A Stolen Tongue (37 page)

Elphahallo says much to the drivers in their heathen tongue, but the traitors make their black eyes into those of uncomprehending strangers and hear him not. John, Conrad, and I crowd around a stunned Lord Tucher.

“And I'll take those provision camels too, please,” Niccolo orders. “A man has got to eat.”

“You mean to strand us in the desert with a dying child and no food?” John stammers.

“You may keep the wretched water. For all the good it will do you.” Niccolo nods to the drivers standing at the loaded camels' flanks, who cut the water loose as they have been dying to do ever since we set out from Gazara. At least they have left us that.

“Pardon me.” Peter pushes past, leading his donkey over to the translator's camp. “To the left then?”

Niccolo extends his boot into the Mameluke's chest.

“Not you, my love. I won't profane Saint Katherine's church with the man who raped my sister.”

“But,” Peter stammers, “you promised to take me home.”

“You deserted God. You deserted Allah. It seems to me you are
most at home in the desert. Die here like the dog you are ... Abdullah.”

Niccolo turns his donkey, and the drivers, mounted on their own animals, trot swiftly after him. Between them, they lead off all our goods, save only the donkeys we ride and the single camel transporting Ursus Tucher. What are we to do? Beside me, a small choking noise builds in Lord Tucher's throat, a hybrid catch between rage and impotence, fear and decision. Before I can grab him, brothers, he twists away from my arms and sprints madly after the translator.

“You fucker! You have murdered my son!”

It happens faster than you think it possible to happen: An arm reaches back, finds an arrow, bends its bow, releases. Tucher is felled before he even reaches the translator's donkey's hoofprints. The Arabs, who are violent and cruel but who rarely kill, glance nervously at Ser Niccolo. Waving his creatures on, the translator gallops swiftly across the plain, followed by our men, the loaded camels lumbering after in a cloud of carmine dust.

“Father!”

We did not see him struggle up, the blanched, frightened boy. He has wriggled out of the pannier, upsetting the balance, causing the camel to wag her neck and roar. He is on the ground, crawling toward his father like the pieces of a butchered mother snake instinctively making toward her orphans.

“Ursus, stop.” John scoops him up under the armpits and pulls him to his feet. “Let us handle it.”

Conrad is the first to reach Lord Tucher. He has pushed up my patron's tunic and is pressing on the wound with both palms, raised up on his knees to lend more body weight. The arrow entered his chest between his fourth and fifth rib, just below the heart.

“Get the water, we must flush this wound.”

Water saved Lord Tucher once, Dear Lord, let it save him again. Let the cool, clean Gazara water restore him, Lord, let it wet his lips and cleanse his wound. Take not away Your servant John Tucher when his child needs him so. Take him not away. I pray as I struggle with the massive terra-cotta jar, twisting the cork stopper between
the crook of my arm and my chest. It comes off with a sucking pop, and in that terrible moment, brothers, when my nose understands this water, I know why Ser Niccolo hesitated not in leaving it with us.

Rotted fish, human ordure, leprosy—nothing could smell worse than this jar of spoiled water. I pour some into my hand, and it splashes out chunky white with maggots and decay. You can trust no one in this land! The thieving merchants in Gazara swore that if we kept the jars well sealed this water would last the entire trip.

“Where is that water?” Conrad shouts.

I kick the jars over near where our asses are tethered. They lunge to drink it, but even they find it too loathsome, and prance away like spoiled colts. I kick the jars again and again, shattering their worthless shells.

“Felix!” our barber calls over his shoulder. I walk back to where he has wrapped his robe around the feather and is tugging straight up. The arrow comes out covered in gray tissue and blood.

“The water was corrupted by the heat,” I say.

“Press, then,” Conrad orders. “I'll get the medicine chest.”

His heart. I think the arrow punctured my patron's full heart. Blood oozes between my fingers and they slip off the wound. I press harder.

Conrad returns with a vial of brandy that he pours into the wound, followed by a vial of oil, then a stuffing of clean rags. There is nothing more to do than wrap his chest and press.

“Let me see my father!” Ursus screams, struggling against John. At last John half walks, half carries the sick child over to us.

“Lord Tucher?”

He is surprisingly gentle, lifting his father's head into his lap. His own face is so distorted with infection that it is impossible to tell whether or not he is holding back tears.

