Mistress of the Art of Death

Eleven

The curtain wall was a rampart from which archers could repel-and during the war of Stephen and Matilda had repelled-an attack on the castle. Today it was quiet and empty except for a sentry doing his rounds of the allure and the cloaked woman with a dog standing by one of the crenels to whom he bade an unanswered good-day.

A fine afternoon. The westerly breeze had pushed the rain farther east and was scudding lambswool clouds across a laundered blue sky, making the pretty, busy scene Adelia looked down on prettier and busier by billowing the canvas roofs of the market stalls, fluttering the pennants of the boats moored by the bridge, swaying the willow branches farther down into a synchronized dance, and whisking the river into glistening irregular wavelets.

She didn’t see it.

How did you do it? she was asking Simon’s murderer. What did you say to tempt him into the position enabling you to push him into the water? It would not have taken much strength to hold him down by the pole jabbed into his back; you would have leaned your weight on it, making it impossible to dislodge.

A minute, two, while he scrabbled like a beetle, until that life of complexity and goodness was extinguished.

Oh, dear heaven, what had it been like for him? She saw flurries of silt cloud the encompassing, entrapping weed, watched the rising bubbles of the last remnants of breath. She began to gasp in vicarious panic…as if she were taking in water, not clean Cambridge air.

Stop it. This does not serve him.

What will?

Undoubtedly, to bring his killer, who was also the children’s, to the seat of justice, but how much more difficult that would be without him. “We may have to do that very thing before this business is finished, Doctor. Think as he thinks.”

And she had answered, “Then you do it. You’re the subtle one.”

Now she must try to enter a mind that saw death as an expedient: in the case of children, pleasurable.

But she could see only the diminution it had brought about. She had become smaller. She knew now that the anger she had felt at the children’s torture had been that of a deus ex machina called down to set matters right. She and Simon had been apart, above the action, its finale, not its continuance. For her, she supposed, it had been a form of superiority-it was not in the play that its gods become protagonists-which Simon’s murder had now removed, casting her among the Cambridge players, as ignorant and as helpless as any of those tiny, breeze-blown, fate-driven figures down there.

She was joined in a democracy of misery to Agnes, sitting outside her beehive hut below; to Hugh the huntsman, who had wept for his niece; to Gyltha and every other man and woman with some beloved soul to lose.

It wasn’t until she heard familiar footsteps approaching along the rampart that she knew she had been waiting for them. The only plank she had been given to hold on to in this maelstrom was the knowledge that the tax collector was as innocent of the murders as she herself. She would have been happy, very happy, to apologize humbly to him for her suspicion-except that he added to her confusion.

To all but her intimates, Adelia liked to appear imperturbable, putting on the kindly but detached manner of one called to profession by the god of medicine. It was a veneer that had helped deflect the impertinence and overfamiliarity and, occasionally, the downright physical presumption with which her fellow students and early patients had offered to treat her. Indeed, she actually thought of herself as withdrawn from humanity, a calm and hidden resort that it could call on in need, though one which did not involve itself in its vulnerability.

But to the owner of the coming footsteps, she had shown grief and panic, called for help, pleaded, had leaned on him, even in her misery had been grateful that he was with her.

Accordingly, the face Adelia turned up to Sir Rowley Picot was blank. “What was the verdict?”

She had not been called to give evidence to the jurors hastily assembled for the inquest on Simon’s body. Sir Rowley had felt that it would not be in her interest, nor that of the truth, if she were exposed as an expert on death. “You’re a woman, for one thing, and a foreigner, for another. Even if they believed you, you would achieve notoriety. I will show them the bruise on his back and explain that he was trying to investigate the finances of the children’s killer and therefore became the murderer’s victim, though I doubt whether coroner or jury-they’re all bumpkins-will have the wit to follow that tangled skein with any credence.”

Now, from his look, she saw that they had not. “Accidental death by drowning,” he told her. “They thought I was mad.”

He put his hands on the crenel and expelled an exasperated breath at the town below. “All I may have achieved is to sap their conviction by an inch or two that it was one of their own and not the Jews who murdered Little Saint Peter and the others.”

For a second, something reared in the turbulence of Adelia’s mind, showing hideous teeth, then sank again, to be hidden by grief, disappointment, and anxiety.

“And the burial?” she asked.

“Ah,” he said. “Come with me.”

Slavishly, the Safeguard was on its spindle legs in a minute and trotting after him. Adelia followed more slowly.

