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shape of a wheel. I never knew whether to believe such stories, but she did have the look of one whom Death had embraced.
    â€œBehind her sat a beautiful man, whose guarded face—I remember thinking at the time—looked like one scratched out and repainted. Our church in Candia had once been a temple to Dionysus, so I had seen it before; beneath the slender oval faces of Saints Peter and Paul, you can still make out the fleshy bloating of our wine god, grape vines centuries ago straightened into haloes, and leopard skins smoothed into draped togas. Her brother, they said he was. He sat at a desk behind her, his ancient watchfulness barely hidden by scholarly dispassion, collecting the words as they fell from his sister’s lips like a midwife catching drops of the Virgin’s breast milk.
    â€œâ€˜How may Saint Katherine intercede for you?’ asked the Tongue. Her brother barely glanced at me but kept his protective eyes fixed upon his sister. I hadn’t slept in days and could barely tell her. I shuffled forward and placed this icon at the Tongue’s feet, lifting a fold of her hem to my lips. I begged her help. For weeks I’d dreamed of drowning, a cold horrible death where ropes of water snaked into my body and flushed away my soul. I should have gone to Saint Nicholas or Saint Andrew, some patron of the sea, I know, but my dream always ended with a young girl’s body replacing my own, floating peacefully on to shore. I wanted Saint Katherine to take this strange, drowned girl to her and restore my sleep. I wanted not to be some creature of the Poets, nightly casting my own death upon the waters, until the day I found myself submerged and dumbfounded, raging at the will of God.”
    Constantine breaks off and hides his face in his hands. He must have prayed to every saint under Heaven the afternoon Schmidhans’s fat, portentous body passed before him on the backstreets of Candia, fearing, yet horribly certain, he would replace that cheerful drunk on our ship. He must have turned to his wife and begged her, for the tenth time, to take the overland route to Sinai: up to Thessalonica, over the land bridge to Constantinople, down to Antioch, across the breadth of Turkey into Syria and Palestine. God would preserve him on land, he knew, against bandits and marauders, through hunger and sandstorm.
Just please
—I can hear how he begged her—
don’t make me take the drowned man’s place!
    â€œWhat did she tell you?” John asks the merchant. “Did she take the dreams away?”
    Constantine peers at John through spread fingers, his face red and blotchy from shame. Slowly, he shakes his head.
    â€œHer words made no sense until her brother translated them for me.
Water,
she said, almost laughing. Then,
Sleep
. At first I thought she was only repeating what I said to her, but then her brother revealed their meaning. ‘You will indeed spend your eternal sleep underwater if you do not help her,’ he told me solemnly. Dear God, I thought, my dreams are true! Then he came over and placed hisink-stained hands on his sister’s shoulders. ‘Katherine has revealed to my sister that her body is raw from too much handling. Saint Katherine told my sister she wants a new skin.’”
    What could Constantine possibly mean by that? A deep and insidious fear creeps over me, brothers, leading me to wild speculation. Katherine’s bones are housed within skins of pure silver and gold, encrusted with opals, emeralds, and diamonds. Flayed of these reliquaries, her sacred joints and organs would be nakedly vulnerable, wholly at the mercy of diabolical thieves like those who took her hand and ear. Twice, now, the merchant’s wife has been present when relics disappeared: first at Candia, when the handsome stranger tracked her to the monastery; and then today, when Katherine’s ear vanished from Rhodes.
    â€œI later found out,” Constantine says,