A Stolen Tongue

  “I will speak to them, my friend,” Calinus reassures me. “Try not to make a scene. Things are tense enough as it is.”

  Remembering the rumor spread against Lord Tucher, a terrible fear strikes me, brothers.

  “You don’t suppose they will get drunk in the wilderness and forget to come back?”

  Elphahallo laughs, I think inappropriately.

  “There is little chance of that,” he says. “If you are thirsty, my friend, drink this. It will make you feel better.”

  Elphahallo holds out his own tanned water skin, but I shake my head. I have seen the water that comes from these; not only is it red as blood but it smells as if it has been stored in an animal’s stomach for three days, then spit back out. The Saracens slurp the stinking stuff with relish, but I am not so bad off, brothers. Elphahallo shrugs, but before he can move on to the next tent, we hear it. As one, Calinus and I prick up our ears.

  Han na yo yo an ho ho oyo o ho! Han na yo yo an ho ho oyo o ho!

  The camel drivers’ song comes over the torrent bed like a throaty bird call, the rhythm of our traveling. A camel will not suffer herself to be goaded or scourged, brothers; the only way to move her is to sing soothingly as to a child.

  “Friar!” Ursus clambers down the other side of the wadi from where he has been looking fruitlessly for sticks. He too has seen the camels return. “The water’s here!”

  We will not assail them, as much as we would like to rip the water skins from their saddles and greedily gulp their contents. We watch the camels pick their way down the torrent bed, tentatively advance a spindly leg, shifting their weight behind them. Conrad joins us, and we wait like a party of angry yet lascivious wives for our husbands back from the tavern.

  Elphahallo helps the last camel driver encourage his beast into camp, where we pounce upon them. The beleaguered drivers toss us our skins.

  “It’s white!” Ursus shrieks when the liquid hits his cupped palms. “Friar, look!”

  I examine my own handful and sniff. Indeed, brothers, the liquid they have brought us back is thick and white, more like milk than water, and gives off the gag-inducing aroma of rotted plants! I show it to Elphahallo, and even he wrinkles his nose.

  “There is nothing to be done about it,” he tells us, after a long conversation with the drivers. “They say the marsh was almost dry and they had to dig even for this.

  “And,” he adds, “they swear they did not even know you had wine.”

  “We can’t drink it!” Ursus cries.

  “Perhaps we should open the jugs,” our barber suggests.

  “No,” I say firmly. “Calinus says we will soon come upon much harder times. When the others come back with firewood, we can boil this.”

  We have another eight days ahead of us, brothers, traveling through a land cursed by God. Calinus tells us wells are few and far between in this, the deepest part of Sinai; they are guarded by tribes of fierce desert nomads, where the heat allows, and by venomous snakes where no human can survive. We can only wait for firewood.

  We have a long time to wait before the next pilgrim makes it back to camp. Ser Niccolo hobbles down the torrent bed, crutched upon a single large stick. When he reaches us, he empties his pockets of some more tangled vine and a few twigs, barely enough for kindling.

  “What happened to your ankle?” Conrad asks. When Niccolo removes his boot, we see it has swollen to twice its normal size.

  “Snake holes, everywhere.” He touches the sprain tenderly. “It was like walking across a sieve.”

  “You saw snakes?” I ask.

  “Hundreds of them. And thousands of holes.”

  “I have read of a certain snake that lives in the desert called dipsades,” I volunteer. “Its bite causes intolerable thirst.”

  “Don’t talk about snakes,” Conrad says.

  “Where is the water?” the translator asks. “I am thirsty.”

  I explain about the dry marsh and how, unless we have a fire to make it drinkable, we will have no water tonight.

  “Let’s open the jars,” he says.

  Can no one think to conserve except for me, brothers? I am dripping with sweat even though the night is cool, my stomach cramps, and my bowels rebel, but at least my head is clear enough to know we will need this water far more, later.

  “No,” I say. “We are saving that.”

  “Saving it for what?”

  “For the dangerous days.”

  “Those days are upon us, Friar,” the translator says, stumping off to his tent to retire for the night.

  “Don’t you want to wait for John?” I call. “He might bring wood and we can boil what we have.”

