A Stolen Tongue (6 page)

“To the Turk, Madame”—my friend speaks with his eyes fixed on the street—“a border town like mine is no more than brush to be cleared on the way to a real city. He treats with Athens or
Constantinople or Belgrade, allows them life if they forfeit their God and kingdom, but a border town is scrub: torchable; to be consumed.

“I preached a sermon the night they breached our wall. I made every man in our town vow to kill or be killed, to die for Christ and his sisters and his crops. Well, my men kept their vows. The Turk pissed on our crops. He raped our church. He burned our sisters. I lost sixty nuns to the fire.”

Arsinoë impulsively takes his hand. “How did it feel to be deserted by Heaven?” she asks, not looking at him. “Did it fill you with hate?”

John smiles. “I wouldn't be on pilgrimage if it had.”

She nods, slowly.

Before us, at the far end of the plaza, ten steps lead up to the doors of a domed Orthodox church. Above the lintel, a squat Joshua blows his trumpet and Jericho's carved walls come tumbling down.

“We're here,” Arsinoë says, hesitating briefly at the door. She glances over her shoulder, taking in the empty square, the closed shutters of shops. Resolutely, she opens the door.

How similar, brothers, and yet how removed from one of the True Faith, is a heretical church. Because of the shiftless nature of their religion, the Byzantines make little art that is not removable—no icons that can't be tossed in a cart, no candles that can't be snatched up. They tile their ceilings with mosaics after the ancient Romans, to symbolize their fractured, piecemeal understanding of God, and orient their churches to the East, after their friends the Saracens. A plump Greek priest trots down the aisle and addresses Arsinoë in her native language.

Does Katherine feel ill at ease here, surrounded by this Oriental splendor? Even though I know she came from the East, I've always pictured her at home in Swabia, happy to sit through our German winters in her light robes and laced sandals. She grows darker the farther we move from Ulm; on the mosaic ceiling, she has the almond eyes of an Asian princess and black, jagged hair.

“Friar,” Arsinoë calls. “Come along, he'll let us see it.”

The priest says a hasty mass in Greek, the only words of which I understand being
apostle
and
Christ,
those sounding the same in Latin. John and I are barely off our knees before he's scurried around
the altar to the sacristy. The reliquary he removes is long and silver and hinged like a book.

“The arm of Martyr, Saint George,” the priest recites in rote Latin.

We step forward and kiss it, touch our rosaries to each finger, and kiss them too. He returns to the sacristy and emerges with another box.

“The arm of Protomartyr, Saint Stephen.”

More kisses. Another box.

“The arm of the blessed Apostle, Saint Thomas.”

Legend has Saint Thomas's entire body preserved deep in heathen India. Whether this be a true relic or no, I let the prudent man decide.

“The head of Saint Philomela. . . .

“The hand of the blessed Saint Anne, mother to the Virgin Mary. . . .

“The arm and pointing finger of the Lord's Precursor, Saint John the Baptist.”

The Archdeacon John Lazinus kisses his namesake with special reverence. The Baptist, too, knew the heat of fire. When miracles abounded at Saint John's grave, jealous Emperor Julian the Apostate ordered his bones dug up and scattered across the fields. Greater miracles then occurred, so the tyrant ordered the sacred bones scattered even farther apart. At last, when neither time nor distance seemed to slow the miracles, Julian ordered the relics recollected and burned as a whole man. Some brave Christians risked death to substitute common bones for those of the blessed saint, but they missed his right arm and pointing finger. This the Emperor could not burn, but it remained fixed, accusing him from its socket of flames.

The priest goes into the sacristy one last time and comes out with a golden box no bigger than the palm of my hand.

O, blessed virgin, like a kind friend you incline your ear to our petitions and prayers, you listen to our chests so that you might take back to Heaven our true desire for God's love. The ear is perhaps your most important organ, for it is the gate through which all language must pass. Speech would be useless without it, for even the most gifted tongue would wag in a void without the ear to catch its eloquence and translate it for your blessed brain.

On a thick pillow of purple velvet, one tiny dried apricot.

Saint Katherine's ear.

