A Stolen Tongue (27 page)

I have no idea of Ser Niccolo's exact address along this street but hope I may stumble upon him or someone who has seen him. I try to imagine what kind of friends he would have in this infected area, equidistant from the abattoir and the city's leper colony. I dare not venture toward those melting milky reaches where the most envious and lustful creatures in the world dwell. We have all heard the rumors back in Ulm that lepers are creatures of the Jews, who are themselves in the employ of the Sultan of Egypt. Together they are planning the overthrow of Christendom, first by poisoning the wells
and then by invasion. I paid the rumor no mind, especially as it seemed spread by men of the lowest character who could not keep gainful employment anywhere in the city. Now, trapped in a triangle of leper, Jew, and Infidel, I shudder and pull my robes tightly around me. Everyone looks suspicious. Yellow turbans touch, beards wag; plots are hatched in every stall and tea salon I pass. The tailors whisper to the shoemakers, the cotton cleaners, tossing white clouds into the air with their bows, signal to the butchers.
That monk is spying on us. Keep silence, compatriots, silence like the bottom of a black and icy well. Go home, my leper friends, pretend we've never met
—

“Christian.” A hand on my shoulder. I jump and spin around.

Yellow turban. A Jew.

“What?”

“Come into my shop, my friend.”

He speaks heavily accented Latin. I barely understand him.

“No. I don't want to.”

“No need to be afraid. I'll pour us a glass of wine.”

Bushy black eyebrows arch up toward his yellow bulb, and his chin beard salutes the sky. He lays hold of my sleeve and tugs me behind him, down the street, into a cluttered shop. Dusty codices line the shelves, figurines, red glass lamps. He clears a stool of papers and gestures for me to sit. I pull away and jar a tray of loose wooden splinters.

“From the True Cross,” the merchant says solemnly.

“Really, I'm not here to buy. I am looking for a friend.”

“And look at this: crocodile heads.”

On the shelf to his left, fifteen monstrous lizard heads, glittering eyes, gaping jaws, teeth painted red to give the impression they've just torn human flesh. At least I think they are painted.

“Only the finest, from Crocodopolis on the Nile.” He takes an enormous triangular head from the shelf and swoops down on me.
“Gra! Gra! Gra!”

“Really, I must find my friend.” The crocodile teeth catch my nose.

“I am going to eat you!”

“Please!” I push past him and find the door. The Jew's cat screeches when I step on her tail, trying to get out.

“Wait, come back!” he calls after me. “I'll make a good price. I have many things for Christ!”

“Pssst, listen.”

I swing right and almost collide with another Yellow Turban lurking in the shadows.

“You want Christian stuff? Don't go to him. He'll cheat you. Come to my brother.”

“I don't want Christian stuff. I'm looking for an Greek translator who is staying on this street.”

“Come to my brother. We have Greeks there.”

Two women carrying baskets pass. I notice one's kerchief has slipped from her forehead. She is bald.

“Come.”

He pulls me hard and the alley swallows us up. A white chicken flutters against my chest and flaps around us, chased by a young barefooted girl. I feel my arm yanked from its socket.

Yellow Turban leads me in a wide semicircle until we come back to the Street of the Quarter of the Jews, a few shops down from where he grabbed me initially. Just outside the doorway, a familiar-looking towheaded man leans against the shop, playing idly with his donkey's tether. The beast in front of him is packed for a journey, saddled and loaded with a trunk on its rear end. Where have I seen this man before?

“Go in,” urges Yellow Turban, pushing me into the dark doorway. “Greeks.”

“Wait.” I pull away from the merchant and walk over to the waiting man. Dressed in somber pilgrim's garb, he wears a coarse brown robe with belt, heavy black boots, a flimsy white chasuble stitched in what looks to have been great haste, from the crookedness of its red cross. He is clean-shaven and weaponless, but there can be no mistake. This waiting pilgrim is Abdullah the Mameluke.

“Abdullah?” I marvel.

He sees me and for an instant contemplates flight. Why on earth is he dressed this way? Certainly, if the Saracens discover it, he will be thrown in jail or even killed.

“Peter, please,” he says, cutting his eyes at the impatient Jew. “How are you, fellow pilgrim?”

