Tears stream down Arsinoë’s face. “Why do they do it?” she asks. “Hundreds of years ago, under cover of a kiss, some pilgrim tore this from her head in Sinai. Couldn’t they leave her alone?”
John holds me back when I want to argue. This is no place, surrounded by this crowd of saints.
“Ask her, Madame,” John whispers. “Ask her if she heard who took her hand.”
Arsinoë says something to the priest in Greek, and he reluctantly extends her the reliquary.
“Can you hear me?” the Tongue of Saint Katherine breathes into the ear. “Do you want this?”
The mystic uses silence more affectively than sermons, brothers, adjusting it like a compass to arc widely over a room or proscribe a tight circle of expectation. Arsinoë’s silence exchanges noiselessness for a whole new language of signs: puzzled frowns and little cocks of the head, widening eyes and nodding acceptance. Neither an awkward silence nor a meaningful silence but a visceral, present intercourse that, in itself, speaks far more forcefully than words. I can tell from his worried expression that John feels it too—someone powerful and unseen troubling the merchant’s wife, though whether it be my bride or the Devil, I know not.
Arsinoë gingerly lifts the relic ear to her own and frowns.
“I don’t understand.”
“Pater!”
The young urchin boy who accosted us earlier throws open the door, causing us all to jump. Wildly, he beckons for the priest to come away. From his frantic looks and gestures, it would appear someone is dying in the street.
Arsinoë hesitates. The priest is obviously torn between locking away the relic and accompanying the desperate boy.
“Go, Father,” she says. “You are needed.”
With a grimace, he sprints down the aisle and out the door. Arsinoë walks to the front pew and sits down.
“Is she saying anything?” John asks.
The merchant’s wife sadly shakes her head. “There was a time, when I was a girl, that her voice came to me like sun on the water. I understood everything she said, not in words, mind you, but as a fish understands, by the warming surface of the lake, that the sun is in the sky. When my brother came and started to give her human words, it got jumbled. I needed him to tease out the meaning of what she said, because suddenly it made no sense to me anymore.”
She runs her finger over the papery rim of ear.
“Now that we are alone again, Katherine and I, I almost think she prefers the language he gave her.”
“Iesu Christi!”
A cry of abject terror comes from the street outside. It sounds like the old priest.
Arsinoë is on her feet. “He’s hurt!”
John and I dash down the aisle and out of the church. A few shopkeepers, opening for the day, peer around their wooden shutters.
“Iesu!”
The cry comes from behind the church, down the narrow alleyway that runs between it and the city wall. The sun has not yet probed the lane, and the way is very dark.
“Felix, look!” John cries.
The fat priest lies on his side with his hands and feet bound behind his back. He screams much at us that we cannot understand.
I work at the knots while John tries to calm him.
“Who did this to you?”
He is incomprehensible, and his struggling makes it that much harder to untie him. He says one word over and over: Turcos.
“A Turk?” asks John. “A Turk did this to you?”
“Please, sir.” I grasp his head to calm him, and he screams as a man tortured. I suddenly see why. “John, would a Turk do this?”
I turn the priest’s head to expose the blood-soaked stones below. On the right side of his face, a tight circle has been carved around his ear.
“Where is the merchant’s wife?” John cries. “Did she come with us?”
I leap up and run back to the church. The merchants are hiding inside their shops; the street is deserted.
“Madame!” I fling wide the doors.
The church is empty. She is gone.
I run to the altar, where, thank God, the gold reliquary still gleams. Her blessed ear! What madness possessed me to leave it alone?
The box is empty.
She is gone.
Confession
Forgive me, O Lord, for I have sinned. It’s been six days since my last confession. I made four wretched galley slaves carry Burgher Schmidhans’s heavy body in the afternoon heat to an inconvenient church so that I might, like a yokel, gape at the hand of Your daughter Saint Katherine of Alexandria. Yesterday, I listened to a woman question Your wisdom in bestowing this same daughter of Heaven’s relics upon the world; and this morning, I almost believed her when, at, of all places a Schismatic church, she claimed conversation with Your most sweet daughter, the virgin Saint Katherine of Alexandria.
