The monk heard that a ship had arrived carrying one of the dog-headed people whom travelers speak of when they tell tall tales of the one-eyed and the winged, and he went out to the docks to see if it was true. This is how he first laid eyes on the relic thief; this is how the voyage to steal the corpse of Saint Nicholas began.
In an age of sickness; in a time of rage; in an epoch when tyrants take their seats beneath the white domes of capitals—I call upon Saint Nicholas, gift giver, light bringer, wonder worker, who saved the living from drowning and pasted together the dead from their pickling jars, who even after death gave of himself in medicinal ooze; I ask Saint Nicholas to tell us a tale to pass a winter night, so that when we rise in the morning, we may feel resolute in the new dawn.
I will tell the story of the heist of St. Nicholas’s body from its tomb. I will tell it as it was told to me by musicians and drunkards and guidebooks and lovers.
Though I am an unbeliever, I pray for faith.
There was a pox in Bari, and half the town had fevers. The countryside shunned the city and its narrow streets for fear of sickness. The monks of Saint Benedict’s stayed locked within their walls, singing troped Kyries to ask God for clemency. “Christ—who removed the blemishes from the sick man and banished demons in the hogs—have mercy upon us.” Farmers who passed outside their sanctuary heard the echo of their chants and looked up to the sky to see if any of it was helping.
Word came down from the Archbishop of Bari that the monks should keep vigil each night for a week, praying to St. Nicholas for healing and guidance. They knelt in the cold chapel without sleep. Eventually, one, Nicephorus, fell asleep and was visited with a sacred dream.
When he woke, he said he wanted to go out and minister to the sick in the city, taking them food and water, despite all dangers. Nicephorus had an irritatingly pure and generous heart.
“In the dream, the saint told me we cannot wait,” said Nicephorus. “We must leave our nest.”
“You are sure?” said the Abbot. “The Blessed Nicholas?”
Nicephorus was uneasy. “He was dead. It has been six centuries. All the people in the dream were made of clay. But Saint Nicholas chanted and I heard. I will take it as a personal calling.”
He went out with a basket of barley cakes and a ewer and visited the sick and drew water for them.
One said to him, “Put me in a wheelbarrow.”
“You’re not ready for the graveyard,” said Nicephorus.
“You’re hale.”
“I want to go over to the docks.”
Nicephorus did not understand. He looked to the man’s wife, who was leaning against the wellhead. She shrugged. “I’m already better,” she said. “If he wants to die in a wheelbarrow, that’s the kind of thing his father did.”
“There’s a dog-headed man on a ship. They’re talking about it next door. I want to see it before I’m dead.”
“You are not likely to die soon,” said Nicephorus.
“I am not likely to see another dog-headed man who can trim a lateen sail,” the man said, and so he stood up roughly and shambled to the wheelbarrow and sat down in it.
Nicephorus rolled him through the tall, muddy streets and passageways toward the port.
The man said, to make conversation, “So you’ve had a sacred dream from the Blessed Nicholas.”
“I cannot say that. We had sung hymns and sequences to St. Nicholas for a week. He was in my thoughts when I fell asleep. I do not know he sent the dream himself from his cloud.”
“How did he seem?”
“Dead. Seven centuries.”
“Did he seem discontented?”
“With us? He did.”
“With death. He knows what it’s like, now. Did he have advice? The weighing of souls?”
Nicephorus smiled. “What do you expect?”
“He might recommend we take ballast up with us. To tip the balances in our favor. He is a friend to sailors and knows the value of weight in the hold.”
Nicephorus rolled the wheelbarrow around a rut. “There is no cargo on that final journey.”
They bumped and rolled through a tunnel, out an old triumphal arch, and toward the blue Adriatic.
As they approached the wharves and warehouses outside the city walls, the piazzas of Bari were no longer empty. There were the crowds of sailors, the merchants, the grandees in their capes, the familiar heckling and haggling. Turbaned Byzantine workmen, Norman soldiers, accountants from the Caliphate in Egypt. Bari sat at the heel of Italy, the crossroads of the Mediterranean, a port at the center of the world: a city once Roman, once Arabian, twice Byzantine, and now Norman. Nicephorus had never been far from Bari, but he was used to foreign crowds: Jewish merchants who traveled back and forth from Córdoba to Samarkand; Christian pilgrims striking out for distant shrines with their trains of slaves; Muslim sailors stopping for a few days on their way to Venice; and those wanderers who spoke of no allegiance to nation and homeland, just to litanies of goods (Widhari cloth, Palermo silk, Basran sugar, borax from Lake Van). They teemed upon the Barese quays and thoroughfares.
