A Murderous Procession (37 page)

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.

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.

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.