A Stolen Tongue

by Sheri Holman

  “We’ve swallowed her.” The creature on the floor laughs. “She’s in our belly.”

  “Jesus Christ.” John turns away.

  The hood falls back; the face comes up; I see the corpse for what it is. She is no less hideous than the demon for whom I’d mistaken her.

  John paces the room, steadying her when the pitching of the ship threatens to capsize us, for she will not rise from her knees and I will not help her up.

  “I will not let it happen to her, Felix.” John speaks through angry tears. “She is determined to continue on alone, and I’ve seen with my own eyes what Arabs do to unprotected women. I will not let her leave this ship dressed as herself.”

  Arsinoë’s hair mimics Constantine’s old-fashioned Julius Caesar cut, releasing its spring around her narrow temples. Could she have possibly cut her own hair so cleanly, or did my piously weeping friend John twine his sympathetic fingers through its length, shear it away in tightening circles, until his fingertips brushed her pale blue scalp? I cannot bear to imagine what took place in this room while Conrad and I crouched in horror, working to preserve her husband’s body.

  “You are spitting in the face of God,” I say, “to counterfeit a dead man.”

  “You and I have formed a partnership, Friar,” the creature says loudly, over the groaning boat. “With a few simple words, you have kept Constantine alive. In his clothes, I can restore form to those words. It is the perfect substitution.”

  “Felix,” John pleads. “Arsinoë was abducted from Rhodes. She stabbed the man who took her and left him for dead. If he’s still alive, he will be looking for her. He will be looking for a woman.”

  “Friar.” Arsinoë crawls woodenly on her knees to where I stand. “Call me Constantine until we reach Jerusalem. Let me borrow him for only a few days.”

  She reaches out her hand, but I smack it violently away.

  “Enough!” I cry. “I have had enough of your pretenses! I want to know what you are doing on this ship in the first place. Why are you Constantine’s wife and then not Constantine’s wife? Why did he tell me you had Saint Katherine’s bones?”

  John rushes over and cradles her where she has fallen, her face angry and distorted.

  “Tell him what happened on Rhodes,” John orders Arsinoë. “Help him understand.”

  She vehemently shakes her head. Behind her, Lando’s treasure-filled trunks squeal against their ropes. Unfettered, Emelia Priuli’s carved ebony chest skids across the cabin and crashes into Arsinoë’s. She pushes the trunk savagely away.

  “He took her from the church,” John tells me, ignoring the woman’s refusal to speak. “He pressed her face into his robes and ran with her down to the shore. He took her, Felix!”

  John hugs the stricken merchant’s wife to his chest, covering her with his huge body. The boat plunges and he supports her, pressing his cheek to her shorn head.

  “God should have made your hair grow to cover you, poor trespassed darling,” he sobs. “Why has He abandoned His virgins?”

  I do not want to hear what John says. I want only to know one thing.

  “Was I right?” I tug her away from him. “Did you take Saint Katherine’s hand from her church in Candia?”

  “Yes!” Arsinoë screams, spraying me with saliva. “Yes, I took her hand!”

  “Did you take her ear?”

  “Yes, I took her ear!”

  “Then what have you done with my wife?”

  The ship screams under our words, spinning us heavily to our knees and across the floor. Katherine’s icons break rank like terrified gilded seaside crabs, scattering across the cabin, flipped onto their backs.

  “You don’t understand,” she sobs. “I took her to save her from a worse fate.”

  “What worse fate could there be than to be kidnapped and held against your will?” I shake her, catching a mouthful of Constantine’s salty fever and death robe. “If her monastery truly has fallen, it is your fault!”

  “It was not against her will, Friar Felix!” Arsinoë kicks away from me. “She chose to come to me. She told me what she wants.”

  “I am her husband. I know what she wants.”

  “You have no idea,” Arsinoë shouts, backing up toward her carnelian trunk. “You only know what you want.”

  “Please!” John throws himself between us when I lunge for this evil woman. How dare she claim to know the mind of Heaven? How dare she speak to me this way when she has ruined my pilgrimage, when she has stolen from me the only being in the world that gives me joy? She throws herself across her cheap wooden trunk when it skids across the lurching cabin, and suddenly I know.

