A Stolen Tongue (2 page)

“Plant him over there, then,” the Franciscan tells me, stopping in their cypress-lined graveyard. “I'll lay out the things for mass.”

Oh, how Katherine inhabits this place! The Franciscan told me her hand is put away in a jewel-encrusted box, locked inside the airless sacristy, and yet I feel her take a seat beside me, here on this stone bench, and watch, as I do, the slaves turn fresh earth. Her white robe falls in tidy folds around her ankles; her wheel, that instrument of torture, rests harmlessly underfoot. We put our heads together, and her blue eyes smile into mine as a fond wife's would, happy to be reunited, even if it is in such a place as this.

“Where's Ursus?”

My bride evaporates at the sound of Lord Tucher's panicked voice.

“Did he go inside?” I sigh. Ursus is forever running off.

“Ursus!” his father calls sharply. “I've told you a hundred times not to leave us.”

I push open the unlocked back door of the church and march across the apse. Sunlight slanting through the red-and-gold glass bodies of the Holy Family melts three sacred hearts across the flagstone floor.

“Ursus, are you in here?”

Huddled on a back pew, mottled by the blue bird-light of Saint Francis's lead-paned grackles, my patron's son sits beside a stranger.

“Ursus?” I take a step closer.

“Here, my friar will confirm. Friar Felix,” Ursus prompts, “there are no ladies on our ship, are there?”

The stranger rises expectantly, hoping I will contradict my charge. What sort of question is that? Why should this man care that we sail womanless upon the sea, if we consider it our great good fortune? Perhaps because he is a handsome man; tall, dark-haired, richly clad in a black doublet and yellow leather boots, he fancies himself a dandy? And yet his full mouth is drawn into a frown, and his somber eyes promise anything but a flirtation.

“That is correct, son,” I say. “All the ladies rode with Contarini.”

“You are certain, good Brother Dominican? No women have recently joined your party?” The stranger speaks the perfectly accented Latin of the university or novitiate.

“I can happily answer, Yes, I'm certain we have not a one. Why do you ask?”

“I'm looking for a young woman.” He smiles self-consciously. “She ran away several days ago, and I tracked her as far as this monastery. You are Jerusalem pilgrims, yes? You continue on to Sinai?”

“We certainly hope so.” I smile, for, without knowing, he has touched upon my deepest desire. “We plan to continue our pilgrimage across the Sinai even to Saint Katherine's Monastery, God willing.”

“God's will may not be the only one at work, I'm afraid.”

The stranger turns to leave. I follow his eyes to where they light briefly on a misfired glass portrait of Katherine, her bubbled yellow sword flaring like that which bars the gates to Eden.

“I hope you make it.” He pushes on the door.

“She is a bad girl, this lady?” Ursus calls after him.

“Worse than that, son.” The man takes one last worried look around the church. “She is completely insane.”

“I just had it!”

Ursus is near tears in the cemetery. I've interrupted mass so he might look for his silver rosary, a present given him by his mother before we left Ulm, along with a pair of oversized gray boots in case his feet grow in the Holy Land. The boy's eyes and nose are red. He fears he dropped the beads into Schmidhans's open grave.

With a sigh, his father hands him his own expensive gold rosary and motions for me to continue.

You are a generous man, Lord Tucher, but are you the sort of man who keeps his promises? Do you have the courage to travel that great empty space with me? My patron puts out his fuzzy yellow tongue for the Host, and I stare deeply into his eyes. I have made you the keeper of my childhood vow, my most solemn oath; and yet the
farther east we push, the wilder the rumors surrounding her monastery become and the less you speak of your promise to me. Here, in her presence, I command you to honor the pledge you made when I agreed to become your confessor. Take me to her.

“May the Lord watch over our dear departed Schmidhans and guide him swiftly through Purgatory with the help of these hundred masses we now purchase for his wretched soul.”

Quickly, I confess my sins in my heart, the most recent being that I was inattentive during my own mass, and take the Lord's Host into my mouth.

“In Jesus' name. Amen.”

Lord Tucher pushes himself to his feet and looks around for the Franciscan. “Felix,” he says, “before we take a peek at the relics, let's see about that malvoisie, eh?”

