A Stolen Tongue

by Sheri Holman

  “I know you must be tired, Madame.” Lord Tucher can not remain silent. “But how did you escape?”

  She seems to have more difficulty with that, and for a second I think John is about to answer for her. He’s an expert on the Turk, after all.

  “I put myself in Saint Katherine’s hands,” she says at last.

  “I’m surprised she had the strength to help you.” Tucher shrugs.

  “What do you mean?” asks the merchant’s wife.

  “First getting her relics stolen, now letting her monastery fall to the Saracens? Seems to me her influence is waning.”

  “What is he talking about?” Arsinoë turns, panic-striken, to me.

  “Nothing, Lady,” I say, swallowing the murderous rage I feel toward that most perfidious patron. “He is merely repeating a rumor told him by a faithless slut dismissed from the court at Cyprus. Pay it no mind.”

  “Friar!” Lord Tucher stands.

  Arsinoë starts up, then suddenly collapses back to her bench, completely colorless. John leaps up to help her.

  “I’ll see you to your cabin, Madame.” He looks at none of us but whisks Arsinoë away. Emelia Priuli angrily leaves the ladies’ cabin when the two barge in and close the door behind them.

  The sun is setting, and an easterly wind has whipped up. Sailors wrestle with their tarred ropes, trying to lower the sails before the strong new wind pushes us back into our wake. Above, a thick windfall bruise of clouds discolors the twilight. It’s the first breeze of the day, but it brings little comfort, being the wrong direction for us. Tucher and I sit in fuming silence.

  “Excuse me, Lord Tuker.” La Priuli has made her mincing, harlotrous way over to our table. “I know you were speaking with that woman a few moments ago. Do you know where her husband is?”

  Ursus answers, saving me the trouble. “He’s in the latrine.”

  She curls her lip at the boy and addresses his father. “He must stifle his wife,” La Priuli says. “She is making herself hateful to me.”

  “My dear woman.” Lord Tucher rises, but Priuli refuses his seat. “What is she doing?”

  “All night long, keeping me awake, nothing but prayer, prayer, prayer. And in that barbaric language of hers.”

  “It is a pilgrimage,” I offer.

  “For Christians, Friar,” the waiting woman snaps. “I had to put up with enough Schismatics on Cyprus.”

  “Are you able to bear with her another few days, Madame?” I can see Lord Tucher weighing this woman’s beauty against Arsinoë’s disruptiveness. “We’re almost to Palestine.”

  “I cannot endure it!” she cries. “All night it’s ‘Please, Saint Katherine,’ ‘Dear Saint Katherine,’ but not a single prayer addressed to our Blessed Virgin. Not one to our Savior. She keeps that saint like a house pet.”

  “We’re going downstairs, now, Madame,” I say stiffly, “to check on her husband. We’ll pass along your warning.”

  “Do so.” She sniffs. “If she’s not out of my cabin by tonight, I’m going to the captain.”

  A narrow flash of lightning strikes the water miles away, and thunder lows like a lost cow in the whale’s belly.

  “Come on, Conrad.” I rise unsteadily. “Let’s go tell the merchant.”

  The Cavity

  So much blood.

  I think about the world’s infinite hollow spaces and how many concentric skins we all wear, while the angry Ocean wedges its fingers into the ship’s belly and Conrad lifts out the stomach.

  Water and blood.

  “Hold the lamp above,” he tells me, and I catch it just as it’s ready to topple. To keep the body from rolling away, Conrad plants one knee on its shoulder, the other on its groin. He reaches under himself to unravel the long tube of intestines.

  The intestines are hollow, the stomach is hollow. I dig a hole in the sand and fill it with these walls. So many borders within the body holding back the empty space.

  We didn’t bring a bucket to catch the blood, but Conrad thinks the worst that can happen is that it will seep down and form a thin table beneath the sand. He works quietly and calmly, detaching the heart and lungs with sharp twists of his wrist.

  “A little higher, please.”

  The ship pitches and, in trying to catch myself, I smash the lantern against the bridge of Constantine’s nose. Constantine? Did the man ever exist outside of this shadowy cave?

