by Sheri Holman
“I’m actually not feeling very well,” he says at last. “Will you excuse me?”
Lord Tucher waits until the merchant has gone belowdeck before launching into me.
“You saved a woman’s life without telling me?”
“I certainly never dreamed she’d refer to it, Lord Tucher.”
“You know this makes me responsible for her?”
“No, certainly, it does not.”
He waves me off. “I am responsible for you, Friar, as my confessor. You saved a woman’s life; therefore, I am responsible for her through you. It’s not that I mind, I would just appreciate knowing about it.”
“Pssst.”
A square-jawed Greek galley slave I recognize as having carried Schmidhans through Candia hisses at me. Between his overdeveloped pectorals, a gold Saint Katherine’s wheel medallion drowns in rapids of sweat. I tear my eyes away from the sailor’s shirtless chest.
“I appreciate your kindness, Lord Tucher,” say I, “but I saved that merchant’s wife with no thought toward responsibility, yours or mine. If anyone is to watch out for her now, let it be Almighty God.”
“Pssst. Friar.”
“What?”
“Can you get me an audience with the lady?” the half-naked Schismatic asks. “I need to know how many more candles to light to get my father into Heaven.”
“How would that lady know how many more candles you need to light?”
“She’d ask her saint.”
“What are you talking about?” I demand.
“Don’t you know who she is?” The slave presses his hircine lips to Katherine’s wheel. “She’s famous throughout the whole Levant. I bought this medal from one of the stalls outside her house.”
The slave cannot believe my stupidity.
“She’s the Virgin of Alexandria’s mouthpiece,” he says. “They call her Saint Katherine’s Tongue.”
“Saint Katherine?” Ursus cries. “Friar, that’s your wife!”
Freeze with me a moment, brothers, and find your breath. Are your palms dripping sweat? Can you see this slave in front of you grinning, his lips locked around the wheel of your bride’s torture, mouthing it like a bit of Turkish candy, and do you not have to strangle back the scream: Stop your lies? If you were in my place, brothers, would you believe the illustrious virgin Katherine would keep company with the likes of that insane creature plucked half dead from the water?
I am on my feet and halfway across the deck by the time John catches up.
“I told Lord Tucher this was an ecclesiastical matter,” he says, slurping at the trickle of drool that leaks from his swollen mouth.
“John, attend to your tooth,” I say. “This is none of your affair.”
“What do you hope to gain by talking to her, Felix?” He stops me halfway up the ladder to the ladies’ cabin. “The world is full of women claiming to converse with Heaven. Maybe one or two actually have.”
I knock emphatically on her door.
“Is that you, Friar Felix?”
“Madame, may we come in?”
“It’s unlocked.”
We step into the cramped room, made even tighter by the iron-studded trunks Lando has lashed, four high, to the wall. They groan against their ropes with each swell of the sea, aggressively threatening to reclaim their freedom. Arsinoë’s own trunk, a faded carnelian box stenciled with fishes, rests at the foot of her narrow pallet, fastened with a cheap lock. But you notice none of this upon first entering the dark room. What you see first are the candles.
And the icons. Everywhere.
I stumble over “Katherine Wedding the Baby Jesus.” Our infant Lord presses His oval olive cheek to hers and fits a shining gold band on her left ring finger.
Every day of her life. Every hour of her martyrdom. Katherine’s vita relived on wood. Here, a barb of the silver wheel gently pricks our saint’s thigh; here, milk fountains up from her severed joints for the faithful to sop; here the stone of Mount Sinai gives way like softened wax to the impression of her blessed bones.
“This is my favorite,” Arsinoë says, lifting “The Defeat of the Fifty Philosophers.”
It is a tableau we’ve all seen a hundred times before: Saint Katherine defeating wisdom with superior wisdom; the fifty pagan philosophers peering out from an overgrowth of flame.
“See?” says she. “Each little man lifts his eyes to heaven. All fifty black-robed scholars stand chin deep in fire yet are not burned by it. My brother often spoke of his fellow students this way—as men kindled by books but never ignited by them. These converted scholars are as indistinguishable from one another as fifty popped mustard seeds.
