Authors: Sheri Holman
Helplessly, I watch Arsinoë stuff her feed bag full with Katherine's hand, her shin, ribs, a leg. Please, I pray, if you must take everything else, just leave that one relic. At least leave the world a face upon which to reimagine her. But my prayer falls unheard. Arsinoë reaches in and lifts it out with both hands, careful not to jar her golden crown: the precious skull of Katherine of Alexandria, Virgin Martyr.
“I waited so you might witness her desire to be taken,” Arsinoë says. “She does not rise up to smite me. She does not struggle. See and know, Felix. It is Katherine's will that we disappear.”
My arms are trapped; with my chest I try to push the marble lid away from my crushed ribs. I can't breathe.
“Kiss her before I go, Felix. I owe you that much.”
I turn my head, but she follows me with it, pinning my cheek to the wall with the sweating head's flat cheek.
I dreamed a thousand nights of her kisses. I never wanted this.
Arsinoë rolls the skull until its gap-tooth smile is even with my mouth, then presses it hard against my lips. I am suffocating under olives and myrrh. Every stolen kiss from my novitiate visits me, tasting of goat's milk and growing boys, the same feeling of asphyxiation. I am falling into my own spine, O my brothers.
And then there is a set of thin, trembling lips against mine, and Arsinoë is kissing me like parchment. My streaming eyes meet her own, and she is crying too.
“Please,” I beg. “I have lost everything.”
“Now you begin to understand the martyr's life,” she whispers.
I wake to cool hands under my robes, rudely pushing aside my testicles on their way to feeling up my armpits. One monk pushes the coffin lid aside; two more argue in Greek while they grope. If only I could draw a real breath, I would laugh at how painfully it tickles, or maybe I would scream at them to stop.
I wake a second time, and one of the monks is prodding me with his shoe, warily, as if I were a wounded wild badger on the side of the road, almost but not quite dead. I open my eyes and he shouts at me, then shouts at his companion, the monk who let me in, who shouts at me in Latin.
“What have you done with her?”
I close my eyes again.
The third time I wake, I am blind.
They have left me in total darkness, brothers, here on a cold stone floor, in a room that smells vaguely of mold and sandalwood. When I roll over, my ribs separate, and the most excruciating pain shoots across my back and into my neck. Once, as a boy, a horse kicked me in the chest, and I felt like this, as if any sudden movement would unsnarl this architecture of bones and leave me a collapsed white heap on the ground.
“Hello!” I call weakly, unable to get enough air in my lungs to yell. “Where am I?”
To my left, along the floor, I spy a faint line of midnight blue, barely a shade lighter than the interior pitch. Slowly, brothers, I roll
onto my knees and painfully crawl to that line. Most definitely, a breeze circulates around it, and if I pat my way higher up, I begin to recognize splintery wood, two hinges, a cold metal ring. With all my might, I pull on this ring, brothers, but nothing happens. I am locked in.
“Let me out!” I pound the door with both fists, stretching my bad ribs even farther. Oh, God. I collapse to my knees and butt the door sharply with my head.
“Let me out!”
It all comes back, brothers: Arsinoë's theft. Her flight. My imprisonment. I vaguely remember two monks lifting me, the setting sun outside the church, and a small low door. They threw me in here like a shovelful of coal. But where is here?
I sense I am on a narrow path in an overly crowded roomâcreeping down an aisle of some kindâbut this doesn't feel like a normal chapel. Gingerly, I stretch out my left hand to test the room's perimeters. I creep only a few feet before I come across what feels like a loosely mortared internal wall, carefully constructed from smooth eroded stone. I crawl farther along, patting my way to get its measure, when, suddenly, unexpectedly, a single round stone breaks off in my hand. The whole heavy wall teeters.
Quickly, brothers, I fumble for the cavity, but my hands are shaking so that I end up pushing the stone into a space already full. The top rows sway, a stone comes loose and strikes the floor hollowly, then bounces away. Oh, God, I recognize that sound. In my panic, I leap back, crashing into the rest of the wall, bringing it raining down on top of me. Hundreds of skulls, brothers, coconut hard and bony, bruise my back with their bulging brows and angled jaws. Centuries of preserved monk heads, from hundreds of exumed Saint Katherine graves, ricochet off the walls of the narrow ossuary like ecstatic berserkers, limbless grinning skulls, alive again and angry. I hunker against the avalanche.