Building was in progress in the great courtyard. The chatter of gathered clerks was being drowned by an insistent, deafening banging of hammer on wood. A new scaffold was going up in one corner to hold the triple gallows for use in the assizes when the justices in eyre emptied the county’s gaols and tried the cases of those thus brought before them. Almost as high as the nooses would be, a long table and a bench reached by steps were being erected near the castle doors to place the judges above the multitude.

Some of the din faded as Sir Rowley led Adelia and her dog round a corner. Here, sixteen years of royal Plantagenet peace had allowed Cambridgeshire’s sheriffs to throw out an abutment, an attachment to their quarters from which steps led down to this sunken walled garden approached from outside by a gate in an arch.

Inside, going down the steps, it was quieter still, and Adelia could hear the first bees of spring blundering in and out of flowers.

A very English garden, planted for medicine and strewing rather than spectacle. At this time of year, color was lacking except for the cowslips between the stones of the paths and a mere impression of blue where a bank of violets crowded along the bottom of a wall. The scent was fresh and earthy.

“Will this do?” Sir Rowley asked casually.

Adelia stared at him, dumb.

He said with exaggerated patience, “This is the garden of the sheriff and his lady. They have agreed to let Simon be buried in it.” He took her arm and led her down a path to where a wild cherry tree drifted delicate white blossoms over untended grass sprinkled with daisies. “Here, we thought.”

Adelia shut her eyes and breathed in. After a while, she said, “I must pay them.”

“Certainly not.” The tax collector was offended. “When I say that this is the sheriff’s garden, I should more properly call it the king’s, the king being the ultimate owner of England ’s every acre, except those belonging to the Church. And since Henry Plantagenet is fond of his Jews and since I am Henry Plantagenet’s man, it was merely a matter of pointing out to Sheriff Baldwin that by accommodating the Jews, he would also be accommodating the king, which, in another sense, he will-and soon, since Henry is due to visit the castle shortly, another factor I pointed out to his lordship.”

He paused, frowning. “I shall have to press the king for Jewish cemeteries to be put in each town; the lack is a scandal. I cannot believe he’s aware of it.”

No money was involved, then. But Adelia knew whom she should pay. It was time to do it, and do it properly.

She bent her knee to Rowley Picot in a deep bow. “Sir, I am in your debt, not only for this kindness, but for ill suspicion that I have harbored against you. I am truly sorry for it.”

He looked down at her. “What suspicion?”

She grimaced with reluctance. “I believed you might be the killer.”

“Me?”

“You have been on crusade,” she pointed out, “as, I think, has he. You were in Cambridge on the pertinent dates. You were among those near Wandlebury Ring on the night the children’s bodies were moved…” God’s rib, the more she expounded the theory, the more reasonable it seemed; why should she apologize for it? “How else would I think?” she asked him.

He had become statuelike, his blue eyes staring at her, one finger pointing at her in disbelief and then at himself. “Me?”

She became impatient. “I see it was a base suspicion.”

“It damned well was,” he said with force, and startled a robin into flying away. “Madam, I would have you know I like children. I suspect I may have fathered quite a few, even if I can’t claim any. Goddammit, I’ve been hunting the bastard, I told you I was.”

“The killer could have said as much. You did not explain why.”

He thought for a moment. “I didn’t, did I? Strictly speaking, it is nobody’s business except mine and…though in the circumstances…” He stared down at her. “This will be a confidence, madam.”

“I shall keep it,” she said.

There was a turfed seat farther up the garden where young hop leaves formed a tapestry against the brick of the wall. He pointed her to it and then sat beside her, his linked hands cradling one of his knees.

He began with himself. “You should know that I am a fortunate man.” He had been fortunate in his father, who was saddler to the lord of Aston in Hertfordshire and had seen to it that he had schooling, fortunate in the size and strength that made people notice him, fortunate in possessing a keen brain. “You should also know that my mathematical prowess is remarkable, as is my grasp of languages…”

Not backward in coming forward, either, Adelia thought, amused. It was a phrase she’d picked up from Gyltha.

Young Rowley Picot’s abilities had early been recognized by his father’s lord, who had sent him to the School of Pythagoras here in Cambridge where he had studied Greek and Arab sciences and where, in turn, he’d been recommended by his tutors to Geoffrey De Luci, chancellor to Henry II, and taken into his employment.

“As a tax collector?” Adelia asked innocently.

