by Sheri Holman
I see the tonsure first when she ducks under the overhang; it catches the light like a dull ivory plate. To my horror, the black-and-white robes of a Dominican monk cover her malnourished woman’s body.
“That’s mine, over there. I didn’t have a headache, but I thought I could use the blessing.”
I lift the short brown curls she points to and let them sift through my fingers. This is the answer to my prayer. It is over. I have no more hope.
“Where did you get that habit?” I ask flatly.
“From a monk I met with no desire to go home.” Arsinoë looks about uncomfortably. “Let’s go upstairs where we can talk. I’m all cramped from hiding beneath this rock.”
My candle has gone out, so I blindly follow her up the stairs to Helena’s hewn bedchamber. A stone shelf that would have once supported a feather mattress provides us enough room to sit, but I cannot bear to be near her. I pace the small room.
“I know you are upset, Felix,” she says. “I booked passage with a caravan leaving tomorrow night for the Sinai. The Calinus might be looking for Constantine, and I couldn’t very well go as myself—”
“Dominican. That’s my order.”
“I know.”
“You are going to Sinai in my clothes.”
“Please, Felix. I’ve been waiting all night to talk to you.”
She knew I would come back here. I didn’t even know myself until my feet touched the stairs. Why does she think she knows me?
“Perhaps you should have stayed with us instead of killing Emelia Priuli.” I turn on her. “How could you murder an innocent woman?”
“I did not kill Emelia,” the Tongue cries. “Does John believe I killed her?”
“Everyone believes it.”
Arsinoë rises and drifts anxiously to the far wall of Saint Helena’s chamber, where a small conch-shaped basin, back in the Age of Miracles, caught perpetually dripping holy water.
“Come listen, Felix. If you put your ear to this shell they say you can hear the souls in Purgatory.”
I join her by the basin and put my ear to the shell. I hear low moans and ancient creaking waterwheels, the loud rush of a thousand arrows released into a storm cloud. I suspect it is the noise of pilgrims walking about above us, but I don’t say so.
“Poor Emelia.” Arsinoë sighs. “She was everything I am not. She commanded love just by being alive.”
“She commanded lust, Madame,” I remind her, “which is an entirely different affair.”
“Is it?” she asks. “I find it hard to love something for which I don’t also feel lust.”
“And do you lust for other people’s lives?” I ask angrily. “You seem to love usurping them.”
“I did not kill Emelia Priuli,” she insists.
“Yet you disappeared at the very moment of her combustion!” I shout.
“I did not kill her!”
“Then who did?” I demand.
“My brother!” The Tongue spins away from Purgatory and faces me like a distorted mirror. She is my height, she wears my clothes. She will take me if I let her.
“When our guard let him in, I knew my time had come,” she says softly, her hands involuntarily going to her new-shaved tonsure. “He lifted his low lantern before every pilgrim, obviously searching for someone. When he got to me, I felt his eyes on my short hair, my merchant’s robes, my woman’s leg. I saw him hesitate, look around—at me, I closed my eyes—at your patron’s son, at Emelia Priuli. She slept on her stomach with her face pillowed in her arms, her skirt fanned out over Ursus, asleep with all the proprietariness of her waking self.
“He melted toward her, the only woman in the cave. I watched him lean down, place his hand on her back, and whisper something into her ear. She didn’t stir, and after a moment he moved on, completing his circuit of the cave, slipping out as quietly as he sneaked in.
“We smelled the smoke, and I used that chance to run away. I knew he made a mistake.”
There is no John here to shield her or manufacture excuses. She is finally exposed for the fraud she is.
“I was with your brother, you liar, the night Emelia caught fire,” I tell her. “Your brother was asleep on Contarini’s ship.”
“My brother would not have mistaken me,” Arsinoë says contemptuously. “He sent the man who took me from Rhodes.”
“Why would your brother want you dead?” I snap.
She shakes her head miserably. “I don’t know. I didn’t think he would be so angry I took the bones.”
This delusion again! I can take no more of it.