But are these heads not you, brothers? Have you not faithfully followed me on all the meanderings of my pilgrimage, even into the charnel house? Is this slope-browed skull not you, Abbot Fuchs? It certainly feels like your bald pate. Like you, this head takes after
the hairless prophet Elisha, who when climbing a mountain was mocked by bad children, crying, “Go up, thou bald head!” When the prophet heard them, he prayed God to curse them, and straightaway two bears came from the woods and devoured forty-two of those children.
I take up the skull and pitch it at the door. It bounces back to me.
No, pardon me, Abbot Fuchs. I am mistaken. You, brothers, are happy in your cells at home, as fully fleshed as I might keep you in my imagination. These heads must certainly be members of my
new
order; they are my kindred spirits, my companions and future. By accident, I have stumbled onto the ossuary where the Donestre store their wept-over heads. A monster might not mourn forever; eventually, he will require a new fool. What happens to all those bright-eyed, curious men who have come East to be devoured and mourned, genuinely regretted when the appetite is sated? Might not the monster, out of a fleeting kindness, think to stack them all companionately in a room at the foothills of Mount Truth? Might these puzzled heads not try to make some sense of their predicament? Surely, some foolish friar head among them would attempt to cheer them. “Brothers, let me give you several reasons why it is more desirable to be a head rather than a whole man,” he would say.
“First: Philosophers, who might be trusted on such matters, say God formed the head into a sphere, to reflect the vault of Heaven; thus this shape is the only one capable of containing the Mysteries of the Universe. Be of good cheer! As heads only, we are better receptacles for Heaven, brothers.
“Second: It is better to be a head than a whole man, for in so being, we alone uphold the Word of Scripture. Behold:
God shall make thee the head and not the tail.
“Third: While the shoulders might be dubbed in a knighting, and the feet washed in contrition, only the noble head, brothers, is anointed with oil on truly important occasions. Priests anoint the heads of babies at christenings; bishops anoint the heads of kings on crownings. Christ Himself chides His apostles, saying, “Thou didst not anoint my head with oil, but this woman anoints my feet.
“Fourth and last: It is better to be a head than a whole man, brothers, because our bodies are what first brought us to this ruin. Had we been only heads before we met the monster, he would have had no desire to eat us. Moreover, had we been but heads, we would never have had cause to mourn, for no matter what selfish, hurtful pilgrimage we might have dreamed up, we would not have had bodies with which to fulfill them. Thus, harm might have befallen nothing but our own wretched imaginations.”
How easy it would be to join this happy company, brothers. To feel my flesh melt away, my body loosen and drop off. I take up another skull, launch it at the door, and catch it when it comes back to me. Oblivion is crowded with friends. Can it not hold one more monk?
But I hear you whispering. Might you simply not have scaled Mount Venus, had you desired such an easy pilgrimage? Would you really fail Christendom, Felix, to fit your tired head into this pyramid of skulls?
Is it not more difficult to choose life over death in this wretched world; is faith not harder to maintain in the face of indifference?
I hurl a hundred skulls against the wall. I deny this brotherhood! I will not take its vows. There is a human woman in this desert who seeks her own Oblivion, and I know where she will find it. Let me out of here!
Frantically, I stumble to the other side of the room, tripping over the littered brothers. As I know most ossuaries are set up, skulls are kept along one wall and bodies on another. I feel my way along until I discover a large square of niches, stuffed full of femurs and tibia. I snatch a long hard shank bone and jump upon its end, feeling it splinter at an angle. I snatch up a skull and limp back to the door.
Fitting the broken bone to the door frame, I pound its round end with the skull. The first blow reduces me to tears, brothers. I feel the tissue around my fractured ribs tear, and the pain is so great I come near to collapse. Leaning against the wall for support, I hit the bone a second time, listening as the wood around the latch gives a bit. A third hammer and the lock comes away from the wood in a
green cloud of dry rot. I look back at my abandoned brothers, a moonlit melon patch of skulls. I will not be just another wept-over head, this I swear to you.
