by Sheri Holman
“What did Heaven gain my sister?” the translator asks. “The only power she ever had in this life lay in giving herself away. Nobody wanted Arsinoë. They only wanted the saint that spoke through her.”
“Yourself included?”
Ser Niccolo studies his hands. “I lived in a house with a body part. It was hard to love the tongue as much as I loved the words that fell from it.”
Constantine clung to Arsinoë to keep from drowning; John pursued her to assuage his guilt. I try to see Arsinoë as that little girl in a big house, measuring herself against her saint, but the Katherine she presses herself against is a rosy German fräulein, a Katherine for me.
“Don’t feel sorry for her, Felix.” Niccolo stands and paces the small room. “My sister understood what true saints understand: that a person cannot live in Heaven until the self is annihilated on earth. It’s the law of translation: One language must die to be reborn in the next.”
“She wanted to die,” I say.
“You are only fortunate she died before she could put her mad plan into effect,” Niccolo says. “Had she escaped with those bones, all the priests and scholars and young girls of the world would have found themselves without a patroness.”
“Arsinoë told me she believed Katherine wanted to return to her monastery at Sinai,” I say.
“Oh, Friar, how like a monk you think!” Niccolo laughs. “My sister believed Saint Katherine wanted to go home. Not back to a comfortable crypt to be venerated by pilgrims. She wanted to return to oblivion, hidden in the desert, lost forever, as my sister believed God wanted her.”
“She wants to make Saint Katherine disappear?” I ask, suddenly more nauseated than I have ever been in my life. Oh, God, what have I turned loose on the world?
“Why do you think I went to all this trouble to get her back? If Arsinoë had reached Mount Sinai, Saint Katherine’s body would have vanished as abruptly as it first appeared.”
“Felix!”
I look up. John is panting in the doorway.
“What’s wrong?”
“You have to come with me.”
“I can’t right now, John.”
“Felix. It’s serious.”
Niccolo extinguishes the dying candles on Christ’s altar with sand.
“I’ll be right back,” I tell him.
After the chapel’s midnight, I am blinded by the wheel of candles hanging from the Anastasis. An angry crowd has gathered around the Edicule. Father Guardian is furious.
“It is a crime against God and your fellow pilgrims, and not one of you can plead ignorance because the rules have been read to you now three times.”
“What’s going on?”
John steers me around to the back of Christ’s tomb. A hunk of marble, big as my fist, has been hewn away. Where the chisel struck looks like teethmarks on an apple.
“Someone has stolen part of the Holy Sepulchre?” I ask.
“Not just someone. Lord Tucher.”
I swing around to find him. He’s leaning against a pillar with his hands tucked inside his sleeves, calmly listening to Father Guardian. He catches my eye and smiles.
“Why do you think it was Lord Tucher?” I whisper. I have whispered not a word of my patron’s confession to anyone.
“He’s been kneeling back here all night. He gets up, and a few minutes later we notice half the Sepulchre is gone? It must have been him.”
“People steal from here all the time. There’s not much we can do about it.”
John stares at me in exaggerated disbelief. “That’s all you have to say? You’re not going to try to get it back?”
“What am I supposed to do, accuse my patron when I saw him do nothing but pray? John, I was in the middle of an important discussion with Ser Niccolo.”
John stares at me horrified. This is obviously about more than the Sepulchre. I would tell him how I tricked the translator if I weren’t increasingly more convinced I have made a terrible mistake.
“What has he been saying to you?”
“Nothing.” I look away.
“He’s trying to turn you against her, isn’t he?” John grabs me by my robes.
“Leave me alone, John.” I shake off the Archdeacon. “You don’t know everything.”
I rush back to Christ’s prison, but as I expect, Niccolo is gone. He stands with his lips pressed against the main doors, murmuring for someone to release him. My God, brothers, Arsinoë wants to make my wife disappear.
“Pilgrims!” Father Guardian’s voice booms. Flanked by two important-looking Eastern Christians, he threatens like a street prophet. “We will not leave this place until the stolen piece of the Holy Sepulchre has been returned. That means everyone, Eastern, Syrian, Latin alike.”
