“Felix?” it begs.
“John?” Arsinoë screams.
“John.” I crawl weakly toward this beaten creature who is my dearest friend. “Oh, God, John?”
Niccolo puts his foot out and kicks me back.
“When you came to me on Contarini’s ship, Friar, you asked me about the Life I was translating.” Niccolo maliciously yanks the rope around the Archdeacon’s raw and bleeding neck. “You said, ‘Tell me a little something about this obscure saint ... tell me how she dies.’ I couldn’t say then, but remember I promised to dedicate that Life to you? I thought your friend might also like a part in her story.
“We are forty-eight short,” Niccolo says to John and me, “but you can represent the Fifty Defeated Philosophers.”
“You have retranslated the martyrdom of Saint Katherine?” I sneer from where I lie, suddenly comprehending his pathetic attempt to blackmail Heaven. “You think she will speak to you if you restage her martyrdom?”
“Is that what you think I’m doing, Friar?” Ser Niccolo laughs. “We could have just put on a little play in the village square, spun a girl on a wheel, and poured milk in her hair if that was all I wanted to do. This is scholarship.”
Dragging the beaten John Lazinus behind him, Ser Niccolo walks to where his trembling sister stands stricken. Gently he touches her cheek.
“Tonight,” he says, “We translate the Mind of God.”
A Blank Saint
He fits each bone into its granite cast: the spine in its trough like a plumb line, the slender arms that once embraced the Christ child folded carefully across her piecemeal chest, the long-toed feet resoled and touching at the heels. Like a sculptor adjusting his model, Niccolo lifts a hip to lend a more natural gait, and I see Katherine at the end of a long day, shifting her weight in anticipation of the Wheel. He understands the saint’s body; it shows in how he gently cups the left hand under where a breast would be, offering up the heavy white mound for sacrifice; in how he anchors the spine for strength; in how far he separates the toes, so she will not appear tense and anxious to run away.
She is a marvel of humanity, brothers. Where Arsinoë covered herself in the chaos of Heaven, Niccolo insists on the order of Man. No stiff Byzantine relic princess for him; his Katherine could wear the marble skin of a Donatello saint and be comfortable, so fluid and yet so strong is she in form. Only her neck seems unnatural, for it, as yet, has no head attached.
Three starving, battered pilgrims were no match for the translator’s knife, and he roughly bound us hand and foot with white Saracen prayer rags ripped from the mountain wall. Next to me, John kneels in a blooming garden of his own blood. Poppies, purple in the moonlight, blossom in the barren earth under the leak in his broken nose. On my other side, Saint Katherine’s Tongue, the inscutable Arsinoë, kneels next to her saint, gazing upon Katherine with wonderment, as if seeing for the first time the lineaments of life within her figure of perpetual Death.
The translator turns to us and holds up Katherine’s head. He speaks like a university lecturer in front of a rapt audience, speaking purposefully and clearly that we might take notes.
“When a man wants to create,” the translator says, “he has at his disposal only the barest tools: a rock, a nail, a mark upon a page. With them, he must construct thriving cities and history and works of great and lasting thought.”
He pauses, taking a turn around his creation, his reconstructed saint.
“God, on the other hand,” he explains, “works in living, breathing, human lives. He has superior tools, and, like a committed pamphleteer who risks wearing out his new printing press papering a town with tracts, God knows repetition, whatever the cost, will eventually bring the world to a higher understanding. So like an eternally reprinted page, each of God’s martyrdoms, translated simply, spell: I am the Word. It may take many saints to make up that short sentence, for God’s mother tongue is dense and deep as the sea. You might even think it is unfair—tens of thousands of Christian lives traded for those ten letters—but when deciphering the Mind of God, as Jerome, the master translator, said, ‘Only fools would translate word for word.’”
The translator stands behind his sister, resting Katherine’s skull idly upon her tonsured head.
“What do you want from her?” John growls through the blood in his mouth. Arsinoë, beneath the skull, stares fixedly ahead.
“Why do you love my sister so much?” The translator comes around to John curiously. “It has bothered me throughout our acquaintance. It seems you are the perfect priest for a border town; your passion is roused only by the weak.”
“Leave him alone!” I cry. “He has been through enough.”