“Fine,” I say. “
What
are you?”

The Mameluke throws his arm around my shoulder and leads me away from the shop door. From the open second-story windows above us, wide-eyed Jewish children, their mouths crusty with goat's milk, their arms albino with dust, lean out and sing the word, “Biscuit!” I reach into my scrip to give them some bread, but Abdullah smacks their grasping hands away.

“I am
battal,
Friar,” the Mameluke says, checking to make certain the children are not spies. “Do you know what that means?”

I do not and say so, brothers.

“It means I disgraced the Mamelukes. I was caught enjoying myself like a Christian once too often and they dressed me down, exiled me to backwater Jerusalem, where I was to petition Allah's forgiveness for the rest of my days.”

I have heard of these outcasts, brothers, though I did not remember the word. They are considered unclean by the Saracens and no longer live free lives. Some are penned up in stalls to meditate on their sins; some are merely followed wherever they go by stern Saracen priests who scowl them to an early grave.

“Ser Nic knew my status when he met me and offered me a way out,” he says. “I perform a few odd tasks for him, and he, in his turn, promises to take me home.”

I know very little about the Mameluke lifestyle, brothers, but I do know it is not possible to simply bid it farewell when it chafes. The Saracens take their Allah very seriously, and to insult him, as Abdullah seems bent on doing, is a capital offense.

“Peter, are you sure?” I ask. “Have you weighed the risks?”

“Do you know what it is like, living divided against yourself?” Abdullah asks. “When I came here as Peter Ber, God how I envied the Mamelukes, their fine horses, their rugs, their huge Damascus swords! I came with seven other Germans, all of whom dropped dead, one by one, of dysentery. What was stopping me from slipping into the East, Friar, from picking up one of those fine swords or stretching out on one of those gorgeous scratchy carpets? Only once I renounced Christ and became Abdullah, Slave to Allah, everything
changed. Then I wanted only what I couldn't have: ham and wine and hot Christian virgins.”

I remember Elphahallo's words to me on the roof at Ramleh; he believed the only men in this world who were truly damned were those who lived an unfamiliar faith. Still, this Mameluke stands before me, ready to be welcomed back into the flock. The least I can do is bless him.

“You will have much to atone for.” I hug the new Peter Ber. “But you have made the right choice. Christ Jesus will welcome you, prodigal son, with open arms.”

“Great,” says the Mameluke, and looks away.

“Where is Ser Niccolo?” I ask, releasing my fellow pilgrim. It is time to get what I came for.

“He is inside with those grave robbers.” Peter fidgets. “I've been watching his stuff for an hour, and I'm getting thirsty.”

“Grave robbers?” I ask.

“You should see that place.” Peter snorts. “Full of legs and eyes and mummified cats and every other dead thing you can imagine. Christ,” he says, wiping his brow. “It's really hot out here.”

Treachery comes easier and easier these days, brothers. I see my chance and take it.

“Why don't you step off and get yourself something cool to drink, my friend?” I offer amiably. “I am happy to watch Ser Niccolo's things until you get back.”

He looks at me uncertainly. “He's very particular about them.”

“Who can he trust if not a priest?” I ask.

Peter Ber considers this briefly and nods agreement. With a brief look back to the donkey, he starts down the street.

“I'll just pop into the tavern for one,” he reassures me. “Won't be long.”

“Take your time.” I wave as he disappears down the alley.

A donkey and a trunk. My entire life comes down to this combination. She is a white donkey with big soulful mandorla eyes that seem almost to be encouraging me in the words of the Apostle Mark: “There is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested; neither was any thing kept secret, but that it should come abroad.” This trunk
upon my rump has obviously come abroad, she says. It is only right that its contents should be manifested.

I duck my head quickly into the relic shop's back door and check for Ser Niccolo. This back room is well organized, if nothing else. The jar of Christ's foreskins sits alphabetically next to the stack of girdles dropped from Heaven by the Virgin Mary. Boxes of fingers sit next to caskets of hands, and toes go with feet. I shudder at how these men make their living, preying on the gullibility of desperate Christians. Is Niccolo inside, right now, rummaging through the assorted paste reliquaries, looking for a set of Saint Katherine's ruby lips? Suddenly a horrifying thought occurs to me, brothers. What if Niccolo is not here buying? What if he is here to sell?

