by Sheri Holman
“Let me out!” I pound the door with both fists, stretching my bad ribs even farther. Oh, God. I collapse to my knees and butt the door sharply with my head.
“Let me out!”
It all comes back, brothers: Arsinoë’s theft. Her flight. My imprisonment. I vaguely remember two monks lifting me, the setting sun outside the church, and a small low door. They threw me in here like a shovelful of coal. But where is here?
I sense I am on a narrow path in an overly crowded room—creeping down an aisle of some kind—but this doesn’t feel like a normal chapel. Gingerly, I stretch out my left hand to test the room’s perimeters. I creep only a few feet before I come across what feels like a loosely mortared internal wall, carefully constructed from smooth eroded stone. I crawl farther along, patting my way to get its measure, when, suddenly, unexpectedly, a single round stone breaks off in my hand. The whole heavy wall teeters.
Quickly, brothers, I fumble for the cavity, but my hands are shaking so that I end up pushing the stone into a space already full. The top rows sway, a stone comes loose and strikes the floor hollowly, then bounces away. Oh, God, I recognize that sound. In my panic, I leap back, crashing into the rest of the wall, bringing it raining down on top of me. Hundreds of skulls, brothers, coconut hard and bony, bruise my back with their bulging brows and angled jaws. Centuries of preserved monk heads, from hundreds of exumed Saint Katherine graves, ricochet off the walls of the narrow ossuary like ecstatic berserkers, limbless grinning skulls, alive again and angry. I hunker against the avalanche.
But are these heads not you, brothers? Have you not faithfully followed me on all the meanderings of my pilgrimage, even into the charnel house? Is this slope-browed skull not you, Abbot Fuchs? It certainly feels like your bald pate. Like you, this head takes after the hairless prophet Elisha, who when climbing a mountain was mocked by bad children, crying, “Go up, thou bald head!” When the prophet heard them, he prayed God to curse them, and straightaway two bears came from the woods and devoured forty-two of those children.
I take up the skull and pitch it at the door. It bounces back to me.
No, pardon me, Abbot Fuchs. I am mistaken. You, brothers, are happy in your cells at home, as fully fleshed as I might keep you in my imagination. These heads must certainly be members of my new order; they are my kindred spirits, my companions and future. By accident, I have stumbled onto the ossuary where the Donestre store their wept-over heads. A monster might not mourn forever; eventually, he will require a new fool. What happens to all those bright-eyed, curious men who have come East to be devoured and mourned, genuinely regretted when the appetite is sated? Might not the monster, out of a fleeting kindness, think to stack them all companionately in a room at the foothills of Mount Truth? Might these puzzled heads not try to make some sense of their predicament? Surely, some foolish friar head among them would attempt to cheer them. “Brothers, let me give you several reasons why it is more desirable to be a head rather than a whole man,” he would say.
“First: Philosophers, who might be trusted on such matters, say God formed the head into a sphere, to reflect the vault of Heaven; thus this shape is the only one capable of containing the Mysteries of the Universe. Be of good cheer! As heads only, we are better receptacles for Heaven, brothers.
“Second: It is better to be a head than a whole man, for in so being, we alone uphold the Word of Scripture. Behold: God shall make thee the head and not the tail.
“Third: While the shoulders might be dubbed in a knighting, and the feet washed in contrition, only the noble head, brothers, is anointed with oil on truly important occasions. Priests anoint the heads of babies at christenings; bishops anoint the heads of kings on crownings. Christ Himself chides His apostles, saying, “Thou didst not anoint my head with oil, but this woman anoints my feet.
“Fourth and last: It is better to be a head than a whole man, brothers, because our bodies are what first brought us to this ruin. Had we been only heads before we met the monster, he would have had no desire to eat us. Moreover, had we been but heads, we would never have had cause to mourn, for no matter what selfish, hurtful pilgrimage we might have dreamed up, we would not have had bodies with which to fulfill them. Thus, harm might have befallen nothing but our own wretched imaginations.”
How easy it would be to join this happy company, brothers. To feel my flesh melt away, my body loosen and drop off. I take up another skull, launch it at the door, and catch it when it comes back to me. Oblivion is crowded with friends. Can it not hold one more monk?
