A Stolen Tongue (34 page)

Ursus Tucher speaks before I can argue. “We shall not take the short path,” says he. “I forbid it.”

He speaks simply but forcefully, in the voice of a knight. “I know we vowed to be ruled by you, Friar,” Ursus continues, shifting awkwardly on his donkey, “but my father is delicate right now, and I will not risk his health, not even at the cost of damning my own soul.”

“But I want to go into the mountains,” Lord Tucher says. “My church is in the mountains.”

“Felix.” Niccolo's face is set. “You should command that boy.”

“Am I a child?” asks Lord Tucher.

“It is not Friar Felix's place to command anyone.” Ursus squares off against the translator, his voice shaking only slightly. “You, Ser Niccolo, my father hired out of love for our confessor. We could just as easily pay an ass driver to escort you home.”

“Do so, little boy,” Ser Niccolo flares. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to move at my own pace.”

“Stop!” commands Elphahallo. “No man will go alone into the desert. We will decide this now, fairly. Show me by your hands: Who wills we take the longer path?”

Ursus, John, and Conrad raise their hands.

“Who wills we journey through the mountains?”

Lord Tucher's hand shoots up, Niccolo nods his head, and after a second's hesitation, a hung-over, battered, deeply abashed Peter Ber joins him.

“Failisk,” says Elphahallo, “you have not voted.”

What am I to do, my brothers? We might beat Arsinoë to the monastery, but we would certainly be useless to Katherine should we perish along the way. My dry throat aches with thirst and fear and indecision. Niccolo's eyes are cold upon me, Lord Tucher's plead. I look into the grown-up, worried face of my charge Ursus,
who has seen far more on this pilgrimage than any boy of his age should have to see.

I vote for water.

And that is how easily, brothers, implacable enemies are made in the desert.

D
ESERT OF THE
S
INAI
T
HE
W
ILDERNESS OF
L
ARICH
S
UMMER
1483

It is blazing afternoon when Lord Tucher comes to me with news of the church. After crossing the sulfurous black plain called the Elysian Fields, Calinus sets up the shady tents and tells us to rest; we will camp during the heat of day, he says, and press on by moonlight.

“Don't you know the story, Friar,” Lord Tucher asks excitedly, “of the hermit who recognized Saint Katherine?”

I glance up from my book, brothers, to find my patron breathlessly pointing out a high craggy hill perhaps an hour's walk away. Back-lit by blue sky, a spiraling limestone church teeters atop it.

“That is his church! That is where the hermit dreamed Saint Katherine.”

“How do you know that is his church?”

“I overheard the translator speaking with a camel driver,” Lord Tucher explains. “Ser Niccolo was angry his swollen ankle kept him from making even this short walk. When I asked him if we should go venerate it, he said I should be ruled by you.”

In the two days since we argued over water, Niccolo has spent even more time in the accursed Arabs' company. They laugh in the Saracen tongue, whisper, trade secrets. These Arabs know the desert like we, my brothers, know the alleys and back lots of Ulm. Is the place this driver named truly holy?

Elphahallo says no. Rumor and legend put the hermitage there because heathen desert people have for millennia worshiped that
place as holy, but the Catholic Church grants no indulgences on the spot. By the time I learn this of our Calinus, it is too late. Lord Tucher has enlisted intrepid knight Ursus for his pilgrimage.

“The boy Jesus sent my father a vision,” says Ursus. “A church on a mountain.”

“Elphahallo says there is no church on that spot,” I tell him.

“Do you doubt your own eyes, Friar?” Lord Tucher points to the squat structure with its vaulted spire. “What do you think that is?”

He pulls his scrip over his shoulder and shoves in a goatskin half full of water, all that remains of our last supply. I have not seen him this spiritually determined since he strode through the streets of Candia to dispose of Schmidhans's bloated body.

“Come on, Friar. Look. It's not far.”

“I don't think we should go without consulting Calinus,” I say.

My patron laughs, and I get a glimpse of the old Tucher.

“Do you expect me to ask permission of my own servant when our Lord commands?”

And so we set out, led by our faithful companions Boredom, Pride, and Idle Curiosity, to seek the mountain of Ser Niccolo's hero, the hermit who, with a single dream, altered the course of Heaven and joined our destinies to Sinai forever.

