A Stolen Tongue

by Sheri Holman

  From a distance, I see a woman start up the mountain. She is too far away to tell for certain, but indeed she has the coloring of the merchant’s wife.

  “How can we tell what is Truth and what is Illusion?” I continue excitedly, keeping the tiny figure in sight.

  “Item: two beautiful women translated to mountains after their deaths. One’s chastity inspires Heaven; one’s depravity inspires Hell.

  “Item: two men associated with these women and their mountains. Where Katherine sleeps at Sinai, God spoke to the Patriarch Moses. Where Venus sleeps on her mount, be it here or in Tuscany, the deluded Swabian nobleman Tannhäuser keeps her company. Law or lust? Which is inspired by God?

  “Item: miracles. On Sinai, a bush burned that was not consumed. Our Lord wrote the Ten Commandments. A virgin was translated from distant Alexandria, whose bones now work wonders throughout the world. On Mount Venus, the artist Pygmalion, disgusted with the harlotry of the Cyprian female population, sculpted a woman from an ivory block. So perfect was his skill that he fell in love with his own creation. Venus, sensing victory, granted the statue Galatea life; whereupon Pygmalion fell upon her and begat a child.

  “This is how we know Illusion from Truth: Ask yourselves, my friends, ‘Is the object of my affection wrought by man or God?’ Ask yourselves, ‘Will I be content with Venus, or will I never sleep until I reach Mount Sinai?’”

  “Sinai!” Ursus cries. “On to Sinai!”

  “Yes, my boy, my brave boy.” I hug him. “You are worthy to come with us. You will live among the blessed.”

  “Is that her?” Constantine swivels to see the approaching woman. “Arsinoë?”

  He is up and running across the garden to where she slipped inside the church. Don’t stop her, Constantine, I almost shout. I want her surprised in the act.

  We catch up to him on the church porch, and I put my finger to my lips to signal silence. I want to give her enough time to unlatch the glass mouth, to force her hand down my bride’s throat and rip, from its bed, her perfect pink tongue.

  Slowly, I inch open the door. A woman kneels before the altar, only inches from the reliquary. As I watch, she reaches up for something, but it is not my bride’s tongue. Slowly the stud priest of Saint Paul lifts his cassock to this strange sloe-eyed farmgirl’s hands.

  It is not her at all! I slam the door. Constantine collapses to the ground in tears.

  “She is gone forever, Friar Felix. I have lost Saint Katherine’s Tongue.”

  Ursus studies the merchant, his eyes as round as saucers.

  “Come on, Constantine.” John pulls him to his feet. “Let’s go back to the ship. Perhaps she’s made her way there.”

  “I still believe—” I start to protest, but John silences me with a stern look.

  “We’ve been here most of the day, Felix,” he says. “She’s not coming.”

  We walk back in silence, heartsick, defeated men. Only Ursus steps lively, practicing his skill against scorpions and poisonous snakes. He crushes the imaginary desert vermin with the heel of his oversized boot and dreams of Arab sands.

  John questions the sailors when we reach the busy dock, but no one has seen a woman or a Turkish ship put in to port.

  “Ursus, son!” Lord Tucher opens his arms to us when we climb up the ladder to our galley. “You look feverish. Did you breathe into your sleeve like I showed you?”

  “No, Father, the air was fine.”

  Constantine makes his way through the thick crowd of pilgrims and wearily climbs the steps to the ladies’ cabin. He curls in front of Arsinoë’s door like an forgotten watchdog.

  “Did you have an opportunity to meet the Lady Emelia Priuli before you went ashore?” Lord Tucher draws forth the heavy-lidded lady-in-waiting who boarded our ship this morning. We look each other up and down with mutual distaste.

  “Why is she wearing Mother’s Venetian comb?” Ursus asks, pointing to a gleam of ivory worked into the woman’s ornate auburn hair. “We bought it as a present.”

  Lord Tucher shifts uncomfortably. “The nice lady lost her comb this morning, so I loaned her ours. We’ll buy your mother a new one in Jerusalem.”

  “I think someone took it.” Emelia Priuli speaks in a flat Italian contralto.

