A Murderous Procession

  “who does that bastard talk to?” Wolf wants to know as the duke walks away.

  “The wrong deity,” Scarry tells him.

  Thirteen

  ADELIA, MANSUR, ULF, and Boggart, carrying her baby, stood hidden amongst the crowd on the road to Palermo’s gates to see Joanna ride up to the capital of her new kingdom to be received by her bridegroom and rank upon rank of Sicilian ambassadors and clergy in peacock robes.

  She was accompanied by Richard, whose height made her look even smaller than she was. Ulf peered for Excalibur, but whatever sword was in Richard’s bejeweled scabbard, it wasn’t King Arthur’s.

  For once, everybody’s eye was on the princess, not her brother. The ladies-in-waiting had dressed her in pearl-encrusted gold, a diadem encircled the long fair hair, her head was held high on its little neck, and she was smiling.

  Watching her go past, Adelia could have cried; so brave, so tiny. As Ulf said—with tears in his own eyes—“These bastards better be good to her.”

  It looked as if they would be; the people standing twelve deep along Joanna’s route shouted huzzahs and blessings to their new queen, scattering bay leaves for her white palfrey’s gilded hooves to tread on.

  Ahead of her went the trumpeters, all shining, flag-bedecked silver. Behind rode Petronilla and Beatrix, pretty and laughing, and Blanche, also pretty, but with the strain showing; then the Bishop of Winchester and the chaplains.

  Then the O’Donnell in Arabic robe and face-enfolding white headdress, the traditional garb for an admiral of Sicily, an honor that had been given him for his services to the country.

  Then gleaming knights with spears, their horses with scalloped scarlet reins and saddles, and behind them Captain Bolt, his men in Plantagenet uniform with the brass-bound treasure chests.

  England was doing its princess proud.

  Then they’d gone. A curve in the road to the gates, and the press of people, denied Adelia the view of Sicily’s king and whether the reception committee contained the Bishop of Saint Albans.

  If Rowley had arrived on the island, the O’Donnell had promised to contact him to say that she had, too, and was well. Which was good of the Irishman, though he took no pleasure in it.

  “Where will you be staying? Out of sight, I hope.”

  “My foster father has a house he keeps for his visits to Palermo. In the Jewish Quarter by the Harat al-Yahud.” It was a joy to say it. “We’ll stay there until the wedding.”

  “Make sure you do.”

  He’d arranged for Adelia, Boggart, Mansur, and Ulf to disembark from the St. Patrick, with Deniz accompanying them to act as go-between, before anyone else. “And see you’re veiled if you venture out.”

  As they gained the teeming streets of Palermo, their ears were deafened by the noise of four different languages—all of them ofncial—being screamed at once; their eyeballs were assaulted by clashes of violent color; their nostrils shriveled under an onslaught of every kind of stink mixing with every kind of perfume; they had to dodge peddlers trying to sell them sugared almonds and ribbons, and prostitutes of both sexes wanting to sell something else. They had to get out of the way of trains of mules and donkeys carrying spices from the East or building materials from the North, resist the call of traders from their shops in the arched walkways, make sure that the purses the O’Donnell had provided them with weren’t cut from their belts ...

  For Adelia, it was magical. “Look, look. See that ruined temple? It’s Greek. My father said that Archimedes taught there when he wasn’t in Syracuse ... And that building’s the Exchange, and down there’s the Street of the Scent-makers-just sniff . . . And the mill over there, can you see it? That’s where they make paper ... Stop a minute, I must buy some cassata, you’ll love it, Boggart. It’s an Arab cake; Mansur calls it Qas’at ... And sciarbat—Lord, I hope old Abdalla still sells it—he makes it from fruit chilled by mountain snow . . .”

  She was a child again, on a visit with her parents to a sanctuary of marvels. She’d thought then that every capital city must be like this one; now she knew that Palermo was the most brilliant, prosperous metropolis in the world, unique.

  Even so, she was entering the past through a different gate; she was Odysseus succumbing to the song of the Sirens, not returning to Ithaca. This could truly be home only if Allie and Gyltha were to join her and Mansur in it.

