A Stolen Tongue (20 page)

“Contarini is here?” John looks over my shoulder. He has not spoken since we left Emelia Priuli's grave, and his voice sounds small.

“Yes,” I answer.

Had that wretched Mameluke not left me behind on Contarini's ship, none of this would have happened. We would be on our way to Jerusalem by now. My friend John looks ten years older than when we began our pilgrimage, as haggard as Constantine before he died. Does the Tongue have this effect on all men?

“I am glad she got away before they docked,” he says.

Until recently, brothers, I had mistaken John Lazinus for a man of good sense. He had been nearly destroyed by the tragedy that befell his convent, that I knew, but his faith was intact; he was on pilgrimage to make peace with his past. Something must have changed the evening he spent alone with the Tongue in the ladies' cabin; while Conrad and I worked to preserve Constantine, Arsinoë was busy replacing one protector with another. John's heart was secured by the time we put the last stitch in the merchant's chest. By Christ, brothers, if I cannot get outside to warn the translator, I can, at least, get to the bottom of John's fixation. Without speaking, I lead the Archdeacon away from the cellar's mouth, back to that smudge of
ash that was once La Priuli's crimson dress. I feel his resistance the closer we get to the spot.

“In this place,” I say sternly, “a lady was killed. I had no fondness for her. She bewitched my patron and undermined my pilgrimage, but she was one of God's children. She was about to take her vows as a Bride of Christ. She would have been one of us.”

“Why are you doing this?” The Archdeacon turns his face away, pretends not to smell the roasted-pork crispness of the flesh that melted into the cave floor. He cannot defend her, his Tongue, here in this place.

“I want to know what Arsinoë said to you the night of the storm.”

“What do you care about that night?” he says protectively, as if it could be stolen from him, like a hand or an ear. “Didn't you do enough?”

“I care,” I say slowly, “because that's the night you ceased being my friend.”

I do not mean to say this, brothers. I do not mean to increase the distance growing between us. He is the only one who understood my need to reach Sinai, who never teased when I stopped in every church that had so much as a carving of Katherine in the nave. He accompanied me to Rhodes, to Cyprus; he sat with me over Constantine's voiding, exhausted body; why do I need to wound him? Why did he have to give his heart to her?

“You said last night that you loved her, even after she set Emelia on fire,” I prompt. “Why, John? What did she promise you that night?”

“Don't you understand, Felix?” John Lazinus whispers angrily, pointing to the thin skin of ashes on the floor. “Don't you see this is my punishment? How many women have I already watched burn? Do you not think God saw my sin and set alight another?”

The Archdeacon throws himself into the corner of the cave, still sticky with the Saracens' filth. Several nosy pilgrims approach us, but I wave them off impatiently. Cautiously, I crouch beside my friend.

“I am still your confessor if you want me.” I take his hand, as I saw Arsinoë do on the beach, and prepare to hear the worst. “I can still absolve you if you desire absolution.”

“I was so weak that night,” he says, so softly I have to bend down to hear him. “To have used her after she had been violated.”

So it is true. I try to swallow my bitter disappointment.

“John, you are a man,” I finally say. “And chastity is a nearly impossible vow.”

He turns on me horrified. “You think that? My God, Felix, what sort of fiend do you take me for? Listen to me.” He laughs ruefully. “What right do I have to be offended when what I did was so much worse?”

“What did you do?”

He shakes his head. “She was exhausted. She was sick. I forced her into it.”

“Into what?”

“Into calling Saint Katherine!” he yells, furious at me for goading him into this. “I believe in her because I
saw
. Katherine was with us the night of the storm.”

Can he possibly be telling the truth? To have withheld this from me, when he
knew;
when he, of all men on earth, knew the anguish I felt at having lost her. I stare at him, speechless, sickened, mortified.

“At first she said Katherine wouldn't come without her brother present.” John speaks, but I look at anything but him: Conrad giving my patron's son his first unnecessary shave, two French pilgrims arm wrestling; a Saracen merchant pleading with our guard to let him enter and sell us yogurt. Though life continues in the cellar, I am numb to all but John's relentless voice.

