A Stolen Tongue (19 page)

“She knew her kidnapper would be looking for a woman, so she made the only woman present unrecognizable. She has a mission.”

“John!” I cry. “Listen to yourself!”

“Oh, God, Felix!” John presses Emelia's grainy black fingers to his lips and weeps over them like a child. “In how many graves has Arsinoë left her body?

“She needs her assassin to believe this talon is her hand. ‘But wait,' say the pilgrims, ‘doesn't her hand lie off the coast of Cyprus where the sailors threw her dead body to stop the storm? We saw her sink ourselves.'

“I tell you, Arsinoë will never die, Felix, she will just go on and on, borrowing the deaths of others. And on the Last Day, she'll appear before God with a whole regiment of identities behind her and she'll say to Him, ‘But I thought I could die in the body of another and still live myself. I thought I could exist as a poem in a hundred corrupt translations and still retain an honest meaning.'”

Only now, brothers, do I fathom the true extent of John's feelings for the merchant's wife. Someone, somewhere, believes the hand he holds to be Arsinoë's, and that will suffice. If he cannot embrace her, he will embrace the perception of her, the hot echo of her against dead skin. I gently pull the stiff fingers from his mouth and cover them with pebbles. He is, after all, still a priest.

“Come away from this place.” I pull John to his feet and lead him up the hill. Dawn is only a few hours away. I will need to find the strength to tell Ser Niccolo that his sister is more disturbed than we thought. Not only is she a runaway and liar, now she is a murderess.

And, God help us, now she is gone.

Sometime before sunrise, the Saracens, tired of being ignored, pushed the pilgrims back into the cellar, locking us in with the rotted-melon fog of burned flesh and our escalating theories. No one truly witnessed anything, except, I learn, my patron's son.

Emelia Priuli had flirted too democratically to feel safe sleeping next to any one pilgrim, so she positioned her pallet between the wall and the unthreatening young Ursus Tucher. He takes me by the hand and walks me to the ember upon which she slept, showing me the buzzard streaks that blacken the wall behind her pallet and his. His face is pale and troubled, and he tries to speak several times before I ask if there's something on his mind.

“Friar, do you remember when we arrived you told me to look for the pearl in the dunghill?” He draws me back into the corner of the cave, digs in his pocket, and deposits something cold and smooth in my hand. Five angular bits of red light. Five perfect bits of polished glass.

“Where did you get these?” I ask.

“Did you see that young man I spoke to for so long, when the Saracen merchants came? He's the son of a very strict Saracen lord, and he'd gotten himself into a scrape gambling. It's quite unfair, really; these jewels came off his father's shabbiest coat. Anyway, I drove a hard bargain—and he was desperate to sell before his father found out. Friar, have you ever seen such rubies?”

“Have you shown your father these stones?” I ask, rolling the glass in my palm.

“No, I bought them with my own money. It took almost all of it, but think of what we would have paid for rubies this large back home!”

“Ursus—”

“Only now they are ruined, Friar.” Ursus looks ready to cry. “I can hardly bear to touch them. I think these rubies killed my father's friend, the Lady Emelia.”

“Son, how could that be?” I ask.

“She slept right next to me, Friar,” he whispers. “What if that Saracen wanted his jewels back and set fire to the wrong person by mistake?”

“Ursus, child”—I smile—“Priuli is a woman, hard to mistake for a young man like yourself.”

“But it looked like him, Friar. In the dark, it looked like the man who sold me the rubies.”

Did Ursus see someone bend over La Priuli? Did he wake up and see Arsinoë's robed figure light the fire?

“I thought you were asleep, son,” I say. “I thought the smoke woke you up.”

Ursus shakes his head miserably. “I was too scared to do anything. I thought he wanted me.” Ursus turns away, and I see his hand go to his running nose. “Will they still let me be a knight of the Holy Sepulchre?” he asks. “Even though I let a lady die in my place?”

My poor Ursus, happily dreaming of hairless Turkish women in chains, suddenly strangled awake by a genie of smoke and melting flesh. I cannot let him believe La Priuli died for him.

“Ursus, look at me.” I lift his hanging head and smile into his eyes. “That man, if it
was
that man, was not after you. I'm afraid you bought nothing more from him than a few worthless chips of glass.”

