A Stolen Tongue (16 page)

We've seen no sign of Contarini's ship, which to my mind is both a blessing and a curse. Happy are we, certainly, to have attained Palestine first; even now, Captain Lando, loaded with presents, waits in the Saracen camp, hoping his bribes will convince the Governor to lock Contarini out. I, of course, have my own reasons for not wanting Lando to succeed. Not only is it uncharitable to wish upon other pilgrims a misfortune we could scarce have endured, had things been reversed but, more to the point, only when Contarini's pilgrims dock may the burden of Saint Katherine's Tongue be lifted from our shoulders.

The woman Arsinoë has taken no food since the night of the storm, brothers, and has drunk nothing but a little water. John has in no way been able to persuade her to sample the delicious puddings concocted by the Saracen merchants, nor has he been able to tempt her with grapes or sesame bread or eggs fried in oil. All of these I tested and assured her were wholesome, but to no use. She fears her enemies will use the Saracens to poison her.

Can you blame me for walking away, brothers? Have I not waited a lifetime to attain this shore, and should I be stuck inside a feculent cave, surrounded by the noisy mercantile Infidel, because of another's madness? Arsinoë has the bewitched John Lazinus to care for her, who, I believe mistakenly, looks for redemption in her folly. Sixty nuns under his charge were violated and burned alive the night the Turks took his town; John, I fear, fights the Turk once more, through her.

The sun is high in the sky above me, and the water looks cool and inviting. When was the last time I had a real bath, brothers, Venice? With soap, Ulm? Could there be a more fitting salutation to the Holy Land than to take off one's sandals, lift the hem of one's robe to one's bony knees, and recapture for a moment what it is to be clean?

I wade out, stepping gingerly over the sharp rocks on the harbor's floor, and lean forward until the perfectly transparent pane of water suspends me like a figure in stained glass. As I break the surface tension, my robes float up like a rounded fin; I swim with my eyes open, brushing small pink pebbles, furry rocks, the sharp hairballs of sea urchins. I feel purer than I have in months, brothers, pushing through this rippled world, and for the first time understand why the Jews consider unclean anything lucky enough to live in the sea that then choses to walk on land.

When the Tongue is safely restored to her brother, all will be like this water, clear and untroubled. John and I will once more take up that ease of friendship that we set aside when Arsinoë arrived; he will once more want to accompany me on outings like this, undivided in mind and loyalty. Once the Tongue is gone, I will have the energy to reclaim my patron from that snare of flesh Emelia Priuli and set his straying feet back on the path of pilgrimage. I will be kinder to Ursus; I will converse with Conrad, who speaks no language but German and thus has found few friends among our international party of pilgrims. Most important, I will have my wife back. When the Tongue is restored to her brother.

Can my pilgrimage be salvaged, brothers? I come up for air across from where the ruins of ancient Joppa start on the beach and collapse back into the desert, a sad end to this eighth city built after the flood. Joppa has been destoyed and rebuilt too many times; Judas Maccabeus leveled it when its perfidious citizens slaughtered the town's Jews; the Saracens dug under its foundations after the Christians restored it. Now Joppa's city walls are sown into arid fields, and cinnamon-colored goats roam the foundations of what were once Roman baths and echoing Hebrew temples. The dismantled city has become like John the Baptist's bones, its remains flung farther and farther apart in an attempt to weaken its formidable power. And yet, brothers, here lies the difference between a saint and a city: The Baptist may be
divided a hundred times over, and still each new mote will contain his impregnable essence; Joppa, like any mortal undertaking, may be shaken only so much before it dissolves away into dust.

I stumble awkwardly out of the water, dragging sand and oyster shells in the hem of my wet robe, and climb up to the carcass of dead Joppa. You can sit upon felled Corinthian columns that once supported great courts of law; you can spread out your clothes to dry on a marble slab that once shaded a Platonic academy. To what indignities a city may be put, once it has expired, brothers: suffering, among other insults, the wet curiosity of a modern German monk. I find a long shallow marble trough and lay myself down to dry. Cicero received a letter on the death of his beloved daughter Tullia; a friend chided him out of his grief by asking what one woman's passing mattered compared to the death of Corinth.
How can we manikins wax indignant, ephemeral creatures that we are, when the corpses of so many towns lie abandoned in a single spot?
Worse even than abandonment, Cicero's friend would have wept to see how the Saracens dismember the original buildings and drag Joppa's marble away to pave their mosques. The eternal transference continues; nothing, in the end, retains its original meaning.