But I hear you whispering. Might you simply not have scaled Mount Venus, had you desired such an easy pilgrimage? Would you really fail Christendom, Felix, to fit your tired head into this pyramid of skulls?
Is it not more difficult to choose life over death in this wretched world; is faith not harder to maintain in the face of indifference?
I hurl a hundred skulls against the wall. I deny this brotherhood! I will not take its vows. There is a human woman in this desert who seeks her own Oblivion, and I know where she will find it. Let me out of here!
Frantically, I stumble to the other side of the room, tripping over the littered brothers. As I know most ossuaries are set up, skulls are kept along one wall and bodies on another. I feel my way along until I discover a large square of niches, stuffed full of femurs and tibia. I snatch a long hard shank bone and jump upon its end, feeling it splinter at an angle. I snatch up a skull and limp back to the door.
Fitting the broken bone to the door frame, I pound its round end with the skull. The first blow reduces me to tears, brothers. I feel the tissue around my fractured ribs tear, and the pain is so great I come near to collapse. Leaning against the wall for support, I hit the bone a second time, listening as the wood around the latch gives a bit. A third hammer and the lock comes away from the wood in a green cloud of dry rot. I look back at my abandoned brothers, a moonlit melon patch of skulls. I will not be just another wept-over head, this I swear to you.
Outside, the monastery complex is a maze of mud buildings and staircases impractically built in tiers up the foothill of the mountain. Ahead of me is Katherine’s granite church and, behind that, a long row of double dormitories, built to house a hundred monks where now there sleep but eight. Between the church and dormitories, a solitary bush grows, my brothers, tangling over its red brick barricade. They say that no other bush of its species takes root anywhere in the whole of Sinai and that innocent children, before the age of consent, have been known to blow upon it, as if to snuff out a burning candle. This eternal bush has been a symbol of our faith since the Israelites first railed against God in the wilderness, begging to return to Egypt or be allowed to die, since Moses resolutely climbed this mountain to bring them down God’s rule. From this bush the Israelites learned all that burns is not consumed, brothers. Sometimes faith is tempered in the flames and grows stronger in the ash.
Judging by the sky, I am north of where we arrived. We must hurry past the bush for now, for I know not how long I was held inside the ossuary while Arsinoë got away. The wall behind the dormitories has almost completely fallen, and I am honestly amazed the Arabs have not just walked right through. When the fortress was built, Emperor Justinian believed the desert nomads so naturally incapable of storming a wall that even mud could hold them back, and judging by this he was right. I peer over the tired fortification and discover that its stones have collapsed outward, forming a rubble hill down to the ground. It is agony to lift my arms, but I manage to hoist myself onto the wall and awkwardly scramble down.
“Felix, is that you? Oh, God, man, help me!”
I swing at the sound of terrified German. Flanked by two stern Saracen guards, the former Mameluke, Peter Ber, staggers up the path.
“That fucking Calinus. He turned me in.”
I shrink back at the sight of him, brothers, afraid to return his salute. These Saracens are not wild Arabs but officials of the Sultan. Peter’s clothes are torn as though he struggled to get awa
y.
“Is Niccolo inside?” the apostate demands. “This is all his fault.”
His two large-turbaned guards jerk him away and pull him roughly toward the torches of the Arab camp.
“Tell Niccolo I want to go home!” the Mameluke screams.
I will never again see Peter Ber, brothers, named for the Rock upon which our Church was founded, who lived for years as Abdullah, the Slave of Allah. Two men cannot exist inside the same body, no more than one man may serve two masters. I fear, brothers, this hybrid will forever war against himself, no matter where he lives or whom he worships, for in him I see the flower with which all of us who go abroad are seeded. I spoke before of what frightens pilgrims most upon their ships. At first I thought it was that narrow wall that held us from the Ocean, reminding us Death was too close by. Now I understand the honest fear of pilgrims is nothing so obvious as Death, my brothers. It is the terror that the walls within our very souls threaten always to collapse. We exchange so many pieces of ourselves in foreign lands for pieces of alien men that we, like this Mameluke, might easily become the true hybrids, a perfect admixture of East and West, with the conscience of neither country. I can only wish this Mameluke well. Saint Peter the Rock denied Christ three times and was still forgiven. Perhaps Peter the rapist and murderer will find his faith inside a Saracen jail.
