“What?” John’s voice is fierce.
“I overheard you talking of escape. I thought her brother should know.”
“You were going to turn her in without telling me?” John cries. “Just hand her over to her brother?”
“You were going to help her run away!” I accuse him, just as angrily. “I certainly was not consulted about that.”
“She was terrified of her brother.” John has leapt to his feet. “She thinks he is trying to kill her.”
There is a scuffle at the entrance to our cellar. Our Saracen guard steps aside to admit two men; the first is the short Saracen yogurt seller, who wiggles in under the guard’s armpit and immediately withdraws ramekins of his cool white dessert for the pilgrims’ inspection. The second is Ser Niccolo, the translator.
“What is he doing here?” John gasps.
“I told him to come for his sister.”
He picks his way through the crowd, searching, no doubt, for me. He is a good head taller than most of the pilgrims, and I watch his curly black scalp, like a snake on the water, wind its way closer.
“Felix, Arsinoë has had only a night’s head start.” John clenches my arm. “You can’t tell him she’s fled.”
“What am I supposed to tell him?” I ask the wild-eyed John, whose grip is bruising my arm.
“Tell him she set herself on fire,” John says.
“Are you out of your mind?”
Ser Niccolo bends familiarly over my newly shaved patron’s son, Ursus. The boy smiles and points me out to him.
“Katherine wills it,” John insists. “Arsinoë is doing her will. Do you know for sure she is not?”
What am I to believe? Ser Niccolo bears down upon me, his eyes troubled and dark. Surely Contarini’s pilgrims have heard the tragedy that took place here last night. Surely Niccolo knows a woman went up in flames.
“You must help her, Felix,” John whispers, as Niccolo steps up to us. “For me.”
The translator does not even glance at my friend; he has eyes only for me. What do I do? I am all confusion.
“Abdullah says the only woman in your party was found in flames last night,” the translator says. “Tell me it is not true.”
John’s hand is on my arm. I may be damned for all eternity for this. I may have sold my wife for a slave.
“It is true,” I say, and, just like that, Arsinoë has stolen another life. “Your sister, the Tongue, is gone.”
Asses
The sun set by the time our captains, not wanting to slow the pilgrimage with an investigation, declared Emelia Priuli’s death an act of God. We stepped out of the cave to find a half-moon rising. I pulled my damp robes around me and breathed in the cold shore smells: rotting crab claws, driftwood, picked bodies, rock.
“She’s over here.”
I led the translator to Emelia Priuli’s grave. He would take one look at this charred body and recognize the fraud. He would call me irregular priest and false friend, beat me to within an inch of my life, I thought, and all this I would deserve.
Niccolo knelt and gently touched the earth over Emelia’s face. Long strands of melted hair stayed fixed to the scalp. Surely, I thought, he would recognize the hairs.
“Will you take her body home to Crete?” I asked softly.
He slowly shook his head. “I have business in Jerusalem. I don’t think I have the means to preserve her.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “She was more self-destructive than I thought.”
The translator nodded slowly, rocking back on his haunches. I was about to help him up when, without warning, he fell upon the grave and tilled up the body, harrowing the charred joints like stones in a field. The baked head separated from the torso, but he embraced the jumble, breathing deeply as of a bouquet of roses.
“Do you smell anything, Friar?” he asked.
“No,” I replied.
“Neither do I.”
Niccolo dropped the bones and walked away.
“There’s a translator’s quarter in Jerusalem.” He spoke more to himself than to me. “Maybe they will let me study with them until I can find the strength to go home.”
“That’s a fine idea.” I dug into the earth with my hands and slowly began to reinter Emelia Priuli.
“Don’t you find it awful, not understanding?” he asked me, gesturing to the hundreds of pilgrims milling about with their luggage. The Italians from Contarini’s ship had sought out the Italians from Lando’s; French had found French; the women, no matter what nationality, stuck close together.
“Not understanding what?” I asked.
“What people are saying all around you. All these private conversations in all these private languages.”
“No one can speak all of God’s tongues,” I reminded him gently.