  The Arab, like a man long parched of water, disappeared to say his prayers in the first mosque vouchsafed to him since he and Adelia had set off for England.

  As they waited for him, Boggart, clutching Donnell, saw her first camel train: “What-a mercy is them things? Lord bless me that I should see hillocks on the move.”

  But, marvel though they did, it was the sheer heterogeneity of the city that soothed the souls of the four former prisoners of Aveyron, who’d seen what intolerance could do.

  Sometimes, savoring the moment, they stopped to watch those who would be mortal enemies elsewhere walking together in reasoned argument; they saw a fellow with a cross on his tunic—thus showing that he was on his way to the Levant to kill Saracens—bemusedly asking for directions from an Arab; a skullcapped Jew chatting with a tonsured monk; the high hat of a Greek Orthodox priest wobbling at a joke told him by a Norman knight.

  “It hasn’t changed,” Adelia said happily.

  “It has,” Mansur told her. “There are more Christian churches and fewer mosques. Fewer synagogues, also.”

  She hadn’t noticed until now, but he was right; the ringing from the bell towers was louder than she remembered it, louder than the calls from muezzin.

  To Ulf and Boggart, however, the mixture was astonishing. “I thought King Henry was liberal,” Ulf said. “Look how good he treats his Jews, but this ... How’d this happen?”

  “The Normans,” Adelia told him. “The Normans happened.”

  And hardheaded, cutthroat adventurers they’d been.

  Of genius.

  Led by a couple of land-hungry brothers, the Hautevilles, they’d hacked both Sicily and Southern Italy into submission, taking it from Arab domination. They’d then promoted Arabs to be their advisers, along with every other intelligent race that could be of use to them. Dissension cost money and men to put down, ergo the Hautevilles ensured that there were no second-class citizens in their new realm to cause trouble. Thus, out of it, they’d made a kingdom that outshone any other, just as Sirius put all other stars in the night sky to shame.

  “Mind you,” Adelia pointed out, “it’s a volatile mixture.” Sicilians were prone to flashes of extreme violence in family vendettas. The occasional minister might get himself assassinated, not because of his race or faith but because he’d made himself unpopular. “And there are back alleys where it’s not safe to go at night—nor in daytime, for that matter.”

  Let it only change for the better, Lord. Let it live forever.

  At last they reached the Harat al-Yahud, a great gateless arch—for what did the Jews here need to be gated against?—with the Star of David carved boldly into its stone.

  Adelia found herself trembling; beyond it lay another of Sicily’s many worlds, her world; a different smell, henna blossom and caraway seeds, all the spices of the Song of Solomon; children playing catch amongst black-hatted men with ringlets poring over chess tables, matchmakers bargaining as they drank kosher wine, the drone of the Shemoneh Esreh prayer issuing from the synagogues.

  And kindness; as the child of a revered visiting doctor, she’d had blessings showered on her, not to mention sticky abricotines and barfi badam from every sweetmeat seller she’d passed.

  She clutched Mansur’s arm as they turned in to a street of tightly terraced houses. “They might be here, they might. They could have come for the wedding.” She turned to Deniz and pointed: “That’s the house we’ll be staying in.”

  The Turk was in a hurry to get back to the admiral, so he left them.

  But the door that always stood open to patients, whether they could pay or not, when Dr. G
ershom and Dr. Lucia were in town was closed, so were the shutters.

  With tenderness Adelia put out her hand to touch the mezuzah in its little barred niche in the doorpost. “They’re not here.” She could have wept.

  There was a shriek from next door. “Adelia Aguilar. Is it you, little one?” She was enveloped in plump arms and a smell of cooking. “Shalom, my child, you are a blessing on my old eyes. But so thin, what have they done to you, those English?”

  Here at least was comfort. “Shalom, Berichiyah. It is lovely to see you. How is Abrahe?” She made the introductions. “This is Berichiyah uxor Abrahe de la Roxela, an old, old friend. She keeps the key to our house and is good enough to look after it in my parents’ absence.”