Look not back, neither stay thou in all the country about; save thyself in the mountain, lest perchance thou be taken captive.
I misunderstood our Lord’s message once before and let her get away. Peter Ber has now been taken captive; I, brothers, must save myself on the mountain.
The full moon finally rose over the patriarch’s shoulder and sat behind his neck, of no use to me, there in the chasm where crannying winds knifed up to numb my hands and pry loose their grip on what handholds I could scratch out. My ribs came free of their moorings and floated around my spine, beyond pain, brothers, after hours of climbing, into another state of consciousness such as mystics discover after days of bare-kneed praying in frostbit churches in the wintertime. I pulled myself up by the roots of shrubs, grasping blindly desert thorn and scrub rose; their silver-blue leaves anchored me to the next level, where I might swing my naked leg up and over a cold outcrop of stone, and shiver there, afraid to climb higher because the wind had picked up and I could be blown down this rocky ledge, breaking off schists of red mountain as I fell. Below, a field of thistle sparks compassed the wild Arabs’ camp, where John and Elphahallo and Conrad must have sat in a fireless circle, listening to the mastication of a hundred savage mouths, gorging themselves on fresh bread when we pilgrims had eaten nothing in days. Could they see me clinging like a tick to the throat of Sinai, deliriously frightened to skirt the jutting chin stubbled with loose rocks and nicked with caves that hung over my head? But I can speak no more of the nightmare climb up Mount Sinai, for to retell a story is to relive it, and, brothers, if I climbed this mountain a second time, I would surely die.
Now that I have attained the summit, pulling myself up by my fingertips, chinning over the final precipice onto the mercifully flat rockbed, I see my vision of moments ago was but one last prank of moonlight. I thought I saw a thousand doves waiting my approach, encouraging my labor with the oaring of their snowy wings. The peak of Mount Sinai, it comforted me to know, was not a fiery rock of retribution but a quivering cushion of wings, a New Testament mountain, alive with birds like angels dancing on the head of a pin. Now that I kneel among these doves, shuddering my eternal thanks to the God who helped me to the top, I see my birds are no more than flapping bits of Saracen linen, stuffed, as at Tucher’s dream church, into every available crevice of the cliff. It seems the Saracens worship God here too.
I can look back, brothers, and almost trace the path that brought me broken to this place. Along a trail with no internal organization, I followed a hand, an ear, a tongue, and then a bag of jumbled bones to the one spot on earth where they all belong. Where else would she have possibly come, brothers, but here? I realized back in the ossuary that, deep down, we all desire to test each other’s graves. Could the vessel Arsinoë bear to disappear without measuring herself one final time?
A hand, an ear, a tongue, a jumbled bag of bones; the desert has taught me we can rely on no guide to provide us a pattern but must fashion for ourselves what our saints should look like and hope we have the skill to shape them into something halfway human.
Arsinoë lies in the shallow indentation where the mountain gave way like wax, preserving the impression of Katherine’s long-limbed body. She has strewn the martyr’s bones over herself, with no thought to composition: Katherine’s hand lies by Arsinoë’s foot, her ear listens near Arsinoë’s wrist; Katherine’s pelvis, a sunken brown pie plate, Arsinoë wears for a scapular. How satisfying it would be, brothers, to take up these bones and become a Christian Deucalion, pitching them over my shoulder to create a whole new race of men—men so organically filled with martyrdom that they waste no time at all in dispatching each other and so end this wretched world. For a moment I can nowhere find Saint Katherine’s skull, but then I notice a pregnant swell beneath Arsinoë’s Dominican monk’s robes.
“Felix,” Arsinoë says, with her eyes shut against the wind, “I am still here.”
“Shhh,” I say, crawling to where Katherine’s guardian angel sat five hundred years beside her head. “No one wants you to disappear.”
