by Sheri Holman
“Ser Niccolo?”
“Is your pallet comfortable, Friar Felix? I’m afraid the other pilgrims think it’s cursed. A man expired upon it just before that awful storm, and the sailors blamed it all on him.”
“A man died on this pallet?” I have to keep myself from leaping up.
“You’re not superstitious, are you?” He raises an eyebrow and returns to his writing.
“No,” I say. “Ser Niccolo?”
“Yes, Friar?”
“Why do you think your sister’s madness fixed upon Saint Katherine of Alexandria? Certainly there are other young virgins to whom she might have turned.”
He thinks long and hard before answering.
“I’ve often wondered that myself. We had a large icon of Katherine in our house that was part of my mother’s dowry. For years it hung in the room where my tutor taught me Latin and classic Greek, mathematics and geography. Arsinoë was a smart young girl and sometimes sat in with us. I wonder if her fixation did not begin there.”
“If you knew Arsinoë was mad and a danger to herself,” I ask, “why did you allow your sister to believe—and, worse, allow foolish pilgrims to believe—she was Saint Katherine’s Tongue?”
He is silent for a long time, regarding me over the lantern.
“If you can seduce a madness, Friar,” he says at last, “you can control a madness. It was wrong, but it was my way of coping. I believed if Arsinoë’s Katherine grew dependent on me, I could protect her from herself.”
“And the bones?”
“Did she show you bones?” he asks, startled.
“No,” I admit. “A man named Constantine told me devotees brought them.”
“A man named Constantine brought them is more like it.” Niccolo puts down his book in disgust. “This merchant showed up one day with a cow’s rib and claimed he had it from Katherine’s church in Hania. It seemed to greatly disturb my sister so I buried it, and the others they continued to bring, in the yard with the carcasses from our slaughterhouse.”
“So those bones were not holy?”
“You be the judge.” He shrugs. “Where would peasants and zealots have gotten true relics, Friar? Heaven itself would have had to provide them.”
He is right, brothers. Unless I am willing to concede that Saint Katherine willingly put herself into the hands of a madwoman, I have no reason to believe the bones Arsinoë claimed to possess—the bones I never saw—were real. And her confession of theft, as much as I want to solve that hurtful crime, cannot possibly have been more than prideful hollow boasting.
“Thank you for your honesty, Ser Niccolo,” I say, putting aside my book and pen. I am suddenly very tired.
“Thank you for your trust, Friar,” says he, and, noting my exhaustion, considerately blows out the light.
An Unrestful Night
Back at sea, my mind inevitably misgives to monstrosities, brothers. The Troyp is replaced by struggling Andromeda chained between two rocks, about to be devoured by the personified gullet of her mother’s pride. For many centuries after Perseus set up house with his rescued Andromeda, the bones of that slain sea monster rested on Joppa’s beach. Men say the skeleton was 90 feet tall and 200 feet long, and no one man owned it so it was enjoyed by all. Children swung from the sand-pocked ribs; poor families stretched fabric between the bones, creating a peaceful community of tents. As he terrorized in life, so this creature sheltered in death, a sort of Noah’s Ark to Joppa’s poor.
But as men covet the famous Ark, seeking it in the land of the Turk and in Aethiopia, the Emperor Vespasian, when he came to Palestine, coveted the bones of this sea monster. He ordered his men to drive spears into the Joppian tents, fling the children from their perches, and load the frame of this monster on a boat for Rome. For centuries it swung like a baby giant’s mobile, suspended above the public square for all Romans to enjoy, until at last Saint Sylvester had the bones dismantled. He knew full well that pilgrims in the Eternal City spent more time gawking at the carcass than at their prayers.