“When she saw I was about to leave her, to go find you and give her up, she pulled me back into the room. ‘Wait,' she said, in a voice beyond all human exhaustion, ‘what do you want to know?'

“I looked on her then, Felix, with wolfish eyes. Not on her bruised and battered body newly covered with Constantine's robes, nor on her aching, uncertain face, nor on her eyes, filled with the pain and humiliation I'd seen in sixty other pairs of eyes when, God forgive me, they still had eyes. I ignored every part of her that was still a woman and searched for that place beyond her that I needed to find, if I was to believe.

“‘Prove she speaks to you,' I ordered. ‘Ask her what has become of my sixty nuns.'”

John drops his head into his lap and covers his face.

“Are we not each of us greedy for Heaven's attention?” he asks. “Is it not greed that sends a young girl to a fortune-teller or a duke to an astrologer? Was it not greed that made me force Arsinoë open, even after she had already been pried apart by a force larger than herself? A man is not allowed the luxury of remorse like mine unless he has already gone too far or taken too much. We are the plunderers of Heaven, Felix, we greedy mortals.”

And yet, I think to myself, you at least, John, have seen the riches that are to be had. You have heard Katherine with your own ears, looked upon her with your own eyes. I cannot plunder if I am no more than a beggar at the gate, and it appears that is all I am ever likely to be.

“What did Katherine say?” I ask roughly.

John's eyes fill with tears, and he swipes them away. “That she had gathered my poor slain daughters to her. She was tending their burns with sweet heavenly ointments; she was brushing their hair to encourage it to grow. They were not restored yet, but they were on the mend.”

My need to know is as great as John's, and yet I almost choke on the words. “What was she like, Saint Katherine?”

“Like fire on a mountain,” he says.

“Damn you, John Lazinus!” I shout, rising to leave. Across the cave, Ursus's troubled eyes are on me, wondering what has made his friar angry now. I have been convinced of Arsinoë's madness since we opened her trunk to find it empty, since she took on the life of a dead man and walked the ship in his clothes. Now my own friend, a man I have trusted and depended upon, says he saw Heaven through this woman, that my own wife spoke to him through her. What am I to believe?

“Come back, Felix.” He pulls me down to him by my robe. “Katherine commanded us to help her. We were to make certain Arsinoë conveys her relics safely to Sinai. It is her will.”

“How can it be her will if there are no bones?” I snap. “This is further proof of the Tongue's madness, don't you see? Her brother told me all the bones those crazy peasants brought were buried behind their slaughterhouse!”

“When did her brother tell you this?” he asks sharply.

I feel my face turn red. For the first time since I boarded Contarini's galley, I feel the furtiveness of what I've done.

“Last night,” I say finally. “I was on his ship.”

“What?” John's voice is fierce.

“I overheard you talking of escape. I thought her brother should know.”

“You were going to turn her in without telling me?” John cries. “Just hand her over to her brother?”

“You were going to help her run away!” I accuse him, just as angrily. “I certainly was not consulted about that.”

“She was terrified of her brother.” John has leapt to his feet. “She thinks he is trying to kill her.”

There is a scuffle at the entrance to our cellar. Our Saracen guard steps aside to admit two men; the first is the short Saracen yogurt seller, who wiggles in under the guard's armpit and immediately withdraws ramekins of his cool white dessert for the pilgrims' inspection. The second is Ser Niccolo, the translator.

“What is he doing here?” John gasps.

“I told him to come for his sister.”

He picks his way through the crowd, searching, no doubt, for me. He is a good head taller than most of the pilgrims, and I watch his curly black scalp, like a snake on the water, wind its way closer.

“Felix, Arsinoë has had only a night's head start.” John clenches my arm. “You can't tell him she's fled.”

“What am I supposed to tell him?” I ask the wild-eyed John, whose grip is bruising my arm.

“Tell him she set herself on fire,” John says.

“Are you out of your mind?”