“Are you much better, Felix?” Niccolo asks. “Yearning to bed Heaven but not willing to be consumed by it? In ancient times, Friar, the gods revealed themselves to their mortal lovers as pillars of fire. Not one among them escaped incineration.”
“Those were pagan demons,” I answer. “Our saints are not gods, they were common men and women.”
“Would you like to know what she sounded like, Felix, when she was a common woman?”
In the icy moonlight, the translator brings Saint Katherine’s head around to me. This leathern skull glows like a blue orb in his hands, willing to accept any face, any voice, that a man might put upon it.
“Look at her,” he says, his voice cajoling. “Imagine her as you knew her in Ulm, as she hung in your library watching over your books. She could have been your neighbor, couldn’t she? A blond, rosy burgher’s daughter who had read a bit of Plato and taught herself geometry. When you hear her in your dreams, Katherine has a Swabian accent, doesn’t she? Her voice is sweet but a little rough, like crushed almonds on the tongue, and in your dreams, Friar, she desires you as much as you desire her.”
Despite myself, I begin to form a face. The open Katherine of our library, leaning against her wheel like a sunny milkmaid might rest against her pitchers.
“Don’t listen to him, Felix,” John says.
“Don’t you want to know what she has to say?” Niccolo asks, marveling at her brown skull. “All I have to do is fit this head on that body.” He nods over his shoulder at his reconstructed woman. “You cannot imagine what that will do to my sister.”
Arsinoë, beside me, smiles to herself.
Niccolo kneels in front of his sister. “I want you to tell the friar how his wife feels about him,” he says, and kisses her softly on the cheek.
Helplessly, I watch as the translator bends over Katherine’s grave and completes the saint. As one struck by lightning, Arsinoë’s body jolts and convulses, collapsing epileptically into itself. He has killed her. Beside me John moans in horror, struggling impotently against his bonds. But wait, brothers. The fallen woman moves. Cautiously, like a wild ass waking in the desert, she sniffs the cold night air.
“Melons. Worm. Sand,” she says. “Bread. Bones. Blood.”
She is disassembling me, reducing me to smell like she did Constantine the merchant when he revealed to her his dream of drowning. I become aware of each stench the moment she names it, feel Ursus Tucher’s body maggots still wriggling through my robes and the grit of sand trapped inside my shoes. This Tongue scents your own self-consciousness, brothers; the more aware you are of your own components, the easier it is to pry them apart.
“Look upon her,” orders the translator.
She turns her silver eyes on me, her library eyes, her scholar’s eyes, the eyes I have dreamed since I was fourteen years old. In them I see the perfect dispassion of pain, a dry, pure anguish, pulling me to where she lies upon her wheel. I cannot look away.
“Do you see it, Friar?” Niccolo returns to me, stares with me at his transformed sister. “Now do you understand what it does to a man to live with that and never understand what they are saying to each other? Don’t you, too, want to make her talk?”
Dear God, brothers, I do. I do want.
“Give me the tongue, Felix,” Niccolo say
s. “We can’t make her talk without her tongue.”
“Don’t, Felix!” John pleads feebly. “Leave her alone.”
Inside my money pouch, the bit of flesh stirs. Useless against Ursus Tucher’s dying wounds, helpless in the face of his father’s death; it corrupted our water, it allowed this man to steal our food. The tongue so badly wants to speak now, after a pointed stony silence when I needed it most. All the muscles of Arsinoë’s exhausted face strain toward me.
“Your wife summoned you to this mountain, Felix, for a reason,” the translator says. “Didn’t you call it the Mountain of Truth?”
“Felix!” John falls into me. “Don’t let him have it. He’ll possess all of her then!”
“Don’t you want to hear how much she loves you? Don’t you want to hear the words from the Tongue’s own mouth?”
Torn and aching, brothers, I look between the reconstructed woman in the grave and Arsinoë’s selfless face. I want to feel my wife like fire on the mountain, how I want, brothers, to burn in her embrace; but not—I shall not know Heaven—if Its love means this Tongue must be consumed. The face I put upon the skull Niccolo holds out to me is Arsinoë’s face, the delicate, pale creature looked over too many times by too many seekers. I attach to Katherine’s scalp the water-sleek hair of the suicide I rescued from the sea; I stretch across her cheeks the bruised, scabbed skin of a woman raped by the Mameluke; I give her the trembling chin of the Dominican monk who handed me the hollow Book of Wonders in our Lord’s most Holy Sepulchre. For once this head shall wear a woman’s face, instead of a woman suffocating inside a mask of Heaven.
