A Murderous Procession

  She was in an alley. Turn left, yes—if she turned left and left again she would be farther down the piazza. The antennae would wave and not locate her. Run. She’d run with everything she had, regain the cathedral and be safe.

  She swung left, but there was no other turning to the left, only another alley going to the right. She took it. Again, no left turn.

  She ran, doubled back, took a narrow cut between some houses where crumbling balconies overhead formed a roof that gave an echo to her running footsteps—and, she thought in her panic, somebody else’s.

  There was no one around. Everybody had gone to the main streets to join in the celebrations. The noise of music and singing faded into quiet as Adelia became lost in the labyrinth that was the oldest and poorest part of La Kalsa....

  ROWLEY HURLED HIMSELF through the streets, shoving people out of the way, yelling for anybody who’d seen a lady and a dog. A garishly dressed woman held out her arms to him. “A lady and a dog,” he shouted at her. She laughed, and he pushed her off.

  A beggar obstructed him and Rowley knocked him flying before he realized the man had nodded. He went back and hauled the wretch to his feet. “A woman and a dog.”

  “Dressed pretty, was she? Her headed that way, sir. Have pity on an old crusader, sir.” With one hand, the beggar pointed toward La Kalsa’s piazza and extended the other for money

  He didn’t get any.

  Running, Rowley entered the piazza. It was full of men, women, and children dancing. Shouting for Adelia, he broke through prancing circles of dancers that merely reformed behind him.

  Jesus Christ, where was she? What the hell had she come here for? If it was her.

  He began looking into shop fronts. “A lady and a dog? Has she been here?”

  And then, because God was good, a fat fellow standing outside a marionette booth beckoned him over. “The lady with the dog?”

  “Was she here?”

  “Such a nice lady, the dog ... well. Bought my best creations ... for her daughter, she said. I have others, sir, if you . . .”

  Rowley shook him. “Where did she go?”

  “Out the back, sir, I don’t know why. She was running....”

  So was Rowley, through the long tent, into the alley, shouting her name. Running, Jesus, she’d been running. He felt for his sword and remembered that he was a bishop—had been—and bishops didn’t wear swords, not in a cathedral at least.

  Just as well; if he found her, he’d kill her with it. “Where are you, damn you?”

  The alleys turned and twisted; he turned and twisted with them.

  He saw a tattered shrub in a pot indicating that the hovel it stood outside served ale. He’d seen it before, minutes ago, same hovel, same fucking shrub. He was going in circles.

  Stopping, he could hear other voices shouting her name; he thought one of them was Mansur’s high treble.

  And someone else, nearer, was calling his. “My lord bishop. Bishop Rowley Bishop Ro-ow-leee.”

  Father Guy Father Guy had run after him.

  Almighty God, they were looking for him; him, the bishop who’d gone insane. He’d shamed the English Church in front of a thousand Sicilians; he was their responsibility; they couldn’t let him scamper the streets yelling for a woman. They’d take him back and shut him up somewhere because, whatever he was, he’d always belong to the Church.

  The chaplain had people with him, was coming nearer, talking. “He must be found, proctor, you understand? I want all your men out.”

  A deep voice: “We’ll find him, Father.”

  The bastards’ll hold me up.

  He backed into a doorway and stood still as death.

  Nearer now. “Lost his wits, poor fellow. Ugh, these stinking by-ways.” It was Dr. Arnulf.

  When they’d passed, he dodged down a narrow cut-through to get away from them and found himself in a dilapidated square with a horse trough in its middle. His eye caught a movement on the far side, the flick of a cloak’s edge as its owner disappeared around a corner. He ran after it and leaped on a hurrying figure, bringing it to the ground.

  It swore as he turned it over. It was Ulf.

  “Have you seen her?”

  “No. Thought I heard the bloody dog bark, though.”

  “Which way?”

  “This way”

  They hared off together, but there were a thousand dogs loose in the city and—“Sod it”—Ulf’s boots slid in a deposit left by one of them, sending him sprawling.