I’ve been sitting upon the horn of Contarini’s ship for the last few sleep-denied hours, brothers, watching the movement of torches on what used to be the sea monster’s shore. Nighttime still belongs to demons in a heathen land: Christians must content themselves with spiritual illumination, for they are kept in abject darkness, denied the comfort of any light whatsoever; while those wanderers in darkness, the wretched Infidel, have before each of their comfortable tents a pole lit with six bright lamps in honor of their accursed Mahomet. Some time ago, a phalanx of lanterns broke off from the Saracen camp, moving quickly toward dark Saint Peter’s Cellars. Now the cellars are ablaze, and a hundred smaller dots of light bob up the hillside.
My worst fear has come true, brothers. They are leaving me behind. Lando has succeeded with the Governor and given the order for his pilgrims to arise. Tomorrow will be spent in Holy Jerusalem, friends, he tells them. If not for Andromeda’s Rocks upsetting the water between us, I might certainly hear the joyful shouts of pilgrim thanksgiving, the bustle of rolling up pallets and repacking trunks. Ursus’s cry would reach me—To my knighthood!—and Arsinoë’s sigh of relief; she would be on her way inland long before Contarini’s ship disgorged its passengers. What have I done, brothers? She is escaping, and I am abandoned; she is on her way to Sinai, and I am still at sea.
O wretched Felix! O prideful Folly that led me to act so rashly! Would I had stayed asleep and not been taunted by those retreating torches. Would I had awakened tomorrow morning to find them gone, Saint Peter’s Cellars housing no more than footprints and half-eaten apples; better that than to wonder, tonight, which torch is John’s and if two shadows mingle in its light. Certainly, it is preferable to die in one’s sleep, brothers, than to be tortured, slowly, to death.
And here is the sea monster. In the pale moonlight, I spy his uneven wake making its way to us from Andromeda’s Rocks. He slithers over the waves, his long flippers propelling him forward. In a matter of moments the monster will be upon us, and this ill-lived life will be snuffed once and for all. Denying me His Holy Land, God has at least sent a swift and merciful death. I close my eyes and prepare to be devoured.
“Ser Nic? Is that you?”
A voice from the dark water. The sea monster—could it be?
“Abdullah?”
“Friar Felix?”
“What are you doing here? Why did you leave?” I whisper roughly. “I got locked out because of you.”
“Prayers, Friar. I had to grovel before Allah. What are you doing on the horn? That’s where Ser Nic sits when he cannot sleep.”
“Listen, Abdullah,” I say, “you must row me back to shore.”
“Forget it. I just came from there.”
He wedges his paddle in the galley’s side to keep from floating backward.
“Are they leaving?” I ask.
“The pilgrims? I don’t know.” He shrugs. “It’s all confused.”
“Now you listen to me, Peter Ber. If I am left behind, I will make your life a living hell,” I threaten, infuriated almost to tears by his casualness. “I will make certain not one more drop of wine passes your wretched Mameluke lips. I will witness to you night and day, calling upon our Lord and all his saints to bring plagues and boils upon your irresponsible apostate head. I will convert you back to Christ and then I will cast you into the pits of Hell—”
“All right, Friar.” The Mameluke holds his hands up in mock surrender. “For Chrissakes, come around to the ladder.”
Once in the rowboat, I can let out my breath. Up close, the Mameluke looks and smells like the drunk he is, disheveled and red-eyed, reeking of pilgrim malvoisie.
“The Governor clapped Lando in jail,” he tells me. “After a few hours, he was begging to have Contarini’s pilgrims come ashore. There’s no more lockout; Ser Nic will be right behind us.”
I glance back over my shoulder at the retreating galley. Ser Niccolo will be angry I have left him behind, but what choice do I
have, brothers? I cannot deliver his sister if she gets away.
The sky above is white with stars, and I lean back under the infinite Milky Way. Even if they have started, I can catch up. I can still make it.
“So, did you and Ser Nic talk about me while I was gone?” The Mameluke pulls unevenly on his oars and steers the boat crookedly.
“No,” I say unkindly.
I see the constellations Cepheus and Cassiopeia enthroned over their daughter’s looming rocks, and I offer to take over rowing as we approach.
“Don’t you trust me?” The drunken Mameluke waves his oars in the air. “After all I’m doing for you, countryman?”