How can he think of grapes when he knows I burn to see her hand?

“Brother Franciscan!” Tucher calls, clapping into the chapel. “Will you help us?”

While his father profanely haggles, Ursus enlists me to crawl around the floor with him and feel for his lost rosary. Three times I watch the Franciscan's feet trot down to the cellar when Lord Tucher sends him back for a different vintage. On the other side of the wall, my beloved idly scratches a cross into the dirt floor with the tip of her sword. She stands and paces the small room, leans her head against the door.

“And this is a good year, you say?” Lord Tucher asks the monk.

“Friar Felix, are you married to her like Father is to Mother?” Ursus asks, reaching under the pew near me. “Can you have children?”

I smile at my charge's naïveté.

“No, Ursus. You know how women, when they become nuns, are called Brides of Christ? How they call our Lord ‘Bridegroom' and wear a gold wedding band to symbolize their union?”

“Yes. My aunt is a nun. We watched her marry Christ.”

“Well, when we monks take our orders, we may choose a spiritual spouse to keep us company, like nuns have Jesus. We can't very well take Jesus because, first, he is a man and, second, he has married
all those nuns. It's wrong to presume the Blessed Virgin would have us; she is married to Saint Joseph. Saint Anne is married to Saint Joachim and Saint Elizabeth is married to Saint Zacharias, so these, too, are out. It is fitting, therefore, that a pious monk not come between the happy couplings of Heaven but take to wife some unwed virgin saint.”

“And you chose Saint Katherine?”

“I like to think she chose me.”

And we have been happily joined now for twenty years, since I first pledged myself to the Dominicans on the anniversary of her martyrdom when I was eighteen years old. Every November twenty-fifth I retire from the world and relive her suffering. I see again her courageous refusal to sacrifice before the pagan gods, her defeat of their Fifty Philosophers sent to break her faith in Christ. I weep for her torture at the hands of Emperor Maxentius, when he bound her to that diabolical wheel and tore her flesh with hooks. How I rejoice when the Emperor orders her head struck off by the sword, only to witness milk flow instead of blood! How I triumph as the Emperor is forced to stand by and watch the angels translate her broken body to the top of holy Mount Sinai! Katherine of Alexandria, the philosopher saint, is the patroness of young girls, scholars, and priests. I try not to take too much pride in her popularity.

“Felix.” Lord Tucher bends over me, wagging a dusty green wine bottle before my face. “I bought an extra for you.”

“Thank you, my lord. Might we see her hand now?”

“Friar!” Ursus cries. “You promised to help me look!”

“We are seeking and not finding, Ursus.”

“Brother Franciscan,” Lord Tucher calls. “We're ready.”

The monk invites us back into the tight, musty sacristy. In my lifetime, I have venerated her foot in Rouen, her spine in Cologne, and now her hand in Crete. The most precious of relics, Katherine's holy head, lies where angels set her down, twelve hundred years ago, in her monastery atop Mount Sinai.

The Franciscan unlocks the sacristy closet and slowly draws from its shadows a silver box marvelously fashioned after a woman's hand. Polished rubies form the hand's fingernails, while inside the
palm veins of pure lapis lazuli trace a deep lifeline, headline, and heartline. It is the left hand! The hand upon which, if we were earthly spouses, she would wear my wedding band.

The hand of Saint Katherine is a very important relic, being the blessed appendage she places upon our Lord's knee to beg favors for men. Her sainted hand holds a cool cloth against the foreheads of those with fevers, whether we suffer the physical pain of illness or the emotional distemper that accompanies too great a love. Katherine, schooled as she was in the seven Liberal Arts, with a voice so melodious it converted fifty pagan philosophers to Christ, must certainly be called upon to read aloud in Heaven. This hand, then, holds the book when she reads sweetly to God and the Holy Family.

“By the grace of God,” the monk intones, throwing open the reliquary, “the hand of Katherina Martyr.”

Where is it?

A cushion of blue velvet. A whiff of myrrh. No bones, no shaving of knuckle, no thumb print.
Where is my wife's hand?

“There's nothing there, Friar,” Ursus whimpers.

The Franciscan sharply shakes the box. His mouth works but no words follow. Ursus's bottom lip begins to tremble.