“No,” I announce. “I do not want to hear how much Katherine loves me.”
“You are a fool, Friar.” Niccolo reaches under my robe and snatches the money pouch from my neck. He pulls out the withered piece of tongue and flings it with all his might straight at the moon.
“Now you will never know.”
With a cry, the translator yanks Arsinoë to her feet. The moment is gone. Katherine’s eyes in Arsinoë’s face, Arsinoë’s face on Katherine’s skull: both are gone. Arsinoë is once more a startled girl, and my scorpion tongue skitters down the mountain.
“‘Take thee a great book, a new book, write in it with the pen of a man taking away the spoils with great speed.’” Niccolo quotes Isaiah. “It is time for me to set you free.”
Gracefully, Ser Niccolo severs his sister’s bonds with his ludicrous sword. He unbinds her feet and releases her hands. Gently, he lifts her torn Dominican cassock from her shoulders, until the full length of Arsinoë stands naked before us. Moonlight shows a hundred scars hidden beneath her clothes, brothers, a lifetime’s worth of hacking and cutting away of flesh without release from it. Beside me on the ground, John Lazinus begins to weep.
“I have a Life in my pocket,” the translator tells her. “The vita I promised to dedicate to Friar Felix when I was finished. It is the Life of an unknown martyr who bravely faced her death and was translated by angels to a desolate mountain deep in the desert.”
Arsinoë’s flesh quivers in the cold. Her arms wrap around her chest, remembering the warmth of the grave with Katherine’s relics embracing her. Wouldn’t it be Heaven, she thinks, to be back there?
“I intend to take this Life back to civilization and hide it in the university library, where perhaps some clever young scholar, sometime near the next millennium, will stumble upon it and fall blindly in love with that saint. He will vow to seek her mountain, and lo, sister! What do you suppose he will find on that mountain’s peak? That’s right. The sweetly scented body of a young woman, preserved uncorrupted for five hundred years. And he will bless this vita as a treasure map, for it holds all the details of her Life, from her birth on Crete, through her years as a prophetess, to piteous death, provided by an eyewitness: a simple translator to whom Heaven refused to speak.”
“Arsinoë, run!” John wheezes, from the ground. He has lost so much blood, brothers; it drains from every orifice.
“The only problem is,” Niccolo says, ignoring the Archdeacon, “this saint doesn’t have a name.”
Arsinoë slowly drops her arms. I cannot bear to see it, brothers. From the valley between Love and Death, Arsinoë carefully picks her mountain. She has always known there was a grave waiting for her upon a peak, but in her mind the hills are superimposed. Death is the path to Love, and Love embraces Death. She sets out on her martyr’s pilgrimage.
“How will you do it?” she asks.
“I will connect your pieces to Saint Katherine’s; then, bone by bone, I will replace her.” Her brother speaks gently, as if explaining the extraction of a tooth. “It will be an honest translation. Five hundred years from now, you will be discovered by your own lone hermit. You will live in Heaven, and I will have created a new saint.”
I struggle desperately against my bonds. I cannot be hearing this. Man shall not compete with God for the manufacture of martyrs.
“I don’t know.” Arsinoë hangs her head.
“You can never be a saint through the front door.” Niccolo reaches out to touch her cheek, and unexpectedly his eyes well with tears. “You are not a virgin anymore.”
A sob escapes Saint Katherine’s Tongue as she throws herself into her brother’s arms. They embrace like children against a lightning storm, clinging desperately against Heaven’s fury. What horrible thread of violence was woven through their fates, brothers, to lead them to this place? Arsinoë will take my bride’s life in Heaven. Katherine will be obliterated, refound, five hundred years from now, in this violated, self-made martyr. Niccolo will play God a final time and carve his name across the heavens.
“Stop!” I cry. “You can’t.”
Carefully, the translator lays his violently shaking sister beside Saint Katherine’s grave.
