A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

by Ariana Franklin

  “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. Gershom 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 u
s 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.

  Some lay on divans, but most were playing games or dancing or wheeling in acrobatics. Their guide stopped; he was going no farther. He put out an arm to halt Ulf, whose mouth had sagged open as he looked in. “Not you,” he said.

  Mansur patted Ulf on the head. “This is a harem,” he said, “and you are a whole man. Enter, and these guards will have to kill you.”

  Ulf was drooling. “Be bloody worth it,” he said.

  He was left behind, and the doors closed on him as Mansur and Adelia stepped in.

  The room stilled for a moment at the sight of Mansur, as did the chatter, but then the kaleidoscope came to life again, reassured by the presence of one who’d been instantly identified as another eunuch.

  In one corner of the room, some of the young women were working at silk looms; it looked an incongruous activity amongst all this recreation, though the owners of the slim hands shuttling back and forth seemed happily engrossed in what they were doing.

  A tall eunuch, who’d been strumming a long-necked lute, put the instrument down and came toward them, touching his forehead and breast. “As-salaam aleikum.”

  “Wa aleikum salaam,” returned Mansur.

  The man relapsed into perfect Norman French. “Lord, Lady, I am Sabir, most humbly at your service. And now, Gracious Ones, if you would be good enough to follow me…” He gestured to one of the harem’s older women. “Rashidah shall chaperone the Lady Adelia.”

  Adelia had begun to wonder whether the king was going to receive them in the chamber to which selected ladies from the harem were summoned for his sexual pleasure, but the room they entered had no samite drapes, no couches, no erotic pictures. A magnificent, claw-footed desk stood in its center. Books and scrolls lined three of the walls, and a superb tapestry depicting hunters in full cry through a forest in which peacocks wandered covered the fourth.

  This was the office of a Norman king, not an Arabian sultan.

  But it wasn’t a king sitting behind the desk; it was a frog. The hood of a burnous framed features with the smooth, greenish pallor of an amphibian. Either the princess’s kiss to her king had reversed the fairy story, or this was not the king.

  The man stood up, showing that he was squat. He salaamed, gesturing for them to take the two chairs on the opposite side of the desk, and greeted them in Norman French that had a lisp to it.

  “May I present myself? I am Jibril, emir secretary to the Musta’íz, the Gracious One, who will join us in a minute. Lord Mansur, you honor us. As for the Lady Adelia, you have been much missed from this kingdom. The King of England’s gain was our loss; it was with deep regret that seven years ago I signed the permission to send you to him, knowing we were losing a most accomplished doctor and that our esteemed Doctor Gershom would be losing a daughter.”

  He bowed. His eyes were the only things about him that weren’t froglike. They directed themselves from beneath the pouched skin like skewers.

  Adelia bowed back. It was you, was it?

  “May I hope that your return to us is permanent?”

  “I’m afraid not. I have to go back, I have left my child behind.” She had a sudden fear that they weren’t going to let her leave.

  But Jibril said: “So we understand. May you be happily and safely reunited with her.”

  “Thank you.” They have spies everywhere, she thought, they even know Allie’s sex. Still, she’d almost forgotten the relief of being in a country where a female doctor was not an abho
rrence.

  “We fear the journey from England has been a difficult one. We learn from the Lord O’Donnell that you have been pursued by a malevolence that wishes you harm. The Glorious One wishes me to tell you that, should he be discovered here in Palermo, that being shall be hunted down and killed like the dog he is.”

  “Thank you, but I don’t think that’s what this meeting is about, is it? You want to discuss the Princess Joanna.” Let’s get it over with.

  Jibril’s lips made a horizontal stretch; presumably he was smiling. “You have adopted English directness, lady Allow me to do the same. The Lady Blanche tells us the princess was taken ill as she boarded ship at Saint Gilles and that drastic measures had to be taken by you to save her life. Would you be good enough to inform us of what they were?”

  She took a deep breath. “I was forced to operate.” She went into the explanation of the appendix, its putrefaction, etc.

  “The procedure has left a scar, of course. Lady Blanche worries that it may displease the king but I am certain that, as a man of sense, he would prefer a scarred bride to a dead one. I can assure you that it makes no difference to the princess’s beauty or disposition, which is of the sweetest.”

  The secretary’s lips stretched wider. “Already, so much is obvious. We are all charmed by this jewel of England. The scarring is of no moment if it saved the dear one’s life; a diamond with a flaw can be more beautiful than one without. That is not our concern…”

  It isn’t? Thank God, thank God. Then what are you worried about?

  “What we would wish to know is whether this operation has had any other ill effect? On her future and that of her marriage?”

  It was Mansur who caught on. He said in English: “He wants to know if Joanna can still have children.”

  Adelia blew an “oh” of relief. Was that it? Of course that was it. She and Blanche had been worrying over the wrong cause. Scarred or not, Joanna’s function was to give William sons. An heir was vital if Sicily was to remain in the hands of the Hautevilles. Childlessness in a king was not just a personal tragedy, it meant the sweeping away of his entire administration; possibly civil war as differing claimants jostled to take his throne.