asked with a smile and a wink:
“A present for me?” She didn’t answer.
Galatea’s last memories of Crete were two gaunt profiles: that of the island receding in the misty dawn and that of the widow, white cap tied under her chin, face resolutely turned into the wind.
CHAPTER 12
ASHER SARO VO
Whose seed (after its kind) is inside it
ABBEY OF SANT’ANTIMO, FIFTEEN YEARS EARLIER, 26TH APRIL 1204
Despite being on her knees, Galatea teetered and felt she was going to faint. Then she thought that were she to fall senseless before the altar, the people of Monte Alcino would conclude she was being sent to a convent for unspeakable reasons, and the house of Ardenga would be dragged through the mud. Pride had the better over the young girl’s senses, and with a deep breath, she regained control.
After being widowed at fourteen, the daughter of Orlando d’Ardenga, who died a glorious death at the siege of Acre thirteen years earlier, was about to become a nun at the age of fifteen.
Abbot Rainerio was celebrating the Eucharist. Galatea lowered her head, tightened her jaw, and bit her lip, contracting her thighs as if that could stop the sticky liquid shamelessly dripping down their insides. Rainerio held up the chalice in his spindly arms as the wine miraculously turned into the blood of Christ. She held back tears of rage as the abbot chanted, “Hic est enim calyx sanguinis mei novi et aeterni testamenti . . .”
Was it as red, she thought, as that on her legs? Was it sacrilege for the fullness of her month to start in church? The novice felt like a bound sacrifice. The outrageous rivulet reached her knee and she wondered if the black wool socks would absorb it. What if it flowed all the way to the floor, marking her steps with scarlet drops when she stood up?
Beads of cold sweat formed on her upper lip. Her head throbbed, and a piercing pain spread from her abdomen. It came from the center of her body, and all other sensations spun around it, giving her a kind of vertigo. The pangs bit on both right and left, as if a two-headed snake had penetrated deep into her vagina.
Her eyes darted around like an animal chased by the hunt. She looked to Bonarina for some comfort. Her nanny was in the third row, praying, head low wrapped in the yellow shawl of holy days. Galatea sighed and thought, “Jesus probably chose his apostles only among men because of this, because the weakness of a woman’s body is always ready to betray her.”
She went over the vows she and the other novices would soon pronounce.
“My Lord,” she prayed, “please give me the strength to serve you . . . as if I were a man!”
The abbey of Sant’Antimo is, for many, the most beautiful church on the Via Francigena,*34 the sunlight at times giving the brown and gold veins in her travertine stone transparencies as soft as a caress.
It sits, hidden from view like a family heirloom, on the comfortable floor of the tiny valley of a brook called Starcia, a few leagues south of Monte Alcino on the road that, leaving Mount Amiata on the left, descends to the river Orcia, and beyond that to the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Inside the church, one could still smell the vinegar used to wash the floor paved with marble slabs the color of a winter dawn. The congregation rumbled, worn out by an hour of fiery homily by the abbot, condemning Cathars, Beguines, Waldenses, Poor Lombards, and other heretical fraternities. Every time he paused to take in air for the next onslaught, the birds outside could be heard celebrating the arrival of the new day.
Don Rainerio, abbot of Sant’Antimo for twenty-five years, cut a fine figure aflame on a pulpit: big, spirited eyes set in cranium bones that competed to jut out the farthest, his thin body hidden by a frock that fell as straight as if empty, and a silver cross on his chest, one could have been forgiven for mistaking him for one of the heretical preachers he felt he must consign to the purifying fire while he still had time.
In the front row sat Count Lupo degli Ardengheschi, lord of Civitella, Montagutolo, Pari, and Fornoli. Fiftyish, handsome, and cynical with eyes fierce enough to intimidate a cardinal. Baldness left just a band of gray hair round his skull, a similarity to a monk’s tonsure that infuriated him. Every item he wore spoke of high rank, from the colors of his mantle to the seal on his ring. Even the pouch hanging at his side bore the coat of arms of Badia Ardenga.
Next to him sat his wife, Blanche, a noblewoman from Champagne and the widow of Lupo’s brother, Orlando, the real count of Ardenga—who for sure, had he been present at his daughter’s ordination as a Cistercian nun, would not have felt the need to flaunt all those historied accessories.
Lulled by Rainerio’s voice, Galatea slipped into a reverie of incense and cramps. The air in the church seemed to become denser, like transparent syrup. She recognized the familiar signs of a vision taking over: the tingling, the hairs on the back of her neck standing. She turned around agai
n. Everyone was stoically waiting for the sermon to end. Her body quieted down some.
“Maybe I’m finally going crazy,” thought the bloodied, fifteen-yearold widow.
The commotion around the abbot as he descended from the altar brought her to. The General of the Cistercian Order took his place, pronounced the ritual formula and accepted the vows of the six novices.
Before dawn that morning, with two candles lighting the empty church, the girls had approached the oak booth one at a time to confess for the last time as lay faithful. The abbot’s voice softened on recognizing her, and Galatea had summoned all her courage, whispering in the semidarkness, “Father, I must confess a dream . . .”
“A dream? Again?”
“Yes, Father, another one, three nights ago . . . it was horrible. If you won’t absolve me, I fear God will not accept my vows,” she’d said, frightened.
“Ahh . . . I see . . .” the abbot had sighed. “So tell me, young countess, what did you dream this time?”
“Blood. The walls of a huge city, full of churches, with the blood of thousands of innocents, men, women, children, sweating from its walls. Oh Father, you should have heard the moans, the screams of pain! Tell me, why does God try me in this way? Why?”
Behind the wooden grill, the abbot was silent.
“What say you, Father? What is the meaning of such a terrifying dream?” Galatea had insisted.
“Enough, Galatea degli Ardengheschi! I’ve heard enough of your dreams!” blurted Rainerio, and the girl imagined the throbbing vein in his forehead. “Why do you allow yourself to be carried away by visions and dreams that can only be from the devil?” He sighed. “You’re still young, my dear; you don’t understand the risks you run. Don’t tell anyone else, not now and not ever! Forget this dream . . .”
Adolescent outrage gripped the girl, who interrupted him, contravening years of rigorous education. “But Father, how can you speak like this? You know the things I dreamed have always come true! Twice I related events to you before they happened! And if, as you say, my soul is in danger, how can you ask me to just forget?”