A Stolen Tongue (11 page)

“Just a minute.”

“The Archdeacon says you must come
now
!”

Helplessly, the merchant coughs a rope of black bile into his chamber pot. He can't hold back any longer; miserable tears squeeze from his eyes. I lean over him and speak clearly into his ear.

“I will be back, Constantine, and when I return I want you to tell me everything.” I wipe his stained mouth with the bedsheet. “And no more talk of dying.”

The glare on deck blinds me, and I have to throw my arm over my eyes to let them readjust. When I regain my faculties, I see, from a distance, John and Conrad leaning over the ship's prow, gesticulating wildly. Ursus drags me over.

“Is it a Troyp?” I ask. The waves are high and loud.

“No, something stranger,” John shouts. He turns to Conrad. “They won't make it from here. Send them around to the steps.”

I follow my friends along the curve of the boat to where the stair rungs descend into the sea. There, way below us, is a small two-oared boat, very like the one we use to row ashore when we're anchored. Unfortunately for this little boat, the bad wind has agitated the sea tremendously, so that one minute the craft is far below our galley and, the next, feet above, completely at the mercy of the swells.

“Here they come,” John calls. “On the count of three ...”

Conrad leans far out over the water to net a fish.

Like a trick acrobat upon the back of a great green horse, the merchant's wife rides the cresting wave. She raises her arms to steady herself and steps onto the rough triangle of the rowboat's neck, nodding to her servant to dig in with his oars, so as not to smash into the galley. Before she has perfectly gained her balance, the wave bucks under her, lifting the small craft a good four feet above us; I have just decided she's waited too long when suddenly, with a cry, she leaps.

On the wall of our refectory at Ulm we have a painting of the Annunciation. In it the Archangel Gabriel appears to the sleeping Virgin as a blur of raised knees and frothing robes, bursting into her room as one having just sprinted through a twilight evening to tell glad tidings. In this suspended moment when the merchant's wife blots out the sun with her pedaling legs and graceful arms, I too expect a miracle. Let her change into a dove, dear Lord, and fly away from here. Let her return to the waves like an underweight fish caught too soon. Let her become anything she likes so long as she disappears and no longer darkens my pilgrimage.

She strikes the deck hard in her fall, and Conrad quickly gathers up her unconscious body. The skin under her eyes is a skein of broken
purple veins, and a cut across her eyebrow has only barely scabbed over, kept soft and white by exposure to salt water. The battering of her face doesn't prepare me for the shock of her collarbones when Conrad removes her water-soaked gorget and loosens her bodice. Like a grotesque queen, she wears a violet and green necklace of mottled bruises across her chest, the pendant of which trails across her cleavage to a ragged ruby scar. Suddenly aware of Ursus staring, I dispatch him to find some malvoisie.

Her eyes snap open. “The other ship?”

Like a startled animal, Arsinoë bolts from John's lap and flings herself half over the ship's side, craning to see from where we've come. All I can make out is the receding figure of her hired boat being swiftly swept back toward shore by the bad wind. I point it out to her.

“No, the other pilgrim ship.”

“Don't worry. The captain says we'll beat them to Jerusalem,” I tell her, gently easing her back onto the galley floor.

“I've made it?”

“Yes,” I say. “You're back among the pilgrims.”

“You know I was left behind.”

“We looked everywhere for you.”

“A Turk.” She struggles to a sitting position. “Off Rhodes. He took me.”

“Shhh. You're safe now.”

“He beat me, you see.”

“Where is that wine?” John bellows. It's obvious that between her ordeal and this fall, the merchant's wife has sunk deep into shock. But what has happened to John? He cannot bear to touch her but stares transfixed, like a man watching his town burn. I take the small glass of malvoisie from Ursus, when he returns, and hold it to her lips. She gulps greedily.

“We must get her out of these wet clothes,” Conrad tells me, helping her off the galley floor and wrapping his cloak around her shoulders. The merchant's wife is soaked and trembling.

“Were you followed?” John asks. He's right. Where there is one Turkish ship, there are bound to be others. We should tell the captain.

She shakes her head. “I'm sure they think me dead.”

