A Stolen Tongue

  “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.

  DESERT OF THE SINAI

  THE DISTRICT OF RACH HAYM SUMMER 1483

  Ursus

  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?”

  Elphahallo says much to the drivers in their heathen tongue, but the traitors make their black eyes into those of uncomprehending strangers and hear him not. John, Conrad, and I crowd around a stunned Lord Tucher.

  “And I’ll take those provision camels too, please,” Niccolo orders. “A man has got to eat.”

  “You mean to strand us in the desert with a dying child and no food?” John stammers.

  “You may keep the wretched water. For all the good it will do you.” Niccolo nods to the drivers standing at the loaded camels’ flanks, who cut the water loose as they have been dying to do ever since we set out from Gazara. At least they have left us that.

  “Pardon me.” Peter pushes past, leading his donkey over to the translator’s camp. “To the left then?”

  Niccolo extends his boot into the Mameluke’s chest.

  “Not you, my love. I won’t profane Saint Katherine’s church with the man who raped my sister.”

  “But,” Peter stammers, “you promised to take me home.”

  “You deserted God. You deserted Allah. It seems to me you are most at home in the desert. Die here like the dog you are ... Abdullah.”

  Niccolo turns his donkey, and the drivers, mounted on their own animals, trot swiftly after him. Between them, they lead off all our goods, save only the donkeys we ride and the single camel transporting Ursus Tucher. What are we to do? Beside me, a small choking noise builds in Lord Tucher’s throat, a hybrid catch between rage and impotence, fear and decision. Before I can grab him, brothers, he twists away from my arms and sprints madly after the translator.

  “You fucker! You have murdered my son!”

  It happens faster than you think it possible to happen: An arm reaches back, finds an arrow, bends its bow, releases. Tucher is felled before he even reaches the translator’s donkey’s hoofprints. The Arabs, who are violent and cruel but who rarely kill, glance nervously at Ser Niccolo. Waving his creatures on, the translator gallops swiftly across the plain, followed by our men, the loaded camels lumbering after in a cloud of carmine dust.

  “Father!”

  We did not see him struggle up, the blanched, frightened boy. He has wriggled out of the pannier, upsetting the balance, causing the camel to wag her neck and roar. He is on the ground, crawling toward his father like the pieces of a butchered mother snake instinctively making toward her orphans.

  “Ursus, stop.” John scoops him up under the armpits and pulls him to his feet. “Let us handle it.”

  Conrad is the first to reach Lord Tucher. He has pushed up my patron’s tunic and is pressing on the wound with both palms, raised up on his knees to lend more body weight. The arrow entered his chest between his fourth and fifth rib, just below the heart.

  “Get the water, we must flush this wound.”

  Water saved Lord Tucher once, Dear Lord, let it save him again. Let the cool, clean Gazara water restore him, Lord, let it wet his lips and cleanse his wound. Take not away Your servant John Tucher when his child needs him so. Take him not away. I pray as I struggle with the massive terra-cotta jar, twisting the cork stopper between the crook of my arm and my chest. It comes off with a sucking pop, and in that terrible moment, brothers, when my nose understands this water, I know why Ser Niccolo hesitated not in leaving it with us.

  Rotted fish, human ordure, leprosy—nothing could smell worse than this jar of spoiled water. I pour some into my hand, and it splashes out chunky white with maggots and decay. You can trust no one in this land! The thieving merchants in Gazara swore that if we kept the jars well sealed this water would last the entire trip.

  “Where is that water?” Conrad shouts.

  I kick the jars over near where our asses are tethered. They lunge to drink it, but even they find it too loathsome, and prance away like spoiled colts. I kick the jars again and again, shattering their worthless shells.

  “Felix!” our barber calls over his shoulder. I walk back to where he has wrapped his robe around the feather and is tugging straight up. The arrow comes out covered in gray tissue and blood.

  “The water was corrupted by the heat,” I say.

  “Press, then,” Conrad orders. “I’ll get the medicine chest.”