“There are no bones.” I grab Arsinoë by the shoulders, and my hands burn from her heat. “This is your madness speaking. The bones Constantine brought were cow bones. You brother buried them in the back yard.”
She looks upon me with eyes full of pity. “Would my brother chase me halfway across the world for cow bones, Friar?”
I fling her away from me. Truly, my hands burn.
“First he stole me from the church on Rhodes,” she says. “Then while I was captive, he came on board our ship and stole Katherine from my cabin. But he underestimated me, and I escaped.”
“Why would your brother want Saint Katherine’s body in the first place?” I argue. “He is a scholar.”
“Nikolas commanded the relics and they came. ‘Katherine wants a new skin,’ he told people. Oh, God, I remember that awful day so clearly. Constantine held out the first one like an apple. He told me I’d ordered him to bring it while I was in a trance. It was a rib, and it was real; I recognized instantly the smoky amber bonfire of her. Less than a month later, another came, this time with no provenance.”
Arsinoë wraps herself tighter in her Dominican robes and looks away.
“Katherine used to ask for icons,” she says wistfully. “You saw them, Felix, as if she needed a constant reminder of how she had lived, in her flesh. I remember her desire for those images. I remember her telling people, through me, to bring them. But when Constantine told me I had commanded him to bring a bone, that I don’t remember. It was the first time Katherine used me without my knowledge; for the first time I was truly just a tongue.”
“If what you say is remotely true,” I counter, not wanting to give her even that inch, “what will he do with her? Sell her?”
“He is a translator, Friar.” She leans against the far wall. “He kidnaps languages and holds them hostage. My brother can’t bear that Heaven won’t speak directly to him. He wants to force it.”
I want no more to do with these people. I have remission from all my sins. My slate is clean. I throw up my hands and start for the stairs.
“You believed once,” she pleads. “The night of the storm, the night I discovered her missing; you knew I kept her relics inside my trunk. You smelled the myrrh. You, Felix, saved our lives the night I despaired of making it without him and tried to drown us both. Why suddenly do you no longer believe?”
“I no longer believe,” I cry, trying to keep control of my voice, “because I no longer care. You destroyed whatever bond Saint Katherine and I had, if in fact there ever was a bond. You have made me doubt my entire life.”
I can see it from her face: She never once considered the toll her pretenses were taking on my faith. In her robes and tonsure, she looks like nothing more than a worried, remorseful Friar Felix. I have not even my own shame to myself anymore.
“Do you honestly believe that?” she asks, stricken.
“I do,” I whisper.
“I do not want you to doubt,” Arsinoë says, reaching into her pocket. She gently places into my hands the book I’d last seen in her trunk the night of the storm, called Wonders of the East, a collection of oddities and mirabilia from the edges of the world. Inside, the pages have been glued together, hollowed out with a knife, creating the kind of false box used by smugglers and nervous ladies of the court.
“The caravans for Sinai leave only once a week. My brother’s name is on the list to go tomorrow. If I have a
head start, I can save her—but I have to have a head start. It’s your decision: Will you detain my brother for me, Felix? Will you make sure he misses tomorrow night’s caravan?”
I turn the book page and am suddenly back in Ulm on a drizzly summer morning eight years ago. Abbot Fuchs ordered our convent treasurer dug up when we learned he’d died swallowing alms money. Decomposed flesh so soft, Abbot Fuchs could push through his chest and extract the thirty coins he’d ingested. All I saw was his mouth, however—his maggoty lips, his mossy teeth, his slippery pink pallet.
In the hollowed-out Book of Wonders, a little leathery patch no bigger than my largest toe.
A human tongue.
I look up for the woman Arsinoë, my eyes streaming with tears, but she has gone. Under the tongue she has left a note, just a single simple sentence.
Will you come when I call, my husband?
Confession
Forgive me, O Lord, for I have sinned. It’s been six hours since my last confession. I am in possession of a stolen relic, the tongue of Your daughter Saint Katherine of Alexandria, and I know not what to do.
