A Stolen Tongue by Sheri Holman Page B

down with mutual distaste.
    â€œWhy is she wearing Mother’s Venetian comb?” Ursus asks, pointing to a gleam of ivory worked into the woman’s ornate auburn hair. “We bought it as a present.”
    Lord Tucher shifts uncomfortably. “The nice lady lost her comb this morning, so I loaned her ours. We’ll buy your mother a new one in Jerusalem.”
    â€œI think someone took it.” Emelia Priuli speaks in a flat Italian contralto.
    â€œMen are strangely apt to play the thief on shipboard,” I tell her. “For example, while you are writing, if you lay down your pen and turn your face away, your pen will be lost, even though you are among men you know.”
    â€œSo, you enjoyed Cyprus, son?” Lord Tucher swiftly changes the subject. “What did you see?”
    â€œFriar Felix took us to a stinking dunghill crawling with worms.”
    â€œWe climbed the Mount of Venus,” I say.
    â€œAnd he told us all about Mount Sinai. I can’t wait to cross the desert, Father. I want to die for Saint Katherine.”
    Lord Tucher looks at me sharply. “There will be no dying for anyone, Ursus. And we are not going to Mount Sinai. Madama Priuli tells me they’ve had news at court that Saint Katherine’s Monastery was attacked by Arabs. The place burned to the ground.”
    â€œWhat?”
I cry.
    â€œWe all wept when we heard.” The harlot wipes away an imaginary tear. “Saint Katherine’s is no more.”

Saint John’s Fire
    The sailors choke the ship with necklaces of Saint John’s fire, flout the usual prohibition against lights on deck by hoisting lanterns from the benches aloft to the maintop. Other crewmen scamper barefoot across the rigging with lighted torches in their mouths, pretending, in the manner of clowns, to drop like Pentecost upon the pilgrims.
    â€œI’m going to bed,” Ursus says dully.
    â€œYou’ll miss the fires,” I tell him.
    â€œI don’t care.”
    I lean my head against the mast and close my eyes. It’s been a week of thefts. My pen, Katherine’s ear, Priuli’s comb, my reason for pilgrimage.
    I argued for hours, but what does the Betrayer Tucher care about Katherine? We’ve been hearing rumors of the monastery’s destruction for weeks, and yet only from sources close to Captain Lando. La Priuli is cousin to his wife; of course she would willingly spread his lies! Only a man as faithless as Lord Tucher would believe them.
    â€œFelix, you look so somber. Be happy. It’s my name day.”
    John shouts into my ear and passes me an open bottle of malvoisie. The wine is thick and sweet, like syrup.
    â€œI know you’re upset, but you must trust God to have a plan.”
    I’ve been too deeply betrayed to be trustful. Instead, I take another few long swigs of malvoisie. Saint John’s lanterns spin the whole deck red.
    â€œIsn’t that better?” John asks. I feel the wine travel hotly down my arms, swell my stiff-flexing fingers. Smoke from the lanterns grays out the other pilgrims; they cavort like insubstantial shades behind a filmy, dying scrim. Even John, with his whorling-smoke beard and fire-shadow face, seems to me beyond the grave.
    We use the word
fire
to mean such a complexity of things. Fire as a deliberate combustion; fire coupled with water to represent the necessities of life; fire to destroy, as a means of torture, to eradicate a body; fire from the heavens; the fires of love. All meanings come back to the simple etymology “
ignis,
”
qui sua omnia “ignit” natura,
fire that consumes all things by its very nature. And yet, if we go back even further, how can we separate that nature from
its
origin? Prometheus stole fire from the gods to give man his first guilty warmth; thus the true etymology of fire and destruction and love is theft.
    I look back to shore and see tiny bonfires dotting the mountainside. Why do we