A Stolen Tongue (21 page)

John tugged my robe, glaring at the translator. “Come on, Felix. They'll leave without us.”

“A kindred spirit.”

I let John lead me away from this man, this friend of monsters. We unhinged him with our lies. As we walked back to the cave to collect our trunks and roll up our pallets, John smiled wanly at me. I could not look at him. What we did was wrong. I saw again the despair on Ser Niccolo's face as he pressed that woman's remains to his face. Was he sniffing for sanctity, for the holy scent of myrrh? Did the translator believe, in his secret heart, that his sister had talked to Heaven?

But enough, brothers! I can bear no more to examine my sins. I promised, when I left, to keep a balanced account of my pilgrimage: the sacred and the profane, the serious and the absurd. What befell the pilgrims next may not be omitted if you are to experience, first hand, what we endured that night.

Like ants on a stick, we walked single file down the path to the beach, each pilgrim hefting his trunk in his arms, each praying not to collapse under its weight. Upon the beach, the shadowy donkeys blended with the sea, a few white-capped backs moving restlessly among them, as anxious to convey us to the Holy City as we were to mount them. Finally, we were on our way, brothers. I stood looking about for the rest of my company when, without any warning, a dark calloused hand reached out and grabbed my arm.

How I screamed, brothers—like a girl! My trunk bumped along my spine as it slid to the ground; my shins slammed against sharp rocks. Because my captor had grabbed my right hand with his right hand, I was dragged awkwardly, stumbling, twisted like a kite's flapping tail behind him.

“Stop!” I screamed, digging in my heels and trying to reverse our momentum. Where was he taking me? All around, pilgrims were
grabbed, fought over, yanked like wishbones. Where was Ursus? My Saracen tugged harder, pulling me off balance while repeating many words I could not understand. I fell and he helped me up, barely missing a step.

When at last I realized what was going on, I was too out of breath to protest. My Saracen shoved me astride a black donkey and patted her thick neck frenetically.
“Gut? Es Gut?”

The donkey whinnied softly and pushed at his hand with her nose. In fact, she
was
a good donkey, her spine not too sharp, her flanks not too barrelish.

“No. Not
gut
.” I leapt from the donkey and mimed myself dragged like Hector behind Achilles' chariot at Troy. The Saracen bowed low before me and clasped my hands repeatedly, I think in a show of apology. Evidently, more ass drivers from Joppa arrive than pilgrims, and thus the drivers must fight for business. This rough and squinty Saracen gestured behind him to a noble member of his faith, beturbaned and sitting astride a purebred horse. The mounted Saracen held aloft a torch, touched me gently with his staff, and said much more to me that I could not understand, but which I took to mean:

“Stay, Christian pilgrim, and accept our ass. My name is Galela, and this is my slave Cassa. If you have need of him on your wanderings, call Galelacassa; he will come to you and serve you faithfully without overcharging you or mistreating you in any way.”

Looking over the broken asses foisted upon the other pilgrims, I reluctantly agreed to stay with Cassa. He ran back for my trunk and affixed it to the saddle behind me.

So here I sit, astride my donkey, brothers, waiting for the other pilgrims to be settled on other asses. The Saracens take a school-boyish delight in annoying Christian pilgrims, and even Cassa, who seems a good sort, peers over my shoulder like a monkey and wonders at my letters, even as I put them on the page. I cannot say I am unhappy to leave Joppa behind. I have committed many sins for having been only one full day on holy soil, and I am carrying into Jerusalem a heavy heart. Pray for me, brothers, pray that things may change.

The moon hangs low in the sky, and dawn will break in a few hours, Elphahallo announces. We must prepare ourselves for an arduous journey to Jerusalem. We may encounter rough Arabs on the way, and if this occurs we are to stay calm and let our Saracen guides protect us. On no account are we to draw weapons.

Elphahallo addresses the pilgrims who have, for piety's sake, elected to walk across the burning desert into Jerusalem. “Know you that you walk of your own volition,” says he, “and if you cannot keep up, you will either be left behind or you will have to find your own ass driver. Do not return to your homelands saying that Saracens will not suffer Christians to ride through their country but make them walk in the heat. Witness this is not so. Are you so resigned?”

