by Sheri Holman
Our secretive translator heeds not Elphahallo’s warning to remain still and quiet upon his donkey, but now jumps down to treat with the desert Arabs in their own tongue. Behind the dark-skinned spear-wielding men, their women wait, some large with child, some bent and old, as shabby and naked as their husbands. They peer at us from beneath indigo ink tattoos, faces swirled and dotted with outlined waves of blue, their palms marine and mermaid undulate. Around their grimy necks, the women layer gold and silver necklaces that jangle rhythmically as their babies take suck. What avarice can gold spark, brothers, when water is the only currency in the desert? I have learned over the past weeks to no longer value valuable things. In the wilderness there is safety in simplicity: a tent over my head, a fire at night, a drink of water from a red, salty skin. In the desert, the nomad Arabs place stone piles on the mountaintops to mark a path through the pathless wilderness. If they did not, no man could keep to his course but would wander too far from water and lose his life. I have come to value markers, brothers, when all around is mysterious land.
“What is he saying?” John Lazinus leans over my shoulder, attempting to decode the translator’s conversation with the Arabs. Far more mistrustful than I from the beginning, John has leapt from suspicion of Ser Niccolo in the desert to outright hatred.
“I can’t tell,” I say.
Our venerable Calinus dismounts and joins the discussion. After a few tense moments, he walks back to our camel drivers and orders them to unload a sack of biscuit.
“Toll.” Elphahallo smiles apologetically at us. “We may not cross the plain until the caravan passes.”
Ser Niccolo will be none too happy about that, I know. He already resents being burdened with pilgrims and priests; we lost two days in Gazara securing enough camels for the Tuchers’ luggage, souvenirs, bags of spice, bedding, and tents; two days in which Niccolo’s sister put a plain and a mountain range between us. When Lord Tucher lay feverish and exhausted by penance in his lowly tent, the translator pulled him up by an arm and thrust him upon his donkey. And yet, what choice does Niccolo have but to travel with us, brothers? He is penniless in this world.
Young knight Ursus leaves his donkey to stand with John and me and marvel at the caravan that lurches up the hill past us, now that toll has been paid. It is East traveling from farther East, bearing goods that will one day make their way to us in farthest Europe. It slices across the Sinai peninsula, linking the ships of the Indian Ocean to those transports of the Red Sea, a great flexible spine of craftsmen and merchants and tax collectors and customers connecting Cathay to Cairo to Venice to Hamburg.
“Look, Friar!”
Ursus points out the first wave of men after the desert Arabs pass us by. I start at the sight of blond heads and hunched pale shoulders, heavy iron shackles around unconditioned ankles. Ahead of us, Peter Ber, the renegade Mameluke, draws in a slow, loud breath. These men are destined to become what he leaves behind; they are the captured marauders of the Spice Islands, second sons to petty European nobles who found careers among the Eastern pirates; they, my brothers, are already learning their Arabic alphabet. They are Mamelukes-to-be.
Peter slouches lower on his donkey, uncomfortable in the presence of other slaves. Since Niccolo forbade Conrad to swab the Mameluke’s neck, it has become blown with infection, so that now his sore perpetually oozes, drying in clumps of his greasy blond hair. I cannot say the Mameluke did not deserve the humiliation he had at Niccolo’s hands for allowing Saint Katherine’s bones to be stolen, but the translator has been harsh to the extreme with him, in these already difficult days. I have no idea why he wanted him along, unless he actually intends to honor the promise he made—to take Peter home. I wonder if the Mameluke will last that long; his infection has made him increasingly unpredictable.
Before us, brothers, the Great Caravan continues past: a ptolemy line across a map, the tail of a comet, a snake’s belly trail in the sand. Do these trajectories care about the lives they cross? A caravan? A pilgrimage, brothers? Was it naive of me to view this journey as anything other than a straight line, bisecting countries and lives and time but, ultimately, a path unto itself, with no more sentience than that path marked for us through the desert by godless savages? Each time I strive to find a meaning in these deaths and betrayals, I am thrown back on chaos. Katherine eludes me. I can only follow the scent lines she has laid down and hope they lead to some humble destiny.