“Father, if you can hear me,” Ursus whispers through his swollen mouth, “thank you for taking care of me in the desert.”

He wipes Conrad's bloody handprint from his father's brow and gives it a tiny kiss.

“I know you took the silver rosary Mother gave me before we left home, but it's all right. You can keep it.”

Like a tender thief, Ursus rummages through the pocket tied next to Lord Tucher's heart and draws out the bloody silver cross stolen a lifetime ago, the day we buried Schmidhans.

“See?” He swings it above his father's sightless eyes. “I knew you had it all along.”

D
ESERT OF THE
S
INAI
I
N THE
R
EGION OF
M
IDIAN
S
UMMER
1483

Ursus asked to dig and we let him, cupping his small hands in our own to help him scoop. It exhausted him, and now he lies asleep, wrapped in the canvas pannier next to our only remaining camel. She guards Ursus like a giant sad-eyed dog, holding back the desert monsters with her hypnotic chewing.

We have settled for the night, brothers, on the warm ashes of a caravan that passed before us. Their dried camel dung fuels our campfire, burning clear and blue, though we have nothing to cook over it. Niccolo took with him the onions and biscuit, the flour and dried meat. Our chickens died of heat exhaustion days ago—they stopped eating the millet we pushed through the bars, settled down in their own shit, and squinted themselves to sleep. Now, unless we eat our donkeys, we will have nothing until we reach Saint Katherine's.

I sit between the fire and the boy and use the thin edge of the recovered silver cross to clean the dirt from under his nails. A boy shouldn't sleep with his father's grave dust on his hands, even if there is no water to wash them. I separate the limp fingers, define the crescent on each one, and relax them into a fist.

“How long had you known your father was a thief?” I asked him after we weighted my patron's grave with rocks so that wild animals might not dig him up again.

“He prayed with my silver rosary the night of the storm,” answered that most wise Knight of the Holy Sepulchre. “It seemed to comfort him.”

Ursus wanted me to bury his father with those silver beads, but I snatched them back when the boy was not looking. The rosary, by rights, belongs to Ursus, and he has great need of it, brothers.

“Failisk, you should go to sleep.” Elphahallo rolls over and sees me sitting up beside Ursus. We have to push on soon, but I cannot close my eyes.

“How is the child?” he asks groggily. His face slackened by sleep, Elphahallo appears to have aged thirty years in the last few hours. I did not know, before today, that he traveled the desert with ruptured genitalia; his hernia is acting up, I can tell, for I see him wince when he lifts up on his elbows.

“He is asleep,” I say.

“Perhaps it is a blessing. In a few days, the father would have had to bury the son.”

My hand steals out to blot the boy's face, where one of his wounds is weeping again. Ursus feels the pressure and starts to cry in his sleep.

“I am so sorry, Failisk,” Elphahallo is saying. “Never in fifty years have I had men turn on me.”

I nod.

“I knew that translator was stirring trouble,” he says. “I finally convinced my drivers Lord Tucher had not sent Christian spies to steal their children, when one of them came to me saying Lord Tucher had been seen casting spells over their water.”

We sit silently, absorbed in the fire and her blue hem. I trace her flame skirt up to her sharp orange arms—she throws them out to me, up to Heaven; out to me, up to Heaven.

“Go to sleep, Failisk.”

“Soon, Calinus.”

Around the fire, our exhausted pilgrims sleep: Conrad still streaked with his patron's blood, John shivering against the cold hard earth, Peter curled into a tight ball as though expecting someone to plunge a knife into his back. I have my boy all to myself, brothers, to study as I would a child of my own.

I comb his dirty blond hair with my fingers in a vague memory of how he wore it when we set out from Ulm. Ursus and his father
appeared at our convent, despite the gray rainy weather, clean and bright and smelling of borax. These two will be my family for the next year, I remember thinking, as you, brothers, hung about my neck, crying for my certain death at sea. Will this surrogate family be kind or cruel? Will they become annoying in their worldliness or will advising them bring me closer to my God? The Tuchers were by turns generous and attentive, frustrating and proud, and yet I could never have guessed how like a real son this child Ursus would become to me. We decide for life or death in life at such an early age, each one of us, brothers. Surely I am not the only one among you who found he needed a family enough to borrow from the dead. What harm could come from playing husband? Does Katherine not already belong to Christ? What harm from playing father? Will my son not return home with another man? A coward's family, surely; a saint and a monk and another's child, but my one chance to pretend I was a man like any other.

