A Stolen Tongue Read Online Free

Where our habits were fine wool and silk, his was desert homespun. Where our cheeks were smooth and soft like women’s, his errupted into a long, wiry beard like a prophet’s. He told my abbot he had walked overland from the Sinai desert, thathe was a young man when he left and now he shuffled like a grandfather. Under his arm, he carried a small carpet tied at both ends with rope, and he asked my abbot’s permission to solicit funds with what was inside it.”
    John’s serious face makes me blush at the foolishness of my story and fall silent. It was a humid day in Basle when the monk came through. The entire monastery crowded around the altar, but I pushed between the sweating bodies to be closest. With swift, practiced movements, the monk arranged four finger joints to spell
K.M.,
for Katherina Martyr, and placed at the four cardinal points around them an eyelid, a toe, a vial of milk, and a piece of silk dipped in her oil. Back in the Age of Miracles, her bones used to produce enough oil for the monks to burn their lamps year round; but by the time I was a boy, oil had to be coaxed from the bones by briskly rubbing them with silk.
    â€œFelix is in love,”
someone whispered behind me. But how could I not be? On our prie-dieu, Katherine stood with sword and wheel on the right hand of Mary. In our ambulatory, she smiled down from her fluted pillar on the way to our library. As one of the Fourteen Heavenly Helpers she was chiseled onto the ceiling that to my mind touched the Celestial City. Katherine was everywhere, the most popular girl in town, the scholar, the philosopher, the king’s daughter, the
East
—and suddenly here she was in front of me, pieces of a corporeal, human woman. I wanted to kiss that monk for bringing her to us; he had reversed the route of pilgrimage for a boy too young to leave his abbey. He brought me my first holy lust.
    â€œIf, in pieces, Katherine could find her way to me,” I say aloud, “I, as a whole man, can certainly find my way back to her.”
    â€œAnd Lord Tucher has agreed to take you there?” John asks.
    â€œHe swore on his own life.”
    My friend winces and gingerly reaches into his mouth.
    â€œHow is your tormentor?” I ask. John’s toothy, open smile has been troubled by a rebel molar rotting in his jaw.
    â€œI’ll get Conrad to pull it tomorrow.”
    â€œPromise?”
    â€œPromise.” He smiles.
    â€œIs this where the dead man slept?”
    John and I look up, startled, to see a man approach, hidden inside a heavy cloak of the Homesick. They hang upon his arms, wrestle with his trunk; one wipes a small flow of blood from the man’s swollen lip with a handkerchief.
    â€œWhat happened to him?” I ask.
    â€œFell down the steps,” one whispers.
    The man throws them off and faces me. “This was his spot, wasn’t it? The drowned man’s spot?”
    I turn to John. I think I saw this man in Candia, shrinking back from the pale white sausage fingers of Schmidhans’s sluicing corpse. He speaks the maritime merchant lingua franca with a nasal accent. Once the Homesick fall away, his long black robe and drawstring cap reveal him further as a tradesman.
    â€œBut soon we will land in Jerusalem, yes?” he asks hopefully. “Then on to Sinai?”
    â€œMy party certainly will be continuing our pilgrimage,” I tell him. “I can’t vouch for anyone else. There have been rumors.”
    â€œWhat sort of rumors?” He fingers his bonnet string into his mouth and nervously chews it.
    â€œThe captain spreads them,” I say. “If we don’t sail back with him—if we cross the desert to Sinai instead—he loses half his fare.”
    John gently unties the mattress the merchant has strapped across his back and drops it over the fat-fisted chalk scrawl,
G. Schmdhns
. Without a word, the merchant sits down, picking worriedly at one wiry overgrown