“Of course, I trust you,” I snap. “I just thought you might be tired.”
“You never get tired when there are two of you,” he shouts, over the roaring water, as we approach Andromeda’s Rocks. “When Peter’s exhausted, Abdullah takes over!”
I feel the swift current suck us closer to the stones, then thrust us back into the sea. I can only distinguish the outlines of the rocks in this lactic starlight, but the weighty nearness of them curves above us, recycling cold waves over the bow of our little boat.
“I wondered if you and Nic spoke of me, because I’ve been looking for his sister for days, and there you had her all along. It’s so lucky!”
I grip the boat’s sides tightly as Abdullah digs in his oars and thrusts us mightily into the channel. Water squeezes into the pass and hurls itself against the rocks, crashing down upon us, nearly sweeping me from my seat. Abdullah heaves once more and spears us through.
With Andromeda’s Rocks behind us, the harbor quiets, and it is only a short ride to the beach. Under cover of darkness, while the Mameluke pulls the small boat onto shore, I kneel down and kiss this holy sand. I will never risk you again.
“Looks like you were right.” The Mameluke points to a troop of bobbing torches. “Something’s going on.”
I push the Mameluke aside and race up the slope, stumbling over my soaked robes. A black, agitated cloud of pilgrims swarms outside the cave. They are still here, brothers! Thank God I have not lost them.
“Friar!” My patron’s son, Ursus, stands apart from the crowd, his hands twisted in his father’s beads. When he sees me standing dumbstruck on the path, he rushes forward and buries his tearstained face in my robes.
“It was so awful. She slept right beside me, and I’m the one who smelled her.”
“Ursus, calm down,” I say, suddenly aware of a thick, sweet fog hanging over the cellar. “What happened here?”
“Where were you, Friar? We needed you so badly, and I thought you were dead in this awful country.”
“Shhhh.” I kiss the top of his sweating blond head. Behind him, our pilgrims stand in postures of disbelief. Some hide their faces in their hands, some chew their fingernails worriedly. For the first time I realize the torches around Saint Peter’s Cellars might spell something besides our departure for Jerusalem.
“Take me to the Archdeacon, son,” I say.
“What happened?” the Mameluke asks, his eyes wide.
I shake my head and leave him to gather his news from the Saracens.
Ursus pulls me through the crowd of disoriented, weeping pilgrims, past where his father leans against the cavern wall, staring blankly before him. Two Homesick, as tremulous on land as they were at sea, hover around him.
“It was the Archangel Gabriel, I saw him myself,” one says. “He touched his flaming sword to her hair.”
“No,” the other argues. “I saw an imp creep in, as black as could be, and piss a stream of fire across her face.”
Ursus pulls me past them, down the hill to a flat square of land just beyond the shore, and points to a figure kneeling in the moonlight.
“Thank you, son.” I squeeze him tight. “Why don’t you check on your father? He looked like he could use you.”
Ursus runs back and I walk down the hill.
Someone has twisted two palm branches into a spiky cross and thrust it down where the earth has been recently turned. As though offended by the smell of its charge, the cross bends away, rustling its fronds woefully in the night breeze. Tendrils of smoke escape the earth like steam from a piecrust.
Before the grave, my friend sits silently. His eyes are swollen and caked with dust; his hands pat the hot earth. He looks up to see me and flings himself into my arms, where we rock like two old Jewish men over their dead.
“She’s gone, Felix.” John’s grief drips down my neck. “I loved her. I loved her even as I watched that woman’s face peel back from the bone.”
“What happened here?” I ask. He shakes his head.
“I don’t want to believe it.”
“Did Arsinoë harm herself? Is that what happened?”
“No,” he whispers.
“She’s a very disturbed young woman,” I say.
“Felix, Arsinoë did not harm herself. She set Emelia Priuli on fire, and she ran away.”
Have I heard him correctly? This body is Emelia Priuli’s? With both hands I brush away the sand that covers her face, flick off the russet crabs that already nibble her pink-black flesh.
