A Stolen Tongue (8 page)

You might wonder at my climbing this mountain first when across the way, on another rise, is built a church containing the cross upon which hung Dysmas, the Good Thief, crucified beside Christ. Do not fear, brothers; I have not been affected by that Cyprian air which some say keeps a man aroused the whole time he remains on the island, nor do I need to sniff the native agnus castus shrubs
that dry up the seminal humors and calm the winds that engorge the sexual organs. I have a method to my madness which, God willing, will benefit not a depraved prostitute but a handmaid of Christ.

“Will we see Tannhäuser here, Friar?” my charge asks, stopping to peer in every cave and crack on the mountain. “Shall I sing his song?”

“Ursus, we are headed to Saint Paul's church. Do you think the Apostle would appreciate your tuneless howlings after the dead?”

“No, Friar.” He kicks the dust. “But this
is
his mountain, isn't it? This is where he went to live with Venus?”

In modern times, the uncouth mob raves over a certain mountain in Tuscany where Venus supposedly lives and takes her pleasure with men and women. They believe a Swabian nobleman called Tannhäuser, from Tannhäusen near Dünkelspüchel, disappeared into her mountain and now lives in joyance with Venus until Judgment Day. Lo, brothers! How easily men are led into error. For Venus, hardly a goddess and no doubt damned, who never saw Europe while she was alive, they believe to dwell now and forever in Tuscany! The Germans are so demented about this Tannhäuser story that many simple people make pilgrimages to that Mount of Venus and, in fact, have so overrun it that the Italians now place rabid dogs at its entrance to scare them away.

The path up our Mount Venus, while free of beasts, is dry and hot, and we are all relieved to finally take our rest in the shade of Saint Paul's church. The locals have planted terraced vineyards here, the grapes from which I've heard are so strong, their first press will corrode a wooden cup. We overlook the whitewashed village of Paphos, no more than a web of footpaths between daub houses. On the slopes of Venus's mountain, sloe-eyed village girls forage sticks for tonight's Saint John's bonfires.

“If your wife is on Cyprus, Constantine,” I say, “I'm certain she will come here.”

John doubted me this morning. He wanted to wait at the docks, to ask each arriving fisherman if he had seen a woman calling for help from the hull of a Turkish galleon. He convinced Constantine that if she escaped her common sense would lead her to Cyprus,
where we would surely stop for provisions. What better place to spot her than at the docks?

But John does not know the way a devotee's mind works.

Katherine's last relic before Sinai, the easternmost tip of her a pilgrim might venerate without crossing the Great Wasteland, lodges in this little church of Saint Paul at the center of Venus's pleasure garden.

Wouldn't Saint Katherine's Tongue come to see Saint Katherine's tongue?

How greatly can we praise the tongue? It is perhaps her most precious organ, even more than the hand or the ear, for with it a saint first glorifies the Lord. Had Katherine been mute, she still might have written down her love for Christ, she might still have convinced the Fifty Philosophers on paper; but the common man, the thresher of wheat, the shepherdess with piebald dog, would never have understood. Why, how else could the unlettered citizens of Alexandria have made sense of that beautiful woman's torture? Why she was beheaded or translated to Sinai? They might still be wandering in the darkness had Katherine not had a tongue.

I expect the Tongue to steal the tongue.

This part I have not shared with John or Constantine; it is a secret between us alone, brothers. As I lay awake last night, agonizing over this painful sequence of events, I realized only one possibility existed: Saint Katherine would never deliberately avoid her devoted husband of twenty years; she is purposefully being withheld by sinister forces. If someone is stealing my wife, she is in dire need of a champion.