Is this a mockery or a miracle, Lord? The woman who placed this tongue in my care behaves like a crazy person; she has no self of her own but assumes the bodies and souls of others, confusing the very notions of Life and Death. She speaks with Saint Katherine’s voice; she moves now in Friar Felix’s clothes. In the brief duration of our acquaintance, already she has expired twice.
And yet. . . .
The only piece of Katherine I knew was safe, that I saw with my own eyes secure within its reliquary, this woman has just put into my hands, using it as a pledge of her good faith, as one might put up a goat or a silver candlestick. She asks me to believe, but everything in me rebels, Lord! Saint Paul tells us that to work Your miracles, You have chosen what the world holds weak, so as to abash the strong; You have chosen what the world holds base and contemptible; nay, You have chosen what is nothing, so as to bring to nothing what is now in being. I think upon the Apostle’s words as I study this thin, withered bit of girl cupped in my palms. Is anything weaker than a snip of displaced muscle? Is anything more contemptible than a human being not only dead but disassembled? My desire to walk away from Saint Katherine and the conspiracy surrounding her is what is now in being, Lord; You have chosen this frail tongue to bring my resistance to nothing.
As I see it, I have two choices. I can either deposit this relic in the capable hands of Father Guardian, who will see it safely returned to Cyprus, or I can take it as a token of Saint Katherine’s faith in my abilities and do as Arsinoë begged: Keep her brother from reaching Sinai.
Which is the correct path, Lord? I have never been so uncertain in my life. One road leads to safety, losing me in the process Katherine’s trust forever, should Arsinoë truly be performing her will. The other road leads to more lies and subterfuge, glory or perhaps to Hell. I am caught between the Tongue and the Lone Scholar, between faith and reason, and I am too weak a man to choose my own salvation.
Grant me, O Lord, a moment of illumination as You did Your beloved son, Saint Augustine, when he too struggled against his destiny. In his deepest despair, that dear man heard a child’s voice from the house next door sing, Take it and read, take it and read, and, seizing the Bible in his lap, fell upon the passage Not in reveling and drunkeness, not in lust and wantoness, and so knew Your will. I have nothing with me but a collection of Jerome’s writings, Lord, his On the Distances of Places and a few of his letters. I am opening my one book, Lord, dropping my finger on the page, and I pray, in my deepest humility, that You send me a sign as you did Saint Augustine.
I am reading the words, Lord:
Avoid men whom you see with braids:
their hair, contrary to the Apostle’s admonition,
is worn long like a woman’s.
Is this Your revelation, Lord? But Niccolo’s hair is short, as is Arsinoë’s. This message I will take to be a false message and will try again.
I am dropping my finger again, Lord, and reading the words Jerome translated from the Book of Genesis:
Look not back, neither stay thou in all the country about; save thyself in the mountain, lest perchance thou be taken captive.
Save thyself in the mountain.
Look not back.
Thy will be done, Lord.
In Jesus’ name. Amen.
The Quarter
I walk down David Street, avoiding the sluice of dung, butcher’s entrails, and dumped chamber pots from the windows above, every manner of blood and runny thing. In winter, rain purges the streets like Hercules’ Augean stables, but when it is hot, like today, the liquid in these trenches bubbles and dries up, forming pestilential pools at the low parts of the city.
By checking the sun, I know I am still headed south, away from the Holy Sepulchre and Saint John’s Hospital, toward the Armenian and Jewish quarters. Ser Niccolo told me he would be staying in the al-Rishah section of the Jewish quarter, but as the hovels grow more and more ruinous, the people more and more abject, I wonder if I heard correctly. By order of the Sultan, Christians in Jerusalem are ordered to wear blue turbans, Jews must wear yellow, like the yellow patches they wear back home. To further spite the Jews, this Sultan ordered an open abattoir built in the middle of their neighborhood, across from one of their synagogues, so that while they pray they might breathe the stench of death. The whole quarter reeks of blood and punctured bowels.