“Your husband was ready to follow you to the grave.” I stumble on the word
husband,
thinking of the merchant's unhinged confession.

“Constantine is ill?”

“He called for a confessor,” Ursus offers.

She breaks away from Conrad and stumbles downstairs.

We find her, below, watching the rise and fall of the merchant's narrow chest. His body spasms, his hand jerks from her grasp, and patiently she retrieves it, cradles it in her lap. I read once about a Celtic finger language in which each joint stood for a letter of the alphabet. Arsinoë smooths his skin, erasing her history off each knuckle of her false husband's hand. As her clothes dry, they thicken the air with the briny scent of mildew. I suggest she change, but I don't think she hears me.

“May I give him some water?” she asks at last.

John rummages through the sand belowdeck and hands her a cool goatskin. Tenderly, she raises the merchant's head, dribbles a bit of orange water into her palm, and holds it against his mouth. When he makes no move to swallow, she separates his lips and pours the water onto his tongue.

“He has a fever,” she whispers.

“He thought you were dead,” I say.

Without a word, our barber steps in and ministers to the patient: listens to his heart, thumps his hypochondria, lifts his eyelids. Conrad examines the bucket of vomit and the black stains on his bedcovers and sadly shakes his head.

“He is very ill.” I translate Conrad's German for Arsinoë. “And this black seems more than seasickness. Conrad is afraid it is one of his organs.”

Arsinoë nods. Hot, fat tears splash onto Constantine's face.

“Conrad,” I whisper, “will you take Ursus upstairs?”

I wait until they leave before addressing her.

“Madame,” I say gently, “your husband was confessing to me at the time you reappeared. He was very troubled and not making much
sense. If I am to absolve him, I need to know the truth. Are you his wife?”

John looks up startled.

“No,” Arsinoë says, almost inaudibly. “I am not his wife.”

“He said you appeared at his shop five days ago and that you had on your person some bones.”

“Felix!” John shouts. “What are you suggesting?”

But Saint Katherine's Tongue nods her head slowly. “Yes. I appeared at his shop five days ago.”

“And where are the bones, Madame?”

“Felix,
stop
!” John orders. “She is obviously very ill.”

With a sob, the Tongue throws herself over the merchant's sweating body. “Constantine, wake up!” she cries. “I need you!”

“Madame!” I pull her up, but John snatches her away.

“Come along, my lady.” He encircles her protectively with his arm. “You have been through a terrible ordeal. Let's go upstairs and get Conrad to look at your wounds.”

The Archdeacon throws me a disgusted look as he leads Arsinoë away. Constantine moans in his delirium and stretches out his withered hand.

At least you have a hand with which to beg, I think to myself. What have you done with my wife's?

Earlier, I mentioned several perils of the sea that plague pilgrims and terrorize them on their voyage, and yet there is one danger of which the inexperienced would never think; nor is it to be found in books. When the winds are silent and the sea is dumb, a calm comes over the Ocean that is more distressing to pilgrims than anything other than actual shipwreck. I have seen men suffer during storms, vomit, and grow weak, but many more have I seen sicken and die during a calm at sea.

When no winds blow and the ship stays fixed in its place, everything on board begins to rot. The drinking water stinks; salted meat spawns maggots, flies, worms, and lice. Men on board grow lazy and sleepy from the unrelenting heat or, worse, indulge in hatred, envy, melancholy, and spleen. On the day after Arsinoë's return, our ship suffers from such a calm. The bad wind drops and is replaced, more maddeningly, by no wind at all. Those who diced the day before, and lost, harbor murder in their hearts against their compatriots who diced and won. Abovedeck there is rage and torpor; below, stagnation and death.

Like a Christian Hermes, I conduct souls from one level to the next.

Down into the underworld, I lead the merchant's wife. John finally persuaded her late the night before to take some rest and let us watch over her husband. Just after dawn, I climb the steps to the ladies' cabin, expecting to find Arsinoë deeply asleep next to the Cypriot
lady-in-waiting. Instead, I surprise her kneeling before the carnelian trunk, mouthing a prayer in the gathering light. When she sees me, she rises and silently follows me down to where her not-husband lies dying.