I cannot let this happen. I pull wildly against the bonds, twisting my wrists until they bleed, but they are tied too tight. Beside me, the sagging John Lazinus gives a final twitch against this evil, but he cannot even raise his head.
“You have Heaven inside you.” Niccolo closes his naked sister’s eyes. “Whole, you have been but a Tongue. In pieces, you will dwell with gods.”
Niccolo lifts his Mameluke scimitar and traces a faint red line around her ankle.
John falls to the ground unconscious. Mercifully, he does not see the knife slice through, flaying skin. He doesn’t hear the crack of bone breaking and the sick pulling away of tendons. As I watch, horrified, Niccolo fits his sister’s severed foot onto Katherine’s skeletal ankle, and places the saint’s bones against Arsinoë’s bleeding stump.
O God, if ever there were a time for wrath, let these bones rise up like a pack of wild dogs and tear this monster apart! Let them incinerate him in angry flame, preferring self-immolation to such utter sacrilege!
“Stop!” I scream.
I hurl my body at them, but Niccolo shoves me angrily back. Tears of pain flow down Arsinoë’s cheeks, and she has bitten a hole through her lip to keep from crying out. Madly, the translator moves up his sister’s leg, twisting her shin bone from her kneecap like a macabre Christmas drumstick. Arsinoë’s back arches, her fists slam the ground, but still she won’t cry out. He joins her human leg onto the skeleton’s thigh bone, flexing it for mobility.
“Katherine!” I cry. “Destroy them!”
Niccolo raises his sword above her hip. Swings it down hard like a butcher.
“Oh, God!” she screams.
Abruptly, Niccolo drops his weapon. Puzzled, he stares down at his hands.
They are smoking, brothers.
Crisp hairs like squirming black ants race up his arms, the cuffs of his black tunic set ablaze. Wildly, he smacks the fires out, and in that moment butchered Arsinoë weakly crawls away.
“Come to me!” I cry.
A black blur runs past us in the night, and suddenly—O my brothers!—in a single pillar of fire, the entire mountain ignites. A thousand doves are set free to whir on wings of fire, diving at
the translator, tearing at his face. White wings, burning red, tangle in his hair; flapping fire lands on Katherine’s Tongue, scorching her bloody robes. The fire surrounds me, eating through my bonds, brothers; skips to John, burning him free. The Burning Bush. A sword of flame. God commands us off His mountain.
“Felix, come on!”
In the angry red light, I recognize my miracle, running through the thick blue haze of smoke, slashing with his torch in a fever of burning. Conrad, our barber, ignites the frantic Saracen prayer rags, setting loose the angry birds. Conrad, our miracle, swipes at the translator, who, heedless of the flames, lunges for Katherine’s burning grave. Through the undulate heat, I see the thief reach into her trough and take for himself Saint Katherine’s head.
“Arsinoë!” I lunge, free at last, for the dismembered almost-saint. She crawls toward me across the flaming grave, leaving behind her severed limbs like a useless sloughed skin. Her hair, Constantine’s short man’s hair, peels away from the scalp in black curling tendrils, Emelia Priuli’s ruined face crosses hers like an aspect on its way to becoming some new being. Our miracle Conrad pulls me up and away—Felix, we must leave this place!—but I crawl back into the fire to pull her free.
A helmet of heat clamped across my face, I reach out to her, brothers, begging her to come away, but it is far too late. She pushes my hands aside, rapt in the joy of burning, trying on her new blue body of flame. A miser’s layer of fat melts, what was once long ago, perhaps, a softness to her. A new layer of muscle snaps red, then white. That weight of flesh she carried with her for so long, brothers, falls away so that a new creature might emerge, a girl fortified by fire, a being wholly her own. She collapses gratefully into the heated embrace of Saint Katherine’s bony arms, but now a cherished sister rather than a second self.
Then the Miracle is upon me again, slapping my face with the rage only a citizen of Botzen can muster against the fever. He pulls me to the ground, stomping my legs, beating my clothes, trying to put my fire out. A storm of fire ants eats the beard I have worn these many months, creeps into my hair to continue its greasy burning. We are all complicitous; no one may escape the wrath of Heaven.