“Think, will you?”
She tried. “Well… oh yes, he was dark. I remember his arms, black hair… but that may just have been shadow.”
“Dark,” Rowley said bitterly. “Very helpful.” Nevertheless, he and Bolt and Ulf began listing the black-haired men in the company. Father Guy, Father Adalburt, knights, squires, servants who were swarthy Captain Bolt’s men, Bolt himself Rankin the Scot, young Locusta, the O’Donnell… it went on and on.
“And any one of them could have been at that dice game,” Rowley pointed out. “It’s an eclectic group.”
“Oh, go away,” Adelia told him. It was difficult enough believing that Scarry was the one who’d been after her in Somerset; impossible to think that a painted outlaw could have joined Joanna’s company and pursued her across the Channel, however good his Latin.
She refused to dwell on it.
FROM HALF A MILE down the column, it was possible to see that something was wrong, causing Adelia and Mansur to urge their horses into a canter that took them to its head, where Joanna and her principals were gathered about a figure that overtopped them all.
Duke Richard was in gleaming mail; under his arm he held a helmet encircled by a gold, ducal coronet. His face was set, exalted, and he was paying no attention to a distracted Captain Bolt and Bishop of Winchester.
Rowley detached himself from the group to approach Mansur and Adelia. “Richard’s leaving us,” he said bitterly, in Arabic.
“Where’s he going?”
“To war.”
“He can’t do that.”
“Actually, I think he has to. There’s a galloper just come with news. Angoulême is in revolt; the duke can’t allow that, though if you ask me it’s his fault the bloody place revolted in the first place.”
Angoulême. Angoulême. From what Adelia could remember of Locusta’s map, the county was due south of them. “We have to go back? Oh God, Rowley how long will a war hold us up?”
“We’re skirting round it. We can’t afford to lose more time, and the duke’s convinced he can defeat Vulgrin of Angoulême within days. He’s called for reinforcements.”
“And can he defeat him?”
“Oh, yes. He’s no favorite of mine, Richard, but he’s a superb general. If I were Count Vulgrin, I’d start running now.”
Adelia looked toward Joanna. “Poor love,” she said.
“Poor Locusta, he’s near tears. We’ll be departing from his precious route; he’ll have to arrange a new one, which, where we’re going, won’t be easy”
But Adelia’s sympathy was for a princess deserted by one brother and now another.
Joanna, however, appeared concerned but not alarmed.
She’s used to it, Adelia thought. The girl’s young life had been spent watching her parents put down rebellion somewhere or another in their empire; she had seen her mother and brothers rise up against her father. Her world was sown with Hydra’s teeth; for her, revolt and battle were the natural order of things. And so they are, except in England and Sicily.
The knights and their squires were leaving immediately An extempore service was held in a grove beneath the high, gaunt branches of a chestnut tree to bless and speed their war.
A troubled Bishop of Winchester stumbled in his office, but Duke Richard showed no sign of restlessness as his impatient father would have done; he drank in the prayers, praise, and blessings. God’s goodwill meant much to him.
As over two hundred throats said a last “Amen” that rumbled through the forest, he rose to his feet and strode over to Joanna, who was still kneeling. “I leave you in the care of the good Captain Bolt and the Lord’s keeping, royal sister. Our enemy shall be cast down, and you and I shall be reunited at Saint Gilles, if not before. May the saints look kindly down on us.”
He drew his sword and raised it high. “For Jesus.”
“For Jesus,” echoed his men.
He’s magnificent, Adelia thought, but his element is battle. God preserve us from him.
A knight in full mail rode up to her, his helmet with its nosepiece making his face unrecognizable from all the others around them. But the voice was familiar even though, for once, the lyrics it sang were ugly
Maces and swords, helms of different hue,
Shields riven and shattered in the fight,
The steeds of dead and wounded run aimless o’er the field,
Mengreat and small tumbled into the ditches,
Dead with pennoned stumps of lances in their ribs…
Links of his hauberk hissed as Sir Guillaume dismounted, took off his helmet, and tucked it under his arm. “I go to war, lady but I leave my heart in your keeping. I beg a remembrance from you to be buried with me, should I die.”
oh, you young idiot. Adelia’s heart went out to him; his face shone with excitement. That he could be one of those in a ditch with a broken lance through his ribs wasn’t in his mind. He saw only glory-and a fortune. By taking hostages and loot, an untried knight could make himself rich in battle. If he survived.