“Friar, look.” Ursus grabs my arm. “The camels.”
Behind the novice Mamelukes, a flotilla of aubergine and orange carpet-saddled camels, each bearing a different wonder upon her hump, hitches past hypnotically. This one carries a wooden cage of grass-green parrots grackling happily to each other. The next conveys a cask of acacia wood carved with leopards and starfish. Aquamarine silk shot with silver thread spills from the third camel. The fourth transports jasmine-scented rice. We have traveled in the company of camels for two weeks and have often praised God for their ingenuity of form. The camel is a kindly if deformed creature, brothers, with a long neck and legs and a humped back upon which to balance burdens. She seems always to be a sorrowful and troubled animal. She has big and terrible eyes in her too-small head, and when a man walks up to her she begins to tremble, for God fashioned the camel’s eyes in such a way that she might perceive men to be four times as large as they really are. Had our Creator not ordained it so, no camel would allow herself to be driven or burdened. A camel may live a very long time, even to one hundred years, so long as she travels not to some cold, wet country where she would contract a disease. Her memory is as long as her life, and she bears a natural hatred for all mules, horses, and asses because they sometimes bear burdens the camel believes belong to her alone. Our camel drivers spend many tedious hours in the mornings loading and reloading these beasts, for our luggage must be perfectly distributed over their humps, or the camels will not budge. Easily a hundred caravan camels stretch like a painted ribbon across the plain.
“Failisk.”
The Calinus, Elphahallo, approaches our little trio and draws me aside.
“Will you walk with me for a few moments?” he asks.
I turn away from the procession and allow him to lead me along the wadi’s ridge until we are out of earshot of the other pilgrims. Ser Niccolo has joined our camel and ass drivers and jokes with them in their language, making the best of this new delay.
“One of my men came to me last night with a disturbing allegation,” Elphahallo says, fixing his gaze on the driver who has his arm thrown around Ser Niccolo’s waist, laughing at a caravan camel ridden by a spider monkey. “A rumor is circulating that your Lord Tucher has hired Christian spies to steal the camel drivers’ children while they are away.”
“What?” I cry. “Surely, Calinus, you can’t believe that?”
“Of course I don’t.” He brushes a bit of sand off his still-white robes. “But I thought you should know, since every rumor has a source.”
Calinus lets his eyes linger on the translator before they drift over to the maligned Lord Tucher. Truly, brothers, when I laid penance upon my patron, first that he should fulfill his pilgrimage to Holy Sinai, the seat of all law, where God decreed Thou shalt not steal, and second that he should assume the financial obligation for our entire party, I never expected him to take his mortification to such an extreme. At first, we all considered his contrition a rich joke and waited for it to exhaust itself, as every fancy had before. While his father knelt motionless, arms extended in the shape of the cross, young knight Ursus would pelt him with stones to make him flinch. Tucher held his shape, though, brothers, and begged forgiveness hours on end for his desecration of the Holy Sepulchre. Now Niccolo is stirring up suspicion against this repentent man? I don’t understand what such a rumor could accomplish.
“Are you well, my friend?” Calinus asks worriedly. I shake my head that I am not. Since we left Jerusalem, lo these two weeks ago, I have felt altogether altered in mind and body, brothers. I have bee
n plagued by fever and troubles in the bowel; truly, I feel like a subtle poison is making its way through my body, affecting first my sense of smell, so that the very essence of an object crawls within my nose; and then my eyes, taking away the natural colors of this world and replacing them with a gray cloud of tears.
“Do what you can to quiet the rumors, my friend,” I say at last, addressing Calinus as “my friend” in the Saracen fashion. “I will warn Lord Tucher to be on his guard.”
“Rarely have I seen a procession as majestic as this.” Elphahallo sighs as the final camels trek by, loaded with indigo and yellow bags of mastic, cardamom, and pepper. “With the Venetians opening more sea routes east, these will soon be a thing of the past.”