  His heart. I think the arrow punctured my patron’s full heart. Blood oozes between my fingers and they slip off the wound. I press harder.

  Conrad returns with a vial of brandy that he pours into the wound, followed by a vial of oil, then a stuffing of clean rags. There is nothing more to do than wrap his chest and press.

  “Let me see my father!” Ursus screams, struggling against John. At last John half walks, half carries the sick child over to us.

  “Lord Tucher?”

  He is surprisingly gentle, lifting his father’s head into his lap. His own face is so distorted with infection that it is impossible to tell whether or not he is holding back tears.

  “Father, if you can hear me,” Ursus whispers through his swollen mouth, “thank you for taking care of me in the desert.”

  He wipes Conrad’s bloody handprint from his father’s brow and gives it a tiny kiss.

  “I know you took the silver rosary Mother gave me before we left home, but it’s all right. You can keep it.”

  Like a tender thief, Ursus rummages through the pocket tied next to Lord Tucher’s heart and draws out the bloody silver cross stolen a lifetime ago, the day we buried Schmidhans.

  “See?” He swings it above his father’s sightless eyes. “I knew you had it all along.”

  DESERT OF THE SINAI

  IN THE REGION OF MIDIAN SUMMER 1483

  A Lion

  Ursus asked to dig and we let him, cupping his small hands in our own to help him scoop. It exhausted him, and now he lies asleep, wrapped in the canvas pannier next to our only remaining camel. She guards Ursus like a giant sad-eyed dog, holding back the desert monsters with her hypnotic chewing.

  We have settled for the night, brothers, on the warm ashes of a caravan that passed before us. Their dried camel dung fuels our campfire, burning clear and blue, though we have nothing to cook over it. Niccolo took with him the onions and biscuit, the flour and dried meat. Our chickens died of heat exhaustion days ago—they stopped eating the millet we pushed through the bars, settled down in their own shit, and squinted themselves to sleep. Now, unless we eat our donkeys, we will have nothing until we reach Saint Katherine’s.

  I sit between the fire and the boy and use the thin edge of the recovered silver cross to clean the dirt from under his nails. A boy shouldn’t sleep with his father’s grave dust on his ha
nds, even if there is no water to wash them. I separate the limp fingers, define the crescent on each one, and relax them into a fist.

  “How long had you known your father was a thief?” I asked him after we weighted my patron’s grave with rocks so that wild animals might not dig him up again.

  “He prayed with my silver rosary the night of the storm,” answered that most wise Knight of the Holy Sepulchre. “It seemed to comfort him.”

  Ursus wanted me to bury his father with those silver beads, but I snatched them back when the boy was not looking. The rosary, by rights, belongs to Ursus, and he has great need of it, brothers.

  “Failisk, you should go to sleep.” Elphahallo rolls over and sees me sitting up beside Ursus. We have to push on soon, but I cannot close my eyes.

  “How is the child?” he asks groggily. His face slackened by sleep, Elphahallo appears to have aged thirty years in the last few hours. I did not know, before today, that he traveled the desert with ruptured genitalia; his hernia is acting up, I can tell, for I see him wince when he lifts up on his elbows.

  “He is asleep,” I say.

  “Perhaps it is a blessing. In a few days, the father would have had to bury the son.”

  My hand steals out to blot the boy’s face, where one of his wounds is weeping again. Ursus feels the pressure and starts to cry in his sleep.

  “I am so sorry, Failisk,” Elphahallo is saying. “Never in fifty years have I had men turn on me.”

  I nod.

  “I knew that translator was stirring trouble,” he says. “I finally convinced my drivers Lord Tucher had not sent Christian spies to steal their children, when one of them came to me saying Lord Tucher had been seen casting spells over their water.”

  We sit silently, absorbed in the fire and her blue hem. I trace her flame skirt up to her sharp orange arms—she throws them out to me, up to Heaven; out to me, up to Heaven.

  “Go to sleep, Failisk.”