“Ah, lady your gentle woman’s heart quails at the thought of war, as it should, yet how else may I be worthy of you but by showing my prowess in conflict? The neighing of mettlesome chargers, the clash of steel, the cry of battle… a remembrance, I beg.”
She gave him the last of Emma’s kerchiefs that she kept tucked in her belt-the others had gone for bandages. “God keep you, Sir Guillaume,” she said, and meant it; he was so young.
She watched him hiss happily away to join his fellow knights, tying the fine linen around his arm as he went.
To AVOID RIDING into conflict, they turned southwest into what was, as far as poor Locusta was concerned, unscouted territory, a wilder countryside of more steeply wooded hills, deeper, faster-flowing rivers.
It was also lonelier.
Captain Bolt didn’t like it and redoubled his outriders. “Suppose that Anglim fella ain’t being chased eastwards. Suppose he doubles back. The princess’d make a fine hostage, let alone the treasure chests, and I ain’t got enough men to hold off an army”
His nervousness transferred itself down the line. Cooks rode with roasting spits in their hands, laundresses grasped washing sticks, the morose blacksmith held a fearsome hammer. Archers had their bows across their saddles, quivers ready on their backs, and Captain Bolt clustered more of his men around the princess’s palanquin and the treasure chests.
Ulf worried about the content of his cross and added a spear to his equipment from one of the armory mules. “Any bugger who tries to get you-know-what off of me is going to get what-for.”
“I think it was more in danger when we were with Richard,” Adelia assured him.
“Crusade?”
She nodded. There wasn’t a land on the continent that didn’t have its own version of the Arthurian legend; flourishing Excalibur, most powerful of mythical weapons, would endow Richard with a symbol of leadership over the different nationalities of Christian knights gathered in the Holy Land almost as potent as the Cross in the fight against the pure black Al-Uqaab flag of Muhammad.
Ulf spat. “Well, he ain’t getting it and nobody else, neither. The king and Prior Geoffrey said as I was to take it to Sicily and to Sicily it’s bloody well goin’.”
Locusta did his best, riding ahead, searching for a hospice in a countryside without signposts, sometimes finding one, sometimes not.
Twice, they had to spend the night in the open under the pavilions and tents they carried with them, making little towns of canvas, their fires and lanterns the only glimmer in the darkness, listening to the hoot of owls and the bark of foxes.
Villages were few, tiny and invariably perched high away from the road, which was as empty as if the few occupants of the land had seen what must still appear a formidable procession coming and had shut themselves away like flowers curling up at the approach of night.
For good reason. With the prospect of having to feed the company themselves, the train’s sumpters fell like wolves on such s
heep as they saw, requisitioning them in the name of King Henry and carrying them off to be roasted.
Luckily, the weather blessed them; by day they rode under skies of clear, forget-me-not blue. There were still hazelnuts and late blackberries in the hedges, and men and women stopped to gather them as they passed before hurrying back to the procession, unnerved by a quiet in which only birds twittered.
They were now in the Massif Centrale. Riders had to dismount, and mule drivers bellowed obscenities in order to encourage their animals up ever-steeper hills and then rein them in down the other side.
It took time. It took time. Sometimes they made barely ten miles a day between stops. Adelia, nearly sobbing at the delays, thought constantly of Allie.
I don’t want to be here, I want to be with you.
AT THE RIVER LOT, they looked for the ferry that would take them over it. Except that there was no ferry
“What do you mean burned?” Locusta raved at the ferryman standing by what had once been a landing stage.
“I mean as Lord Angoulême set fire to it,” the man said wearily.