The proud merchants touch their turbans to Elphahallo as they pass, and our Calinus bows low to the ground. At the tail end of the caravan, bringing up the very rear, ten strapping Saracens heft a cloth draped litter; its bed marvelously constructed of sturdy red-laquered wood worked with gilt, its carpet canopy woven with scenes of sea battles: spouting whales sundering bireme ships; dolphins taunting voracious giant squid. Surely this is a litter constructed for a true marvel, brothers, an enormous pearl or perhaps coral formed into the shape of a horse. For the briefest second I think they have my wife under that shroud, a perfectly preserved effigy of Katherine, sunlight streaming through the carpet’s weave, gently warming her set jaw; thick blond hair poured over her breasts, her two hands meeting in prayer over a just-cooled heart. They plucked her from Constantine’s dream, after she replaced the drowned merchant and floated serenely to shore. Shrouded against the sun and sand, this final Wonder of the East remains veiled to us. Whatever sleeps inside serves as a reminder that no matter how far afield our wanderings take us, be they to Sinai or India or to the threshold of Alexander’s Gates, there is always an East beyond us, unknown and unknowable. In that East, the sun rises and monsters dwell, there the Ages of Men are born and demons are fought, and it is all the same place, brothers, the same East; let no man tell you otherwise.
“Calinus! They are getting away!”
My patron’s son, Ursus, grabs Elphahallo by the sleeve and tugs him toward the retreating caravan.
“We want to see what is under that veil!”
It is not for us to know what prize the Saracens carry across the desert from sea to sea. I tell Ursus to leave it be, but he runs for Ser Niccolo.
“Please, Ser, ask the Saracens to let us look!”
Of course this bad boy finds his champion in the translator, whose impatience is only matched by his curiosity. Niccolo, too, wants to know what is so precious that ten men would carry it on foot across the burning sand. He halts the Saracen merchants with blandishments and speeches, smiles winningly, and asks them, for the sake of the child, won’t they please expose the treasure on their litter?
Calinus and I join John, Conrad, Lord Tucher, and Peter Ber where they wait nervously on the wadi’s rise. Below, on the plain, Ursus capers next to Niccolo, eagerly collecting another wonder to vaunt at Count Eberhart’s court. The Saracen merchants are proud of their find and want the Christians to see what it is they possess that we do not. Look upon this and marvel, they seem to say. Look into the eyes of Death.
With a flourish, Niccolo and a Saracen merchant uncover the red lacquer bed to reveal the Wonder of the East.
It is a fish, brothers, captured in the Indian Ocean. Monstrously long and thick, it spans the length of two men laid end to end, sports a wing upon its back and a ferocious swordlike beak. Its scales reflect all the colors of marine life: green for the moss that grows upon the wreckages of ships, purple for the ticklish finger anenome, blue like a sky distorted by the waves, the yellow of the Ocean bed. His beak is sharp and threatening, but it is by his eyes that we know him: two violet, searing, magnetic eyes, weakened in death, but not completely. Close upon this creature, I see he holds a man fast with a very simple trick of reflection. The fish before us has no pupil, no cornea, no second lid. In his enormous eye, you may see only yourself, set shamefully inside the head of a monster.
Look not away from the dreaded Troyp, brothers.
When you can bear to see yourself no longer, that is when he devours you.
DESERT OF THE SINAI THE VALLEY OF MINSCHENE SUMMER 1483
Water
We fight over everything, but nothing more so than water.
We fight over how much of it we are allowed, how far out of our way to go to find it, if it is drinkable, if we need it. We fight incessantly with our camel drivers, who disdain to load the four enormous sealed earthenware jugs of pure water I purchased in Gazara to drink in case of emergency. At first they refused to carry the water at all, calling it foolish and heavy, and raised such a hue and cry that Elphahallo, in disgust, commissioned two more beasts simply to transport the jugs. I can only console myself with dreams of those camel drivers, their tongues swollen and black, crawling across the parched plain to beg some of Friar Felix’s cool, clean Gazara water. Shall I laugh to scorn at them, brothers, tilting back my head to let the life-giving liquid trickle through my beard? Tempt me not, for a good Christian struggles mightily sometimes to turn the other cheek.
