A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

by Ariana Franklin

  Adelia stumbled toward them to take them in her arms. In laying her face against theirs, she felt the same tears of gratitude on their cheeks that were falling down hers.

  EVEN WHEN DINNER was finished, the explanations were not, and the company, sitting cross-legged on its cushions, remained round the table long after the dishes had been cleared away.

  “But this is terrible,” Dr. Gershom said, not for the first time. “Who is this monster? Such a thing to happen to our darling.”

  “We must remain calm,” Dr. Lucia told him-it was her mantra. “Jibril will find the madman and have him put away”

  “He had better. She doesn’t leave my sight until he is.” He looked at his wife: “And I am calm, woman.”

  “No, you’re not. Only when dealing with your patients. They will live longer than you do, old man.”

  It was an old, old exchange that, to Ulf and Boggart, taken aback, sounded like the beginning of an argument.

  Adelia and Mansur caught each other’s eye and smiled. No change here, then. This ill-assorted couple bantered, sometimes insulted each other, to a degree that concerned strangers, especially those who, like most Sicilian husbands and wives, used elaborate courtesy to one another in public, whatever they might do in private. Those who knew them well, however, recognized the disguise of a devotion so deep that each had preferred ostracism from their families, one Roman Catholic, the other Jewish, rather than not marrying.

  It had never occurred to Adelia that her foster parents’ arguments were anything other than freedom of expression, nor that the roots of the tree sheltering her while she was growing up could ever be shaken.

  “And Henry Plantagenet to tear a mother away from her child?” asked Dr. Gershom. “Is that royal? The deepest-dyed ruffian would hesitate. I need to see my granddaughter.”

  “We shall see her if we go to England.”

  Adelia caught her breath. “You might come to England? When? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Dr. Lucia said: “Some time ago, that deepest-dyed ruffian of your father’s sent us a most courteous letter, praising you, Adelia, and saying that if we should wish to visit England, he would be delighted to have us under his protection.”

  “Henry did?” Adelia was amazed.

  Gershom sniffed. “Every now and then one of his fancy couriers has called in at Salerno on his way to Palermo with a letter to tell us how you get on. Your mother thinks that’s courtesy I say it’s no more than our due for taking our daughter from us and keeping her away His invitation is a puff, a sop to keep us happy.”

  “Oh, no,” Adelia said, still surprised, but with certainty. “No, it isn’t. If he’s offered you a place in England, he truly wants you there.”

  The Plantagenet did nothing out of sensitivity She wondered why he had done it at all; she hadn’t thought he’d even been aware of her parents’ existence. But he was a canny monarch with a network of information like no other, and two more of the world’s most gifted doctors would be of considerable use to his kingdom.

  What amazed her was that they should be considering it; she’d thought them too deeply founded into Southern Appenine rock to be dislodged.

  Staring at her mother, Adelia saw what, in the misty happiness of seeing her again, she had missed-a dent on the woman’s cheekbone.

  She leaned over to touch it, gently “How did that happen? Has Father been beating you again?”

  “I should have,” Gershom said bitterly. “If ever a stubborn, obstinate maypole of a woman deserved knocking down, it is that woman there. Didn’t I tell her not to go visiting her Salerno patients without Halim to guard her? Did she listen? Mansur, my old friend, where were you? You’d have seen them off.” His face changed. “They stoned her.”

  “Stoned her… Who did?”

  Unperturbed, Dr. Lucia said: “Oh, it was a monk. In the Via Mercanti. I think he was a brother from the San Mateo monastery. An inept thrower, in any case; his other stones missed.”

  “Dear God. But why?”

  “Presumably because I am married to the Jew you are pleased to call a father.”

  “It is true,” Gershom said. “The next day the amiable fellow arrived with reinforcements and broke all our front shutters, which, on the whole, was preferable to stoning your mother, though not so good economically Wood is expensive. We complained to Bishop Jerome, but nothing was done; there was no prosecution.”

  “Why?»

  “Child, your parents are an affront to God. A Jew, a Catholic, living together? Insupportable. Enough to make angels weep and disturb the Heavens.” Gershom sighed. “Even your aunt Felicia has found it necessary to leave us and retire to the Convent of San Giorgio.”