A great protest goes up. Shouting and pushing and name-calling. Anyone seen with a metal instrument tonight is suspect. The bickering priests accuse each other; the graffiti artists swagger, defiant. Through it all, Lord Tucher maintains his equanimity. He is such a bad liar, is it possible he can be responsible?
Father Guardian commands silence in the church. “Please, pilgrims, we don’t want the Eastern Christians to think badly of us. Give back the stone anonymously, and all will be forgotten.”
Lord Tucher listens politely, then turns his attention to John, who I’m sure is reciting the Ten Commandments.
Hours pass. Father Guardian pleads, allows no one to sleep. “Through the actions of one, we all stand accused,” he admonishes. “Give back the stone and pardon us all.”
All during the night, Niccolo wanders the church like one of the earth’s dispossessed. He returns to the door every few minutes to try it, speaks against it as though his breath will animate the wood and cause it draw back before him. From where I sit nearby, I can tell the hour by the thickening stubble on his cheek. Rich sable, it must be close to morning.
“They won’t let us out till daybreak; you’re wasting your time,” I tell him sharply. His constant attempts at the door are wearing thin. “Why don’t you relax and wait it out?”
He ignores me and pulls on the door handle with both hands, curling his body like a strung bow.
“You’ve already missed your caravan for the Sinai, what’s the rush?”
Niccolo turns and looks at me sharply, both hands still on the handle. “What caravan to Sinai?”
“Don’t play dumb. The one you were to be on tonight.”
Niccolo releases the door and crosses to me.
“Who said anything about the Sinai? I was headed to Alexandria tonight.”
Now it’s my turn to be shocked. In truth he never had mentioned the Sinai.
“What’s in Alexandria?”
“A ship back to Greece. I was going home. That’s why you gave me the tongue. To take back.”
“But she said you were taking the bones to Sinai.”
“Who said?”
“I saw Saint Katherine’s bones in your trunk.”
“Yes, but they don’t belong to me. I’m taking them back to Italy and Rouen and wherever else her mad devotees got them.”
“You are not going on to Sinai?”
“How many times do I have to say it? Who told you I was going to Sinai, Abdullah?”
I shake my head slowly.
“Who?”
“Your sister.”
“My sister is dead,” Niccolo says slowly, deliberately. “You told me so yourself.”
“I lied,” I whisper. “She lives.”
Before I can move, Niccolo seizes me and slams me against the door. Once. Twice. I feel the bones in my back separate and crack.
“All this time, you’ve let me think my sister was dead? What kind of sick priest are you?”
“I believed her,” I choke. “I believed that lying Tongue.”
“You trusted a woman with no self of her own, Friar?” Ser Niccolo breathes in my face. “Reason it out: If she has no self, she suffers no pain. If she suffers no pain, she has no feelings. If she has no feelings, she is
without a soul. A soulless creature is a monster, Friar. You sold your saint to a monster.”
Next to me, I hear a key move in the lock. From halfway across the church, Father Guardian hears it too and is beside us in an instant, his mouth against the crack. He barks something at the guard and the door slams shut.
“No one, I repeat no one, will leave this church until the stone is returned. I don’t care if we all turn cannibal. There will be no food or water or any hope of outside air until I see that stone.”
“I have to get out.” Niccolo catches Father Guardian’s cassock. “I’m not supposed to be here.”
“Tell that to the thief.” Father Guardian shakes him off. “He is responsible for your suffering, not I.”
“Felix, do you realize what you’ve done?” Niccolo pulls on the door like Samson working the pillars at Philistra. “She has gotten away. You will never see your saint again!”
It is all my fault. The monster Arsinoë is on her way to Sinai and no one can stop her. I leave Ser Niccolo and run through a crowd of fighting pilgrims for Lord Tucher.
Chisels drawn, fists raised, the pilgrims lunge at each other, connect knuckle to bare skin. Criminal, they scream. Despoiler. Cunt. Ursus watches wide-eyed, as if it were a drunken brawl in Ulm’s main square instead of the blackest kind of sacrilege. Calmer heads rush to break it up, but the rage is too hot.
I am sick with fear and disgust. When John runs to separate the combatants, I grab Lord Tucher by the arm and drag him away from the melee.