Two walking pilgrims slink away from the group and procure drivers. The rest, perhaps twenty in all, remain. Elphahallo surveys the pocket of barefoot walkers, the legion of donkey drivers, the Mameluke and Saracen guards, armed and on horseback. Asses stamp their impatience, guards joke, but when Elphahallo raises his staff high above his head and shouts, we Christians fall as silent as the grave.

“Pilgrims, set your hearts for Jerusalem. We are off!”

T
HE
S
ARACEN
C
ITY OF
R
AMLEH
P
ALESTINE
S
UMMER
1483

“Do you hear it? That tapping?”

“Yes, I think so. Look, it's moving.”

My patron and his son stare fixedly at the back wall of our room, here in the well-appointed pilgrim's hospice of Ramleh. After a weary night and day of traveling, we've finally put to rest at the man-made oasis left us by Duke Philip of Burgundy, of blessed memory. My party has taken a room off the loggia that opens onto a courtyard complete with marble fountain and spreading green fig trees. All eyes are turned away from Nature's beauty, however, riveted on a single large block of stone, waist-high from the floor, that appears to be wiggling its way toward us.

“What do you suppose they're doing?”

“Repairing the wall?” Conrad ventures.

“I think they're trying to break through.” Lord Tucher paces. “To rob us.”

I snort, perhaps too rudely.

“After what happened in Joppa, Friar Felix, I'm not about to take chances with my son's life.” Lord Tucher picks up the weapon of war he wrought after Emelia's assassination, a sea urchin on a stick.

Fellow pilgrims, lured by our intense concentration, stop into the room, depart in search of boards and stones—as we are forbidden by Article Thirteen to wear daggers slung about us—and return to wait. The mood in our cell has grown so black, I fear for whoever is
working to reach us. I hope for his sake he is a bad man—a robber or an assassin—because, good or bad, he will not escape a braining.

The stone teeters and drops to the ground.

“All right, dog!” Lord Tucher shouts at the hole. “Show yourself!”

A thick brick of setting sun replaces the missing stone, confirming that the culprit bored through from outdoors. Ursus leans down to put his eye to the hole, but his father yanks him back.

“Whoever you are,” Tucher calls, his voice cracking, “come out.”

We all breathe shallowly, each man with a different threat before him: demons, Turks, red poisonous gas from the East that saps the will and leaves us slaves to the Sultan. The tension is unbearable. I have to look.

“Felix, don't!” Lord Tucher grabs for my collar, but I throw off his hand. Momentarily blinded by the pink light, it takes a second for my eyes to find their subject, and when they do my confusion is so great it takes another for my mind to process it.

“Don't!” I pull back. “Don't look!”

But it is too late. She sticks her head through the hole for all to see and calls to us in her heathen language: a Saracen woman, swathed in the black crepe veils they wear, and behind her, in a mirror courtyard to our own, five of her wanton sisters. They gyrate with gloved hands, these mute Lorelei dipped in tar. A rough grip on my shoulder pulls me away from the hole.

“Let me see!”

“No! Me!”

All the male pilgrims want to spy on the Saracen women, and together they cause a great push, as when flesh arrives in times of famine. I back away frightened. Tenth Article: Let the pilgrims beware of gazing on any Saracen women, as their husbands are exceedingly jealous and apt to do harm. Eleventh Article: Should any Saracen woman beckon to a pilgrim and invite him into her house, on no accounts go. Two articles against such behavior, and yet they will not stop.

Ursus struggles to the front.

“What are your names? Are you married?”

“Are you attracted to us? Is that why you broke in?”

“Are you in trouble?”

These knights and pilgrims query the women as if expecting them to suddenly reply in the German tongue, and the women answer nonsensically to whatever it is they suppose we say. Throughout this fruitful conversation, the pilgrims trade places so that each can gaze upon the women in their natural hareem, not out furtively shopping or disappearing into doorways as has heretofore seemed their wont. Never have we met such brazen women in the East, but assumed them all to be chaste and frightened of their men, as commanded by their Alcoran.

“If only we had some way of talking to them!” Ursus wails. “I want to ask them about their hair!”