  “Men are strangely apt to play the thief on shipboard,” I tell her. “For example, while you are writing, if you lay down your pen and turn your face away, your pen will be lost, even though you are among men you know.”

  “So, you enjoyed Cyprus, son?” Lord Tucher swiftly changes the subject. “What did you see?”

  “Friar Felix took us to a stinking dunghill crawling with worms.”

  “We climbed the Mount of Venus,” I say.

  “And he told us all about Mount Sinai. I can’t wait to cross the desert, Father. I want to die for Saint Katherine.”

  Lord Tucher looks at me sharply. “There will be no dying for anyone, Ursus. And we are not going to Mount Sinai. Madama Priuli tells me they’ve had news at court that Saint Katherine’s Monastery was attacked by Arabs. The place burned to the ground.”

  “What?” I cry.

  “We all wept when we heard.” The harlot wipes away an imaginary tear. “Saint Katherine’s is no more.”

  Saint John’s Fire

  The sailors choke the ship with necklaces of Saint John’s fire, flout the usual prohibition against lights on deck by hoisting lanterns from the benches aloft to the maintop. Other crewmen scamper barefoot across the rigging with lighted torches in their mouths, pretending, in the manner of clowns, to drop like Pentecost upon the pilgrims.

  “I’m going to bed,” Ursus says dully.

  “You’ll miss the fires,” I tell him.

  “I don’t care.”

  I lean my head against the mast and close my eyes. It’s been a week of thefts. My pen, Katherine’s ear, Priuli’s comb, my reason for pilgrimage.

  I argued for hours, but what does the Betrayer Tucher care about Katherine? We’ve been hearing rumors of the monastery’s destruction for weeks, and yet only from sources close to Captain Lando. La Priuli is cousin to his wife; of course she would willingly spread his lies! Only a man as faithless as Lord Tucher would believe them.

  “Felix, you look so somber. Be happy. It’s my name day.”

  John shouts into my ear and passes me an open bottle of malvoisie. The wine is thick and sweet, like syrup.

  “I know you’re upset, but you must trust God to have a plan.”

  I’ve been too deeply betrayed to be trustful. Instead, I take another few long swigs of malvoisie. Saint John’s lanterns spin the whole deck red.

  “Isn’t that better?” John asks. I feel the wine travel hotly down my arms, swell my stiff-flexing fingers. Smoke from the lanterns grays out the other pilgrims; they cavort like insubstantial shades behind a filmy, dying scrim. Even John, with his whorling-smoke beard and fire-shadow face, seems to me beyond the grave.

  We use the word fire to mean such a complexity of things. Fire as a deliberate combustion; fire coupled with water to represent the necessities of life; fire to destroy, as a means of torture, to eradicate a body; fire from the heavens; the fires of love. All meanings come back to the simple etymology “ignis,” qui sua omnia “ignit” natura, fire that consumes all things by its very nature. And yet, if we go back even further, how can we separate that nature from its origin? Prometheus stole fire from the gods to give man his first guilty warmth; thus the true etymology of fire and destruction and love is theft.

  I look back to shore and see tiny bonfires dotting the mountainside. Why do we light fires on Saint John’s Eve? They say that sometimes, while flying through the air, dragons will become lustfully aroused and drop their sperm into wells or live water. This causes a year of plague. Our forefathers built smoky fires out of the bones of animals to scare off these dragons, and we continue wisely to observe this custom.

  Why then, you ask, if we deplore the dragon’s arousal, do we, as Christians, copulate so indiscrimi
nantly on this day?

  This, my brothers, I may not answer, for only the Devil knows why men do it. I only know something happens to a man on this the longest day of the year that stretches his passions to the breaking point.

  The man who steals onto our ship, hiding behind a bright white torch, looks vaguely familiar to me. Lucifer, I think drunkenly to myself, the light bearer. He has the lithe grace and fashion sense of a fallen angel, decked out in a short black tunic and high mustard knee boots. His black curls loll across his forehead and rear in two sharp horns behind his ears. After a slow-eyed inventory of the ship, he turns back to the ladder and hands up his familiar, a fearsome creature in red felt fez, white linen tunic, and high, hard platform clogs.

