A Stolen Tongue

P
RAISE FOR
A S
TOLEN
T
ONGUE
:

“
A Stolen Tongue
is that rare thing: a page-turner that is at the same time intellectually stimulating, very moving, and highly original in execution. The best historical thriller I have read since Umberto Eco's
The Name of the Rose
.”

—Alain de Botton, author of
How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel

“A curious novel . . . A fascinating and often very funny re-creation of a unique medieval pilgrimage, coupled with a wise and thought-provoking evocation of the role of saints and martyrs in the church-centered time.”

—Barbara Hodge Hall,
The Anniston Star

“You wonder: how could Sheri Holman have written her novel,
A Stolen Tongue
, without spending half her life in some vast library, the other half hiking and sailing from Ulm, Germany, to Mount Sinai? From the outset she seduces you into a world of priests, rogues, saints, a world bright with horizon, wonder, piety. Sheri Holman's prose, tart, racy, and somber, will sing in your soul a long while.”

—Frank McCourt, author of
Angela's Ashes
and
Teacher Man: A Memoir

“This book is an ambush. Holman's touch is so tender, her seduction so sly, she'll have you believing you
disdain
her fussy and virtuous Brother Fleix—before it hits you that you've fallen in love with the man. Hopelessly, shamelessly,
A Stolen Tongue
is brilliant in its evocation of fifteenth-century life, gripping and suspenseful as it sweeps across the Holy Land. But what most enthralls us is our
own
journey—our pilgrimage into the landscape of Felix's great wobbling heart. This is an uncompromisingly original novel, a rapture.”

—George Dawes Green, author of
The Juror

“Widely varied notions of faith and mission, from the conventional to the bizarre, color this intriguing historical thriller . . . First-novelist Holman pulls her readers along with odd riddles and careful suspense. . . . This is a strong debut, an often enthralling yarn that draws the reader right in among the pilgrims on their harrowing trek.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Told in language, images, and humor that mixes something like Monty Python's quirky Holy Grail humor with the unseemly
Silence of the Lambs
.”

—Creative Loafing Online (Charlotte)

“
A Stolen Tongue
is splendid in its evocation of fifteenth-century life. In addition, it is an astounding story and a fascinating mystery. . . . [A] marvelous historical thriller.”

—Dr. Melvin H. Schreiber,
County Daily News
(Galveston)

A STOLEN TONGUE

SHERI HOLMAN

Copyright © 1997 by Sheri Holman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Holman, Sheri.

A stolen tongue / Sheri Holman. — 1st ed.

   p.       cm.

eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4767-8

I. Title.

PS3558.035596S76   1997

813′.54—dc20                      96-42390

Design by Laura Hammond Hough

Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

To Sean
Who I hope will wander with me, always

T
HE
P
ORT OF
C
ANDIA
, C
RETE
J
UNE
1483

We are separated from death by the span of only four fingers, those of us at sea; and from what I can tell, it is that certain knowledge, more than any monster or misfortune, that terrorizes pilgrims on their ships. If you were never unaware, not even for a moment, that a hand's-width of wood alone stood between you and the fathomless waters, wouldn't
you
be inclined to drink a little too much? I ask you, is it fair then to label a man a buffoon and a jackass, as I heard someone call him, for falling, drunk, into the Ocean? Who on board this ship hasn't, out of fear, drunk himself nearly overboard?

I stand beside the winch while the first mate's crew hoists our dead burgher off the harbor floor. Four galley slaves wait on the wharf below, their arms lifted to catch all three hundred pounds of him, their knees flexed in anticipation. They will walk him, dripping, through the ribbon streets of Candia, to the convent I recommended, just outside the city's gate. There they will help dig him a grave and stand solemnly by while I say a mass to speed Burgher Schmidhans's lurching, insensible soul on to Purgatory.

“Oh, goodness. Was he that fat?”

My patron arrives just as the burgher's thunderous Bavarian body rains upon the slaves below. They turn away their faces and reach up blindly to unhook him.

“Bloated,” I offer.

Lord Tucher and I knew him only as a fellow German who lodged, as all German pilgrims lodge, at Zu der Fleuten in Venice and who aspired to take this pilgrim ship over Contarini's because we were on it. His berth was next to mine belowdeck, and though he kept me from my bedtime prayers too often with his idle settling of the world's problems, I blame him for one thing only. On nights after the lanterns went out and the waves groaned around us like evil spirits in a nursery, he would draw my attention to the worthless curve of gopherwood, as he called it, that separated us from a watery grave. “For the length of the trip,” he wondered out loud, “shouldn't we call
that
Savior?”

“Let's go.” My patron touches my back. “Ursus is waiting.”

The Mediterranean sun has been kind to Ursus Tucher, my patron's son, bleaching the first dark smudge above his upper lip, buying him a few more months of childhood. He squats at the bottom of the gangplank, watching a naked brown boy repair a crack in the ship's hull. The water is so clear we can see him, three feet under, kicking out his legs like a frog, carefully painting the crack with tar.

