A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

by Ariana Franklin

  “I assure you, my lord, that as far as I know, Joanna is capable of having as many babies as God and the king give her.”

  The little skewers that were Jibril’s eyes had become mercilessly sharp, like his voice: “And that is the truth?”

  “The woman is incapable of speaking anything else,” Mansur told him.

  “The cecum is nowhere near the womb,” Adelia said. “I can draw you a diagram, if you like.”

  For the first time the secretary’s smile was genuine. “Spare me that. And forgive me.” He was a different man. “We need a son and heir, you see. We are surrounded by enemies who will take Sicily over the brink if there is no succession.”

  “Aha.” Here was an opportunity

  Adelia said: “My lord, the King of England entrusted us with bringing King William a gift; next to his daughter it is the greatest he could bestow. To be used against a mutual enemy, he said. He’s sent him Excalibur.”

  Excalibur. The beacon of light that sprang into every eye at the mention of the name was lit even in this Arab’s. The Normans had brought the story of Arthur with them when they came, and it had taken root; there was a strong Sicilian legend that Arthur roamed Mount Etna.

  Jibril leaned forward; he knew the sword’s value to whoever owned it. For the first time, he was abrupt. “Where is it?”

  If Richard had it, and Adelia was almost certain that he did-Henry had as good as warned her-then now was the time to betray him. Though carefully.

  She explained how the sword had been hidden in a cross and given to Ulf to carry “It was lost when my companions and I… fell into some difficulty that separated us from Princess Joanna and her company for a while, but we have a hope that Duke Richard may have found it. It-or certainly the cross that contained it-was seen being carried aboard the Nostre Dame, just before she set sail from Saint Gilles.”

  She looked into Jibril’s eyes and knew they saw everything; this man would have spies scattered through every country in the known world; was probably more aware than she was of Richard’s ambition.

  “If Duke Richard has taken it into his keeping,” she went on, “it may be that he wishes to give it to King William himself and, I am sure, will present it when he feels the moment has come.”

  “I am sure he will,” Jibril said.

  That was enough; the word was out. Subtly, it would be made known to Richard that William was aware of Henry’s intention to give him the sword and had every expectation of receiving it.

  She could do no more.

  “‘To be used against a mutual enemy.’ That is King Henry’s message?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Which one, I wonder; we have so many” But Jibril was a happier man. “Name your reward, my dears.”

  The reward was to have the advantage of being direct. “About the babies, my lord. The princess is not ready for them yet.”

  “My dear Lady Adelia.” It was said with reproach. “Is our Gracious One a barbarian? He is not. Princess Joanna shall enjoy her childhood until such time as… ah, here he is now.”

  A man came into the room. He was as beautiful as his palace and, despite the long, fair hair of his Viking ancestors, almost as eastern. Slippers of engraved red leather ending in a point were visible under his tasseledburnous of soft wool. He trailed servants, scent, and Oriental courtesy, touching his forehead and breast in a salaam as they were introduced to him. It was disconcerting to hear him speak in Norman French and invoke the Virgin rather than Allah as he expressed his gratitude for “this pure pearl of England whose life and safety is so dear to me and for whom I am eternally in your debt.”

  He gave a look toward Jibril, who nodded-business concluded satisfactorily-and then he was gently chiding them. “But why were you not with my princess when she arrived? You, who have done so much for her, should have been in the royal train. Where are you staying? No, you are to lodge at the Ziza during your time here; you and your household are my honored guests. Mansur, my friend, do you hunt? Lady Adelia, I was in debt to your esteemed father, and now to you… And how is my cousin of England?”

  He was young, twenty-four, twenty-five perhaps, and, to judge from his charm, let alone his harem, experienced with women-as a nation expected its king to be, while at the same time expecting perfect fidelity from its queen. But there was none of the forceful-ness nor sign of the overweening intelligence possessed by his future father-in-law. Henry Plantagenet wouldn’t have left the questioning of Joanna’s fertility to a secretary; important decisions were his alone.

