A Murderous Procession (12 page)

“I think he suspects Ulf of not being a real pilgrim,” Adelia told Mansur grimly, after the Irishman had gone. “Why can’t the blasted man leave us alone? I’m beginning to wonder if he’s looking for Excalibur.”

“It is for you that he joins us, I think,” Mansur said.

“Nonsense, he’s prying.”

The Arab shrugged. “We have given nothing away.”

But Adelia was left with the feeling that, somehow, they had.

“Lupus,
MEO
CARO
,
I have found Excalibur, I thinh. Henry gave it to his creature and she, with wily subterfuge, has it concealed,
arte perire sua.
The stinking cur that is always with her leaps on the youthful pilgrim with a rapture he shows to no one else except her Saracen and her maladroit maid. They are connected. Also the boy is never without the rough cross he carries. Does it rattle if shaken, I wonder? I believe it does.

Richard shall have it and make us rich as he promised. Let him create havoc with it, let him use it to kill his father, for that is what he secretly wishes. Our main purpose lies elsewhere.

PROGRESS
SLOWED
WHEN
they joined the broad highway leading toward Aquitaine, for this was the main westerly route to the Pyrenees and the road was crowded with pilgrims on their way to, or coming back from, the great shrine of Saint James at Compostela.

Here was holy zeal a-plenty; the air thrummed with it as well as with a hundred different languages and the smell of unwashed bodies tinged by mugwort, a specific against weariness that most of the pilgrims had tucked into their hats or shoes. Those returning from Spain, limping from their long march, despite the mugwort, wore the apostle’s token of a cockleshell and a look of exaltation. Villagers came out from their houses to beg their blessing or kiss the hands that had touched the sacred tomb.

The ones still on their way to Compostela were mostly rowdier, yelling hallelujahs, praising the Lord that their sins would soon be forgiven, some scourging themselves, some dancing, some clearly demented, some barefoot.

One tatterdemalion group surrounded Joanna’s cart, shouting at her to come with them for the good of her soul. Captain Bolt’s men would have dispersed them with the flat of their swords, but the princess showed her mettle by standing up and throwing coins into the crowd.

“I have made the pilgrimage, good people, and been blessed accordingly Take these alms and may God speed you.”

It was the ones pushing handcarts containing their sick relatives in the expectation that Saint James would cure them who concerned Adelia, and she went among them with her medical bag to try to treat them. In most cases she was waved away: “Thank you kindly, but Saint James’ll mend us when we get to him.”

“Leave them,” Mansur advised. “There are too many of them.”

There were, but she couldn’t bear to abandon them, and he had to force her back on her horse or she would have been left behind.

AT
THE
NEXT
MONASTERY
, Scarry watches his victim from a high window.

“There she goes to the courtyard to subsume herself in the pilgrims’ gangrenous flesh. And her lustful bishop with her, ostensibly to give comfort and alms, but in truth to be by her side.

“Yes, I hear you, beloved. We approach Aquitaine. It is time for the killing to begin.”

THE FIRST TWO KILLINGS appeared to be accidental- and one of them actually was.

The ladies of the party having retired to bed, the Abbot of Saint Benoit’s was sitting late at table with his male guests, and offering them the opportunity to go after boar in an hour or two’s time—boar hunting being best done at night when the male, most dangerous of quarries, leaves his sow and young ones in their lair to patrol the forest, snuffling his snout into the leaf mold and plowing the earth with his great tusks to sharpen them.

As Rowley explained to Adelia later, each man had feasted well but was not too drunk. Sir Nicholas had been watched carefully by his squire, who had seen to it that, when refilling his master’s wine cup, there’d been a good measure of water in it.

The abbot was talking of the grandfather of all boars that had been ruining his sown fields through the winter, not to mention killing two peasants. A worthy adversary at the height of his powers, God love him, the abbot had said. To prove it, he had his huntsman bring to the table such of the brute’s droppings as had been found so that the guests could assess them.

Also, the abbot went on, he owned a pack of boar hounds that were sans
pareil
and ready for the fray. He was sure the noble lords would wish to see them in action.

