by Sheri Holman
Full of love for each other and for our Creator, Lord Tucher and I make short work of the summit. Lord Tucher tugs my robe when I climb ahead of him; Ursus, rejuvenated by his rest and delighted at his father’s sprightliness, kicks out stones to slow us down. I fall behind, still weighted by a heavy syrup of poison gourd, and so am the last to behold the cenobium of Saint Katherine’s hermit, that soon-to-be rededicated chapel to the murdered Emelia Priuli, the Church of Lord Tucher’s inspired Dream.
My patron stands in disbelief before it, at a total loss for words.
“Father, turn away,” says Ursus softly.
His church is no more than a marker, brothers, an inverted ark of uneven stones, stacked up to blaze a path through the wilderness.
I look out around me, onto the boundless wilderness, broken up by mountains, white and red hills, torrent beds. From this vantage, a hundred dream churches stretch into the desert, marking a winding road across the mountaintops for nomads to follow. Some are great cathedrals, some tiny little shrines; some look unlike churches at all but, to a tired, dehydrated pilgrim, resemble clumpy hunkering lions and horses, whose raised hooves displace the sky.
“Why would Ser Niccolo tell you there was a church here when there are only rocks?” Ursus wails. “Father, why did we come?”
But Lord Tucher has been betrayed far more deeply. The boy Jesus commanded him to endow a church in the desert. He sent a sign. Tucher strides to the pile, where Saracens have stuffed rags, torn pieces of robes and shirts—as is their wont to mark some natural spot, high in the desert, that they consider holy—and flings them away like startled doves caught on the wind. He wrenches a sharp stone from the cairn and, double-fisted, scratches upon his church a shallow, flyaway cross.
Like a recording angel he scores, leaving his wrath upon the place. I will be back, and where once there was a phantom church upon this rock, I will build a stone cathedral even unto Heaven. Ursus and I watch him passionately claim each rock for Christ like a tomcat marking a doorpost, scoring cross after cross, until at last his son steps forward and says, Father, please, I want to go.
A deep chill settles over me with the passing of the light, brothers. I do not see our camp from up here, nor in fact do I see any man, bird, or beast, only the vista of that scorched, sulfurous plain called the Elysian Fields through which we passed this morning, hurrying the asses so that their hooves might not burn. We climbed so haphazardly up the mountain, finding handholds where we might, that I am completely turned around. In the end, I suggest we take the less steep path down the hill, on the opposite side from where we climbed up but certainly safer in the encroaching dark. If night claims us, we are Children of Death, brothers, as that godless translator intended by sending us here. And who shall be our brothers and sisters? Goat-legged satyrs and prying demons like those who attacked Saint Anthony as he lay alone in his sepulchre? Scorpions and the crackling ghosts of dehydrated Arabs? Other pilgrims who have strayed from the path and gone insane from adiaphoria, wandering the wilderness naked and raving, living off the shells of locusts and their own hot piss? I feel them out there, waiting for darkness, anxious for their element.
Ursus tugs his numbed father by the hand and pulls him down the path, where we walk without speaking, each of us alone in his own desert. Light, like water and love, abandons a man too soon. Let me never again, brothers, take for granted a long purple sunset over the Danube, or cease to esteem that stalwart orange ball as it struggles to remain above water, denying quarter to the oppressive night. How I yearn to fashion all my unappreciated sunsets into a single day, like a fishwife adding scraps to her ball of twine. We might travel in perpetual pink twilight for twenty-four hours, no matter, so long as day did not desert us.
“Father, look! A cross!”
Without warning, Ursus peels away and disappears into a black fissure in the mountain’s side. His father and I stand transfixed, neither knowing what to do.
“Maybe it’s your church!”
The young voice escapes the cavern in wreathed echoes. Cautiously, Lord Tucher and I step through this pitch into dusk, into a long narrow downhill shaft that disappears into darkness, a shaft filled with the fresh-blood smell of metal. Lord Tucher trips and, reaching down, retrieves an irregular conglomerate of shiny stone and porous gray rock, the refuse driven out when refining gold. Slag.