“But look.” The merchant’s wife nods. “Behind the sculpted cedar bushes with one eye on Saint Katherine and the other on his colleagues—a lone scholar. He has not been picked to dispute with the great saint and so hangs behind, envious of his lessers’ martyrdom but relieved, it seems, to be alive. Of course, he believes that if only he had been chosen, his argument would have been the one to defeat this girl.”
I reach out for the unusual icon. Katherine’s arguments converted the fifty philosophers to Christianity and they saw Heaven that day. The lone scholar was left among the damned.
“How did you come by these?” John croaks.
“The faithful bring them to me. Some have been in their families for generations.”
“They are all of Saint Katherine,” I say.
“Yes.” Arsinoë clears a path for us to her pallet. “But I promised Constantine we wouldn’t speak of her.”
She shakes off her cap, infusing her hair with candlelight.
“I’m afraid this is the only place to sit.”
John and I fold ourselves up on her bed, careful not to set the room on fire.
“We’ve just learned of your reputation, Madame,” I say. “That they call you the Tongue of Saint Katherine. That some among the unlearned even claim Saint Katherine speaks to you.”
“I only recently doubted her friendship.” The merchant’s wife smiles. “You restored my faith last night, Friar Felix.”
I? I restored her faith? Does she attribute my rescue to the auspices of my bride? I turn to John, hoping to find mirrored my own disbelief and pity for this poor madwoman; instead, I discover my friend poring over the icon “Katherine, Protectress of Young Girls.”
“Why did you come on pilgrimage, Brother Felix?” the merchant’s wife asks me unexpectedly.
I give the answer that won your permission, Abbot Fuchs, the answer any right-minded dutiful son of the Church would give.
“Saint Jerome tells us we cannot truly understand the Bible until we have walked the earth that Christ walked.”
“And?”
Her large dark eyes blink patiently. Does this woman’s madness give her the ability to command the truth? I was able to dissimulate to you, my own abbot; I misdirected my own brothers, and, at the time, even convinced myself that Jerusalem, not the Sinai, was my soul’s desire. But I am far from home now, and the truth feels less sinful than it once did.
“I made a vow as a boy to venerate Saint Katherine’s body in the place God first put her,” I hear myself say. “On the spot where He first spoke to Moses in words of flame. I can become a better husband by learning the land in which my bride chose to die.”
Arsinoë nods, picking up a small icon of the hermit who discovered the saint’s bones five hundred years after her translation. “When I was a child, I used to dream of living in the desert with the blessed Katherine as my spiritual sister. We would run in the morning, meditate on Christ in the afternoon, and study Latin by candle in our cave at night. I realize now how silly that was. How can you study if your eyes are in one town and your head in another?
“And you, Archdeacon John?” she asks quickly. “Why did you come on pilgrimage?”
He doesn’t like to speak of it. I see his jaw flinch around its toothless socket as he relinquishes “Katherine, Protectress of Young Girls.”
“All these vows,” says Arsinoë. “And now the mouth with which you gave the order is punishing you. Forgive yourself, friend John.”
The merchant’s wife stretches out her hand and brushes the Archdeacon’s swollen jaw. I expect him to pull away, but he slowly shuts his eyes.
“Madame,” I say loudly, “do you know that Saint Katherine’s hand was stolen from the Franciscans’ monastery in Candia?”
She lowers her hand to the icon in her lap. “Yes. I heard.”
“If she speaks with you, as you claim, did she reveal who did it?”
“A hermit found a young girl’s bones on top of a mountain and presumed to bring her down.” Arsinoë carefully replaces the icon behind its candle. “Men have been taking bits of her away ever since.”
“With the sanction of the Church.” I hear my voice rise. “The Church Fathers approved of breaking up saint’s bodies so that Heaven might seed Earth. Had Katherine’s bones not come West all those years ago, we might never have known she existed.”