“Look what you’re doing.” I hold him by the collar as if he were my child rather than my patron, turn him toward the fight. “You’re turning brother against brother, fostering strife in the holiest church on earth. These men are damning themselves—all because of you.”
His pupils flick between the fists and my face. Ursus has joined the fight, swinging a thick Mary in Agony candle at people’s knees. I see him wince when Ursus takes a boot to the neck.
“I’m the only one who knows what you really are.” I speak into his ear, crowding out the shouts and curses of the pilgrims. “Seems as good a time as any to inform Ursus his father is a thief.”
I drop his collar and head toward the fray. Wounded, Ursus has crawled outside the tangle, dragging himself on his elbows. He looks up and sees me.
“Make them stop, Friar Felix,” he sobs.
“Ask your father to make it stop, Ursus,” I shout, loud enough for Tucher to hear. “He’s a far more powerful man than I.”
“All right!” Lord Tucher grabs my shoulder, pulls me away from his son. “I took the stone. But I can’t give it back.”
We spin around behind a thick choir column, into the indigo darkness of an abandoned chapel.
“You must give it back. We have to leave here.”
“I won’t. I can’t.”
“You stole it.”
Lord Tucher draws himself up to his full height. He reaches in his pocket and holds out the stone to me.
“You do it,” he says.
Without thinking, I grab his wrist and pull him back toward the Anastasis.
“Let me go!” he screams, in absolute terror. He twists his body against my grip, struggling back toward the abandoned chapel. I have him too tightly, force his arm straight like a flagstaff, his hand full of Christ’s tomb. I want everyone to see.
“No! Don’t!” He tries to draw in his arm, but I snap his elbow sharply, lock it into place, press my mouth hard against his ear.
“Let’s let the other pilgrims decide. Let’s ask John and Conrad and Father Guardian and Ursus.” I wrench him toward me and push him toward the light. He struggles with more strength than I knew he possessed.
“Don’t expose me!” The flailing man drops to his knees, pulling me down with him. “I’ll do anything you say, just don’t shame me in front of my son!”
Lord Tucher sobs against my knees. I squeeze his bloodless wrist and the stone rolls to the floor. A perfect diamond. A golden cup. Nothing on earth has more value than this hacked bit of stone.
“Get up,” I command. “I will return this rock for you, and I, Lord Tucher, will name your penance. I will brook no whining, no resistance. You will do as I say, or you will be revealed as a thief and a coward before the whole Church. Do you understand?”
He nods slowly from where he lies.
I walk to Father Guardian, who still tries in vain to part the fighting pilgrims. Drawing him aside, I slip the stone into his pocket, tell him I found it near the Adam Chapel, that the thief must have repented but was too ashamed to come forth publicly. Father Guardian studies me to determine if I am that ashamed thief, but I hold his eye, refusing to stand accused. At long last, he breaks away and pounds twice upon the locked doors. They swing open as if by magic.
“Get out of here, you wicked men,” he shouts. “You’re lucky I don’t excommunicate every last one of you!”
Niccolo and I rush through the doors, each bent on the same creature. We find him sprawled out in the courtyard, the white donkey tethered to his ankle. At first I think he’s dead, but then I smell the grapy syrup on his labored breath.
“Peter, wake up.” Niccolo shakes him roughly. The donkey turns up her head and brays. “Wake up, you idiot.”
“What happened to you?” The former Mameluke struggles upright, rubbing his tongue across his mossy teeth. “I waited all night.”
“I got locked in. Are my things safe?”
“That’s a nice hello.” Peter throws his arms over the donkey and pulls himself to his feet. “I spend all night here in the cold, and all you care about are your things.”
“Peter, you’re drunk,” I say.
“Thanks to that friend of yours.” He squints. “And I thought I was the most wicked sinner you knew.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The fey little Dominican who recognized me from Joppa. He said he was looking for you, Felix, to make you a present of some Cyprian wine. When I told him you were inside, we drank it ourselves.”
“What time did he leave?” Niccolo demands.
“Can’t really say. That’s some strong stuff from Cyprus.”