  With trepidation, Adelia suspected laziness. Undoubtedly Joanna would fall dutifully in love with him. It would probably be a happy marriage from that point of view, but whether William had the energy and acumen and kingship to maintain the balance on which his realm depended she was less sure.

  The room became full of servants bringing sherbet, cakes, and two little velvet cushions with leather cases on them. The Lord Mansur stood up to be invested with the Order of the Lion, the Lady Adelia to have a gold cross hung around her neck. Both received heavy purses that chinked.

  “Accept this from our grateful hands. We hear that yours were taken from you.”

  “Thank you, my lord, thank you.” Where do they get their information? She fingered the cross, bending her head so that she could see it properly, and swallowed. It was studded with diamonds, enough to keep her and Allie in comfort for the rest of their lives.

  When William had gone, Jibril said: “And now, dear lady, there are covered carts waiting outside to take you and your household to the Ziza Palace. In return for the princess’s life, it is the Gracious One’s obligation and ours to safeguard your own, therefore the transfer will be done in secrecy. Nobody but ourselves shall know where you are.”

  It wasn’t a request, it was a command. The king was in Adelia’s debt; honor demanded that nothing should happen to her until it had been repaid.

  Le roi le veult, she thought.

  The Ziza, one of the palaces that ringed Palermo like a necklace, was rumored to be the loveliest of them all. Her father and mother had once taken her to stare at the great Arabic inscription round its entrance arch: This is the earthly paradise that opens to the view; this king is the Musta’iz; this palace is the Ziza (noble place).

  Well, a little bit of luxury wouldn’t come amiss for once.

  “That would be very nice,” she said.

  LATER THAT DAY, in a room of the Palazzo Reale, two men were having a discussion. A beautiful room, one of many designed for valued guests; a curved and painted ceiling met the arches of the walls in a frieze of sculptured, marble fruit while, in the resultant niches, real pomegranates and oranges were piled in boat-shaped porphyry dishes on silver-topped tables. In case the guest should be cold-for though Palermo weather begins to warm in February, it was still chilly-bowls of scented oil burned in the braziers.

  The discussion-it was taking place in English-was less civilized.

  In fact, the room might have been a ring in which two fighting dogs strained against their leashes in order to tear out each other’s throat.

  “And where is she now?” The Bishop of Saint Albans didn’t like the tale he’d been told of what had happened to his woman since he’d last seen her, and he didn’t like the man who’d told it-a man who didn’t like him either.

  “I don’t know.” The lightness with which Admiral O’Donnell said it, and the ease with which he lolled on a brocaded ottoman while saying it, was an affront in itself.

  “Of course you bloody know.”

  “Indeed, I do not. We parted at the boat. I came on with the princess; she went off-apparently, her family owns a house in the Jewish Quarter. But she’s gone from there, the others with her, and the neighbors don’t know where.”

  In fact, he had a good idea that she was in the safekeeping of Jibril, who’d questioned both himself and Blanche closely on the happenings during the princess’s journey, and shown a great interest in Adelia’s whereabouts. Yes, he
was pretty sure the woman was somewhere in one of the royal palaces, in safety, thank God, but damned if he’d say so to this bishop who’d done nothing to ensure it. Let him sweat.

  “Why in hell didn’t you bring her here?”

  “Well now…” If it was possible to lounge with even more annoying elegance, the Irishman did it. “I decided that rejoining a royal household where somebody wants her death was not perhaps the finest move she could make.”

  Did you, you bastard, Rowley thought, and what gave you the right to decide what she should do and shouldn’t? And then he thought: Saving her damned life, I suppose.

  Well, he could still regain the high ground. “I’ve found him,” he said.

  “Scarry?”

  That’s jolted the bugger. “Come over here.”

  The Irishman approached an exquisite three-legged table covered with papers and scrolls. “How did you do that, now?”