“Perhaps that’s what God wanted, hiding her in the desert.” Arsinoë looks away. “Most saints are buried where they died. They perform miracles for their own communities. Why was her body translated to the most desolate mountain in the world? Why did He hide her, Friar, if He didn’t want to keep her whole?”
“Katherine lets you believe this sacrilege?” I cry.
“Who do you think suggests it?”
“John, please.” I rise, for things are taking a decidedly heretical turn. “We should leave this room.”
John puts out his hand to stay me. How can he remain here? She’s suggesting God never wanted my beloved found.
“Madame,” he says, “do you have any idea who stole her relic? Whether or not you agree she should have been broken up, you can understand the horror in a piece of her having been unlawfully taken.”
Arsinoë picks up the icon of the Fifty Philosophers and thoughtfully traces the lone scholar.
“Come with me to Rhodes tomorrow,” she says at last. “Saint Katherine’s ear is there. Perhaps she heard something.”
THE PORT OF COLOSSUS, RHODES JUNE 1483
What Was Overheard
Lando’s galley anchored outside the harbor defenses of Rhodes, but the dazzled Greek slave rows Saint Katherine’s Tongue ashore with John and me. He maneuvers around the sharpened wooden pikes that jut from the water and points out the high char-streaked city wall.
“They waged a war of fire,” John whispers in the eerie predawn silence. “The Knights of Saint John lit quicklime, petroleum, and sulfur and poured it down upon the Turkish army. The Turks flung clay eggs filled with smoldering pinewood and charcoal that could only be extinguished with vinegar, urine, or glue.”
John knows the Turks’ gift for fire. The only difference between his village in Hungary and the island of Rhodes is that God fought here for the Knights of Saint John. The Christian apostates on the Sultan’s payroll grew so conscience-stricken when ordered to attack the handful of warrior monks that they turned on their Infidel masters and cut them to ribbons.
The merchant’s wife is strangely nervous for the ride in, scanning the ramparts of rebuilt Fort Saint Nicholas, peering into the three slowly revolving windmills that, Fate-like, haunt the harbor walls. I don’t know who she expects to see; it is so early in the morning even the city’s dogs are asleep. The slave touches shore and hands us out of the rowboat.
Day breaks in muddy pink puddles along the back streets to her church. We pass cremated houses, smelling of wet ash and lead, their roofs collapsed, their doors broken and brick-choked. The town’s Jewish quarter was the worst hit; the Turkish cannonballs felled bakeries and crushed Jewish virgins. At the worst of the attack, Grand Master d’Aubusson ordered the neighborhood razed, and every man, woman, and child, Christian and Jew, knight and slave, worked through the night to refortify the wall, using the Turks’ own cannonballs for bricks. When the war was over and the Turks repelled, d’Aubusson paid the highest honor to the valiant Jews of Rhodes. We pass by the shining new church he erected on the site of their bombed synagogue, dedicated to Our Lady of the Victories.
Arsinoë spins on me. “Did you hear that?”
I jump at her jumpiness. What does she hear?
“Footsteps,” she says.
I look behind us. Yellow morning sun creeps along the damp cobblestones.
“No one is there,” I tell her. “It must be an echo.”
Then suddenly a young boy scampers out of the dark alley, begging for money. He puts his blackened fingers on Arsinoë’s arm and chatters to her in a language I don’t understand. She pats him on the head and sends him away.
“I told him if he came round to the church when we were done, I’d give him a coin.”
Warily, she resumes the walk.
“Someone talk,” Arsinoë commands after a moment. “I’m hearing every little noise.”
“What shall we discuss?” asks John.
“Tell us about the Turk, Archdeacon. Do they really snatch Christian women and keep them as slaves?”
John is visibly shaken by this topic of conversation.
“The Archdeacon suffered great loss at the hands of the Turk,” I tell her. “I’m sure he doesn’t care to dwell—”
“No, Felix, it’s all right,” John interrupts. His speech is much clearer today; his mouth—miraculously, according to him—nearly healed.
