by Sheri Holman
“I’ll get it,” John volunteers.
“I’ll come with you.” The Mameluke follows, throwing his arm familiarly around my friend’s stiff shoulders. They head into the shadows of the kitchen and ladies’ cabin.
Behind us, the Saint John’s festivities are beginning. A horn tosses its vibrato across the lanterns like fat into fire. A galley slave raises his voice in song.
“Are you a scholar or a diplomat?” I ask, suddenly aware of his eyes on mine.
“You have to be a little of both in my profession.” He studies me as if gauging how interested I truly am in his response. “If you are introducing one language to another, you must first cajole them, get them to touch hands; it’s too easy to treat translation as a rape—to usurp the meaning of the weaker language and force it into the characters of the stronger. Translation must be a seduction, Friar, with all the slow persuasions of a willing kidnap.
“I’ve learned all known languages but one.” Ser Niccolo turns away from me and stares deep into the ship’s shadows. “I’ve not yet mastered the vocabulary of madness.”
Suddenly I know where I’ve seen him before.
“You’re the gentleman from Candia! You were looking for a runaway woman!”
He studies me narrowly. “My sister, yes. Now I remember you,” he says. “You were with a young boy.”
“We found her,” I cry. “She was on our ship!”
“Where is she?” His eyes follow mine to the ladies’ cabin, where I still expect to see her emerge, wet and guilty. Does her brother suspect her too?
“She is gone,” I tell him regretfully. “She ran off from Rhodes.”
“Was she well? Did she appear troubled?”
Brothers, what should I do? Should I address the drowning? Should I confide my suspicions?
“You needn’t say.” The translator sighs. “I can see from your face she is still unwell. Please, Friar,” he begs, gripping my knee urgently, “if she should return—keep her for me. You have no idea what she might do.”
I do know. But dare I say?
A pilgrim strikes a tabor. Someone squeezes a bladder pipe. Ser Niccolo releases me, looks about him in despair. All around, the pilgrims pick up the drum’s tempo, stomp their feet, clapping gaily along. Before tonight, I had never beheld the practice of clapping the hands for joy; I knew it only from the Forty-seventh Psalm: “O clap your hands, all ye people; shout unto God with the voice of triumph.” I would never have imagined that the sound of many men’s clapping could kindle such emotion in my breast. Sensing my confusion, Niccolo slides behind me, snakes his arms through my arms, takes my hands in his, brings the four together. John comes back with another bottle of malvoisie, but I can no longer feel my legs, my hands under the stranger’s hands. Before I know what’s happening, Ser Niccolo grabs me by the waist and swings me up and around, wildly, until the individual lanterns on their strings above resolve into a single heavenly wheel of fire. Like a frenzied Israelite, I put my hands together and feel the vibration ring deep in my chest, shoot out through my elbows. Ser Niccolo laughs at my amazement; before I know what he’s about, he slaps me with a sloppy, winey kiss of peace—full on my laugh-stretched lips.
“True translators know there is no language without persuasion, no persuasion without seduction,” he shouts in Latin, Italian, German, in love with my shock and the language of stinging palms. His hands are on my body, but his eyes are out there in the night, shooting sparks into dark corners, looking, still looking. On the landing by the ladies’ cabin, I see his friend, the Mameluke, wave.
I barely remember John pulling me away, his mouth on my ear—“Felix, we don’t even know this man”—or their departure, as abrupt and unexpected as their arrival. I can’t tell you if the tears on my cheeks, as I stand abandoned in the middle of the ship, dizzy and hot, afraid to move for fear of falling, are from shame or loss or laughter.
I only know today is the longest day of the year, and night has suddenly fallen.
A Bad Wind
“It’s that merchant.” Ursus’s voice is like a nail in my skull. “He won’t get out of bed.”
A bad wind hit us just outside the Cyprus harbor. The stomach sea churns, belching fish that panic midair and plunge back down its gullet. In vain, the sailors tack, the oarsmen row, inching us laterally along. We’re all seasick from last night’s festival.