  “Look at this.” Rowley picked up one of the scrolls. In his triumph, he’d lost aggression. “We had to submit a list of the names of Joanna’s household to the majordomo here at the palace, everybody traveling with her and requiring accommodation.” He batted his fist against the side of his head. “God Almighty, I don’t know why I didn’t think of the names before… it’s there as plain as bloody day”

  The bell for Vespers could be heard ringing close by from the nearby San Giovanni degli Eremeti, which, with its vermilion cupolas, looked more mosque than church. Rowley ignored it.

  It was a long scroll. It held not only names, but the person’s occupation and place of origin.

  Rowley pointed. “There.”

  The Irishman studied the name. “Him? It’s never him, surely Jesus, he was… That doesn’t necessarily mean he’d be called Scarry.”

  “I know. But Scarry’s a nickname-his outlaw name, and the odds are it was adapted from this. It surprised me, too, but there’s no other on that list would lead to it-I’ve studied them all. And when you come to think about it, he’s the only one with the opportunity.”

  “But he’s… I never even considered… Where is he now?”

  “Nobody knows. Disappeared since the Nostre Dame landed. Which clinches the matter. Apparently, he was becoming more and more odd every day”

  “Odd? I can think of more fitting terms. So he’s roaming the city somewhere?”

  “I presume so. I’ve got men out looking for him-and her. In the name of God, why did you let her loose?”

  O’Donnell fingered his chin. “Well now, she’s promised Joanna she’d see her married, so she’ll be in the cathedral for the wedding the day after tomorrow. She’s a woman who keeps her word…”

  “I know that.”

  “… but I’ll find her before then.” He got up and began moving toward the door.

  Rowley stopped him. “I’ll find her. She’s my woman, O’Donnell.”

  There was a smile of apparent surprise. “Is she now? Is she? And you a bishop.” The smile went. “Should have taken more fokking care of her, then, shouldn’t you?”

  ULF REACHED FOR a honeyed date, a delicacy he’d not encountered before but found to his taste. “What’s funny about that? I don’t need any more silk. Go home dressed like this, and the lads’ll throw me in a pond for a clothes horse.”

  “You look very nice,” Adelia said. They all did. Her own bliaut fitted like a skin at bosom and waist while its sleeves and skirt trailed in wafts of exquisite silver-green. “Though perhaps violet was a mistake with your complexion.”

  “I like violet.”

  Mansur pursued the matter. “So the majordomo asked you if you wanted a silk worker sent up to your room, and you said no.”

  “I’m not saying it ain’t a nice room, but I don’t want it cluttered with looms and such, do I.”

  “It’s a euphemism,” Mansur told him.

  “Didn’t want it cluttered with euphemisms neither.” Then it dawned. “You mean…? Hell and sulfur. And I said no.”

  “Quite right, too,” Adelia said. “Think of the poor girl.”

  “She might have liked him in violet,” said Mansur.

  Adelia put her arms behind her head and listened to a bird singing on an almond tree branch that was beginning to bud.

  She remembered Homer: I was driven thence by foul winds for a space of nine days upon the sea, but on the tenth day we reached the land of the Lotus-eater.

  Boggart, cradling Donnell after his evening feed, came back from her regular, self-imposed tour of the gardens that she made “so’s he can sniff all them lovely scents up his little nose.”

  She, too, was elegant. Like Adelia’s, her hair was encased in a pearl caul. Admittedly, things still tended to fall over when she passed them by, but clumsiness disappeared when she had Donnell in her arms; there never was a mother so attentive.

  Adelia sat up and took the baby from her so that she could snuggle with him among the cushions and feel the down of his head against her cheek. He smelled of fresh air and milk. “No lotuses for you,” she told him, “not until you’ve got teeth.”

  “Ain’t tried lotuses,” Boggart said. “They as nice as couscous?”

  Even Ward had a silver collar round his neck. Since he’d played his part in the rescue from Aveyron, the Ziza’s Moslem servants had been told to quash their antipathy to dogs as unclean beasts. At first, he’d been offered a home in the only canine residence the palace contained, the royal kennels, but since its hunting pack of salukis had terrified him, he’d been allowed to rejoin Adelia and the others as one more honored guest.