“As a chancery clerk,” Sir Rowley said, “to begin with. Eventually, I came to the attention of the king himself, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Will I proceed with this narrative?” he wanted to know. “Or shall we discuss the weather?”

Chastened, she said, “I beg you to continue, my lord. Truly, I am interested.” Why am I teasing him, she wondered, on this day of all days? Because he makes it bearable for me with everything he does and says.

Oh, dear God, she thought with shock, I am attracted to him.

The realization came like an attack, as if it had been gathering itself in some cramped and secret place inside her and had grown suddenly too big to remain unnoticed any longer. Attracted? Her legs were weak with it, her mind registering intoxication as well as something like disbelief at the improbability and protest at the sheer inconvenience.

He is too light a man for me; not in weight certainly, but in gravitas. This is an infliction, a madness wreaked on me by a garden in springtime and his unsuspected kindness. Or because I am desolate just now. It will pass; it has to pass.

He was talking with animation about Henry II. “I am the king’s man in all things. Today his tax collector, tomorrow-whatever he wants me to be.” He turned to her. “Who was Simon of Naples? What did he do?”

“He was…” Adelia tried to gather her wits “Simon? Well…he worked secretly for the King of Sicily, among others.” She clenched her hands-he must not see that they trembled; he must not see that. She concentrated. “He told me once that he was analogous to a doctor of the incorporeal, a mender of broken situations.”

“A fixer. ‘Don’t worry, Simon of Naples will see to it.’”

“Yes. I suppose that is what he was.”

The man beside her nodded, and because she was now furiously interested in who he was, in everything about him, she understood that he, too, was a fixer and that the King of England had said in his Angevin French, “Ne vous en faites pas, Picot va tout arranger.”

“Strange, isn’t it,” the fixer said now, “that the story begins with a dead child.”

A royal child, heir to the throne of England and the empire his father had built for him. William Plantagenet, born to King Henry II and Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1153. Died 1156.

Rowley: “Henry doesn’t believe in crusade. Turn your back, he says, and while you’re away, some bastard’ll steal your throne.” He smiled. “Eleanor does, however; she went on one with her first husband.”

And had created a legend still sung throughout Christendom-though not in churches-and brought to Adelia’s mind images of a bare-breasted Amazon blazing her naughty progress across desert sands, trailing Louis, the poor, pious king of France, in her wake.

“Young as he was, the child William was forward and had vowed he would go on crusade when he grew up. They even had a little sword made for him, Eleanor and Henry, and after the boy died, Eleanor wanted it taken to the Holy Land.”

Yes, Adelia thought, touched. She had seen many such pass through Salerno, a father carrying his son’s sword, a son his father’s, on their way to Jerusalem on vicarious crusade as a result of a penance or in response to a vow, sometimes their own, sometimes that of their dead, which had been left unfulfilled.

Perhaps a day or so ago she would not have been so moved, but it was as if Simon’s death and this new, unsuspected passion had opened her to the painful loving of all the world. How pitiable it was.

Rowley said, “For a long time the king refused to spare anybody; he held that God would not refuse Paradise to a three-year-old child because he hadn’t fulfilled a vow. But the queen wouldn’t let it rest and so, what was it, nearly seven years ago now, I suppose, he chose Guiscard de Saumur, one of his Angevin uncles, to take the sword to Jerusalem.”

Again, Rowley grinned. “Henry always has more than one reason for what he does. Lord Guiscard was an admirable choice to take the sword: strong, enterprising, and acquainted with the East, but hot-tempered like all Angevins. A dispute with one of his vassals was threatening peace in the Anjou, and the king felt that Guiscard’s absence for a while would allow the matter to calm down. A mounted guard was to go with him. Henry also felt that he should send a man of his own with Guiscard, a wily fellow with diplomatic skills, or, as he put it, ‘Someone strong enough to keep the bugger out of trouble.’”

“You?” Adelia asked.

“Me,” Rowley said smugly. “Henry knighted me at the same time because I was to be the sword carrier. Eleanor herself strapped it to my back, and from that day until I returned it to young William’s tomb, it never left me. At night, when I took it off, I slept with it. And so we all set off for Jerusalem.”

The place’s name overcame the garden and the two people in it, filling the air with the adoration and agony of three inimical faiths, like planets humming their own lovely chords as they hurtled to collide.

“ Jerusalem,” Rowley said again, and his words were those of the Queen of Sheba: “Behold, the half was not told me.”