I confess these sins in my heart, O Lord, and on paper for my abbot Reverend Ludwig Fuchs, hoping to spare my friend, and tender shipboard confessor, the Archdeacon John Lazinus, any further discussion of the missing woman aforementioned in my list of sins. He despairs of her safety, Lord, and blames himself, in my opinion taking on a responsibility out of all proportion with the depth of their acquaintance. He endangered his own life, along with that of Your servant Friar Felix Fabri, by combing the back streets of Colossus, questioning wharf prostitutes and scabaceous fishermen as to the likelihood of a Turkish pirate attack. No one spotted a foreign ship in the harbor, Lord, yet John remains convinced the woman was stolen, as the Greek priest was mutilated, by a renegade Turk.
But I turn to You now, O Lord, and to Your Son, and to His mother, the gentle Virgin who knows men’s souls, with a heart full of shame and sorrow. I beg You, teach me, Lord, how to please You and thus earn for myself a place at Your handmaid’s foot; for truly, my sins must be grievous in her eyes to avoid me so. Would that I should be devoured by the Troyp or eaten alive by lions than that Saint Katherine should, like chaste Diana, flee before me. Men grow weak in middle age, Lord, when the ambitions of youth have been harvested and old age seems not far away. In an earthly marriage, when the children have grown and money has finally been put aside, a married man might turn for comfort to his wife of twenty years and find, instead, an old and tired woman beside him. He might for the first time see in her face not the bride of his boyhood but his son’s children’s grandmother, whose life has been measured in blood and miscarriages, epidemics and wakes. How fortunate did I then feel, to have taken a bride of Heaven! After twenty years, I could rejoice that my love had not weighted my beloved’s belly or lined her face; I could believe, in fact, that this love was a source of comfort to her in its magnification, through her, of Christ. In middle age, when I had attained, at last, the leisure to render Katherine in adoration what I had taken over the years in supplication, I fondly hoped she would welcome me to her land and clasp me joyfully to her bosom. How foolish I feel, Lord, standing before her empty reliquaries; how I blush and perspire, knowing I have made too great a show of my love, like some simple country farmer in love with the King’s daughter. I tremble to remember my presumption! I rue my words! I deserve her scorn and Yours, Lord; and yet, if humility will teach me the proper way to adore a Bride of Heaven, I will be an abject student. Give me another chance, Lord. Take no more away the earthly remains of your daughter Saint Katherine. Leave me a finger, a tooth, a tongue, Lord, and I will build upon that single brick a greater, purer love, one that will be pleasing in Your eyes.
I ask this of You in Your Son’s name.
Thy will be done.
Amen.
A Brief History of the Merchant’s Wife
When John and I, tired and heartsore, return to the ship, Constantine Kallistos is but one in the slack-jawed circle of pilgrims that includes our barber, Conrad, and my patron’s son, Ursus, watching a tragedy unfold. The object of their pity is this: a long blue fish who writhes across the floorboards, sucking daylight with its swollen pink mouth, drowning on air.
“He flipped himself on deck,” Conrad tells me. “I was going to throw him back, but the merchant thinks it’s a sign.”
“A sign of what?”
Our barber shrugs. “Fish for dinner?”
One look at Constantine tells me dinner is the last thing on his mind. His pupils are dilated like a consumptive on belladonna and a half smile plays at the corners of his mouth.
“It’s the drowned man,” Constantine whispers, “come to reclaim his berth.”
“Don’t touch it, Friar,” Ursus warns. “It’s Herr Schmidhans.”
This will not do. I squat down and wrap the poor creature in my black robes, feeling its muscular panic against my thighs. I climb over the galley slaves and fling the fish back into the sea.
“Friar! You’ve killed him all over again.”
“It was a fish, Ursus, and not even a German fish. Now, run along. The Archdeacon and I must speak with Herr Kallistos.”
We grasp Constantine by the arm and steer him away from the wet floorboards. His wife made a stain only a little larger the night she flipped from the sea. Up to the ladies’ cabin we lead him, into the room of snuffed candles and neatly stacked icons.