  His mistress had asked if she might send a message to the Bishop of Saint Albans to tell him where she was, but Jibril’s command that her whereabouts be kept a secret from everybody was obeyed to the letter, and her request had been ignored-courteously, but ignored.

  Rowley had arrived in Palermo, they’d told her that much. Yes, my lord bishop was also aware of her presence in Sicily, but it was better, since spies were everywhere, that there be no contact between the Ziza and the outside world.

  Well, she’d said to herself I shall see him at the wedding. And an unworthy thought had followed that one: It won’t do him any harm to wait until then.

  It was unfair on Rowley and, perhaps, the O’Donnell who had taken such care of her, but she had no energy for men and the emotion they engendered. Indeed, it hadn’t been until she was installed in the luxury of the Ziza that she’d realized that she and the others were tired to the bone.

  It was enough, it was deep sensual pleasure, to be waited upon like pashas, to take a soak in a heated pool big enough to swim in, to be massaged, oiled, perfumed, to have beautiful clothes laid out for their choice, to have cooks vying to tempt their appetites with dishes that took the palate to succulent heaven.

  All this in an edifice built for Norman kings by Arab craftsmen so that they wandered through an eye-bewildering, senses-enchanting, fountain-murmuring zigzag of stalactite and honeycombed ceilings and dazzling mosaics amidst living, pacing peacocks.

  It suited the four of them to be by themselves, to banter and remember another time of friends and contentment in Caronne. Each knew that the others woke up sweating from nightmares of screams and flames. In Adelia’s dreams a murdered laundress came time and again to point a shaking, accusing finger, but though they shared these memories they didn’t speak of them, trying to make themselves well in an earthly paradise and each other’s beloved company

  To be guarded by the scimitar-bearing men who stood at every entrance was, for the time being at least, not irksome but a source of comfort. Adelia convinced herself that, whoever he was, Scarry had died, or given up and gone away, to bother her no more.

  If she could have had Allie and her parents with her, it would have been as near Heaven as she could reach.

  IN ONE OF the poorer areas of Palermo, a landlord and his wife are discussing the man to whom they have just rented a space in the attic of their shambling lodging house.

  “His money’s good,” Ett
ore points out. For rooms are at a premium with the forthcoming wedding attracting so many people into the city, but the fact that the stranger hadn’t quibbled at being charged a gold tari for what even Ettore can’t claim to be luxurious accommodation has taken the landlord aback.

  “Did you look at his eyes?” Agata crosses herself. “Made me go all gooseflesh. And not a word out of him. Don’t you leave me alone with that creature.”

  Her husband, too, has been perturbed by his new, silent guest, but a gold tari is a gold tari. “His money’s good,” he says again.

  “ANOTHER PRESENT, RAFIQ?”

  The majordomo’s hands were cupped as if he offered the gift of a sip of water. “From the Gracious One, lady I was to say that it arrived by boat this morning. It is in the Court of the Fountain, if you would follow me. It is for the Lord Mansur also.”

  Mansur, Adelia saw, kept his hand on the dagger in his sash as they went; even here, he was never as relaxed as she was, always scanning the walls to the gardens as if Scarry might leap over them with a knife in his teeth.

  It had been an overcast day, and the court was made chilly by the water spurting from the stone lion’s head in the wall where two people, a man and a woman, stood under one of the palm trees, watching the stream’s twirling progress along the conduit in the tiled floor.

  They turned.

  The man had a close-shaven beard and humorous eyes. He was slightly shorter than the elegant woman with him.

  They were a couple that had once come across a bawling, abandoned baby girl on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius during an exploration. Childless themselves, they had taken the baby home and, in raising it, had given it the profit of their affection and exceptional intelligence. On finding, as she grew up, that their foster daughter had a mind to match and even outrank their own, they had enrolled her in the School of Medicine at Salerno at which they were both professors.