A Stolen Tongue (3 page)

“Felix,” John chides. “Tell me you don't believe she waited until just before you arrived to grow restless. That Franciscan may not have checked the sacristy in months. She might have been taken weeks ago.”

“We met a strange man at the convent,” I tell John. “He was acting suspiciously, and when I spoke of God willing us to Sinai, he suggested God's will might not be enough.”

“Since we've boarded this ship,” John says, “I've heard only warnings against that desert. We are seeing Jerusalem, Felix. Is achieving Sinai really so essential?”

How can I answer a question that has been put to me a hundred different ways all my life? How can I explain without scandalizing you, my brothers, without appearing light-minded and impatient with the quiet of the cloister, or guilty of the sin of idle curiosity, or moved by the Devil?

“When I was a boy,” I tell John, “a traveling Greek monk came through Basle, where I served my novitiate, wearing the dust of the East like a glamour. Where our habits were fine wool and silk, his was desert homespun. Where our cheeks were smooth and soft like women's, his errupted into a long, wiry beard like a prophet's. He told my abbot he had walked overland from the Sinai desert, that
he was a young man when he left and now he shuffled like a grandfather. Under his arm, he carried a small carpet tied at both ends with rope, and he asked my abbot's permission to solicit funds with what was inside it.”

John's serious face makes me blush at the foolishness of my story and fall silent. It was a humid day in Basle when the monk came through. The entire monastery crowded around the altar, but I pushed between the sweating bodies to be closest. With swift, practiced movements, the monk arranged four finger joints to spell
K.M.,
for Katherina Martyr, and placed at the four cardinal points around them an eyelid, a toe, a vial of milk, and a piece of silk dipped in her oil. Back in the Age of Miracles, her bones used to produce enough oil for the monks to burn their lamps year round; but by the time I was a boy, oil had to be coaxed from the bones by briskly rubbing them with silk.

“Felix is in love,”
someone whispered behind me. But how could I not be? On our prie-dieu, Katherine stood with sword and wheel on the right hand of Mary. In our ambulatory, she smiled down from her fluted pillar on the way to our library. As one of the Fourteen Heavenly Helpers she was chiseled onto the ceiling that to my mind touched the Celestial City. Katherine was everywhere, the most popular girl in town, the scholar, the philosopher, the king's daughter, the
East
—and suddenly here she was in front of me, pieces of a corporeal, human woman. I wanted to kiss that monk for bringing her to us; he had reversed the route of pilgrimage for a boy too young to leave his abbey. He brought me my first holy lust.

“If, in pieces, Katherine could find her way to me,” I say aloud, “I, as a whole man, can certainly find my way back to her.”

“And Lord Tucher has agreed to take you there?” John asks.

“He swore on his own life.”

My friend winces and gingerly reaches into his mouth.

“How is your tormentor?” I ask. John's toothy, open smile has been troubled by a rebel molar rotting in his jaw.

“I'll get Conrad to pull it tomorrow.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.” He smiles.

“Is this where the dead man slept?”

John and I look up, startled, to see a man approach, hidden inside a heavy cloak of the Homesick. They hang upon his arms, wrestle with his trunk; one wipes a small flow of blood from the man's swollen lip with a handkerchief.

“What happened to him?” I ask.

“Fell down the steps,” one whispers.

The man throws them off and faces me. “This was his spot, wasn't it? The drowned man's spot?”

I turn to John. I think I saw this man in Candia, shrinking back from the pale white sausage fingers of Schmidhans's sluicing corpse. He speaks the maritime merchant lingua franca with a nasal accent. Once the Homesick fall away, his long black robe and drawstring cap reveal him further as a tradesman.

“But soon we will land in Jerusalem, yes?” he asks hopefully. “Then on to Sinai?”

“My party certainly will be continuing our pilgrimage,” I tell him. “I can't vouch for anyone else. There have been rumors.”

“What sort of rumors?” He fingers his bonnet string into his mouth and nervously chews it.

“The captain spreads them,” I say. “If we don't sail back with him—if we cross the desert to Sinai instead—he loses half his fare.”

John gently unties the mattress the merchant has strapped across his back and drops it over the fat-fisted chalk scrawl,
G. Schmdhns
. Without a word, the merchant sits down, picking worriedly at one wiry overgrown eyebrow.

