A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

Twelve

“WHAT IS IT?”

“There’s a light out at sea. Flashing.”

Adelia got out of bed and joined Fabrisse at the slit window in the upper room of the Château de Salses’s keep where it looked out on the Mediterranean. “Must be from a ship,” she said helpfully

“Of course from a ship,” Fabrisse said. “The question is, whose?”

It could be the O’Donnell, who so far hadn’t turned up. It could be friendly smugglers. It could be a less friendly force ready to invade the Count of Toulouse’s territory It could be decidedly hostile pirates intent on pillage and rape.

If it was either of the last two, the Château de Salses was not equipped to hold them off. In fact, Adelia thought, it couldn’t have held off a couple of determined winkle pickers.

The Château de Salses, originally a fortress, was even more dilapidated than the Château de Caronne. Beautiful from a distance, Adelia had to grant it that. As she and the others had ridden down the hills toward it on that first day, it had looked like a large crenellated pink cake against the chill blue water lapping its seaward wall.

On closer inspection, defensive walls of the same dusty pink sandstone crumbled into the moat around them, bridges sagged, while a weedy bailey contained a tall keep/watchtower with an unsafe interior circling staircase, and some reed-thatched stables and working quarters.

“I can’t afford to keep it up,” Fabrisse had said cheerfully, if obviously, “even though it provides most of my income. We’re nearly on the border of Spain here and out of the way, so it’s useful for smuggling, though not enough.” Feeling she hadn’t done it justice, she added: “But at some point B.C., Hannibal brought his army through here on his way to Italy.”

Perhaps the elephants trampled it, Adelia thought. There didn’t seem to have been much renovation since.

“They’re signaling,” she said now, watching the light appear and disappear at erratic intervals.

“Question is, who to?” One never knew who skulked in the lonely hills behind them.

Leaving Boggart to sleep on, they lit a taper, wrapped themselves in cloaks, and went cautiously down the staircase, trying to avoid its missing steps, to the bailey

Deniz, who’d been keeping watch, was in muttered conversation with Johan on the seawall.

And that was another thing; at the Château de Salses there had been no sign of the knight whose service in war to Count Raymond of Toulouse, when called on, was the fee Fabrisse should pay for holding the castle. (Knowing Fabrisse, Adelia suspected that she gave her rent to Count Raymond in other ways.)

What it had instead was a flock of goats, and an elderly man with shrewd eyes and a clutch of grandsons whom Fabrisse had introduced as “my bookkeeper, Johan”-a euphemism, as it turned out, for the manager of her smuggling trade.

“Who is it, Deniz?” Fabrisse called softly

“She the Saint Patrick.”

The O’Donnell’s flagship. That was a relief. It was also a summons they had all been awaiting for some days.

“I shall be losing you tomorrow,” Fabrisse told Adelia sadly “He’ll have made arrangements to send you all back to England.”

“No,” Adelia said. “We’re going with him to Palermo.”

Ever since she’d been surprised by the terrible indignation that had come over her in the cave at Caronne, she had regained certainty.

How dare he, how dare he, I won’t HAVE it. She’d been hired by Henry Plantagenet to do a job; so far Scarry had made her fail in her obligation, but she would see it through to its end if he killed her for it-or she killed him, which she was now perfectly prepared to do.

“Oh-ho,” said Fabrisse, looking at her. “We have stopped being frightened.”

“No, but I have stopped running.”

Oddly enough, it had been overhearing Rankin call her pursuer “the black-avised buzzard” that had raised her spirit. She’d forever cherish the phrase for taking the demonic out of her demon. It had turned hooves into human feet. Whether she could unmask and disable the buzzard, she didn’t know, but by God, she would try. After all, madmen had their own vulnerability

She and the others had gone over and over their time with Joanna for any clues to Scarry’s identity; who’d had the opportunity; who’d been where and when to do what he’d been able to do. As Ulf had said: “Who was it in that company kept buggering off?”

Practically everybody on what had turned out to be an erratic and rambling journey, that was the trouble.

Well, who had a mind that could influence other people’s into making Adelia seem a curse they were glad to offload onto a bonfire?

Who indeed?

They had scoured their impressions and memories until they could practically work out Scarry’s shoe size, but putting a face to him eluded them.

Eventually… “Ain’t got no further, have we?” Ulf had said, in defeat.

But Adelia, looking out over the Mediterranean, with Fabrisse beside her, was aware that they had. Scarry was like the light she could see flickering out at sea, a promise that he was somewhere in the darkness with the sword he had stolen. How she knew it, she wasn’t sure, but she knew for certain that he was going to Palermo, that she would meet him there-and defeat him.

She heard Deniz’s voice come down to them from the seawall. “Somebody rowing ashore.”

“Now?”

It was an overcast, moonless night, and at this point the land petered out into minuscule islands like scattered, tufty sponges that provided a better, almost unnavigable, defense against nighttime seaborne invasion than the castle walls.

“Signal ‘stand by and show light.’” Deniz came down from the walkway. “He brings goods.”

“Patricio, Don Patricio. My silk, hurrah.” Fabrisse hurried off to prepare food for her visitor.

Adelia waited while Deniz lit a lantern and flashed a signal to the invisible vessel out at sea, then accompanied him through the castle postern to the beach beyond.

Behind them, they could hear Johan calling for his eldest grandson to come and help prepare the mules that would carry the landed contraband into the keep, but on this side the only sound was the waves soughing softly against the shore. Adelia hadn’t stopped to put on her shoes, and the sand was cold against her feet. The ship had ceased signaling now, leaving Deniz’s lantern a solitary gleam in the blackness.

“It’s not just the countess’s silk, is it?” Adelia asked Deniz. She’d seen his face in the lamplight.

The Turk shook his head. “He signals ‘trouble.’”

Adelia ran back the way she’d come in order to rouse Mansur and Ulf and put on her shoes. Trouble. God dammit, was there ever anything else?

It was a chilly wait; the northern Mediterranean could be very cold in winter. The men warmed their hands at the lanterns they’d brought. Adelia stamped about in an effort to keep warm and tried to work out the date. It would be what… early January?

More than four months since she’d said good-bye to Allie. If the O’Donnell’s arrival this night meant another delay she’d… she’d kill somebody.

Fabrisse turned up with another lantern.

Ulf looked up; his young ears had heard something. Another second, and theyd all caught the creak of oars straining in rowlocks. Deniz waded out into the water, holding his light high.

Mansur and Ulf went to help him drag the rowing boat in. When they came back, they were supporting someone between them… a woman…

“Blanche?” Adelia shook her head to get her eyes in working order. “Mistress Blanche?”

The lady-in-waiting fell on her. “You’ve got to help her. Mother of God, she’s so ill. Help her. She’s dying.”

“Who?”

But now the O’Donnell was coming ashore, squelching through the water.

He was carrying something in his arms.

It wasn’t Fabrisse’s silk, it was Princess Joanna, and he was echoing Blanche. “Help her,” he said to Adelia. “I think she’s dying.”

THERE WAS A scramble to clear the bottom room of the keep and lay Joanna on the table at which soldiers had dined in the days when the room had been a guardhouse. Lanterns were hung.

Joanna was feverish and barely conscious. Her right knee kept rising toward her abdomen. It was a struggle to undress her because Mistress Blanche held on to Adelia like a drowning woman to a raft, begging her to save the child. “Use witchcraft,” she kept saying. “I know you can, everybody knows it. You saved those people from the flux, it was you, I saw you. Save her. I don’t care how, but save her.” Eventually, she had to be forcibly restrained by Ulf and taken outside.

Adelia began her examination, barely listening to the O’Donnell telling the others what had happened.

“She was taken ill almost as soon as we got her on board at Saint Gilles,” he was saying. “Doctor Arnulf diagnosed acute indigestion, he’s been treating her with seethed toad, powdered unicorn, cramp rings, various talismans, and I don’t know what else. The good Bishop of Winchester’s been reciting Psalm 91 over her ad infinitum. And her only becoming sicker and sicker.”

He broke off as Adelia abruptly left the room and headed across the bailey to where Blanche sat on a straw bale, her head in her hands, with Ulf awkwardly patting her shoulder.

The lady-in-waiting looked up at Adelia’s approach. “Can you help her? Can you make her well?”

“Has she been constipated?” Adelia asked.

Ulf growled with embarrassment, but it was a measure of Mistress Blanche’s desperation that, after a second’s hesitation, she nodded.

“Nausea? Vomiting?”

Blanche nodded again.

“Hmm.”

Adelia went back to the keep.

The O’Donnell was still talking: “… frantic she was. It’s my opinion, Blanche is the only one of those three women who cares more for Joanna than for herself Lord bless her. When I suggested to them we sail to Salses, where her ladyship here was in situ, the other two set up a caterwauling about what’d the king do to them if he learned they’d delivered his daughter to a witch and a Saracen, what’d Sicily do, what’d dear Doctor Arnulf do. I told them, I said, dear Doctor Arnulf’s doing damn all except kill her quicker…”

On the table, Adelia pressed gently on the lower right quadrant of the girl’s abdomen and then quickly removed her hand. There was a moan. The right knee flexed again.

“So we kidnapped her, Blanche and I. Left the other ladies asleep, had my lads lower the dinghy with Joanna in it, and here we are, and may God save us all from perdition.”

“So brave to dare it.” This was Fabrisse. “’Delia, isn’t he brave?”

Adelia didn’t hear her. The muscles she’d pressed had been rigid.

“And Duke Richard?” Mansur was asking.

“He doesn’t know. He’d already left for Sicily aboard my Nostre Dame. The royalty don’t travel together in case of accidents.” O’Donnell broke off again and looked toward Adelia, who’d left the table and was sitting on a chair, much as Blanche had done, with her head in her hands.

