by Sheri Holman
“Soon, Calinus.”
Around the fire, our exhausted pilgrims sleep: Conrad still streaked with his patron’s blood, John shivering against the cold hard earth, Peter curled into a tight ball as though expecting someone to plunge a knife into his back. I have my boy all to myself, brothers, to study as I would a child of my own.
I comb his dirty blond hair with my fingers in a vague memory of how he wore it when we set out from Ulm. Ursus and his father appeared at our convent, despite the gray rainy weather, clean and bright and smelling of borax. These two will be my family for the next year, I remember thinking, as you, brothers, hung about my neck, crying for my certain death at sea. Will this surrogate family be kind or cruel? Will they become annoying in their worldliness or will advising them bring me closer to my God? The Tuchers were by turns generous and attentive, frustrating and proud, and yet I could never have guessed how like a real son this child Ursus would become to me. We decide for life or death in life at such an early age, each one of us, brothers. Surely I am not the only one among you who found he needed a family enough to borrow from the dead. What harm could come from playing husband? Does Katherine not already belong to Christ? What harm from playing father? Will my son not return home with another man? A coward’s family, surely; a saint and a monk and another’s child, but my one chance to pretend I was a man like any other.
Ursus stirs in his sleep and calls upon his younger brother, Henry, to shut out the lamp.
The single fierce ember in our guttering fire is the one piece of wood abandoned by the caravan that preceded us. John Lazinus read this square as a pledge, brothers, and a token of faith. I am not so sure the icon that I threw into the flames means the Tongue is alive. It could just as easily have been tossed aside by thieves. Throughout the night, I have watched the Fifty Philosophers slowly melt into one, separated by a hedge of dripping green from the Lone Scholar; it took the scholar longer to combust, but when he did his end was long and lingering, a flame through his heart that slowly ate away his head. John did not argue when I set Arsinoë’s token alight. He too is exhausted by Heaven.
“We should get ready to go.” Elphahallo sits up. “The wind is blowing stronger.”
Indeed, brothers, another storm seems to be brewing off to the east. I sigh and breathe in a mouthful of flying pulverized stone, chilled in the cold night air. Sand sticks to Ursus’s lemon paste, but if I wipe it clear, it will hurt him more, so, helplessly, I watch the uneven bunkers amass across his cheeks.
Elphahallo shakes the others awake. We need to cover as much ground as possible before the heat of the day, and, moreover, we must find water. My body feels the lack of food, the strain on my back from digging and sitting on cold earth. And now we must suffer the fierce sand that, like a ghostly horseman, gallops over the plain.
Ursus won’t be budged. John and I wrap our arms around him, but he shudders like a lamprey and slides back to the ground. At last I pull him into my lap while John scours the soiled pannier with handfuls of sand. We don’t want him riding all day in his own filth.
How we complained of driving rain aboard ship, brothers; how little we were prepared for the deluge of sand that falls upon the wilderness. We remount our donkeys and turn our faces toward the quarter we hope holds Katherine’s Star, for we can barely see the man beside us, much less make out the heavens. A fierce wind blows off the Indian Ocean, pushing the desert sand always before it, so that, hour by hour, entire mountains melt away under our donkeys’ feet.
We hunch our way through these mountains, shoulders drawn around our ears to keep out the bitter winds. My stomach shakes with cold and hunger, and I can feel my trapped heart beat sideways against my lungs. From time to time we sink in pits of sand, when pilgrim and camel, Saracen and ass must struggle up as through deep snow. Just as we are about to lie down and abandon ourselves to Death, brothers, the landscape gradually changes. Hard rock replaces loose sand, and the storm, like fire denied its air, slowly dies. A warm dawn breaks over the flinty mountains, buying us ten minutes of comfort. Our shoulders relax, our stomachs unclench, and for the brief morning we are human.
But hour by hour the heat’s gentle fingers on our shoulders tighten; the sun clamps down on our backs and necks, the ridges of our ears, our calves. Soon sweat slides across our upper lips, drips down our inner thighs, and the frozen, stormy hours of Erebus are forgotten. We are back in Hell.