“The Donestre can. They can speak all the languages of the world, Friar Felix. But we’d do well to stay far away from them.” His eyes welled with moonlight, overflowed his cheeks.
“Who are the Donestre?” I asked.
“A race of men I met in the Red Sea. If you were to go to their island, Friar, one would call to you in an accent so subtle, you’d believe he grew up in the next parish over.
“Felix . . . Felix Fabri . . . he would call. Good Abbot Ludwig Fuchs commends me to you. Come and eat with us.
“You would walk up the path to the rock where he sits, holding out his arms for an embrace, and you would be so delighted to find someone from Ulm in the middle of the troubled sea, you’d happily fling yourself into them. The Donestre would kiss you on your cheeks and eyes. He would murmur in the voice of your favorite aunt and remind you of your boyhood summers in Zurich. You wouldn’t feel his teeth on your leg until it was too late. First your knees would be gone, then your thighs. Your trunk would be eaten and then your shoulders. The Donestre would devour you, all but the head. And then he would sit and weep over the head.”
“Felix?” John approached with a lantern. “Everyone is moving down to the beach.”
“I got away with my life.” Niccolo rolled down his thigh-high yellow boot and pulled up his slashed hose to reveal a deeply churned red scar. “Because he recognized me for what I am.”
John tugged my robe, glaring at the translator. “Come on, Felix. They’ll leave without us.”
“A kindred spirit.”
I let John lead me away from this man, this friend of monsters. We unhinged him with our lies. As we walked back to the cave to collect our trunks and roll up our pallets, John smiled wanly at me. I could not look at him. What we did was wrong. I saw again the despair on Ser Niccolo’s face as he pressed that woman’s remains to his face. Was he sniffing for sanctity, for the holy scent of myrrh? Did the translator believe, in his secret heart, that his sister had talked to Heaven?
But enough, brothers! I can bear no more to examine my sins. I promised, when I left, to keep a balanced account of my pilgrimage: the sacred and the profane, the serious and the absurd. What befell the pilgrims next may not be omitted if you are to experience, first hand, what we endured that night.
Like ants on a stick, we walked single file down the path to the beach, each pilgrim hefting his trunk in his arms, each praying not to collapse under its weight. Upon the beach, the shadowy donkeys blended with the sea, a few white-capped backs moving restlessly among them, as anxious to convey us to the Holy City as we were to mount them. Finally, we were on our way, brothers. I stood looking about for the rest of my company when, without any warning, a dark calloused hand reached out and grabbed my arm.
How I screamed, brothers—like a girl! My trunk bumped along my spine as it slid to the ground; my shins slammed against sharp rocks. Because my captor had grabbed my right hand with his right hand, I was dragged awkwardly, stumbling, twisted like a kite’s flapping tail behind him.
“Stop!” I screamed, digging in my heels and trying to reverse our momentum. Where was he taking me? All around, pilgrims were grabbed, fought over, yanked like wishbones. Where was
Ursus? My Saracen tugged harder, pulling me off balance while repeating many words I could not understand. I fell and he helped me up, barely missing a step.
When at last I realized what was going on, I was too out of breath to protest. My Saracen shoved me astride a black donkey and patted her thick neck frenetically. “Gut? Es Gut?”
The donkey whinnied softly and pushed at his hand with her nose. In fact, she was a good donkey, her spine not too sharp, her flanks not too barrelish.
“No. Not gut.” I leapt from the donkey and mimed myself dragged like Hector behind Achilles’ chariot at Troy. The Saracen bowed low before me and clasped my hands repeatedly, I think in a show of apology. Evidently, more ass drivers from Joppa arrive than pilgrims, and thus the drivers must fight for business. This rough and squinty Saracen gestured behind him to a noble member of his faith, beturbaned and sitting astride a purebred horse. The mounted Saracen held aloft a torch, touched me gently with his staff, and said much more to me that I could not understand, but which I took to mean:
“Stay, Christian pilgrim, and accept our ass. My name is Galela, and this is my slave Cassa. If you have need of him on your wanderings, call Galelacassa; he will come to you and serve you faithfully without overcharging you or mistreating you in any way.”