As a man entranced, he had trodden the stones made sacred by his Savior, shuffled on his knees along the Via Dolorosa, prostrated himself, weeping, at the Holy Sepulchre. It had seemed good to him, then, that this navel of all virtue should have been cleansed of heathen tyranny by the men of the First Crusade so that Christian pilgrims should once more be able to worship it as he worshipped. He had floundered in admiration for them.

“Even now I don’t know how they did it.” He was shaking his head, still wondering. “Flies, scorpions, thirst, the heat-your horse dies under you, just touching your damned armor blisters your hands. And they were outnumbered, ravaged by disease. No, God the Father was with those early crusaders, else they could never have recaptured His Son’s home. Or that’s what I thought then.”

There were other, profane pleasures. The descendants of the original crusaders had come to terms with the land they called Outremer; indeed, it was difficult to distinguish between them and the Arabs whose style of living they now imitated.

The tax collector described their marble palaces, courtyards with fountains and fig trees, their baths-“I swear to you, great Moorish baths sunk into the floor”-and the rich, pungent scent of seduction drenched the little garden.

Rowley, particularly, of all his group of knights, had been bewitched, not just by the outlandish, exotic holiness of the place but by its diffusion and complexity. “That’s what you don’t expect-how tangled it all is. It’s not plain Christian against plain Saracen, nothing as straightforward as that. You think, God bless, that man’s an enemy because he worships Allah. And, God bless, that fellow kneeling to a cross, he’s a Christian, he must be on our side-and he is a Christian, but he isn’t necessarily on your side, he’s just as likely to be in alliance with a Moslem prince.”

That much Adelia knew. Italian merchant-venturers had traded happily with their Moslem counterparts in Syria and Alexandria long before Pope Urban called for the deliverance of the Holy Places from Mohammedan rule in 1096, and they had cursed the crusade to hell then and cursed again in 1147, when men of the Second Crusade went into the Holy Land once more with no more understanding than their predecessors had had of the human mosaic they were invading, thus disrupting a profitable cooperation that had existed for generations between differing faiths.

As Rowley described a mélange that had delighted him, Adelia was alarmed at how the last of her defenses against him crumbled. Always one to categorize, quick to condemn, she was finding in this man a breadth of perception rare in crusaders. Don’t, don’t. This infatuation must be dispelled; it is necessary for me not to admire you. I do not wish to fall in love.

Unaware, Rowley went on. “At first I was amazed that Jew and Moslem were as ardent in their attachment to the Holy Temple as I was, that it was equally holy to them.” While he did not allow the realization to put a creep of doubt into his mind about the rightness of the crusading cause-“that came later”-he nevertheless began to find distasteful the loud, bullying intolerance of most of the other newcomers. He preferred the company and way of life of crusaders who were descendants of crusaders and who had accommodated themselves to its melting pot. Thanks to their hospitality, the aristocratic Guiscard and his entourage were able to enjoy it.

No question of returning home, not yet. They learned Arabic, they bathed in unguent-scented water, joining their hosts in hunting with ferocious little Barbary falcons, enjoying loose robes and the company of compliant women, sherbet, soft cushions, black servants, spiced food. When they went to war, they covered their armor with burnooses against the sun, indistinguishable from the Saracen enemy apart from the crosses on their shields.

For go to war Guiscard and his little band did, so completely had they turned from pilgrims into crusaders. King Amalric had issued an urgent call to arms to all the Franks in order to prevent the Arab general Nur-ad-Din, who had marched into Egypt, from uniting the Moslem world against Christians.

“A great warrior, Nur-ad-Din, and a great bastard. It seemed to us, then, you see, that in joining the King of Jerusalem’s army, we were also joining the King of Heaven’s.”

They marched south.

Until now, Adelia noticed, the man next to her had spoken in detail, building for her white and golden domes, great hospitals, teeming streets, the vastness of the desert. But the account of his crusade itself was sparse. “Sacred madness” was all he had to say, though he added, “There was chivalry on both sides, even so. When Amalric fell ill, Nur-ad-Din ceased fighting until he was better.”

But the Christian army was followed by the dross of Europe. The Pope’s pardon to sinners and criminals as long as they took the cross had released into Outremer men who killed indiscriminately-certain that, whatever they did, they would be welcomed into Jesus’ arms.

“Cattle,” Rowley said of them, “still stinking of the farmyards they came from. They’d escaped servitude; now they wanted land and they wanted riches.”

