The Leopards of Normandy: Duke: Leopards of Normandy 2

by David Churchill

  Jamila was so outraged by the way this malformed infidel was talking about her husband that she did not immediately realise what was happening.

  One of the soldiers had stepped forward. He carried a bow in his right hand and there was a quiver slung over his shoulder. ‘The other leg, please,’ said de Gacé.

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  Serlo took a dozen long strides away from the knot of men holding Mahomet. Then he turned to face them.

  Jamila felt as though an invisible hand had grabbed her throat and started to throttle her. She could not breathe. Her mouth was bone dry. Her pulse raced.

  ‘Observe,’ said de Gacé again, in a much more conversational tone, as the bowman took an arrow out of his quiver and laid it on the bow. ‘Serlo is one of the finest marksmen in all Normandy,’ he went on as the bowstring was drawn back and the arrow aimed.

  ‘No!’ Jamila cried, but the sound of her voice was drowned as Mahomet shouted, ‘In the name of God the merciful, flee!’

  De Gacé turned to look at the Moor. ‘Release him,’ he said.

  The men holding Mahomet let go of him, and stepped sharply away. At that same instant, Serlo loosed his arrow, and a heartbeat later it buried itself about halfway up Mahomet’s left thigh, breaking the bone.

  The Moor could not help himself. He let out a high, keening cry of pure agony and collapsed, writhing helplessly on the forest floor.

  Jamila had given men poisons that left them racked with unspeakable pain, vomiting blood or suffocated from within. She had stood and watched quite calmly as her victims left this world for the next. But never had she felt even the slightest degree of the anguish that consumed her now. Her man was enduring unspeakable suffering. It was her duty to help him in any way she could. Yet it was also her duty to obey her husband, and he had commanded her to flee. But how could she, if that meant leaving him?

  ‘Serlo can keep shooting,’ de Gacé went on. ‘He can fill the ape with more arrows than St Sebastian. Perhaps you won’t care. In that case, my trip will have been wasted and you will have to hope you aren’t burned to death when I put this home of yours, and all the land around it, to the flame. Or you can come and talk, and I will tell you what I want and present you my terms, and if you accept, you will both live.’

  Jamila watched Mahomet open his mouth to speak. He was going to tell her, for a final time, to go. She knew it. But when he tried to speak, he could manage nothing more than a pathetic whimper of pain. A mighty giant of a man had been brought down like a felled tree, and it was the sight of him so reduced that made up Jamila’s mind.

  ‘I am the one you seek,’ she said, emerging from her hiding place. ‘I am Jarl the Viper.’

  13

  De Gacé had been about to laugh, but checked himself just in time. Two women had been spotted going in and out of the rooms in which Jarl the Viper’s possible victims had died. But what if they were actually one and the same woman, and she was in fact the killer? Even now, the very notion of a woman hiring herself out as a paid murderess seemed inconceivable. Still, there was no harm in finding out. The one thing that all the descriptions agreed on was that the Viper, if so she was, possessed extraordinary beauty. The tall, slender woman in front of him had a scarf draped over her head and then wound around her face so as to hide much of it from view. And no sooner had she introduced herself than she had lowered her head, not looking him in the eye, but carrying herself modestly and even submissively. That was surely not the way a murderer looked at the world.

  ‘Show yourself. Let me see your face,’ de Gacé commanded.

  It was only because he was watching her so closely that he noticed the woman glancing towards the wounded Moor, catching his eye and waiting until he had given her a barely perceptible nod before unwinding her scarf and looking directly at de Gacé himself.

  De Gacé gasped. The woman who stood before him had long golden hair that spilled around her shoulders and then tumbled down her back and over the breast of her dress. Her forehead was high and smooth; her eyes were a deep cornflower blue, and as she looked at him, there was no fear in them whatever; and her sweet pink lips seemed to be hovering on the edge of a smile. By God, de Gacé thought, if Duke Richard really did fuck this temptress on his last night on earth, he must have died a happy man.