  Rowley ran on. Ahead was a cross street with a flambeau guttering in its bracket at a corner of the intersection.

  And there she was. He saw her as if in a bright frame. She was standing on tiptoe with her back to him, trying to read a street name by the light of the expiring flambeau. The dog was at her feet.

  He heard Ulf coming up behind him, cursing. To his left, at the top of the street, a tall man in white robes was hurrying down it. Mansur.

  Another figure was coming up on his right out of the darkness.

  Hearing him swear, she turned around and came toward him, smiling. He went forward and took her in his arms, still cursing her for the fright she’d given him.

  The miserable light from the flambeau glinted on an upraised blade over her shoulder.

  He swung her round so that the blade went into his own back, once, twice, before the killer was pulled away and Ulf pinioned the arms while Mansur drew the curved dagger from his sash and cut Locusta’s throat with it.

  THEY DRAGGED ROWLEY into the vestibule of a shabby tenement. Adelia never let go of him, crawling beside him with one arm under his back so that it was raised above the dirty floor, the blood from it pouring over the crook of her elbow.

  Knowledge deserted her; she didn’t know what to do.

  Help me, I don’t know what to do. But her mouth was too frozen to say the words, and she looked up into the faces of Mansur, Ulf ... and recognized neither of them.

  “Get away, woman. Let a proper doctor see to him.” Another face, mouth puffing from exertion. Arnulf’s hands were on her shoulders, trying to pull her off, so she sank her teeth into his wrist to stop him.

  He fell back. “She’s bitten me, the bitch has bitten me.”

  A calm voice said: “Adelia.” It was Dr. Gershom’s.

  “Yes?”

  “Let me look, child. We’ll see what the damage is.”

  “Yes, Father.” Sense came back to her; she had help; she was a doctor again. She said: “Somebody bring a light.”

  Light came.

  Calling for quiet, Dr. Gershom tore open the front of Rowley’s shirt and pressed an ear against his chest to listen for any sucking sound. He heard none. “Not the lung, I think,” he told her.

  “I’m frightened it’s the liver.”

  “Let’s see.”

  Rowleywas heaved onto his side, and they ripped away the back of his shirt to see what lay underneath.

  Two wounds, both gaping, both deep. Downward and sideways strokes had gone into the heavy musculature of the back between the posterior axillary lines.

  “I don’t know,” Dr. Gershom said. “I don’t know. Maybe ...” He avoided looking at his daughter. She was bunching the folds of her skirt around her fists to press them into the wounds—the blood immediately soaked into the silk until it dripped.

  Gershom knew, as she knew, that even if no major organ had been touched, part of Rowley’s clothing had most likely gone in with the passage of the knife and would turn the area round it putrid if it wasn’t got out.

  “I need my equipment,” he said. “We’ll get him to my house ... operate ... something to carry him on.”

  Mansur moved to the stairs and ripped out two of its risers with the ease of a man pulling up grass.

  “No.” For a dying man, the voice was clear. “They’ll find me. Take me home. Adelia? Are you there?”

  “I’m here, dearest.”

  “Who, my son? Who will find you?” Dr. Gershom asked.

  Adelia kne
w. They. The “they” who would claim her lover for their own, who’d absorb their bishop back into the organism that was blanketing the world, the “they” who would take this man away from her for the last time and give him to the torture of their doctors.

  She looked up and around. So many people in this dirty place. How had they all come here? Had they flown?

  There were those she loved; her father, her mother—tearing her own petticoat into strips for bandages—an agonized Ulf and Boggart with her baby, Mansur, tight-lipped, efficiently making a stretcher ... And the O‘Donnell, the O’Donnell had come ...

  Behind them, the enemy; Dr. Arnulf, Father Guy, outraged and giving orders to a large man in clerical robes. “Fetch help, Master Proctor. It is not seemly for a bishop to die here. Bring assistance. He must be taken to the cathedral, relics, the last rites....”

  “You shan’t have him.” In this unreality, it was all she knew.

  “The woman is a witch and must be arrested....”