  “You have her in there!” I shout. “You have Saint Katherine’s bones in that trunk.”

  “Felix, Constantine was delirious,” John yells, grabbing my robes as I leap for the trunk. “You can’t believe Arsinoë would have Saint Katherine’s relics in there.”

  I have found her. I remember the distended bag Arsinoë wore around her neck the night she climbed into the sea, how she spoke to it lovingly and covered it in kisses. Katherine has been under my eye this entire time! Arsinoë screams when I pry her from the chest and hammer away its cheap lock with a heavy icon. I feel the wood give, the metal rip from its mooring.

  “Don’t touch her!” the Tongue screams, clawing at my flesh. “She wants to go home!”

  I throw open the lid. A rush of sandalwood escapes, like Pandora’s final hope.

  “Felix, you should be ashamed.” John reaches into the trunk and pulls out its contents. “A cloak. A drinking cup. A book. Where are your bones, Felix?”

  Arsinoë shoves us aside and stares into the trunk as into a bottomless well. There is nothing there. No hand. No ear. No feedbag full of my wife’s body. I turn away in tears. She is not a rival for my wife’s affection; she is nothing more than what her brother said she was: a sad, delusional madwoman. How could I have been carried along? The ship pitches and our one source of light, our little lantern, smashes to the ground and rolls crazily downhill, exploding against the wall in a cloud of oil and glass.

  “Come away, darling.” John fumbles for her, trying to release her from where she grips the trunk. “You have suffered too much.”

  “You’ve gone over to him,” she whispers into the darkness. “Why?”

  “John, listen!”

  A loud banging on the door to the cabin. “Open this door!”

  “The ship is sinking,” John says. “Constantine’s blood has eaten a hole.”

  “That will be the captain, Madame,” I say, crouching beside her. “Give yourself up to him,” I urge. “He will see you get safely back to Crete. He will find your brother, if you like, and put you back into his care.”

  This snaps her awake. “How do you know about my brother?” she asks coldly.

  “He was here looking for you,” I say. “He wants to help you.”

  “Open this door!”

  “Felix?” John asks. “What do we do?”

  Before either of us can reach it, the cabin door is violently kicked open. Two figures stand before me, orange and black in a circle of lantern light.

  “Where is she?” Emelia Priuli screams. “I told him this was all her fault, blasphemous bitch that she is!”

  She pushes past me and bangs into the skittering trunk at her feet. Sharply, she rights herself.

  “Hand over the Greek woman,” the other figure commands. As he lifts his lantern to survey our dark room, I realize it is not the captain but the ship’s soothsayer.

  “She angered the Virgin!” Priuli cries. “I told her with all that selfish praying to Katherine she would infuriate Our Holy Mother and Her Son. She’s brought Their wrath upon us all!”

  I hear the hysteria in the gentlewoman’s voice, but I can not force myself to speak. Arsinoë kneels by the trunk, her hood covering her face. John presses himself against the wall to remain standing.

  The soothsayer approaches Arsinoë, his lantern shaking in his fist. “Sir,
where have you hidden your wife?”

  Beside me, John shuts his eyes. I can no longer breathe.

  “She’s dead,” says Constantine the merchant, evenly meeting the soothsayer’s eyes. “Felix buried her this evening.”

  The Mouths of Fishes

  A cancer, Friar. You preserved a cancer.

  I can’t face Lord Tucher or the other muttering pilgrims when I emerge clotted with sand from the ship’s belly. Nor can I stand the whispers and moanings when the soothsayer and I lift the sagging V of merchant between us and head for the stairs. I grasp Constantine’s ankles and hug his feet to my chest. Despite the two layers of Conrad’s cloak and sheet, I feel each individual icy toe against my ribs. Each toe is a cancer.

  They follow us, those pilgrims, swallowing their vomit and fear, up the stairs, through the hatch, onto the rainy deck. I feel like an ink drawing of myself, heavily outlined in black, leading that quickly sketched procession. I have darker borders than anyone else; the eye is drawn to me.

