FOUR LEAGUES NORTH OF KALIVIANI, IN THE EXTREME NORTHWEST OF CANDIA, 5TH MAY 1219
“Con..fi..teor,”* whispered the pilgrim. The young Greek monk bending over him saw the word form on his lips and tightened his grip on the dying man’s hand.
“All rancour must remain here, brother. Are you at peace with everyone?”
The pilgrim raised his head with a grimace of pain that resembled a smile, exhaled, “I’ve no more loads,” and fell back on the sand. The monk made small signs of the cross on his forehead, his chest, and the soles of his feet, murmuring the words of the ritual. When he was sure the man’s soul had left this world, he stood up and gestured to the sail-ors assigned to the burials.
An hour after the beaching, the sea was still bringing pilgrims ashore, both dead and dying. Thirty-two of them had not answered Vidoso’s roll call, and twenty-two bodies had been buried so far.
*I confess
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The Falcus, her underbelly indecently exposed, lay on her side in the sand like a stranded leviathan. The small cove crawled with men recovering their belongings. The cog had majestically sailed up the beach, hesitated as if trying to remain heroically upright, then settled down onto her starboard flank, slightly crushing a central section of the hull, as if to make herself more comfortable.
The rabbi’s flock was intact, but don Sancio had been grabbed by the current, and before André could reach him and drag him ashore, the waves flung him twice onto the low rocks at one end of the beach.
Now the scribe lay under a rosemary bush, senseless but breathing, and the rabbi thought that with God’s help, he might survive.
The bulk of survivors, some two hundred people led by Vidoso and the Templars, just set off to the nearest village, Kaliviani, four leagues from the cove. Yehezkel climbed to the shrubs behind the beach and was sitting there, drained, surveying the scene. In a cor-ner of the beach the drowned were being buried, one or two relatives mourning them and a row of corpses awaiting their turn. The sun was about to sink into the choppy sea, still full of white horses. In the distance behind him, storm clouds crowned the mountaintop in a purplish, crepuscular light.
For the past hour, people from nearby hamlets flocked to the cove—which he’d learned was called Gramvoussa—and now either helped the survivors or stood around the edge of the beach, chatting.
More were arriving despite darkness falling, for everyone wanted to witness an event that all western Crete—the Greeks never accepted the Venetians’ name for their island—would weave into tales for generations.
The rabbi snapped out of his reverie and helped Rustico and Garietto build a stretcher for the scribe. Fiar Vassayl ordered two sail-ors to take the stretcher so that Galatea’s armigers could carry her chest, which they’d unloaded from the cog under Yehezkel’s direc-tion using pulleys, suffering small injuries, and cursing in their lagoon dialect all through the process. Just as they were ready to head for the
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village, don Sancio came to with a moan which Yehezkel thought was a good sign.
Galatea’s mood as they set off was so good it embarrassed her. She was probably the happiest of all the survivors, and not because her gift had saved so many people from drowning, nor because everyone in their little group was safe and sound. No, the abbess was secretly happy because for the first time in eleven days, she wasn’t seasick. Was it right to praise God and be relieved, she asked herself, when a storm had just taken thirty-two lives?
Then she raised her eyes—and thought she was back on the Falcus. The hill ahead of them leaned to one side and the ground gave way beneath her feet just as that cursed deck had done. She felt light-headed and instinctively grabbed the rabbi’s arm not to fall. Yehezkel almost jumped back to avoid contact with a woman, then saw the nun’s expression and put his arm around her waist just in time to stop her falling headlong on the rocky path. When she was over her faint-ing spell, Galatea turned to him with a frail little smile, the back of her hand on her forehead. “It was certainly God’s will, Master Ezekiel, but you saved my life twice in the space of a month, once by pulling me out of the water and once by throwing me into it! For the rest of my days, I won’t be able to look at water without thinking of you . . .”
Yehezkel laughed for the first time since the peaks had appeared downwind of the Falcus.
After walking for over an hour they saw white square patches in the moonlight: the roofs of Kaliviani. The first house was crumbling, with the roof beams half exposed and its walls rising to different heights, here above the door, there just to the window sill. Yehezkel guessed it must have been set on fire in one of the innumerable raids on the island by Normans, Saracens, or pirates.
Standing in front of the house was a woman with a folded ker-chief on her head. A little stout, neither fair nor ugly, she wasn’t old, but had wilted early and seemed to have been placed there to complete
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the picture of desolation. Yehezkel thought no woman in the world could have been more clearly a widow.
When she saw that the man on the stretcher was an aged cleric, the woman stepped into the path and said in a mixture of Greek and gestures, “Someone said ‘Show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’ Come in for a drink of water.”
Galatea recognized the Apostle’s words, but didn’t catch Yehezkel’s retort in Greek which lit a smile on the woman’s face that wiped ten years off it. She asked him what he’d said, and he answered, “That comparing you to an angel is a slight exaggeration, but comparing me to an angel is blasphemy . . .”
The abbess stepped into the house, giggling at the compliment, but with her back to the rabbi.
The woman said the big group of survivors had gone on to Chania, the biggest town in the west of the island, some twenty-fives leagues to the east. Yehezkel asked if there were any Jews in the village and when she answered negatively, he gratefully accepted her Christian hospitality.