  ‘So, you know what I look like,’ the woman said, wrapping her scarf around her head and face again. ‘What is the business you wish to discuss?’

  De Gacé shook his head. ‘First prove to me that you are truly the Viper.’

  ‘Very well. Perhaps your men would like an apple each. If you give me just a short time to prepare, I can bring them a bowl of shiny red fruit, half of them poisoned in a variety of different ways, the other half not. Let them try their luck. If I am not Jarl, and know nothing about poison, they will live and I will die. If I am who I say I am, I will survive and we will do business, but those who choose a poisoned apple will die. You will lose several of your men, and sadly, their deaths will not be pleasant to watch.’

  De Gacé did not have to look at his men to know that this was not a suggestion he could accept. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘My men are of use to me. Your ape, however, is not. Poison him.’

  The woman nodded, showing no emotion. ‘I accept,’ she said. ‘I shall release him from his suffering. But I need to search among my potions, and they are stored in my workroom. Will you allow me to go into the house and get them?’

  ‘Very well, but I and two of my men will accompany you.’

  De Gacé got down from his horse and signalled to a pair of his largest, most intimidating men to follow him, which they did, though the expressions on their faces when their master’s back was turned suggested that they would have been much happier charging an army of ten thousand men than entering the lair of this lone sorceress.

  Jamila smiled beneath her scarf as she sensed the unease of the Normans who were following her into the ruined villa. They were right to be frightened. It would be the work of moments to dispose of this misbegotten lord and his two dull-eyed minions and then vanish into the depths of the forest before anyone outside was any the wiser. But her priority, as always, was Mahomet, and for what she had planned she needed a clear head, a sharp eye and a steady hand, which meant no distractions. She led them through the main room, where she and Mahomet spent their days, pausing only to take a key attached to a leather band that hung from a peg on the wall. Then she strode along a series of passages, turning to the left and right so frequently that the men must have lost all sense of their bearings by the time she came to a heavy wooden door criss-crossed by bands of iron. There she inserted her key into the lock, turned it and, with some effort, pushed open the door.

  The chamber into which she led de Gacé and the men was unlike any they had ever entered. On the walls there were strange, astonishingly lifelike paintings of naked men and women and mythical creatures – de Gacé, who had been given some education, recognised the bull-headed Minotaur and the half-man, half-horse centaur – disporting themselves in a landscape dotted with buildings more elegant than any in Normandy.

  ‘These paintings are Roman,’ said Jamila, seeing his wonder. ‘They must have been here for many hundreds of years.’

  But de Gacé was not paying attention. He and his two men were looking upwards, mouths open in wonder, at a roof made entirely of glass, fifty or more panes of it set in a wooden frame, through which they could see the sky, the blurred outlines of clouds and the radiance of the sun. They had, of course, seen great windows in churches, and even some that glowed with bright, jewel-like colours. But this was something else entirely, and it meant that the room, though it had solid walls on all four sides, was barely any darker than the world outside. There was no need for the candles or burning torches casting a sputtering orange glow into the gloom that enveloped even the grandest castles or palaces. Everything could be seen perfe
ctly, thanks to daylight alone.

  Along one side of the room ran a workbench. On the wall behind it wooden shelves had been erected, and these were filled with glass and pottery containers, each labelled with a script that made de Gacé frown as he looked at it. For though he could not write anything beyond his own crude signature, he knew his letters well enough to see that these were something quite different, something foreign. The equipment on the bench was equally mysterious. De Gacé recognised scales, though they were finer than any he had ever known, and made of a strange shiny material. But he was baffled by the oddly shaped jars and bottles – some of metal, others of glass – that stood on tripods above stone bowls. One of the bowls appeared to contain a small fire, which played on the bottom of the glass bottle perched above it and blackened its base with soot. De Gacé peered more closely and saw a liquid that looked as thick and dark as pitch bubbling and smoking the glass. The bottle had a cork in its neck, though the cork had been pierced by a long, thin glass tube that looped up, across and down in an inverted horseshoe shape. The other end of the tube had also been forced through the cork in the top of a bottle, although this one stood directly on the workbench with no fire beneath it. A liquid was dripping slowly from the end of the glass tube into the second bottle, but this liquid looked as clear and cool as spring water.