“Three days ago that was. So as to stop the duke chasin’ him over the river. No bloody thought for my living, neither of ’em.”
“Where can we find other boats?”
“Ain’t any Lord Angoulême burned them an’ all.”
So much was obvious; a great river that should have been dotted with waterborne traffic was empty to a sky that smelled of ash.
“Then, what are we to do?”
The ferryman didn’t care; his employment was gone and so was his livelihood until a new ferry could be constructed-“always supposin’ the buggers don’t come back and burn that.”
He spat and pointed his thumb downriver. “Lord Richard went thataway You better go east to find another crossing; ain’t been any fighting in that direction, far as I know. Make for Figères. Biggest town round here, Figères.”
“How far is it?”
“Two days’ ride.” He gave them directions.
“At least we’ll be going east,” Locusta said to the Bishop of Saint Albans, as they rode back to rejoin the procession. “We’ve been going too far west.”
“I know, but we daren’t risk taking the princess into a war.”
“Another night in the open,” Locusta groaned. “And no baths. My lord, I’d be eternally grateful if you would break the news to the ladies-in-waiting.”
“That’s your job,” Rowley told him. “I’m not that brave.”
THE ROUTE TO Figères meant taking a wide traverse through the mountains. Thus they came across the hilly little village of Sept-Glane…
It was a tiny hamlet, hardly worth razing to the ground, but its lord was Vulgrin of Angoulême, so Duke Richard, in passing, had made an example of it.
Nothing was left of cottages and cultivation except cinders. On its terraced pastures, dead animals were beginning to balloon. Its men had been taken away-for what purpose was unknown. Weeping women and children scrabbled for tubers in the blackened earth of their fields.
Rowley ordered a halt so that food and money could be distributed but he knew, as the victims knew, that Sept-Glane was dead.
IT WAS EARLY the next day after another night under canvas, that Ulf who’d been riding alongside Adelia, suddenly thrust his cross at her, got down from his mule, and ran toward a neighboring wood, clutching his stomach and vomiting.
Handing over the cross to Mansur, she dismounted and chased after him. The youth was squatting when she found him. “Get away” he groaned. “I’m dying.”
She hurried back to her horse for her medicine bag, passing other men and women running toward the trees on the same errand as Ulf.
By midafternoon the procession had been forced to halt as more and more of its people succumbed.
“You’ve got to find somewhere we can use as a hospital,” Adelia told Locusta. “And quickly”
“Around here?” The mountains on all sides, covered in the soft shrub that the natives called garrígue, were empty even of sheep.
Adelia pointed to a track that climbed to their right, eventually losing itself in distant trees from which issued a thin spiral of smoke. “Up there?”
She watched him put his horse at the hill, and then joined the emergency conference of bishops, doctors, chaplains, the Irishman, and Captain Bolt that had gathered in the middle of the stony road they’d been following.
Dr. Arnulf was shrill: “It is the plague. The princess must be got away immediately”
There was a squeak of alarm from Father Adalburt. “Plague?”
But Adelia had been asking questions amongst the servants, both sick and well. Yesterday it appeared, their ale had run dry and, while charity was being distributed in Sept- Glane’s fields, they had filled up a cask with water for themselves from one of Sept-Glane’s wells.
“My Lord Mansur doesn’t think it’s the plague,” Adelia said, carefully And explained, “Only those who drank the water are sick.”
There was a moment’s silence. Then: “Dear God,” Rowley said. “Richard poisoned Sept-Glane’s wells.”
“I’m afraid… Lord Mansur is afraid that he must have done.”
It was the standard practice of lords to deprive the enemy of fresh water during a war, an atrocity that visited more suffering on innocent villages caught up in it.
“It is the plague,” Dr. Arnulf insisted. “I shall accompany the princess and her household to Figères. I shall administer my specific against contagion to her…”
The Bishop of Winchester fell to his knees: “God, God, how have we offended thee that Thou sendest this misfortune upon us?”
“How many of our people are ill?” Rowley wanted to know.
