A Stolen Tongue (31 page)

We meet the caravan on the great wide avenue of Hachseve, a flat caesura between the sand mountains of Magareth and the terrible white wilderness known as Minschene. These are names in the desert for realms that to our eyes, brothers, appear interchangeable wastelands, identical in their uninhabited desolation, and yet are privileged with a name because of their proximity to water. The thousands of other parched wadis and hilltops that compose the Great Desert wait out their eternities in anonymity; we scale and cross them, carrying their dust on the soles of our feet, but we know them not. Water is the only bestower of fame in the wilderness.

Hachseve, Minschene, Meschmar.

Hallicub, Ramathaym, Machera.

These valleys and rises are still to come, these names and more, before our party reaches the Mountain of Saint Katherine.

It was in the sand mountains of Magareth that Lord Tucher finally collapsed and first saw his dream church. On a night when a storm blew up from the quarter of the Great Sea, pushing before it roiling waves of sand, our young Lord, Jesus Christ, pointed out to my patron a limestone cathedral high on a mountaintop.
Tucher,
said He,
seek my church, rededicate it to the Martyr Priuli, and all your sins will be forgiven.
The air was black with dust that night, brothers, sharp glassy sand like sea spray stung our cheeks, and we could barely open our eyes against the flying dirt. From the quarter of the Great Sea, thick blue fissures of lightning rent the sky, and the troubled sand rained down upon us, threatening to drown us where we camped in the foothills. Conrad, at last, wrapped his nose and mouth with a cloak and pulled the penitent Tucher in from the
storm. My patron had been kneeling with no food or water for six hours, by the time he saw his dream church, and was delirious for another twenty-four. Ser Niccolo cared not but ordered him set upon his donkey when the storm lifted, when we again set course for Sinai.

Our secretive translator heeds not Elphahallo's warning to remain still and quiet upon his donkey, but now jumps down to treat with the desert Arabs in their own tongue. Behind the dark-skinned spear-wielding men, their women wait, some large with child, some bent and old, as shabby and naked as their husbands. They peer at us from beneath indigo ink tattoos, faces swirled and dotted with outlined waves of blue, their palms marine and mermaid undulate. Around their grimy necks, the women layer gold and silver necklaces that jangle rhythmically as their babies take suck. What avarice can gold spark, brothers, when water is the only currency in the desert? I have learned over the past weeks to no longer value valuable things. In the wilderness there is safety in simplicity: a tent over my head, a fire at night, a drink of water from a red, salty skin. In the desert, the nomad Arabs place stone piles on the mountaintops to mark a path through the pathless wilderness. If they did not, no man could keep to his course but would wander too far from water and lose his life. I have come to value markers, brothers, when all around is mysterious land.

“What is he saying?” John Lazinus leans over my shoulder, attempting to decode the translator's conversation with the Arabs. Far more mistrustful than I from the beginning, John has leapt from suspicion of Ser Niccolo in the desert to outright hatred.

“I can't tell,” I say.

Our venerable Calinus dismounts and joins the discussion. After a few tense moments, he walks back to our camel drivers and orders them to unload a sack of biscuit.

“Toll.” Elphahallo smiles apologetically at us. “We may not cross the plain until the caravan passes.”

Ser Niccolo will be none too happy about that, I know. He already resents being burdened with pilgrims and priests; we lost two days in Gazara securing enough camels for the Tuchers' luggage, souvenirs, bags of spice, bedding, and tents; two days in which Niccolo's sister put a plain and a mountain range between us. When Lord
Tucher lay feverish and exhausted by penance in his lowly tent, the translator pulled him up by an arm and thrust him upon his donkey. And yet, what choice does Niccolo have but to travel with us, brothers? He is penniless in this world.

Young knight Ursus leaves his donkey to stand with John and me and marvel at the caravan that lurches up the hill past us, now that toll has been paid. It is East traveling from farther East, bearing goods that will one day make their way to us in farthest Europe. It slices across the Sinai peninsula, linking the ships of the Indian Ocean to those transports of the Red Sea, a great flexible spine of craftsmen and merchants and tax collectors and customers connecting Cathay to Cairo to Venice to Hamburg.

“Look, Friar!”

