by Sheri Holman
We trade off dragging John Lazinus down the mountain. He fades in and out of consciousness, brothers, calling upon the name of his hometown in Hungary, calling for the burned Arsinoë. Conrad wants to stop and bandage us properly, but I push us on, brothers. The translator is somewhere down the mountain, sprinting through the night with Saint Katherine’s head under his arm.
“John went up to the mountain to look for you,” Conrad gasps, when at last we reach the foothills and stop to rest. “When he didn’t come back, I got worried. More wild Arabs have come out of the desert, Felix. They heard the monastery lost its patron saint.”
Dawn breaks when we have only one more rise to crest before the downhill broken-stone stretch to the monastery. The mountains are pomegranate red in the early light, slippery from the morning dew. The sun rises over the monastery to the East.
“Look!” Conrad points down to the valley below, just before the garden. A small, hobbling figure limps across the exposed boulder field.
“Watch John,” I say, running down the mountain path as fast as my broken ribs and burned legs will carry me.
“Niccolo!” I scream. “Niccolo!”
The figure turns at the sound of my voice. Seeing me on the rise above him, he triumphantly holds up the head of Katherina Martyr. He is getting away, brothers, I cannot run fast enough.
I slip down the slope, banging my ribs grievously. I look up, but to my shock, Niccolo has barely stumbled a step closer to the monastery. He spins again to face me, and I see his utter lack of comprehension—and an arrow lodged in his left shoulder.
“Felix!” Conrad screams. “Watch out!”
I am certain in old age, when I look back upon this day, I will swear the wheel that slayed that thief of Heaven came spinning from the sky. I will tell one of you how it revolved with the azure firmament, gourd green, clustered aubergine colors of the desert, and its spokes were made of bone. Another will see a wooden wheel, flung like a discus, catch the translator by the throat with its iron spikes. Still to one more, I will protest the orb of rising sun betrayed its orbit around the earth to slice that wicked translator into a thousand flaming pieces. And I would be telling each one of you the truth; for all the while it happened, brothers, I could not distinguish what made up that blurring streak of blue-red-yellow flesh that spun itself around his pinioned hub, pounding, screaming, releasing arrows. I caught a glint of metal, a chestnut hoof, a streak of flying hair. Blue hands I thought I saw, a flash of white barred teeth, but not until the exploded valley stilled and the sanguine dust began to settle could I distinguish the individual radiants on his torture wheel. A hundred panting, rage-spent Arabs reined in their stamping mounts.
I race to where the translator has fallen, push my way through frothing white donkey mouths, to step across the creek of blood running down this baked, poreless plain. Niccolo, affixed with a thousand arrows, is dead on his knees, bent double over my wife’s stolen head. Weep, you envious creature. You are the death of all.
A familiar white-robed Saracen steps into the circle and forcefully pries Katherine’s skull from Niccolo’s perforated arms. Slowly, he walks toward me.
“Elphahallo,” I gasp, conscious of the nomads’ unreadable black eyes upon me. “Why?”
“The Bedouin love Saint Katherine too,” he says. “She gives them bread.”
Another Language
From somewhere East of this mountain, from deep in the lonely desert, the brothers of Saint Katherine’s Monastery claim to hear bells toll every day. They say there exists a monastery in the wilderness filled with the holiest of men; but this monastery no man in modern times has ever been able to find. Still, every day the bells ring faint canonical hours, and still men set off in search of it. It happens, occasionally, that brethren disappear from Saint Katherine’s, and it is believed that they have been translated to that hidden monastery in the desert to fill the places of those who die from time to time. I would like to think one of those kindly monks came and removed my patron’s son for burial there. When we returned to Saint Katherine’s tomb with her head, Ursus’s body was gone, and no one knows what has become of it.
Today, I climb back up the mountain to separate out the heavenly from the human. Katherine’s grave is a tangled mess, still hot to the touch, smudged black and oily. Our two natures have been fused in this exploded heart of mountain; the divine unites with the earthly or the earthly pollutes the divine—however you choose to see it. I will turn to my sad task of selection soon enough, but first, brothers, look with me a moment upon the World.
In daylight, from this vantage, a man can see for hundreds of miles around. Farther to the East lies the kingdom of Persia, once a glorious empire, now known primarily for the strange apples that grow there, in our language called peach. I have read those apples are poisonous in their own country, but in ours they are sweet; which seems to be the property of many apples. Beyond Persia, Arabia Felix, a barely known country, stretches wide with deserts, rich in veins of gold, and divers precious perfumes. The Saracens’ holy city of Mecca lies in this land, to which men of the East make their own pilgrimages, the desire for earthly shoots of Heaven having been planted in mortals of every different faith. Many of the Bedouin who saved Saint Katherine are on their way to honor their prophet Mahomet there. These naked wild men, in their heathen tongues, invited us to join them and see for ourselves the truth of their Alcoran, revealed at Mahomet’s floating tomb. Our savior Conrad has decided to go along with them, deeper into this puzzling land, and so learn more for himself of the World. John is too ill to go, recovering from his wounds slowly in the monastery’s infirmary. My route is not meant to be farther East, with strangers, but homeward, in the company of my dearest friend.
Westward, then, I turn my eyes, to seek out the Red Sea and eventually our departure port of Alexandria. In my ignorance, I had imagined the Red Sea to truly be red, but it is a cool, inviting blue, brothers, and it is the first leg of my journey back to you. Up until today, our travels have carried us farther from home, but now comes the time to turn ourselves back, to set our faces toward our native land. I have lost everything I loved and cared about, brothers, but that one thing: home. It is many miles and many tribulations away, but it is God’s single consolation, the gift he gives to fools. You may wander this entire earth to find your paradise, He says. But you will find it as you left it: in the quiet of your cloister, in your simple routine, among the ones who love you.