He strode over to her: “She’s dying, isn’t she?”

“I think so.”

“Can you save her?”

Adelia shook her head. “Even if I could have, and that’s very doubtful, I’ve no equipment. It was at Ermengarde’s.”

“Now, then.” He went away calling for Deniz: “What did you do with that damned contraption I brought?”

When he came back, he was carrying a wrought-leather, silver-bound case. “Will this do? I, er… liberated it from Arnulf’s cabin while the good doctor was sleeping.”

Inside, calfskin pockets held flasks, a well-thumbed urine chart, greasy ointment pots, tweezers, a rusty wound-cauterizing tool, a mallet, presumably for rendering difficult patients unconscious, pliers for pulling teeth, also rusty…

Adelia threw the instruments on the floor as she delved for the pots and flasks, opening them, sniffing, discarding. The tenth pot held what she’d been looking for-and had dreaded. So did one of the larger flasks. It appeared that, for all his pious protestations. Dr. Arnulf kept anesthetics among his medicaments.

There were no knives-apparently like Arnulf obeyed the papal edict of 1163, which had banned the shedding of blood.

“No knives,” she said, and was ashamed of the relief in her voice.

“For what do you need knives?” the Irishman asked. “I’ve a fine dagger, if that’s of use.”

“Knives?” asked Fabrisse. “If it’s knives you want, Johan’s the man; he travels to Leucate every week. There are some of his fellow Jews there, and he does their slaughtering. He’s a, what’s it called… a crocket?”

“A shochet?” Adelia raised her head. “He’s a shochet?”

“I believe so. Anyway, he has a fine collection of knives, very sharp, very clean; he’s particular about them.”

“Yes,” Adelia said slowly. “Yes, he would be.”

It was why Jews often stayed healthier than their neighbors, and so were accused of poisoning Christian wells when plague broke out. Adelia’s foster father, Dr. Gershom, a nonpracticing Jew himself put it down to the religion’s command that ritual slaughtering equipment must be be kept honed and clean. It was his contention that the stale, stinking, bloody filth on the knives of Gentile butchers helped to putrefy their meat.

God, dear God, every excuse she had for doing nothing was being taken away from her.

She closed her eyes and went over her diagnosis again. Pain in the abdomen’s lower right quadrant, the flexing knee, rigid muscles. Classic symptoms, her foster father had told her. On the corpse of a child he’d shown her what lay beneath those muscles-the large intestine with a small, wormlike pouch emerging from the bottom of it.

Neither Gershom, nor Gordinus the African, her tutor at the Salerno School, had been able to explain its function. Gordinus had referred to it as “the vermiform addimentum.” Gershom called it “an appendix to the cecum of no damned use whatever except to become diseased.”

And Joanna’s appendix was diseased.

I need air. Adelia got up and went out into the bailey, puffing hard. Dawn was breaking, the clouds had cleared, and, with her dog wheezing behind her, she climbed the steps of the seawall into the light of a freezing, breathless day

To her right the two Roqua sons were filling sacks from the glaring white squares of the Salses salt pans. Beyond them, naked vines stood in neat rows ready, when in season, to produce Salses wine, a substance so rough it could clean armor.

But it was the sea Adelia looked at; blue and gold in the rising sun, tranquil, its touch on the shore like the regular breathing of a child, its only ornament the distant St. Patrick, O’Donnell’s ship, riding quietly at anchor while, on board, its passengers seethed, some with worry for their princess, Dr. Arnulf with resentment, and none of them able to do anything about it unless they swam the couple of miles to the shore.

Adelia would have given anything to change places with them. “Father, help me,” she said, and it wasn’t just God she prayed to but the Jew who had brought her up and had faced what she was facing now.

The responsibility was crushing her. “Father, help me. The only time I’ve used a knife these last months was on a goat-and that was dead.”

A cry came from behind her as Mistress Blanche scurried up the seawall steps, followed by the O’Donnell. “Why are you standing there? Why aren’t you doing something?”

“Because what I have to do may kill her anyway,” Adelia said, her eyes still on the sea.

She took a deep breath and turned to face them. “I cannot magic her well, I wish I could. I am merely a doctor. You see, there is an organ in our bodies… here.” She pressed her hand against the right side of her stomach. “Sometimes it goes bad…” She wondered if she should go into the subject of suppuration and fecal matter, and decided against it. “I believe it has done so in the princess’s case and must be removed.”

“Removed, how?”

“Well, by making an incision above the affected area and taking the bad piece out.” Dear God, if it were only that simple.

“With scissors? Like cutting cloth?” Blanche’s knowledge of incisions extended only to dressmaking.

“Yes, except that we use a knife.”

If Blanche’s face had been wild before, it was ghastly now. “You make a hole? In the skin?”

“Yes. It is sewn up afterward…”

“But it will scar her, won’t it?”

“I’m afraid so, yes…” She was going to go on and assure the poor woman that her princess would feel no pain, that there had been preparations of poppy in Dr. Arnulf’s bag…

This, however, was not the lady-in-waiting’s concern. “You can’t.” She made a rush for the steps as if to go down to Joanna and protect her, but the Irishman stopped her. “Now, now, Blanche. Listen to the nice ladyship.”

Blanche thrashed at him. “Don’t you see? He’ll reject her. Dear Mother of God, he’ll reject her.”

“I don’t understand.” Adelia really didn’t. “The princess is very ill. There is a remote chance that by doing this I can save her life.”

Blanche put her hand over her mouth and began rocking.

The O’Donnell took Adelia’s arm and led her farther along the wall. With the sun on it, his face was lined and the eyes she’d distrusted were infinitely tired. “That poor lady is between Scylla and Charybdis, mistress,” he said, quietly. “On the one hand, she’s desperate for her mistress to live. On the other, if the princess survives this procedure… Will she?”

“I don’t know.”

He nodded. “If she lives, she’ll be imperfect, d’ye see? Scarred by an unholy operation. Damaged goods, you might say King William could reject her, might even have the right to reject her, I don’t know. And how would our good Henry take that humiliation? A spurned daughter? Wars have started for less.”

Adelia saw. This wasn’t just a sick patient they were discussing, it was a bargain between kings and countries. The girl lying on the table in the keep was of international importance. If she died from the operation, and most likely she might, Adelia herself would be accused of killing her. If Joanna survived-as two of Dr. Gershom’s patients had survived-her surgeon would be equally culpable of-what was it this man had said?-damaging the goods, royal goods. Either way, the political ramifications would engulf not only all of them, but a continent.

From the first, she had known that any operation was a sin against the teachings of the Church, subject to rigorous penalty-all surgery was that; it was an accepted hazard for those who possessed the skill and were compassionate enough to use it to save a patient’s life. That the School of Medicine was known to permit it put it at risk from the Church.

But this, this intervention could not be hidden; Joanna’s body was a present from the King of England to the King of Sicily; when its wrapping was taken off in the bridal bed, its blemish would be discovered, the jewel found imperfect, deliberately spoiled by what was, in the eyes of the Church and, undoubtedly, a royal Christian husband, an act of the grossest impiety

Adelia thought of all this, of the far-reaching consequences, and knew that in the end, it didn’t make any difference.

She looked up at the Irishman. “It doesn’t make any difference,” she said. “It can’t. A doctor’s duty is only to the patient. Joanna is dying. Because there’s just a chance of saving her, I have to take it.”

“What are the chances?”

“Well, it’s been done. My tutor performed the operation once, on an old man, but the patient died; it was too late, the organ had burst and spread poison. My father… I was assisting when he saved two by it, both children.” It was strange, she thought, how the condition so often affected the very young. “I also assisted when three others died-it’s such a horrible risk.”

“But you know how?”

Tears were making her eyes blink. “O’Donnell, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to, but I’ve got to. I can’t just let her die.”

“Yes,” he said gently. “It’s the reason I love you.”

He watched her face and gently reached out with his finger to raise her dropped jaw. “Did you not know? Ah, well, it’s no matter.”

No matter? No matter? He had stupefied her. All she could find to say was: “Why?”

It made him smile. “Now, then, if I knew that, we’d have the answer to why the sun comes up and goes down.”

She would have done anything then, anything, to help the pain of this wonderful man to whom she owed everything, anything not to hurt him. But the one thing he wanted of her, she was incapable of giving him.

“I didn’t know,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry. So sorry”

“No need. But it had to be said. Go along now, and get ready”

THE OPERATING TABLE, Gershom said, was an altar on which the surgeon laid his supplication to God and, like all altars, it had to be pristine. Just as he who was to be dubbed a knight the next day took a bath before his night’s vigil in church, so must the supplicant surgeon and his offering be cleansed in the sight of God so that, if the surgeon’s prayers were accepted, God would return that offering to health.

Now Adelia became tigerish. Everybody was put to work. The suffering princess was removed from the keep’s table and laid on a couch while Ulf and the O’Donnell dragged the table itself out into the open air-there’d be more light there-and made to scrub it as it had never been scrubbed before. Johan’s knives gleamed well enough, but they were nevertheless once again put into boiling water, as were the needles and silk thread from the sewing basket that Mistress Blanche, for all her panic, had brought with her from the ship, along with her face powder, rouge, and scents.

Everything, everything must be holy

As Adelia lowered a basket of the wool swabs she would need into the vat’s bubbling water, Mansur touched her arm. “You know you are mad? You should leave the girl be, she is in the hands of Allah.”

“No, she’s in mine. Oh, God, Mansur, I’m so frightened.”

He sighed. “Well, well, they can only hang us once. What did the gladiators say in the arena? ‘We who are about to die… ’?”

She wasn’t listening to him. “Is Fabrisse scrubbing our clothes?” She must be washed of her sins, of the guilt of Brune’s death, of Ermengarde’s. She had to be pure for this, all things had to be pure.