Ursus points out the first wave of men after the desert Arabs pass us by. I start at the sight of blond heads and hunched pale shoulders, heavy iron shackles around unconditioned ankles. Ahead of us, Peter Ber, the renegade Mameluke, draws in a slow, loud breath. These men are destined to become what he leaves behind; they are the captured marauders of the Spice Islands, second sons to petty European nobles who found careers among the Eastern pirates; they, my brothers, are already learning their Arabic alphabet. They are Mamelukes-to-be.

Peter slouches lower on his donkey, uncomfortable in the presence of other slaves. Since Niccolo forbade Conrad to swab the Mameluke's neck, it has become blown with infection, so that now his sore perpetually oozes, drying in clumps of his greasy blond hair. I cannot say the Mameluke did not deserve the humiliation he had at Niccolo's hands for allowing Saint Katherine's bones to be stolen, but the translator has been harsh to the extreme with him, in these already difficult days. I have no idea why he wanted him along, unless he actually intends to honor the promise he made—to take Peter home. I wonder if the Mameluke will last that long; his infection has made him increasingly unpredictable.

Before us, brothers, the Great Caravan continues past: a ptolemy line across a map, the tail of a comet, a snake's belly trail in the sand. Do these trajectories care about the lives they cross? A caravan?
A pilgrimage, brothers? Was it naive of me to view this journey as anything other than a straight line, bisecting countries and lives and time but, ultimately, a path unto itself, with no more sentience than that path marked for us through the desert by godless savages? Each time I strive to find a meaning in these deaths and betrayals, I am thrown back on chaos. Katherine eludes me. I can only follow the scent lines she has laid down and hope they lead to some humble destiny.

“Friar, look.” Ursus grabs my arm. “The camels.”

Behind the novice Mamelukes, a flotilla of aubergine and orange carpet-saddled camels, each bearing a different wonder upon her hump, hitches past hypnotically. This one carries a wooden cage of grass-green parrots grackling happily to each other. The next conveys a cask of acacia wood carved with leopards and starfish. Aquamarine silk shot with silver thread spills from the third camel. The fourth transports jasmine-scented rice. We have traveled in the company of camels for two weeks and have often praised God for their ingenuity of form. The camel is a kindly if deformed creature, brothers, with a long neck and legs and a humped back upon which to balance burdens. She seems always to be a sorrowful and troubled animal. She has big and terrible eyes in her too-small head, and when a man walks up to her she begins to tremble, for God fashioned the camel's eyes in such a way that she might perceive men to be four times as large as they really are. Had our Creator not ordained it so, no camel would allow herself to be driven or burdened. A camel may live a very long time, even to one hundred years, so long as she travels not to some cold, wet country where she would contract a disease. Her memory is as long as her life, and she bears a natural hatred for all mules, horses, and asses because they sometimes bear burdens the camel believes belong to her alone. Our camel drivers spend many tedious hours in the mornings loading and reloading these beasts, for our luggage must be perfectly distributed over their humps, or the camels will not budge. Easily a hundred caravan camels stretch like a painted ribbon across the plain.

“Failisk.”

The Calinus, Elphahallo, approaches our little trio and draws me aside.

“Will you walk with me for a few moments?” he asks.

I turn away from the procession and allow him to lead me along the wadi's ridge until we are out of earshot of the other pilgrims. Ser Niccolo has joined our camel and ass drivers and jokes with them in their language, making the best of this new delay.

“One of my men came to me last night with a disturbing allegation,” Elphahallo says, fixing his gaze on the driver who has his arm thrown around Ser Niccolo's waist, laughing at a caravan camel ridden by a spider monkey. “A rumor is circulating that your Lord Tucher has hired Christian spies to steal the camel drivers' children while they are away.”

“What?” I cry. “Surely, Calinus, you can't believe that?”

“Of course I don't.” He brushes a bit of sand off his still-white robes. “But I thought you should know, since every rumor has a source.”

Calinus lets his eyes linger on the translator before they drift over to the maligned Lord Tucher. Truly, brothers, when I laid penance upon my patron, first that he should fulfill his pilgrimage to Holy Sinai, the seat of all law, where God decreed
Thou shalt not steal,
and second that he should assume the financial obligation for our entire party, I never expected him to take his mortification to such an extreme. At first, we all considered his contrition a rich joke and waited for it to exhaust itself, as every fancy had before. While his father knelt motionless, arms extended in the shape of the cross, young knight Ursus would pelt him with stones to make him flinch. Tucher held his shape, though, brothers, and begged forgiveness hours on end for his desecration of the Holy Sepulchre. Now Niccolo is stirring up suspicion against this repentent man? I don't understand what such a rumor could accomplish.