In the days when Antony was besotted with Cleopatra, the Romans struck illegal coin in mines all over the Sinai. When Rome abandoned her veins, Christian hermits moved in, as Saint Jerome tells us, settling the old shafts like underground cities. Saint Katherine’s hermit may very well have lived here, brothers: hungry, thirsty, holding off demons with the iron lining of his empty stomach. Lord Tucher points to the wall and the faint ochre need graffitied there: O Esau, my brother, Give me lentils, for I will surely die.
“Ursus, come out,” I call. “We don’t have time for this.”
A rustling deep in the cave. What else lives here?
“Ursus,” his father calls. “Let’s go!”
I test each step the deeper in we press. We seem to be walking more steeply downhill, into the very heart of the mountain. The sun trails behind us like a carpet runner, just a thin orange band lighting our feet. From deep in the shaft comes a low, inhuman growl. Are there wild dogs?
“Ursus! Come on!”
My voice shimmies through the shaft, drops off somewhere just ahead. I put my foot out, and it falls into nothingness.
“Ursus!” I scream, grabbing Lord Tucher to keep from tumbling into the pit. “Ursus, dear God, are you down there?”
The pit is deep, brothers, and it is full. Stuffed with the twisted length of my patron’s whimpering son and a scuttling, hungry darkness.
DESERT OF THE SINAI
SOMEWHERE IN DARKNESS SUMMER 1483
Alexander’s Gate
It is night and there are monsters at the gate.
I know because I heard them stirring: the quiet shiver of a headless Blemmy who wears his eyes in his chest; the thumping run of the one-legged Sciapode, the soft whinny of the captive Centaur. Alexander the Great built the iron gate to pen them along the edges of maps, in the mountains on the other side of this desert; but I worry about gaps. Who is to say the Dog Heads aren’t, at this very minute, sniffing the air, kicking up dust on their way to devour us? The gourd. Perhaps they smell the poison gourd.
I hear it again, that awful howl.
Is the Desert as hungry as we are, brothers? Are the monsters?
Even if we could light a fire, we wouldn’t dare, not knowing if we would attract our party or murderous strangers. I take the first watch in darkness. Saint Katherine’s Star floats like a drop of milk on black suet, but I am so turned around I don’t know whether we are east or west of it.
I only know we passed the Elysian Fields today.
A scorched rock plain where no grass grows, smelling of sulfur and char, its smoldering eternity separates us from Alexander’s Gate. We kept this plain on our right-hand side all day long and never saw the end of it—Elphahallo says a man might travel ten German miles a day for two months, never meet another human, and find neither food nor water. And yet all the ancient heroes made their home here, living an afterlife one layer of fame more substantial than the dim multitude of common shades. Ulysses, that best known of pagan pilgrims, who wandered far from home for twenty years, traveled to the Elysian Fields to learn what would become of him. He dug a pit and poured black blood, and the ghosts crowded round, unable to move, unable even to communicate without a sip of it. Have any of you died, my brothers, since I went away from Ulm? If you are here in the night, circling me, I won’t scare you away; you may drink as much of this dwindled bloody camp as you can stomach. So long as it is you howling, my good dead brothers, and not the Dog Heads. Or the Flesh Eaters. Or, as I fear, murderous Arabs, less merciful even than either of these. It comes again, low over the sand, a vibrato lamentation of pain and agony, neither human nor animal—a hybrid screa
m.
Monsters at the gate.
“Friar, what is that?”
Poor scarred Ursus turns over next to his sleeping father. I tried to bind his wounds the best I could, ripping the hem of my robe into long wide strips. He mumbles through the bandage covering his lower face.
“It is probably dogs, child, a long way off.”
“It’s not our men?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I am so thirsty, Felix. These burn.” He pulls at the bandages that cover his purple lesions and asks again, “Why would Ser Niccolo have sent us here?”
There is only one answer for Ursus, and I will not give it to him when we are so close to fulfilling the translator’s desire. Ser Niccolo sent us here to die.