  Now the O’Donnell had the chaplain by the throat and was shaking him like a bundle of straw. “You touch her, you bastard ...”

  But the proctor had gone. They’d be here soon to take him. They’d taken Ermengarde.

  There was a bloodied bundle half in, half out of the vestibule’s entrance where somebody had kicked it out of the way. Its throat was severed. Her eyes passed over it, had no interest in it; the insect had done its damage and now was squashed; she felt nothing for it. Only Rowley mattered.

  “Adelia?”

  Her mother was pushing her gently. “Let me take over now, little one.” Dr. Lucia was holding clean, folded pieces of petticoat to stanch the wounds, other strips were bandages. “He needs to be able to see you.”

  Relinquishing a post she would have given to nobody else, she lifted her dripping hands from her lover’s back and moved so that her mother’s instantly replaced them.

  She went to kneel on the other side of Rowley and put her face close to his, touched it.

  “Is it you?”

  “It’s me. Don’t talk. We’re going to make you well.”

  He smiled and shut his eyes. “Take me home, sweetheart,” he said again. “England ... with you. They mustn’t have me again.”

  “They won’t.” He wasn’t theirs, he was hers.

  “Sweetheart?”

  “I’m here, Rowley. Stay still, we’ll have you out of here in a trice.”

  “Get me home. Get me to England.”

  “I will.”

  But Arnulf and Guy were here. Others would come. They’d follow the trail of a man carried through the streets on a stretcher, like the killer had trailed her. Only a matter of time ... Time. It was ebbing away ... like Rowley’s life.

  She said: “We’re taking you to my father’s house first, dearest. We can mend you there.”

  “Better be ... bloody quick about it.”

  He put her back in time and space. If he could swear, he could live.

  She looked for the face of the Irishman. “My father and I are going to save him,” she said; she was quite clear about it. “But then I want you to take us home, before the Church can find us. Sail us home, O’Donnell. All of us. To England.”

  Father Guy’s back interrupted her view; he was facing the O’Donnell. “Admiral, I forbid it. This man is a lord of the Holy Church. I have men coming....”

  There was a smack and he fell. Ulf had punched him. The O’Donnell picked him up and threw him into the street. “And you, too,” he said to Arnulf. “Before I kill you.”

  They went, stumbling, shouting for reinforcements.

  Mansur and Dr. Gershom were lifting Rowley onto the stretcher, carefully, carefully, putting him on his side so that Dr. Lucia’s hands could keep stanching the wounds.

  Adelia’s eyes never left the O’Donnell’s. “We’re going to mend him,” she said, “then you must sail us home. The land route ... too hard on him. A calm voyage while he gets better. Please, I beg you.”

  He stared back at her. The man was dying; she had his blood on her face. And did she know what she was asking? How long a voyage? Through the Pillars of Hercules with their sudden storms? Running from fokking Barbary pirates? Beating up the bloody coast of Portugal until the Gulf Stream took them north?

  But he would. She’d never love him, but he would. He’d still the seas for her.

  “I’ll take you,” he said. “All of you.”

  He watched her turn to her lover. “My lord O’Donnell’s taking us home, Rowley”

  “That’s right . . .” The voice was getting weaker. “I’ll live if you take me home.”

  “Is that a bargain?”

  A slight nod.

  “It’d better be,” she told him.

  Mansur and Ulf lifted the stretcher, Dr. Lucia and Adelia on either side of it, Adelia still holding Rowley’s hand, the dog at her heels. Dr. Gershom. Boggart stooping, with her child in her arms, to pick up a package that contained marionettes. Behind them the O’Donnell.

  On their way out, they stepped over the corpse of the man known as Locusta, who’d once been William of Scaresdale, and who’d at last found peace in the filth of a Palermo street.

  And left it there.

  Author’s Notes

  ADELIA AGUILAR, my fictional mistress of the art of death, came about because in twelfth-century Salerno, then part of the Kingdom of Sicily, there really was a great School of Medicine, which not only permitted the practice of autopsy, but also took women students. We know this because of an extant treatise on women’s medicine, known as the Trotula, which was written by a female professor.