They’d slaughtered Greeks, Armenians, and Copts of an older Christianity than their own because they thought they were heathens. Jews, Arabs, who were versed in Greek and Roman philosophy and advanced in the mathematics and medicine and astronomy that the Semitic races had given to the West, went down before men who could neither read nor write and saw no reason to.

“Amalric tried to keep them in check,” Rowley said, “but they were always there, like the vultures. You’d come back to your lines to find that they’d slit open the bellies of the captives because they thought Moslems kept their jewels safe by swallowing them. Women, children, it didn’t matter to them. Some of them didn’t join the army at all; they roamed the trade routes in bands, looking for loot. They burned and blinded, and when they were caught, they said they were doing it for their immortal souls. They probably still are.”

He was quiet for a moment. “And our killer was one of them,” he said.

Adelia turned her head quickly to look up at him. “You know him? He was there?”

“I never set eyes on him. But he was there, yes.”

The robin had come back. It fluttered up onto a lavender bush and peered at the two silent people in its territory for a moment before flying off to chase a dunnock out of the garden.

Rowley said, “Do you know what our great crusades are achieving?”

Adelia shook her head. Disenchantment did not belong on his face, but it was there now, making him look older, and she thought that perhaps bitterness had been beneath the jollity all along, like underlying rock.

“I’ll tell you what they’re achieving,” he was saying. “They’re inspiring such a hatred amongst Arabs who used to hate each other that they’re combining the greatest force against Christianity the world has ever seen. It’s called Islam.”

He turned away from her to go into the house. She watched him all the way. Not chubby now-how could she have thought that? Massive.

She heard him calling for ale.

When he came back, he had a tankard in each hand. He held one out to her. “Thirsty work, confession,” he said.

Was that what it was? She took the pot and sipped at it, unable to move her eyes away from him, knowing with a dreadful clarity that whatever sin it was he had to confess, she would absolve him of it.

He stood looking down at her. “I had William Plantagenet’s little sword on my back for four years,” he said. “I wore it under my mail so that it should not be damaged when I fought. I took it into battle, out of it. It scarred my skin so deep that I’m marked with a cross, like the ass that carried Jesus into Jerusalem. The only scar I’m proud of.” He squinted. “Do you want to see it?”

She smiled back at him. “Perhaps not now.”

You are a drab, she told herself, seduced into infatuation by a soldier’s tale. Outremer, bravery, crusade, it is illusory romance. Pull yourself together, woman.

“Later, then,” he said. He sipped his ale and sat down. “Where was I? Oh, yes. By this time we were on our way to Alexandria. We had to prevent Nur-ad-Din from building his ships in the ports along the Egyptian coast; not, mind you, that the Saracens have taken to sea warfare yet-there’s an Arab proverb that it is better to hear the flatulence of camels than the prayers of fishes-but they will one day. So there we were, fighting our way through the Sinai.”

Sand, heat, the wind the Moslems called khamsin scouring the eyeballs. Attacks coming out of nowhere by Scythian mounted archers-“Like damned centaurs they were, loosing arrows at us thick as a locust swarm so that men and horses ended up looking like hedgehogs.” Thirst.

And in the middle of it, Guiscard falling sick, very sick.

“He’d rarely been ill in his life, and he was all at once frightened by his own mortality-he didn’t want to die in a foreign land. ‘Carry me home, Rowley,’ he said, ‘Promise to take me to Anjou.’ So I promised him.”

On behalf of his sick lord, Rowley had knelt to the King of Jerusalem to beg for and be granted leave to return to France. “Truth to tell, I was glad. I was tired of the killing. Is this what the Lord Christ came to earth for? I kept asking myself that. And the thought of the little boy in his tomb waiting for his sword was beginning to trouble my sleep. Even so…”

He drank the last of his ale, then shook his head, tired. “Even so, the guilt when I said good-bye…I felt a traitor. I swear to you, I’d never have left with the war unwon if it hadn’t fallen to me to see Guiscard home.”

No, she thought, you wouldn’t. But why apologize? You are alive, and so are the men you would have killed if you had stayed. Why feel more shame for leaving such a war than pursuing it? Perhaps it is the brute in men-and dear heaven, it is certainly the base brute in me that I thrill to it.