I place a ruby between my teeth like a cherry pit and bite down hard. When it cracks in two, I cough it up and hold it out to him. I watch the boy's face shift from fear to relief to righteous indignation.

“Faa-ther!”

Lord Tucher strides across the cave at the sound of his son's cry. He takes one look at me and snatches Ursus away.

“We are angry with Friar Felix,” my patron tells his son sternly. His eyes are red from crying. “Come away.”

“I'm very sorry for having wandered off, Lord Tucher,” I say, as contritely as possible. “It was wrong of me.”

“Thank God we learned Saint Katherine's Monastery burned to the ground. I can see you just ‘wandering off' and leaving Ursus and me to die in the desert.”

“I was cheated, Father,” Ursus cries.

“We were both cheated, son. Putting our faith in such an irresponsible priest.”

“That's not fair, Lord Tucher, I got locked out.”

“I wanted
my
friar to bury Lady Emelia Priuli. I wanted her poor body put into the earth by a friend. Where were you, Felix?” my patron yells, his voice breaking painfully. “Where
were
you?”

“Gentlemen.”

Like the snapping of a holy wafer in an echoing church, this dry, crisp word stills us. The desert speaks in our archway, in the guise of an ancient Saracen man.

“I know you have suffered a loss. I am here to see it redressed.”

He does not yell or even speak loudly, yet his words reach every teeming, wet crevice of the cave. This venerable Saracen must be near to eighty years old, upright in posture, trim of beard, cleanly dressed in white robes with a crisp white turban. Someone has finally come to us.

“My name is Elphahallo,” says he. “I am the Calinus, interpreter to the pilgrims. From this hour forth, you shall entrust your physical bodies to my keeping so that you may concentrate solely on your spiritual selves. I understand one among you has gone early to God. Who saw her attacker?”

If the patriarch Moses appeared in our archway, I don't believe he could have been more commanding. The Saracen rakes the cave with abrasive eyes, rooting up the truth, commanding our consciences. With a red face and an aching throat, I open my mouth to confess, to say, Yes, it is my fault. I deserted my patron in his hour
of need. I committed the worst sin a confessor could commit. I left his son to carry the guilt of this woman's death; I abandoned my dearest friend to an unholy obsession; worst of all, none of it helped. She still got away. Had I only been here, I could have watched her. I could have saved Priuli's life.

“I did it!” A Spanish pilgrim on the far side of the cave flings himself to the floor. “I killed my mother as sure as if I'd burnt her alive!”

His sobs echo through the cave; we watch horrified as he forces mouthfuls of grassy feculence into his mouth, rubs it through his hair, into his eyes.

“I needed the money. She never understood how desperate it was. Mother, why else would I have married a Jew?”

The pilgrims part silently to allow Elphahallo into the cave. He holds his white robes scrupulously above his ankles and picks his way to the shrieking man.

“Christ, I've come to make peace with you! You took my mother, you left me with that stinking convert Jew wife and her devil father. Take me back! I need you!”

“You married a Jew?” someone beside him marvels.

“Stand up, my son,” says Elphahallo, careful not to let his wide sleeves trail across the man's shit-smeared face. “You must not speak that way of your wife.”

The Saracen addresses him in hushed tones for what feels like an hour, but try as I may I can make out none of it. He shows the pilgrim how to wipe his hands and mouth on his robe, demonstrating the procedure on his own pure white caftan. Soon after, the guilt-stricken pilgrim quiets and Elphahallo addresses us once more.

“Each man must make his personal peace with God, and I know many of you have journeyed to this place to do so. It is not my concern what baggage you brought with you from your separate homes, unless in it you packed ill will against your brother. My sworn duty as Calinus is to see that you stay safe while in my care, so I ask again: Who marked that woman's murderer?”

“Excuse me, sir.” To my surprise, Ursus speaks up. “I might have seen something.”

“What's that, child?”

Across the cave, John catches my eye, asks the question.
Did he see? Will he betray her?