“She’s gone, isn’t she?” he asks, looking between us. “She didn’t come back with you.”
“You must think, Constantine.” John sits the rigid merchant upon the Tongue’s carnelian trunk. “Does your wife have any enemies? Anyone who might wish her harm?”
“She promised not to leave the ship. I told her only on the ship could she be safe.”
“Safe from whom, Constantine?” John urges.
Silently, the merchant sorts through Arsinoë’s collection of Katherine icons, arranging them in descending order, a life lived backwards: from her discovery atop Sinai, past the Philosophers’ ignition, back to her first vision of the infant Jesus. His face sags when he reaches the earliest icon, that of a haloed baby Katherine perched on the knee of her soldier father, Good King Costus.
“I brought her this one.” He presses the wooden panel to his cheek and hands it to me. It is an ill-painted piece in blue and red, with a hydrocephalic father and daughter lifting stiff-fingered hands. Katherine’s heavy halo has flaked away behind the shoulder.
“He looks so protective and strong, but in the end he died and left her alone in the world.”
“Constantine,” I ask, insisting he keep to the subject, “was your wife in trouble? Is that why she tried to destroy herself?”
The merchant leans his head against the wall, lost in the flat, foreshortened world of her icons. Sweat pills along his upper lip, and his hands lie lifelessly in his lap.
“I’m sure she did not intend to destroy herself, Friar,” he says. “It’s been my experience that Arsinoë always gets what she wants. She must have intended to be saved.”
“Are you suggesting Arsinoë knew I would be on deck that night?”
“I am suggesting, Friar”—Constantine looks upon me wearily—“that if Arsinoë meant to test her saint, you were the means by which she received her answer.”
“Please, Constantine,” John interrupts, when I am about to challenge the merchant. “Your wife disappeared along with a priceless relic. Surely, this was the agency not of Heaven but of a malevolent human being.”
Constantine’s pallor exceeds even that of his worst seasickness. He closes his eyes.
“In the end, all became perverted, Archdeacon,” the merchant says dreamily, heedless of our presence. “I should never have followed that path to her house.
“I knew when I saw the makeshift stalls hung with sharp wheel medallions and cloudy vials of Katherine milk, when I started up the long trampled mud path through the almond grove, that I had taken a dangerous road. Mostly women milled about, pulling their teenaged daughters away from the Tongue’s wild hibiscus bushes, for what girl could resist picking one of those lewd red flowers and tucking it behind her ear? I asked the women why they had come, wondering if their troubles were as great as mine. ‘My daughter’s womb is restless,’ one said. ‘It migrates to her nose and bleeds during her monthlies.’ I looked over at the poor girl squatting in the grass, breathing through her mouth. She pressed a stained handkerchief to her face. Another mother told me, ‘We took our daughter to Saint Paraskevie’s shrine closer to our house, but Saint Paraskevie told us Katherine’s Tongue had to intercede for us. Paraskevie has no power over pregnancy, you see, and our daughter has been with child now thirteen months.’
“The road was crowded with fat women, unable to walk unassisted. Old men with sores. And dogs, everywhere. They ran in packs and begged food from the pilgrims. Someone said they were holy dogs, sacred to Katherine’s Tongue. It wasn’t true, but the dogs got fed.”
John glances over at me. The merchant is rambling, nearly incoherent. What does this have to do with his wife’s disappearance, or who might have wished her harm? John is about to recall him to the point when he speaks again.
“You should have seen her in her own room, Archdeacon.” He opens his eyes on John. “Back then, little crowded settlements of icons flickered behind small candles, set on every table and chair, tucked into corners. In the beginning, Katherine only wanted to see herself. Most pilgrims knew and brought as an offering some small painting of the Saint, some richly plated with African silver, some smudged with eggshell tempera. You clutched your icon and walked into her hot, dark room, mingling your nervous body stench with the chamber’s melted wax and incense and something else less definable: the lingering desperation of the supplicant who preceded you. All these smells Arsinoë used. She spoke them aloud as you came in, sketching you for her saint: Vines, oak, tar, she said. Onions, civet, clay. You became aware of each aroma the moment she named it, dismantling and reconfiguring your own familiar essence, startled that everything you had passed through, during a day, clung and was knowable. When she had the measure of you in the dark, she lit a taper before her, and you were granted your first close look at Saint Katherine’s Tongue.”