“Thirty-four,” Adelia said, “but Lord Mansur believes there will be no more. The rest of us drank from different ale casks.” (The elite had its own and better brew.) “If we hadn’t, if we’d drunk the water, all of us would be showing signs of the flux by now. Luckily, the princess has been unaffected.”
“We cannot take that risk,” Dr. Arnulf said, hurriedly. “I must accompany her to safety”
“Let him go, Rowley” Adelia said swiftly in Arabic. “He’ll just be a hindrance.”
“You’re going with him, I can tell you that much.”
An expression that Gyltha and Mansur knew well settled on Adelia’s face, making it squarer and heavier, a this-far-and-no-farther look. “I am staying with my patients.” Every word emphasized; she had failed in her duty to Brune, she wasn’t deserting again.
Her lover recognized defeat.
Locusta joined them, gasping from haste and with a young woman riding pillion behind him. “Nuns up there… Two of them. This lady is Sister Aelith, she says…There’s an unused cowshed…” He helped her dismount.
Sister Aelith bobbed to the company shrinking back slightly at the sight of Mansur-Languedoc’s occupation by the Moslem army one thousand years before had left a folk memory in which the word Saracen was still synonymous with ruin.
“He’s a doctor,” Locusta told her impatiently “Tell them, tell them what you told me.”
Sister Aelith bobbed again. “My mother says she is sorry to hear of your trouble and offers our old cowshed for those who are ill-she is cleaning it now.”
“Anything, Rowley We must get these people where I can treat them.”
Decisions were made, swiftly-the condition of the sick was becoming more and more pitiable and dangerous.
The princess, her retinue, treasure carts, and every healthy servant were ordered to go on to Figères.
Dr. Arnulf couldn’t get them away fast enough.
Rowley was to help in getting the invalids to the cowshed and then maintain liaison between them and Figères for as long as the illness lasted. Locusta was sent ahead to warn the town of the princess’s coming.
To everybody’s surprise-and Adelia’s distaste-O’Donnell said he, too, would stay. “For sure Lord Mansur’ll be needing another pair
of manly hands. He’ll get two, for Deniz will be with me.”
The sick were urged up the track to what was to be their hospital-a transfer subject to pitiable stops that left an unsavory trail behind them.
Against a slope stood a typical Angoulême cowshed, with a half wall on one side that left it open to the air. Redundancy had tumbled one end to the ground, though the rest looked sturdy enough. Outside was a dew pond.
By the time Adelia and her patients arrived, the hard-baked earth floor had been swept and a woman, clad in black like the younger nun, was busily stuffing straw into sacks to make palliasses.
She came forward. She was a small, upright woman whose astute dark eyes, though she was not old, shone out of the deeply creased face of one who had been too much out in the sun, like winkles set in ribbed sand.
Rowley bowed to her and explained who they were and their situation. “May we know to whom we are indebted, Mother…?”
“Sister,” she told him. Her voice was unexpectedly deep and had the heartiness of a vocal slap on the back. “We are all brothers and sisters in this world. I am Sister Ermengarde. This is my daughter, Aelith. You need help? Splendid, you have found it. We are itinerants but, by the Mercy, we are settled here for a while. Since we keep no cows, this shed is at your disposal. Also, I have sent word to nearby villages to requisition every chamber pot they have.”
Thank the Lord, a practical woman. But even in her relief for a second it flashed across Adelia’s mind that there was something strange about the two nuns. To judge from their black robes, theywere Benedictines, but they wore no scapulas and their veils were merely scarves tied round their heads like those of peasant women.
Presumably they had chosen the religious life but hadn’t yet been officially incorporated into an order by their bishop. Peculiar, though, that they were itinerant; nuns usually stayed where they were put.
There was something else odd about them, something missing… Dammit, what did it matter? They were godsent.
The immediate concern was to get the patients cleaned of their vomit and bloody diarrhea; they’d need swabbing down and their clothes burned before they took to their clean palliasses, a process that necessitated a privacy separating the men from the women; in Adelia’s experience, embarrassment weakened a patient’s chance of recovery.
A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin Page 14