The Arab nodded. “Scrubbing hard. We shall be in clean robes.” He allowed himself a smile. “But they may be wet.”

It was in the middle of all this that a cry came from the top room of the tower. Fabrisse went up to see about it and returned, grimacing. “Boggart’s waters have broken,” she said. “The baby’s coming.”

“Not now, oh, not now.”

“Now.”

Adelia took in a deep breath. “You’ll have to see to it. Take one of the shochet’s knives. And you…” She turned on Mistress Blanche, whose worry, so far, had kept her from being of use. “You go and help.”

“But I…”

“Help, I said.” Adelia bit her lip and lowered her voice. This was, after all, a brave and loving woman. “Blanche, my dear, you had the courage to bring Joanna to me, now you must leave her in my hands.”

FOR OVER AN HOUR, Ulf and Johan with his collection of grandsons had been squatting in the bailey, well away from the table in its center, like people watching a sacred, terrible rite from a distance-as they were.

Despite a bright sun, it was bitterly cold. Mansur, who leaned over the table, the long fingers of his left hand holding the cut edges of flesh apart, swabbing with his right, shivered in his damp clothes. O’Donnell, standing next to a smaller table, on which implements and flasks lay on a cloth, also shivered-despite the fire in the brazier next to him.

A fresh blanket had been tucked around the head, arms, and legs of Joanna in her laudanum sleep, but the flesh of her bare, white stomach was goose-pimpled, except for the gaping slash down it.

From the top bedroom of the keep, where Boggart’s contractions were coming hard and fast, deep, loud, involuntary huffs from her lungs groaned round the bailey like the blasts of a horn.

Adelia was aware of none of it, not noise, not the passing of time, not people, not fear, not even the humanity of the body on which she operated. She was battling with the enemy, a plump, yellowish, glistening, red-veined vermiform tube proving difficult for her tweezers to tease away from the rest of the gut. It hadn’t yet perforated, thank God. But it was taking too long.

At last she had it. Still holding the tweezers in place, she gestured for O’Donnell to pass her a knife, and cut.

“Cauterizing iron. Quick.”

There was a hiss. The body on the table jumped and Mansur, in response to Adelia’s brief look, held the laudanum sponge to Joanna’s nose.

The worm was thrown into a bucket.

Now the sewing up. “Needle.” She was passed the curved steel needle from Blanche’s sewing kit and knotted the sutures.

“Brandy” The wound had alcohol squeezed over it and was covered with lint.

Adelia took a swig of brandy herself and then sat down on the ground, staring into space, still clutching the bottle.

She only looked up as Fabrisse came out of the keep with a lustily bawling baby in her arms.

Joanna was breathing, but the battle for her life would continue and was now mostly in the hands of God. Adelia had done her best; it remained to be seen whether it was good enough.

FOR A WHILE it looked as if the Lord had given and the Lord was taking away. Donnell, as the new baby boy was called, thrived while Joanna went into a delirium and Adelia into panic.

The Irishman rowed out to his anchored ship to tell those aboard that it was still touch-and-go for the princess, but that “Lord Mansur’s ministrations” were doing her good.

He refused their demands to take them ashore and ordered his crew to keep all passengers on board, where water, wine, and food would be rowed out to them.

There was to be no mention of an operation; if Joanna died, it must be assumed that she had succumbed to the illness that had been the reason for her abduction in the first place-some small protection for Mansur and Adelia, who would be blamed by Arnulf and the others for the princess’s death in any case, but might possibly save them from their almost certain execution were it known that death had been caused by the child’s body being cut open.

Even Henry I I’s fondness for Adelia would not outlive that.

Blanche, however, was unlikely to keep silent. She struggled between Scylla and Charybdis, the two monstrous, crushing rocks between which she had placed herself. Her grief and self-condemnation were heaped on Adelia’s head as the two of them kept their vigil beside Joanna’s bed. Sometimes it was: “You have killed her.” At other times: “Better I had let her die than bring her to you.”

Even when Joanna’s fever began to abate, the outpourings continued-though always where the girl couldn’t hear them: “What is she now? Dear Mary, Mother of God, you have ruined her.”

The scar was undoubtedly terrible; Adelia was no needlewoman; on the seventh day, when she took out the stitches, it remained a violent, puckered obscenity on otherwise pearl-colored young flesh.

Adelia said nothing in her own defense. She was too humbled. For her, the scar represented only the amazing endurance of the human body, the quick healing of young flesh, and a loving God who had forgiven the temerity of the one who’d inflicted it by granting a miracle.

THOUGH THE O’Donnell was impatient to begin the long sail down the coast of Italy, Adelia insisted that Joanna recuperate for another week after the removal of the stitches. The child did well, though when, on the third day-the tenth after the operation-she was allowed to begin walks around the bailey, Mistress Blanche pointed out angrily that the princess did so with a certain stiffness.

More days, then, to help the muscles recover, days to discover what a nice child she was. Without the enterprise of Eleanor, and with none of Henry’s command, she had a gentle charm all her own. An intimacy grew between them all that allowed the princess to discard royal aloofness and be lighthearted in their company Ulf told her bloodcurdling stories of Hereward the Wake, which delighted her, even though most of that fenland gentleman’s exploits had been directed against her great-great-grandfather, William the Conqueror. There were more bloodcurdling pirate tales from O’Donnell, while Mansur, for whom she’d developed a great regard, improved her chess.

She was captivated by Boggart’s baby and the curl of his fingers round hers. She wanted to know if giving birth hurt-“Mama said it didn’t much”-and Boggart tactfully said: “No more’n is natural.”

But it was Adelia who most intrigued her. Like all practicing physicians, Dr. Arnulf had taught the princess that medicine was an occult secret to which he alone held the key; that it should be a science which even a woman could practice was a concept she found difficult to comprehend.

“But if God ordained that I should die, wasn’t it a sin to go against Him?”

“Why should God make an ordinance against knowledge? It is there, a resource that only He could have put into the world for us to use. Deliberate ignorance is the sin. Obviously He did not mean you to die. Mistress Blanche knew that.”

“It was a miracle, then?”

Oh, dear. She didn’t want the child to believe she was a saint. “In the sense that Nature is a miracle. Nature has secrets that God wishes us to learn. If He didn’t, a swordsmith wouldn’t know how to forge steel, nor an herbalist how to extract the health-giving properties of plants. I am not a witch nor a miracle worker, just a mechanic, no more, no less, trained by a school that believes in discovering what things God has created in order to relieve His people’s suffering. Like all mechanisms, your operation could have gone wrong; that it didn’t is a privilege for which I send up prayers of gratitude every day.”

Joanna smiled. “So do I.” She became royal. “My father will ever be in your debt; so will my husband.”

Husband. She was still only eleven years old-there had been a birthday celebrated at Saint Gilles.

They became friends. Every night, when her wound was being checked, she wanted to hear about Adelia’s upbringing, which she thought exotic. She especially liked tales of Allie. “Mama loves animals, too; they should get on well.” She was suddenly wistful: “What fun to be Allie.”

Adelia wanted to spirit her off so much just then that, on impulse, she said: “We could always ask the O’Donnell to sail us into the blue… run away”

“And be a pirate?” Joanna was amused. “How funny that would be. Why should I run away?”

“Well… just suppose you don’t like Sicily”

“But I shall like it. It’s my duty, I shall be queen of it.”

Adelia never mentioned the subject again. If there was steel in Joanna’s gentle soul, it was stamped with the word duty; it could not occur to her that she was ill used or, if it did, she’d suppressed the idea. What she was aware of was the diplomacy involved; her father had arranged a most excellent marriage to a king, as he had arranged her sisters’. It was her destiny; she had no other.

WHEN ADELIA JUDGED her patient fit enough to leave the Château de Salses, and before they were rowed out to the St. Patrick, the O’Donnell lectured her and her companions “privatim et seriatim,” as he said, on the necessity for watchfulness.

“We don’t know which damned vessel Scarry’s on, if he’s on any,” he said. “We had to divide the household between three crafts. Most of the servants along with the horses are in my biggest cog, The Trinité, which set out at the same time as the Nostre Dame that’s got Richard aboard. Scarry could be on either, but he could be skulking aboard the Saint Patrick, in which case I’ll be too busy keeping an eye on wind and weather to see what he’s up to. For all any of us know, we’re taking our goose into the fox’s lair, as my old granny used to say.”

He looked straight at Adelia. “You be afraid, now. Fear keeps you on the qui vive.”

There was no sentiment in the way he said it, no fond glance; he could have been talking about a breakable piece of cargo that needed careful stowing in his ship’s hold. His declaration of love might never have been made, but it placed a burden on her, as it does on those who cannot love in return.

If it hadn’t been that she’d met Rowley first, she could have loved this man, she thought. Bold, confident, amused and amusing, and, hidden beneath it all, an infinite kindness.

But as he’d said, one had as little control over one’s heart as over the rise and fall of the sun-and she’d given hers to somebody else.

She had kept faith with him and told nobody about what he’d said, not even Fabrisse, though, she realized now, the woman had known all along.

Dear God, but she would miss Fabrisse, who had become her twin. When it was time for the two of them to say good-bye, they clung to each other, rendered almost inarticulate by a parting that would inevitably be permanent.

At last Adelia tore herself away. “I owe you so much… I can’t…”

“Don’t.” Fabrisse wiped away tears. “To me, you have been… I will never find…”

“Fabrisse, take care, take care.”

“You are the one… you take care.”

Yet, as the hopeful, yelping seagulls following their boat dotted Adelia’s view of the diminishing figure waving energetically from the castle seawall, it seemed to Adelia that the woman in greatest danger was not herself but the one who defied the Church by her loving shelter of Cathars. For a second, a bonfire flared in Adelia’s mind, and the person amidst its flames was not Ermengarde, but the Dowager Countess of Caronne.