Ser Niccolo bends familiarly over my newly shaved patron's son, Ursus. The boy smiles and points me out to him.

“Katherine wills it,” John insists. “Arsinoë is doing her will. Do you know for sure she is not?”

What am I to believe? Ser Niccolo bears down upon me, his eyes troubled and dark. Surely Contarini's pilgrims have heard the tragedy that took place here last night. Surely Niccolo knows a woman went up in flames.

“You must help her, Felix,” John whispers, as Niccolo steps up to us. “For me.”

The translator does not even glance at my friend; he has eyes only for me. What do I do? I am all confusion.

“Abdullah says the only woman in your party was found in flames last night,” the translator says. “Tell me it is not true.”

John's hand is on my arm. I may be damned for all eternity for this. I may have sold my wife for a slave.

“It is true,” I say, and, just like that, Arsinoë has stolen another life. “Your sister, the Tongue, is gone.”

The sun set by the time our captains, not wanting to slow the pilgrimage with an investigation, declared Emelia Priuli's death an act of God. We stepped out of the cave to find a half-moon rising. I pulled my damp robes around me and breathed in the cold shore smells: rotting crab claws, driftwood, picked bodies, rock.

“She's over here.”

I led the translator to Emelia Priuli's grave. He would take one look at this charred body and recognize the fraud. He would call me irregular priest and false friend, beat me to within an inch of my life, I thought, and all this I would deserve.

Niccolo knelt and gently touched the earth over Emelia's face. Long strands of melted hair stayed fixed to the scalp. Surely, I thought, he would recognize the hairs.

“Will you take her body home to Crete?” I asked softly.

He slowly shook his head. “I have business in Jerusalem. I don't think I have the means to preserve her.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “She was more self-destructive than I thought.”

The translator nodded slowly, rocking back on his haunches. I was about to help him up when, without warning, he fell upon the grave and tilled up the body, harrowing the charred joints like stones in a field. The baked head separated from the torso, but he embraced the jumble, breathing deeply as of a bouquet of roses.

“Do you smell anything, Friar?” he asked.

“No,” I replied.

“Neither do I.”

Niccolo dropped the bones and walked away.

“There's a translator's quarter in Jerusalem.” He spoke more to himself than to me. “Maybe they will let me study with them until I can find the strength to go home.”

“That's a fine idea.” I dug into the earth with my hands and slowly began to reinter Emelia Priuli.

“Don't you find it awful, not understanding?” he asked me, gesturing to the hundreds of pilgrims milling about with their luggage. The Italians from Contarini's ship had sought out the Italians from Lando's; French had found French; the women, no matter what nationality, stuck close together.

“Not understanding what?” I asked.

“What people are saying all around you. All these private conversations in all these private languages.”

“No one can speak all of God's tongues,” I reminded him gently.

“The Donestre can. They can speak all the languages of the world, Friar Felix. But we'd do well to stay far away from them.” His eyes welled with moonlight, overflowed his cheeks.

“Who are the Donestre?” I asked.

“A race of men I met in the Red Sea. If you were to go to their island, Friar, one would call to you in an accent so subtle, you'd believe he grew up in the next parish over.

“
Felix
. . .
Felix Fabri
. . . he would call.
Good Abbot Ludwig Fuchs commends me to you. Come and eat with us
.

“You would walk up the path to the rock where he sits, holding out his arms for an embrace, and you would be so delighted to find someone from Ulm in the middle of the troubled sea, you'd happily fling yourself into them. The Donestre would kiss you on your cheeks and eyes. He would murmur in the voice of your favorite aunt and remind you of your boyhood summers in Zurich. You wouldn't feel his teeth on your leg until it was too late. First your knees would be gone, then your thighs. Your trunk would be eaten and then your shoulders. The Donestre would devour you, all but the head. And then he would sit and weep over the head.”

“Felix?” John approached with a lantern. “Everyone is moving down to the beach.”

“I got away with my life.” Niccolo rolled down his thigh-high yellow boot and pulled up his slashed hose to reveal a deeply churned red scar. “Because he recognized me for what I am.”