  ‘This is witchcraft!’ de Gacé snarled.

  ‘You may think so,’ Jamila replied, ‘but to me it is simply learning. Everything I do now was known to the people who built this house and painted this room. It is simply that so much has been forgotten . . . but not by everyone. Now, let me show you what I can do, and I shall release a dying man from his misery.’

  As a young child, Jamila had seen her father killed and her mother raped before her eyes. From that day on, she had possessed the ability to step aside from her emotions and remain entirely calm and detached from what was going on around her. On the night she had killed Duke Richard III, he had treated her as the whore she was pretending to be, using her with crude, drunken coarseness. She had taken her mind elsewhere, so that she could not be degraded or hurt; similarly, when she had ended his life, there was no shred of anger or revenge in her actions, simply the calm concentration on a job well done.

  Now, though, as she measured out the opium powder with which she would silence Mahomet’s cries of pain and still the suffering in his eyes, even her lifetime of training was barely enough to keep the flood of grief at bay.

  This was the same drug, made from her own poppies, that had killed the archbishop. It had never occurred to Jamila that she might ever be required to give it to the one person in all creation whom she loved completely and without reservation. She poured the powder into a small vial of sweet rosehip syrup and then told de Gacé, ‘I’m ready. Now I will give this to the Moor . . . unless you would rather one of your men sampled it first?’

  ‘No, that won’t be necessary,’ said de Gacé.

  Jamila could detect the nervousness in his voice. She knew that he must now be thinking of her as a devil in female form. But equally, it was clear that he was in dire need of her services. Why else would he have gone to such lengths to find her? And why else had he let her live once he had seen her laboratory? To an infidel mind she was practising witchcraft, and the penalty for that was death. Yet here she still was, very much alive.

  They walked back the way they had come and emerged into the courtyard again. Mahomet was now lying on his back with the arrows, whose heads were still buried deep within his flesh, sticking up into the air. His wounds had been bleeding profusely, and the lower portions of his baggy sirwal leggings were drenched in blood, as was the ground to either side of him. His eyes were closed and he was moaning softly, wordlessly, as if he were lost in pain and hardly aware of anything or anyone else around him.

  Jamila had managed to walk through the house in a calm, unhurried fashion, but now she could restrain herself no longer. She ran to Mahomet, crouched down beside him and took out the vial of syrup and opium. She pulled out the cork and then cradled his head in her left arm as she brought the vial to his lips with her right hand. ‘Drink, my beloved,’ she whispered in Arabic. ‘Drink and you will be at peace.’

  She poured the syrup into Mahomet’s mouth and he swallowed it. His eyelids fluttered open and he looked at her for a moment through his huge, dark, liquid eyes. Then he gave one last, long sigh, and a moment later Jamila’s true love lay still and silent in her arms. She bent down and kissed his forehead, then, heedless of the Normans’ stares, placed her lips on his before gently resting his head back on the earth.

  ‘Very well,’ she said, rising to her feet. ‘I have proven myself. What is it you want me to do?’

  14

  Jamila and de Gacé held their negotiations in private. He explained that he needed Alan of Brittany to die within the next ten days. He told her where she could find him. She assured him that he could consider the job done. That aspect of the conversation took very little time. The more delicate matter was that of their own joint survival.