“You can imagine it, sweetheart,” Rowley told Adelia, “nearly all the noble lords, and some not so noble, were on their feet in an instant, calling for their horses to be saddled, especially Lord Ivo and Sir Nicholas and, of course, the ubiquitous O’Donnell.” Rowley’s mouth went into the thin line it was beginning to adopt every time the Irishman was mentioned.

He went on: “I tried to restrain Father Adalburt because boar hunting is not for amateurs, but the idiot was squeaking with excitement and couldn’t be persuaded. Locusta—poor lad, he doesn’t get much chance to hunt what with having to act as route master all the time—he wanted to go. Even Father Guy was enthused and said he’d join in, at least to watch.”

The Bishop of Winchester had declined on the grounds of being too old and tired. Rowley, reluctantly had decided to accompany the hunt, mainly he said, to keep his eye on the idiots.

IN
THE
LITTLE
stone lodge in the grounds of the Abbot of Saint Benoit’s house, huntsmen are arming themselves. For this is where the good abbot keeps his spears, lances, crossbows, bolts, arrows and yew bows, his stabbing andgralloching knives.

The men are excited and, as ever when boar is the quarry, a little nervous. Not so the hounds in the kennels next door; they are clamoring to be let out and do what they’ve been bred for.

Somebody chaffs Scarry for picking too slender a spear. “That’ll never get through a tusher’s hide.”

Scarry gives a naive smile. “Won’t it?” But he hefts its weight and takes it all the same.

ADELIA
WAS
ATTENDING
to sick pilgrims in the abbey courtyard as the hunt set off, its blare of trumpets and horns competing with the shouts of the whipper-in, the deep belling of the hounds and the rallying cries of riders.

She was in bed asleep when it returned but, like everyone else, was woken by the long note of a horn emerging from the forest sounding the mort, the salute to a dead quarry.

Except that this time it was not announcing the death of an animal …

It was raining. Monks, guests, and pilgrims gathered by the gates to watch the dripping hunt’s return. A weeping abbot walked beside a hastily assembled travois on which lay two bodies.

The corpse of Sir Nicholas Baicer was taken immediately to the Lady Chapel. Lord Ivo, bleeding horribly, was carried to the abbot’s room and laid on its bed.

The boar had indeed proved a worthy adversary; the dogs had found and bayed it; Lord Ivo and the abbot with their squires and huntsmen had dismounted ready for the kill.

But, though hounds were sinking their teeth into almost every part of it, the huge animal managed to charge and gore Lord Ivo in the groin, tossing him into the air, before the abbot’s sword went deep into its eye.

“Only then,” said the abbot, still crying, “didwe notice that Sir Nicholas was not with us, indeed had not been with us when we found the beast. Being moonless, the forest was so dark that I fear many of our following missed their way A search was instituted and at last we came upon Sir Nicholas, lifeless, being dragged by his horse, his poor foot still in its stirrup. Now God forgive me that this tragedy should come upon us … one fine knight injured unto death, another already gone to Paradise and my best boarhound with him. Surely we are accursed.”

With Mansur and Dr. Arnulf giving instruction, Adelia and the abbey’s herbalist did what they could for Lord Ivo.

By general agreement, sphagnum moss was applied to his injuries to cleanse them and stem the blood. But, as Adelia could see, the tusks had gone in too far, his lordship was undoubtedly bleeding internally and to stitch the wounds together would merely cause more agony without extending a life that was inevitably coming to its end.

She hurried from the room to fetch poppy juice from her pack and found Rowley waiting for her outside. “Is Ivo dying?”

“Yes. All we can do is to relieve the pain.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know.” She was distressed.

“I’ll go in. God have mercy on a good friend and a fine soldier.”

When Adelia returned to the room, Rowley was holding Lord Ivo’s hand while the Bishop of Winchester prayed as he readied the oils in his chrismatory box preparatory to giving the last rites. The abbot, still in hunting clothes, Father Guy and Dr. Arnulf were discussing in low voices such of Saint Benoit’s relics as could help forward Lord Ivo’s soul to its immortal rest, while Mansur, apparently detached from the conversation, looked on with a concern unlike his usual impassivity

Candles in their holders at the head and foot of the bed cast upward shadows that distorted the faces of the men standing up, turning their eye sockets into those of skulls.