I reluctantly walk back to Katherine’s crowded grave and set about my task. I, alone, was happy with Heaven as I found it, and yet here I am, upon this mountain, deciding which bones are holy and which are not. I sniff a foot. It smells like char. Where is the perfume of sanctity to guide me, brothers? To my nose, it all smells like ash.
When I was a boy, I learned the meaning of objects by accumulation. Here is an apple: It is round, it is red, it ripens in the autumn; if cut open it will reveal flesh, seeds, and juice. If I add round + red + autumn + flesh, seeds, and juice, I will understand this object: an apple.
Now that I am a man, I look at words with a more awakened eye. If I take the word apple, in Latin malum, and gaze inside it, as if putting my inner eye to one of those wet black seeds, I see its name comes from malum, meaning distress and misfortune, woe, a misdeed. Now I understand the origin of apple, for knowing its core, as it were, I see by its very name its inseparability from Eve, who in offering it to Adam brought eternal woe and misfortune upon us all.
Might we not, then, understand a saint better by her parts than by her whole?
Katherine’s name is melodious and familiar, centuries of women, good and bad, having borne it after her. When we cleave her name like the apple, however, we see Katherine comes from catha, meaning total, and ruina, ruin; hence total ruin. I once thought it was because she demolished the Devil’s edifice through her eloquence, or perhaps because she defeated the Fifty Philosophers with her learning. Lifting up a hand that might be hers, or might be Arsinoë’s, I see n
ow how wrong I was. Katherine’s name can only be read against my own, Felix, “The Happy One,” her servant translator. We are only happy in ruin, brothers, for only then can we be sure we have nothing left to lose.
I choose my relics and rise to go home.
We grope for the wall like the blind,
and we grope as if we had no eyes:
we stumble at noon as in the night,
we are in desolate places as dead men.
We roar all like bears, and
mourn sore like doves: We
look for judgment, but there is none;
for salvation, but it is far off from us.
ISAIAH 59:10–11
DESERT OF THE SINAI
SUMMER 1483
F.F.F.
Author’s Note
Friar Felix Fabri (1441–1502) seems to find a groupie in every generation. My own devotion owes everything to two English translators who preceded me, H. F. M. Prescott and Aubrey Stewart.
Dame Hilda Prescott’s two works, Friar Felix at Large (Yale, 1950) and Once to Sinai (Macmillan, 1958), helped me organize Felix’s own twelve-volume Latin work, Evagatorium in Terrae Sanctae Arabiae et Egypti Peregrinationem.
In the spirit of putting new flesh on old bones, I took Felix’s pilgrimage and stretched my own concerns over it. This would in no ways have been possible without Aubrey Stewart, who translated the first half of Felix’s journey into English (The Wanderings of Felix Fabri, Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society, 1896: Reprint, AMS Press, 1971). Whenever Felix speaks for himself in this novel—The Rules for Pilgrimage, Why the Eucharist May Not Be Celebrated on Shipboard, A Few Brief Descriptions of the Holy Land, to name the longest passages—I acted only as editor, and Felix spoke in Aubrey Stewart’s words.
Aubrey Stewart was not alive in 1969, and I was only three years old, when the Roman Catholic Church annulled Friar Felix’s spiritual marriage to Saint Katherine of Alexandria. Along with Saint Christopher, Saint Margaret, and many other immensely popular, colorful saints of the Middle Ages, Saint Katherine was removed from the Catholic canon. No one could prove she ever existed.
Acknowledgments
I have had more help in my life than one woman could expect, and I can only name a few people here. I’d like first to thank all the readers of the early drafts of this manuscript, a torture few can appreciate: my friends Bill Tipper, Jillian Medoff, Lindsey Tate, Katie Kerr, and Frances Jalet Miller, gifted writers and editors all, whose kind and stern criticisms were always invaluable. Most of all, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to novelist George Dawes Green. He was my advocate long before I warranted it, and he has been a constant inspiration.
I cannot thank enough my colleagues at the Aaron Priest Literary Agency, for their support and understanding during my mysterious leaves of absence. Thank you, Aaron, Lisa, Lucy, Arleen, Barbara, and Paul, my other half, for being a true family to me. I am still offering burnt sacrifices on the altar of the god who first steered me to Molly Friedrich, my friend, agent, and role model for adult womanhood. Without her generosity and goodwill, this book would never have been conceived, written, or sold.
The staff at Atlantic Monthly Press has been another source of rejoicing; such happy, smart, committed people are rare these days in publishing. I want to thank Kenn, Elisabeth, Eric, my vigilant and wise copy editor, Janet Baker, and everyone else who has been so wonderful to me. Most of all, I want to thank my brilliant, hysterical editors, Carla Lalli and Morgan Entrekin. Thanks for putting my monk on your wonderfully sexy list!
Last, but not least, let me thank my mother, father, and sister for their tenacious support as I left the country and moved to the city. Without the love and unapologetically biased praise of my mom, Gerri Workman, I would be nothing in this life.
And again, thank you to Sean Redmond, to whom this book is dedicated. He read every word, far too many times. He tirelessly trotted to the library for me. He translated. He cooked. Oh, how he suffered! And I can never thank him enough.
