A Stolen Tongue (7 page)

“You must think, Constantine.” John sits the rigid merchant upon the Tongue's carnelian trunk. “Does your wife have any enemies? Anyone who might wish her harm?”

“She promised not to leave the ship. I told her only on the ship could she be safe.”

“Safe from whom, Constantine?” John urges.

Silently, the merchant sorts through Arsinoë's collection of Katherine icons, arranging them in descending order, a life lived backwards: from her discovery atop Sinai, past the Philosophers' ignition, back to her first vision of the infant Jesus. His face sags when he reaches the earliest icon, that of a haloed baby Katherine perched on the knee of her soldier father, Good King Costus.

“I brought her this one.” He presses the wooden panel to his cheek and hands it to me. It is an ill-painted piece in blue and red, with a hydrocephalic father and daughter lifting stiff-fingered hands. Katherine's heavy halo has flaked away behind the shoulder.

“He looks so protective and strong, but in the end he died and left her alone in the world.”

“Constantine,” I ask, insisting he keep to the subject, “was your wife in trouble? Is that why she tried to destroy herself?”

The merchant leans his head against the wall, lost in the flat, foreshortened world of her icons. Sweat pills along his upper lip, and his hands lie lifelessly in his lap.

“I'm sure she did not intend to destroy herself, Friar,” he says. “It's been my experience that Arsinoë always gets what she wants. She must have intended to be saved.”

“Are you suggesting Arsinoë knew I would be on deck that night?”

“I am suggesting, Friar”—Constantine looks upon me wearily—“that if Arsinoë meant to test her saint, you were the means by which she received her answer.”

“Please, Constantine,” John interrupts, when I am about to challenge the merchant. “Your wife disappeared along with a priceless
relic. Surely, this was the agency not of Heaven but of a malevolent human being.”

Constantine's pallor exceeds even that of his worst seasickness. He closes his eyes.

“In the end, all became perverted, Archdeacon,” the merchant says dreamily, heedless of our presence. “I should never have followed that path to her house.

“I knew when I saw the makeshift stalls hung with sharp wheel medallions and cloudy vials of Katherine milk, when I started up the long trampled mud path through the almond grove, that I had taken a dangerous road. Mostly women milled about, pulling their teenaged daughters away from the Tongue's wild hibiscus bushes, for what girl could resist picking one of those lewd red flowers and tucking it behind her ear? I asked the women why they had come, wondering if their troubles were as great as mine. ‘My daughter's womb is restless,' one said. ‘It migrates to her nose and bleeds during her monthlies.' I looked over at the poor girl squatting in the grass, breathing through her mouth. She pressed a stained handkerchief to her face. Another mother told me, ‘We took our daughter to Saint Paraskevie's shrine closer to our house, but Saint Paraskevie told us Katherine's Tongue had to intercede for us. Paraskevie has no power over pregnancy, you see, and our daughter has been with child now thirteen months.'

“The road was crowded with fat women, unable to walk unassisted. Old men with sores. And dogs, everywhere. They ran in packs and begged food from the pilgrims. Someone said they were holy dogs, sacred to Katherine's Tongue. It wasn't true, but the dogs got fed.”

John glances over at me. The merchant is rambling, nearly incoherent. What does this have to do with his wife's disappearance, or who might have wished her harm? John is about to recall him to the point when he speaks again.

“You should have seen her in her own room, Archdeacon.” He opens his eyes on John. “Back then, little crowded settlements of icons flickered behind small candles, set on every table and chair, tucked into corners. In the beginning, Katherine only wanted to see
herself. Most pilgrims knew and brought as an offering some small painting of the Saint, some richly plated with African silver, some smudged with eggshell tempera. You clutched your icon and walked into her hot, dark room, mingling your nervous body stench with the chamber's melted wax and incense and something else less definable: the lingering desperation of the supplicant who preceded you. All these smells Arsinoë used. She spoke them aloud as you came in, sketching you for her saint:
Vines, oak, tar,
she said.
Onions, civet, clay.
You became aware of each aroma the moment she named it, dismantling and reconfiguring your own familiar essence, startled that everything you had passed through, during a day, clung and was knowable. When she had the measure of you in the dark, she lit a taper before her, and you were granted your first close look at Saint Katherine's Tongue.”

