‘So what does your city look like?’ he asked, as the man poured him more wine.
‘It has twelve gates. Three at each point of the compass. Before that one must cross a desert and climb a mountain.’
‘And you cannot return by either?’
‘Sometimes the gate is too tight, the road too narrow.’
‘What is the desert like?’
The stranger poured more wine in silence as he sought a definition. Finally he drew an arc in the air and replied: ‘It is almost the same as here, except that instead of moss and grass there is sand everywhere.’
‘Did you travel through so many lands to find me? And what,’ asked Bjorn, gulping, ‘what was that, there in the forge?’
‘I will explain everything. But first could you tell me a story? Your story? What you remember.’
The request amazed Bjorn. No one had ever asked him about his life. Nor had he ever confided in anyone. Occasionally he went back to the past in his dreams, but it caused him pain. He regarded his fate as closed, as if a large, invisible hand had stamped a heavy seal on it. But at the same time there was something tempting about this proposal, some inexplicable hint of hope, which prompted his first words, and then a lot of simple, shyly uttered sentences.
It was hardest of all for him to talk about Venice. He was four-and-a-half when he and his father, a painter of urban alleyways and human faces, had boarded a ship and set off for the Swedish king’s court. For several years they had done perfectly well, although his father had not gained the title of court painter. He was a Catholic and refused to change his faith. However, he had commissions and money. He told his son, soon we will have saved enough to afford the return journey and a happy life. But good fortune had turned its back on them for ever. Arrested on a charge of conspiracy and tortured, he had taken poison, which friends had provided. From them Francesco – for in those days he was not yet Bjorn – had learned that the officials had taken everything his father had put aside. He had been taken into service, first to a stable, then to a pastor. He had had to adopt their faith and take a new name. He ran away from that house, became a vagrant and ended up in prison. The pastor had bought him out, but when the plague had devastated whole villages on the island of Öland, and people were being sought to work there, he had handed the disobedient boy to the estate at Ottenby, taking compensation from the royal game warden. Bjorn had sailed to the island with some prisoners, with whom he spent almost two years putting up the King’s wall. Then, taken into service at Ventlinge, he could choose himself a house to live in. Many of them still stood empty after the plague. He chose the one on the cliff top, at the edge of Alvaret plain, situated furthest away from people and from the village. He did not have the money to be a tenant farmer or a smith. The steward needed shepherds, so he had become one. For the first few years he thought about giving it up, but he had nowhere to go back to. Later on he came to like solitude, and so a good fifteen years had gone by, if he had not made a mistake in the reckoning. The kings had changed, so had the squires of Ventlinge, and the royal game wardens at Ottenby, while each year he followed the same clouds and the same stars in the sky.
‘Sometimes,’ Bjorn concluded, ‘I dream of strange things. A year ago, when I lost the flock, I saw a city with four gates. Apparently it stood here, in the middle of Alvaret, before the people left it in long boats. Jansen heard that a thousand years ago they built a kingdom in the south and that they captured Rome. And now,’ he said, drinking up the wine, ‘I shall listen to your tale.’
What the stranger talked about was not simple, because it had no definite beginning. There was some sort of quarrel in Edessa, during which he had hoodwinked two avaricious Persians. Then there was a conversation with a Sufi in Smyrna, convoluted, too complicated; next a voyage by ship to Tagaste, with no results. Bjorn listened avidly, but understood little. His attention was riveted by a recurring word: the Book. Found, but lost forever, as if it were everywhere and nowhere all at once. He did not know if he had understood properly, but it emerged that this Book was older than the Bible, and that it contained everything that has been, is now, and has yet to be, from a grain of sand at the bottom of the sea to the boundlessness of the starry sky, from the word that was in the beginning, to the terrible riders of the very last days. Something else had been worrying Bjorn ever since he had vaguely yet adequately understood that if the stranger were telling the truth he must have witnessed events so remote in time that he could not possibly be an ordinary mortal. He had seen other great books, forgeries and copies, sometimes so perfect that his mission had seemed to be over. As he described examining these pages and symbols, time seemed to flow by in his story like an unfolding, moving image of something that never actually changed. Imperceptibly he passed into explanations: in a prophecy unknown to him before, which he had found in the scriptorium at the monastery of Notre Dame d’Aiguebelle in Provence, he had come upon a description of the island and the shepherd. He had hired a ship and headed here, to the North, where he had never set foot before.
Bjorn listened in extreme concentration. And when the stranger had finished, he asked to hear the prophecy.
‘Neither Ahuzat, nor Abimelech, nor Phichol, but still one of the three, a son of the Orient, a son of the Supreme Light, the one who, having made obeisance with the others lost the Book on the way, this one, I declare, who for all time has never set his bones to rest, will travel across the cold sea to an island. Its shape a wingless butterfly, its countenance rock and pasture, and girdling it the wall of an irascible king, that fawn nor hind may not leave it.’
The stranger’s lips quivered as he uttered these words. Bjorn tossed another log on the fire and leaned forward to avoid missing a single word.
‘You will take a lone shepherd from a foreign land, pure and just, who will not crave gold, who will break bread with you, and will accept your wine. By a spring at sunrise let him send forth a lamb to pasture; I shall guide it, and wherever it stops, you shall seek that which I sealed in the beginning, until you shall find and I shall open the gate, and wide will be your road again – so say I, whom you worshipped in the form of fire, before I opened the Word to you.’
Bjorn furtively wiped away his tears. Although they contained so many mysterious things, names and expressions, he sensed that these words were referring to him. Someone, maybe as long as a thousand years ago, had known more than even he did about his life, a life which was like slavery, about the King’s stone wall and the pastureland, and about solitude. The stars were still shining overhead, but above the eastern side of Alvaret the first, narrow strip of dawn had appeared.
‘Can you tell me,’ he asked timidly, ‘about what was not destined for me?’
‘I must gather various books along my way.’ The stranger poured them both wine. ‘The one that you saw is the Book of Light. Some take it for the Jewish Zohar, but they are wrong. It is much older and comes from Kashan.’
‘What story does it tell?’
‘Not every book tells a story. This one contains the words of all the languages in the world, but only those in which there is the brightness of truth.’
‘And your face?’
‘You saw the real one. Old age, as it is. Among people I must look different.’
They fell silent. Then, when the sun rose, Bjorn tied on a linen belt and drove a young ram out of the flock. For some time they followed it together: the shepherd with a wooden stick, the stranger with his saddlebag on his shoulder, and the dog.
‘I’d like to go with you,’ said Bjorn, ‘to leave here for ever – take me on board your ship.’