“I bet Schmidhans's head made a hole,” Ursus tells us. “When he fell.”

Ahead of us, the galley slaves count three and bounce the burgher to their shoulders. We follow this giant dripping horseshoe crab as it slowly crawls away from the sea, past wooden doors that bang wide to reveal bolts of tamarind silk and orange-dusted spice barrels, beyond fish stalls where women clad sluttishly in the Mediterranean fashion lean over baskets and buy those creatures that leap highest for their dangling breasts. I look over my shoulder to see the ship's crew raise a black silk flag between Captain Lando's lion banner of Saint Mark and the immense white and red cross ensign of the Holy Sepulchre. I've observed that Lando only pranks up the ship when something is to be gained thereby—when he wants to impress or intimidate a foreign power. At sea, with only an audience of pilgrims, he furls the holy flag of Jerusalem and hides from us the proof of our journey, begrudging even that little comfort a pilgrim might find, contemplating it at sea. Lando must want to
advertise the empty space on board our ship. Certainly reverence plays no part in hoisting the black flag; he would have left Schmid-hans to be picked clean by fishes, had not Lord Tucher bribed him with five ducats.

My patron looks down the dirty Greek lane, perplexed. “I don't know what I was expecting.” He frowns. “Marble?”

What a discerning patron I've found! I know Abbot Fuchs worried about my traveling so long in the company of secular persons, but Lord Tucher is a grave, reverent man, much concerned with the state of souls, his own and ours. He, more than any other, saw how Schmidhans's drowned body had become like a magnet, luring pilgrims to the ship's side to stare past their reflections into our dead friend's aqueous eyes. He saw his own son, Ursus, walk away from his lessons to stand with the common crowd and wonder at the mythical properties of water: how like slumbering Neptune Schmid-hans looked in death, magnified and pale, the wild hairs of his beard stiffening into strands of purling bubbles. Something had to be done, Lord Tucher knew, for Schmidhans's corpse was becoming a distraction.

My patron walks purposefully beside me, his money pouch jingling softly against his chest. He dresses strictly by the pilgrim's handbook, in a white robe with red cross chasuble and a gray felt hat, lovingly stitched with crosses by virgins dedicated to God. He lets his sparse facial hair grow, as all male pilgrims must, and shoulders a leather pilgrim's scrip containing water skin, bread, and hymnal. Lord Tucher is conscious of the town's eyes on him, as head mourner to the horseshoe crab, and stares piously back at the Greeks, who cross themselves and shrink into their shops when we pass. Ursus capers around us, peeking in this window, spitting in that. He will be fourteen at summer's end and will straightaway trade his pilgrim's clothes for a page's uniform in the household of the illustrious Count Eberhart of Württemberg. Ursus is young to be on pilgrimage, but his father rashly promised him a knighthood of the Holy Sepulchre to raise his status among the other pages, and the child doggedly holds him to his word.

“Why did you pick this particular church, Friar?” Ursus grumbles. “It's so far from the ship.”

“I understand they have a fine wine cellar there,” Lord Tucher says.

“The Franciscans, where we are headed,” I tell them, “have Saint Katherine of Alexandria's hand.”

“Saint Katherine again!” Ursus cries. “You make us stop at every statue of her. You make us kiss every painting!”

“But this will be the first relic we'll venerate on the way to her tomb in Sinai.”

Lord Tucher nods. “That will be edifying for us.”

Edifying indeed! It will be as if the heavenly cloister opened its gates and she pricked her ear at our arrival. It will be as if she raised her paper-nicked finger from the book in her lap and shyly extended her hand to earth, for me to kiss and press to my cheek. I chafe when our slaves spill Schmidhans across the path leading out of town and we are forced to wait while they pick him clean of pine needles.

“Look, Father, that must be it!”

Ursus speeds ahead, up to the thick daub walls and iron gate surrounding the monastery. Carved herringbone detail work softens the edifice of the church, and a red dome, skirted with flaring tile roofs, gives it the slightly effeminate look of all Eastern buildings. Upon Ursus's persistent yanking of the entry bell, a brown-robed figure comes to the gate.

I introduce myself. “I am Friar Felix Fabri with the Dominican Preaching Brothers in Ulm. We would like to inter this drowned man in your cemetery.”

The Franciscan eyes us suspiciously, taking in my black-and-white Dominican robes, our pilgrims' chasubles, the slippery, peat-flecked flesh of corpse Schmidhans. As a rule, the animal- and poverty-loving Franciscans have no great fondness for the more intellectual Dominican order, but at least I'm not decked out in the tall hat and showy chin beard of our common enemy, the Greek Orthodox.

“And, of course, we'll pay for masses,” Lord Tucher adds.

The gate swings open.

The Franciscan leads us through the dark church and out under a shady latticed arbor plaited with pea-sized grapes, just flushing
purple. This region of Crete is famed for its malvoisie, the sweet boon to pilgrims and reviver of flagging spirits. Would that Schmid-hans had not been revived even unto death.