A strange calm always descends upon me in moments of greatest sinfulness. The resolute hand of the murderer, the slow heartbeat of the thief, the liar's cool head are all mine when the Devil's work is to be done. With only a swift glance around to make certain I am not noticed, I walk back to the trunk and sink my pen deep into its cheap lock. I will not name names, but one among you may congratulate yourselves for my acquisition of this useful skill. It requires only a bit of jiggling before the shoddy lock drops open. The donkey's skin twitches with horseflies, and her tail slaps my hand, shooing them away. She takes a short step backward, jarring the trunk from my grip.

Katherine, give me the strength to deal with whatever I find here. I fling open the lid.

The myrrh. You smell it first, brothers. The heady sandalwood, jasmine flowering of Heaven. A thin unguent of this scent oiled the empty reliquaries of Crete and Rhodes; a wispy column escaped the night of the storm when I threw open Arsinoë's trunk, expecting to find it full of bones. It was this celestial perfume Niccolo was sniffing for when he plowed up Emelia Priuli's bones on the beach of Joppa.

Ask your nose how something so pitiable can smell so sweet. Then ask your eyes to make sense of the jumbled hostage that is your beloved saint.

I spread open the burlap feed bag that once embraced the neck of drowning Arsinoë and find inside what must be a hundred pieces of Heaven. Narrow ribs comingle with a thigh and a wrist, recalling some ancient runic alphabet written all in sharp angles and joints. There is the left hand from Candia. Dear God, there, with no velvet to cushion it—clenched, in fact, between two bony toes—is the ear we lost on Rhodes. My hand goes instinctively to the money pouch next to my heart, where I have had to bunk her tongue in a bed of filthy lucre to keep it safe.

You were imprisoned in this trunk the night I slept on Contarini's ship. You were bound and gagged, before that, in a waterlogged bag around Arsinoë's neck. How many times I could have saved you, had I only known! Forgive me, dearest spouse. Forgive a foolish, wrong-headed, inflexible husband.

I gather the oily bones in my hands and bring them to my mouth. John once remarked that relics were only stolen for love or profit. Niccolo left her outside a relic shop, when he could have taken her inside and made a fortune. If he did not kidnap her for profit, what sort of ungodly love does he indulge for her?

“Abdullah, let's go!”

A shout from inside the shop. I drop my beloved back into her bag and slam shut the trunk. With frantic, fumbling hands, I try to snap the lock back into place. I broke it with my pen.

“Friar?”

Ser Niccolo the Translator steps through the doorway as I pound the lock with my fist. The white donkey leaps forward at my violence, and the trunk slips precariously. I lunge to right it.

“What are you doing?” he yells, pulling me away from his ass. “Don't touch that!”

“Some children tried to steal it,” I gasp, my voice breathless with fear. “Abdullah . . . I mean Peter . . . ran after them. That way.”

I point down the alley where the Mameluke disappeared and pray Niccolo does not decide to follow. He eyes me suspiciously, but says nothing.

“I'm sorry,” I stammer. “It's my fault, really. I distracted Peter. We were speaking of his conversion, when these children—”

Niccolo has noticed the lock won't close. He turns on me angrily.

“The children I suppose picked this lock?”

“They had a stick,” I say weakly.

“What are you doing here, Friar?” the translator asks, not believing a word I say.

I haven't thought that far ahead. What am I doing here?

“I was headed out to Aceldama when I found myself on your street. I thought I'd stop in and see if you'd join me for a bite to eat.”

“I am leaving the city tonight,” he says, opening the trunk wide enough to satisfy himself that nothing is missing. “I'm afraid this will have to be good-bye.”

“You are leaving already?” I ask. I have thought of no way to detain him. “You mustn't leave Jerusalem without visiting the Holy Sepulchre. Come with us tonight.”

Niccolo shakes his head. “I'm sorry, Friar. If I miss my ride, I'll be here another week.”

He bends over, tightening the saddle around his white donkey's flanks, and repositions the trunk. Should I confront him here on the street and demand Katherine's body? He will get away unless I can convince him he absolutely cannot go.