Ursus stirs in his sleep and calls upon his younger brother, Henry, to shut out the lamp.

The single fierce ember in our guttering fire is the one piece of wood abandoned by the caravan that preceded us. John Lazinus read this square as a pledge, brothers, and a token of faith. I am not so sure the icon that I threw into the flames means the Tongue is alive. It could just as easily have been tossed aside by thieves. Throughout the night, I have watched the Fifty Philosophers slowly melt into one, separated by a hedge of dripping green from the Lone Scholar; it took the scholar longer to combust, but when he did his end was long and lingering, a flame through his heart that slowly ate away his head. John did not argue when I set Arsinoë's token alight. He too is exhausted by Heaven.

“We should get ready to go.” Elphahallo sits up. “The wind is blowing stronger.”

Indeed, brothers, another storm seems to be brewing off to the east. I sigh and breathe in a mouthful of flying pulverized stone, chilled in the cold night air. Sand sticks to Ursus's lemon paste, but if I wipe it clear, it will hurt him more, so, helplessly, I watch the uneven bunkers amass across his cheeks.

Elphahallo shakes the others awake. We need to cover as much ground as possible before the heat of the day, and, moreover, we must find water. My body feels the lack of food, the strain on my back from digging and sitting on cold earth. And now we must suffer the fierce sand that, like a ghostly horseman, gallops over the plain.

Ursus won't be budged. John and I wrap our arms around him, but he shudders like a lamprey and slides back to the ground. At last I pull him into my lap while John scours the soiled pannier with handfuls of sand. We don't want him riding all day in his own filth.

How we complained of driving rain aboard ship, brothers; how little we were prepared for the deluge of sand that falls upon the wilderness. We remount our donkeys and turn our faces toward the quarter we hope holds Katherine's Star, for we can barely see the man beside us, much less make out the heavens. A fierce wind blows off the Indian Ocean, pushing the desert sand always before it, so that, hour by hour, entire mountains melt away under our donkeys' feet.

We hunch our way through these mountains, shoulders drawn around our ears to keep out the bitter winds. My stomach shakes with cold and hunger, and I can feel my trapped heart beat sideways against my lungs. From time to time we sink in pits of sand, when pilgrim and camel, Saracen and ass must struggle up as through deep snow. Just as we are about to lie down and abandon ourselves to Death, brothers, the landscape gradually changes. Hard rock replaces loose sand, and the storm, like fire denied its air, slowly dies. A warm dawn breaks over the flinty mountains, buying us ten minutes of comfort. Our shoulders relax, our stomachs unclench, and for the brief morning we are human.

But hour by hour the heat's gentle fingers on our shoulders tighten; the sun clamps down on our backs and necks, the ridges of our ears, our calves. Soon sweat slides across our upper lips, drips down our inner thighs, and the frozen, stormy hours of Erebus are forgotten. We are back in Hell.

The thirst is unbearable, brothers. We have had no water to drink now for a full day and night; my lips bleed freely, my nose membranes crack like brittle bug wings. I notice, ahead of me, Peter is sucking on his fist.

“What do you have?” I ask, trotting next to him. He takes his hand from his mouth.

“A lemon,” he says. Its feathery flesh looks like the poison lungs of a she-crab.

“Those are for Ursus.” I slap it from his hand, send it spinning.

“How much longer do you think he'll need them?”

I lick the sweat from my lips and move ahead.

Elphahallo has tied the camel's lead to his pommel and trots beside Ursus. He is telling him the story of Albaroch, Mahomet's steed.

“He was a bit bigger than an ass, with the feet of a camel, and a fair face like a man's; his hair was fashioned all of pearls, his breast made of emeralds, his tail hung all with rubies, and his eyes were brighter than the sun. Albaroch would let no man mount him unless the Archangel Gabriel vouched for his goodness. ‘I have met no man on this earth better than Mahomet,' said Gabriel, and offered to hold the prophet's stirrup. Together, Mahomet and his steed came swift as the wind to Jerusalem, where all the patriarchs and holy men did them homage.”