“Yesterday I bought what I thought were precious gems from a despicable unclean Saracen—no offense, sir—only to discover this morning that they were glass. Is it possible that same lying Saracen came back in the night to set me on fire so that I wouldn't tell and, in the darkness, killed the person beside me by mistake?”

“It's quite a theory, young man.”

Lord Tucher boxes his son's ear, but Ursus will not be stilled.

“I only—” Ursus raises his voice over the laughter of his fellow pilgrims, straining his neck to be heard—“I only mention it—
please
—I only mention it because I thought I heard the lady scream while she was burning, ‘It wasn't me!' I thought she screamed,
‘It wasn't me!'
”

“I understand you discovered her, son, and I know that has been very hard on you,” Elphahallo says at last. “I'll keep what you said in mind.”

“What about that man? He took most of my money. Don't you want to know what he looks like, what he said?” Ursus demands.

“I know who he is.”

“You know? And you let him prey on innocent pilgrims?”

“You bought gems off a desperate man for a fraction of what you would have paid back home, did you not? Who exactly, son, was preying on whom?” Elphahallo bows to us and turns to leave.

“I want my money!”

Ursus's scream shakes the cave, and that's all it takes.

“Wait! When are we leaving?”

“Our captain! Let us see our captain!”

“Why are we being held prisoner in this stinking shit hole? Why aren't we in Jerusalem?”

“I want my
—”

“Will we have a guard? You're in league with them, aren't you.”

“—
money!”

Elphahallo answers no one but waits like a patient camel against a raging sandstorm. When at last he is certain to be heard, he touches his white turban respectfully.

“The other pilgrim ship is debarking at dawn. I'll ask you to remain inside until we've registered them and spoken with your captains about this tragedy.”

And with a duck under the archway, he is gone.

Oh, the tedious hours.

Conrad found a dead tortoise yesterday, and in between the times we are lined up, counted, and checked off by the Saracens he sits by our lantern, hollowing the beast out with his knife. The meat he sets aside for stew; the muscle he shears as he did Constantine's intestine in the belly of the ship. I watch him bore two holes at each end of the shell, thread the sinew through, and tie it off at the bottom. He plucks the string. A lyre.

Disaffected Ursus consoles himself by stacking shells he collected on the beach one on top of the other. Clams and angel wings, scallops and oysters, he builds his little Tower of Shellfish Babel, then blasts it with his fist, sending it clattering across the cavern floor. Lord Tucher watches his son sorrowfully, while John stares intently into space. I want to see if Ser Niccolo has arrived, but the guard will not allow anyone outside, not even to pass water. There is nothing to do but wait. As we were born to wait.

When Christ walked the earth, so near and yet so far from this port of Joppa, He was wont sometimes to take his ease in the comfortable home of the sisters Saint Mary Magdalene and Saint Martha. Now, once when blessed Saint Martha was running herself ragged—going to market, chopping sweetmeats, setting places at table, spicing wine, ordering the servants about, tidying her hair, stirring the soup, sweeping the floor, and seeing to all else that must be done in honor of such an important guest as our Lord—she chanced to see her sister, Mary, sitting at His feet, listening calmly to His Word. Martha wiped the sweat from her brow, straightened her apron, and stepped out of the kitchen. “Mary,” asked she, “can you be comfortable sitting while your sister goes crazy making all things happen?”

“Martha,” said our Gentle Lord, touching the Magdalene's head, “Mary has chosen the best part, which shall not be taken away from
her.” By which he meant, Mary has chosen a life of contemplation over a life of action. When I have departed this world, she will have heard me, while you will have been bustling.

As you know, brothers, those of us in religious orders have chosen Mary's part. We have retired from the world to meditate upon Christ and devote our lives to prayer. But woe unto me! At the heart of my Mary life I am still a Martha! Try as I may, this enforced inactivity is more grievous to me than any amount of effort could possibly be.

I rise and tap our Saracen guard on the shoulder. Will he not, please, let me go outside? Again he shakes his head, gestures for me to return and sit with the other pilgrims. I sneak a quick peek over his shoulder and see Contarini's rowboat unloading six pilgrims onto the beach. They will soon have their first look at Saint Peter's Cellars, recapitulate our labors of yesterday, and scrape their own Mounts of Venus to the cave's center.