A Murderous Procession (40 page)

She went to kneel on the other side of Rowley and put her face close to his, touched it.

“Is it you?”

“It’s me. Don’t talk. We’re going to make you well.”

He smiled and shut his eyes. “Take me home, sweetheart,” he said again. “England … with you. They mustn’t have me again.”

“They won’t.” He wasn’t theirs, he was hers.

“Sweetheart?”

“I’m here, Rowley. Stay still, we’ll have you out of here in a trice.”

“Get me home. Get me to England.”

“I will.”

But Arnulf and Guy were here. Others would come. They’d follow the trail of a man carried through the streets on a stretcher, like the killer had trailed her. Only a matter of time … Time. It was ebbing away … like Rowley’s life.

She said: “We’re taking you to my father’s house first, dearest. We can mend you there.”

“Better be … bloody quick about it.”

He put her back in time and space. If he could swear, he could live.

She looked for the face of the Irishman. “My father and I are going to save him,” she said; she was quite clear about it. “But then I want you to take us home, before the Church can find us. Sail us home, O’Donnell. All of us. To England.”

Father Guy’s back interrupted her view; he was facing the O’Donnell. “Admiral, I forbid it. This man is a lord of the Holy Church. I have men coming….”

There was a smack and he fell. Ulf had punched him. The O’Donnell picked him up and threw him into the street. “And you, too,” he said to Arnulf. “Before I kill you.”

They went, stumbling, shouting for reinforcements.

Mansur and Dr. Gershom were lifting Rowley onto the stretcher, carefully, carefully, putting him on his side so that Dr. Lucia’s hands could keep stanching the wounds.

Adelia’s eyes never left the O’Donnell’s. “We’re going to mend him,” she said, “then you must sail us home. The land route … too hard on him. A calm voyage while he gets better. Please, I beg you.”

He stared back at her. The man was dying; she had his blood on her face. And did she know what she was asking? How long a voyage? Through the Pillars of Hercules with their sudden storms? Running from fokking Barbary pirates? Beating up the bloody coast of Portugal until the Gulf Stream took them north?

But he would. She’d never love him, but he would. He’d still the seas for her.

“I’ll take you,” he said. “All of you.”

He watched her turn to her lover. “My lord O’Donnell’s taking us home, Rowley”

“That’s right . . .” The voice was getting weaker. “I’ll live if you take me home.”

“Is that a bargain?”

A slight nod.

“It’d better be,” she told him.

Mansur and Ulf lifted the stretcher, Dr. Lucia and Adelia on either side of it, Adelia still holding Rowley’s hand, the dog at her heels. Dr. Gershom. Boggart stooping, with her child in her arms, to pick up a package that contained marionettes. Behind them the O’Donnell.

On their way out, they stepped over the corpse of the man known as Locusta, who’d once been William of Scaresdale, and who’d at last found peace in the filth of a Palermo street.

And left it there.

ADELIA
AGUILAR
, my fictional mistress of the art of death, came about because in twelfth-century Salerno, then part of the Kingdom of Sicily, there really was a great School of Medicine, which not only permitted the practice of autopsy, but also took women students. We know this because of an extant treatise on women’s medicine, known as the Trotula, which was written by a female professor.

Sicily was then the most liberal, forward-thinking realm in all Christendom, treating its Arabs, Greeks, Jews, and Normans as equal citizens, something that occurred nowhere else. (Two fine books on the subject are
The Normans in the South
and
The Kingdom in the Sun by
John Julius Norwich.)

The school disappeared in the thirteenth century, probably under pressure from the Church of Rome, which regarded the science of autopsy and women doctors as anathema.

PRINCESS
JOANNA’S
JOURNEY
from England to Palermo to marry King William of Sicily at the age of ten is another historical event.

We know most of her route. We know that she was accompanied at certain points by two of her brothers—Henry, the Young King, and Richard, later the Lionheart. We know that it was interrupted at one point when she had to be taken ashore because she was ill.