  Felicia? And this was the woman who’d kept the household in Salerno running with the ease of oiled wheels so that her younger, medically gifted sister could concentrate on her profession.

  “Well, well,” Lucia said. “She was getting old. Maybe we had become too much for her.”

  “No,” Gershom said. “She was frightened.” He took his daughter’s hand in his. “Things have changed, little one. Simeon and his Arab wife have been driven out, so has our excellent Greek chemist-you remember Hypatos who was so ill-advised as to marry a Catholic girl?”

  “Nobody used to mind-well, they minded but it was tolerated…”

  “But you are remembering the days when the Christian Church here overlooked mixed marriages. It no longer does. William is being pressured to replace his nonbelieving advisers with those of the Latin faith. Even Jibril has to pretend that he is a Christian convert when he’s in public-he told me so himself when we arrived.”

  “I know it,” Mansur said. “Did I not say that there were fewer mosques than there were?”

  Aveyron.

  Adelia got up and opened the door into the garden so that she could breathe. Not here, oh God, not here.

  They had stoned her mother, stoned her, in Salerno, which had been a boiling pot producing the greatest social, political, and scientific advances the world had ever seen. She’d thought that its steam would spread throughout every land to be sniffed appreciatively by men and women with the wit to envisage a future in which there was no racial or religious conflict.

  Don’t let the sun set on it.

  But the sun was setting. A huge semicircle of orange was turning the gardens into amber as it sank. Far off, she could hear the summonses to evening prayer coming from minarets, muezzins, and campaniles. In town, the white robes of Arabs, Norman tunics, monks’ habits, and Jewish cloaks would be brushing past each other on their way to the mosques, synagogues, and churches of their various faiths.

  But Mansur was right; what had once been musically discordant concordance was now dominated by bells for Latin vespers.

  Not Aveyron. Not here.

  Gershom joined her. He put an arm round her shoulders. “It is grief for me to tell you, my child, but you would not be allowed to study in Salerno’s school now.”

  Adelia turned to stare at him. “No women?”

  “No women. No autopsy, either. Occasionally old Patricio sneaks the corpse of a destitute to me, but…” His hands went up toward the sky. “How can we mend the human body if we do not know how it works?”

  They stood together, watching the great semicircle turn to gold and diminish into a final, lustrous arc before it disappeared entirely and left them in the dark.

  IN THE ATTIC of Signor Ettore’s lodging house, Scarry is seated on the truckle bed with its stinking mattress. He stares, unmoving, at the plaster peeling on the wall.

  His landlady is right about his eyes; they are beautiful in their way, clearly defined slit pupils set in very white whites and totally without emotion-a wolf’s eyes.

  Fourteen

  IN ALL ITS HISTORY, Palermo had not seen such splendor as attended the wedding of its lord to the King of England’s daughter. The city was so lit by lanterns and flambeaux that the blaze brightened a dull sky and turned vivid the crowding, exulting press that
made its streets almost impassable.

  In the cathedral itself, the packed congregation might have been enclosed in a jewel of flashing and infinite color.

  Like all the other ladies of privilege crushed into a roped-off area of the nave, Adelia was veiled. Two centuries of Arab rule had left a legacy of Islam that respectable Sicilian women, whatever their religion, had yet to discard.

  Boggart and Dr. Lucia, also veiled, were seated in a compartment high up in the southern clerestory-a Christian imposition on what had once been Palermo’s greatest mosque-behind a filigree screen that had a shutter which, should young Donnell start to cry for his next feed, could shut out the noise from the rest of the congregation.

  Mansur who, with Ulf and Dr. Gershom, was lost somewhere on the other side amongst the vast, male congregation, had become alarmed again now that they were leaving the protection of the Ziza and had forbidden the women to attend unless they wore the anonymous veil.

  “The Scarry may be in the cathedral. He knows your faces, but we do not know his.”

  Dr. Gershom hadn’t wanted her to come at all, but Adelia had promised to see Joanna married and would do no other.