Constantine wets his lips, but by now John, at least, has no desire to stop him. My friend breathes deeply, with purpose, trying to sniff out the narrator's truth.

“The first time I saw her, she was seated on a simple chair,” the merchant whispers hoarsely, “her hair virgin loose around her shoulders. Dressed for bed, in a white shift, she looked more like a fever patient than an oracle, wasted and thin with dark, ringed eyes. They said her mother died just as the child's head emerged, and when the afterbirth slithered out it formed the shape of a wheel. I never knew whether to believe such stories, but she did have the look of one whom Death had embraced.

“Behind her sat a beautiful man, whose guarded face—I remember thinking at the time—looked like one scratched out and repainted. Our church in Candia had once been a temple to Dionysus, so I had seen it before; beneath the slender oval faces of Saints Peter and Paul, you can still make out the fleshy bloating of our wine god, grape vines centuries ago straightened into haloes, and leopard skins smoothed into draped togas. Her brother, they said he was. He sat at a desk behind her, his ancient watchfulness barely hidden by scholarly dispassion, collecting the words as they fell from his sister's lips like a midwife catching drops of the Virgin's breast milk.

“‘How may Saint Katherine intercede for you?' asked the Tongue. Her brother barely glanced at me but kept his protective eyes fixed upon his sister. I hadn't slept in days and could barely tell her. I shuffled forward and placed this icon at the Tongue's feet, lifting a fold of her hem to my lips. I begged her help. For weeks I'd dreamed of drowning, a cold horrible death where ropes of water snaked into my body and flushed away my soul. I should have gone to Saint Nicholas or Saint Andrew, some patron of the sea, I know, but my dream always ended with a young girl's body replacing my own, floating peacefully on to shore. I wanted Saint Katherine to take this strange, drowned girl to her and restore my sleep. I wanted not to be some creature of the Poets, nightly casting my own death upon the waters, until the day I found myself submerged and dumbfounded, raging at the will of God.”

Constantine breaks off and hides his face in his hands. He must have prayed to every saint under Heaven the afternoon Schmidhans's fat, portentous body passed before him on the backstreets of Candia, fearing, yet horribly certain, he would replace that cheerful drunk on our ship. He must have turned to his wife and begged her, for the tenth time, to take the overland route to Sinai: up to Thessalonica, over the land bridge to Constantinople, down to Antioch, across the breadth of Turkey into Syria and Palestine. God would preserve him on land, he knew, against bandits and marauders, through hunger and sandstorm.
Just please
—I can hear how he begged her—
don't make me take the drowned man's place!

“What did she tell you?” John asks the merchant. “Did she take the dreams away?”

Constantine peers at John through spread fingers, his face red and blotchy from shame. Slowly, he shakes his head.

“Her words made no sense until her brother translated them for me.
Water,
she said, almost laughing. Then,
Sleep
. At first I thought she was only repeating what I said to her, but then her brother revealed their meaning. ‘You will indeed spend your eternal sleep underwater if you do not help her,' he told me solemnly. Dear God, I thought, my dreams are true! Then he came over and placed his
ink-stained hands on his sister's shoulders. ‘Katherine has revealed to my sister that her body is raw from too much handling. Saint Katherine told my sister she wants a new skin.'”

What could Constantine possibly mean by that? A deep and insidious fear creeps over me, brothers, leading me to wild speculation. Katherine's bones are housed within skins of pure silver and gold, encrusted with opals, emeralds, and diamonds. Flayed of these reliquaries, her sacred joints and organs would be nakedly vulnerable, wholly at the mercy of diabolical thieves like those who took her hand and ear. Twice, now, the merchant's wife has been present when relics disappeared: first at Candia, when the handsome stranger tracked her to the monastery; and then today, when Katherine's ear vanished from Rhodes.

“I later found out,” Constantine says, “her brother had been giving the same response to all the pilgrims. Most, wrapped up in their own private troubles, didn't understand the needs of the saint. Some of us, unhappily—Oh, God!—some of us did.”

“What do you mean by that, Constantine?” I ask the merchant sharply. “What could Saint Katherine possibly need that Heaven does not provide?”