“Are you well, my friend?” Calinus asks worriedly. I shake my head that I am not. Since we left Jerusalem, lo these two weeks ago, I have felt altogether altered in mind and body, brothers. I have been plagued by fever and troubles in the bowel; truly, I feel like a subtle poison is making its way through my body, affecting first my sense of smell, so that the very essence of an object crawls within my nose;
and then my eyes, taking away the natural colors of this world and replacing them with a gray cloud of tears.

“Do what you can to quiet the rumors, my friend,” I say at last, addressing Calinus as “my friend” in the Saracen fashion. “I will warn Lord Tucher to be on his guard.”

“Rarely have I seen a procession as majestic as this.” Elphahallo sighs as the final camels trek by, loaded with indigo and yellow bags of mastic, cardamom, and pepper. “With the Venetians opening more sea routes east, these will soon be a thing of the past.”

The proud merchants touch their turbans to Elphahallo as they pass, and our Calinus bows low to the ground. At the tail end of the caravan, bringing up the very rear, ten strapping Saracens heft a cloth draped litter; its bed marvelously constructed of sturdy red-laquered wood worked with gilt, its carpet canopy woven with scenes of sea battles: spouting whales sundering bireme ships; dolphins taunting voracious giant squid. Surely this is a litter constructed for a true marvel, brothers, an enormous pearl or perhaps coral formed into the shape of a horse. For the briefest second I think they have my wife under that shroud, a perfectly preserved effigy of Katherine, sunlight streaming through the carpet's weave, gently warming her set jaw; thick blond hair poured over her breasts, her two hands meeting in prayer over a just-cooled heart. They plucked her from Constantine's dream, after she replaced the drowned merchant and floated serenely to shore. Shrouded against the sun and sand, this final Wonder of the East remains veiled to us. Whatever sleeps inside serves as a reminder that no matter how far afield our wanderings take us, be they to Sinai or India or to the threshold of Alexander's Gates, there is always an East beyond us, unknown and unknowable. In that East, the sun rises and monsters dwell, there the Ages of Men are born and demons are fought, and it is all the same place, brothers, the same East; let no man tell you otherwise.

“Calinus! They are getting away!”

My patron's son, Ursus, grabs Elphahallo by the sleeve and tugs him toward the retreating caravan.

“We want to see what is under that veil!”

It is not for us to know what prize the Saracens carry across the
desert from sea to sea. I tell Ursus to leave it be, but he runs for Ser Niccolo.

“Please, Ser, ask the Saracens to let us look!”

Of course this bad boy finds his champion in the translator, whose impatience is only matched by his curiosity. Niccolo, too, wants to know what is so precious that ten men would carry it on foot across the burning sand. He halts the Saracen merchants with blandishments and speeches, smiles winningly, and asks them, for the sake of the child, won't they please expose the treasure on their litter?

Calinus and I join John, Conrad, Lord Tucher, and Peter Ber where they wait nervously on the wadi's rise. Below, on the plain, Ursus capers next to Niccolo, eagerly collecting another wonder to vaunt at Count Eberhart's court. The Saracen merchants are proud of their find and want the Christians to see what it is they possess that we do not. Look upon this and marvel, they seem to say. Look into the eyes of Death.

With a flourish, Niccolo and a Saracen merchant uncover the red lacquer bed to reveal the Wonder of the East.

It is a fish, brothers, captured in the Indian Ocean. Monstrously long and thick, it spans the length of two men laid end to end, sports a wing upon its back and a ferocious swordlike beak. Its scales reflect all the colors of marine life: green for the moss that grows upon the wreckages of ships, purple for the ticklish finger anenome, blue like a sky distorted by the waves, the yellow of the Ocean bed. His beak is sharp and threatening, but it is by his eyes that we know him: two violet, searing, magnetic eyes, weakened in death, but not completely. Close upon this creature, I see he holds a man fast with a very simple trick of reflection. The fish before us has no pupil, no cornea, no second lid. In his enormous eye, you may see only yourself, set shamefully inside the head of a monster.