  The argument had gone on for some time; they were to be carried to the cathedral in palanquins, like potentates. When Mansur, whose height made this form of conveyance too uncomfortable for him, had said he would walk beside them, there was an immediate outcry; it was obvious to everybody that his actual purpose was to scan the people they passed in case Scarrywas among them ready to attack. For the Arab, the assassin had gained superhuman qualities.

  “You great gawk,” Ulf had said, “if he is in the crowd, he’ll recognize you. Might as soon stride along ringing a bell and shoutin’, ‘Make way for the Lady Adelia.’”

  “I shall not do that,” Mansur said. “I, too, will go veiled.” It was not unreasonable; many Arabs, especially the most orthodox of their faith, wore the tagelmust, the strip of cloth covering the lower part of the face.

  “Let him,” Adelia had said at last. “At least, it’ll keep the dust out of his nose.”

  There had been dust in plenty, but no Scarry. Looking through the curtains of her palanquin at Mansur striding beside her like a watchful Tuareg, Adelia had been reminded that they were leaving Eden’s Garden to return to the world of suspicion and fear.

  But while, for Mansur, her parents, and Ulf, the immediate threat was Scarry, she was more concerned by a wider and greater menace which, here in the cathedral, was being reinforced-the wedding had been taken over by the Latin Church; she saw few Jewish rabbis among the congregation, fewer Greek clergy, while Mansur was among only a select number of Moslems wearing Islamic robes.

  Yes, it was a Christian ceremony and had to be. But it’s not representative of what Sicily stands for, she thought. It begged the question as to why William had allowed a coercion that his father and grandfather would not have stood for.

  The king worried her. She’d seen nothing of him since that one meeting and hadn’t expected to, but Mansur brought back gossip from his fellow eunuchs at the Ziza that was not encouraging.

  “They say he spends too much time in the harem.”

  “He’s popular with the people,” she’d said defensively

  “Because he has beauty and charm. Because the country is in a time of peace, but he does nothing to maintain it and they are afraid. He is weak, they say The Norman feudal lords are creeping into power in his government and bringing their Church in their wake.”

  And then Mansur had surprised her. He added: “Our king would have kicked their backsides for them.”

  Our king.

  “Dear God,” she’d said, after a moment. “Mansur, we’ve become English.”

  Now, here in the cathedral, she let her eye follow a march of slender, Saracen pillars eastward, past the high altar to the presbyterium, up the apsidal wall with its prophets, saints, and cherubim to the great mosaic that presided over them all.

  Where Christ God looked back at her.

  At least, if the face wasn’t God’s it was surely Man’s at his best and highest-achieving. In tiny tiles, some Byzantine genius had captured strength, love, and tenderness to give life to the Pantocrator he worshipped-and was right to worship, for here was a Ruler of All who could embrace man, woman, and child with a compassion that discounted color of skin or faith.

  Adelia looked into the dark, pouched eyes that looked back into hers. Don’t let them change you, don’t let them.

  There was a swirl of trumpets, and she had to turn away as the crowd in the nave parted to give passage to the procession of princes, archbishops, bishops, and ambassadors making its way toward the choir.

  There was only one for her.

  Rowley looked uncomfortable, as he always did when he was in full regalia; the miter had never suited him.

  She loved him all over again, had never stopped loving him. Only a grubby and unworthy fit of pique, she realized, had stopped her going to him the minute she arrived in Palermo. In seeing him now, she no longer cared that his duties had taken him away so that she’d been left to the protection of another man. There was no other man; never would be.

  Dare I wave at him? Ooh-hoo, sweetheart, I’m here.

  Hardly The moment had passed in any case; the sumptuously robed men processing the nave now were lesser bishops and clergy from other countries.

  One of them, the Bishop of Aveyron.

  Adelia put her hand to her mouth to stop a moan. The monster was here, invited, accepted, a symptom of gangrene, which, if the princes of the world did not cut it out, would infect the earth. And there, going past now, was the other ghoul, Father Gerhardt-and Father Guy with him, chatting, as if contagions were multiplying and joining up.