  “A Turk.” I grip John’s arm. At his waist, he wears a curving bright scimitar.

  John follows my eyes, shakes his head no. “Look at his beard,” he says. “It’s blond.”

  They pretend a casual stroll, but the dark man’s eyes flick sharply to the shadows, while the other’s stray to pilgrims toasting Saint John. Without a word, John and I fall into step behind them.

  Between the two is a slender marriage of fire and night, annulled where their heads meet to confer, where their shoulders touch possessively when they dip to peer under benches or crane behind stolid pilgrims. They move in perfect Manichaean unison, light and dark, two individuals either so completely of the same mind or so accustomed to one’s thrall that they seem never to doubt their rhythm. When the dark one breaks off down our hatch, the blond stares after him like an abandoned bride.

  “Ursus is down there,” I whisper.

  “Look at his neck.”

  A splinter of wood, almost as thick as my thumb, protrudes from his linen collar. Around it, an angry red mouth drools a trickle of pus over his swollen flesh.

  I’ve changed my mind. What terrorizes pilgrims most on their ships is nothing so familiar as a four-fingers’-width of wall between themselves and the Ocean; what terrorizes pilgrims beyond their wildest dreams is to have strangers prowl their decks while their captain is leaping bonfires on shore.

  The blond turns around, his hungry blue eyes fixed on us. No, not on us; on an ember that rides by my face, faints into my bottle of cold dark wine. I hear his sigh.

  “Hast du Durst?” Are you thirsty? The dark one asks, climbing up behind him.

  “Ja.”

  “Ihr sprecht Deutsch?” I gasp, before John can clamp his hand over my mouth. It is the last thing I expected.

  “Who are you?” The blond turns on me, his Swabian accent filtered through his outlandish mustache.

  “Friar Felix Fabri of the Preaching Brothers in Ulm!” I cry. “Countryman, if you are a countryman, have some of our malvoisie.”

  His hand hesitates before taking the bottle, and I catch a swift, stolen glance at his comrade. He turns his back to us and, hunching over, drains the bottle dry.

  “Is there more?”

  “Ha!” His friend laughs. “Go among Christians for five minutes and you turn drunkard.”

  John reluctantly leaves to fetch another bottle of malvoisie. Everything sinister has fallen away. They speak German!

  “What brings you aboard our humble galley?”

  “Curiosity more than anything.” The dark one smiles. He props his yellow boots against a bench and slowly takes in the whole deck. “I wanted to see how Lando’s pilgrims traveled.”

  “You’re familiar with our captain?”

  “Only by reputation. I’m sailing with Contarini.”

  “Contarini’s here?”

  “We just arrived.”

  And Lando is on shore with his wife. For the briefest second, I see Jerusalem snatched away like a rug, its dust snapped in our face.

  “So you’re my enemy, then?”

  He smiles at the absurdity of it all. “Looks like.”

  “John.” I reach for my returning friend. “Meet our enemy . . .”

  “Ser Niccolo Callegeris.”

  “John Lazinus, Archdeacon of Hungary.” John shifts the bottles to shake the stranger’s hand. “Who will do the honors?”

  “Let Abdullah.” Ser Niccolo passes a bottle to his friend. “He’s the driest of us all.”

  John’s eyes meet mine over the name. Abdullah on a blond man could mean only one thing.

  “You’re a Mameluke?” I blurt.

  Ser Niccolo laughs a short, sharp blast. Abdullah pauses in his uncorking to look offended.

  “Yes, Brother Dominican, I am. And I don’t see anything funny about it.”

  Under his feminized dress, the Mameluke’s thick arm muscles jump. He drives his dagger deep into the cork and yanks it out, lifts the bottle to his mouth, and drinks defiantly.

  Why did this man deny his faith, I wonder? Was he, like most forsworn Christians, captured during the Eastern wars, forced to renounce Christ at cold Muslim knifepoint? Or was he, caught perhaps pants down over the interdictory loins of a Saracen woman, given the simple choice by her father: embrace Islam and marry, or suffer your spine plucked vertabra by vertabra clean of your body? It matters not. He exchanged God for Allah, and he’s damned just the same.