As I have no desire to see how this folly plays out, I quietly take up my mat and book and walk up the marble stairs to the hospice's flat-tiered roof, there to take advantage, in the Saracen fashion, of the cool night air. A Minorite friar, one of the monks assigned to watch over us in Ramleh, rushes past me with a bowl of mortar and a trowel. I can hear the lecture he will give our ungovernable pilgrims now, for if a Saracen man catches them making sport with his women the punishment will be conversion or death.

Below me, across the city of Ramleh, a hundred Saracen steeples puncture the twilight. Flat-bedded donkey carts, hillocked with boughs of cherries, roll through the dark streets; behind them walk slow, sandaled men, bone-weary after an afternoon's harvest. Are they headed home to discover that their wives have been soliciting lusty Western pilgrims through chinks in the wall? Do they have to fear, every time they leave the house, that their spouses will reveal themselves to others?

Is there any faith left in women, brothers? As much as I have tried to push it from my mind, the night of the storm returns to me again and again: my friend the Archdeacon John writhing on the Tongue's pallet, bent over the aching girl who slowly becomes my wife. He held her and looked into her eyes and asked questions of her like a familiar; and she answered him. Every time I look at John, I feel her betrayal. Today, in a church outside of Gath, the city that bred Goliath and the Dog-Headed Saint Christopher, John stopped to
point out a carving of Saint Katherine I had overlooked. She stood between Saint Christopher, who only became a man after he ferried Christ across the river, and Saint Nicholas, whom some in our country depict as a child-eater. The mason had been careless and had carved Katherine's sword so that it appeared to pierce Saint Christopher's flat bare foot. The smile on her face was full of satisfaction and, worse, brothers, drew into an almost carnal smirk, pressed as she was between two male saints. I could not bear to look on her, and when John came around to see what disturbed me, I could not look on him either.

Farther out, our Calinus, Elphahallo, with several of his companions who have also made their beds on the roof, talk among themselves, sharing bread and melons. When he sees me, Elphahallo beckons for me to join them.

“Friar Failisk”—he smiles—“come lay your bed near us.”

I smile but shake my head no, preferring, instead, to spread out my mat a little higher up.

“Will you not at least take some fruit?” The Calinus extends a juicy pink wedge encased in green rind. I want no more to think on women, brothers, so I walk down to sit with the Saracens.

“Thank you,” I say, gingerly biting into the melon. Oh, what ineffable springtime sweetness! Like crunchy new-scythed grass and honey on the tongue. I accept the second piece he offers and, cautiously, eat that as well.

“The name of this town, Ramleh,” Elphahallo says, “means lofty. Look how far you can see, Failisk. And over there, the patch where they grow your melons.”

Indeed, brothers, Ramleh is a green, fertile place, and everything here is cheap, sweet, and exceedingly good, save only its citizens, who are evil-minded and bear an especial hatred to Christians. When we arrived, they would not suffer us to ride our donkeys into town but commanded us to dismount and carry our luggage on our backs like pack slaves. Bad boys sat on the hospice rooftop, while we celebrated divine service in the courtyard, and hindered our worship by hooting and laughing and twisting their fingers with an ill meaning. We looked
in our turn with serious countenances at these boys and signed to them to go down, which only after much joking did they do.

One cannot appreciate the foreignness of the Saracens until one has dwelt for a few days among them, brothers. They wear hermaphroditic clothing, so that from the back it is difficult to distinguish their sex, and upon their heads turbans, after the fashion of the drunken god Dionysus, who bound his head against the headache after too much drinking. The Saracens' false prophet, Mahomet, followed the tradition of Dionysus, both in turban wearing and in excessive imbibing, until one day he committed homicide while inebriated and forever after swore off drink for himself and his followers. The turbans, however, he allowed to remain.

Elphahallo, Cassa, and the many Saracens we meet, from the Sultan's officials to the humble food merchants who feed us every day, seem genuinely helpful, yet we mustn't forget their manifest heresies. Elphahallo and his kind declare that God cannot have a Son, because He has no wife, and that He does not live because He does not eat! Cassa believes Christ was not God, only a good man, and calls him merely Rucholla, the Breath of God. Our food merchants might be accomplished in their cooking of eggs, but as for their understanding of Creation, they are mooncalves! Imagine believing that Heaven is made of vapor, which is called an exhalation of the sea, and that in the Beginning there was no distinction between night and day! Saracens also enjoin a plurality of wives and do not scruple to recognize sodomy.