Friar Vassayl and the four Falcus men with him chose to follow the main group and took their leave. The maître entrusted don Sancio them, then gripped Yehezkel’s forearm, sincere friendship in his eyes. Twenty minutes later, only Yehezkel’s flock, still white with sea salt and quietly stunned by the storm and the beaching, was left in the derelict house.
“I am Albacara Mudaciol, widow of Vidal Cordier, a settler from Rialto,”
said the woman with a curt bow to Galatea. Her features reminded the abbess of Bonarina, her nanny at Castel Romitorio.
“And I am Galatea degli Ardengheschi, abbess of San Maffìo, in Torcello,” answered Galatea.
“Oh, you’re from Torcello! I have a cousin there! Do you know a man called Raniero Zanin?”
Soon the two women were deep in lagoon gossip. A little later, after Galatea introduced the others to the widow, they hung sheets to divide
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the big kitchen, men and women improvising pallets to sleep on in the two halves of the room, which, like all Greek homes, smelled strongly of myrrh. Now and then the rabbi checked don Sancio’s pulse and raised one of his eyelids with a finger. The scribe reacted well and as the even-ing turned to night was increaseven-ingly aware of his surroundeven-ings.
When the chorus of regular breaths indicated everyone was asleep, Yehezkel went outside to pray Maariv. After thanking the Lord with all his heart for the presence of the Christian prophetess on the Falcus, he reflected on the situation. The Templars said they would rest in Chania, then purchase mounts and ride on to the capital of the island, Heraklion, also unsuccessfully renamed Candia by the Venetians.
Yehezkel’s hope, both to save don Sancio’s life and to get his flock off the island, had been the presence of Jews, if not in Kaliviani, then at least in Chania. What to do?
The night was so dark that though the only light in the house was a candle, the derelict structure was incapable of containing it. Light seeped from the gaps between the roof beams, from every fissure in the walls, and from the small kitchen window, splashing onto the rocks and shrubs outside. Yehezkel thought it looked like a bonfire was raging in the kitchen, yet it was just a candle.
Sun, sea, and silence filled the next days. The widow’s guests did little and said even less. Don Sancio improved and began to speak but felt weak and complained of pains in his abdomen. Yehezkel laid him on his side and palpated gently to see where he felt the greatest pain, and con-cluded that one of the scribe’s organs had probably broken its envelope.
Galatea suggested that they carry him to Chania.
“Has ve-Halilah!”* cried Yehezkel in Hebrew. “A Greek medicus would kill him! I can do more for him in this village than half the physicians in the Polis, Madame, even if you don’t seem to think so . . .”
Galatea felt the haughtiness that occasionally escaped Master Ezekiel’s
*God forbid!
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control, but since don Sancio was visibly better—he had even taken some warm milk with honey without vomiting—chose not to insist.
In the days before the scribe’s condition took a turn for the worse, a strange friendship, of the kind that sometimes blooms between old people and adolescents, developed between don Sancio and Aillil. When asked,
“Do you like it?” the boy would often answer, “I don’t quite know what to think of it,” an attitude that soon endeared him to the old philosopher.
Don Sancio began to instruct Aillil in those subjects that most intrigued the boy, trusting Aillil’s nose to lead him to the best all-round education one could hope to impart in a few days of conversations.
Aillil was enthusiastic. Released from the cage of the rabbi’s verbose ethical sermons, he was fascinated by the theory and notation of music, and that even the conjugation of Latin verbs had a strangely satisfying logic. On the second day, don Sancio asked him, “Did you father ever tell you about Outremer?”
Aillil smiled disarmingly. “I never met my father, Sir, but knights who were there told me of white towns and palm trees, of castles watching over desert trails, and strange animals unknown in the West. I’ve thought of nothing else for years. It’s why I’m going there.
And to find my father.”
When Yehezkel thanked him for his efforts with Aillil, don Sancio mumbled, “Qoheleth says ‘Better a poor but wise youth, than an old but foolish king who no longer knows how to heed a warning.’”
That afternoon Galatea, Yehezkel, and don Sancio were sitting in the shade of a fig tree behind the house, discussing how the presence of sand behind the rocks had been revealed by the blue. The rabbi explained the importance kabbalists attribute to the color Scripture calls Saphir, the celes-tial blue beneath the divine throne when Moses ascended Mount Sinai.
“I always knew it,” sighed Galatea. “Did I not tell you how many times that heavenly blue appeared in my visions?”
“Interesting,” murmured don Sancio. He spoke with difficulty, pausing often.
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“Forgive my bluntness, don Sancio,” butted in Yehezkel, “but do you really not know any more about the Parchment of Circles than what you told us that night on the Falcus?”
The scribe’s eyes were closed, his breaths shallow. He reflected for a while, 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 black-mailing 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 teeter-ing. “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 dona-tions . . . 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
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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 whin-ers 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 percep-tible. 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 dic-tated to Yehezkel a letter to Pedro de Montaigu, 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 for 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.
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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 a cal-umny, 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 judgement—at least between ourselves—on the exist-ence 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 man-aged 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
His body lay in the widow’s house for the whole day as the monks