  Berichiyah dressed little differently from Sicily’s other respectable women—here, as everywhere else, Jews mainly adopted the wear of the country they lived in. The chinstrap of a stiff linen toque encircled the ample wrinkles of her face; the crease of an enormous bosom was apparent above the bodice of a stuff gown, its skirt pinned up above a petticoat, but nobody could have taken her for anything other than Jewish, and she would have been offended if they had.

  “Aren’t they here, Berichiyah?”

  “They wrote they might be coming, but maybe, maybe not.”

  There was something chilling in the “maybes” that caused Adelia to ask sharply: “They’re not ill?”

  “No, no, not ill. In their last letter, both well.” Berichiyah changed the subject. “Wait now, while I let you in. How long are you here? I hope long enough for me to put flesh on your bones.”

  She disappeared and came back with a key. “Go in, go in. Everything is clean, the beds are aired. I will fetch Rebekah’s cot for the baby, her Juceff has grown out of it. Ten grandchildren have we got now, Adelia. Six boys, four girls. And a great-grandson—our Benjamin married the ax maker’s daughter last year ...”

  Theywere swept into a dark, shining interior that smelled of beeswax and astringent herbs.

  “Is Abrahe well?” Adelia asked.

  “Not well, my dear, not well at all. Now he has the gout, poor man, and even your father can do nothing for it.”

  Berichiyah’s husband had enthusiastically embraced ill health for years, teaching his wife to read so that she could run the date-importing business that he’d inherited from his father, leaving her, while doing it, to provide for and bring up their many children whilst maintaining the fiction, as she did, that he was still head, if the ailing head, of the household.

  “Exhausted, the lot of you. You will want to be quiet tonight, so I will bring you some stewed kid and tzimmes, enough for all. You remember my tzimmes, Adelia? But tomorrow night you eat with us.”

  That happiness, however, was denied them.

  STILL WEARING THE sheepskin coats from Caronne, they went out the next morning to purchase badly needed clothes. Adelia took them to the market square in La Kalsa, the working-class area of Palermo, where Mansur could find new robes and headdresses and she and Boggart and Ulf outfit themselves as well as buy clouts and a new shawl for young Donnell—and do it cheaply

  Borrowing from the O’Donnell had worried her but he’d said: “Rest easy now, I’ll charge it to King Henry.”

  “Oh, he’ll like that.”

  It was while Boggart was poring over a stall carrying a selection of bright secondhand skirts that Adelia, holding Donnell, became transfixed by the booth next door. Four marionettes were being manipulated by people unseen behind the backcloth of a tiny stage. Palermo was famous for its marionettes; her parents had bought her one when she was a child, a wooden, painted little knight that she’d ruined by operating on it.

  Here was another knight, presumably the epic hero Roland of Roncesvalles energetically clashing swords with a frightening-looking Moor. What caught Adelia’s eye, though, were not the humanoid puppets, but a comic mule and camel chasing each other round the left-hand side of the stage, legs kicking, their mouths opening to bite and shutting again.

  Allie would love them.

  Whether she could afford more of the Irishman’s money to buy both for her daughter was the problem.

  “One though, eh, Donnell?” she asked the baby, whose eyes were fixated on the bouncing puppets. “The camel? The mule?”

  That was when somebody pushed something between Donnell’s shawl and her hand.

  Automatically feeling to see if the purse at her belt was still there, she whipped round to see the back of a dowdy-looking man disappearing quickly into the crowd.

  “What is it, missus?”

  It was a piece of paper—a substance still virtually unknown in England—sealed with two drops of unstamped sealing wax.

  “To Mistress Adelia from her friend, Blanche of Poitiers, greetings,” she read out. “Be at the Sign of Jerusalem in the Street of Silversmiths within the hour.”

  The script was looped and cursive. “I didn’t think Blanche could write,” Adelia said.

  “She can’t,” Ulf said immediately “That’s Scarry, that is. Lurin’ you to your death, that’s what he’s doing.”

  Ulf was suspicious of all males who looked at them sideways and kept his hand constantly on the hilt of his sword—another gift from the O’Donnell.

  “He wouldn’t have found us this quickly. I’d better go; Joanna may need me.”