ON BOARD THE ST. PATRICK, Captain Bolt had been chafing badly at the absence of a princess he’d been ordered to protect and spat hard words at the O’Donnell for taking her away. Pleased as he was to see Adelia, his anger made him unapproachable and it wasn’t until a day or two later, when he’d calmed down somewhat, that she could tell him of Rankin’s defection.

That didn’t please him, either. “Happy, is he? He’s no right to be happy, bloody deserter.”

In fact, the reception to Adelia and the others was cold. The only welcome was to the princess. Even this, though made to appear ecstatic, was overdone, for underlying it was resentment that she had been content to recuperate among magicians and foreigners rather than insist on being returned to her own dear household.

Joanna’s nurse’s reception was the most honest: “You naughty little widdershin, you. Why’n’t you take me along? What they been a-doing to you, so pale as you are. Still and all, my honeypot, you’re alive and that’s a mercy o’ God.”

Blanche’s greeting from her two fellow ladies-in-waiting was chilly; she had broken ranks, not consulted, preferred a Saracen and a witch to the orthodoxy of Queen Eleanor’s own choice of physician.

What they would say if and when they saw the scar on Joanna’s abdomen, Adelia didn’t like to think.

The Bishop of Winchester lectured Blanche and the O’Donnell for their temerity in kidnapping the princess. In view of Joanna’s good spirits, his chiding was unheated, but it was noticeable that he did not include the names of Mansur and Adelia in his prayers of thanksgiving for his charge’s safe return.

Father Guy took their reappearance hard and refused to speak to them.

Dr. Arnulf tried squirming his way back into royal favor. An unfortunate episode, but one he was prepared to overlook; however, had the dear princess stayed under his supervision, she would not be so pallid nor show that slight stiffness when she walked.

Joanna was having none of it. She owed her life to Adelia and knew it, though she upheld the fiction that it was to Lord Mansur to whom her recovery should be attributed. Both had to be treated with honor in her presence. Mistress Adelia was even promoted to sharing the royal cabin-and, yes, the dog with her. (Ward, like her new friend, Ulf, made Joanna laugh.)

The fact of the scar seemed to concern the princess not at all. Perhaps she thought it would never be seen; nudity was infra dig for noble-women; they usually wore a light shift even in the bath. Adelia was afraid that the girl didn’t realize she would have to strip naked in front of her husband, or even if she was fully aware of the sexual side of marriage.

And when would that be imposed on her? What sort of man was William of Sicily?

When the nurse Edeva, in a rare burst of confidence, confessed to Adelia that she had never seen “my lambkin so blithe as aboard this here ship,” Adelia hoped that this time spent on board the St. Patrick wouldn’t turn out to be the most carefree of Joanna’s life.

It was a cold voyage but one made under a clear sky. The O’Donnell took advantage of a bitter northerly wind and crammed on all sail, sending St. Patrick bowling along at a rate which was fast but which, now that Joanna and the others had gained their sea legs, upset nobody’s stomach. For Adelia, there was a reassuring sense of freedom that convinced her Scarry was not on board.

She spent what time she could on the quarterdeck with Mansur and Ulf, watching Italy go by and wondering whether the traffic on the coast roads that she could see in the distance included one particular rider heading for Sicily.

After two days, her captain took pity on her. “If it’s Saint Albans you’re looking for, he’ll be long farther south by now.”

“If he hasn’t been held up in Lombardy,” she said, adding uncomfortably”

“Ah, now, a little thing like international relations shouldn’t stop him from keeping an appointment with you in Palermo.” The Irishman’s mouth twisted. “It wouldn’t stop me.”

Adelia winced. She said quickly: “Will we catch up with Duke Richard?”

“Overtake him, at this rate. Nostre Dame’s not got the speed of Saint Patrick. The Dame’s a lumberer, and she needs to set in for forage and water from time to time, so I had to allocate Locusta to her captain for his advice on the friendliest ports.”

Somebody else was missing from St. Patrick’s complement. “It was an odd thing,” the O‘Donnell said, “but embarking at Saint Gilles, our good chaplain, Father Adalburt, who is not the idiot he looks, was taken by a sudden determination to sail on Nostre Dame with Duke Richard. Now why would the man desert his princess and bishop like that, d’ye think?”

Adelia shrugged. “I suppose Richard’s religious views accord more closely with his own.”

“‘F you ask me,” Ulf cut in, gloomily, “he reckons he’s got better prospects under the duke. He can go crusadin’ with him. He’ll probably end up Bishop of Jerusalem.”

“God help the Holy Places,” O’Donnell said, and Adelia laughed.

The Irishman had a thought and turned to Ulf. “A wooden cross, was it?” He used his hands. “So big by so big?”

“Yes.” Ulf had never left off bewailing the taking of his cross; not just because he was afraid to face Henry II and tell him he’d lost it-though he was-but because he was tortured by the thought of great Arthur’s Excalibur in dirty hands.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” O’Donnell said, “I’ve not remembered until now, but I saw a wooden cross being taken aboard Nostre Dame at Saint Gilles. I remarked it because it was so rough a thing, not at all like the jeweled crucifixes that went on with it.”

Ulf’s hands clenched. “Who was carrying it?”

The Irishman shrugged. “One of the crew, I think.”

Ulf looked at Adelia. “Scarry I told you, I told you, that was Scarry in the cowshed.”

“Dear God. I’m sorry, my dear, so sorry”

“What’re you sorry for? You said Richard’d want it and now he’s got it, that murdering bastard’s sold it to him.”

The St. Patrick yawed slightly and the O’Donnell went aft to shout at his tillerman to keep his eye on the wind.

“What’re we going to do?” Ulf demanded.

“I don’t know. Nothing we can do.” Except despair at the perfidy of men in their lust for power.

EVERYBODY WAS ON DECK to stare at Vesuvius on the evening that they sailed past the Bay of Naples. The volcano looked flat-topped and disappointingly undistinguished.

Father Guy took the opportunity for an extempore sermon, explaining that the eruption that Pliny the Younger described had been God’s punishment on Pompeii’s and Herculaneum’s citizens for their wickedness in not being Christians. “Just as our Lord destroyed the Cities of the Plains.”

Joanna interrupted him. “Mistress Adelia was found on the slopes of Vesuvius, weren’t you, ‘Delia?”

“I was.”

“How romantic,” Lady Petronilla said, acidly “Like baby Moses in his basket. Only drier.”

“So if we miss Sicily and sail into Egypt, we’ve got somebody to lead us out of it,” said Lady Beatrix.

It was getting chilly. Everybody except Adelia and the watchful Mansur deserted the quarterdeck for the warmth of the lower deck.

We’ll be passing Salerno soon. Past the two best people in the world. I don’t even know if they’re still alive. Dear Lord, let them be alive so that, perhaps, on the way back, I may see them again.

A hand touched her shoulder, making her jump.

It was Blanche. “We’re only days from Sicily. What are we going to do? Mother of God, what are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Adelia told her. “But I was just thinking about my foster father. Some years ago, he was called to Palermo to attend on King William. He’s a great doctor, you see.”

“William?”

“My foster father.”

“And he cured the king? What of?”

“I didn’t ask. He wouldn’t have told me, a patient’s complaint is confidential.”

Blanche was stuttering with hope. “Perhaps… perhaps he took a worm thing out of William as well. Do you think the king’s got a scar like Joanna’s?”

“I have no idea. Probably not.”

“Your father might have influence with the king, he could plead with him for Joanna’s sake.”

Adelia was irritated. “Why should anyone plead for her? William’s lucky-he’s getting a sweet-tempered bride instead of a dead one.”

But Blanche had seen a life raft in what she was certain would be the wreckage of Joanna’s marriage. Within minutes, she was begging the O’Donnell to put the St. Patrick into Salerno and haul Dr. Gershom aboard.

Impatient though he was with any further delay, the Irishman agreed, mainly because of Adelia’s joy at the thought of seeing her parents so soon.

It was not to be. As the St. Patrick rounded Punta Campanella, the wind of a typical Mediterranean storm veered them helplessly westward. By the time it released its grip and returned to its former direction, St. Patrick’s position was due north of Sicily and the ship could only make a straight run to the port of Cefalù.

It was there that Princess Joanna asked for the assurance that Adelia would put off the return to England long enough to see her married. “Promise me. Promise.”

“I promise.”

IN THE DARK hold of the Nostre Dame, an exchange is made between Scarry and Duke Richard’s secretary; a rough wooden cross for a purse of gold.

But the duke is not as pleased as he should be and summons Scarry to him. “They say you are ill.”

“No, my lord. It is merely that being at sea does not agree with me. I am well enough.” And indeed Scarry does feel better than he did, though every now and then, when he is alone, he unscrews his head in order to relieve it.

“They say you talk to yourself.”

“Not to myself, my lord, I pray to my God.”

For, truly, he does pray to Satan. And, to Wolf, he has to give constant reassurance: “she will be in Sicily. There she was ordered, and there she shall die.”

Sometimes Wolf believes him and sometimes he doesn’t, which is when their arguments attract attention.

“It is good to talk to the Almighty,” the duke said. “But see to yourself, you are covered in grime. I have no use for the deranged.”

Scarry, who has moments of wonderful clarity, knows in that moment that Richard has forgotten the service that he, Scarry, who is now expendable, has rendered him. Scarry knows that the duke believes the sword has been willed miraculously to him, as if God’s arm has pierced the clouds with it and put it into his hand to be used for God’s almighty purpose.

“who does that bastard talk to?” Wolf wants to know as the duke walks away.

“The wrong deity,” Scarry tells him.

Thirteen

ADELIA, MANSUR, ULF, and Boggart, carrying her baby, stood hidden amongst the crowd on the road to Palermo’s gates to see Joanna ride up to the capital of her new kingdom to be received by her bridegroom and rank upon rank of Sicilian ambassadors and clergy in peacock robes.