  “Here’s what did it,” Conrad says, snipping away at a melted mass just above the fat-pillowed kidney. “This organ exploded,” he says. “See the infection?”

  He hands me an empty casing, but in the darkness I can’t distinguish its green from its red. I bury this fallen wall with the ones that held.

  “Hand me the water.”

  “What?”

  Inches above our heads, frantic aimless running tells us the pilgrims have begun to panic. I hear trunks crash to the floor with each lurch of the ship, and iron pots roll across flexing feet. I needn’t have worried about our voices carrying or our lantern inviting suspicion. The rough seas have completely overwhelmed us.

  We flush the cavity with seawater and sprinkle it with wine. Turn him over, let him drain.

  “The salt!” Conrad yells.

  This part feels less unnatural to me, for I have often dressed meat for the monastery. I pour a steady stream between his ribs and spread it with my hand until every inch of pink inner flesh is lumpy with it. Since there’s no water left, I run my hand through the sand until it comes clean.

  Conrad is shoving fistfuls of straw up into the hollow neck, and I help stuff the pelvis, replacing the viscera with cold yellow grass up to the ribs. We work quickly, because, though neither of us has expressed our fears out loud, we are both terrified of being trapped below during the storm. Conrad unearths the merchant’s buried intestine, shears off a long resilient strand with his knife, and threads it through the eye of his needle.

  “Try to flatten him some, will you?”

  I’ve stuffed the cavity too full, and now the flaps of skin no longer meet. I tug them together and hold them in place while he sews. Constantine is a lumpy hermaphroditic mess by the time we’ve finished, with a concave stomach and bulging hairy breasts, but he’ll keep until we dock. Quickly, we wind him from head to foot in his sheet, and Conrad sacrifices his black cloak to provide an extra layer, knowing he can retrieve it when we land. Should a nosy pilgrim stumble upon the corpse tomorrow, he would be completely unrecognizable.

  “Done?”

  Conrad shrugs.

  We sit for a moment studying the swaddled, misshapen figure, too tired to do much more than listen to the Ocean hammer against the ship’s walls. Was this how it happened with Constantine? Did the force of grief rage so incessantly against his poor weak organs that one could only escape in explosion? Will it be the same for us, pulsing inside this hollow heart, when the storm finally hits?

  A splintered vessel? A hundred open veins?

  The Storm

  Filthy bilge water has overflowed its well, sloshing stink across the floorboards. When I point this out to a wretched Homesick, he turns his lantern on his ruined biscuit, his sodden hymnal, his mattress, and I understand the time we’ve spent below preserving Constantine has been a time of devastation for those above. Men stumble among their belongings, trying to suspend their lanterns and baggage above the intrusive water. They make little progress, for when the ship pitches, all that aspires to height is brought low. Water cascades down the stairs from waves breaking over the prow and pours through the badly tarred ceiling in torrents. My pallet, when I push my way through the huddle of stunned pilgrims to reach it, lies like a new-risen Delos in a sea of brown water.

  “Felix!” A terrified Lord Tucher sees me and grabs my robe. “The slaves say this storm is absolutely unnatural for this time of year,” he sobs, “and must be the wrath of God. Pray for us!”

  He pulls me reeling, off balance, into a tangle of moaning, supplicating pilgrims. See how Judas Tucher needs me now! Ha
d he only thought of that when he kissed my dream of Sinai on both cheeks and handed it over to the Pharisees!

  I will pray for him.

  “‘Save us, O God, for the waters are come in unto our souls. Send Thine hand from above; rid us and deliver us out of great waters, from the hands of strange children.’

  “You, O Lord, punished a wicked world with a forty-day flood when, after watching generations of perversity and wickedness come of age, You could no longer abide Your children’s faithlessness. Rain fell upon them, Lord, welcome at first in their thirsty land, until the rain soaked their robes and wet their skin, tangled their dark hair into ropes against their cheeks. By the fifth day, the bottom stories of their houses flooded, and Your faithless children took their families onto the roof to wait out the storm, worried the water would rise upon them in their sleep and invade their nostrils, stealing away their babies while they dreamed of drowning. By the tenth day, the children who had held cheap their promises to You floated like pond scum on the water’s surface, and still You let it rain thirty more days, just to be certain every forsworn, false friend sank to the bottom of the sea.”