  “He will find nothing in this valley,” Niccolo says over his shoulder. “And I have work to do.”

  A lantern always burns inside Niccolo’s tent, brothers, sometimes even until dawn, and I have no need to spy to know he is hunched beside it, frantically scratching away at his lost saint’s vita. Every night when the others have sat around the campfire trading stories of home, and I, keeping company, have perhaps scribbled in this little book for you, Niccolo has retired to his tent to add another chapter to his secret translation. It is no use asking to read it, brothers; he only shakes his head and says, “Soon, Friar. Soon.”

  The translator’s prediction proves sadly correct. We wait another hour, until the mountains have soaked up the last of the sun, and John comes dragging home, defeated, with not a single shrub. There is nothing to do but gnaw some hard biscuit, wash it down with our own saliva, and go to bed.

  Dejectedly, John and I retire to the close leather tent we share with Conrad, whose turn at watch it is: there, to strip as we did each night at sea and pick our gelatinous vermin. Before we might lie down, Calinus warned us always to check for biting sand fleas and their far more lethal cousins, the Pharaoh’s Lice. These black worms, about the size of a hazelnut, crawl up from the ground to suck a man’s blood like gruesome ticks. After their bite there remains a scar, a livid blue mark streaked with a red cross, about the size of a penny. If this scar is not immediately anointed with lemon juice, it will turn into an incurable foul wound.

  While John checks himself, I strip down to my breeches and money pouch, remove Saint Katherine’s tongue, and kiss it. This token is the only piece of her I know is safe, this voiceless instrument, this unpaired fifth of a mouth. I thought I understood her desire when I read the words of Saint Jerome, but now I know not whom to trust. Even my old friend John watches me suspiciously from across the tent, certain I betrayed the Tongue when I accepted this organ in her stead. John Lazinus joined our party in Venice, brothers; he was under no obligation to come to Sinai. Sometimes I believe he accompanies us solely out of spite.

  I set the tongue before our lantern and close my aching eyes to say my silent prayers.

  Lord, I used to have such deep desires. I yearned for enlightenment, for peace among our brothers, for a German Pope in Rome; and every night I devoutly prayed for these. Sometimes You heeded my prayers; sometimes, as is Your will, You chose not to grant my idle supplications. Once when Abbot Fuchs had fallen down the stairs and it seemed unlikely he should live, I prayed with such frightened coursing tears that You took pity and spared our gentle Abbot. I have no tears tonight, Lord, for there is no water in my body to offer up, but if there were, You should see it streaming down my cheeks. Your servant Lord John Tucher needs water to recover, Lord. He is ill from excesses of devotion and even now lies weakly in his tent. Your servant Friar Felix Fabri suffers on again and off again with fever, Lord, and nothing seems to hold his interest long but the idea of cold, clean water. I fear there is trouble brewing in our camp, O gentle Father, and water might be the only antidote. We snap and bicker over water; our numbers grow weak from the lack of water; friend sides against friend over a simple swallow and soon will come to blows. O Lord, let this simple tongue before me act as a divining rod and lead us on to water. It is all I ask, the most elemental prayer. In Jesus’ name.
br />   Amen.

  When I open my eyes, brothers, our divining rod, Saint Katherine’s tongue, is gone.

  John smirks at me, his hands cupped like a child’s holding a squirming toad.

  “John,” I say. “Give that back.”

  “Not until you tell me what is going on.”

  “This is not funny.”

  “I haven’t laughed in weeks.”

  “I mean it.” I lunge for him, feeling the fever surge behind my eyes. “Give it back!”

  John kicks out and hits me in the chest, sending me sprawling across my pallet.

  “No. I want Katherine to whisper to me tonight,” he says. “I want her to tell me why she is putting us all through this. What’s that you say?” He holds her tongue up to his ear. “You don’t know whom you love?”

  “John!” I command. “Give that back—you are damning yourself to Hell.”

  “I don’t see how Hell could be any worse than this constant unknowing. We used to be friends, Felix. We used to confide in each other. Now you have betrayed Arsinoë, and I don’t know you anymore.”

  “I did not betray her, John. She lied to us.”