And in that moment, brothers, I realize what I say is true. I forced myself up this murderous mountain for a woman, but it was not the miscellany of perfumed bones and flesh I climbed to save; it was this simple Tongue. The woman who had no self, simply by having been born one of my own kind, was suddenly as precious to me as twenty years of marriage.
Arsinoë runs her hands over her distended belly.
“I wouldn’t mind having a daughter if she were born a relic,” she says. “It is the only merciful way to bring a woman into this world, don’t you think? With all her suffering already behind her.”
The bitter wind lashes Mount Sinai, startling the cloth birds of peace. My hollow stomach fills with wind that shakes me from the inside out, a quivering, tooth-knocking mass of man, hunkered low against the cold. There is but one woman on this mountain, brothers, and she is of warm, living flesh: activity on the bone. I creep down beside her and fit my man’s body into a woman’s hollows. Stretched out in Katherine’s crowded grave, we are warmed by that heat of two creatures who have sacrificed everything for the same cause.
“Arsinoë?” I ask, pressing her hand to my cheek. “If you wanted to hide forever, why did you come to the one place you knew I would look?”
“I am a fraud, Felix,” the Tongue whispers, opening her eyes under the latticework of bones that divide us. “I said Katherine wanted to disappear, but that is not true. Deep down, I thought if I could make the world forget her, I might, one day, have a life.”
“You can still have a life,” I whisper.
“But I can never be a saint.” She sighs, shutting out the world once more. “I am afraid to die.”
So this is what we find waiting upon the pinnacle of Mount Truth, brothers; after a lifetime of scaling and falling back, after caring too fiercely and losing all hope, we simply find a waiting grave. Whether we chose to fill it with a hopeful martyr who fears to play her own tyrant or a monk who has gazed too long at Heaven is up to us. Mount Illusion gave us Love, Mount Truth gives us Death; we exist somewhere in the valley, brothers, trying on a hundred loves, imagining a thousand deaths. Arsinoë bears the fruit of both. The kindest thing I can do for her is induce her to labor.
With steady midwife’s hands, I reach under her robes and grasp Saint Katherine’s warm head, extracting it with as much pain as would accompany any virgin birth. Arsinoë shivers as if I have taken away a blanket but offers no resistance. Saint Katherine will be safe at last. I will see that her ear reaches Rhodes and her hand returns to Crete. I will place her blessed tongue back in its golden mouth on Cyprus. It will be a s
ad diaspora, brothers, returning all to normal, while I have been forever changed. I have no more bits of saint to follow, and anyway it is time for me to lead.
“Come away, Arsinoë.” I stretch out my hand and help her back to life. Perhaps she might return to Hungary with John and begin to ease the emptiness of his sixty slaughtered nuns. Perhaps I might even escort her on to Ulm, to dwell among our sisters there. The world is an open place to her, if she will let herself be free. Carefully, she takes my hand, pulling herself up from the grave. Halfway out, she spots something over my shoulder, brothers, something over the mountain’s edge, and hesitates in her resurrection.
“Oh!” Arsinoë whispers, stumbling against my chest. She holds out her hand as if to ward someone off or call him forward, I cannot tell which.
I turn, brothers, in both surprise and horror. How did he know we were here?
Now that we have found our saint, the hermit steps onto the mountain to provide us our legend.
He stands on the other side of the monk’s wall, with one hand clutching the curved blade I last saw the Mameluke wearing and the other trailing a crimped length of jute rope: this conscienceless murderer of my patron, this translator of a happy child into vermin-poisoned, sun-rotted, putrid food for worms. How dare he show his face on this mountain? I will rip it from his head and throw it to the desert lions howling for his blood.
He hesitates not, when I charge at him, but brings the butt of his sword hard up into my ribs. Oh, God, the air, brothers. Who has stolen all the air?
“You are a very fortunate man, Friar Felix,” Ser Niccolo shouts, himself still gasping for breath from the mountain’s tortuous climb. He yanks hard on the rope in his hand, and a creature staggers up behind him, collared like a slave, looking more pained than may be explained by the rope or the mountain’s tortuous climb. Its eyes are closed and it sways like a drunken man. Then I realize why. Half of its face has been caved in.