Up into the light of day I lead John, when the merchant's wife asks for solitude in which to bid her husband good-bye. Neither of us has slept, and the glaring sun upstairs induces in us a cranky, blinking drowsiness. To stay awake, we search each other for lice, wiping the ones we pop between our fingernails on the rigging where we sit. I stare out across the water, listening to the soft plash of ripples against the boat, letting John's fingers root through my hair. The vermin scuttle before his nails, tickling my scalp, dropping into the collar of my tunic, and swimming down my sweaty back. The Perfidious Tucher sits some feet away from us, pounding his infested shirt between two rocks he has collected for this purpose. He has endured much under-the-breath teasing for his refusal to touch the bugs, and now his exposed back is turning a deep pink in the morning sun. I run my fingers through my beard, and they come away covered in eggs.

To stay awake, we talk of Jerusalem.

In Jerusalem there will be wholesome foods to eat like new-killed mutton and eggs with cheese. Live water will bubble up from the earth to slake our thirsts, and the breezes that rustle across the Mount of Olives will dry the sweat from our swollen faces. I recite for John whole passages of Saint Jerome's letters to Paula and Eustochium, describing his life in exile. The Holy Land was perfect, Jerome has written, except that he carried his forced separation from them like a pebble in his shoe. John and I think on Jerome with selfish envy. We are a mere two days from Jerusalem, and yet it feels like God has stretched out His arm and set His palm on our ship, holding us in place like a father stays an impatient child.

John comes up with the game of putting saints to spices when, after an hour, we've grown too heartsick to talk on about Jerusalem. After all, he says, Saint Bernard wrote that saints' lives added spice to mankind's otherwise bland diet of mortality. If, as John suggests, we assign the precious saffron to the Virgin Mary and the
essential salt to Her Son, where on the palate do the legions of the blessed reside?

Since John is the inventor, he begins. Oregano? he asks. To which saint do we assign oregano?

I think for a moment. Saint Anthony of the Desert, I reply, reminding him of the thorny herb bushes that perfume the wilderness. During one of the dry storms over the desert, lightning might have struck a shrub, reducing it to a cloud of thick aromatic smoke. Asleep in his cell, the old ascetic might have dreamed of roasting shanks of meat, dripping juice thick with flecks of the oregano bush. He might have awaked suddenly in that sharp, smoky night and understood the old wisdom: It is far easier to tame one's manhood than one's stomach.

Hot pepper, I demand of John, raising the stakes. I only once tasted this spice, and my tongue throbbed for days after. John laughs. That's easy. Saint Dominic, the founder of your order. During her pregnancy, didn't his mother dream of a dog with a torch in his mouth?

Rosemary? Immediately, I think of Saint Agnes, whose sign is the lamb. One of my earliest memories, before I entered the novitiate, was of my aunt's mutton stew, deliciously oiled with fat and rosemary.

Mustard? I see the dusty road to Damascus and the yellow cloud that rose when Paul fell to his knees in front of Christ.

Clove? John imagines the sharp black teeth of the dragon that swallowed Saint Margaret.

On and on we name—basil, coriander, sesame—and as we play I come to understand why Bernard chose this metaphor. Like barrels of incorruptible spice, all the early saints traveled from the East to preserve the West. Whether, like Paul, they came in person or, like the blessed Katherine, as a cult and legend only, all the ancient saints at some point boarded a ship and sailed to us. I've often wondered how a princess martyred in Alexandria and translated to fiery Sinai could find herself alive in the hearts of forest-dwelling inland Europeans. The returning ships of our ancestors must have brought her legends wrapped up with their pepper and cardamom, heedless of the peasants running along the docks, gathering their dropped stories
like precious peppercorns that escaped their packaging. Once taken to market, a merchant might have related the color of the saint's hair to an Italian housewife buying cinnamon for her vats of prunes. Another might have handed over her height with a cone of green cumin. In this way, Saint Katherine was transported and reconstructed in Europe, given back her legs, and handed off the boat. Her story was told and retold in every language where ships sail, and there again she is like a spice, for thyme tastes the same on the tongue of a German as it does on an Italian, as on a Swede.