Only the dying man’s features were fully lit, and Adelia gritted her teeth at the thought of what agony he was in and with what courage he was bearing it. His eyes were shut, his lips compressed, but his hand gripped at Rowley’s like a raptor’s.

“Here, my lord,” she said, passing the phial to Mansur.

Dr. Arnulf was on them in a second. “And what is that?”

“Poppy juice. Lord Mansur has prescribed it for the pain.”

“Poppy juice?”
This was Father Guy “It is the devil’s concoction. That dear man on the bed is being purified and redeemed by what he suffers. The agony of Christ endowed pain with his own touch of divinity. You, Arnulf, you are a clerk in minor orders as well as a doctor, you surely cannot agree to this. There are edicts from the Vatican….”

“Indeed I cannot,” Dr. Arnulf said firmly “The poppy
mandragora,
hemp seed, all are absent from my medicine chest.”

Adelia stared at them, trying to understand what she was hearing. “That man is in torment. You can’t, you
can’t
deny him relief.”

“Better torment of the body than the soul,” Father Guy told her.

The abbot joined them, still smelling of the wide outdoors and the blood, Lord Ivo’s blood, on the sleeves of his leather tunic. “My child, I have sent for the femur of Saint Stephen, the first martyr. We must pray that its application will aid this good knight through his martyrdom.”

“Help me,” Adelia said in Arabic.

Mansur acted. Snatching the phial from her hand, he showed it to Rowley who looked toward Adelia. She nodded.

While the Arab held Lord Ivo’s head up, Rowley administered the opiate: “Here, my dear friend.”

While Father Guy raved that the noble lord had not yet made his confession, a furious Arnulf pulled Adelia out of the room.

“You chit,” he hissed. “Do you and your master set yourselves up against the Holy Fathers, against practice as laid down by Blessed Mother Church?”

This was too much. She hissed back, “Since when would a true mother allow any son of hers to suffer as that poor man is suffering? Or any true doctor, either?”

“Do you question my authority?”

“Yes, I bloody well do.” She stamped off down the corridor.

IT
TOOK
ALL
DAY
for Lord Ivo to die. Joanna and the ladies-in-waiting spent it in the abbey church, praying for the soul that had departed and the one that was about to depart.

Adelia spent it in her room. Twice more, Mansur came in to have the phial refilled. Lord Ivo had gained consciousness long enough to make his confession and receive the last rites from the Bishop of Winchester.

Dr. Arnulf and Father Guy having washed their hands of the business, Mansur said, had left the sickroom.

“Good.” But she grimaced. “We haven’t made any friends today you and I.”

“Do we want friends such as those?”

“No. They call themselves Christians. When did Christ ever look on suffering without being moved to help it?”

“I do not think they are Christians, I think they are churchmen.”

When he’d gone, she turned back to the window. It had begun to rain hard. She could see a river not far away, the heavy raindrops making discs in its surface. Under a dark gray sky, the forest beyond it appeared an indeterminate mass. It occurred to her that she knew the name of neither and felt the panic of an orphaned child taken away from everything it loved to be abandoned in a hostile landscape. The thought that Allie could be feeling the same bowed her down.

She longed for the comfort Gyltha would have given her.
“We been through worse nor this, bor.”

And so they had, but not apart.

It was dark when Mansur returned to say that Lord Ivo was dead. He handed her a monk’s habit. “You are to put this on and join the bishop in the Lady Chapel.”

“Why?”

“He thinks there was something strange about Sir Nicholas’s death.”

The awfulness of the day was suddenly released by the ridiculous. How typical of Rowley; not a beckoning to a lovers’ tryst, but a command to waddle through a crowded abbey in disguise. To do what? Perform an autopsy?

She would go, of course. If she was caught, she could hardly be in worse odor with everybody than she was now. She would go because she was an iron filing drawn to that man’s magnet. She would go because … well, because it was a silly thing to do, and silliness just now was a blessing.

She took her veil and circlet off her hair and pulled on the habit, putting its cowl over her head until the hem dangled over her eyes. “Do I look like a monk?”