Now, before you upbraid me, brothers, before you call me puffed-up priest and knight-errant friar, let me explain. I do not claim to understand why Saint Katherine allowed herself to be stolen in the first place. Perhaps she was distracted by long months of intercession and exhaustive charity, which selflessly led her to take fewer pains about her physical remains. Or perhaps in her dutiful humility she was fulfilling the psalm, “And God hath scattered the bones of them that please themselves,” for nothing pleases Katherine more than being attentive and kind to mortals. We would slight her to
believe she could not have saved herself had she only been more alert. Over the centuries, hundreds of thieves have succeeded in robbing the tombs of saints; Saint Benedict was stolen from Monte Cassino and translated to Fleury, but only because Monte Cassino was in decline and the saint no longer desired to reside there. By contrast, when a wicked monk attempted to spirit away the body of Saint Martin, he was foiled by Abbot Hilarius, to whom the threatened saint appeared in a vision. Could anything then be clearer, brothers? Saint Katherine warned me in a dream after her hand was stolen in Candia. She swam behind the boat, begging my help. I was so beguiled on Rhodes, I did not see the thief before me, though her guilty conscience had all but driven her to suicide. The woman Arsinoë took Saint Katherine's ear, and Constantine the merchant has some suspicion of it; I'm convinced. Had he not been of my same mind, if he did not suspect his wife might make an attempt on Katherine's tongue, why else would he have consented to come here? As John urged, the docks are by far the more logical place to search. But she will come, brothers, of this I am certain.

And we will be waiting.

I gather up the pilgrims and go inside. I must accept my charge and fly Saint Katherine of Alexandria's colors like a noble champion.

Inside, the church is whitewashed and bare, bereft of any decoration save a stiff, crooked icon of a shiny-pated Saint Paul. Twelve rows of plain cedar benches, split by the center aisle, lead forward to a wobbly altar. A young, well-formed priest rises from his prayers when we enter.

My first fear—that the merchant's wife might have beaten us here—is quickly put to rest. Beside the altar crucifix, the reliquary sits in plain view, a golden head with a surprised glass-fronted mouth, through which we may view the tongue. My turn comes to venerate it, and in my heart I offer up this prayer:

Like a tiny blind mouse, dear tongue, you struggled in the mouth of our infant saint. Quivering and straining, you woke her first words, rolling them off their pink, muscular bed and into the
world. Shyly, you reached out for your first taste of cold melon, sadly forgot the flavor of mother's milk. You, tongue, recited pagan rhymes, thrust yourself at naughty pagan boys, licked the sweat that gathered on our saint's upper lip when she sprinkled incense before the pagan gods.

A stone in her mouth the night her father, Good King Costus, died; a wrung sponge, barely wetting her lips by her third day in the desert, taken there to learn the ways of our Lord by Saint Sabba. You tasted no flesh but her elder's webbed knuckles, no liquid but tears heated on the portal of her sunburned lips. A straining, yearning fourteen-year-old tongue against the cheek of her bridegroom, the baby Jesus, when he slipped a ring on her finger and sent her back to Alexandria.

For four years, you issued proclamations and exalted the poor, until the Emperor arrived to survey his vassalage. You, tongue, hesitated not in your answer to Emperor Maxentius; no, you touched the roof of her mouth, slid behind her teeth.
I will not renounce my husband, Jesus Christ. I will not sprinkle incense before your pagan gods.

The Emperor followed you in your route around her mouth, watched you pause at each station of thought on your pilgrimage of refusal. He wanted so badly to take you between his lips that he sometimes felt his own mouth open and close softly, like a baby dreaming of its mother's tit. He challenged Saint Katherine further, merely to watch you savor your retort. Poor kidney-colored tongue of his wife, the Empress; the Emperor sought to replace it with you, offering Katherine his wife's place at his side for one handful of incense on an altar. Again, a slight tap to the roof of the mouth. No.

Could not fifty philosophers convince her?

You humiliated and pleasured them, first in defeat, then in conversion.

Could not torture—the Wheel, starvation—silence her?

No, you gave to God a new song, lapped nectar from the palms of angels.

Lop off her breasts, roared the Emperor, but don't touch her tongue!

Where could you rest in her rictus mouth? Could you have possibly found an idea to go with the pillows that dropped from her chest? But good came from evil: Queen Kidney Tongue was converted; jailor Porphyrius, the thousands in the square come to cheer their patroness, were converted and instantly martyred.

And when in his reddest rage, standing in the stubble field of severed limbs, the Emperor struck her head from her shoulders, his guards had to restrain him from sucking the dirt and grainy milk from your still quivering flesh. He fought hard. He had to know how Christianity tasted.

Bless me, O tongue.

In Jesus' name. Amen.

The priest stands by, while I fog the glass with my reverent kiss, and wipes it after me.