Amid the grain ships and the fishing boats with their sails furled and the great warships, the dromons, at dock with their ranks of oars up like the flippers of Leviathan, there was a table set outside a taverna with a crowd gathered around it, pushing for a glimpse of the dog-headed man. Comedians shouted things like “Over here, boy there’s a good boy!” and “Bowwow!” which seemed blunt and unwelcoming. Nicephorus winced.
The man in the barrow yelled out, “Let me scratch you between your ears!”
“Maybe quieter,” said the monk.
“Sure,” said the man in the barrow. “He might be startled by loud noises.”
The dog-man was seated at the table next to some sort of Tartar. Both were dressed in old brocade qabas, scalded with sea salt and smudged with labor. The Tartar ate with his hands, like all decent men did. The dog-man had brought with him a weird metal claw on a stalk which held the meat down with three tines as he cut with a knife.
“All very entertaining, gentlemen, ladies,” said the dog-man, waving irritably at the crowd agog.
“A dog-man and a Tartar in one day,” said the man in the wheelbarrow. “Sometimes life serves me shit on a trencher, but today Fortune hands me a fucking dumpling.”
“I will leave you briefly,” said the monk. “I need to call upon the Sisters of Saint Scholastica. If you need something, stagger.”
Nicephorus went to see the sisters in their convent by the seawalls. They had suffered only one death within their whited chapel. Several more were fevered.
“Could you intercede with your new friend?” said the Abbess.
“In the wheelbarrow?”
The Abbess squinted. “The Blessed Nicholas. Abbot Helias told me you’d had a dream. The Archbishop is thrilled.”
“I do not know the dream was inspired,” said Nicephorus unhappily.
“Ask the saint what we can do to lift this sickness.”
“I simply received a dream.”
“Ask him on our behalf.”
Nicephorus insisted: “I have no reliable avenue of communication with the undead Bishop of Myra.”
The Abbess drew her fingers across the sacred linens on the altar. She did not meet his eyes. “He looks so severe in his icons.”
“Not severe,” said Nicephorus. “Just balding.”
He asked whether the Abbess needed any little thing sent over from the monastery of St. Benedict. His abbot, he said, would be happy to comply.
When he got back to the taverna, the crowd had thinned around the Tartar and the cynocephale. The two adventurers were chatting with some port girls who Nicephorus knew from his dealings in the town: Gallenice and Aquilina. Nicephorus’s sick charge was listening to the chitchat with wide-eyed curiosity. Some Samaritan had rolled the man’s wheelbarrow closer to the table.
“You mistake me,” said the dog-headed person. “I am no bitch.”
“You look like a very good boy to me,” said Aquilina huskily.
The man in the barrow said, “It talks really well.”
“As do you, my malingering lazar,” said the cynocephale.
“Do you get friendly with mankind ladies?” asked Aquilina.
“Not generally,” the dog-man said, swallowing goat, his tail in a slow wag. “I find my sentimental evenings are often foiled by the oviform tang.”
The Tartar and Gallenice were admiring each other.
“And you’re . . . ?” said Gallenice.
“A relic hunter,” said the Tartar.
“Any samples?” she teased. “Sell me your wares.”
“I sold a church the very finger John the Baptist pointed with when he said, ‘Behold the Lamb of God.’ ”
“Anything that might protect a girl from disease?” She leaned close to him.
Nicephorus found himself interested in the man’s relaxed repose upon the bench, the sprawl of his legs beneath the table; and he wondered why he was so offended at the smile the man gave Gallenice, why he was irritated at the contract being drawn up in the air between saint hunter and provincial waitress.
“I retrieved a phial of the seed of Adam, First Man, from the mountains of the East.”
“Did you now?”
“It was from a shrine in a walled garden near the gates of dawn.”
“And you found it?”
“Imagine this, ladies,” said the Tartar pirate. “Within our living seed float countless homunculi, waiting for life, each of which contains the next generation. And within those homunculi are curled, even smaller, the homunculi of our children’s children. We were within our parents’ seed. They were within our grandparents’. So, within Adam’s seed, if you could examine it closely enough, you would find all human generations, the whole history of man, manikins of all of us nested within each other, like the ziggurats of Mataram—a series of steps, ever broadening, crammed with faces and carved figures striving and loving.” At “loving,” he gave her a kind smile, which made the monk step to the side of the wheelbarrow and announce to his friend, “We should return you to your wife.”