Looking over the broken asses foisted upon the other pilgrims, I reluctantly agreed to stay with Cassa. He ran back for my trunk and affixed it to the saddle behind me.
So here I sit, astride my donkey, brothers, waiting for the other pilgrims to be settled on other asses. The Saracens take a school-boyish delight in annoying Christian pilgrims, and even Cassa, who seems a good sort, peers over my shoulder like a monkey and wonders at my letters, even as I put them on the page. I cannot say I am unhappy to leave Joppa behind. I have committed many sins for having been only one full day on holy soil, and I am carrying into Jerusalem a heavy heart. Pray for me, brothers, pray that things may change.
The moon hangs low in the sky, and dawn will break in a few hours, Elphahallo announces. We must prepare ourselves for an arduous journey to Jerusalem. We may encounter rough Arabs on the way, and if this occurs we are to stay calm and let our Saracen guides protect us. On no account are we to draw weapons.
Elphahallo addresses the pilgrims who have, for piety’s sake, elected to walk across the burning desert into Jerusalem. “Know you that you walk of your own volition,” says he, “and if you cannot keep up, you will either be left behind or you will have to find your own ass driver. Do not return to your homelands saying that Saracens will not suffer Christians to ride through their country but make them walk in the heat. Witness this is not so. Are you so resigned?”
Two walking pilgrims slink away from the group and procure drivers. The rest, perhaps twenty in all, remain. Elphahallo surveys the pocket of barefoot walkers, the legion of donkey drivers, the Mameluke and Saracen guards, armed and on horseback. Asses stamp their impatience, guards joke, but when Elphahallo raises his staff high above his head and shouts, we Christians fall as silent as the grave.
“Pilgrims, set your hearts for Jerusalem. We are off!”
ii
THE SARACEN CITY OF RAMLEH PALESTINE SUMMER 1483
Prayers
“Do you hear it? That tapping?”
“Yes, I think so. Look, it’s moving.”
My patron and his son stare fixedly at the back wall of our room, here in the well-appointed pilgrim’s hospice of Ramleh. After a weary night and day of traveling, we’ve finally put to rest at the man-made oasis left us by Duke Philip of Burgundy, of blessed memory. My party has taken a room off the loggia that opens onto a courtyard complete with marble fountain and spreading green fig trees. All eyes are turned away from Nature’s beauty, however, riveted on a single large block of stone, waist-high from the floor, that appears to be wiggling its way toward us.
“What do you suppose they’re doing?”
“Repairing the wall?” Conrad ventures.
“I think they’re trying to break through.” Lord Tucher paces. “To rob us.”
I snort, perhaps too rudely.
“After what happened in Joppa, Friar Felix, I’m not about to take chances with my son’s life.” Lord Tucher picks up the weapon of war he wrought after Emelia’s assassination, a sea urchin on a stick.
Fellow pilgrims, lured by our intense concentration, stop into the room, depart in search of boards and stones—as we are forbidden by Article Thirteen to wear daggers slung about us—and return to wait. The mood in our cell has grown so black, I fear for whoever is working to reach us. I hope for his sake he is a bad man—a robber or an assassin—because, good or bad, he will not escape a braining.
The stone teeters and drops to the ground.
“All right, dog!” Lord Tucher shouts at the hole. “Show yourself!”
A thick brick of setting sun replaces the missing stone, confirming that the culprit bored through from outdoors. Ursus leans down to put his eye to the hole, but his father yanks him back.
“Whoever you are,” Tucher calls, his voice cracking, “come out.”
We all breathe shallowly, each man with a different threat before him: demons, Turks, red poisonous gas from the East that saps the will and leaves us slaves to the Sultan. The tension is unbearable. I have to look.
“Felix, don’t!” Lord Tucher grabs for my collar, but I throw off his hand. Momentarily blinded by the pink light, it takes a second for my eyes to find their subject, and when they do my confusion is so great it takes another for my mind to process it.