I look upon Lord Tucher, brothers, corpse-pale in the starlight, his fear and bellicosity having finally exhausted themselves in sleep. He has been a millstone around my neck all night, dragging me away from the direction I knew was right, running toward footprints that were no more than wind pocks on the sand. If only I were comfortable with the idea of an orphaned Ursus, I would club his father over his head with the chunk of slag he insisted on bringing back, the relic of his dream church.
But I must think of Ursus. I must bring back Conrad so that Ursus’s wounds won’t go another minute untreated. I must bring a donkey, as he is no longer able to walk, and a full water skin to slake his thirst. I see those creatures on him still, chewing the lenses of his eyes, black plague buboes fixed to his jaw, his neck, shins, groin. He was unconscious by the time I reached him in the shaft, face down in a nest of starving Pharaoh’s Lice. Lord Tucher screamed like a woman while I pried each one loose.
I can’t shake the feeling that our camp is nearby. Nothing concrete tells me, brothers, only a slight heaviness in the night that feels like the weight of men. I listen for an argument, for the crackling of a fire, for camel roars: that welcome nightly noise I railed against and grit my teeth over and swore I could go a lifetime without ever hearing again. And I think.
What if they have left us?
Who would want to wait? John, my friend, whom I have banished from my confidences? Peter, the apostate, who would desert his own mother if she lay bleeding before him? Niccolo, our murderer? Conrad is our only champion. He would defend even Lord Tucher—but will anyone listen to a lowly barber?
I am almost positive our camp is just over that hill.
Quietly, I leave the sleeping Tuchers and pace out under the stars. The penitential Seventeenth psalm has always calmed me, brothers, and I sing it now, loudly, with all my heart. Dominie, exaudi, I sing:
“Hear the right, O Lord, attend unto my cry, give ear unto my prayer, that goeth not out of feigned lips.
“Hold up my goings in thy paths, that my footsteps slip not.
“Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings,
“From the wicked that oppress me, from my deadly enemies, who compass me about.
“They are inclosed in their own fat: with their mouth they speak proudly.
“John!” I call, for the hundredth time tonight. “Conrad!”
John? My voice comes back to me bounced off the invisible mountains. Conrad?
My sandals push hard against the sand. I will only go as far as the next rise, for surely the pilgrims must be camped beneath it, protected from the wind by this promontory’s stiff back. They will have retired to their tents by now, and soon I will spy their lanterns like the glowing hearts of three animals kneeling around the campfire that still sizzles with fat from a skewered white chicken. Surely, John will hear the strains of Domine, exaudi on the wind and know only one man in the desert could be singing that psalm.
“They have now compassed us in our steps: they have set their eyes bowing down to the earth;
“Like as a lion that is greedy of his prey, and as it were a young lion lurking in secret places.
“John, Conrad!”
Lemon juice. What we need is lemon juice to anoint his wounds.
The howl. And its echo. I am sweating in the cold air. Can the monsters smell me?
“John!”
“Felix?”
The heat lightning of a woman’s copper voice in the night. It could not be her, could it, brothers? Could we have overtaken her caravan where they paused for the night? Dear God, will the Tongue be our salvation?
“Arsinoë?” I cry.
“Felix?”
She is calling as to a lost dog. Mournful, anxious, impatient. “Meine Liebe?”
“Who is there?” I spin, for now the voice comes from behind me.
“Felix, komm du zurück, ich brauche dich.” Come back, I need you.
My stomach seizes in fear. Arsinoë speaks no German. There can be only one woman.
“Katherine?” I ask.
“Mein Mann?” My husband?
“Where are you? Oh, God, I knew you would come!”
Hill after hill I climb, but her voice is like the hermit’s mountain, forever in front of me. How far I’ve strayed from my patron I don’t know, until I see the orange melon moon slowly bubble up from the plain. I am back at the Elysian Fields.
“Mein Gatte, ich bin hier, komm zu mir.” I’m here. Come to me.
