by Sheri Holman
“I later found out,” Constantine says, “her brother had been giving the same response to all the pilgrims. Most, wrapped up in their own private troubles, didn’t understand the needs of the saint. Some of us, unhappily—Oh, God!—some of us did.”
“What do you mean by that, Constantine?” I ask the merchant sharply. “What could Saint Katherine possibly need that Heaven does not provide?”
“Oh, Arsinoë, where have you gone?” The merchant moans. “I am so afraid.” Constantine throws himself over his wife’s trunk and sobs like a child.
I have no idea how to comfort him, for I cannot shake my own rising horror. Is it the great waste of sea that haunts this wracked merchant, knowing it might at any moment reach into his sleep and claim him? Or is it the specter of a fish across the floorboards, harboring the spirit of a drowned German burgher? I glance at John, but he seems as confused as I, wondering, as I do, whether Constantine’s fear has less to do with his wife’s disappearance than with some horrible secret they hold in common.
“Do not despair, Constantine,” John says, when the merchant’s wails quiet a bit. “Tomorrow we reach Cyprus. If your wife is able, she will surely meet the boat there.”
“We had a plan, Archdeacon,” Constantine says flatly, wiping away his tears. “She would protect me from the sea, and I would make certain she reached Mount Sinai. Our first day aboard ship, and I’ve already lost her.”
The merchant’s agony is really too great to behold.
“Look on the bright side.” I flounder, sounding unconvinced, even to myself. “Perhaps your wife was not stolen but merely wandered off and is even now booking passage back to Crete. She’ll be waiting for you when you return with clean sheets on the bed and a spinach pie on the table. And she will laugh at how worried you once were.”
“That would be quite a feat, Friar,” The merchant says to me, letting his head fall back heavily against the cabin wall, “since Arsinoë doesn’t even know where I live.”
THE PORT OF PAPHOS, CYPRUS SAINT JOHN’S EVE JUNE 23, 1483
The Mount of Venus
I have often read in pilgrims’ accounts that one should not pause long on the isle of Cyprus because the air here is poisonous to Germans. They say healthy winds get trapped behind the Caucasus and Armenian mountains and thus are not able to circulate, leaving this place both stagnant and unwholesome. If that were so, would the delightful Venus have swum out to Cyprus when she found herself unexpectedly made flesh from foam? Would Noah’s son Japheth have established a new world on a noxious island? No, my brothers, discount this rumor. The air of Cyprus is not poison, merely ill-suited to Germans who are born and raised in hard, cold, consumptive air and who cannot live well in light climates where their intemperate eating and drinking may not be indulged.
I urge you to cast aside your superstition, brothers, because my patron was unable to do so. After much pleading and cajoling, he allowed Ursus and me to go ashore but elected, himself, to remain behind, far from the injurious vapors of land. Of course, his decision had nothing in the world to do with the Venetian lady-in-waiting who boarded our galley this morning.
Constantine nearly threw himself over the ship’s side when he saw her small boat approach. My heart broke to watch all expectation, all hope, pool in his trembling lower lip, when Emelia Priuli, former waiting woman to the Queen of Cyprus, cousin by marriage to our captain, Peter Lando, climbed up the ladder. I’ll leave it to you to determine why a woman of her youth and beauty should be ending her days in a Jerusalem convent; I’ll be circumspect and say only this: She is a Jezebel if ever I’ve seen one, and a scheming Delilah to trim the locks of this ship! All the ringleted, earringed pilgrim swains lined up for their haircuts, and Bald Tucher was first in line.
We left my patron sitting at her side, holding her comb, while she smiled through a veil of damp auburn hair at pilgrims whose minds should have been fixed on God. I announced to the entire ship that I was organizing a pilgrimage to the holy sites of Cyprus, but, so besotted were they with the new woman, only these intrepid pilgrims came along:
Lord Ursus Tucher, a merry youth and much intrigued with the legends of Venus, whose isle this is;
Master John Lazinus, Archdeacon of Hungary, a man of principle and passion;
Conrad Buchler, our barber and cook, who pleases many with his spicy stews;
Constantine Kallistos, a depressed merchant of Crete; and
Friar Felix Fabri of the Dominican Preaching Brothers at Ulm, the moving spirit of all these.