When we are done, we retire to the shaded pleasure garden, there to open our scrips and eat some lunch. Conrad, our barber, takes out a little reed pipe he has lashed together and plays festively for our entertainment.

“My brothers and pilgrims,” I say, rising when all are sprawled under pine boughs and lunch is nearly finished, “I have prepared a profitable sermon on how compares this Mount of Venus to that of holy Mount Sinai: their likenesses and divergences, their places in history, and their accompanying miracles. I call this sermon Truth and Illusion. Would you like to hear it?”

“Hear, hear!” cries John, waving his water skin. “If we are to bear the heat of the afternoon, how better to weather it than with a sermon?”

Conrad pipes a little arpeggio signifying assent, and Constantine puts his head in his hands, the better to concentrate. I position myself in the pine grove so I am facing the Church of Saint Paul, there better to see the merchant's wife when she sneaks in.

“Friar, didn't we just have a mass?” Ursus pleads.

“The Sermon of Truth and Illusion,” I begin. “Delivered this Saint John's Eve by Friar Felix Fabri of the Dominican Preaching Brothers in Ulm for his dear friends John, Conrad, Constantine, and Master Ursus Tucher.

“Now a sermon, like any new creature, is best begun with a birth, so before we climb the two mountains Venus and Sinai, let me first speak of a pair of births, one false and one true, that occurred in the shadow of this pleasure garden.

“When the god Jupiter took umbrage with his father and severed his genitals with a scythe, the blood from those organs frothed upon the sea until a lady was born. Does anyone know who this lady was?” I point to my patron's son. “Ursus!”

“The Lady Venus?”

“Correct. And though she was a most beautiful woman, what was she born from? That's right. She was born from a deposed god's pollution.

“Now some centuries later, another birth graced this island, even though its inhabitants were sunk deep in Venus's harlotry. A daughter was born to the vice-consul of Cyprus, before he was granted the kingship of Alexandria: a child as chaste as Venus was corrupt, as intellectual as Venus was sexual. Perhaps it was memories of her days on Venus's island that prompted her words to the Emperor Maxentius: ‘If you are ruled by the mind, you are king; if by the body, you are a slave.' Does anyone know who spoke those words?” I point to my patron's son. “Ursus!”

“Saint Katherine! Saint Katherine spoke those words!”

“Correct. So, two births: one the daughter of a king on his way down, one the daughter of a king on his way up. One from pollution, one from honest employed parents.

“Let us now turn to their mountains.”

I glance at Saint Paul's church, but still no one approaches.

“I think you know where the two mountains in question are situated in the world. The Mount of Venus rises up from the sea on the well-endowed island of Cyprus. It overlooks fields and streams, plowed lands and vineyards.

“The Mount of Sinai lies in a land completely opposite, in a rough, dead country, encompassed by barren rocks and poisonous snakes. A man might sail to Cyprus in the company of jolly Europeans, but to reach Sinai he would have to brave camel bite and Arab attack, perhaps then only to die of convulsive thirst in the wilderness.”

Constantine shudders.

“And yet, here come into play Truth and Illusion. For all its shade and abundance, for all its accessibility and cool breezes, the mount upon which we now sit, the Mount of Venus, is a dung heap of corruption, a foul squirming pyramid of worms. It is home to a pagan prostitute who, not content with debauching her own body, had to sully an entire continent, spreading her contagion even unto Tuscany, where it might infect foolish German travelers.

“Witness, friends, how illusory then is Sinai. On the surface, it appears a forbidding, friendless rock, tempered in flame, abandoned by God. But search for Truth. You will find it in the shape of a young girl who chose
this
mount for her eternal home. For all its heat and dust, for all its scorpions, sand, and silence, Sinai is a paradise! Look with your heart and you will see blue plashing fountains, lush green groves laden with fruit. Sinai is no wasteland—no—it rewards the bold pilgrim a thousandfold with its promise of Heaven! How easy to reach inviting Mount Venus. How perilous, and thus how profitable to a man's soul, to achieve Mount Sinai. It is as close to martyrdom as a man might come in this Age of Faith!”

From a distance, I see a woman start up the mountain. She is too far away to tell for certain, but indeed she has the coloring of the merchant's wife.