At dawn the Saracens woke us, banging the doors of the Holy Sepulchre and practically pulling them off their hinges when we didn’t leave quickly enough. Frantically, the pilgrims ran around kissing the holy places as if they’d never see them again, when in fact we are scheduled to return for a second vigil later tonight. The Saracens entered with sticks and ran us out like cattle. I saw Arsinoë no more and assumed she escaped in the stampede. The more I comtemplated her confused theories, brothers, the more they made a chilling sort of sense. I remembered the translator’s bizarre behavior on Saint John’s Eve: the Mameluke’s appearance by the ladies’ cabin, and their sudden departure. Did Ser Niccolo come onto Lando’s ship with the express purpose of stealing Saint Katherine from Arsinoë’s trunk? Did he distract me with talk of translation and lessons on clapping, while that thief-in-the-night Mameluke snatched up the brown bag Arsinoë had worn around her neck? There is only one way to find out. Today I will learn, once and for all, the secret of Saint Katherine’s body. Or if there is any body at all.
Ducking under the low archways and flattening myself to let others pass, I can see into the small shops. Ancient men in rolled velvet sleeves draw straight lines across parchment. They dip their brushes into jeweled pots and trace the letters YHWH until their soulless, vowelless name for the great Jehovah fills a page. This is the al-Rishah quarter, named for their feathers and quills, a quarter of timeless writers and illuminators and scholars. Dogs run free through their shops, licking gilt from the floor with their pink tongues. Only when I see so many dogs in one place do I realize I had been conscious of their absence. A few streets west, in the Muslim quarter, I am told dogs are clubbed to death, considered unclean by the followers of the Proto-dog Mahomet. A curly-tail trots past me with a donkey’s hoof in his mouth. I follow him down three flights of stairs before I remember I am here for a reason and turn back to the Via David.
I have no idea of Ser Niccolo’s exact address along this street but hope I may stumble upon him or someone who has seen him. I try to imagine what kind of friends he would have in this infected area, equidistant from the abattoir and the city’s leper colony. I dare not venture toward those melting milky reaches where the most envious and lustful creatures in the world dwell. We have all heard the rumors back in Ulm that lepers are creatures of the Jews, who are themselves in the employ of the Sultan of Egypt. Together they are planning the overthrow of Christendom, first by poisoning the wells and then by invasion. I paid the rumor no mind, especially as it seemed spread by men of the lowest character wh
o could not keep gainful employment anywhere in the city. Now, trapped in a triangle of leper, Jew, and Infidel, I shudder and pull my robes tightly around me. Everyone looks suspicious. Yellow turbans touch, beards wag; plots are hatched in every stall and tea salon I pass. The tailors whisper to the shoemakers, the cotton cleaners, tossing white clouds into the air with their bows, signal to the butchers. That monk is spying on us. Keep silence, compatriots, silence like the bottom of a black and icy well. Go home, my leper friends, pretend we’ve never met—
“Christian.” A hand on my shoulder. I jump and spin around.
Yellow turban. A Jew.
“What?”
“Come into my shop, my friend.”
He speaks heavily accented Latin. I barely understand him.
“No. I don’t want to.”
“No need to be afraid. I’ll pour us a glass of wine.”
Bushy black eyebrows arch up toward his yellow bulb, and his chin beard salutes the sky. He lays hold of my sleeve and tugs me behind him, down the street, into a cluttered shop. Dusty codices line the shelves, figurines, red glass lamps. He clears a stool of papers and gestures for me to sit. I pull away and jar a tray of loose wooden splinters.
“From the True Cross,” the merchant says solemnly.
“Really, I’m not here to buy. I am looking for a friend.”
“And look at this: crocodile heads.”
On the shelf to his left, fifteen monstrous lizard heads, glittering eyes, gaping jaws, teeth painted red to give the impression they’ve just torn human flesh. At least I think they are painted.
“Only the finest, from Crocodopolis on the Nile.” He takes an enormous triangular head from the shelf and swoops down on me. “Gra! Gra! Gra!”
“Really, I must find my friend.” The crocodile teeth catch my nose.
“I am going to eat you!”
“Please!” I push past him and find the door. The Jew’s cat screeches when I step on her tail, trying to get out.
“Wait, come back!” he calls after me. “I’ll make a good price. I have many things for Christ!”