The ancients write much about Cyprus, most of it concerning the harlot Venus and her amours. It is said she swam naked in the waves of the sea for many years until her eyes at last turned to this place. The moment she stepped ashore, the Cyprians ran after her beauty and gladly instituted the practice of harlotry in her name. They gave her the highest mount on the island for her pleasure garden and held her watering can while she sowed every herb and plant that might be used in the business of love.
You might wonder at my climbing this mountain first when across the way, on another rise, is built a church containing the cross upon which hung Dysmas, the Good Thief, crucified beside Christ. Do not fear, brothers; I have not been affected by that Cyprian air which some say keeps a man aroused the whole time he remains on the island, nor do I need to sniff the native agnus castus shrubs that dry up the seminal humors and calm the winds that engorge the sexual organs. I have a method to my madness which, God willing, will benefit not a depraved prostitute but a handmaid of Christ.
“Will we see Tannhäuser here, Friar?” my charge asks, stopping to peer in every cave and crack on the mountain. “Shall I sing his song?”
“Ursus, we are headed to Saint Paul’s church. Do you think the Apostle would appreciate your tuneless howlings after the dead?”
“No, Friar.” He kicks the dust. “But this is his mountain, isn’t it? This is where he went to live with Venus?”
In modern times, the uncouth mob raves over a certain mountain in Tuscany where Venus supposedly lives and takes her pleasure with men and women. They believe a Swabian nobleman called Tannhäuser, from Tannhäusen near Dünkelspüchel, disappeared into her mountain and now lives in joyance with Venus until Judgment Day. Lo, brothers! How easily men are led into error. For Venus, hardly a goddess and no doubt damned, who never saw Europe while she was alive, they believe to dwell now and forever in Tuscany! The Germans are so demented about this Tannhäuser story that many simple people make pilgrimages to that Mount of Venus and, in fact, have so overrun it that the Italians now place rabid dogs at its entrance to scare them away.
The path up our Mount Venus, while free of beasts, is dry and hot, and we are all relieved to finally take our rest in the shade of Saint Paul’s church. The locals have planted terraced vineyards here, the grapes from which I’ve heard are so strong, their first press will corrode a wooden cup. We overlook the whitewashed village of Paphos, no more than a web of footpaths between daub houses. On the slopes of Venus’s mountain, sloe-eyed village girls forage sticks for tonight’s Saint John’s bonfires.
“If your wife is on Cyprus, Constantine,” I say, “I’m certain she will come here.”
John doubted me this morning. He wanted to wait at the docks, to ask each arriving fisherman if he had seen a woman calling for help from the hull of a Turkish galleon. He convinced Constantine that if she escaped her common sense would lead her to Cyprus, where we would surely stop for provisions. What better place to spot her than at the docks?
But John does not know the way a devotee’s mind works.
Katherine’s last relic before Sinai, the easternmost tip of her a pilgrim might venerate without crossing the Great Wasteland, lodges in this little church of Saint Paul at the center of Venus’s pleasure garden.
Wouldn’t Saint Katherine’s Tongue come to see Saint Katherine’s tongue?
How greatly can we praise the tongue? It is perhaps her most precious organ, even more than the hand or the ear, for
with it a saint first glorifies the Lord. Had Katherine been mute, she still might have written down her love for Christ, she might still have convinced the Fifty Philosophers on paper; but the common man, the thresher of wheat, the shepherdess with piebald dog, would never have understood. Why, how else could the unlettered citizens of Alexandria have made sense of that beautiful woman’s torture? Why she was beheaded or translated to Sinai? They might still be wandering in the darkness had Katherine not had a tongue.
I expect the Tongue to steal the tongue.
This part I have not shared with John or Constantine; it is a secret between us alone, brothers. As I lay awake last night, agonizing over this painful sequence of events, I realized only one possibility existed: Saint Katherine would never deliberately avoid her devoted husband of twenty years; she is purposefully being withheld by sinister forces. If someone is stealing my wife, she is in dire need of a champion.
