A Stolen Tongue (36 page)

No, it is my turn, here in the wilderness, to be the single frond on her palm branch. East and West float away like two unmoored islands, revealing the core of the earth. This desert. This woman.

“
Help us!
”

I run to her and fall to my knees in the burning waste dump of Elysium. The bloom of her hair, Heaven on her lips, she bends and gently lays me flat as for an anointing. My head is on fire, clouded by green sulfur; my body shakes as from a high fever, the gourd in my throat, though perhaps it is only the terror of proximity. Over her shoulder I see the discarded wheel and her sword driven into the ground as through a steaming heart.

Like a wife, she takes my leg and slowly brings it to her lips.

“I will chew away the man in you, so that you may approach my bones.”

It hurts, the teeth going through sinew, the grinding molars on my ankle. Is this a gift, I ask?

Her delicate teeth tear into my knee. I feel them pop the joint out of place and scrape along the cupped patella.

“We who have eternal life in Christ must expect a dismantling from time to time. Fragmentation is Man's natural state.”

I feel nothing below the waist, not even the phantom limbs of an amputee. I am simply missing. Her jaw dislocates to fit itself around my pelvis and, like a mighty lion's, snaps my body in two.

Up the torso she rips, building speed, spitting ribs like broken teeth; pared ringlets of skin make a beard around her working mouth. She is getting closer to my money pouch, to the piece of her inside it. Will she reclaim herself?

Katherine's incisors taste the leather, lift the pouch from my neck.

“What is this?”

“Your tongue,” I gasp through the blinding pain. She must know where they left her pieces.

“Saint Katherine's tongue?”

Even in my delirium, brothers, I am instantly wary.

And then the howl, the human-animal frenzy of a thousand impaled infants flung to a thousand starving wolves, makes all things clear.

I jerk back on my stump of torso to see the Donestre's jaw snap furiously around my shoulders, my arms, my neck. He hisses at the pouch but is unable to sever another limb.

Green egg-stink sulfur chokes the field. I dig my elbows into smoking earth and fall into the stench, frantically trying to get away.

What has he done to my body?

“
Stop!
Felix!” Her voice like arms around my neck, hugging me back. I can't move and he cradles me, snapping my shoulder joints until I am a paralyzed bust of myself staring up from his heated lap. He sees the pain of betrayal in my eyes; he sees, so much more than any physical disassembly, how completely he has broken my faith in myself.

“Oh,” says the Donestre, gently touching the corners of my eyes. “Oh.”

I remember only snatches.

“Felix?”

I remember my hand like a swollen starfish.

“It is. Felix. Oh, God.”

And only one eye, scabbed with sticky yellow sun.

“He is covered in sand. Help me!”

I remember German voices, but that language was no longer a tongue I trusted, brothers. I remember the worried blue eyes of my friend John Lazinus, whom I realized at that moment would love me even if I were no better than a melon head, a cartographer's globe, an orb. My one eye wanted to cry, but I had no water left in what was once my body.

“Roll him over, he can't breathe.”

And Conrad was with him. Our barber who loves bodies for what bodies do: bleed, ooze, swell, char. If anyone could put my broken body back together, this barber could.

But did he leave the pieces? I spoke the words in my head but was unsure if I had said them aloud. In answer, a palm slipped under my neck and tilted my head forward.

“Here, drink this. It's all we have left.”

If I have a neck, I remember thinking, I must have shoulders. And if shoulders, arms; the water slid down my throat and into my stomach, which meant I must have a torso.

“John,” I remember saying.

“Oh, God, Felix. He tried to make us leave you behind.”

“Feel my legs.”

The weeping Archdeacon crushed me to his sweaty chest and my back gratefully cracked. Over John's shoulder, Conrad paced out into the plain, scanning the ground before him.
What is he looking for?
I remember thinking.

“We thought we had lost you forever,” John cried, glancing behind him to where two glowering Saracens helped Conrad look. He lowered his voice.

“The drivers have gone over to Niccolo. Elphahallo threatened to slit their throats and drink their blood if they mutinied.”

“Where am I, John?”

