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From the award-winning and bestselling author of Feed comes a raucous and slyly funny adult fiction debut, about the quest to steal the mystical bones of a long-dead saint
The year is 1087, and a pox is sweeping through the Italian port city of Bari. When a lowly monk is visited by Saint Nicholas in his dreams, he interprets the vision as a call to action. But his superiors, and the power brokers they serve, have different plans for the tender-hearted Brother Nicephorus.
Enter Tyun, a charismatic treasure hunter renowned for "liberating" holy relics from their tombs. The seven-hundred-year-old bones of Saint Nicholas rest in distant Myra, Tyun explains, and they're rumored to weep a mysterious liquid that can heal the sick. For the humble price of a small fortune, Tyun will steal the bones and deliver them to Bari, curing the plague and restoring glory to the fallen city. And Nicephorus, the "dreamer," will be his guide.
What follows is a heist for the ages, as Nicephorus is swept away on strange tides—and alongside even stranger bedfellows—to commit an act of sacrilege. Based on real historical accounts, Nicked is a wildly imaginative, genre-defying, and delightfully queer adventure, full of romance, intrigue, and wide-eyed wonder at the world that awaits beyond our own borders.
I
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.
...
Excerpted from NICKED by M.T. Anderson. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by M.T. Anderson.
It's the year 1087, and the Adriatic port city of Bari, Italy—like much of the rest of Europe—has been overrun by a pox outbreak. In the absence of medical knowledge, the people, fearful and helpless, look to God for deliverance from suffering and death. The Benedictine monks are instructed by the archbishop to keep vigil and to pray to Nicholas, the saint known for so many miracles that he is called Nicholas the Wonderworker. One in particular, a monk named Nicephorus—possessed of "an irritatingly pure and generous heart"—has a dream in which the saint himself exhorts the monk not to wait, instead to "leave our nest."
News of Nicephorus's dream quickly spreads, and the city leaders immediately interpret it to mean that a ship should set sail from Bari to Myra, in what is now Turkey, to steal the saint's body from where it has rested for six centuries and to bring it to Bari, where it can both heal and protect the inhabitants. For it's well known that Nicholas's bones ooze an oily fluid called ichor, and anyone who drinks it is healed of their maladies. Coincidentally, a noted relic thief, Tyun, is in town, and he agrees to undertake the mission—for a price. Tyun's mercenary nature is as notorious as his skill at relic hunting is famous, so in order to ensure that he returns with the actual bones of the saint rather than those of an imposter, the abbot suggests that Nicephorus join the entourage, for he is "unable—infuriatingly unable—to tell a lie." With Nicephorus on board, the city's nobility and church leaders will know their investment is safe.
And quite an investment it is—in order to gain Tyun's services, they have to offer twice as much as Venice did for the same service. Nicholas's relics are in demand across pox-ravaged Europe. And so Nicephorus, a lowly monastery clerk, sets sail on the quest of a lifetime. On the way, he encounters sailors, adventurers, and mercenaries from across Europe, Asia, and Africa, including those who are Muslim or who worship no god at all. He also finds himself growing perplexedly fond of Tyun's brash claims and gentle teasing alike—and he might just find that telling the truth is the sneakiest possible way to save the day.
M.T. Anderson is an award-winning author of numerous books for children and young adults, and here he seamlessly applies his storytelling skills to his first novel for adults. As he explains in an afterword, the seemingly outlandish adventures he chronicles are based on the historical record. But the novel is far more than a straightforward factual account; narrated wryly from the present day—"in an age of sickness; in a time of rage; in an epoch when tyrants take their seats beneath the white domes of capitals"—Anderson also infuses his clever account with playful details inspired by medieval texts. This is a world where miracles and magic are accepted as fact, where no one questions that men with the heads of dogs can serve as sailors. The end result for the reader is a sense of wonder, a readiness for anything to be possible.