“Let him rest, Ursus. He’ll be fine.”
“I don’t think so, Friar. He says he’s dying. He called for a confessor.”
“Why don’t you run along and fetch Archdeacon John for him?”
“Archdeacon John suggested I run along and fetch you.”
What choice do I have? I shade my eyes with my book and walk unsteadily to the stairs. Like a fart in the chapel, Ursus follows.
“The merchant might prefer to be alone with his private thoughts, son.”
Near the prow of the ship, the Betrayer Tucher sits at Emelia Priuli’s side while she throws dice with some Frenchmen.
“Run along and remind your father there is less at sea to distract God’s attention away from our sinning selves.”
It takes a few minutes for me to adjust to the woody darkness and fetid stench below. Wine sweat, when it pushes through the pores of several hundred hung-over pilgrims, mingling with the aroma of filthy feet and unwashed hair, is more likely to rouse a man than the loudest cock crow. Constantine must be extraordinarily ill to have remained in bed.
I know you are wondering, brothers, why I have not brought with me the Sacrament of Eucharist for a man who is supposedly dying. And yet, my brothers, this is a privation you cannot imagine until you have actually set sail, until the first storm hits and pilgrims wail and cry out for the body of Christ to comfort them. Then, frightened and seasick, you would run to the captain, only to be told, “No, Friar, the Church does not allow Christ’s body to be carried on ship.” What? You would rail against Holy Mother Church! Could she so abandon her needy children? But you would be wrong to accuse her, brothers. With contemplation and reflection you would realize the Eucharist might not be celebrated on board ship for five good reasons: First, because the Host is made of bread and cannot be well preserved at sea; after three days it becomes watery and moldy and melts away into liquid paste. Second, because the Host must be kept beside a burning light; and, as I said earlier, through sailor’s superstition no lights are allowed to burn on deck. Third, because of want of due reverence; during a storm, sailors must run around to secure the ship, and all would be overturned, priest, sacrament, and altar together. The fourth reason the Eucharist may not be kept aboard ship is because of the folly of bad Christians: Imagine, my brothers, that a storm should blow up; were the consecrated Host on board, how easy it would be for the pilgrims to turn to the Host and say, “If Thou be Christ, save Thyself and us!” Fifth and last, the Host may not be kept on board because of the ease with which men vomit there; should a storm arise immediately after a priest had celebrated mass, he would, by force of nature, be compelled to vomit forth the Body of Christ, which thing, as some among us know, is horrible to behold.
Because of these five reasons, dying men aboard ships are denied the last consolation of the Church. If Constantine is as ill as he believes himself to be, I can do little more for him than trace a dry cross on his forehead and hear his confession.
When I reach his pallet, I’m shocked at how greatly his wife’s absence of only forty-eight hours has changed him. His dirty fingernails rest beside clouded, bloodshot eyes. Next to him, a shallow ceramic chamber pot sloshes with thin green vomit. I almost gag at the smell.
“Constantine?” I kneel beside him, breathing through my mouth. “You must give over this grief.”
“Felix? Is that you?” He’s looking right at me. “Are we on the Ocean?”
“Yes, Constantine,” I tell him. “We’re in the boat.”
“Felix? If my body is thrown to the fishes after I die, can God still resurrect me?”
What er
rors men entertain! I smile indulgently.
“Saint Augustine tells us that if a man is starving and, to save himself, eats another man, even if the eaten man is absorbed into the starving man’s flesh, God knows to whom the body belongs. Should fish eat you, Constantine, God can extract your essence from the bubbles they exhale. They will only have borrowed your body for a time.”
“Still,” he moans, “don’t let the fish borrow me. I don’t want anything to make use of my body. Do you promise, Felix? Do you promise on Saint Katherine’s life?”
“You’re not going to die, Constantine. You are simply melancholy.”
“Promise me. On Katherine’s life.”
His lips are white and cheesy from lack of water. Truly, he does look very ill.
“I promise,” I say at last.
“I need to make a confession, Friar, and there are no priests of my faith on board.”