“Thief!” The monk shouts, sweeping up his robes and running from the church. “Thief!”

My beloved? My wife?

She knew I was coming and she allowed herself to be stolen.

Brothers, you made me promise, that gray farewell day in Ulm, that in the event God should grant me safe passage across the sea, I would write down all that happened to me on pilgrimage, the good and the bad, the bitter and the sweet, by design or by accident, and thus make you my constant companions. Up until today, I have strictly honored that vow, recording the distances between places, the holy sites of Venice, how I found the food in Dalmatia, and much more that goes into the making of a travel book of pilgrimage. I turn to you now in my hour of need and beg you forgive me if, under the circumstances, I should transgress the realm of expected narration and turn this account, as emotional people tend to do, into some personal cogitation of my own.

Be assured. I am not upset.

I know a saint navigates the world in two ways: via translation, as Katherine was angelically translated from the forum in Alexandria to blessed Mount Sinai; or
furta sacra
—that is, by holy theft, a translation by man. If we believe the saints have power over their own locomotion, we can only reason that Katherine no longer wished to remain on Crete. Had she chosen to stay, her hand certainly would have leapt up, gripped tight the windpipe of her would-be abductor, and strangled the blasphemous miscreant dead.

My friend Archdeacon John Lazinus hovers over us, speeding our returning party up the gangplank.

“Hurry, Felix. They'll leave you behind!”

Contarini's ship has been spotted. On deck, sailors frantically hoist the mainsail and trinketum. Galley slaves, three to a bench, grasp their oars and pull; crewmen drag up the great iron anchors on either side of the prow. A word of warning, brothers: You might think, in times of bustle and haste, the sailors would welcome help or direction from the pilgrims, but in fact this is displeasing to them.

“Father John, you'll never guess what!” Ursus dodges the rigging and the swinging rope. “Someone stole a piece of our friar's wife.”

“Felix, is this true?”

John's brown eyes are kind and concerned, like your eyes, Abbot Fuchs, when one of the brothers comes secretly to you in the night and lays his head in your lap. I don't want to take this turn of events personally, but I suddenly find it difficult to speak.

“I'll put the wine away,” I whisper.

Seven ladderlike steps lead downstairs to the fetid, cavernous pilgrims' deck. All along the floor, in even rectangles, we chalk off our berths, side by side, with the ship's curving wall as our headboard and our trunks, placed toward the ship's center, serving as footboards. Only the Homesick stay belowdeck out of choice, and it depresses me even more to move among them. They love the dark, rotting wood that blocks this foreign sun and magnifies what few familiar Western smells remain: smoke and European piss, beer sweat, pine pitch. When the rest of us roll up our mattresses in the morning and suspend them from the rafters, the Homesick turn over and imagine their wives' hair on the pillow next to them, or the smell of their pet roosters' feathers on the windowsill, or the sound only their dog makes when his paws skid in frosty winter horse manure. They tell each other long detailed stories about their backyard cabbage gardens and their children's agues, but rarely listen to anyone's but their own.

I follow the aisle of luggage far back to my berth, where another smaller hatch opens onto the ship's belly. This third hold, filled completely with sand, is where pilgrims bury their perishables: meat, cheese, eggs. I push the bottles deep into the chilled sand and fasten the hatch.

“Felix, are you sad?”

Truly, God sent good John Lazinus to ease the pain of separation from you, Abbot Fuchs. He has been a comfort to me since we first met, at Zu der Fleuten in Venice, when the German innkeeper's black dog, who loved only Germans and loathed with an instinctual passion all Italians and Italian dogs, indeed, all Spaniards, Dutch, French, and all other races, and all their dogs—allowed Hungarian John Lazinus to teach it to dance for ham. My spirits can't help but rise, seeing my gentle friend come toward me across the field of the Homesick.

“What kind of criminal shoves the hand of a saint into his sweaty pocket?” I ask as he nears. “I keep seeing her delicate fingers spilled across some cheap inn's bedside table or peeking from an overstuffed saddlebag, tangled with twine and old raisins. Who would do it?”

“Relics are only stolen for love or profit.” My friend sighs.

“
I
love her! If she wanted to move, couldn't she have waited another hour? Wouldn't she have liked to come to Ulm?”