Nicked is also a gentle, sweet coming-out story, as Nicephorus allows his newfound openness and spirit of adventure to extend to his human relationships (readers who enjoy the mixture of history, humor, and queer love story in the TV show Our Flag Means Death will find much to appreciate here). And in the end, the story is as much about bodies as it is about the divine, and perhaps how the two are connected in more ways than one. Stories of the miracles of St. Nicholas are interspersed throughout the narrative, for, as the novel contends, recalling the stories of deceased loved ones helps keep the departed intact for a while longer: "Not just for saints, but for those we loved and ancestors we've heard of from our parents...Recall their stories. Otherwise, they are once again disarticulated and their remains scattered." Thanks to M.T. Anderson, the exploits of Nicephorus, Tyun, and their crew will not soon be forgotten.
Reviewed by Norah Piehl
George Saunders, author of Liberation Day and Lincoln in the Bardo
Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of Manhunt and Cuckoo
Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love
M.T. Anderson's novel Nicked is based on a real-life relic theft occuring when, in 1087, an expedition from Bari, Italy, traveled to Myra, in present-day Turkey, to steal the bones of St. Nicholas. Even today, St. Nicholas's primary reliquary can be found in Bari, where pilgrims can buy holy water infused with the "myrrh" his bones supposedly produce. This heist, while entertaining enough to be the stuff of fiction, is but one of dozens of examples of relic theft throughout history, a phenomenon known as "furta sacra."
In his book by the same name, historian Patrick J. Geary cites more than one hundred documented thefts during the period from roughly the ninth to the twelfth centuries. It's no wonder that there was a brisk business in relic sale, trade, and theft—Charlemagne himself dictated that every church altar in his empire should have a relic.
It wasn't just a legal mandate that drove this phenomenon, however; Geary outlines how, in medieval times, monasteries and other holy sites often relied on relics—and the pilgrims who would pay to visit these shrines—for their livelihood: "Possession of the remains of a popular saint could mean the difference between a monastery's oblivion and survival." What's more, Geary writes, "the only means of acquisition were purchase, gift, invention, or theft." In short, if a monastery couldn't afford to buy significant relics outright and weren't unethical enough to lie about false relics, they would resort to theft, often with the support of their entire community, who would all benefit by extension if a particularly notable saint's body (or parts thereof) could be acquired and displayed.
Church and civic leaders employed a variety of rationalizations to justify the theft of relics, including the argument that they were simply relocating a relic from a place where it was less venerated to a new home where it would be truly appreciated. Others made the claim that if a relic found its way to a new location, only the saint's will would have allowed it to be so.
Sometimes monks took it upon themselves to steal relics—one story tells of a French monk from Conques who spent ten years undercover at another monastery in Agen, waiting for the opportunity to steal the remains of St. Foy. Others seem to have undertaken this work professionally, such as a relic hunter known as Deusdona, who raided the Roman catacombs and then traded away supposed bits of saints' bodies for profit, since Catholic doctrine held that every part of a saint's body, no matter how small, was a site of holiness. The most hazardous aspect of Deusdona's business—which he ran with his brothers Lunisius and Theodorus—was probably transporting relics from southern Europe across the Alps to northern churches and monasteries.
Although the market for relics cooled during the Crusades—when religious fervor found new targets—and further still during the Reformation, when reformers like Martin Luther based part of their critique of the Catholic Church on its materialism, the phenomenon of relic theft is not unknown even today. As of 1969, the Catholic Church no longer requires relics to be housed in every altar, but many churches are still in possession of these sacred objects. Just this year, a fragment of bone smaller than a fingernail, purported to belong to Mary Magdalene, was stolen from a church in Salt Lake City. The church is offering a $1,000 reward—perhaps an incentive for a modern-day relic hunter to retrieve it and reap the treasure.
Abbey-church in Conques, France where the remains of Saint Foy were held after being stolen from Agen
2005 photo by Phillip Capper (CC BY 2.0)
Filed under Cultural Curiosities
By Norah Piehl
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