  Pausing for breath, I can hear the sailors above us cry out one to another, each in his own language, heedless of meaning or comprehension. It seems the commonality of words has deserted them, leaving each man little more than a grunting hoarder of sense flinging chaff at his comrades.

  “Again, in Moses’ day”—I raise my voice over the groaning boat—“You punished betrayal with water, O wise Lord. The Egyptians, who promised the Israelites freedom and safe-conduct across the desert into Zion, went back on their sworn word. When they followed Your chosen people into the parted Red Sea, into that sea which embraces Your blessed Sinai—the land no man should be denied—You withdrew Your hand, O Lord, and called down the waters upon them. Like an airless mouth, the Red Sea closed over the hypocrites, sucking them from their horses and grinding them between her currents.”

  “I am not comforted by this prayer, Friar Felix,” Ursus sobs. “Can’t we have something else?”

  “Let us be worthy, O God, and nothing like these false men who wantonly broke their promises,” I shout. “Let us not deserve Your wrath!

  “Should You come upon Your petitioners Lord John Tucher and his son Ursus, or upon their humble mouthpiece Brother Felix Fabri of the Preaching Brothers, shipwrecked and without life, I entreat You, do not let them enter Your kingdom in soggy clothes with bones exposed and eyes red from salt water. Undress them from these, their ill-fitting bodies, and translate them as shining spirits into Your house, O Lord.”

  A lantern crashes to the floor beside me, switching behind it a tail of darkness. Knee to knee we stand in the thick night, sweating from the closeness, grasping fistfuls of tunic and hair in the vain attempt to remain upright. The next wave flings me back against my trunk and the other pilgrims on top of me like a giant attacking octopus made all of startled mouths and slimy legs. I can’t breathe, and I feel the gorge rise in my throat.

  “Lord Tucher,” I call, elbowing my way through the stack, “I must go upstairs for some air.”

  “No, Felix!” he shouts back, though I can not tell from which open mouth the prohibition comes. “You may not leave me.”

  I hear the splash as someone above me gives in to seasickness and know it will be mere seconds before hysteria sets in. Instantly, I give a mighty shove and am free, stumbling over fallen pilgrims, tripping over my robes. I pick myself up and slide toward the stairs, stepping on God knows what in the darkness: a loaf of bread? another’s pillow? an arm? At the waterfall that was once our ladder, I plunge my hands into the icy wave, arch my neck so that it misses my face, and climb blindly.

  Above, all is chaos.

  Sailors fight the unwieldy mainsail and hoist in its place the short square papafigo, sewn of a hundred individual cloths. Lightning haloes the ship, turning faces blue and the sea dark green. The thunder that follows each bolt seeps deep into the saturated floorboards, until I imagine I’m standing on decades of dead and resurrected storms. And yet it does not rain.

  “You, monk.” I feel rather than see a man approaching. When he’s upon me, I realize it is the ship’s soothsayer who sits with the galley’s pilot. “Is anyone dead down there?”

  My heart stops beating. “Why do you ask?”

  “You must tell me.” I hear the controlled panic in his voice. “A corpse is like a lightning rod: Death seeking fiercer death. There’s no other explanation for this storm.”

  “That’s superstition,” I say.

  He shakes his head wildly. “It’s a lightning rod.”

  “There’s no one dead,” I tell him.

  “Listen to me, my friend.” The soothsayer’s long beard scratches my cheek. “If someone dies, come straight to me.”

  “I will.”

  What have I done?

  I must find John. He understands chaos and passion and death. He’ll tell me what to do. I run back to the hatch but, in my haste, trip over the edge of a galley plank. Chained to his bench, the bedazzled Greek slave who rowed us to Colossus huddles miserably in the dark.

  “You, slave!” I yell, when the lightning reveals his terror-flaccid face. “Have you seen my friend, the Archdeacon John?”