  She looked toward the face of the Pantocrator. Don’t let them, don’t let them.

  A choir had begun singing an epithalamium, announcing the arrival of the bride.

  Adelia had to crane her neck to see the smallest figure in the cathedral come walking slowly up the aisle, accompanied by her brother.

  Across his outstretched palms, Duke Richard carried a glittering sword, ready to lay it on the marriage altar. Excalibur had finally reached the destination for which it was meant.

  Adelia thought of the Glastonbury cave where it had been found and in which the quiet bones of its original owner still rested undisturbed. She stood on tiptoe to look for Ulf-this was his moment as well as hers-but she couldn’t see him.

  Beside her brother, her hand on his arm, Joanna looked like an exquisite, trailing forget-me-not. They’d dressed her in the same lovely blue as the Pantocrator’s cloak. There were flowers and diamonds in her hair.

  But she was tiny, so tiny. Adelia wanted to snatch her up and run.

  What would they do to her, these wolves in their cassocks and copes? What inept bloodletters would they call in to attend to her if she fell ill again?

  The ignorant are trying to set science back a thousand years. They may succeed. Nor can I be your doctor anymore, little one; they wouldn’t let me. In any case, there is another child who needs me, and I must go home.

  Home, she thought. This isn’t home. Home is Gyltha and Allie and Rowley and a rainy little island ruled by a bad-tempered king who looks forward, not back. I shall go home.

  But first there was a marriage ceremony to be performed.

  WHERE IN HELL IS SHE? The Bishop of Saint Albans, crammed like a celery stick between the two pumpkins that were the Bishop of Winchester on one side and the papal legate on the other, ran his eyes over the nave’s congregation, trying to locate his woman. Or, if not Adelia, then the thing that was out to harm her.

  In the last three days, he’d enlisted keen-eyed, sharp-witted Palermo-born Sicilians to try and find its hiding place. He’d spent his own nights in this city asking questions, hunting. Nothing. The snake had slithered into the undergrowth so that it could rise and strike when the opportunity came.

  He’s here, somewhere in this packed, bloody cat
hedral, because she’s here, and he knows she is.

  Rowley’s eyes went back to the women’s section. There were two hundred or more females in there. Why did they all have to look the same? Apart from the fact that some were wider or thinner, taller or shorter than others, their bloody veils rendered them indistinguishable bottle tops.

  Are you one of them, damn you? Which one?

  And what the hell am I doing here, bobbing up and down like an overdressed cork, praying for this, for that, and not giving a tinker’s curse for any of it because it is nothing-dear God, not even God-if I lose her.

  IN ANOTHER PART of the cathedral, an Irishman used his height to peer over surrounding heads in order to find the only one that mattered to him. He was angry at himself, and her; of all the women he’d known throughout the seven seas-most of them intimately-he was flummoxed by why he’d been cursed with this one.

  I am a Colossus, did you know that? I stride the oceans, I can forward wars and I can hinder them. Mermaids fawn on me. Women beautiful as the dawn wait on me; whores and saints and some that are both. And in the middle, like wrecking rock, there’s you.

  She wasn’t beautiful, he’d seen camels more graceful than her as she stumped along, glaring at fokking plants in case they’d be of use to her fokking patients. And never a look in his direction; the only smile on her for that fokking useless bishop, lighting up the world with it.

  Why would I die for that one? Because, O’Donnell, you poor bastard, the moment you saw her, her dimensions fitted exactly into the empty space in your misbegotten soul, and there’s damn all you can do about it.

  BETTER PLACED THAN all of them to have a view of the congregation below, another pair of eyes looks down from behind one of the artful pillars of the cathedral’s northern clerestory.

  The monkish usher, who’d asked the eyes’ owner what he wanted up there and tried to impede him reaching it, lies on the steps of the concealed staircase with gushing holes where his own eyes had been.

  The thing that had once possessed an identity of its own, and is now a dead man called Wolf, gives a red-tongued yawn. There is no need for him to concern himself; she will be revealed to him, just as the path that has led him to this place has been cleared for every step he’s taken against her in the last 1,000 miles.