Now, before you upbraid me, brothers, before you call me puffed-up priest and knight-errant friar, let me explain. I do not claim to understand why Saint Katherine allowed herself to be stolen in the first place. Perhaps she was distracted by long months of intercession and exhaustive charity, which selflessly led her to take fewer pains about her physical remains. Or perhaps in her dutiful humility she was fulfilling the psalm, “And God hath scattered the bones of them that please themselves,” for nothing pleases Katherine more than being attentive and kind to mortals. We would slight her to believe she could not have saved herself had she only been more alert. Over the centuries, hundreds of thieves have succeeded in robbing the tombs of saints; Saint Benedict was stolen from Monte Cassino and translated to Fleury, but only because Monte Cassino was in decline and the saint no longer desired to reside there. By contrast, when a wicked monk attempted to spirit away the body of Saint Martin, he was foiled by Abbot Hilarius, to whom the threatened saint appeared in a vision. Could anything then be clearer, brothers? Saint Katherine warned me in a dream after her hand was stolen in Candia. She swam behind the boat, begging my help. I was so beguiled on Rhodes, I did not see the thief before me, though her guilty conscience had all but driven her to suicide. The woman Arsinoë took Saint Katherine’s ear, and Constantine the merchant has some suspicion of it; I’m convinced. Had he not been of my same mind, if he did not suspect his wife might make an attempt on Katherine’s tongue, why else would he have consented to come here? As John urged, the docks are by far the more logical place to search. But she will come, brothers, of this I am certain.
And we will be waiting.
I gather up the pilgrims and go inside. I must accept my charge and fly Saint Katherine of Alexandria’s colors like a noble champion.
Inside, the church is whitewashed and bare, bereft of any decoration save a stiff, crooked icon of a shiny-pated Saint Paul. Twelve rows of plain cedar benches, split by the center aisle, lead forward to a wobbly altar. A young, well-formed priest rises from his prayers when we enter.
My first fear—that the merchant’s wife might have beaten us here—is quickly put to rest. Beside the altar crucifix, the reliquary sits in plain view, a golden head with a surprised glass-fronted mouth, through which we may view the tongue. My turn comes to venerate it, and in my heart I offer up this prayer:
Like a tiny blind mouse, dear tongue, you struggled in the mouth of our infant saint. Quivering and straining, you woke her first words, rolling them off their pink, muscular bed and into the world. Shyly, you reached out for your first taste of cold melon, sadly forgot the flavor of mother’s milk. You, tongue, recited pagan rhymes, thrust yourself at naughty pagan boys, licked the sweat that gathered on our saint’s upper lip when she sprinkled incense before the pagan gods.
A stone in her mouth the night her father, Good King Costus, died; a wrung sponge, barely wetting her lips by her third day in the desert, taken there to learn the ways of our Lord by Saint Sabba. You tasted no flesh but her elder’s webbed knuckles, no liquid but tears heated on the portal of her sunburned lips. A straining, yearning fourteen-year-old tongue against the cheek of her bridegroom, the baby Jesus, when he slipped a ring on her finger and sent her back to Alexandria.
For four years, you issued proclamations and exalted the poor, until the Emperor arrived to survey his vassalage. You, tongue, hesitated not in your answer to Emperor Maxentius; no, you touched the roof of her mouth, slid behind her teeth. I will not renounce my husband, Jesus Christ. I will not sprinkle incense before your pagan gods.
The Emperor followed you in your route around her mouth, watched you pause at each station of thought on your pilgrimage of refusal. He wanted so badly to take you between his lips that he sometimes felt his own mouth open and close softly, like a baby dreaming of its mother’s tit. He challenged Saint Katherine further, merely to watch you savor your retort. Poor kidney-colored tongue of his wife, the Empress; the Emperor sought to replace it with you, offering Katherine his wife’s place at his side for one handful of incense on an altar. Again, a slight tap to the roof of the mouth. No.
Could not fifty philosophers convince her?
You humiliated and pleasured them, first in defeat, then in conversion.
Could not torture—the Wheel, starvation—silence her?
No, you gave to God a new song, lapped nectar from the palms of angels.
Lop off her breasts, roared the Emperor, but don’t touch her tongue!
Where could you rest in her rictus mouth? Could you have possibly found an idea to go with the pillows that dropped from her chest? But good came from evil: Queen Kidney Tongue was converted; jailor Porphyrius, the thousands in the square come to cheer their patroness, were converted and instantly martyred.
And when in his reddest rage, standing in the stubble field of severed limbs, the Emperor struck her head from her shoulders, his guards had to restrain him from sucking the dirt and grainy milk from your still quivering flesh. He fought hard. He had to know how Christianity tasted.