She was accompanied by Richard, whose height made her look even smaller than she was. Ulf peered for Excalibur, but whatever sword was in Richard’s bejeweled scabbard, it wasn’t King Arthur’s.

For once, everybody’s eye was on the princess, not her brother. The ladies-in-waiting had dressed her in pearl-encrusted gold, a diadem encircled the long fair hair, her head was held high on its little neck, and she was smiling.

Watching her go past, Adelia could have cried; so brave, so tiny. As Ulf said-with tears in his own eyes-“These bastards better be good to her.”

It looked as if they would be; the people standing twelve deep along Joanna’s route shouted huzzahs and blessings to their new queen, scattering bay leaves for her white palfrey’s gilded hooves to tread on.

Ahead of her went the trumpeters, all shining, flag-bedecked silver. Behind rode Petronilla and Beatrix, pretty and laughing, and Blanche, also pretty, but with the strain showing; then the Bishop of Winchester and the chaplains.

Then the O’Donnell in Arabic robe and face-enfolding white headdress, the traditional garb for an admiral of Sicily, an honor that had been given him for his services to the country.

Then gleaming knights with spears, their horses with scalloped scarlet reins and saddles, and behind them Captain Bolt, his men in Plantagenet uniform with the brass-bound treasure chests.

England was doing its princess proud.

Then they’d gone. A curve in the road to the gates, and the press of people, denied Adelia the view of Sicily’s king and whether the reception committee contained the Bishop of Saint Albans.

If Rowley had arrived on the island, the O’Donnell had promised to contact him to say that she had, too, and was well. Which was good of the Irishman, though he took no pleasure in it.

“Where will you be staying? Out of sight, I hope.”

“My foster father has a house he keeps for his visits to Palermo. In the Jewish Quarter by the Harat al-Yahud.” It was a joy to say it. “We’ll stay there until the wedding.”

“Make sure you do.”

He’d arranged for Adelia, Boggart, Mansur, and Ulf to disembark from the St. Patrick, with Deniz accompanying them to act as go-between, before anyone else. “And see you’re veiled if you venture out.”

As they gained the teeming streets of Palermo, their ears were deafened by the noise of four different languages-all of them ofncial-being screamed at once; their eyeballs were assaulted by clashes of violent color; their nostrils shriveled under an onslaught of every kind of stink mixing with every kind of perfume; they had to dodge peddlers trying to sell them sugared almonds and ribbons, and prostitutes of both sexes wanting to sell something else. They had to get out of the way of trains of mules and donkeys carrying spices from the East or building materials from the North, resist the call of traders from their shops in the arched walkways, make sure that the purses the O’Donnell had provided them with weren’t cut from their belts…

For Adelia, it was magical. “Look, look. See that ruined temple? It’s Greek. My father said that Archimedes taught there when he wasn’t in Syracuse… And that building’s the Exchange, and down there’s the Street of the Scent-makers-just sniff… And the mill over there, can you see it? That’s where they make paper… Stop a minute, I must buy some cassata, you’ll love it, Boggart. It’s an Arab cake; Mansur calls it Qas’at… And sciarbat-Lord, I hope old Abdalla still sells it-he makes it from fruit chilled by mountain snow…”

She was a child again, on a visit with her parents to a sanctuary of marvels. She’d thought then that every capital city must be like this one; now she knew that Palermo was the most brilliant, prosperous metropolis in the world, unique.

Even so, she was entering the past through a different gate; she was Odysseus succumbing to the song of the Sirens, not returning to Ithaca. This could truly be home only if Allie and Gyltha were to join her and Mansur in it.

The Arab, like a man long parched of water, disappeared to say his prayers in the first mosque vouchsafed to him since he and Adelia had set off for England.

As they waited for him, Boggart, clutching Donnell, saw her first camel train: “What-a mercy is them things? Lord bless me that I should see hillocks on the move.”

But, marvel though they did, it was the sheer heterogeneity of the city that soothed the souls of the four former prisoners of Aveyron, who’d seen what intolerance could do.

Sometimes, savoring the moment, they stopped to watch those who would be mortal enemies elsewhere walking together in reasoned argument; they saw a fellow with a cross on his tunic-thus showing that he was on his way to the Levant to kill Saracens-bemusedly asking for directions from an Arab; a skullcapped Jew chatting with a tonsured monk; the high hat of a Greek Orthodox priest wobbling at a joke told him by a Norman knight.

“It hasn’t changed,” Adelia said happily.

“It has,” Mansur told her. “There are more Christian churches and fewer mosques. Fewer synagogues, also.”

She hadn’t noticed until now, but he was right; the ringing from the bell towers was louder than she remembered it, louder than the calls from muezzin.

To Ulf and Boggart, however, the mixture was astonishing. “I thought King Henry was liberal,” Ulf said. “Look how good he treats his Jews, but this… How’d this happen?”

“The Normans,” Adelia told him. “The Normans happened.”

And hardheaded, cutthroat adventurers they’d been.

Of genius.

Led by a couple of land-hungry brothers, the Hautevilles, they’d hacked both Sicily and Southern Italy into submission, taking it from Arab domination. They’d then promoted Arabs to be their advisers, along with every other intelligent race that could be of use to them. Dissension cost money and men to put down, ergo the Hautevilles ensured that there were no second-class citizens in their new realm to cause trouble. Thus, out of it, they’d made a kingdom that outshone any other, just as Sirius put all other stars in the night sky to shame.

“Mind you,” Adelia pointed out, “it’s a volatile mixture.” Sicilians were prone to flashes of extreme violence in family vendettas. The occasional minister might get himself assassinated, not because of his race or faith but because he’d made himself unpopular. “And there are back alleys where it’s not safe to go at night-nor in daytime, for that matter.”

Let it only change for the better, Lord. Let it live forever.

At last they reached the Harat al-Yahud, a great gateless arch-for what did the Jews here need to be gated against?-with the Star of David carved boldly into its stone.

Adelia found herself trembling; beyond it lay another of Sicily’s many worlds, her world; a different smell, henna blossom and caraway seeds, all the spices of the Song of Solomon; children playing catch amongst black-hatted men with ringlets poring over chess tables, matchmakers bargaining as they drank kosher wine, the drone of the Shemoneh Esreh prayer issuing from the synagogues.

And kindness; as the child of a revered visiting doctor, she’d had blessings showered on her, not to mention sticky abricotines and barfi badam from every sweetmeat seller she’d passed.

She clutched Mansur’s arm as they turned in to a street of tightly terraced houses. “They might be here, they might. They could have come for the wedding.” She turned to Deniz and pointed: “That’s the house we’ll be staying in.”

The Turk was in a hurry to get back to the admiral, so he left them.

But the door that always stood open to patients, whether they could pay or not, when Dr. Gershom and Dr. Lucia were in town was closed, so were the shutters.

With tenderness Adelia put out her hand to touch the mezuzah in its little barred niche in the doorpost. “They’re not here.” She could have wept.

There was a shriek from next door. “Adelia Aguilar. Is it you, little one?” She was enveloped in plump arms and a smell of cooking. “Shalom, my child, you are a blessing on my old eyes. But so thin, what have they done to you, those English?”

Here at least was comfort. “Shalom, Berichiyah. It is lovely to see you. How is Abrahe?” She made the introductions. “This is Berichiyah uxor Abrahe de la Roxela, an old, old friend. She keeps the key to our house and is good enough to look after it in my parents’ absence.”

Berichiyah dressed little differently from Sicily’s other respectable women-here, as everywhere else, Jews mainly adopted the wear of the country they lived in. The chinstrap of a stiff linen toque encircled the ample wrinkles of her face; the crease of an enormous bosom was apparent above the bodice of a stuff gown, its skirt pinned up above a petticoat, but nobody could have taken her for anything other than Jewish, and she would have been offended if they had.

“Aren’t they here, Berichiyah?”

“They wrote they might be coming, but maybe, maybe not.”

There was something chilling in the “maybes” that caused Adelia to ask sharply: “They’re not ill?”

“No, no, not ill. In their last letter, both well.” Berichiyah changed the subject. “Wait now, while I let you in. How long are you here? I hope long enough for me to put flesh on your bones.”

She disappeared and came back with a key. “Go in, go in. Everything is clean, the beds are aired. I will fetch Rebekah’s cot for the baby, her Juceff has grown out of it. Ten grandchildren have we got now, Adelia. Six boys, four girls. And a great-grandson-our Benjamin married the ax maker’s daughter last year…”

Theywere swept into a dark, shining interior that smelled of beeswax and astringent herbs.

“Is Abrahe well?” Adelia asked.

“Not well, my dear, not well at all. Now he has the gout, poor man, and even your father can do nothing for it.”

Berichiyah’s husband had enthusiastically embraced ill health for years, teaching his wife to read so that she could run the date-importing business that he’d inherited from his father, leaving her, while doing it, to provide for and bring up their many children whilst maintaining the fiction, as she did, that he was still head, if the ailing head, of the household.

“Exhausted, the lot of you. You will want to be quiet tonight, so I will bring you some stewed kid and tzimmes, enough for all. You remember my tzimmes, Adelia? But tomorrow night you eat with us.”

That happiness, however, was denied them.

STILL WEARING THE sheepskin coats from Caronne, they went out the next morning to purchase badly needed clothes. Adelia took them to the market square in La Kalsa, the working-class area of Palermo, where Mansur could find new robes and headdresses and she and Boggart and Ulf outfit themselves as well as buy clouts and a new shawl for young Donnell-and do it cheaply

Borrowing from the O’Donnell had worried her but he’d said: “Rest easy now, I’ll charge it to King Henry.”

“Oh, he’ll like that.”