But now we wait anxiously for these same drivers, here in the white valley of Minschene, where burned lime cliffs hide like a secret leper colony inside the red desert. We have seen no live vegetation all day, brothers, but our camel drivers swore there was a marsh some few miles away and, taking with them our animals and water skins, have gone off in search of it. It is getting dark, and they have not yet returned. We are counting on that water for dinner.
“Gather your branches and eat cooked meat while you may,” said Elphahallo, who, seeing us fret, dispatched us to scour the chalky torrent bed for firewood. “Soon you will find not another living thing to burn.”
He sent us out to take our minds off the water, brothers, for Calinus knows we worry each time the Arabs leave us that this will be the night they don’t come back; tonight they will leave us stranded in the desert. A few yards beyond me, Lord Tucher weakly searches the torrent bed for sticks, sifting through the albescent sand. I have not had the heart to tell him the Arabs believe he has hired Christian spies to kidnap their children. He would merely smile beatifically if I did.
“Think they’ll be back soon?” Conrad joins me by the spot we have cleared for the anticipated fire. I throw upon it the confection of dried vine I found.
“Elphahallo said the marsh was several hours away,” I reassure him, pretending a confidence I do not feel. “And the animals must drink.”
Conrad glances at me worriedly. “You don’t look good, Felix,” says our barber. “Really, we should open the water jars.”
I look over at the four huge earthenware containers jumbled together with our other bedraggled possessions. These four jars, brothers, are far more precious than the bolts of red silk the Tuchers bought in Jerusalem, or the silver inlaid trays, or the august bags of cloves, cinnamon, and mace they intend to take back to Swabia. Without water, a man would die inside two days, for the heat in this desert reaches deep into his body and steals water from wherever she finds it. A man’s two eyes, like islands in a dredged marshland, sink back into his head; his open mouth, no longer lubricated with saliva, fills with sand; his every organ dries up, brothers, and blows away.
“They are only for emergency,” I tell Conrad. “They must get us to the mountain.”
“Take a sip of wine then,” he orders. “You need to keep your strength.”
I agree to taste a little from our precious store of wine, well hidden from the felonious Arabs in a burlap bag of salt pork, for in fact I do feel very dizzy. This malady that has gripped me, brothers, comes in waves, like seasickness, leaving me barely able to stand.
“Did you move it?” Conrad asks, rummaging in the bag of salt pork.
I reply that I did not and join him to more closely search our baggage.
Our flagon of wine is nowhere to be found, brothers, and
this is a serious matter. Water we need for survival, but wine we need for health. To cross the desert with no medicinal spirits is the height of folly; ask any doctor you know. I resolved where to hide the wine when I recalled the story of Saint Mark’s relics being spirited out of Alexandria under layers of pork. The scrupulous Muslims would not touch the barrels to inspect them, and thus the clever Venetian thieves made away with their patron saint. I cannot believe our Arabs would be so undevout as to rifle through the filthy pig for a few swigs of alcohol, and yet it is well known they become terrible drunkards whenever they are able, being denied by their faith even a sip of the stuff.
Conrad looks grim. He has been nursing Lord Tucher back to health with three sips of wine before bedtime. Behind the camp, our guide, Elphahallo, drives the tent poles deeper into the earth with his shoe. I storm over to confront him.
He nods to me as I approach. “Failisk.”
“Calinus.” I frown. “The camel drivers have now stolen our wine.”
Expertly, he reties the tent flaps, brushes away the creeping sand. At this news, he straightens up.
“Are you certain?” he asks. “It is prohibited by our faith.”
“They are thieves, Elphahallo,” I tell him. “Every night some bit of food goes missing, and now our wine. I want it back.”