Outside, the monastery complex is a maze of mud buildings and staircases impractically built in tiers up the foothill of the mountain. Ahead of me is Katherine's granite church and, behind that, a long row of double dormitories, built to house a hundred monks where now there sleep but eight. Between the church and dormitories, a solitary bush grows, my brothers, tangling over its red brick barricade. They say that no other bush of its species takes root anywhere in the whole of Sinai and that innocent children, before the age of consent, have been known to blow upon it, as if to snuff out a burning candle. This eternal bush has been a symbol of our faith since the Israelites first railed against God in the wilderness, begging to return to Egypt or be allowed to die, since Moses resolutely climbed this mountain to bring them down God's rule. From this bush the Israelites learned all that burns is not consumed, brothers. Sometimes faith is tempered in the flames and grows stronger in the ash.
Judging by the sky, I am north of where we arrived. We must hurry past the bush for now, for I know not how long I was held inside the ossuary while Arsinoë got away. The wall behind the dormitories has almost completely fallen, and I am honestly amazed the Arabs have not just walked right through. When the fortress was built, Emperor Justinian believed the desert nomads so naturally incapable of storming a wall that even mud could hold them back, and judging by this he was right. I peer over the tired fortification and discover that its stones have collapsed outward, forming a rubble hill down to the ground. It is agony to lift my arms, but I manage to hoist myself onto the wall and awkwardly scramble down.
“Felix, is that you? Oh, God, man, help me!”
I swing at the sound of terrified German. Flanked by two stern Saracen guards, the former Mameluke, Peter Ber, staggers up the path.
“That fucking Calinus. He turned me in.”
I shrink back at the sight of him, brothers, afraid to return his
salute. These Saracens are not wild Arabs but officials of the Sultan. Peter's clothes are torn as though he struggled to get away.
“Is Niccolo inside?” the apostate demands. “This is all his fault.”
His two large-turbaned guards jerk him away and pull him roughly toward the torches of the Arab camp.
“Tell Niccolo I want to go home!” the Mameluke screams.
I will never again see Peter Ber, brothers, named for the Rock upon which our Church was founded, who lived for years as Abdullah, the Slave of Allah. Two men cannot exist inside the same body, no more than one man may serve two masters. I fear, brothers, this hybrid will forever war against himself, no matter where he lives or whom he worships, for in him I see the flower with which all of us who go abroad are seeded. I spoke before of what frightens pilgrims most upon their ships. At first I thought it was that narrow wall that held us from the Ocean, reminding us Death was too close by. Now I understand the honest fear of pilgrims is nothing so obvious as Death, my brothers. It is the terror that the walls within our very souls threaten always to collapse. We exchange so many pieces of ourselves in foreign lands for pieces of alien men that we, like this Mameluke, might easily become the true hybrids, a perfect admixture of East and West, with the conscience of neither country. I can only wish this Mameluke well. Saint Peter the Rock denied Christ three times and was still forgiven. Perhaps Peter the rapist and murderer will find his faith inside a Saracen jail.
Look not back, neither stay thou in all the country about; save thyself in the mountain, lest perchance thou be taken captive.
I misunderstood our Lord's message once before and let her get away. Peter Ber has now been taken captive; I, brothers, must save myself on the mountain.
The full moon finally rose over the patriarch's shoulder and sat behind his neck, of no use to me, there in the chasm where crannying winds knifed up to numb my hands and pry loose their grip on what handholds I could scratch out. My ribs came free of their moorings and floated around my spine, beyond pain, brothers,
after hours of climbing, into another state of consciousness such as mystics discover after days of bare-kneed praying in frostbit churches in the wintertime. I pulled myself up by the roots of shrubs, grasping blindly desert thorn and scrub rose; their silver-blue leaves anchored me to the next level, where I might swing my naked leg up and over a cold outcrop of stone, and shiver there, afraid to climb higher because the wind had picked up and I could be blown down this rocky ledge, breaking off schists of red mountain as I fell. Below, a field of thistle sparks compassed the wild Arabs' camp, where John and Elphahallo and Conrad must have sat in a fireless circle, listening to the mastication of a hundred savage mouths, gorging themselves on fresh bread when we pilgrims had eaten nothing in days. Could they see me clinging like a tick to the throat of Sinai, deliriously frightened to skirt the jutting chin stubbled with loose rocks and nicked with caves that hung over my head? But I can speak no more of the nightmare climb up Mount Sinai, for to retell a story is to relive it, and, brothers, if I climbed this mountain a second time, I would surely die.