Deep, deep in the desert, brothers, a hermit lies asleep in his cramped cenobic cell, dreaming of a mountain. It is a red, forbidding, impossibly tall mountain, untouched by human feet since Moses took off his shoes and walked beside God there, a millennium ago. Across from the mountain, separated by a fiery plain, the hermit sees a dark, beautiful chained woman: Jerusalem, the lovely daughter of Sion, looking back over the red stones and waterless hills to where she stumbled in her journey, to that place where her love for a golden calf first tugged her from her Lord. She turns her eyes to the pinnacle of Sinai, remembering how God willed her into being, put the desire for her into every Jew's heart, and then, after the rebellion, denied her to them for forty years. Now, in her stead, she sees another, an adopted daughter sleeping on her Lord's bosom: a young Christian virgin, the child of His old age. Jerusalem studies her temples and churches, her invader's mosques like heavy bracelets on her arms. It is as Isaiah said, she thinks: I, the daughter of
Sion, am left as a cottage in a vineyard, a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, a besieged city.

The hermit rolls over, troubled in his sleep. Upon the dream mountain's top, he sees another young woman, a blond virgin, herself turning over in a new bed, herself dreaming, but of her bridegroom here in His father's house. Of all the saints and all the martyrs, of all the patriarchs and all the prophets, Sinai chose her. An intellect to replace a passion, she keeps Him company, helps Him forget the daughter He lost. He smiles at her pagan philosophy; she listens politely to His tales of wrath and slaughter. She loves the Son enough to put up with the Father's war stories.

Who is this beautiful virgin? the dreaming hermit asks. Why does she lie in a bed of scented oil? Why do angels sit at her head and feet like kindly duennas, protecting her reputation, still, after five hundred years?

And the Mountain says to this hermit, Come to Me. Upon My summit, you will find this virgin pressed into stone as to a fit grave. Take her down and give her to the world. She is the first Katherine, who died for Me in Alexandria.

The hermit awakes, brothers, in a trembling sweat of indecision. Should he ask permission of his Abbot to leave the cenobium and walk alone across the desert to the mountaintop, or should he roll over and go back to sleep, hoping to dream safely of a fresh loaf of bread and plenteous rain?

Unknown to the hermit, on the other side of the desert, at the foot of Mount Sinai, the Abbot of the Monastery of the Transfiguration is also dreaming. Surely there are some hermits in these mountains, the Abbot's dream suggests, who have lived holy lives and died unknown to us. Surely, we should climb the hills and search out their relics, to bring greater glory to our monastery. So this Abbot seeks out his fellow monks, who are praying piously in the Chapel of the Burning Bush, and sends them into the wilderness, with a directive to bring back the bodies of any holy hermits they should find there.

And lo, brothers! The monks of the Monastery of the Transfiguration climb Mount Sinai and find upon its pinnacle the body of a young girl, floating in oil, and they marvel not a little. Woe unto
us, says one monk, for our Abbot has sent us to search out the bodies of holy hermits, and here we have found the bones of a virgin, surely devoted to God. If only we knew her name, if only we knew her legend!

And at that moment the clever hermit, having heeded his dream after all, appears on the mountaintop.

She is the first Katherine, says he. Patroness to scholars, priests, and young girls. She was tortured on a wheel and beheaded under Maxentius in the year of our Lord 307, and angels translated her here, to Mount Sinai, where she has remained, uncorrupted, for lo these five hundred years. Take her, brothers, said the hermit, and when your monastery knows her, let it throw off its old name and be re-christened the Monastery of Saint Katherine.

Seven hundred years later, and we are still dreaming in the desert, brothers; for man loves nothing more than to hang his legends upon the dead. We privilege our martyrs with mystery and strength and the power over monsters, but who is the greatest martyr of them all? Surely, it is the desert, this plot of ground so beloved by God that it had to die. Before I left Ulm, I believed no place on earth could please me more than our dripping evergreen forests rising along the Danube. But then I had not guessed at the spiritual euphoria of true emptiness. We travel this desert with the same automatic veneration reserved for our holiest saints, as though our minds and bodies have been melded in this crucible, irrevocably binding prayer to locomotion. We travel as we dream and pray, to make shape of the eternal emptiness.

“Look, son.” Lord Tucher points to a trinity of rocks made roundly irregular by weather. “Doesn't that look like the Holy Family?”