“You are southeast of the camp, just on the edge of that cursed Elysium. Felix, how did you get here?”

For a moment, this was the one piece I could not remember. I recalled gases and howls, a beast with a glowing heart, an orange bubble moon, but nothing else. I was on my way to find something, this much I knew, to bring back something absolutely necessary.

Lemon juice.

“Ursus!”

I sat up too quickly, brothers, and that is all I remember.

D
ESERT OF THE
S
INAI
T
HE
D
ISTRICT OF
R
ACH
H
AYM
S
UMMER
1483

He weighs as much as the medicine chest, two carpets, and a bag of browning, thin-skinned lemons. He swings at eye level—my eye level, because I am the one walking next to him now, trying to keep his mind off the heat and burning—and balances out the makeshift pannier Elphahallo has slung over a camel's hump. I am describing our view for him, keeping my eyes away from the daubed white lemon paste Conrad made from mashed pulp and what juice he could wring from the stringy fruit. As though he walked into an acid spider's web, the lesions have left a red net over Ursus's entire face.

“You can feel us walking uphill, can't you?” I ask him. His pannier is rigged so that no matter the inclination, he hangs flat.

“Yes,” comes the muffled voice from deep in the shaded pannier. He can see only the canvas sides of his hammock and the slab of sky directly above him.

“Elphahallo tells us that when we reach the top, we will have our first view of Mount Sinai. Would you like to sit up for that?”

“Yes, thank you, Friar, it's hard to breathe in here.”

I pull the sides apart, holding them against the tension of his sagging body, to let in some air. I get a glimpse of his poisoned knees, feeding like swollen ticks on his legs. The red streaks from them run down to his ankles.

When John and I finally retraced my path to where I had left them, brothers, I thought we were too late. Lord Tucher sat like an ineffective seamstress, trying to keep his skein of son from unraveling.
His hands worked methodically, clearing Ursus's sticky wounds of the gnats that crawled through them, his mouth buried in the child's salty hair. I was stricken with a sharp pang of guilt at having left them alone, even though I had inadvertently brought help; it was obvious Lord Tucher had prepared them both to die.

And now he rides before his son, his eyes fixed between his donkey's ears. Lord Tucher has spoken to no one since our camp was reunited. Elphahallo ran out to berate us, but one look at Ursus silenced him immediately. He has ridden quietly beside Lord Tucher all morning.

I have told no one but you, brothers, how I mistook a monster for a martyr on the Field of Elysium. I have no sense if the Donestre was real or an apparition sent by the Devil or a product of the poison gourd firing in my brain. My body is whole, I know that, and, except for a few scrapes I received dragging myself across the black volcanic plain, is unmarked. And yet, brothers, I still feel disassembled. If my corporeal self is intact, my faith has been snapped into a hundred little pieces and left like a trail of bread crumbs across this pilgrimage. Have I the strength to follow them back out of the wilderness? I do not know. The Donestre has left me a nomad in the desert, and I must teach myself new markers if I am ever to find my way home.

“I see a stone that looks like a pouncing lion,” I tell Ursus. “It is yellow with jagged claws.”

“There are lions in the desert, aren't there, Friar?”

“Certainly used to be. A lion dug the grave of Saint Mary of Egypt.”

“That's unusual, isn't it?”

“Yes, son, highly.”

Ursus is a marker, brothers. This thin, vulnerable boy is a reason to go home. He will recover and take his scars back like scallop shells from the beach, to stir the envy of other pages. I will not be there to see him pull up his tunic and display his wounds, but I will know he flourishes, a man among boys, and surely that will be enough.

John, too, is a marker. My friend will take me as far as Venice, where, needfully, we will have to part ways: he home to Hungary, me back to you. His donkey trots beside me now with my own ass's
lead tied around its pommel. I cannot fathom being divorced from this friend, brothers, as much as I long to see you again. His faith is the only thing that stands between me and despair. When my saints have been replaced with monsters, is there any reason to maintain a pilgrimage? John says, Yes, Felix, keep moving forward. Go farther so that you may, at last, go home.