“In Adam’s seed, however,” the Tartar continued, “there is one difference: Suspended within that blessed solution, we are all laid out, one generation to the next—but without sin. When this seed fell, that first bite from the Tree of Knowledge had not yet been taken. We had not yet been corrupted. Adam’s seed is prelapsarian. During our conception, deep in our parents’ viscera, we receive sin like the pox. We are born screaming with it. But within the seed of the first man, our images are perfect and unblemished. What floats in Adam’s semen is God’s hope for what we all should have been—a perfected history, not what we became outside the gates of Eden.”
The monk couldn’t stand any more flirtation. He lifted the handles of the wheelbarrow with an aggressively chummy “Heigh-ho, here we go!”; and despite the complaints of the sick man, he began to rattle him over the cobbles, back through the gate in the city walls.
The relic thief watched him go. “Benedictine?” he asked Gallenice, with a nod of his head.
“Yeah. Nice guy, though.”
“Good,” said the Tartar, as if calculating a strategy. And then he resumed his pitch: “You can imagine,” he said, “the price we got for that phial. It contained the whole history of humanity, unmixed with sin.”
Gallenice leaned close to hear the sum. The Tartar whispered it with lips that almost touched her ear.
This is how Brother Nicephorus met the saint hunter Tyun and the dog-head Reprobus for the first time, and how their disastrous heist began.
The infirmary. A cross painted above every bed.
“The disfiguration,” said the Abbot, wincing. “We should all have incorruptible bodies.”
Brother Nicephorus was distributing the morning meal. The monks on the pallets were not just fevered: some were showing pox.
“There is a solution,” said the Abbot.
“Barley water?”
“You have been called.”
“We do not know that.” Nicephorus dipped his head.
“I think St. Nicholas spoke to you. He is dissatisfied.”
Nicephorus turned away and considered the sick.
The Abbot pressed. “Nicholas is dissatisfied with his resting place. That is what I take from your dream. He is not in his chosen home.”
“He is celestial. He sails among the stars.”
“His body. In Lycia. If we had his relics here, there would be no pox among us.”
Nicephorus looked up and down the ranks of pallets on the floor, his fellow brothers of St. Benedict, slumbering heavily or stirring uncomfortably with sickness.
The Abbot said, “You have perhaps heard: The Blessed Nicholas’s body weeps an ichor. Every morning, in his sarcophagus, there is an ooze. It is medicinal. Those who drink the oil that cascades off his corpse are healed.”
“It is a sure medicine?”
“It is better than theriac and masterwort for fevers. Nicephorus, the Duke and Archbishop Urso are arranging an expedition to liberate the corpse. Your dream shows us the saint no longer wants to be trapped, entombed, in Lycia. He wants to be here, in Bari.”
“I do not remember him saying anything of that sort in my dream. It would be prideful to imagine he recommended any such task. It was a dream of clay people, long dead.”
The Abbot was not pleased. “It would be
prideful, Brother, for you to deny your abbot’s interpretation of a dream sent straight from Heaven.”
“What if my dream was simply a dream? The Archbishop asked that we hold vigils for St. Nicholas for a full week. My thoughts were on the Blessed Nicholas day and night. Maybe this was just a phantasm. Maybe the saint does not want to be removed from his Lycian tomb at all.”
“Nicephorus, this is God’s will: You will set out with a team of experts in the liberation of saints. You will sail to Lycia, to the city of Myra, where Nicholas was bishop and where he has lain in a coffin these seven hundred years. We need you because the dream was yours.”
Nicephorus held up a hand. “The dream—”
“We need Nicholas to smile upon our efforts. We need you. You will return with his bones, his flesh, his oil.” The Abbot indicated the sick men around him. “Will you let them fester? No. The dream was yours. You must answer the call of the undead Bishop of Myra.”
Nicephorus laid down his wooden tray. Outside the window, a towering oleander rocked in the salt-scented breeze, and a swift darted at it, unsure whether it was shelter or foe.
“Why do you hesitate?” the Abbot asked. “Are you saying you are a fraud? That you had no dream? That you do not wish to exert yourself for the good of all Bari?”
“I will go,” Nicephorus agreed uncomfortably.
“God go with you. You leave the day after tomorrow.”
· · ·
Copyright © 2024 by M.T. Anderson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