Tucher's strides are long and purposeful, and Ursus manfully keeps pace beside him. For the briefest moment, brothers, I put away my reservations. Lord Tucher and his son hum the song that we, like centuries of Germans before us, sang as we set sail from Venice, the happy “
In Gottes Namen Fahren Wir,
” We Go in God's Name. Barely a month after he gets home, Ursus will enter the service of Count Eberhart, and begin his apprenticeship. He will return to Ulm probably only upon his father's death, to pick up the reins of the
household, console his weak-eyed mother, and, perhaps, come across his father's faded pilgrim's chasuble wrapped up in Jerusalem silk, tucked among processionals and vials of evaporated Jordan water in the back of a sea-warped trunk. He will remember, then, this day, when his father set off bravely to find his dream church, when a Saracen goatskin passed between them felt as natural as the sharing of a pint of beer; and, if I know Ursus, he will tell his own young son not how bitter the water tasted but how his father swore he wasn't thirsty, so that Ursus might drink his fill.

The mountain is farther away than it looks, brothers. We scaled the first rise, expecting to find ourselves, easily, halfway there. The camp already lay far behind us; from the summit, I could make out tiny Elphahallo, waving his arms to call us back, but when I turned again toward the mountain, the church seemed in no ways closer.

Just one more hill. Lord Tucher has said it now eight times, and each time his voice gets tighter, more querulous, as though daring us to disagree. Ursus lags behind, dragging his oversized boots in the sand, sitting down suddenly and refusing to get up.

“Father, are you sure Jesus wanted you to walk this far?” Ursus asks. “It's getting dark.”

Lord Tucher sets his jaw and says, Just one more hill.

My patron, who nearly died of exhaustion and heat and sand only days before, now has more energy than Ursus and I combined. The longer we walk, the more I feel the gourd again in my veins, brothers, weakening my legs, tingling my lower back. Our water gave out an hour ago, and since then, the desire for it has filled my world. Water follows all the rules of love, brothers. When it is plentiful, you take it for granted, waste it, pass over it in favor of intoxicating spirits. When you are without it, though, your body aches for water; it recalls the particulars of each sip upon your tongue, from the rushing streams of your heady adolescence to the thin infertile drops squeezed from a Saracen's goatskin in middle age. My mouth is so dry, it would hurt to swallow, even if I did not feel the bite of gourd lodged still in my throat, slowly pumping its heated poison.
Beside me, my patron's son chews his tongue, trying to raise what soothing saliva he can.

When at last we come to the mountain's foot, brothers, we have walked three hard hours from camp. Long shadows slant around us and the evening wind picks up, fanning the desert's tide into skittering waves. It has been decided that I will quickly say mass, reconsecrating Lord Tucher's dream church to the Martyr Priuli; then we will walk purposefully back to camp, hoping to make it with an ember of sun still left in the sky.

But there is still a mountain to climb.

We follow a corkscrew path worn in the dusty granite, until the slope becomes too steep and we are forced to hand each other up the headland. Digging for toeholds, scraping our chins and elbows against the flinty rock face, we, the most miserable of men, painfully scale the hermit's mountain.

I would consider this exercise pure folly if not for what Lord Tucher whispered in my ear, three quarters up the slope, when Ursus demanded to rest and entrenched himself upon a flat outcropping of stone. My patron drew me aside, under the pretense of straightening my tonsure, and breathed into my ear what sounded remarkably like a thank-you.

“Soon all my sins will be forgiven me,” said Lord Tucher softly, “but while I am still a thief and a miserable man, let me ask your forgiveness for my behavior in the Holy Sepulchre.”

I assured my patron there was no need to seek my forgiveness when our Lord God had forgiven all.

“Still,” said he, “had Ursus begun his knighthood with that cloud over him, I could never have forgiven myself. A son should not think ill of a father, Friar. Thank you for not exposing me.”

Brothers, a feeling of peace unlike few I have known came over me then, and impulsively I kissed my patron on both cheeks. I confess I had questioned his dream church as I questioned my own visions of Saint Katherine, as something born more from fear and need than piety. Now I see God has truly worked a change in Lord Tucher. He has set my patron on the path of redemption, and I blush, brothers, for my own dogged skepticism.