  “Why did she come to you?” I can’t tell whether John is asking me or the tongue. “Why did she trust you? I never would have sided against her.”

  Outside, the night wind pushes against the tent flaps like a woman in labor, grunting sand through the joints and laces. John is holding the tongue carelessly. Little grains of stone and earth stick along the tip, as though she has licked a city street.

  Why do we do it, brothers? Why do we struggle over bits of women? Even John and I, who have renounced the sex completely, are not free. I want Katherine’s tongue; John wants Arsinoë’s heart—no, no, more than that. He wants that small, pulsing piece of absolute trust that no man ever truly wins. But he knows Arsinoë has long ago given that to another woman. John cannot bear that we are both more devoted to the tip of this tongue than either of us are to him.

  “Felix. John. I think you should see this.” Conrad, our watch, sticks his sandy head through the tent flap. For a second John is distracted; he loosens his grip on the tongue. I snatch it and thrust in into my money pouch before I grab our lantern and follow Conrad. I must be more careful from now on.

  Down the torrent bed, unevenly lit by the half-moon rising in the sky, staggers our final pilgrim, the Mameluke Peter Ber. Even before he breaches the ring of camels surrounding our camp, I can smell his reeking breath.

  “I guess we know what happened to our wine,” Conrad says.

  “Everybody! Everybody wake up!” Peter shouts, stumbling over a tent brace. “Guess what I found.”

  Heads emerge from the other two tents. Ser Niccolo raises his lantern and scowls in disgust at the Mameluke’s condition.

  “Peter,” I say sternly, “that wine was our medicine. You had no right to take it.”

  “This is the thanks I get,” he scoffs, throwing his heavy arm around my shoulder, “when I traveled miles for these?”

  Ursus creeps outside his tent, hoping not to wake his exhausted father. He too wants to see what the Mameluke brags about.

  With a flourish, Peter unfurls his robe, and like Venus’s golden apples they roll out: four perfect spheres.

  “Fruit!” Ursus cries. “Herr Peter, where did you find it?”

  “Way, way down the torrent bed.” He gestures behind him, opposite to where the others searched. “There must be an underground spring. I found no water, but a whole patch of these apples.”

  “Can we eat them?” Ursus reaches for one, but Peter pushes his hand away.

  “Cut them, son. We mustn’t be greedy.”

  Like a good anatomist, Ursus cleaves them, working his knife through firm flesh and flicking away seeds like small chips of bone. The apples bleed clear juice onto the sand, fall vivisected into his palm, to be passed between us. If our earthly Paradise is truly to the east of here, brothers, it seems some kindly prelapsarian took pity on our thirsty party and rolled us the fruit of Eden. My fever has gone down several degrees just at the sight of them.

  “Enjoy!” the Mameluke cries and collapses to the ground.

  Before my teeth even touch the apple wedge, my lips have shriveled into my skull. A tongue crashing against my pallet to get out, a dry desert vacuum in my mouth! I try to swallow, to raise saliva, but it is impossible. My mouth has turned in on itself.

  “Oh, God! Oh, God! You should see yourselves!” The drunken Mameluke practically pees with laughter.

  Ursus thrusts handfuls of sand into his mouth, scrubbing his tongue and screaming.

  John, Conrad, and I spit again and again at the ground, but for nothing. Our mouths are bitter, arid, puckered bladders.

  “Must be what Adam felt like when he bit into his apple, eh, Felix? Oh, no, Evie! Ye vile shriveler!” Peter coughs raucously and points to his phlegm on the ground. “Look. The spit comes back.”

  “Why did you make us eat those apples?” Ursus cries like someone numbed with alcohol.

  “I didn’t make you, son. I offered, just like Mother Eve. I bit into one myself a few hours ago and knew I couldn’t deny you the experience. Just drink some water.”

  Elphahallo comes running from his own tent at the sound of our wild screams and stoops to examine the apple Ursus spit out. I move my tongue inside my mouth and feel only the cracked, uneven salt flat of a cheek.

  “Oh, Failisk!” Elphahallo shakes his head sadly and holds up the fruit for the awakened Arab camel drivers to see. “Don’t eat these! They are wild gourds. They are poison.”