We know that much and little else. But, then, the chroniclers of the early Middle Ages disappoint in giving details of their journeys. Men and women of all sorts, not just royal, traveled extensively in those days; some making pilgrimages over the known Christian world, others flitting off to Rome—a journey that, from England, took only a few weeks. We find laconic references to crossing the Alps with little mention of the hardship that must have involved, especially as some of those climbs were made in winter.

So, in order to prefigure the growing and stultifying power of the Latin Church at that time, I have felt justified in taking that journey and running with it, adding even more drama to what must have been an adventurous undertaking, though I have taken care—I always do—to make sure that none of the historical people in it act out of character.

What I have done is some date fixing. In the story, Joanna still sets off at the age of ten, as she did, and arrives by the time she was eleven years old, again as she did, but I have put her trek to Sicily two years later—in 1178—than when it actually took place in 1176. This is to fit in with my fictional heroine’s time line. In 1176, Adelia was busy elsewhere, so I have used a novelist’s license to enable her to take part in Joanna’s extraordinary journey

HENRY
,
THE
YOUNG
KING
. It would have been typical of that young man to desert his sister while he went off to fight in one of the tournaments to which he was addicted. Professor W L. Warren, that fine historian of Henry II’s reign, says of the Young King: “He was gracious, benign, affable, courteous, the soul of liberality and generosity Unfortunately he was also shallow, vain, careless, empty-headed, incompetent, and irresponsible.” He let nearly everybody down at one time or another. He died when he was twenty-eight years old of dysentery contracted while he was supporting rebels in Aquitaine in their fight against Richard, the brother with whom he’d once been in alliance against their father.

RICHARD
THE
LIONHEART
. History’s P.R., which so often gives good publicity to the wrong people, has awarded him an almost saintly aura through the Robin Hood legend. Nobody can deny that he was a fine general and a brave fighter, but he was capable of greed and cruelty On crusade, he once ordered his Moslem prisoners to be slaughtered and their bellies slit open to see if they had swallowed any jewels.

He had no care for England, spending less than a year in that country in all his life. His coronation was a signal for a massacre of the English Jews his father had protected. He’s said to have announced that he would sell London if by doing so, he could raise money for crusade. It may be that his bisexuality—he seems to have done penance for sodomy at one point—drove him to try and placate his Christian God by his effort to win back Jerusalem from the Moslems. His death was caused by an inglorious arrow that hit him while he was in what is now France, besieging the castellan of Chalus who he mistakenly thought had unearthed some treasure.

HENRY
II OF
ENGLAND
was damned by history for calling for the death of his Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas a Becket. He was in France at the time and, in a famous rage at Becket’s refusal to allow reform of a corrupt system, cried: “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” A few of his knights, who had their own quarrel with the archbishop, immediately took ship to Canterbury and assassinated the man on the steps of his own cathedral. Thus Thomas became a martyr and saint, and the king a sinner. But it was Henry Plantagenet who plucked England out of the legal Dark Ages by introducing the Common Law (i.e., a comprehensive system of justice available to all his people) and that wonder available to the English-speaking people—trial by jury. Until then, judgment on crime had been left to God, by chucking the accused into a pond, for instance, to see if he sank (innocent) or floated (guilty).

ELEANOR
OF
AQUITAINE
. Not up to the intellectual weight of her husband, King Henry, she is still one of the few women of that time who emerge from the monk-written chronicles with a blazing character. She bore ten children, and she backed her elder sons’ rebellion against their father, who imprisoned her for it (though quite nicely). After his death, she ruled England on Richard’s behalf while he was away on crusade, as well as raising the ransom when he was held hostage on his way back. When he was killed, she spent her time trying to get the erratic King John out of trouble. Outliving all her sons except John, she died in her eighties, having had probably more adventures than any queen before or since.

At the end of her life, she took the veil at Fontevrault in Anjou, France (most beautiful of abbeys), where, despite their turbulent marriage, she was put to rest beside Henry Plantagenet.