Like an infant, he wills his eyes to focus. For the first time I know he really sees me.
“What do you want to say, Constantine?”
“I was the first one, you see. I was the first to understand what her saint wanted.”
“Constantine.” I brush the merchant’s hair from his sweaty forehead. “I’m afraid you’re making very little sense today.”
“Up until I came, Katherine only asked for icons; she only needed to see herself to know she existed. I began the whole awful thing, Friar. I brought Arsinoë the first bone.”
“Constantine, what are you saying?”
“At first Arsinoë was horrified, but her brother took the rib and thanked me. He said Katherine had at last found a way to come to his sister.”
My hand falls away from his hair. Has the merchant lost his mind? Does he honestly expect me to believe Saint Katherine would make a pilgrimage to a mere girl?
“When other people found out Katherine wanted to come to her Tongue, they began to bring bones as well. Some were purchased; some, I know, were stolen. They were so desperate, Felix. I knew they wouldn’t stop until they’d brought Arsinoë her entire saint.”
I shudder at the image. A whole town lined up at the door, each neighbor holding a femur or a rib. I see a little girl with an elbow, a dog with a foot in its mouth.
“Constantine, if this horrible thing is true, as her husband why didn’t you put a stop to it?”
“I have a horrible lie to confess, Friar.”
Our galley hits a swell and Constantine’s chamber pot sloshes onto his mattress.
“The woman Arsinoë is not my wife.”
“Friar! Come quick!” Ursus calls from far away.
“What do you mean not your wife? Why is she with you?”
“She came to my shop five days ago. I know she had the bones with her.”
Ursus pounds down the steps, his boots echoing through the hollow belly of the ship. Constantine rolls back on his side.
“What is it, Ursus?” I ask sharply.
“You’ll never believe!” He yanks my robes, nearly pulling me off my feet.
“Just a minute.”
“The Archdeacon says you must come now!”
Helplessly, the merchant coughs a rope of black bile into his chamber pot. He can’t hold back any longer; miserable tears squeeze from his eyes. I lean over him and speak clearly into his ear.
“I will be back, Constantine, and when I return I want you to tell me everything.” I wipe his stained mouth with the bedsheet. “And no more talk of dying.”
The glare on deck blinds me, and I have to throw my arm over my eyes to let them readjust. When I regain my faculties, I see, from a distance, John and Conrad leaning over the ship’s prow, gesticulating wildly. Ursus drags me over.
“Is it a Troyp?” I ask. The waves are high and loud.
“No, something stranger,” John shouts. He turns to Conrad. “They won’t make it from here. Send them around to the steps.”
I follow my friends along the curve of the boat to where the stair rungs descend into the sea. There, way below us, is a small two-oared boat, very like the one we use to row ashore when we’re anchored. Unfortunately for this little boat, the bad wind has agitated the sea tremendously, so that one minute the craft is far below our galley and, the next, feet above, completely at the mercy of the swells.
“Here they come,” John calls. “On the count of three ...”
Conrad leans far out over the water to net a fish.
Like a trick acrobat upon the back of a great green horse, the merchant’s wife rides the cresting wave. She raises her arms to steady herself and steps onto the rough triangle of the rowboat’s neck, nodding to her servant to dig in with his oars, so as not to smash into the galley. Before she has perfectly gained her balance, the wave bucks under her, lifting the small craft a good four feet above us; I have just decided she’s waited too long when suddenly, with a cry, she leaps.
On the wall of our refectory at Ulm we have a painting of the Annunciation. In it the Archangel Gabriel appears to the sleeping Virgin as a blur of raised knees and frothing robes, bursting into her room as one having just sprinted through a twilight evening to tell glad tidings. In this suspended moment when the merchant’s wife blots out the sun with her pedaling legs and graceful arms, I too expect a miracle. Let her change into a dove, dear Lord, and fly away from here. Let her return to the waves like an underweight fish caught too soon. Let her become anything she likes so long as she disappears and no longer darkens my pilgrimage.