Niccolo shoves Peter aside and throws open his wooden trunk. On top is the woven feed bag that Arsinoë wore around her neck the night I saved her. Niccolo unties the drawstring and looks inside.
“My sister has fulfilled your prophecy, Felix.” He flings open the bag, and a hacked, gristly cow’s head bounces across the marble.
“My money is gone too.” He slams the trunk lid shut, grabs the fallen Mameluke, and slaps him hard across the face. And again. And again.
Peter stretches out his arms to me, weeping, begging me to save him. But I cannot. I must find Lord Tucher. It is time for him to learn his penance.
III
THE MOUNTAIN
i
DESERT OF THE SINAI THE WADI OF HACHSEVE SUMMER 1483
Wonders of the East
After two weeks in the wilderness, brothers, after the betrayals and the violations, the thefts and recriminations—when suspicion threatens to bury this pilgrimage more completely than any desert sandstorm—Fortune, festively arraying herself for our wake, sends us a caravan.
At first, we bristle. Easterners and Westerners do not usually look upon one another save with loathing and, if reason did not hold them back, would rush at each other like angry dogs. The caravan’s advance guard, comprised of hired desert savages only one degree less nakedly wretched than their cousins, our camel drivers, sniffs our flank warily. Surely the Arabs scent nervous German blood and the ethereal ichor of a duplicitous Greek translator. Or perhaps their noses are even sharper, and they detect the redolence of madness that serves as our own advance guard. Let them engage our dementia like the practiced desert veterans they are; surely they will have better luck quelling it than we.
The Arabs are royalty for hire, brothers; offer them only a few pence or a handful of hardened biscuit, and they will walk miles before your carav
an, defending it against other tribes as if you carried the floating tomb of Mahomet on procession. They will take your hand and lead you to the pearls of the desert, those secret wells swallowed by oyster crags of wadi, underground caverns that bubble salty rust water you would sell your own mothers to drink. The Arabs suffer such poverty and want as not even a dog could bear among us, and yet they carry their filthy bodies regally, dress their wives in gold, and style themselves Lords of the Desert. Cross them at your peril. Should you disdain to pay them toll, they will bar you from these same wells. They will conspire with your own servants to steal from you in the night and with them gnaw holes in your provision bags, help themselves to your onions and flour, and murder your chickens while you sleep. The desert Arabs say that, of all peoples, they alone are the true nobles, for they live by plunder and not by work. So this advance guard of nobles sniffs our flank and scowls, and Elphahallo, our Calinus, motions us to be perfectly still.
We meet the caravan on the great wide avenue of Hachseve, a flat caesura between the sand mountains of Magareth and the terrible white wilderness known as Minschene. These are names in the desert for realms that to our eyes, brothers, appear interchangeable wastelands, identical in their uninhabited desolation, and yet are privileged with a name because of their proximity to water. The thousands of other parched wadis and hilltops that compose the Great Desert wait out their eternities in anonymity; we scale and cross them, carrying their dust on the soles of our feet, but we know them not. Water is the only bestower of fame in the wilderness.
Hachseve, Minschene, Meschmar.
Hallicub, Ramathaym, Machera.
These valleys and rises are still to come, these names and more, before our party reaches the Mountain of Saint Katherine.
It was in the sand mountains of Magareth that Lord Tucher finally collapsed and first saw his dream church. On a night when a storm blew up from the quarter of the Great Sea, pushing before it roiling waves of sand, our young Lord, Jesus Christ, pointed out to my patron a limestone cathedral high on a mountaintop. Tucher, said He, seek my church, rededicate it to the Martyr Priuli, and all your sins will be forgiven. The air was black with dust that night, brothers, sharp glassy sand like sea spray stung our cheeks, and we could barely open our eyes against the flying dirt. From the quarter of the Great Sea, thick blue fissures of lightning rent the sky, and the troubled sand rained down upon us, threatening to drown us where we camped in the foothills. Conrad, at last, wrapped his nose and mouth with a cloak and pulled the penitent Tucher in from the storm. My patron had been kneeling with no food or water for six hours, by the time he saw his dream church, and was delirious for another twenty-four. Ser Niccolo cared not but ordered him set upon his donkey when the storm lifted, when we again set course for Sinai.