The thirst is unbearable, brothers. We have had no water to drink now for a full day and night; my lips bleed freely, my nose membranes crack like brittle bug wings. I notice, ahead of me, Peter is sucking on his fist.
“What do you have?” I ask, trotting next to him. He takes his hand from his mouth.
“A lemon,” he says. Its feathery flesh looks like the poison lungs of a she-crab.
“Those are for Ursus.” I slap it from his hand, send it spinning.
“How much longer do you think he’ll need them?”
I lick the sweat from my lips and move ahead.
Elphahallo has tied the camel’s lead to his pommel and trots beside Ursus. He is telling him the story of Albaroch, Mahomet’s steed.
“He was a bit bigger than an ass, with the feet of a camel, and a fair face like a man’s; his hair was fashioned all of pearls, his breast made of emeralds, his tail hung all with rubies, and his eyes were brighter than the sun. Albaroch would let no man mount him unless the Archangel Gabriel vouched for his goodness. ‘I have met no man on this earth better than Mahomet,’ said Gabriel, and offered to hold the prophet’s stirrup. Together, Mahomet and his steed came swift as the wind to Jerusalem, where all the patriarchs and holy men did them homage.”
“I had jewels once,” Ursus says.
“I know, my child.”
I drop back.
What can we do to slake this thirst? The mountains are too sharp against the sky, and their red throbs painfully against my broken eye veins. The smells of our company, usually so muted, separate themselves into deities: Lord of the Camel’s Breath, Master of the Unwashed Crotch, Hierarch of Piss. Standing Godhead over all odors is the Whiff of Lord Tucher’s Punctured Heart—I smell it every time I scratch my cheek or brush the hair off my brow. It lingers like the first fish I ever skinned as a boy, impossible to keep my knuckles from my nose, realizing that salty foreignness had been absorbed into me. Each sniff explodes my headache until I have to ride with my eyes closed.
At last Elphahallo stops us. “Here it is.”
Another dusty, arid torrent bed. Has he lost his mind?
“No,” Elphahallo says. “Climb down. The river has dried up, but some water remains standing in pools.”
We dismount our donkeys and skid down the wadi’s steep face. Blessed Jesu, brothers! Elphahallo is right. In shallow clefts, like molten alexandrite, stands warm green water. I cup handfuls into my mouth, gulping like the greediest swine. I drink until my cleft is half empty, until my swollen belly strains against my navel, and then, only when I am completely satisfied, are my eyes opened.
I have been drinking worms.
Above us, Elphahallo shakes his head. See how the donkeys drink—he gestures to the animals sucking only the top inch of the water, straining off any parasites with their careful tongues. See how the men drink—more like beasts than their own asses.
All the little pools are writhing with flat white worms, but what can we do? We must drink. I strain the water through my handkerchief into my empty goatskin and toss the loaf of worms aside.
“Felix, over here!”
John has found a deep blue hidden spring at the bottom of a narrow ravine. He slides his way down and plunges in, popping up like a sleek brown otter. Soon we are all bathing, brothers, and baptizing each other as though we swam in the River Jordan. When our Calinus sees what we are about, he sternly warns us against diving under the water, but we heed him not and so enjoy ourselves for the first time in weeks. At last, naked and clean, we lay ourselves upon the hot rocks and feel our hair slowly stiff
en and our skin tighten across our cheeks and chests. We all clamor to spend the night at this torrent bed, but Elphahallo will hear none of it. When we are dry, he forces us back onto our donkeys to make for a protected plain just through the mountain pass. Arabs, again. We’re always guarding ourselves against these Arabs.
I ride next to Ursus, who is looking much stronger for his swim. Conrad reapplied the lemon paste to each bite, and it has hardened into a pulpy mask over his face, evening out his features. His eyes are bright from the exertion, and he is smiling for the first time since his father died.
“My legs don’t hurt anymore, Friar,” he confides. “They feel like a fishtail.”
I think Elphahallo and Conrad are wrong about his condition; I am not at all convinced the infection has spread as far as they. A monk of our order once chopped his wrist while cording wood and I witnessed the gangrene that set in; this child’s skin does not pump that rotted-melon stench and does not break open along the same juicy jags. His web is almost beautiful, as if the insects had constructed an intricate highway between the stations of his bites, paths as straight as Roman roads, colonizing his body in order to restore order. I ask him if he feels like a flourishing province, and he tells me fish can swim upside down if they want.