And is this not my deepest fear, brothers? Do I not mourn for the dying of my pilgrimage and tremble that it is being put to some other use than what I conceived? I feel so out of control, so at the mercy of my patron's fears and the Tongue's madness. He keeps us from Sinai; she keeps me in constant confusion about my beloved's desires. I know she is ill—why can't I put her from my mind?

“How can you know they are healed?”

Hark, brothers! Just above me: a man's voice, muffled by the marble walls of my trough. We know that voice.

“Because they are with her now,” replies another, softer voice. “Your nuns. I see a crowd of young women behind Katherine. They wear pure white wimples and carry the slender palm fronds of martyrdom.”

I ease my chin over the rim of the trough, but they do not notice me, brothers: John and Arsinoë. They take a seat upon a heap of Joppa and stare out over the harbor, past Andromeda's Rocks.

“They are not ruined?” John asks, not looking at her.

“Oh, no!” The Tongue shakes her head vehemently. “They are overjoyed to have stepped out of those bodies. Without skins and muscles and organs to impede them, your nuns can finally achieve true heavenly dispassion. Where there is no passion, there can be no ruin.”

They sit too closely together, their fingers tracing the shallow flutes of the same fallen column. Arsinoë has dared to take off Constantine's bonnet, and her profile for the moment appears almost a woman's. She seeks desperately to comfort my friend, looking upon him with that determined hopefulness I've seen too often on the faces of softhearted deathbed confessors. I should reveal myself and put an end to this intimacy. She should not look at him that way.

John turns to her suddenly. “How did Katherine first come to you?”

Without thought, I duck back into my trough. Arsinoë takes a long time to answer.

“We had an icon of her in our family chapel, as big as I was when I was a girl. Saint Katherine painted tall and long-limbed, holding an open book in one hand, a heavy golden sword in the other, her hip resting lightly against her wheel. I used to measure myself against that icon. I fit myself to it as to a grave: Was my hair as long and sable as Saint Katherine's? Was my foot arched as gracefully? Did my eyes, almond and dark like hers, recall pain so exquisite it read like euphoria?

“I would press myself against her portrait and imagine us deep in the desert, alone in a shallow cave, with only icons of ourselves for decoration. She would touch me as a woman touches, not tousling my hair or pinching an arm, but firm and confident, kissing my face before sleep, washing my arms and legs in the stream.”

John's eyes stray to her legs, where she has propped them on the column's pedestal. They are naked and brown in the sun, tight, like those of a distance runner.

“The night my brother left for university,” she continues, “I took all my sorrow and fear and loneliness to that icon. I worshiped him, you know. My brother taught himself a thousand languages, he
understood
things, and, as men do, he was leaving me behind. I went to Katherine, begged her to do something, anything to bring him back, when suddenly her eyes began to vibrate, like a rabbit's or a bird's. I couldn't break away from them. She left her frame, Archdeacon. She bent over me, where I had fallen to the ground”—Arsinoë brings her face closer to John's, until not an inch of sky shows between them—“And she blew into my mouth.”

John hesitantly licks his lips. He is trembling.
Please, John,
I pray.
Don't.

“The Saracens call Christ the Breath of God,” the Tongue whispers. “I became her breath that night, her voice, her sighs, her indignation. I was no longer a little girl in a big house. I was someone important. And no one could prove I wasn't.”

Her mouth is so close to his, I am afraid for him to breathe, lest by his inhalation he should draw them together.
A woman is more bitter than Death, John; she is a snare, her heart a net, her arms are chains.

“How can we love a saint who reveals herself to little children”—Arsinoë searches his face—“knowing full well she has perverted us for the rest of the world?”

John closes his eyes and surrenders to the Tongue. I cannot bear to watch.

“Look, Archdeacon.” Arsinoë stiffens, sighting something over his left shoulder. “The mast.”