“Oh, Arsinoë, where have you gone?” The merchant moans. “I am so afraid.” Constantine throws himself over his wife's trunk and sobs like a child.

I have no idea how to comfort him, for I cannot shake my own rising horror. Is it the great waste of sea that haunts this wracked merchant, knowing it might at any moment reach into his sleep and claim him? Or is it the specter of a fish across the floorboards, harboring the spirit of a drowned German burgher? I glance at John, but he seems as confused as I, wondering, as I do, whether Constantine's fear has less to do with his wife's disappearance than with some horrible secret they hold in common.

“Do not despair, Constantine,” John says, when the merchant's wails quiet a bit. “Tomorrow we reach Cyprus. If your wife is able, she will surely meet the boat there.”

“We had a plan, Archdeacon,” Constantine says flatly, wiping away his tears. “She would protect me from the sea, and I would
make certain she reached Mount Sinai. Our first day aboard ship, and I've already lost her.”

The merchant's agony is really too great to behold.

“Look on the bright side.” I flounder, sounding unconvinced, even to myself. “Perhaps your wife was not stolen but merely wandered off and is even now booking passage back to Crete. She'll be waiting for you when you return with clean sheets on the bed and a spinach pie on the table. And she will laugh at how worried you once were.”

“That would be quite a feat, Friar,” The merchant says to me, letting his head fall back heavily against the cabin wall, “since Arsinoë doesn't even know where I live.”

T
HE
P
ORT OF
P
APHOS
, C
YPRUS
S
AINT
J
OHN'S
E
VE
J
UNE
23, 1483

I have often read in pilgrims' accounts that one should not pause long on the isle of Cyprus because the air here is poisonous to Germans. They say healthy winds get trapped behind the Caucasus and Armenian mountains and thus are not able to circulate, leaving this place both stagnant and unwholesome. If that were so, would the delightful Venus have swum out to Cyprus when she found herself unexpectedly made flesh from foam? Would Noah's son Japheth have established a new world on a noxious island? No, my brothers, discount this rumor. The air of Cyprus is not poison, merely ill-suited to Germans who are born and raised in hard, cold, consumptive air and who cannot live well in light climates where their intemperate eating and drinking may not be indulged.

I urge you to cast aside your superstition, brothers, because my patron was unable to do so. After much pleading and cajoling, he allowed Ursus and me to go ashore but elected, himself, to remain behind, far from the injurious vapors of land. Of course, his decision had nothing in the world to do with the Venetian lady-in-waiting who boarded our galley this morning.

Constantine nearly threw himself over the ship's side when he saw her small boat approach. My heart broke to watch all expectation, all hope, pool in his trembling lower lip, when Emelia Priuli, former waiting woman to the Queen of Cyprus, cousin by marriage to our captain, Peter Lando, climbed up the ladder. I'll leave it to you to determine why a woman of her youth and beauty should be
ending her days in a Jerusalem convent; I'll be circumspect and say only this: She is a Jezebel if ever I've seen one, and a scheming Delilah to trim the locks of this ship! All the ringleted, earringed pilgrim swains lined up for their haircuts, and Bald Tucher was first in line.

We left my patron sitting at her side, holding her comb, while she smiled through a veil of damp auburn hair at pilgrims whose minds should have been fixed on God. I announced to the entire ship that I was organizing a pilgrimage to the holy sites of Cyprus, but, so besotted were they with the new woman, only these intrepid pilgrims came along:

Lord Ursus Tucher, a merry youth and much intrigued with the legends of Venus, whose isle this is;

Master John Lazinus, Archdeacon of Hungary, a man of principle and passion;

Conrad Buchler, our barber and cook, who pleases many with his spicy stews;

Constantine Kallistos, a depressed merchant of Crete; and

Friar Felix Fabri of the Dominican Preaching Brothers at Ulm, the moving spirit of all these.

The ancients write much about Cyprus, most of it concerning the harlot Venus and her amours. It is said she swam naked in the waves of the sea for many years until her eyes at last turned to this place. The moment she stepped ashore, the Cyprians ran after her beauty and gladly instituted the practice of harlotry in her name. They gave her the highest mount on the island for her pleasure garden and held her watering can while she sowed every herb and plant that might be used in the business of love.