“I would never cross the desert.” A Homesick shakes his head. “Satyrs and Fauns live there.”

“The sea is bad enough, with its sharks and Troyp,” adds another.

I kneel beside the merchant, who grows more pale by the minute.

“Don't listen to them.” I throw my arm about his shoulder, knowing, myself, the irrational fears that accompany any new voyage. “You'll survive.”

The merchant's face is close to mine, clammy and green. He lets his cap string drop from his mouth.

“None of it matters.” He sighs, collecting himself at last. “If I am to ride in the drowned man's spot, I am already dead.”

“John, wake up.” I push my friend, and he rolls over onto his stomach.

Katherine came to me in a dream. She swam frantically behind the ship, her wet hair matted to her cheek.
Husband!
she cried, treading water. Between her teeth she held a wedding ring. Then she stretched out her left hand, imploringly. It was a bloody stump.

“John? Are you awake?”

How can he sleep, oblivious to the pitching boat and groaning boards, the burning lanterns that keep night from ever truly falling here? A rat gallops between us with a mouse locked between its jaws.

I have barely closed my eyes all night. The Greek merchant, Constantine Kallistos as he identified himself, kept me up for hours with his womanly puking and odiferous unfamiliarity. Schmidhans reeked of stale beer and mutton, but it was a German reek, suspended in the national fat like ambergris. This man smells like I don't know what. Octopus? Vinegar? There's a sharp aroma that clings to him as if he's rolled in a field of onions.

O my brothers, how unquiet is the sleep of pilgrims aboard ship! As if sour, recycled smells weren't bad enough, I have witnessed whole parties of pilgrims fall upon one another with swords in a dispute over whose mattress is overlapping whose chalk line. I have seen men hurl full chamber pots at burning lanterns to extinguish them. I have heard noble knights cry like little children and call out for their mothers, only to blush in the morning at their comrades'
merciless ribbing. Fleas and lice breed in our sweat; rats and mice fall onto our faces from the beams above. For a monk used to the privacy of his own cell, nighttime aboard ship is a new circle of Hell.

“John.” I push him a little harder this time. “Shall we go up on deck for some fresh air?”

My friend covers his head with his pillow.

“That's a yes? You'd like to come?”

Nothing.

“I'll meet you up there, then.”

While I pick my way upstairs, let me give you some advice, brothers, on what a pilgrim should guard against while moving about at sea.

First: Let the pilgrim go up and down these steep ladderlike steps with due deliberation. Twice I have made haste, and both times I have fallen, so that it is a wonder I was not dashed to pieces.

Second: Let him beware of carrying a light on deck at night, no matter how convenient it would make things, for the galley slaves dislike this strangely, being by nature superstitious, credulous creatures, and will not endure it.

Third: Endeavor not to wake these same wretched creatures, who burrow their lousy heads into their neighbors' bellies and squirm for position on their narrow wood benches, for they are also a quarrelsome, untrustworthy, easily angered lot, culled mostly from the captured peoples of Eastern Europe: Albania, Sclavonia, Macedonia. Among the slaves you will also find Bashi Bazouks, Christian apostates who fought for the Turks; Jews, Saracens, Schismatic Greeks, and Sodomites. You will never, though, meet a German galley slave, because no German could withstand such misery.

Fourth: Let the pilgrim not trust any ropes without pulling on them first to make sure they will not bring a pulley or a sail crashing down upon his head.

Fifth and last: As a pilgrim carefully climbs from one cross bench to another, let him grasp the tension lines and carefully ease himself out onto one of the horns of the ship, which is a comfortable spot to sit and think, always making sure he sits not in pitch, which
substance covers almost every inch of the ship, and which would be easier to spot if a pilgrim were allowed what is forbidden in Article the Second.

I settle myself on the ship's prow, where I am wont to sit during the day, and lean my back against the damp rigging. Even alone, brothers, you are not alone at sea. The Ocean is crowded with creatures: large, round fishes shaped like winnowing fans, some with heads like dogs and floppy long ears, dolphins, mer-people, Scyllas and Charybdises that suck ships down. At night, a monster called the Troyp circles and with his long sharp beak pierces the sides of ships. Should you ever encounter a Troyp, lean as far over the side as you dare, fix it with a fearless stare, and on no accounts look away. If you grow frightened of the Troyp's hypnotic eyes and falter, he will rise up and devour you straightaway.