  We stop in front of the captain, who yells over the wind for the other pilgrims to stay belowdeck so as not to imperil more lives, but they are like those in a trance. The rain lashes them and the boat tilts, yet they hold their diagonal and do not fall. John and Arsinoë stand behind the captain, two brave, defiant men. I drop the merchant at his wife’s feet.

  Without a word, the captain summons a pair of strong sailors, men I saw scampering like cats along the rigging with St. John’s fire in their teeth, to lift the body. Their arms flex and their bony hips shift and then he is gone. The merchant, the merchant’s wife, arcing like a white comet over the sea. Rain catching on her tail, dragging him, cold and hissing, down.

  As that body breaks the wall of water, spiraling down past porpoises and black octopi, past the beak of the Troyp, who disdains all lifeless prey, I realize I’ve broken the first promise I have ever sworn on Katherine’s life.

  The soothsayer smiles. He knew he smelled Death on board.

  How We Look for Land

  Washed clean by the storm, for two days every corner of our galley smells of drying salt and sunlight. Below, gathered in our little marketplace near the mast, my fellow pilgrims resume the occupations they’ve pursued since the moment we set sail, a solid month ago today. Some sit over chessboards; some sing songs accompanied by lutes and bagpipes. Some have their heads together discussing worldly matters; some read books; still others laugh aloud for lightness of heart. Others run up the rigging; others jump; others show off their strength by lifting heavy weights. And then there are the pilgrims who accompany all of these, looking on first at one and then another. They end their tour with me, sitting upon the horn, writing to you, my brothers. A glamour has settled upon me for my part in the storm, and these men as they pass by move their fingers in a quick gesture to ward off the evil eye. I find this treatment grievous, brothers, for as you know, I am by nature a likable fellow and not used to unpopularity.

  Arsinoë, also, spends a good deal of time alone. I watch her brazenly wander the galley or read a book in the bright sunlight. She makes no effort to hide herself, and, when a curious pilgrim gathers his courage to approach her, she talks at length about the virtues of her late wife and how she will miss the dear woman’s company. I am no longer afraid of her, brothers, but feel a sort of pity, for I am now certain she belongs to the genus of woman known among learned men as a hysteric. You might recall the time I was summoned down to Memmingen to exorcise a young woman who claimed the Devil was leaving water snakes in her bed. Upon close examination, I can say that Arsinoë, like that poor girl of Memmingen, is more in need of a doctor’s care than a priest’s. But that is not for me to decide. If she returns, hold her for me, Friar, her brother asked on Saint John’s Eve. You don’t know what she might do. Do I need any further proof of her capabilities? Did she not nearly convince me she possessed Saint Katherine? Has she not convinced John that she is sane?

  John Lazinus, my poor confused friend, drifts toward the prow of the ship more often than not. He sits silently with me for an hour, sometimes two, with his eyes fixed on the same distant point as mine. It’s nice to share again a single vision, and I like that time of the day best when we stretch out as we used to, on the horns of the prow, hook our arms through the rigging, and seek Jerusalem through the leaping fish. My pleasure always ends too soon, however, for John grows restless, cranes his head back toward the other pilgrims, searching out her hooded figure. Five minutes more I’ll have after that, while he wrestles with his conscience. I take my eyes from the sea long enough to watch his approach, his hesitation, his desire to lean in as one does to greet a woman and the sturdy clap on the shoulder he gives her instead.

  For two days after the storm I care neither for eating, drinking, nor sleeping. I can no longer read or write as before, but my only pleasure is to sit on the prow and look ceaselessly across the wide sea, that by the toil of my eyes I might quiet the fever of my mind. I can tell you a curious thing about the Ocean, one I’ve observed over many weeks: No matter how high or choppy the waves are surrounding the ship, the earth’s horizon appears eternally smooth and composed. I’ve been able to think of no explanation for this phenomenon except that perhaps God wills it for the comfort of travelers. He knows men are less afraid when they believe themselves moving away from tribulation into tranquillity. From the pilot I learned that, in our approach to Palestine, we will pass by Antioch with Syria Phenice on our left-hand side. Once we reach this place, our right will directly face God’s bosom, and only a matter of hours will keep us from nesting there. I begin to hate the night that snatches away my means of seeing and yearn only for the dawn, when I may sit again upon the prow, turn my eyes toward the East, and fix my gaze unflinchingly on that part of the sky where it joins the sea. Ach, mein Gott! How deep the love of Christ’s heavenly home must be for a saint, when an undevout, wretched, sinful pilgrim like myself feels so keen and sharp a longing for His earthly one!