FATHER
ADALBURT’S
pronouncements were made by naive real-life clergy round about this time.

DOCTOR
. For clarity, I have applied the title to physicians though, in fact, it was conferred only on teachers of logic and philosophy in those days.

CATHARS
. That name for the sect, and “perfects” for its priesthood, were not what the Languedoc heretics applied to themselves but were given to them by the Church that wiped them out. I have used them because that is how both are now generally referred to. The full crusade against them, and its burning of thousands of Cathar men, women, and children, didn’t begin until after the time of my story, but already one or two were being sent to the stake and enough cruelty inflicted on them by the Church to justify my account of what Adelia and her friends suffered in the fictional palace of a fictional Bishop of Aveyron, in order to demonstrate an Inquisition that was starting to flex its horrifying muscles.

Her subsequent enforced stay in the Cathar village is based on the classic
Montaillou
by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (Penguin Books, 1980), which, because it, in turn, is based on the papers of the painstaking inquisition endured by that village’s people, gives us insight into the lives of men and women of that region during the Middle Ages.

BAGPIPES
. The
cornemuse des Pyrenees
, the
samponha,
was, and is, sufficiently like the Scottish bagpipes to make the Highlander Rankin feel at home.

THE
APPENDECTOMY
. I believe it is feasible that Adelia could have performed one, and for her patient to have survived. The existence of the appendix was known in very early times. Certainly, the Salerno School, with its practice of anatomy, would have been aware of it, and of its danger when infected.

ANESTHETIC
. Man has been aware of the properties of opium since the days of the pharaohs, whilst laudanum, extract of opium—usually with wine—certainly appeared in the Middle Ages if not before, though its use for anesthesia was prohibited by the Inquisition as an evil, the Church not approving of interference with God-appointed pain, nor of the shedding of blood, thus reducing surgeons to the status of barbers.

SURGERY
. The practice stretches back to the time of the Sumerians around 4000 B.C.—archaeologists have discovered sharpened bronze scalpels, knives, and trephines among Nineveh’s remains. In the Hammurabi Code from that time, there’s a list of what the physician should be paid if he “make a large incision with an operating knife and cure it,” etc. In India around 600 B.C., an ancient surgical text describes procedures for surgery, even cosmetic.

Above all, we should not underestimate the hardihood of the human body Neolithic skulls have been found showing that they underwent successful trepanning—the growth of bone inward from the operation site suggests that the patients lived for a considerable time afterward.

From what we can gather from early records, the survival rate after amputation was about fifty percent.

Fanny Burney, writer and diarist, lived for many years after having had a breast removed because of cancer in 1811 without benefit of anesthetic.

In September 1942, Wheeler B. Lipes, a twenty-three-year-old corpsman, was acting as pharmacist’s mate on board the American Navy submarine
USS
Seadragon
in enemy waters when, in the absence of a qualified doctor and without access to penicillin, he successfully took out the appendix of a nineteen-year-old shipmate.

In 1961, a Russian doctor, Leonid Rogozov, on an Antarctic expedition, cut out his own appendix under local anesthetic with the help of nonmedical colleagues, and lived to tell the tale.

HEMORRHAGE
. In olden times, this was stemmed by cauterization—a risk in itself but not an automatically fatal one.

SUTURES
were in use from the first, though some early surgeons employed ants to bite the flesh of the wound together, cutting the insects’ bodies away and leaving the teeth in place.

SEPSIS
. A killer, of course, and one that Adelia would not have been aware of, as was no one else until the nineteenth century But though the Middle Ages are depicted as being unsanitary—and mostlywere—cleanliness was prized by some. Jews and Arabs, of course, had it written into their religious rituals, and a Christian to be dubbed a knight had to take a bath before the ceremony Medieval household accounts show considerable outlay spent on laundry and fullers—robes that took months, even years, of needlework to make had to be kept clean if they were not to disintegrate from sweat and dirt.

Also, though the infant mortality rate was horrific, a child that survived beyond the age of five probably developed an immunity that could carry it into old age.