A Stolen Tongue by Sheri Holman

puts his head in his hands, the better to concentrate. I position myself in the pine grove so I am facing the Church of Saint Paul, there better to see the merchant’s wife when she sneaks in.
    â€œFriar, didn’t we just have a mass?” Ursus pleads.
    â€œThe Sermon of Truth and Illusion,” I begin. “Delivered this Saint John’s Eve by Friar Felix Fabri of the Dominican Preaching Brothers in Ulm for his dear friends John, Conrad, Constantine, and Master Ursus Tucher.
    â€œNow a sermon, like any new creature, is best begun with a birth, so before we climb the two mountains Venus and Sinai, let me first speak of a pair of births, one false and one true, that occurred in the shadow of this pleasure garden.
    â€œWhen the god Jupiter took umbrage with his father and severed his genitals with a scythe, the blood from those organs frothed upon the sea until a lady was born. Does anyone know who this lady was?” I point to my patron’s son. “Ursus!”
    â€œThe Lady Venus?”
    â€œCorrect. And though she was a most beautiful woman, what was she born from? That’s right. She was born from a deposed god’s pollution.
    â€œNow some centuries later, another birth graced this island, even though its inhabitants were sunk deep in Venus’s harlotry. A daughter was born to the vice-consul of Cyprus, before he was granted the kingship of Alexandria: a child as chaste as Venus was corrupt, as intellectual as Venus was sexual. Perhaps it was memories of her days on Venus’s island that prompted her words to the Emperor Maxentius: ‘If you are ruled by the mind, you are king; if by the body, you are a slave.’ Does anyone know who spoke those words?” I point to my patron’s son. “Ursus!”
    â€œSaint Katherine! Saint Katherine spoke those words!”
    â€œCorrect. So, two births: one the daughter of a king on his way down, one the daughter of a king on his way up. One from pollution, one from honest employed parents.
    â€œLet us now turn to their mountains.”
    I glance at Saint Paul’s church, but still no one approaches.
    â€œI think you know where the two mountains in question are situated in the world. The Mount of Venus rises up from the sea on the well-endowed island of Cyprus. It overlooks fields and streams, plowed lands and vineyards.
    â€œThe Mount of Sinai lies in a land completely opposite, in a rough, dead country, encompassed by barren rocks and poisonous snakes. A man might sail to Cyprus in the company of jolly Europeans, but to reach Sinai he would have to brave camel bite and Arab attack, perhaps then only to die of convulsive thirst in the wilderness.”
    Constantine shudders.
    â€œAnd yet, here come into play Truth and Illusion. For all its shade and abundance, for all its accessibility and cool breezes, the mount upon which we now sit, the Mount of Venus, is a dung heap of corruption, a foul squirming pyramid of worms. It is home to a pagan prostitute who, not content with debauching her own body, had to sully an entire continent, spreading her contagion even unto Tuscany, where it might infect foolish German travelers.
    â€œWitness, friends, how illusory then is Sinai. On the surface, it appears a forbidding, friendless rock, tempered in flame, abandoned by God. But search for Truth. You will find it in the shape of a young girl who chose
this
mount for her eternal home. For all its heat and dust, for all its scorpions, sand, and silence, Sinai is a paradise! Look with your heart and you will see blue plashing fountains, lush green groves laden with fruit. Sinai is no wasteland—no—it rewards the bold pilgrim a thousandfold with its promise of Heaven! How easy to reach inviting Mount Venus. How perilous, and thus how profitable to a man’s soul, to achieve Mount Sinai. It is as close to martyrdom as a man might come in this Age of Faith!”
    From a distance, I see a woman start up the