  The Arabs convulse and hold their throats, pantomiming our deaths from the gourds. Did I spit out my piece or did I swallow it?

  “Elphahallo,” I beg, “our mouths are filled with poison, and we have no water. I beseech you, let us have some of yours.”

  “You mean our stinking red water?”

  “Please, my friend.” I feel my desperation rise. I did swallow the gourd.

  “I don’t know, Failisk. I have no water to spare for men who will pick anything off the ground and put it in their mouths. These men lack the proper humility to make it across the desert alive. I would be wasting my water.”

  “You can be assured, we are the lowest of all men. We are at your mercy, Elphahallo.”

  Elphahallo turns back to his comrades and confers with them. After much incoherent wrangling and jabbering, he extends his water skin.

  “Though red and salty, this water is medicinal, Failisk. Drink, and pass this among you. When you have emptied this skin, come back and I will give you another.”

  I could kiss the ancient Saracen, but instead I solemnly do as I am told: drink and make the others drink. Little by little, the poison gall washes from my mouth; patches of my tongue retain the metallic imprint of the gourd, souring each mouthful, but at least I am able to swallow. We all glare at the abashed Mameluke.

  Peter kicks the dust. “It was just a joke.”

  Ser Niccolo, the only man not to taste the fruit, strides to Peter Ber and smacks him sharply across the face.

  “You think that’s funny?” Niccolo growls. “Here—in this place where there is too much to die from already?”

  The Mameluke’s spirits, in the manner of drunken men, change instantly from levity to belligerence.

  “Don’t you fucking hit me!” He shoves the translator hard in the chest.

  “You are a stupid slave, Abdullah,” Ser Niccolo sneers. “I should have left you in Jerusalem to rot.”

  “You couldn’t very well do that, now, could you?” Peter spits. “You owe me.”

  “Shut up,” the translator warns.

  “You lied. She wasn’t even worth it. Like fucking a corpse.”

  With a cry, Ser Niccolo tackles the raving Mameluke, battering his face with his fists. I grab Ursus Tucher, who looks on wide-eyed, and press his face into my robes.

  “You fucking animal!” the translator screams, banging Peter’s head against the ground.
“I never told you to do such a thing.”

  “You only told me how pretty she was,” Peter shouts back, wrapping his beefy fingers around Ser Niccolo’s neck. “How weak. You only sent me to steal her for you.”

  “Goddamn you!”

  The Arab camel drivers dive upon the foes and fearlessly pull them apart. Niccolo and Peter claw the air between them, eager for more blood, but the Saracens won’t allow it. A skinny camel driver walks the Mameluke one way down the torrent bed, gibbering at him in Saracen, while another steers Niccolo in the opposite direction.

  What could Niccolo have been thinking, brothers? It is not as though he was unaware of the sort of man he sent in search of his sister. He knew Abdullah to be a dissolute, erratic apostate, pledging allegiance to no faith or country; worse still, battal, a disgrace even among the most depraved Infidel. How could he imagine a man of this sort would not take liberties with a defenseless woman and, after she stabbed him and escaped, later seek revenge upon her? It was Emelia Priuli’s eternal misfortune to have slept in a woman’s skin our first night in Joppa. I can only imagine the drunken Mameluke saw only one female form among our slumbering pilgrims and extracted his payment from it. Thank God, brothers, that Lord Tucher sleeps through the Mameluke’s tirade. Happily praying inside his dream church, he has no idea Peter Ber set fire to his beautiful Martyr Priuli.

  “Go back to bed,” Elphahallo orders us solemnly.

  It is my turn at watch, and while the others reluctantly head back to their tents, I miserably take up my post to walk the concentric camps of Animal, Infidel, and Christian until dawn.

  Elphahallo falls into step beside me, stopping to pet the distressed camels, who lift up their necks and roar. I am truly the most wretched of monks, brothers, stumbling through this darkness. I try not to let Calinus see my emotion.

  “Do you see that star that has just risen?” The venerable Saracen stops me and points to the dark southern sky. “That is called Saint Katherine’s Star, and beneath that star is the Mountain of Sinai. When we must travel at night, as we will soon, we will go no other way than toward that star.”