How Katherine haunted me tonight! I can still see the swift panic in her salt-reddened eyes, still smell her blood where it bloomed in our ship's wake. I am not a fanatic, brothers, nor am I a star-eyed prophet claiming visions from beyond. The infrequent glimpses I'm allowed of Katherine are perhaps no more than clothes I give to air, and yet only one other time have I felt her this strongly.

The night before I left on pilgrimage, brothers, a strange dread overtook me. As I lay awake in my familiar room, keenly aware of my packed trunk in the corner, my pocket processional upon it, and my clean pilgrim's costume on a nail by the door, all the eagerness I felt for touring Jerusalem and Sinai, which heretofore had been my greatest desire, suddenly drained away and was replaced by an intense loathing for travel. Those of you who had counseled me against going appeared as my truest friends, and those who encouraged me seemed to me enemies of my life. A trembling fear of the sea possessed me, and I conceived so many objections to pilgrimage that, had I not been ashamed, I would have run straight to Abbot Fuchs and begged to stay in Ulm. But then the miracle. As I lay in bed, one cowardly foot skimming the floor, a voice cut through my turmoil, pitched in the low, severe tones of a injured spouse.

Will you come when I call, my husband?
it asked.

I started up, expecting to find a woman in bed beside me, Katherine's hardened face, her blond hair spilling over her shoulder like a spurned Valkyrie's. But all was dark. Only the echo of her challenge hung in the air.

Would I come when she called? Was this dream not a dream but a cry for help? No milk flowed from her severed hand tonight, only cold red blood.

What makes a saint choose a certain friend, brothers? Saint Paulinus kept company with my name saint, Saint Felix, though he knew him not in life; he built a villa by his grave, fashioned poems in his honor, was laid beside him in death. Fifty years ago, my wife Katherine, along with Saints Margaret and Michael, spoke to a young peasant girl from Domremy, encouraging her to put on knight's armor and liberate France from the English. These friendships are formed across the great gulf of Heaven; they are unlikely, dangerous alliances. We must take as much care in these friendships as we would walking about a dark ship at night.

First: We must be deliberate in our scaling of the ladder to Heaven, lest we take undue pride in our friendship and tumble painfully to earth.

Second: Like a lantern on deck at night, we must hide the light of our saint under a bushel, lest we be too tempted to gaze upon her always and slide into the sin of idolatry.

Third: We should be careful not to wake the galley slaves of the Devil, those being his demons and minions, jealous of our heavenly friendships, who will seek to disrupt them.

Fourth: We must test the ropes of our friendship by pulling on them, by which I mean through prayer. We must pray often and not fear to ask favors of our saint, for prayer and supplication keep proper tension on the ropes and stave off the pulleys and sails of Heaven's wrath, that might crash upon our heads.

Fifth and last: We must ease ourself onto the horn of salvation by remembering that Jesus Christ, not any one of his saints, is the pitch that sweetly covers this ship. How gladly we should sit in Him, brothers, that died to save us all.

So I have given you a catalog of things to guard against, both while at sea and in forming an attachment to Heaven. I will add only one more caution, and it is this: Beware of talking to strangers, or God may make a liar of you, as he has just done to me. I said we had no women aboard our ship, but I swear on my life I see one.

What a cruel joke the passing clouds play on Friar Felix, smudging moonlight and salty air, spinning silver night white hot into a hollow vessel. What I see across the deck cannot possibly be female: that flock of loose hair lifted on dark wings, the paucity of skin brushed across a face so thin it would rather wear its bones on the outside. This must be a trick of light, an Ocean mirage—there are no women aboard this ship.

And yet, without a doubt, she stands against the moon, leached of all but angular blue shadows, wearing about her neck a heavy bag, like those used to feed cattle. Could she be one of the wretched women our sailors pick up on the docks for their sport? We see them limping down the gangplanks just before the ship sets sail, twisting their skirts in their fists where the bloodstains show. Vacant, pliable women, they exist only to contain the flood of sodomy, like soft wax plugs wedged into a cracked urn. No, were she one of those women surely some sailor would be right behind her, pulling her roughly back into his hold, there to store her beside his coiled rope and his bolt of precious contraband silk, the one he carefully wraps first in straw and then in burlap to keep out the mildew and preserve its resale value in Venice.