The way up the torrent bed is steep, and we have to climb on hands and knees from time to time. The driver leading Ursus's camel tugs the beast to make her clamber up. By nature, camels prefer flat sandy ground, but there is no flat land for miles.

“I wish I could see.”

“I know, son. Say your prayers.”

Ahead of us, the traitor Niccolo rides with the other camel drivers. Last night, the translator had demanded the camp move out at midnight as usual, even though there was no hope of us finding a moving camp in darkness. He made them load the camels, but Conrad and John pulled their things off and set out to find us. Niccolo fumed all morning as Conrad dressed Ursus's wounds, not even bothering to hide his disgust at our return. Hourly, brothers, I berate myself for having ever trusted that perfidious translator, for having been wooed by his reasonable voice and artificial logic. And yet perhaps he too is a marker, like the stones sailors set up on bluffs to keep ships from sailing into a Scylla or Charybdis. A whirlpool of pride, Niccolo rescues and condemns at will; snatching obscure saints from oblivion while at the same time sending Christian pilgrims to their certain deaths. Once, at the beginning of this folly, when we were on better terms, Ser Niccolo said that articulation was the only weapon we had against God. If we can order our own chaos, Friar, said he, what use have we for a Higher Power? Perhaps Niccolo is a marker to warn me away from my own chaos, brothers. I stumbled into it last night, and it has nearly spun me apart.

Of course, they reach the top of the torrent bed first, Niccolo and his friends, and wait upon its sharp rise impatiently for the rest of us. In the blue heat of day, no star shines to mark it, but I know where to look. Off to our left, brothers, a deep red mountain, angular and cropped, raises its head above all the rest.

“Ursus, sit up,” I whisper. “The holy mountain!”

He struggles against the confining material and rests his chin on the canvas side.

What does he see, this sick child, straining to focus his eyes? Does he see the young Midianite Moses, sitting upon one of the mountain's terraces, scratching the neck of a shaggy gray sheep, or does he imagine that stern patriarch staggering under the injunctions of twin stone tablets? Is Sinai's burning bush made all of blooming desert thorns for Ursus, or does it resemble the white rosebush in his mother's garden at Ulm, the one he could smell from his bedroom window? The pale smile Ursus gives me is far away, brothers, a smile that comes from a happier part of his brain, where the mountain hasn't even registered. Slowly, he sinks back into the pannier.

“Gebel Musa.” Elphahallo slips off his donkey and touches his forehead to the ground. “
Allahu Akbar
.”

It takes us three times as long to descend the wadi as it did to climb its bank. The camels refuse the precarious footing, balking at almost every step. Our donkeys are only marginally better; their hooves skid over the slick stone, dislodging pebbles that collect more pebbles in their fall. I can tell time by Ursus's pendulum pannier, six counts from the apex until he almost smashes against the rock face, six counts more until he hangs suspended over nothingness. I am glad his father is in front of him, concerned with his own lack of balance, and doesn't have to watch.

We make it safely down a little before sunset, and Elphahallo steers us to the right, hurrying us along. Something feels wrong.

“Where do you think you are going, old man?”

Niccolo's shout stops us cold. He has not moved from the torrent bed.

“This is the way to water,” Elphahallo states. “We have a sick child who must drink.”

“This is the way to the mountain, though.” Niccolo points off to the left, where from above we saw Sinai's peak.

“That way is too difficult. We must approach it through the pass that lies behind the mountain and to the right.”

“Too difficult for whom?” Niccolo asks frostily. “Strong men, or grandparents and children?”

Elphahallo draws himself to his full height.

“I don't think you should suggest putting your benefactor's son at any further risk,” he says quietly. “You don't hold the purse to this expedition.”

“Then I think it is time I did. Calipha, Ibrahim.” Niccolo nods to two of the camel drivers, and before I know what is happening, brothers, these two treacherous Arabs have drawn knives, cut the money pouch from Lord Tucher's neck, and tossed it to the translator. As one, the Arabs, including our ass drivers, turn their bows and arrows against us.

“I have promised to pay them double their wages to come with me,” Niccolo says, smiling at their raised weapons. “Will you really drink their blood, old man?”