Constantine wets his lips, but by now John, at least, has no desire to stop him. My friend breathes deeply, with purpose, trying to sniff out the narrator’s truth.
“The first time I saw her, she was seated on a simple chair,” the merchant whispers hoarsely, “her hair virgin loose around her shoulders. Dressed for bed, in a white shift, she looked more like a fever patient than an oracle, wasted and thin with dark, ringed eyes. They said her mother died just as the child’s head emerged, and when the afterbirth slithered out it formed the shape of a wheel. I never knew whether to believe such stories, but she did have the look of one whom Death had embraced.
“Behind her sat a beautiful man, whose guarded face—I remember thinking at the time—looked like one scratched out and repainted. Our church in Candia had once been a temple to Dionysus, so I had seen it before; beneath the slender oval faces of Saints Peter and Paul, you can still make out the fleshy bloating of our wine god, grape vines centuries ago straightened into haloes, and leopard skins smoothed into draped togas. Her brother, they said he was. He sat at a desk behind her, his ancient watchfulness barely hidden by scholarly dispassion, collecting the words as they fell from his sister’s lips like a midwife catching drops of the Virgin’s breast milk.
“‘How may Saint Katherine intercede for you?’ asked the Tongue. Her brother barely glanced at me but kept his protective eyes fixed upon his sister. I hadn’t slept in days and could barely tell her. I shuffled forward and placed this icon at the Tongue’s feet, lifting a fold of her hem to my lips. I begged her help. For weeks I’d dreamed of drowning, a cold horrible death where ropes of water snaked into my body and flushed away my soul. I should have gone to Saint Nicholas or Saint Andrew, some patron of the sea, I know, but my dream always ended with a young girl’s body replacing my own, floating peacefully on to shore. I wanted Saint Katherine to take this strange, drowned girl to her and restore my sleep. I wanted not to be some creature of the Poets, nightly casting my own death upon the waters, unti
l the day I found myself submerged and dumbfounded, raging at the will of God.”
Constantine breaks off and hides his face in his hands. He must have prayed to every saint under Heaven the afternoon Schmidhans’s fat, portentous body passed before him on the backstreets of Candia, fearing, yet horribly certain, he would replace that cheerful drunk on our ship. He must have turned to his wife and begged her, for the tenth time, to take the overland route to Sinai: up to Thessalonica, over the land bridge to Constantinople, down to Antioch, across the breadth of Turkey into Syria and Palestine. God would preserve him on land, he knew, against bandits and marauders, through hunger and sandstorm. Just please—I can hear how he begged her—don’t make me take the drowned man’s place!
“What did she tell you?” John asks the merchant. “Did she take the dreams away?”
Constantine peers at John through spread fingers, his face red and blotchy from shame. Slowly, he shakes his head.
“Her words made no sense until her brother translated them for me. Water, she said, almost laughing. Then, Sleep. At first I thought she was only repeating what I said to her, but then her brother revealed their meaning. ‘You will indeed spend your eternal sleep underwater if you do not help her,’ he told me solemnly. Dear God, I thought, my dreams are true! Then he came over and placed his ink-stained hands on his sister’s shoulders. ‘Katherine has revealed to my sister that her body is raw from too much handling. Saint Katherine told my sister she wants a new skin.’”
What could Constantine possibly mean by that? A deep and insidious fear creeps over me, brothers, leading me to wild speculation. Katherine’s bones are housed within skins of pure silver and gold, encrusted with opals, emeralds, and diamonds. Flayed of these reliquaries, her sacred joints and organs would be nakedly vulnerable, wholly at the mercy of diabolical thieves like those who took her hand and ear. Twice, now, the merchant’s wife has been present when relics disappeared: first at Candia, when the handsome stranger tracked her to the monastery; and then today, when Katherine’s ear vanished from Rhodes.