I glance over, to discover the miracle that has saved my friend from certain damnation, and spy a tiny twig bobbing in the Ocean way beyond Andromeda's Rocks. Certainly it is Contarini's ship. Our enemy. My salvation!

“That is my brother's ship,” she says.

“The brother who transcribed your visions?” asks John, his voice hoarse and shy. He is remembering Constantine's description of brother and sister together, Arsinoë's hair falling loose over her sheer nightdress.

“The night she first came to me, I prayed.” The Tongue laughs softly. “I begged Saint Katherine to do anything to bring my brother back.

“This was the price. He did come back, but not for me. He came back to study
her,
to learn
her.
Sometimes I wish he had stayed at his university. He belonged there, among like-minded men, not locked in a girl's bedroom listening for saints. My brother thought I was worthless because I could not manage to communicate directly with God; he said I was merely some freakish vernacular dialect. Katherine was the translation, God the true Words. He couldn't bear to be God three times removed.”

Her brother the translator, the man who taught me how to clap on Saint John's Eve. I have only to hold her until he comes ashore.

“No matter what, Archdeacon”—the Tongue turns forcefully on John—“I cannot allow him to find me. I must reach Saint Katherine before he does.”

“If that is the only way you believe you will be safe,” he says, “I will do anything to help you.”

Reach Saint Katherine? What is John Lazinus promising?

“Tonight, before they dock,” she says. “I must get away before Contarini's pilgrims come ashore.”

“Let's go back, then.” John rises, staring worriedly out to sea. “If Lando can lock them out, you have plenty of time. If not ...”

She stands and slips her hand in his. “Your nuns are smiling, Friend John.”

Oh, God! What fresh betrayal is this, brothers? I watch them walk down the beach, hand in hand, until they come in sight of the Saracen camp, where Arsinoë reties Constantine's cap under her chin and squares her shoulders into a man's. Like a senseless animal John has fallen into her pit, has become food for her madness. He would truly help her escape? He would free her to dog my pilgrimage, to keep me in perpetual fear for my wife's well-being? Who knows what this creature might do if, God forbid, she should reach Sinai? No, John. Climb out of the pit! Fill it in so it swallows no others! I will help you, my dearest friend, the only way I know how.

I stand up and quickly brush myself off.

I must fetch Arsinoë's brother.

The hired Arab who pulls the oars of our small boat studies my monk's robe with its great red cross, listens to our friendly German; slowly he shakes his head at my companion, Abdullah the Mameluke.

“Fucking Arab dog.” The Mameluke seethes. “They're always looking at you as if you're going to slip. Look, Friar, I can call him a fucking Arab dog and he doesn't understand a thing.”

Abdullah smiles at the rower, rolls his eyes at me.

“Fucking Arab dog.”

Behind us, on the shore, tiny sandpiper pilgrims hop in and out of the surf. My patron and his son are among them. They must wonder where I am.

“I'm the only one allowed to leave the ship,” Abdullah says proudly. “Contarini sent me to petition the Governor. Lando's trying to lock him out.”

“Is Lando having any success?” I ask.

“Not much.” The Mameluke laughs. “The Governor told me that if your captains don't agree to tour Jerusalem together, he'll send you all right back home.”

There's not much chance of that; both captains are so greedy they would sooner climb into bed together than lose a florin between them. That Lando is having little luck, however, means I have even less time to accomplish my task.

If meeting the Mameluke is any indication, fortune favors my mission, brothers. When I was certain John and Arsinoë were out
of sight, I started purposefully back to Saint Peter's Cellars, resolute in my plan but confounded as to how it might be executed. Could I hire a Saracen to row me out to Contarini's ship and back before our guards locked us in for the night? Could I be certain Lando would not start for Jerusalem while I was away, leaving me bereft of patron and possessions? As I fretted, I came upon the donkey pen of the Saracen camp, where the restless brown beasts we'll use for our peregrinations through the Holy Land grazed upon thistles and reached with their lips for the sweetly scented terebinth flowers above them. I confess, I was distracted from my plan long enough to move among those donkeys and gather for myself an armload of terebinth, as this plant's red-tipped thorns, brothers, crowned the greatest king of all: the poor mocked King of the Jews.