“Why would she do such a thing?” I ask in disbelief.
He shakes his head and will not answer.
“John.” A horrible fear grips me. “Did you know she was planning this?”
“How can you suggest such a thing?” He shoves me away from him, confirming my suspicion that, if nothing else, he guessed at her intentions.
“I heard you this afternoon.”
“Since when did you become a spy?” John asks angrily.
“Since everything I held sacred became threatened by this woman.”
“She is not a monster!” he shouts. “She was kidnapped. She was raped. Someone is trying to kill her. Can you blame her for trying to protect herself?”
“How is murdering someone else going to protect her?”
“She knew her kidnapper would be looking for a woman, so she made the only woman present unrecognizable. She has a mission.”
“John!” I cry. “Listen to yourself!”
“Oh, God, Felix!” John presses Emelia’s grainy black fingers to his lips and weeps over them like a child. “In how many graves has Arsinoë left her body?
“She needs her assassin to believe this talon is her hand. ‘But wait,’ say the pilgrims, ‘doesn’t her hand lie off the coast of Cyprus where the sailors threw her dead body to stop the storm? We saw her sink ourselves.’
“I tell you, Arsinoë will never die, Felix, she will just go on and on, borrowing the deaths of others. And on the Last Day, she’ll appear before God with a whole regiment of identities behind her and she’ll say to Him, ‘But I thought I could die in the body of another and still live myself. I thought I could exist as a poem in a hundred corrupt translations and still retain an honest meaning.’”
Only now, brothers, do I fathom the true extent of John’s feelings for the merchant’s wife. Someone, somewhere, believes the hand he holds to be Arsinoë’s, and that will suffice. If he cannot embrace her, he will embrace the perception of her, the hot echo of her against dead skin. I gently pull the stiff fingers from his mouth and cover them with pebbles. He is, after all, still a priest.
“Come away from this place.” I pull John to his feet and lead him up the hill. Dawn is only a few hours away. I will need to find the strength to tell Ser Niccolo that his sister is more disturbed than we thought. Not only is she a runaway and liar, now she is a murderess.
And, God help us, now she is gone.
How Someone Finally Came to Us
Sometime before sunrise, the Saracens, tired of being ignored, pushed the pilgrims back into the cellar, locking us in with the rotted-melon fog of burned flesh and our escalating theories. No one truly witnessed anything, except, I learn, my patron’s son.
Emelia Priuli had flirted too democratically to feel safe sleeping next to any one pilgrim, so she positioned her pallet between the
wall and the unthreatening young Ursus Tucher. He takes me by the hand and walks me to the ember upon which she slept, showing me the buzzard streaks that blacken the wall behind her pallet and his. His face is pale and troubled, and he tries to speak several times before I ask if there’s something on his mind.
“Friar, do you remember when we arrived you told me to look for the pearl in the dunghill?” He draws me back into the corner of the cave, digs in his pocket, and deposits something cold and smooth in my hand. Five angular bits of red light. Five perfect bits of polished glass.
“Where did you get these?” I ask.
“Did you see that young man I spoke to for so long, when the Saracen merchants came? He’s the son of a very strict Saracen lord, and he’d gotten himself into a scrape gambling. It’s quite unfair, really; these jewels came off his father’s shabbiest coat. Anyway, I drove a hard bargain—and he was desperate to sell before his father found out. Friar, have you ever seen such rubies?”
“Have you shown your father these stones?” I ask, rolling the glass in my palm.
“No, I bought them with my own money. It took almost all of it, but think of what we would have paid for rubies this large back home!”
“Ursus—”
“Only now they are ruined, Friar.” Ursus looks ready to cry. “I can hardly bear to touch them. I think these rubies killed my father’s friend, the Lady Emelia.”
“Son, how could that be?” I ask.
“She slept right next to me, Friar,” he whispers. “What if that Saracen wanted his jewels back and set fire to the wrong person by mistake?”