Bless me, O tongue.
In Jesus’ name. Amen.
The priest stands by, while I fog the glass with my reverent kiss, and wipes it after me.
When we are done, we retire to the shaded pleasure garden, there to open our scrips and eat some lunch. Conrad, our barber, takes out a little reed pipe he has lashed together and plays festively for our entertainment.
“My brothers and pilgrims,” I say, rising when all are sprawled under pine boughs and lunch is nearly finished, “I have prepared a profitable sermon on how compares this Mount of Venus to that of holy Mount Sinai: their likenesses and divergences, their places in history, and their accompanying miracles. I call this sermon Truth and Illusion. Would you like to hear it?”
“Hear, hear!” cries John, waving his water skin. “If we are to bear the heat of the afternoon, how better to weather it than with a sermon?”
Conrad pipes a little arpeggio signifying assent, and Constantine puts his head in his hands, the better to concentrate. I position myself in the pine grove so I am facing the Church of Saint Paul, there better to see the merchant’s wife when she sneaks in.
“Friar, didn’t we just have a mass?” Ursus pleads.
“The Sermon of Truth and Illusion,” I begin. “Delivered this Saint John’s Eve by Friar Felix Fabri of the Dominican Preaching Brothers in Ulm for his dear friends John, Conrad, Constantine, and Master Ursus Tucher.
“Now a sermon, like any new creature, is best begun with a birth, so before we climb the two mountains Venus and Sinai, let me first speak of a pair of births, one false and one true, that occurred in the shadow of this pleasure garden.
“When the god Jupiter took umbrage with his father and severed his genitals with a scythe, the blood from those organs frothed upon the sea until a lady was born. Does anyone know who this lady was?” I point to my patron’s son. “Ursus!”
“The Lady Venus?”
“Correct. And though she was a most beautiful woman, what was she born from? That’s right. She was born from a deposed god’s pol
lution.
“Now some centuries later, another birth graced this island, even though its inhabitants were sunk deep in Venus’s harlotry. A daughter was born to the vice-consul of Cyprus, before he was granted the kingship of Alexandria: a child as chaste as Venus was corrupt, as intellectual as Venus was sexual. Perhaps it was memories of her days on Venus’s island that prompted her words to the Emperor Maxentius: ‘If you are ruled by the mind, you are king; if by the body, you are a slave.’ Does anyone know who spoke those words?” I point to my patron’s son. “Ursus!”
“Saint Katherine! Saint Katherine spoke those words!”
“Correct. So, two births: one the daughter of a king on his way down, one the daughter of a king on his way up. One from pollution, one from honest employed parents.
“Let us now turn to their mountains.”
I glance at Saint Paul’s church, but still no one approaches.
“I think you know where the two mountains in question are situated in the world. The Mount of Venus rises up from the sea on the well-endowed island of Cyprus. It overlooks fields and streams, plowed lands and vineyards.
“The Mount of Sinai lies in a land completely opposite, in a rough, dead country, encompassed by barren rocks and poisonous snakes. A man might sail to Cyprus in the company of jolly Europeans, but to reach Sinai he would have to brave camel bite and Arab attack, perhaps then only to die of convulsive thirst in the wilderness.”
Constantine shudders.
“And yet, here come into play Truth and Illusion. For all its shade and abundance, for all its accessibility and cool breezes, the mount upon which we now sit, the Mount of Venus, is a dung heap of corruption, a foul squirming pyramid of worms. It is home to a pagan prostitute who, not content with debauching her own body, had to sully an entire continent, spreading her contagion even unto Tuscany, where it might infect foolish German travelers.
“Witness, friends, how illusory then is Sinai. On the surface, it appears a forbidding, friendless rock, tempered in flame, abandoned by God. But search for Truth. You will find it in the shape of a young girl who chose this mount for her eternal home. For all its heat and dust, for all its scorpions, sand, and silence, Sinai is a paradise! Look with your heart and you will see blue plashing fountains, lush green groves laden with fruit. Sinai is no wasteland—no—it rewards the bold pilgrim a thousandfold with its promise of Heaven! How easy to reach inviting Mount Venus. How perilous, and thus how profitable to a man’s soul, to achieve Mount Sinai. It is as close to martyrdom as a man might come in this Age of Faith!”