Tears stream down Arsinoë's face. “Why do they do it?” she asks. “Hundreds of years ago, under cover of a kiss, some pilgrim tore this from her head in Sinai. Couldn't they leave her alone?”

John holds me back when I want to argue. This is no place, surrounded by this crowd of saints.

“Ask her, Madame,” John whispers. “Ask her if she heard who took her hand.”

Arsinoë says something to the priest in Greek, and he reluctantly extends her the reliquary.

“Can you hear me?” the Tongue of Saint Katherine breathes into the ear. “Do you want this?”

The mystic uses silence more affectively than sermons, brothers, adjusting it like a compass to arc widely over a room or proscribe a tight circle of expectation. Arsinoë's silence exchanges noiselessness for a whole new language of signs: puzzled frowns and little cocks of the head, widening eyes and nodding acceptance. Neither an awkward silence nor a meaningful silence but a visceral, present intercourse that, in itself, speaks far more forcefully than words. I can tell from his worried expression that John feels it too—someone powerful and unseen troubling the merchant's wife, though whether it be my bride or the Devil, I know not.

Arsinoë gingerly lifts the relic ear to her own and frowns.

“I don't understand.”

“Pater!”

The young urchin boy who accosted us earlier throws open the door, causing us all to jump. Wildly, he beckons for the priest to come away. From his frantic looks and gestures, it would appear someone is dying in the street.

Arsinoë hesitates. The priest is obviously torn between locking away the relic and accompanying the desperate boy.

“Go, Father,” she says. “You are needed.”

With a grimace, he sprints down the aisle and out the door. Arsinoë walks to the front pew and sits down.

“Is she saying anything?” John asks.

The merchant's wife sadly shakes her head. “There was a time, when I was a girl, that her voice came to me like sun on the water. I understood everything she said, not in words, mind you, but as a fish understands, by the warming surface of the lake, that the sun is in the sky. When my brother came and started to give her human words, it got jumbled. I needed him to tease out the meaning of what she said, because suddenly it made no sense to me anymore.”

She runs her finger over the papery rim of ear.

“Now that we are alone again, Katherine and I, I almost think she prefers the language he gave her.”

“
Iesu Christi!
”

A cry of abject terror comes from the street outside. It sounds like the old priest.

Arsinoë is on her feet. “He's hurt!”

John and I dash down the aisle and out of the church. A few shopkeepers, opening for the day, peer around their wooden shutters.

“
Iesu!
”

The cry comes from behind the church, down the narrow alleyway that runs between it and the city wall. The sun has not yet probed the lane, and the way is very dark.

“Felix, look!” John cries.

The fat priest lies on his side with his hands and feet bound behind his back. He screams much at us that we cannot understand.

I work at the knots while John tries to calm him.

“Who did this to you?”

He is incomprehensible, and his struggling makes it that much harder to untie him. He says one word over and over:
Turcos
.

“A Turk?” asks John. “A Turk did this to you?”

“Please, sir.” I grasp his head to calm him, and he screams as a man tortured. I suddenly see why. “John, would a Turk do this?”

I turn the priest's head to expose the blood-soaked stones below. On the right side of his face, a tight circle has been carved around his ear.

“Where is the merchant's wife?” John cries. “Did she come with us?”

I leap up and run back to the church. The merchants are hiding inside their shops; the street is deserted.

“Madame!” I fling wide the doors.

The church is empty. She is gone.

I run to the altar, where, thank God, the gold reliquary still gleams. Her blessed ear! What madness possessed me to leave it alone?

The box is empty.

She is gone.

Forgive me, O Lord, for I have sinned. It's been six days since my last confession. I made four wretched galley slaves carry Burgher Schmidhans's heavy body in the afternoon heat to an inconvenient church so that I might, like a yokel, gape at the hand of Your daughter Saint Katherine of Alexandria. Yesterday, I listened to a woman question Your wisdom in bestowing this same daughter of Heaven's relics upon the world; and this morning, I almost believed her when, at, of all places a Schismatic church, she claimed conversation with Your most sweet daughter, the virgin Saint Katherine of Alexandria.