  Sicily was then the most liberal, forward-thinking realm in all Christendom, treating its Arabs, Greeks, Jews, and Normans as equal citizens, something that occurred nowhere else. (Two fine books on the subject are The Normans in the South and The Kingdom in the Sun by John Julius Norwich.)

  The school disappeared in the thirteenth century, probably under pressure from the Church of Rome, which regarded the science of autopsy and women doctors as anathema.

  PRINCESS JOANNA’S JOURNEY from England to Palermo to marry King William of Sicily at the age of ten is another historical event.

  We know most of her route. We know that she was accompanied at certain points by two of her brothers—Henry, the Young King, and Richard, later the Lionheart. We know that it was interrupted at one point when she had to be taken ashore because she was ill.

  We know that much and little else. But, then, the chroniclers of the early Middle Ages disappoint in giving details of their journeys. Men and women of all sorts, not just royal, traveled extensively in those days; some making pilgrimages over the known Christian world, others flitting off to Rome—a journey that, from England, took only a few weeks. We find laconic references to crossing the Alps with little mention of the hardship that must have involved, especially as some of those climbs were made in winter.

  So, in order to prefigure the growing and stultifying power of the Latin Church at that time, I have felt justified in taking that journey and running with it, adding even more drama to what must have been an adventurous undertaking, though I have taken care—I always do—to make sure that none of the historical people in it act out of character.

  What I have done is some date fixing. In the story, Joanna still sets off at the age of ten, as she did, and arrives by the time she was eleven years old, again as she did, but I have put her trek to Sicily two years later—in 1178—than when it actually took place in 1176. This is to fit in with my fictional heroine’s time line. In 1176, Adelia was busy elsewhere, so I have used a novelist’s license to enable her to take part in Joanna’s extraordinary journey

  HENRY, THE YOUNG KING. It would have been typical of that young man to desert his sister while he went off to fight in one of the tournaments to which he was addicted. Professor W L. Warren, that fine historian of Henry II’s reign, says of the Young King: “He was gracious, benign, affable, courteous, the soul of liberality and generosit
y Unfortunately he was also shallow, vain, careless, empty-headed, incompetent, and irresponsible.” He let nearly everybody down at one time or another. He died when he was twenty-eight years old of dysentery contracted while he was supporting rebels in Aquitaine in their fight against Richard, the brother with whom he’d once been in alliance against their father.

  RICHARD THE LIONHEART. History’s P.R., which so often gives good publicity to the wrong people, has awarded him an almost saintly aura through the Robin Hood legend. Nobody can deny that he was a fine general and a brave fighter, but he was capable of greed and cruelty On crusade, he once ordered his Moslem prisoners to be slaughtered and their bellies slit open to see if they had swallowed any jewels.

  He had no care for England, spending less than a year in that country in all his life. His coronation was a signal for a massacre of the English Jews his father had protected. He’s said to have announced that he would sell London if by doing so, he could raise money for crusade. It may be that his bisexuality—he seems to have done penance for sodomy at one point—drove him to try and placate his Christian God by his effort to win back Jerusalem from the Moslems. His death was caused by an inglorious arrow that hit him while he was in what is now France, besieging the castellan of Châlus who he mistakenly thought had unearthed some treasure.

  HENRY II OF ENGLAND was damned by history for calling for the death of his Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas à Becket. He was in France at the time and, in a famous rage at Becket’s refusal to allow reform of a corrupt system, cried: “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” A few of his knights, who had their own quarrel with the archbishop, immediately took ship to Canterbury and assassinated the man on the steps of his own cathedral. Thus Thomas became a martyr and saint, and the king a sinner. But it was Henry Plantagenet who plucked England out of the legal Dark Ages by introducing the Common Law (i.e., a comprehensive system of justice available to all his people) and that wonder available to the English-speaking people—trial by jury. Until then, judgment on crime had been left to God, by chucking the accused into a pond, for instance, to see if he sank (innocent) or floated (guilty).