She strikes the deck hard in her fall, and Conrad quickly gathers up her unconscious body. The skin under her eyes is a skein of broken purple veins, and a cut across her eyebrow has only barely scabbed over, kept soft and white by exposure to salt water. The battering of her face doesn’t prepare me for the shock of her collarbones when Conrad removes her water-soaked gorget and loosens her bodice. Like a grotesque queen, she wears a violet and green necklace of mottled bruises across her chest, the pendant of which trails across her cleavage to a ragged ruby scar. Suddenly aware of Ursus staring, I dispatch him to find some malvoisie.
Her eyes snap open. “The other ship?”
Like a startled animal, Arsinoë bolts from John’s lap and flings herself half over the ship’s side, craning to see from where we’ve come. All I can make out is the receding figure of her hired boat being swiftly swept back toward shore by the bad wind. I point it out to her.
“No, the other pilgrim ship.”
“Don’t worry. The captain says we’ll beat them to Jerusalem,” I tell her, gently easing her back onto the galley floor.
“I’ve made it?”
“Yes,” I say. “You’re back among the pilgrims.”
“You know I was left behind.”
“We looked everywhere for you.”
“A Turk.” She struggles to a sitting position. “Off Rhodes. He took me.”
“Shhh. You’re safe now.”
“He beat me, you see.”
“Where is that wine?” John bellows. It’s obvious that between her ordeal and this fall, the merchant’s wife has sunk deep into shock. But what has happened to John? He cannot bear to touch her but stares transfixed, like a man watching his town burn. I take the small glass of malvoisie from Ursus, when he returns, and hold it to her lips. She gulps greedily.
“We must get her out of these wet clothes,” Conrad tells me, helping her off the galley floor and wrapping his cloak around her shoulders. The merchant’s wife is soaked and trembling.
“Were you followed?” John asks. He’s right. Where there is one Turkish ship, there are bound to be others. We should tell the captain.
She shakes her head. “I’m sure they think me dead.”
“Your husband was ready to follow you to the grave.” I stumble on the word husband, thinking of the merchant’s unhinged confession.
“Constantine is ill?”
“He called for a confessor,” Ursus offers.
She breaks away from Conrad and stumbles downstairs.
We find her
, below, watching the rise and fall of the merchant’s narrow chest. His body spasms, his hand jerks from her grasp, and patiently she retrieves it, cradles it in her lap. I read once about a Celtic finger language in which each joint stood for a letter of the alphabet. Arsinoë smooths his skin, erasing her history off each knuckle of her false husband’s hand. As her clothes dry, they thicken the air with the briny scent of mildew. I suggest she change, but I don’t think she hears me.
“May I give him some water?” she asks at last.
John rummages through the sand belowdeck and hands her a cool goatskin. Tenderly, she raises the merchant’s head, dribbles a bit of orange water into her palm, and holds it against his mouth. When he makes no move to swallow, she separates his lips and pours the water onto his tongue.
“He has a fever,” she whispers.
“He thought you were dead,” I say.
Without a word, our barber steps in and ministers to the patient: listens to his heart, thumps his hypochondria, lifts his eyelids. Conrad examines the bucket of vomit and the black stains on his bedcovers and sadly shakes his head.
“He is very ill.” I translate Conrad’s German for Arsinoë. “And this black seems more than seasickness. Conrad is afraid it is one of his organs.”
Arsinoë nods. Hot, fat tears splash onto Constantine’s face.
“Conrad,” I whisper, “will you take Ursus upstairs?”
I wait until they leave before addressing her.
“Madame,” I say gently, “your husband was confessing to me at the time you reappeared. He was very troubled and not making much sense. If I am to absolve him, I need to know the truth. Are you his wife?”
John looks up startled.
“No,” Arsinoë says, almost inaudibly. “I am not his wife.”
“He said you appeared at his shop five days ago and that you had on your person some bones.”
“Felix!” John shouts. “What are you suggesting?”
But Saint Katherine’s Tongue nods her head slowly. “Yes. I appeared at his shop five days ago.”
“And where are the bones, Madame?”