  Each now possessed incriminating knowledge about the other. De Gacé knew that she was Jarl the Viper and had killed both the archbishop and Duke Richard. She knew that he had commissioned the death of one of the duke’s guardians and might be expected to kill the rest in due course. It was therefore in both their interests to place as much distance between one another as possible. After some debate and a number of threats, both veiled and blatant, on either side, de Gacé agreed to give Jamila a further ten days, following Alan’s death, to pack up her possessions and leave Normandy. She agreed not to kill de Gacé in the meantime. No money changed hands.

  When they had finished, they walked back outside and Jamila watched as de Gacé led his men away. She waited to make sure they were not coming back before dashing to Mahomet’s side. She had given him a dose of opium calculated to make him unconscious without killing him. But he was so large that the amount required to knock him out might very well, if she had miscalculated even fractionally, be fatal. She placed her fingers to the side of his throat, just beneath his jaw, and felt for the faintest beating of life. When she finally detected it, she slumped for a moment, tears flooding her eyes, but then reminded herself that there was work to be done, and since she could not hope to move Mahomet back into the house, she would have to carry out her tasks out of doors.

  Luckily for them both, there were still many hours before sunset. Jamila made a fire and boiled water, for her master in Damascus had taught her that this removed impurities and made water safe to drink and to wash with, no matter how dirty it might be to begin with. She found a clean linen dress and cut its skirt into strips. She fetched vinegar, which she knew aided healing and prevented infection if poured over raw wounds. From her sewing box she extracted her most delicate needle and finest silk thread. Finally she went back to her laboratory, prepared some more opium-laced syrup and collected a set of small knives whose blades were honed to an even greater sharpness than her dagger. She carried everything outside and set it down in an orderly row beside Mahomet, so that every item could swiftly be located when the time came to use it.

  Jamila looked at her husband’s face. He still seemed completely insensible. When she lifted an eyelid, he gave no sign of any conscious response. Very well, it was time to begin.

  First she washed her own hands with some of the boiled water, cleansing herself exactly as if for an act of worship. She cut away the blood-soaked fabric of his sirwal so that his legs were revealed. Then she washed the area around each wound so that she could see more clearly the damage the arrows had caused. She poured vinegar over both wounds to cleanse them thoroughly. Mahomet twitched a little and emitted a low, soft sound that was neither a sigh nor a grunt but something in between. This was a good sign. Had he been awake, the stinging of the vinegar on his exposed flesh would have convulsed him in pain. Jamila raised her eyes to the heavens. She called upon God t
o be merciful and to guide her hand to save the life of this, His true and faithful follower, whose wounds had been inflicted by unbelievers. Then she took out the sharpest of the knives, laid it on Mahomet’s right thigh, just where the shaft of the arrow protruded, and made a single, decisive cut down towards the buried arrowhead.

  The sun had travelled much of the way towards the western horizon, and Jamila had been obliged to give Mahomet a second, slightly lighter dose of opium, by the time the operation was complete. She had removed the two arrows, stitched and cleaned the wounds and tied the fabric from her dress around each leg to form bandages. While removing the arrow from Mahomet’s left thigh, she had seen that the bone was badly cracked and splintered, with fragments floating loose amidst the torn muscles. There was, however, no sign that it had been snapped clean in two, so she removed whatever splinters she could find, then cut straight shafts of newly grown hazel and bound them tightly to the broken leg to help keep it as immobile as possible.

  Since there was no hope of getting Mahomet indoors, she pitched a tent around him – the very one in which they had first lain as lovers on their journey from Damascus. There she watched over him through the night. She slept beside him, and just as a new mother wakes at the slightest suggestion of her baby’s distress, so it only took the faintest of noises from Mahomet and Jamila was awake and tending to him.

  The following day, Jamila unwound the bandages to inspect the injuries and was greeted by the sight of thick yellow-white pus seeping like bloodshot milk curds from the open wounds. With that vile sight came a stomach-churning stench of disease and corruption. She cleaned them with vinegar once again and applied fresh bandages, but by sunset more blood and pus was soaking through the linen, and now beads of sweat were appearing on Mahomet’s face as a fever struck him.