Baudolino by Umberto Eco

towards their ruin."
    "Maybe you can do that, Master Niketas, but not the good Otto; and I'm only telling you how things went. So that holy man on the one hand was rewriting the
Chronica,
where the world went badly, and on the other the
Gesta,
where the world could only become better and better. You will say he contradicted himself. If it were only that. What I suspect is that in the first version of the
Chronica
the world went even worse, and so as not to contradict himself too much, as he gradually went on rewriting the
Chronica,
Otto became more indulgent towards us humans. This is what I caused by scraping away the first version. Maybe, if that had remained, Otto wouldn't have had the courage to write the
Gesta,
and since it's thanks to the
Gesta
that in the future they will say what Frederick did and didn't do; if I hadn't scraped away the first text, in the end Frederick wouldn't have done everything we say he did."
    "You," Niketas said to himself, "are like the liar of Crete: you tell
me you're a confirmed liar and insist I believe you. You want me to believe you've told lies to everybody but me. In all my years at the court of these emperors I have learned to extricate myself from the traps of masters of deceit far more sly than you.... By your own confession, you no longer know who you are, perhaps because you have told too many lies, even to yourself. And you're asking me to construct the story that eludes you. But I'm not a liar of your class. In all my life I have questioned the stories of others in order to extract the truth. Perhaps you're asking me for a story that will absolve you of having killed someone to avenge the death of your Frederick. You are building, step by step, this story of love for your emperor, so that it will then be natural to explain why it was your duty to avenge him—assuming that he was killed, and that he was killed by the man you have killed."
    Then Niketas looked outside. "The fire is reaching the Acropolis," he said.
    "I bring bad luck to cities."
    "You believe you are omnipotent. That is a sin of pride."
    "No. If anything, it's an act of mortification. All my life, no sooner did I approach a city than it was destroyed. I was born in a land sown with hamlets and a few modest castles, where I heard itinerant merchants sing the beauties of the
urbis Mediolani,
but what a city was, I didn't know. I had never gone even to Terdona, whose towers I could see in the distance, and Asti and Pavia I thought were at the confines of the Earthly Paradise. Afterwards, all the cities I encountered were about to be destroyed or had already been burned to the ground: Terdona, Spoleto, Crema, Milan, Lodi, Iconium, and then Pndapetzim. And the same will happen to this one. Could I be—how do you Greeks say it?—a polioclast, fated to bear the evil eye?"
    "Don't punish yourself."
    "You're right. At least once, I saved a city. My own. I saved it with a lie. Do you think that one good deed is enough to ward off the evil eye?"
    "It means there is no destiny."
    Baudolino remained silent for a moment. Then he turned and looked at what had been Constantinople. "All the same, I feel guilty. The men who are doing that are Venetians, and people of Flanders, and above all the knights of Champagne and of Blois, of Troyes, Orleans, Soissons, not to mention my own people of Monferrato. I would rather see this city destroyed by the Turks."
    "The Turks would never do that," Niketas said. "We're on excellent terms with them. It's the Christians we have to guard against. But perhaps your people are the hand of God, who has sent you for the punishment of our sins."
    "
Gesta Dei per Francos,
" Baudolino said.

4. Baudolino talks with the emperor and falls in love with the empress
    In the afternoon Baudolino resumed his narrative, more tersely, and Niketas decided not to interrupt him any more. He was in a hurry to see the story grow, to arrive at the point. He had not realized that Baudolino, as he was