  “At a bloody tavern?”

  “You do not go without me,” Mansur said.

  “Nor me.”

  “Nor me.”

  Adelia looked at Boggart. “We can hardly take the baby.”

  “Well, I ain’t leaving him, and I ain’t leaving you.” She added: “And we ain’t leaving Ward on his own here, neither.”

  Ah, well ...

  The Sign of Jerusalem stood, or rather leaned, end-on to the silversmiths’ street down an alley deserted except for a vulture energetically pecking at the carcass of a dead cat. It didn’t look like a tavern, more a shack due for demolition; the crusader cross on its sign was barely visible under peeling paint, and its shutters were barred up.

  Mansur’s hand went to the dagger at his belt. Ulf drew his sword. “Don’t reckon this place gets much custom,” he said.

  Ward made a halfhearted attempt to scare off the vulture but gave up when it ignored him.

  The man who opened the door to Mansur’s rap wasn’t a landlord either, to judge from his tabard, which was embroidered with two golden lions bringing down two golden camels, the arms of Sicily’s kings ever since their conquest of the Moslems.

  He stood well back to bow them in. “Mistress Adelia?”

  “Yes.”

  He picked up a lit lantern from a dusty table and opened his other hand to show Adelia a ring.

  She nodded and turned to the others. “It’s Blanche’s.”

  “And who are you?” Ulf wanted to know.

  “I am your guide. Be good enough to follow me.” The man spoke Norman French with a Sicilian accent. He indicated an open trapdoor with a short flight of steps leading downward into darkness.

  “We ain’t going nowhere less’n we know where,” Ulf told him.

  “Really? It was understood that Mistress Adelia has an enemy and it were better her whereabouts were not known. Follow me, please.”

  The steps were slippery. Ulf, still carrying his sword, went first, followed by Mansur, to whom Adelia passed down Baby Donnell before giving a hand to Boggart. They had to wait while Ward made an ungainly descent.

  “Exciting this, ain’t it, missus?” Boggart said nervously.

  The bravest of the brave, that girl. Adelia could only pray she wasn’t leading her into more trouble; this passage might be out of One Thousand and One Nights, but it could lead to a sultan angry at being given a damaged bride.

  It was a long tunnel that led eventually to steps up into a garden and a grilled gate in a wall guarded by fearsome, turbaned, baggytrousered guards with scimitars.

  Mistress Blanche was waiting for them, trembling with nerves. “He says he’ll
see you, Delia. I haven’t told him, only that you saved her life. He remembers your father well. If you explain, tell him, then, perhaps ...”

  “Explain?”

  Blanche grabbed Adelia’s neck with two hands as if she would shake it. Instead, she hissed into her ear. “The scar, woman, the scar. Persuade him, beg him, tell him how lovely she really is.”

  “She is lovely”

  “In our eyes, but he’s expecting perfection.” She fell back, crossing herself. “I can’t bear her to be rejected. Mary, Mother of God, let him understand.”

  The guide was gesturing to them to hurry. Blanche, it appeared, was going no farther. In that case, Adelia decided, neither were Boggart and the baby; whatever was coming, they must have no part in it. “Look after Boggart and Donnell for me,” she said. “And the dog.”

  Blanche nodded and wrung Adelia’s hand as if sending her to war, then turned away, dabbing her eyes.

  At a nod from the guide, the guards opened the gate and they were in a pillared walkway running beside a little tiled square, like an atrium, with a fountain playing in it.

  Into a great and gilded chamber. More terrifying but obliging guards, more chambers, until the last—largest and most gilded of all—from which, even through the door, they could hear the noise, like a thousand birds twittering at once in a giant aviary.

  Adelia’s eyes met Mansur’s. She knew what was beyond the door; the kings of Sicily might be Normans, but they had adopted—and obviously still kept—this most Arab of customs.

  The door was opened. Inside was an enormous room full of women, some of them elderly, most of them young and olive-skinned, all beautiful and all in billowing silk, for though the night outside the filigree bars on the windows was cold, these were tropical birds and were kept warm by fifty or more chased lamps and braziers.