It was while Boggart was poring over a stall carrying a selection of bright secondhand skirts that Adelia, holding Donnell, became transfixed by the booth next door. Four marionettes were being manipulated by people unseen behind the backcloth of a tiny stage. Palermo was famous for its marionettes; her parents had bought her one when she was a child, a wooden, painted little knight that she’d ruined by operating on it.

Here was another knight, presumably the epic hero Roland of Roncesvalles energetically clashing swords with a frightening-looking Moor. What caught Adelia’s eye, though, were not the humanoid puppets, but a comic mule and camel chasing each other round the left-hand side of the stage, legs kicking, their mouths opening to bite and shutting again.

Allie would love them.

Whether she could afford more of the Irishman’s money to buy both for her daughter was the problem.

“One though, eh, Donnell?” she asked the baby, whose eyes were fixated on the bouncing puppets. “The camel? The mule?”

That was when somebody pushed something between Donnell’s shawl and her hand.

Automatically feeling to see if the purse at her belt was still there, she whipped round to see the back of a dowdy-looking man disappearing quickly into the crowd.

“What is it, missus?”

It was a piece of paper-a substance still virtually unknown in England-sealed with two drops of unstamped sealing wax.

“To Mistress Adelia from her friend, Blanche of Poitiers, greetings,” she read out. “Be at the Sign of Jerusalem in the Street of Silversmiths within the hour.”

The script was looped and cursive. “I didn’t think Blanche could write,” Adelia said.

“She can’t,” Ulf said immediately “That’s Scarry, that is. Lurin’ you to your death, that’s what he’s doing.”

Ulf was suspicious of all males who looked at them sideways and kept his hand constantly on the hilt of his sword-another gift from the O’Donnell.

“He wouldn’t have found us this quickly. I’d better go; Joanna may need me.”

“At a bloody tavern?”

“You do not go without me,” Mansur said.

“Nor me.”

“Nor me.”

Adelia looked at Boggart. “We can hardly take the baby.”

“Well, I ain’t leaving him, and I ain’t leaving you.” She added: “And we ain’t leaving Ward on his own here, neither.”

Ah, well…

The Sign of Jerusalem stood, or rather leaned, end-on to the silversmiths’ street down an alley deserted except for a vulture energetically pecking at the carcass of a dead cat. It didn’t look like a tavern, more a shack due for demolition; the crusader cross on its sign was barely visible under peeling paint, and its shutters were barred up.

Mansur’s hand went to the dagger at his belt. Ulf drew his sword. “Don’t reckon this place gets much custom,” he said.

Ward made a halfhearted attempt to scare off the vulture but gave up when it ignored him.

The man who opened the door to Mansur’s rap wasn’t a landlord either, to judge from his tabard, which was embroidered with two golden lions bringing down two golden camels, the arms of Sicily’s kings ever since their conquest of the Moslems.

He stood well back to bow them in. “Mistress Adelia?”

“Yes.”

He picked up a lit lantern from a dusty table and opened his other hand to show Adelia a ring.

She nodded and turned to the others. “It’s Blanche’s.”

“And who are you?” Ulf wanted to know.

“I am your guide. Be good enough to follow me.” The man spoke Norman French with a Sicilian accent. He indicated an open trapdoor with a short flight of steps leading downward into darkness.

“We ain’t going nowhere less’n we know where,” Ulf told him.

“Really? It was understood that Mistress Adelia has an enemy and it were better her whereabouts were not known. Follow me, please.”

The steps were slippery. Ulf, still carrying his sword, went first, followed by Mansur, to whom Adelia passed down Baby Donnell before giving a hand to Boggart. They had to wait while Ward made an ungainly descent.

“Exciting this, ain’t it, missus?” Boggart said nervously.

The bravest of the brave, that girl. Adelia could only pray she wasn’t leading her into more trouble; this passage might be out of One Thousand and One Nights, but it could lead to a sultan angry at being given a damaged bride.

It was a long tunnel that led eventually to steps up into a garden and a grilled gate in a wall guarded by fearsome, turbaned, baggytrousered guards with scimitars.

Mistress Blanche was waiting for them, trembling with nerves. “He says he’ll see you, Delia. I haven’t told him, only that you saved her life. He remembers your father well. If you explain, tell him, then, perhaps…”

“Explain?”

Blanche grabbed Adelia’s neck with two hands as if she would shake it. Instead, she hissed into her ear. “The scar, woman, the scar. Persuade him, beg him, tell him how lovely she really is.”

“She is lovely”

“In our eyes, but he’s expecting perfection.” She fell back, crossing herself. “I can’t bear her to be rejected. Mary, Mother of God, let him understand.”

The guide was gesturing to them to hurry. Blanche, it appeared, was going no farther. In that case, Adelia decided, neither were Boggart and the baby; whatever was coming, they must have no part in it. “Look after Boggart and Donnell for me,” she said. “And the dog.”

Blanche nodded and wrung Adelia’s hand as if sending her to war, then turned away, dabbing her eyes.

At a nod from the guide, the guards opened the gate and they were in a pillared walkway running beside a little tiled square, like an atrium, with a fountain playing in it.

Into a great and gilded chamber. More terrifying but obliging guards, more chambers, until the last-largest and most gilded of all-from which, even through the door, they could hear the noise, like a thousand birds twittering at once in a giant aviary.

Adelia’s eyes met Mansur’s. She knew what was beyond the door; the kings of Sicily might be Normans, but they had adopted-and obviously still kept-this most Arab of customs.

The door was opened. Inside was an enormous room full of women, some of them elderly, most of them young and olive-skinned, all beautiful and all in billowing silk, for though the night outside the filigree bars on the windows was cold, these were tropical birds and were kept warm by fifty or more chased lamps and braziers.

Some lay on divans, but most were playing games or dancing or wheeling in acrobatics. Their guide stopped; he was going no farther. He put out an arm to halt Ulf, whose mouth had sagged open as he looked in. “Not you,” he said.

Mansur patted Ulf on the head. “This is a harem,” he said, “and you are a whole man. Enter, and these guards will have to kill you.”

Ulf was drooling. “Be bloody worth it,” he said.

He was left behind, and the doors closed on him as Mansur and Adelia stepped in.

The room stilled for a moment at the sight of Mansur, as did the chatter, but then the kaleidoscope came to life again, reassured by the presence of one who’d been instantly identified as another eunuch.

In one corner of the room, some of the young women were working at silk looms; it looked an incongruous activity amongst all this recreation, though the owners of the slim hands shuttling back and forth seemed happily engrossed in what they were doing.

A tall eunuch, who’d been strumming a long-necked lute, put the instrument down and came toward them, touching his forehead and breast. “As-salaam aleikum.”

“Wa aleikum salaam,” returned Mansur.

The man relapsed into perfect Norman French. “Lord, Lady, I am Sabir, most humbly at your service. And now, Gracious Ones, if you would be good enough to follow me…” He gestured to one of the harem’s older women. “Rashidah shall chaperone the Lady Adelia.”

Adelia had begun to wonder whether the king was going to receive them in the chamber to which selected ladies from the harem were summoned for his sexual pleasure, but the room they entered had no samite drapes, no couches, no erotic pictures. A magnificent, claw-footed desk stood in its center. Books and scrolls lined three of the walls, and a superb tapestry depicting hunters in full cry through a forest in which peacocks wandered covered the fourth.

This was the office of a Norman king, not an Arabian sultan.

But it wasn’t a king sitting behind the desk; it was a frog. The hood of a burnous framed features with the smooth, greenish pallor of an amphibian. Either the princess’s kiss to her king had reversed the fairy story, or this was not the king.

The man stood up, showing that he was squat. He salaamed, gesturing for them to take the two chairs on the opposite side of the desk, and greeted them in Norman French that had a lisp to it.

“May I present myself? I am Jibril, emir secretary to the Musta’íz, the Gracious One, who will join us in a minute. Lord Mansur, you honor us. As for the Lady Adelia, you have been much missed from this kingdom. The King of England’s gain was our loss; it was with deep regret that seven years ago I signed the permission to send you to him, knowing we were losing a most accomplished doctor and that our esteemed Doctor Gershom would be losing a daughter.”

He bowed. His eyes were the only things about him that weren’t froglike. They directed themselves from beneath the pouched skin like skewers.

Adelia bowed back. It was you, was it?

“May I hope that your return to us is permanent?”

“I’m afraid not. I have to go back, I have left my child behind.” She had a sudden fear that they weren’t going to let her leave.

But Jibril said: “So we understand. May you be happily and safely reunited with her.”

“Thank you.” They have spies everywhere, she thought, they even know Allie’s sex. Still, she’d almost forgotten the relief of being in a country where a female doctor was not an abhorrence.

“We fear the journey from England has been a difficult one. We learn from the Lord O’Donnell that you have been pursued by a malevolence that wishes you harm. The Glorious One wishes me to tell you that, should he be discovered here in Palermo, that being shall be hunted down and killed like the dog he is.”

“Thank you, but I don’t think that’s what this meeting is about, is it? You want to discuss the Princess Joanna.” Let’s get it over with.

Jibril’s lips made a horizontal stretch; presumably he was smiling. “You have adopted English directness, lady Allow me to do the same. The Lady Blanche tells us the princess was taken ill as she boarded ship at Saint Gilles and that drastic measures had to be taken by you to save her life. Would you be good enough to inform us of what they were?”

She took a deep breath. “I was forced to operate.” She went into the explanation of the appendix, its putrefaction, etc.

“The procedure has left a scar, of course. Lady Blanche worries that it may displease the king but I am certain that, as a man of sense, he would prefer a scarred bride to a dead one. I can assure you that it makes no difference to the princess’s beauty or disposition, which is of the sweetest.”