God, brothers, our bodies smell so good!
I had forgotten what clean people smell like. Ursus smells like lemon verbena, and John behind me smells like tin spoons. I can’t quite place Elphahallo, but I imagine him as blue Iznik tiles or black calligraphy ink—some repeating pattern, simple and Saracen and interlocking. I left Lord Tucher’s heart in the torrent pool, floating like fat on the surface, and made sure to step out of the water far away from the slick. I can’t have that smell clouding my reason at a time like this.
For the first time today, my hunger feels like a blessing. Unpolluted by food, my mind is sharp like a Hindoo’s or a Brahmin’s. I think I may have picked up Arsinoë’s scent, her briny trail over the rocks. I peek back at John to see if he has noticed it, but he is surreptitiously sucking the inside peel of one of Ursus’s medicine lemons.
Those are for him!
I push us to move faster.
A fish out of water, that’s her scent, and when we squeeze through the superhumanly narrow mountain pass that leads to the Field of Machera, we must keep our cheeks from scraping her cod-liver oil off the rock walls. The growing evening shadows throw each stone into high relief, and, like a miracle, dew begins to sift from the sky, brothers, like the softest, sweetest rain. Elphahallo laughs quietly to himself and sticks out his tongue to catch the moisture. Our donkeys shake it from their bristly manes, blinking it from their eyelashes. They stop of their own accord, then gallop through the pass down onto the sunken grassy plain as though home to their own stables.
While the donkeys rip at the monkey grass, we clear stones for a night’s rest. I have just smoothed a spot for Ursus when Elphahallo puts his hand on my arm and points up.
Above us, where the ground swells toward Saint Katherine’s Star, a squat animal stands on four thick legs. She is the color of boxwood, brothers, with small pig eyes that watch our work and, most amazingly, a single horn upon her head.
“What is it?” I ask Elphahallo.
“It’s a unicorn,” says Peter.
“It is a rhinoceros,” answers the Saracen in a whisper. “Very few still live here.”
“What’s happening?” my patron’s son asks anxiously. “Friar?”
I move to where Ursus is still attached to the kneeling camel and lift him in my arms to see. His scalding, light body is all moist on the bottom.
“Look there, son, do you see that creature?”
“Is it a lion?”
“No, sweet, can you see the horn?”
“Did it come to dig my grave?”
He twists in my arms so sharply that I lose my grip and drop him, hear his head hit the stones I cleared like a heavy fish slapped against a table. A fish out of water. A fish.
“Oh, God!” Conrad is above him, returning his head to its proper place on his neck. I walk swiftly away from the camp, hard through the twilight. The rhinoceros started at Ursus’s scream; I find her four solid footprints, her streak across the sand where she ran away. In her flight, a tiny stunted tree was crushed; it glistens with falling dew. How simple it is, just to kneel down and lick the moisture from its leaves, savor the ineffable sweetness, better than any honey, any syrup. Between the fronds, I spy a hardened droplet, translucent as amber but dusted with white. I sniff it, then put it between my teeth. Pure heaven. It is the child of the moon and the air, dried in the hot afternoon sun. Manna.
“Manna!” I cry, weeding the tree of it, prying droplets from between adjacent stones. I have got a double handful, enough for us to feast on, enough to turn this night into a party, a proper thanksgiving. I run across the plain, dribbling candy like a breathless, drunken Santa Claus.
“Ursus!” I pelt him with fistfuls of treats. “Look what I found for you!”
The pilgrims stare up at me, from where they kneel beside my broken, lifeless boy. My legs can hold me no longer; I drop beside his body, gathering this fallen knight to me. Surely there is one more miracle left in this wretched Age of Man.
I rip the tongue from around my neck and touch it to his eyes, motionless beneath their lids. I place it on his mouth, the gate of breath, upon his heart, so still and quiet beneath my hand. I touch her tongue to his useless legs, to his wasted arms; I press it tight against his nostrils to seal his loosened soul inside.