  On the third morning, a handful of other pilgrims join me. From time to time one of the novices fancies he sees land and calls upon the others to look. A pious dispute evolves, one party seeing for sure the mountains of Palestine, the other party denying them. Through the course of this wrangling a pilgrim will inevitably lay a wager on land and call on the lookout man in the maintop to give his verdict, paying in a glass of malvoisie when proven wrong. They continue thus all day until dinner is served and they drift away.

  On the evening of the third day while everyone else is eating, I keep watch despite my hunger. The sun, low in the sky, has spread its lava across the waves, making me draw my knees up under my cassock to conserve what little warmth remains. I am shivering and stiff when she sidles out onto the other horn. We have not spoken since she publicly became her resurrected husband.

  “One of our philosophers wrote that those at sea could be counted among neither the living nor the dead,” Arsinoë says, not looking at me. “When we can do nothing but wait, we don’t even need these bodies.”

  Since she has taken Constantine’s name, Arsinoë’s face has settled into more masculine lines. I think of all the early saints who made themselves sexless before God: Marina, Pelagia, the radical virgin Thecla, who followed Paul in men’s clothes and was thrown to wild animals for her pains.

  “I would give every wretched bone in my body to have Saint Katherine back.” She pitches her voice low over the waves and wind, but it reaches my ear like a smooth skipped shell. I will do as I promised her brother and watch her until he reaches the shore. When he reaches the shore, this will all be over.

  “This man’s flesh is even heavier than my own,” she continues. “Once I’ve fulfilled my obligation to her, I can finally rid myself of the weight.”

  I sigh. I almost wish she could have spoken to Katherine. I have so much I want to know.

  “There are so many ways to dissolve, aren’t there, Friar?”

  Arsinoë turns on the horn, lost already, once, inside the robes of a drowned merch
ant. She studies her man’s hand.

  “Sometimes dissolution is a woman’s only way to be seen,” she says.

  The sun funnels into the sea, conical against two far-off purple peaks. A soft moment passes between us when neither wants to let the other know he sees; each wants to be alone with the knowledge. It is almost over.

  “The mountains,” she whispers.

  “Jerusalem,” say I.

  II

  THE CITY

  Rules for Pilgrimage

  FIRST ARTICLE: Should any pilgrims have come here without express permission from the Pope, they incurred upon themselves the sentence of excommunication and should report to the Father Guardian of Jerusalem at once. The Pope has excommunicated this Holy Land, as it is infested with all manner of Schismatics and Infidel, and will only allow pilgrims access by his blessed leave.

  SECOND ARTICLE: No pilgrim ought to wander alone about the holy places without a Saracen guide, because it is perilous and unwise.

  THIRD ARTICLE: The pilgrim should beware of stepping over the sepulchres of Saracens for they are greatly vexed by this, believing as they do that it torments their dead.

  FOURTH ARTICLE: Should any pilgrim be struck by a Saracen, he should bear it with patience for the glory of God and report it directly to the Interpreter, who will help if he is able.

  FIFTH ARTICLE: Let the pilgrim beware of chipping off fragments from the Holy Sepulchre and from spoiling the hewn stones thereof, for this is forbidden under pain of excommunication.

  SIXTH ARTICLE: Pilgrims of noble birth must not deface the holy places by drawing their coats-of-arms thereon, or by writing their names, or by scratching marble slabs, or by boring holes in them with iron tools to mark their having visited them.

  SEVENTH ARTICLE: Pilgrims must proceed to visit the holy places in an orderly manner and must not try to outrun one another, because the devotion of many is hindered thereby.

  EIGHTH ARTICLE: Pilgrims must beware of laughing together as they walk about Jerusalem, lest the Infidel suspect we are laughing at him.