The secretary’s lips stretched wider. “Already, so much is obvious. We are all charmed by this jewel of England. The scarring is of no moment if it saved the dear one’s life; a diamond with a flaw can be more beautiful than one without. That is not our concern…”

It isn’t? Thank God, thank God. Then what are you worried about?

“What we would wish to know is whether this operation has had any other ill effect? On her future and that of her marriage?”

It was Mansur who caught on. He said in English: “He wants to know if Joanna can still have children.”

Adelia blew an “oh” of relief. Was that it? Of course that was it. She and Blanche had been worrying over the wrong cause. Scarred or not, Joanna’s function was to give William sons. An heir was vital if Sicily was to remain in the hands of the Hautevilles. Childlessness in a king was not just a personal tragedy, it meant the sweeping away of his entire administration; possibly civil war as differing claimants jostled to take his throne.

“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,” Ettore 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.

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 cathedral, 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.

He lets drops of the usher’s blood drip from his knife onto the floor, then peers into the congregation below. It is merely a matter of waiting. She will be shown to him.

IN THE ZIZA PALACE, Ward had been fed and watered-at arm’s length-by the servant Rafiq, and then shut in the Lady Adelia’s bedroom until she should return.

For a while the dog slept, then began snuffling at the door which, when it opened to allow a servant to come in with a duster and horse-tail polish, he slithered out of, unseen. He was good at slithering, an art that he’d perfected at the Ziza, where dog-hating servants tended to give him a surreptitious kick if they saw him.

Until he came to the entrance hall, he went unnoticed. Its great doors were open to allow fresh air through the hall’s tunnel vaulting and into the rest of the palace, though guarded by the scimitared sentries, men who, in Ward’s experience, were harder kickers than most.

He made a dash for it and, hearing the shouts behind him, skirted the pool outside at a speed that left him panting as he gained the slope to the busy streets. There the stinks were delicious. Flattening and weaving to avoid the boots of passersby, Ward enjoyed them, forgetting Adelia and adding his own contribution.

But now, ah, here was a scent he recognized; it wasn’t Adelia’s but one equally familiar and pleasing. The dog began the arduous job of detecting it from a thousand others so that he could trace it; sniffing, occasionally making a false cast, but finding it again, following the route that Mansur had taken to the cathedral.

THE BISHOP OF WINCHESTER was making the most of his allotted part in the wedding by droning Latin supplications at a length that matched the other Latin drones preceding his.

The mass of bodies in the cathedral was producing a heat that had encouraged an usher to open its doors in the hope that fresh air might dispel the sleep overcoming most of the congregation.

In fact, the only invigorating part of the ceremony so far had been when Duke Richard revealed the provenance of the sword he carried. He’d lacked grace in doing it but, adapting the words from the Book of Samuel with which the priest Ahimelech had given the sword of Goliath to David, he’d handed Henry of England’s gift to William and mumbled: “Ecce hic gladius Arturi regis. Behold, great king, I give you Excalibur.”

The woman next to Adelia had grabbed at her with hennaed fingers: “Excalibur. Did he say Excalibur?”

“Yes.”

“Arthur is here, then. Arthur has come to us.” It was a susurration on every breath so that, for a moment, the very saints in their plaques seemed to whisper a name that would make Sicily invulnerable.

Again, Adelia had looked for Ulf but, again, couldn’t see him.

After that, the ceremony once more degenerated into ordeal by boredom, and Adelia wondered how Joanna and William were surviving it on their knees, knowing, God help them both, that it was to be succeeded by another immediately afterward when they moved to the palace’s shimmering Palatine Chapel for Joanna’s coronation.

Adelia’s eyelids drooped and, being so tightly wedged between other women, she was able to doze standing up.

She woke up when a clear voice said: “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, take and wear this ring as a sign of my love and faithfulness.”

They were exchanging rings. Joanna was married.

Hopefully, Adelia looked to her left where the side door led to the cathedral’s cloister. Only a moment ago, it seemed, the afternoon winter had been shining through it; now it was diminishing into twilight. The day was nearly over.

Not the ceremony, however; the congregation wasn’t to be released yet; not until Joanna and William had signed a register of their marriage.

She felt a jab in the ribs from the lady next to her, whose temper, despite the joy of Excalibur, had not been improved by heat or overcrowding. “Is that you? Kindly control yourself.”

Adelia, equally irritable, denied any lapse in good manners. But there was undoubtedly a sudden and awful smell. She looked down at her shoes to see that they were being rolled on by Ward in his pleasure at having discovered them. “I’m afraid it’s my dog.”

“Then get rid of it before we all faint.”

Adelia managed to reach down and gather Ward up. The chance of reaching the side door through her packed neighbors seemed remote, but, though they tutted and exclaimed behind their veils, a waft of Ward sent the ladies stepping back on one another’s feet in their eagerness to clear an exit for him.

“You,” Adelia said, when she’d gained the cloister, “what am I going to do with you?”

She pulled one of her long silk sleeves out of her cloak and knotted its end round the dog’s collar. If he wasn’t to infect the cathedral again, she would have to wait until the service inside was over and the others could rejoin her, which might well be another half hour or longer.

The sky had turned gray at the onset of evening, with occasional gusts of wind that blew dust along the cloister; it would be a cold wait.

It was then that she thought of the marionettes at the stall in La Kalsa’s piazza. She could now afford both the mule and the camel, probably the fighting men as well, though Allie would be less interested in them than the animals. This empty time was as good a moment to buy them as any; tomorrow might be taken up with other matters, seeing Rowley, going home, perhaps.

Well, damned if she’d return to England without a present for her daughter. And La Kalsa wasn’t far away; she could be there and back in no time…

THE SUDDEN DISTURBANCE among the female guests had drawn attention to a woman leaving the cathedral with a horrible-looking dog in her arms.

On the men’s side of the nave, Mansur began struggling through impeding bodies to reach her, his flailing arms making a passage for Ulf and Dr. Gershom behind him.

Up in the clerestory, behind their filigree screen, Dr. Lucia and Boggart, with Donnell in her arms, started up and headed for the stairs.

The Irishman hadn’t seen Adelia go, but, alarmed by Mansur’s sudden movement, he began making his own way out.

From his higher position in the choir, the Bishop of Saint Albans saw all this, and something more-the shadow of a figure with a knife in its hand slipping along the clerestory.

I’ll never get to the side door in time.

Go the front way and the hell with everything.

Rowley charged out of his stall and began running, stripping off his cope as he went. He sent his miter spinning onto the altar steps, his jeweled crook of office still bouncing and clattering on the stones of the nave for some seconds after he’d disappeared out of the cathedral’s great front door, leaving a shocked and staring congregation behind him.

THE MARIONETTE-MAKER, a fat and elderly bearded Greek, was being difficult. “Signora, the knights, yes, I have plenty of those, but of the beasts I have only the two my sons are manipulating this moment. They are a draw, a favorite with children, I cannot let those last two go until I have made more.”

It was a ploy, of course. The damned man was going to put up the price; he’d seen her standing outside his booth before she came in, slavering over the dancing, kicking camel and mule; seen, too, that she was richly dressed, despite the unlovely dog to which her dangling sleeve was attached.

The booth was basically a long, thin canvas tent and smelled of paint and wood shavings. At this end, directly behind the stage, the backsides of two younger men waggled as they leaned over its little proscenium arch, expertly working the strings of the puppets for the benefit of the openmouthed children and adults outside who watched them. At the other end, the tent’s flaps were pulled up to let in light on a long bench on which lay half-finished figures amidst a complexity of struts and string.

Signor Feodor had sat her down when she’d entered, offered her a glass of sherbet, and got ready for the bargaining without which no sale in La Kalsa was complete.

She sipped her drink: “How much, Signor?”

“For the knights, a gold tari. For the animals, two.”

“Each?”

He spread his hands. “What would you, Signora? The articulation to make them kick and bite is complex. Also, as I say, I am reluctant to let them go.”

It was a ridiculous price. Normally, she’d have pretended to walk out of the shop, and he’d have called her back with a lower offer, and she’d have pretended to leave again, and he’d have called her back… but it would take time that she didn’t have-while he did.

“Three tari for the lot,” she said.

“You would ruin me, Signora? Five.”

“Four.”

“Four and a half, and I am a fool to myself.”

“Done,” she said. “Wrap them up.”

She’d surprised him; he’d have gone down to three and a half. He was on his feet in a second, tapping the son pulling the animals’ strings on his rump. “We have a sale, Eneas.”

Because she’d overpaid, much grateful attention was given to parceling the puppets. She would be traveling far with them? Then they must be encased in wool to prevent damage. And the lucky recipient? A girl? Allow us to include a box of Greek delight for her…

Ward was pulling at her sleeve and making the noise in his throat that indicated he’d smelled something or somebody he knew and liked. Still sitting with the glass in her hand, Adelia turned her head to peer through the narrow gaps in the calico ribbons that hung over the booth’s entrance to keep out flies.

The piazza was beginning to celebrate its king’s wedding; flares were being lit, merchants were redoubling their efforts to sell plaster-cast depictions of a crowned bride and groom, drink stalls were doing a roaring trade, and, in the square’s center, a dais was being put together for a band to accompany the night’s dancing.

“Who’ve you seen, you silly dog?”

Then she saw who it was because his was the only figure in the piazza that was totally still. A man she knew was standing on the far side of the piazza under a fan-shaped palm tree, looking toward the booth, where the two remaining marionettes were still jouncing.

He and she had traveled the same one thousand miles-much of it together.

“Poor thing, he’s ill” was her first thought; his hair, which was capless, had been allowed to grow bushy, his robe was worn ragged, while his face had the fixity of suffering.

Adelia got up to go and greet him. As she did it, the wind gusted, swaying the fronds of the man’s palm tree, raising his hair, and sending shade and light flickering over him as, once, they had flickered over a wild figure in the glade of a Somerset forest, striping his face as it had been striped then.

