A Stolen Tongue (41 page)

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 sad 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.

“Felix?” it begs.

“John?” Arsinoë screams.

“John.” I crawl weakly toward this beaten creature who is my dearest friend. “Oh, God, John?”

Niccolo puts his foot out and kicks me back.

“When you came to me on Contarini's ship, Friar, you asked me about the Life I was translating.” Niccolo maliciously yanks the rope
around the Archdeacon's raw and bleeding neck. “You said, ‘Tell me a little something about this obscure saint ... tell me how she dies.' I couldn't say then, but remember I promised to dedicate that Life to you? I thought your friend might also like a part in her story.

“We are forty-eight short,” Niccolo says to John and me, “but you can represent the Fifty Defeated Philosophers.”

“You have retranslated the martyrdom of Saint Katherine?” I sneer from where I lie, suddenly comprehending his pathetic attempt to blackmail Heaven. “You think she will speak to you if you restage her martyrdom?”

“Is that what you think I'm doing, Friar?” Ser Niccolo laughs. “We could have just put on a little play in the village square, spun a girl on a wheel, and poured milk in her hair if that was all I wanted to do. This is scholarship.”

Dragging the beaten John Lazinus behind him, Ser Niccolo walks to where his trembling sister stands stricken. Gently he touches her cheek.

“Tonight,” he says, “We translate the Mind of God.”

He fits each bone into its granite cast: the spine in its trough like a plumb line, the slender arms that once embraced the Christ child folded carefully across her piecemeal chest, the long-toed feet resoled and touching at the heels. Like a sculptor adjusting his model, Niccolo lifts a hip to lend a more natural gait, and I see Katherine at the end of a long day, shifting her weight in anticipation of the Wheel. He understands the saint's body; it shows in how he gently cups the left hand under where a breast would be, offering up the heavy white mound for sacrifice; in how he anchors the spine for strength; in how far he separates the toes, so she will not appear tense and anxious to run away.

She is a marvel of humanity, brothers. Where Arsinoë covered herself in the chaos of Heaven, Niccolo insists on the order of Man. No stiff Byzantine relic princess for him; his Katherine could wear the marble skin of a Donatello saint and be comfortable, so fluid and yet so strong is she in form. Only her neck seems unnatural, for it, as yet, has no head attached.

Three starving, battered pilgrims were no match for the translator's knife, and he roughly bound us hand and foot with white Saracen prayer rags ripped from the mountain wall. Next to me, John kneels in a blooming garden of his own blood. Poppies, purple in the moonlight, blossom in the barren earth under the leak in his broken nose. On my other side, Saint Katherine's Tongue, the inscutable Arsinoë, kneels next to her saint, gazing upon Katherine
with wonderment, as if seeing for the first time the lineaments of life within her figure of perpetual Death.

The translator turns to us and holds up Katherine's head. He speaks like a university lecturer in front of a rapt audience, speaking purposefully and clearly that we might take notes.

“When a man wants to create,” the translator says, “he has at his disposal only the barest tools: a rock, a nail, a mark upon a page. With them, he must construct thriving cities and history and works of great and lasting thought.”

He pauses, taking a turn around his creation, his reconstructed saint.

“God, on the other hand,” he explains, “works in living, breathing, human lives. He has superior tools, and, like a committed pamphleteer who risks wearing out his new printing press papering a town with tracts, God knows repetition, whatever the cost, will eventually bring the world to a higher understanding. So like an eternally reprinted page, each of God's martyrdoms, translated simply, spell: I am the Word. It may take many saints to make up that short sentence, for God's mother tongue is dense and deep as the sea. You might even think it is unfair—tens of thousands of Christian lives traded for those ten letters—but when deciphering the Mind of God, as Jerome, the master translator, said, ‘Only fools would translate word for word.'”

The translator stands behind his sister, resting Katherine's skull idly upon her tonsured head.

“What do you want from her?” John growls through the blood in his mouth. Arsinoë, beneath the skull, stares fixedly ahead.

“Why do you love my sister so much?” The translator comes around to John curiously. “It has bothered me throughout our acquaintance. It seems you are the perfect priest for a border town; your passion is roused only by the weak.”

“Leave him alone!” I cry. “He has been through enough.”

“Are you much better, Felix?” Niccolo asks. “Yearning to bed Heaven but not willing to be consumed by it? In ancient times, Friar, the gods revealed themselves to their mortal lovers as pillars of fire. Not one among them escaped incineration.”

“Those were pagan demons,” I answer. “Our saints are not gods, they were common men and women.”

“Would you like to know what she sounded like, Felix, when she was a common woman?”

In the icy moonlight, the translator brings Saint Katherine's head around to me. This leathern skull glows like a blue orb in his hands, willing to accept any face, any voice, that a man might put upon it.

“Look at her,” he says, his voice cajoling. “Imagine her as you knew her in Ulm, as she hung in your library watching over your books. She could have been your neighbor, couldn't she? A blond, rosy burgher's daughter who had read a bit of Plato and taught herself geometry. When you hear her in your dreams, Katherine has a Swabian accent, doesn't she? Her voice is sweet but a little rough, like crushed almonds on the tongue, and in your dreams, Friar, she desires you as much as you desire her.”

Despite myself, I begin to form a face. The open Katherine of our library, leaning against her wheel like a sunny milkmaid might rest against her pitchers.

“Don't listen to him, Felix,” John says.

“Don't you want to know what she has to say?” Niccolo asks, marveling at her brown skull. “All I have to do is fit this head on
that
body.” He nods over his shoulder at his reconstructed woman. “You cannot imagine what that will do to my sister.”

Arsinoë, beside me, smiles to herself.

Niccolo kneels in front of his sister. “I want you to tell the friar how his wife feels about him,” he says, and kisses her softly on the cheek.

Helplessly, I watch as the translator bends over Katherine's grave and completes the saint. As one struck by lightning, Arsinoë's body jolts and convulses, collapsing epileptically into itself. He has killed her. Beside me John moans in horror, struggling impotently against his bonds. But wait, brothers. The fallen woman moves. Cautiously, like a wild ass waking in the desert, she sniffs the cold night air.