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“her brother had been giving the same response to all the pilgrims. Most, wrapped up in their own private troubles, didn’t understand the needs of the saint. Some of us, unhappily—Oh, God!—some of us did.”
    â€œWhat do you mean by that, Constantine?” I ask the merchant sharply. “What could Saint Katherine possibly need that Heaven does not provide?”
    â€œOh, Arsinoë, where have you gone?” The merchant moans. “I am so afraid.” Constantine throws himself over his wife’s trunk and sobs like a child.
    I have no idea how to comfort him, for I cannot shake my own rising horror. Is it the great waste of sea that haunts this wracked merchant, knowing it might at any moment reach into his sleep and claim him? Or is it the specter of a fish across the floorboards, harboring the spirit of a drowned German burgher? I glance at John, but he seems as confused as I, wondering, as I do, whether Constantine’s fear has less to do with his wife’s disappearance than with some horrible secret they hold in common.
    â€œDo not despair, Constantine,” John says, when the merchant’s wails quiet a bit. “Tomorrow we reach Cyprus. If your wife is able, she will surely meet the boat there.”
    â€œWe had a plan, Archdeacon,” Constantine says flatly, wiping away his tears. “She would protect me from the sea, and I wouldmake certain she reached Mount Sinai. Our first day aboard ship, and I’ve already lost her.”
    The merchant’s agony is really too great to behold.
    â€œLook on the bright side.” I flounder, sounding unconvinced, even to myself. “Perhaps your wife was not stolen but merely wandered off and is even now booking passage back to Crete. She’ll be waiting for you when you return with clean sheets on the bed and a spinach pie on the table. And she will laugh at how worried you once were.”
    â€œThat would be quite a feat, Friar,” The merchant says to me, letting his head fall back heavily against the cabin wall, “since Arsinoë doesn’t even know where I live.”

T HE P ORT OF P APHOS , C YPRUS S AINT J OHN’S E VE J UNE 23, 1483
The Mount of Venus
    I have often read in pilgrims’ accounts that one should not pause long on the isle of Cyprus because the air here is poisonous to Germans. They say healthy winds get trapped behind the Caucasus and Armenian mountains and thus are not able to circulate, leaving this place both stagnant and unwholesome. If that were so, would the delightful Venus have swum out to Cyprus when she found herself unexpectedly made flesh from foam? Would Noah’s son Japheth have established a new world on a noxious island? No, my brothers, discount this rumor. The air of Cyprus is not poison, merely ill-suited to Germans who are born and raised in hard, cold, consumptive air and who cannot live well in light climates where their intemperate eating and drinking may not be indulged.
    I urge you to cast aside your superstition, brothers, because my patron was unable to do so. After much pleading and cajoling, he allowed Ursus and me to go ashore but elected, himself, to remain behind, far from the injurious vapors of land. Of course, his decision had nothing in the world to do with the Venetian lady-in-waiting who boarded our galley this morning.
    Constantine nearly threw himself over the ship’s side when he saw her small boat approach. My heart broke to watch all expectation, all hope, pool in his trembling lower lip, when Emelia Priuli, former waiting woman to the Queen of Cyprus, cousin by marriage to our captain, Peter Lando, climbed up the ladder. I’ll leave it to you to determine why a woman of her youth and beauty should beending her days in a Jerusalem convent; I’ll be circumspect and say only this: She is a Jezebel if ever I’ve seen one, and a scheming Delilah to trim the locks of this ship! All the ringleted, earringed pilgrim