“Don’t!” I pull back. “Don’t look!”
But it is too late. She sticks her head through the hole for all to see and calls to us in her heathen language: a Saracen woman, swathed in the black crepe veils they wear, and behind her, in a mirror courtyard to our own, five of her wanton sisters. They gyrate with gloved hands, these mute Lorelei dipped in tar. A rough grip on my shoulder pulls me away from the hole.
“Let me see!”
“No! Me!”
All the male pilgrims want to spy on the Saracen women, and together they cause a great push, as when flesh arrives in times of famine. I back away frightened. Tenth Article: Let the pilgrims beware of gazing on any Saracen women, as their husbands are exceedingly jealous and apt to do harm. Eleventh Article: Should any Saracen woman beckon to a pilgrim and invite him into her house, on no accounts go. Two articles against such behavior, and yet they will not stop.
Ursus struggles to the front.
“What are your names? Are you married?”
“Are you attracted to us? Is that why you broke in?”
“Are you in trouble?”
These knights and pilgrims query the women as if expecting them to suddenly reply in the German tongue, and the women answer nonsensically to whatever it is they suppose we say. Throughout this fruitful conversation, the pilgrims trade places so that each can gaze upon the women in their natural hareem, not out furtively shopping or disappearing into doorways as has heretofore seemed their wont. Never have we met such brazen women in the East, but assumed them all to be chaste and frightened of their men, as commanded by their Alcoran.
“If only we had some way of talking to them!” Ursus wails. “I want to ask them about their hair!”
As I have no desire to see how this folly plays out, I quietly take up my mat and book and walk up the marble stairs to the hospice’s flat-tiered roof, there to take advantage, in the Saracen fashion, of the cool night air. A Minorite friar, one of the monks assigned to watch over us in Ramleh, rushes past me with a bowl of mortar and a trowel. I can hear the lecture he will give our ungovernable pilgrims now, for if a Saracen man catches them making sport with his women the punishment will be conversion or death.
Below me, across the city of Ramleh, a hundred Saracen steeples puncture the twilight. Flat-bedded donkey carts, hillocked with boughs of cherries, roll through the dark streets; behind them walk slow, sandaled men, bone-weary after an afternoon’s harvest. Are they h
eaded home to discover that their wives have been soliciting lusty Western pilgrims through chinks in the wall? Do they have to fear, every time they leave the house, that their spouses will reveal themselves to others?
Is there any faith left in women, brothers? As much as I have tried to push it from my mind, the night of the storm returns to me again and again: my friend the Archdeacon John writhing on the Tongue’s pallet, bent over the aching girl who slowly becomes my wife. He held her and looked into her eyes and asked questions of her like a familiar; and she answered him. Every time I look at John, I feel her betrayal. Today, in a church outside of Gath, the city that bred Goliath and the Dog-Headed Saint Christopher, John stopped to point out a carving of Saint Katherine I had overlooked. She stood between Saint Christopher, who only became a man after he ferried Christ across the river, and Saint Nicholas, whom some in our country depict as a child-eater. The mason had been careless and had carved Katherine’s sword so that it appeared to pierce Saint Christopher’s flat bare foot. The smile on her face was full of satisfaction and, worse, brothers, drew into an almost carnal smirk, pressed as she was between two male saints. I could not bear to look on her, and when John came around to see what disturbed me, I could not look on him either.
Farther out, our Calinus, Elphahallo, with several of his companions who have also made their beds on the roof, talk among themselves, sharing bread and melons. When he sees me, Elphahallo beckons for me to join them.
“Friar Failisk”—he smiles—“come lay your bed near us.”
I smile but shake my head no, preferring, instead, to spread out my mat a little higher up.
“Will you not at least take some fruit?” The Calinus extends a juicy pink wedge encased in green rind. I want no more to think on women, brothers, so I walk down to sit with the Saracens.
“Thank you,” I say, gingerly biting into the melon. Oh, what ineffable springtime sweetness! Like crunchy new-scythed grass and honey on the tongue. I accept the second piece he offers and, cautiously, eat that as well.