Across the smoking region, she stands, her head thrown so far back that it appears stricken from her shoulders. She is not looking at me but she knows I am here, hesitating as if she had asked me to walk upon water. Have I never shown myself to you before because of your imperfect faith? I can hear her wonder. Am I mistaken now?
No, it is my turn, here in the wilderness, to be the single frond on her palm branch. East and West float away like two unmoored islands, revealing the core of the earth. This desert. This woman.
“Help us!”
I run to her and fall to my knees in the burning waste dump of Elysium. The bloom of her hair, Heaven on her lips, she bends and gently lays me flat as for an anointing. My head is on fire, clouded by green sulfur; my body shakes as from a high fever, the gourd in my throat, though perhaps it is only the terror of proximity. Over her shoulder I see the discarded wheel and her sword driven into the ground as through a steaming heart.
Like a wife, she takes my leg and slowly brings it to her lips.
“I will chew away the man in you, so that you may approach my bones.”
It hurts, the teeth going through sinew, the grinding molars on my ankle. Is this a gift, I ask?
Her delicate teeth tear into my knee. I feel them pop the joint out of place and scrape along the cupped patella.
“We who have eternal life in Christ must expect a dismantling from time to time. Fragmentation is Man’s natural state.”
I feel nothing below the waist, not even the phantom limbs of an amputee. I am simply missing. Her jaw dislocates to fit itself around my pelvis and, like a mighty lion’s, snaps my body in two.
Up the torso she rips, building speed, spitting ribs like broken teeth; pared ringlets of skin make a beard around her working mouth. She is getting closer to my money pouch, to the piece of her inside it. Will she reclaim herself?
Katherine’s incisors taste the leather, lift the pouch from my neck.
“What is this?”
“Your tongue,” I gasp through the blinding pain. She must know where they left her pieces.
“Saint Katherine’s tongue?”
Even in my delirium, brothers, I am instantly wary.
And then the howl, the human-animal frenzy of a thousand impaled infants flung to a thousand starving wolves, makes all things clear.
I jerk back on my stump of torso to see the Donestre’s jaw snap furiously around my shoulders, my arms, my neck. He hisses at the pouch but is unable to sever another limb.
Green egg-stink sulfur chokes the field. I dig my elbows into smoking earth and fall into the stench, frantically trying to get away.
What has he done to my body?
“Stop! Felix!” Her voice like arms around my neck, hugging me back. I can’
t move and he cradles me, snapping my shoulder joints until I am a paralyzed bust of myself staring up from his heated lap. He sees the pain of betrayal in my eyes; he sees, so much more than any physical disassembly, how completely he has broken my faith in myself.
“Oh,” says the Donestre, gently touching the corners of my eyes. “Oh.”
I remember only snatches.
“Felix?”
I remember my hand like a swollen starfish.
“It is. Felix. Oh, God.”
And only one eye, scabbed with sticky yellow sun.
“He is covered in sand. Help me!”
I remember German voices, but that language was no longer a tongue I trusted, brothers. I remember the worried blue eyes of my friend John Lazinus, whom I realized at that moment would love me even if I were no better than a melon head, a cartographer’s globe, an orb. My one eye wanted to cry, but I had no water left in what was once my body.
“Roll him over, he can’t breathe.”
And Conrad was with him. Our barber who loves bodies for what bodies do: bleed, ooze, swell, char. If anyone could put my broken body back together, this barber could.
But did he leave the pieces? I spoke the words in my head but was unsure if I had said them aloud. In answer, a palm slipped under my neck and tilted my head forward.
“Here, drink this. It’s all we have left.”
If I have a neck, I remember thinking, I must have shoulders. And if shoulders, arms; the water slid down my throat and into my stomach, which meant I must have a torso.
“John,” I remember saying.
“Oh, God, Felix. He tried to make us leave you behind.”
“Feel my legs.”
The weeping Archdeacon crushed me to his sweaty chest and my back gratefully cracked. Over John’s shoulder, Conrad paced out into the plain, scanning the ground before him. What is he looking for? I remember thinking.