“To the Turk, Madame”—my friend speaks with his eyes fixed on the street—“a border town like mine is no more than brush to be cleared on the way to a real city. He treats with Athens or Constantinople or Belgrade, allows them life if they forfeit their God and kingdom, but a border town is scrub: torchable; to be consumed.
“I preached a sermon the night they breached our wall. I made every man in our town vow to kill or be killed, to die for Christ and his sisters and his crops. Well, my men kept their vows. The Turk pissed on our crops. He raped our church. He burned our sisters. I lost sixty nuns to the fire.”
Arsinoë impulsively takes his hand. “How did it feel to be deserted by Heaven?” she asks, not looking at him. “Did it fill you with hate?”
John smiles. “I wouldn’t be on pilgrimage if it had.”
She nods, slowly.
Before us, at the far end of the plaza, ten steps lead up to the doors of a domed Orthodox church. Above the lintel, a squat Joshua blows his trumpet and Jericho’s carved walls come tumbling down.
“We’re here,” Arsinoë says, hesitating briefly at the door. She glances over her shoulder, taking in the empty square, the closed shutters of shops. Resolutely, she opens the door.
How similar, brothers, and yet how removed from one of the True Faith, is a heretical church. Because of the shiftless nature of their religion, the Byzantines make little art that is not removable—no icons that can’t be tossed in a cart, no candles that can’t be snatched up. They tile their ceilings with mosaics after the ancient Romans, to symbolize their fractured, piecemeal understanding of God, and orient their churches to the East, after their friends the Saracens. A plump Greek priest trots down the aisle and addresses Arsinoë in her native language.
Does Katherine feel ill at ease here, surrounded by this Oriental splendor? Even though I know she came from the East, I’ve always pictured her at home in Swabia, happy to sit through our German winters in her light robes and laced sandals. She grows darker the farther we move from Ulm; on the mosaic ceiling, she has the almond eyes of an Asian princess and black, jagged hair.
“Friar,” Arsinoë calls. “Come along, he’ll let us see it.”
The priest says a hasty mass in Greek, the only words of which I understand being apostle and Christ, those sounding the same in Latin. John and I are barely off our knees before he’s scurried around the altar to the sacristy. The reliquary he removes is long and
silver and hinged like a book.
“The arm of Martyr, Saint George,” the priest recites in rote Latin.
We step forward and kiss it, touch our rosaries to each finger, and kiss them too. He returns to the sacristy and emerges with another box.
“The arm of Protomartyr, Saint Stephen.”
More kisses. Another box.
“The arm of the blessed Apostle, Saint Thomas.”
Legend has Saint Thomas’s entire body preserved deep in heathen India. Whether this be a true relic or no, I let the prudent man decide.
“The head of Saint Philomela. . . .
“The hand of the blessed Saint Anne, mother to the Virgin Mary. . . .
“The arm and pointing finger of the Lord’s Precursor, Saint John the Baptist.”
The Archdeacon John Lazinus kisses his namesake with special reverence. The Baptist, too, knew the heat of fire. When miracles abounded at Saint John’s grave, jealous Emperor Julian the Apostate ordered his bones dug up and scattered across the fields. Greater miracles then occurred, so the tyrant ordered the sacred bones scattered even farther apart. At last, when neither time nor distance seemed to slow the miracles, Julian ordered the relics recollected and burned as a whole man. Some brave Christians risked death to substitute common bones for those of the blessed saint, but they missed his right arm and pointing finger. This the Emperor could not burn, but it remained fixed, accusing him from its socket of flames.
The priest goes into the sacristy one last time and comes out with a golden box no bigger than the palm of my hand.
O, blessed virgin, like a kind friend you incline your ear to our petitions and prayers, you listen to our chests so that you might take back to Heaven our true desire for God’s love. The ear is perhaps your most important organ, for it is the gate through which all language must pass. Speech would be useless without it, for even the most gifted tongue would wag in a void without the ear to catch its eloquence and translate it for your blessed brain.
On a thick pillow of purple velvet, one tiny dried apricot.
Saint Katherine’s ear.