  “Friar Felix!” He brings his shackled hands to his face. “This is the Devil’s work. Today too calm, tonight—! We’re all going to die!” He yanks at the iron eyelet that attaches his chains to the ship. Should we capsize, this man and all the other slaves will dangle from their chains like grapes on a vine, tightly trestled to their wooden benches.

  “No, listen,” I say. “It’s very important I find John.”

  “I’ve done such wicked things in my life, brother. Please, I can’t die with them on my conscience.”

  “You’re not going to die. The pilgrims are downstairs praying right now.”

  A sail spins loose; its sheets snap like a cave of bats suddenly terrified awake.

  “We will die. Because there’s already a dead on this ship. I can smell it. Only if they find it will we be safe.”

  I want to slap him.

  “That is not a Christian thing to believe. If you don’t want to spend more years in Hell than you’re already set for, you must stop this superstition.”

  The slave to his right shrieks as a wild oar strikes him hard in the temple. He moans something in a language I don’t understand and shakes the blood from his hair.

  “Tell me.” I grip his shirt. “Has John been on deck?”

  “I saw your friend. Earlier tonight, before it is so dark.”

  “He’s not downstairs, though?”

  “No, I saw him upstairs, above, with the Greek man that came to this boat at Crete.”

  “What Greek man?” I ask. “Do you mean the holy woman, Saint Katherine’s Tongue?”

  “No, no, I saw him clearly.” The galley slave crosses himself and screams when a squat emerald bolt strikes the sea not two hundred yards from our ship. “Your John was struggling with that man. The sad merchant. The husband of the Tongue!”

  Constantine?

  The sea goes green with fire.

  Heaven and Earth

  The first drop hits as I frantically push my way through the shoulders and sweating backs of the working men. For a moment, the rain sobers them; they freeze in their efforts, quivering like a pack of hunting dogs sighting a flock.

  A naked pilgrim, spiraling rain, runs to the latrine. His ankles are red and his wrists are red and his flapping penis is deep, deep red. The ship moans as a yellow wave breaks over the bow, grainy with sand from the Ocean bed.

  Heaven and Earth reversed.

  One minute we are atop a lofty mountain, the next we are deep into Hell. The rain, black and cold, kicks me back toward the downstairs hatch. I fight to reach John.

  I am responsible. I hollowed out the conduit for Heaven’s rage to barrel through this ship. Constantine’s empty body, his channel, his lightning rod. We’ve inverted t
he world, allowed water to become sky, fire water.

  And then I see it. Against a fireball. Hell clutching a dark lantern, poised by Arsinoë’s door. Hell in black flapping pilgrim’s robes.

  The dead and gutted Constantine.

  I slam against the torrential rain, feel it jerk my shoulder from its socket, swing my arms behind me. I find the ladder steps in darkness, take them two at a time, praying to be struck and spared what I know awaits. Don’t hurt John, I pray. I did it. He has no knowledge. Fists against the door, wood giving way. I scream John’s name, Arsinoë’s name, as all God’s wrath crashes upon me.

  At last the door swings inward, sweeping a curtain of rain into the dark cabin. Inside, a fire has been struck and tucked into a lantern that swings maniacally on a hook above Arsinoë’s pallet. Beside the door, the violently trembling frame of John Lazinus stands silent as the grave. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust, but gradually I become aware of another figure, waiting in the dark corner. His face is partially obscured by his hood, his hands hang at his sides in fists, and if I look closely I can just make out the bulge in his chest where Conrad and I stuffed his cavity too full of straw.

  “He’s come for his wife, hasn’t he?” I ask John, barely able to hear my voice over my pounding heart.

  “Arsinoë is gone,” he says.

  “What has he done to her?”

  “Felix, you must let us explain.”

  John steps in and suddenly Constantine leaps from the shadows, hurling himself at my throat. Instinctively, I grab the merchant’s sleeve and fling him to the ground. The ship plunges and he rolls hard down the incline.

  “If you’ll explain it to him as you did to me, he’s got to understand!” John shouts at the merchant. “He’s not a monster!”

  I felt the chill of death when he touched me.

  “Tell him,” John commands.

  “Constantine,” I ask as gently as fear permits, “what have you done with your wife?”