Read Online A Stolen Tongue by Sheri Holman - Free Book Online

Friar”—Constantine looks upon me wearily—“that if Arsinoë meant to test her saint, you were the means by which she received her answer.”
    â€œPlease, Constantine,” John interrupts, when I am about to challenge the merchant. “Your wife disappeared along with a pricelessrelic. Surely, this was the agency not of Heaven but of a malevolent human being.”
    Constantine’s pallor exceeds even that of his worst seasickness. He closes his eyes.
    â€œIn the end, all became perverted, Archdeacon,” the merchant says dreamily, heedless of our presence. “I should never have followed that path to her house.
    â€œI knew when I saw the makeshift stalls hung with sharp wheel medallions and cloudy vials of Katherine milk, when I started up the long trampled mud path through the almond grove, that I had taken a dangerous road. Mostly women milled about, pulling their teenaged daughters away from the Tongue’s wild hibiscus bushes, for what girl could resist picking one of those lewd red flowers and tucking it behind her ear? I asked the women why they had come, wondering if their troubles were as great as mine. ‘My daughter’s womb is restless,’ one said. ‘It migrates to her nose and bleeds during her monthlies.’ I looked over at the poor girl squatting in the grass, breathing through her mouth. She pressed a stained handkerchief to her face. Another mother told me, ‘We took our daughter to Saint Paraskevie’s shrine closer to our house, but Saint Paraskevie told us Katherine’s Tongue had to intercede for us. Paraskevie has no power over pregnancy, you see, and our daughter has been with child now thirteen months.’
    â€œThe road was crowded with fat women, unable to walk unassisted. Old men with sores. And dogs, everywhere. They ran in packs and begged food from the pilgrims. Someone said they were holy dogs, sacred to Katherine’s Tongue. It wasn’t true, but the dogs got fed.”
    John glances over at me. The merchant is rambling, nearly incoherent. What does this have to do with his wife’s disappearance, or who might have wished her harm? John is about to recall him to the point when he speaks again.
    â€œYou should have seen her in her own room, Archdeacon.” He opens his eyes on John. “Back then, little crowded settlements of icons flickered behind small candles, set on every table and chair, tucked into corners. In the beginning, Katherine only wanted to seeherself. Most pilgrims knew and brought as an offering some small painting of the Saint, some richly plated with African silver, some smudged with eggshell tempera. You clutched your icon and walked into her hot, dark room, mingling your nervous body stench with the chamber’s melted wax and incense and something else less definable: the lingering desperation of the supplicant who preceded you. All these smells Arsinoë used. She spoke them aloud as you came in, sketching you for her saint:
Vines, oak, tar,
she said.
Onions, civet, clay.
You became aware of each aroma the moment she named it, dismantling and reconfiguring your own familiar essence, startled that everything you had passed through, during a day, clung and was knowable. When she had the measure of you in the dark, she lit a taper before her, and you were granted your first close look at Saint Katherine’s Tongue.”
    Constantine wets his lips, but by now John, at least, has no desire to stop him. My friend breathes deeply, with purpose, trying to sniff out the narrator’s truth.
    â€œThe first time I saw her, she was seated on a simple chair,” the merchant whispers hoarsely, “her hair virgin loose around her shoulders. Dressed for bed, in a white shift, she looked more like a fever patient than an oracle, wasted and thin with dark, ringed eyes. They said her mother died just as the child’s head emerged, and when the afterbirth slithered out it formed the