This fraud, this worthless piece of flesh.
Ursus, child. I have killed you too.
ii
DESERT OF THE SINAI
SAINT KATHERINE’S MONASTERY SUMMER 1483
The Other Mountain
No matter what cartographers say, there are only two mountains in the world: the Mountain of Truth and the Mountain of Illusion.
Mount Illusion, I have learned, is, in fact, a chain; a jagged spine that originates beneath our monastery in Ulm, swells across the Mediterranean into the Holy Land, and spikes under us, here in the wilderness. Upon this range, brothers, saints intercede for men, churches in our dreams are churches in the flesh, and brave young boys are buried by lions that come down from the hills to paw the earth. Here upon the range of Illusion, a stern Asian princess might once more become the sweet fräulein I believed I married; she might stand beside the sad-eyed lion and rub his head as he roars over an open grave.
Love truly does own Illusion, I have learned, and I blush to remember how I reviled her on her island of Cyprus. Were I a skilled Pygmalion, I too would take up a chisel to carve something familiar and kind from the ossified creature my pilgrimage has become. As it is, with no such talents, I can only sit here, on Illusion’s last rise, remembering happier times, knowing I must soon cradle the Truth of Ursus Tucher’s putrefied body and walk it to my wife’s monastery below.
How small her house looks from this vantage, brothers. It would disappear into the desert, were it not for the defining green spit of olive and cypress trees planted behind it. Her church sits behind a thick military wall, erected almost a thousand years ago by the Emperor Justinian to protect the monks who dwelt beside Moses’ Burning Bush. A trained eye can read the history of the complex in its buildings, as one might divine the seasons of a felled tree by the rings in its trunk. Fat, prosperous years yielded the lead-roofed Byzantine church and the verdant garden, heavy with olives and purple aubergine. Lean, parsimonious years converted the monks’ guest house into a Saracen mosque, to placate its Turkish invaders, and bricked up the entry, so that the only remaining way into the monastery is via a basket drawn up into a suspended gatehouse. This monastery has endured by its very isolation, keeping close its Aramaic Bibles and Pancrator Christs, texts and images as old as Christianity itself. What Emperor, King, or Sultan would not want to own this rough-hewn jewel? But which of them can be bothered to locate it somewhere, out there, inside that brutal desert?
Brothers, as we know that it is not Truth’s nature to remain for long unassailed, so now we arrive to find the monastery choked by new invaders. Garotted by traitorous criminals like the ones who deserted us. Or their naked cousins. Or their naked cousins’ bastard stepbrothers. On camels and asses, tethered with jangly silver coin bridles and saddled with carpets. Armed.
Wild Arabs, at last, at the end of our journey.
From where we sit, we can count almost two hundred of them spread out around the monastery. Our ship’s captain warned us against these nomads, and Elphahallo did all in his power to avoid camping by their wells. Next to these men, the Saracens in Jerusalem, whom until now we had regarded as scarce human, seem civilized and almost as ourselves.
Disquieted, we drink the last of our leftover crevice water, remount our asses, and pick our way across this final field. John reaches out to steady the collapsed body of Ursus Tucher as he sags from my saddle. Mercifully, the Archdeacon did not argue when I insisted on burying my patron’s son on holy ground. Ursus wanted to die for Saint Katherine. The least she can do is provide him a bed in her church’s graveyard.
The nomads watch our approach with interest. Their cousins who led the merchant’s caravan, for all their filth, carried themselves like princes; these savages, brothers, mill like desperate, hardened guerrillas. We wind slowly through their ranks, past dark-skinned men who rise in their stirrups to scratch unself-consciously at their naked buttocks; beyond chieftains in filched European helmets, sharpening their arrowheads with flint. The scrawny nomad children hide behind their unclothed mothers and reach out imploringly to us. Surely, brothers, these hands are too small to hold a coin, should we even have one left.
Cautiously, Elphahallo approaches the most intricately tattooed and fiercely armed of the savages. I see our Calinus touch his turban many times, gesturing back at our bedraggled party and the dead boy I hold across my lap. A few moments later he returns to us in defeat; we may not enter the monastery, he informs us, unless we pay their toll.