I confess these sins in my heart, O Lord, and on paper for my abbot Reverend Ludwig Fuchs, hoping to spare my friend, and tender shipboard confessor, the Archdeacon John Lazinus, any further discussion of the missing woman aforementioned in my list of sins. He despairs of her safety, Lord, and blames himself, in my opinion taking on a responsibility out of all proportion with the depth of their acquaintance. He endangered his own life, along with that of Your servant Friar Felix Fabri, by combing the back streets of Colossus, questioning wharf prostitutes and scabaceous fishermen as to the likelihood of a Turkish pirate attack. No one spotted a foreign ship in the harbor, Lord, yet John remains convinced the woman was stolen, as the Greek priest was mutilated, by a renegade Turk.

But I turn to You now, O Lord, and to Your Son, and to His
mother, the gentle Virgin who knows men's souls, with a heart full of shame and sorrow. I beg You, teach me, Lord, how to please You and thus earn for myself a place at Your handmaid's foot; for truly, my sins must be grievous in her eyes to avoid me so. Would that I should be devoured by the Troyp or eaten alive by lions than that Saint Katherine should, like chaste Diana, flee before me. Men grow weak in middle age, Lord, when the ambitions of youth have been harvested and old age seems not far away. In an earthly marriage, when the children have grown and money has finally been put aside, a married man might turn for comfort to his wife of twenty years and find, instead, an old and tired woman beside him. He might for the first time see in her face not the bride of his boyhood but his son's children's grandmother, whose life has been measured in blood and miscarriages, epidemics and wakes. How fortunate did I then feel, to have taken a bride of Heaven! After twenty years, I could rejoice that my love had not weighted my beloved's belly or lined her face; I could believe, in fact, that this love was a source of comfort to her in its magnification, through her, of Christ. In middle age, when I had attained, at last, the leisure to render Katherine in adoration what I had taken over the years in supplication, I fondly hoped she would welcome me to her land and clasp me joyfully to her bosom. How foolish I feel, Lord, standing before her empty reliquaries; how I blush and perspire, knowing I have made too great a show of my love, like some simple country farmer in love with the King's daughter. I tremble to remember my presumption! I rue my words! I deserve her scorn and Yours, Lord; and yet, if humility will teach me the proper way to adore a Bride of Heaven, I will be an abject student. Give me another chance, Lord. Take no more away the earthly remains of your daughter Saint Katherine. Leave me a finger, a tooth, a tongue, Lord, and I will build upon that single brick a greater, purer love, one that will be pleasing in Your eyes.

I ask this of You in Your Son's name.

Thy will be done.

Amen.

When John and I, tired and heartsore, return to the ship, Constantine Kallistos is but one in the slack-jawed circle of pilgrims that includes our barber, Conrad, and my patron's son, Ursus, watching a tragedy unfold. The object of their pity is this: a long blue fish who writhes across the floorboards, sucking daylight with its swollen pink mouth, drowning on air.

“He flipped himself on deck,” Conrad tells me. “I was going to throw him back, but the merchant thinks it's a sign.”

“A sign of what?”

Our barber shrugs. “Fish for dinner?”

One look at Constantine tells me dinner is the last thing on his mind. His pupils are dilated like a consumptive on belladonna and a half smile plays at the corners of his mouth.

“It's the drowned man,” Constantine whispers, “come to reclaim his berth.”

“Don't touch it, Friar,” Ursus warns. “It's Herr Schmidhans.”

This will not do. I squat down and wrap the poor creature in my black robes, feeling its muscular panic against my thighs. I climb over the galley slaves and fling the fish back into the sea.

“Friar! You've killed him all over again.”

“It was a fish, Ursus, and not even a German fish. Now, run along. The Archdeacon and I must speak with Herr Kallistos.”

We grasp Constantine by the arm and steer him away from the wet floorboards. His wife made a stain only a little larger the night
she flipped from the sea. Up to the ladies' cabin we lead him, into the room of snuffed candles and neatly stacked icons.

“She's gone, isn't she?” he asks, looking between us. “She didn't come back with you.”