  “Don’t hog, my friend.” Ser Niccolo reaches for the bottle. “Oops, I forgot. No talk of the pig!”

  Abdullah grimaces but passes him the malvoisie. Niccolo hands it off to me.

  “Abdullah’s new religion forbids him to eat pork, doesn’t it, my friend?” Niccolo needles the Mameluke. “Or drink alcohol. Thank God you’re among Christians.”

  “Thank Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” He snatches back the bottle and salutes.

  Imagine, brothers, if our servants suddenly rose up and demanded the same meat we ate, to ride upon the same horses, to lead our prayers! Would we allow our servants to rule us so? Would we provide them the arms to kill us? Luckily, we are sensible Germans and not decadent Egyptian sultans, so suspicious of our fellow countrymen that, centuries ago, we surrounded ourselves with thousands of burly apostate Christian slaves to protect us. It was only a matter of time before these slaves, these mamluks as they are called in the Arabic tongue, looked down at the swords in their hands and thought, This will slice through a sultan’s neck as clean as anyone else’s. For two hundred years, Mameluke slaves have ruled in Egypt. When one is speared or poisoned or nailed to a camel—for slave kings never die natural deaths—another upstart slave steps in to take his place. Abdullah tells us that when he was still Peter Ber he was captured and sold to an illegitimate son of Egyptian Sultan Qa’it Bey and a Greek slave girl. If he kills enough people, Peter/Abdullah has as good a chance of becoming Sultan as any man on earth.

  But Abdullah wants to talk of Germany.

  “Yes, it’s still black with forests,” I tell him. “And gray-capped mushrooms grow through nets of running cedar. It rained every day of my pilgrimage, until we crossed into Italy.”

  “Is the beer still thick and brown?”

  “With malt-flecked clouds on top.”

  “And the wurst?”

  “Dear God, the wurst!”

  “Watch the pig, Abdullah,” Ser Niccolo warns. “Dwell not on the filthy pig!”

  “A man who speaks perfect German mustn’t joke about the wurst,” I chide him, feeling the wine hot in my cheeks when I lean in for more. “Where did you learn this perfect German?”

  “Ser Niccolo is a translator,” Abdullah says. “He speaks all the languages of the world.”

  “I etymologize a bit myself”—I laugh—“but I won’t translate. There are too many vernacular ideas that just won’t fit any other language. The world is too full of stray words.”

  “Ah, there you’ve found the seat of the translator’s power, Friar.” Niccolo slaps my back with the same pride as my abbot in Basle when at seven I completed my first catechism. “It is where we have more sway than kings or bishops. It serves translators to keep mankind ignorant; the reader must trust us to think for him.”

  “What if we prefer to think for ourselves?”r />
  “Then you must do as I did and learn a hundred different languages. If not, you’ll always be dependent on a complete stranger’s version of the truth.”

  “I’ve always thought of translators as servants,” I say, emboldened by the drink. “They are slaves to genius, are they not?”

  Ser Niccolo smiles, noticing the little copy of Saint Jerome’s On the Distances of Places that peeps from my pocket. He plucks out the book and flips through it.

  “Many would have it so. But let me give you an analogy: Take Abdullah, here.”

  He holds Jerome in one hand and places the other on the Mameluke’s swollen neck. I see Abdullah wince.

  “He is a slave, the servant to an illegitimate son of the Sultan. Yet if he had the genius to obliterate his enemies, he, a wretched, amoral apostate, could easily find himself ruler of the East, the most potent political and religious figure alive.

  “Do you not think Saint Jerome was aware of this when he sat down to wrest the Bible from Hebrew? He knew only a handful of Romans understood that arcane Jewish language, and thus the rest of us would be utterly dependent on his Latin translation of God’s Word. If the Jews were wiped out tomorrow, as many European rulers would have it, and the Hebrew language were obliterated, who would then speak for God? Only the master translator, Saint Jerome. So, I ask you, Friar Felix, who really serves in this world? Who really rules?”

  John looks decidedly uncomfortable with the conversation. Abdullah shifts on his bench.

  “If we’re to have philosophy,” the Mameluke says, “we need another bottle of wine.”