The eyes gleamed when the light caught them, then went dark; they weren’t staring at the marionettes; it was the booth’s curtain strips. When the same gust of wind that had revealed him blew them aside to reveal her, he smiled. She saw his teeth. And the knife in his hand.

She couldn’t move.

“There, Signora. Signora?”

The string handle of a heavy parcel was being slipped over the untrammeled wrist of her left arm. Still she didn’t move.

All this way, destroying as he went, unsuspected. He’d killed. He’d smiled and killed… who? She was unable to remember, only that they were dead. Now it was her turn.

A group of people moved, chattering, across the square, blanking him out for a moment. When they’d gone, the space beneath the palm tree was empty.

She began to move backward slowly, pulling Ward with her, the parcel weighing on her other arm as it groped for any obstruction behind her. It was a shrinking away, not so much through terror for herself-though she was terrified-as through a dreadful revulsion. That thing out there was disordered, no longer human, more a giant poisonous insect unable to control itself; its antennae had discovered her and its fangs would sink into her whether or not there were people around to watch.

“Get away. Get away.” She didn’t know if she said it to the creature or herself.

“Signora?”

She kept backing off until she bumped into the marionette table. Then she turned and began running for the opening at the rear of the tent, Ward galloping beside her.

She was in an alley. Turn left, yes-if she turned left and left again she would be farther down the piazza. The antennae would wave and not locate her. Run. She’d run with everything she had, regain the cathedral and be safe.

She swung left, but there was no other turning to the left, only another alley going to the right. She took it. Again, no left turn.

She ran, doubled back, took a narrow cut between some houses where crumbling balconies overhead formed a roof that gave an echo to her running footsteps-and, she thought in her panic, somebody else’s.

There was no one around. Everybody had gone to the main streets to join in the celebrations. The noise of music and singing faded into quiet as Adelia became lost in the labyrinth that was the oldest and poorest part of La Kalsa…

ROWLEY HURLED HIMSELF through the streets, shoving people out of the way, yelling for anybody who’d seen a lady and a dog. A garishly dressed woman held out her arms to him. “A lady and a dog,” he shouted at her. She laughed, and he pushed her off.

A beggar obstructed him and Rowley knocked him flying before he realized the man had nodded. He went back and hauled the wretch to his feet. “A woman and a dog.”

“Dressed pretty, was she? Her headed that way, sir. Have pity on an old crusader, sir.” With one hand, the beggar pointed toward La Kalsa’s piazza and extended the other for money

He didn’t get any.

Running, Rowley entered the piazza. It was full of men, women, and children dancing. Shouting for Adelia, he broke through prancing circles of dancers that merely reformed behind him.

Jesus Christ, where was she? What the hell had she come here for? If it was her.

He began looking into shop fronts. “A lady and a dog? Has she been here?”

And then, because God was good, a fat fellow standing outside a marionette booth beckoned him over. “The lady with the dog?”

“Was she here?”

“Such a nice lady, the dog… well. Bought my best creations… for her daughter, she said. I have others, sir, if you…”

Rowley shook him. “Where did she go?”

“Out the back, sir, I don’t know why. She was running…”

So was Rowley, through the long tent, into the alley, shouting her name. Running, Jesus, she’d been running. He felt for his sword and remembered that he was a bishop-had been-and bishops didn’t wear swords, not in a cathedral at least.

Just as well; if he found her, he’d kill her with it. “Where are you, damn you?”

The alleys turned and twisted; he turned and twisted with them.

He saw a tattered shrub in a pot indicating that the hovel it stood outside served ale. He’d seen it before, minutes ago, same hovel, same fucking shrub. He was going in circles.

Stopping, he could hear other voices shouting her name; he thought one of them was Mansur’s high treble.

And someone else, nearer, was calling his. “My lord bishop. Bishop Rowley Bishop Ro-ow-leee.”

Father Guy Father Guy had run after him.

Almighty God, they were looking for him; him, the bishop who’d gone insane. He’d shamed the English Church in front of a thousand Sicilians; he was their responsibility; they couldn’t let him scamper the streets yelling for a woman. They’d take him back and shut him up somewhere because, whatever he was, he’d always belong to the Church.

The chaplain had people with him, was coming nearer, talking. “He must be found, proctor, you understand? I want all your men out.”

A deep voice: “We’ll find him, Father.”

The bastards’ll hold me up.

He backed into a doorway and stood still as death.

Nearer now. “Lost his wits, poor fellow. Ugh, these stinking by-ways.” It was Dr. Arnulf.

When they’d passed, he dodged down a narrow cut-through to get away from them and found himself in a dilapidated square with a horse trough in its middle. His eye caught a movement on the far side, the flick of a cloak’s edge as its owner disappeared around a corner. He ran after it and leaped on a hurrying figure, bringing it to the ground.

It swore as he turned it over. It was Ulf.

“Have you seen her?”

“No. Thought I heard the bloody dog bark, though.”

“Which way?”

“This way”

They hared off together, but there were a thousand dogs loose in the city and-“Sod it”-Ulf’s boots slid in a deposit left by one of them, sending him sprawling.

Rowley ran on. Ahead was a cross street with a flambeau guttering in its bracket at a corner of the intersection.

And there she was. He saw her as if in a bright frame. She was standing on tiptoe with her back to him, trying to read a street name by the light of the expiring flambeau. The dog was at her feet.

He heard Ulf coming up behind him, cursing. To his left, at the top of the street, a tall man in white robes was hurrying down it. Mansur.

Another figure was coming up on his right out of the darkness.

Hearing him swear, she turned around and came toward him, smiling. He went forward and took her in his arms, still cursing her for the fright she’d given him.

The miserable light from the flambeau glinted on an upraised blade over her shoulder.

He swung her round so that the blade went into his own back, once, twice, before the killer was pulled away and Ulf pinioned the arms while Mansur drew the curved dagger from his sash and cut Locusta’s throat with it.

THEY DRAGGED ROWLEY into the vestibule of a shabby tenement. Adelia never let go of him, crawling beside him with one arm under his back so that it was raised above the dirty floor, the blood from it pouring over the crook of her elbow.

Knowledge deserted her; she didn’t know what to do.

Help me, I don’t know what to do. But her mouth was too frozen to say the words, and she looked up into the faces of Mansur, Ulf… and recognized neither of them.

“Get away, woman. Let a proper doctor see to him.” Another face, mouth puffing from exertion. Arnulf’s hands were on her shoulders, trying to pull her off, so she sank her teeth into his wrist to stop him.

He fell back. “She’s bitten me, the bitch has bitten me.”

A calm voice said: “Adelia.” It was Dr. Gershom’s.

“Yes?”

“Let me look, child. We’ll see what the damage is.”

“Yes, Father.” Sense came back to her; she had help; she was a doctor again. She said: “Somebody bring a light.”

Light came.

Calling for quiet, Dr. Gershom tore open the front of Rowley’s shirt and pressed an ear against his chest to listen for any sucking sound. He heard none. “Not the lung, I think,” he told her.

“I’m frightened it’s the liver.”

“Let’s see.”

Rowleywas heaved onto his side, and they ripped away the back of his shirt to see what lay underneath.

Two wounds, both gaping, both deep. Downward and sideways strokes had gone into the heavy musculature of the back between the posterior axillary lines.

“I don’t know,” Dr. Gershom said. “I don’t know. Maybe…” He avoided looking at his daughter. She was bunching the folds of her skirt around her fists to press them into the wounds-the blood immediately soaked into the silk until it dripped.

Gershom knew, as she knew, that even if no major organ had been touched, part of Rowley’s clothing had most likely gone in with the passage of the knife and would turn the area round it putrid if it wasn’t got out.

“I need my equipment,” he said. “We’ll get him to my house… operate… something to carry him on.”

Mansur moved to the stairs and ripped out two of its risers with the ease of a man pulling up grass.

“No.” For a dying man, the voice was clear. “They’ll find me. Take me home. Adelia? Are you there?”

“I’m here, dearest.”

“Who, my son? Who will find you?” Dr. Gershom asked.

Adelia knew. They. The “they” who would claim her lover for their own, who’d absorb their bishop back into the organism that was blanketing the world, the “they” who would take this man away from her for the last time and give him to the torture of their doctors.

She looked up and around. So many people in this dirty place. How had they all come here? Had they flown?

There were those she loved; her father, her mother-tearing her own petticoat into strips for bandages-an agonized Ulf and Boggart with her baby, Mansur, tight-lipped, efficiently making a stretcher… And the O‘Donnell, the O’Donnell had come…

Behind them, the enemy; Dr. Arnulf, Father Guy, outraged and giving orders to a large man in clerical robes. “Fetch help, Master Proctor. It is not seemly for a bishop to die here. Bring assistance. He must be taken to the cathedral, relics, the last rites…”

“You shan’t have him.” In this unreality, it was all she knew.

“The woman is a witch and must be arrested…”

Now the O’Donnell had the chaplain by the throat and was shaking him like a bundle of straw. “You touch her, you bastard…”

But the proctor had gone. They’d be here soon to take him. They’d taken Ermengarde.

There was a bloodied bundle half in, half out of the vestibule’s entrance where somebody had kicked it out of the way. Its throat was severed. Her eyes passed over it, had no interest in it; the insect had done its damage and now was squashed; she felt nothing for it. Only Rowley mattered.

“Adelia?”

Her mother was pushing her gently. “Let me take over now, little one.” Dr. Lucia was holding clean, folded pieces of petticoat to stanch the wounds, other strips were bandages. “He needs to be able to see you.”

Relinquishing a post she would have given to nobody else, she lifted her dripping hands from her lover’s back and moved so that her mother’s instantly replaced them.

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.