He had begun organizing the journey back. “I knew it wouldn’t be easy,” he said. “We were deep in the White Desert at a place called Baharia, a biggish settlement for an oasis, but if God has ever heard of it, I’ll be surprised. I intended to head back west to strike the Nile and sail up to Alexandria -it was still in friendly hands then-and take passage to Italy from there. But apart from the Scythian cavalry, assassins behind every bloody bush, wells poisoned, there were our own dear Christian outlaws looking for booty-and over the years, Guiscard had acquired so many relics and jewels and samite that we were going to be traveling with a pack train two hundred yards long, just asking to be raided.”

So he’d taken hostages.

Adelia’s tankard jerked in her hand. “You took hostages?”

“Of course I did.” He was irritated. “It’s the accepted thing out there. Not for ransom as we do in the West, you understand. In Outremer, hostages are security.”

They were a guarantee, he said, a contract, a living form of good faith, a promise that an agreement would be kept, part and parcel of the diplomacy and cultural exchange between different races. Frankish princesses as young as four years old were handed over to ensure an alliance between their Christian fathers and Moorish captors. The sons of great sultans lived in Frankish households, sometimes for years, as warranty for their family’s good behavior.

“Hostages save bloodshed,” he said. “They’re a fine idea. Say you’re besieged in a city and want to make terms with the besiegers. Very well, you demand hostages to ensure that the bastards don’t come in raping and killing and that the surrender takes place without reprisals. Then again, suppose you have to pay a ransom but can’t raise all the cash immediately, ergo you offer hostages as collateral for the rest. Hostages are used for just about anything. When Emperor Nicepheros wanted to borrow the services of an Arab poet for his court, he gave hostages to the poet’s caliph, Harun al-Rashid, as surety that the man would be returned in good order. They’re like pawnbrokers’ pledges.”

She shook her head in wonder. “Does it work?”

“To perfection.” He thought about it. “Well, nearly always. I never heard of a hostage paying the penalty while I was there, though I gather the early crusaders could be somewhat hasty.”

He was eager to reassure her. “It’s an excellent thing, you see. Keeps the peace, helps both sides understand each other. Those Moorish baths now-we men of the West would never have known about them if some high-born hostage hadn’t demanded that one be installed.”

Adelia wondered how the system worked in reverse. What did the European knights, of whose cleanliness she had no great opinion, teach their captors in return?

But she knew this was wandering from the point. The narrative was slowing. He doesn’t want to arrive at it, she thought. I don’t want him to, either; it will be terrible.

“So I took hostages,” he said.

She watched his fingers crease the tunic on his knees.

He had sent an emissary to Al-Hakim Biamrallah at Farafra, a man who ruled over most of the route he would have to take.

“Hakim was of the Fatimid persuasion, you see, a Shia, and the Fatimids were taking our side against Nur-ad-Din, who wasn’t.” He cocked an eye at her. “I told you it was complicated.”

With the emissary had gone gifts and a request for hostages to ensure the safe passage of Guiscard, his men, and pack animals to the Nile.

“That’s where we were going to leave them. The hostages. Hakim’s men would pick them up from there.”

“I see,” she said very gently.

“Cunning old fox, Hakim,” Rowley said in tribute, one cunning fox to another. “White beard down to here but more wives than you could shake a stick at. He and I had already met several times on the march; we’d gone hunting together. I liked him.”

Adelia, still watching Rowley’s hands, nice hands, grip and grip again like a raptor’s on a wrist. “And he agreed?”

“Oh, yes, he agreed.”

The emissary had returned minus the gifts and plus hostages, two of them, both boys: Ubayd, Hakim’s nephew, and Jaafar, one of his sons. “Ubayd was nearly twelve, I think; Jaafar…Jaafar was eight, his father’s favorite.”

There was a pause, and the tax collector’s voice became remote. “Pleasant boys, well-mannered, like all Saracen children. Excited to be hostages for their uncle and father. It gave them status. They regarded it as an adventure.”

The large hands curved, showing bone beneath the knuckles. “An adventure,” he said again.

The gate to the sheriff’s garden creaked and two men came in carrying spades, and walked past Sir Rowley and Adelia with a tug of their caps and on down the path to the cherry tree. They began digging.

Without comment, the man and woman on the turf bench turned their heads to watch as if observing shapes across a distance, nothing to do with them, something happening in another place entirely.

Rowley was relieved that Hakim had sent not only mule and camel drivers to help with Guiscard’s goods but also a couple of warriors as guards. “By this time, our own party of knights was diminished. James Selkirk and D’Aix had been killed at Antioch; Gerard De Nantes died in a tavern brawl. The only ones left of the original group were Guiscard and Conrad De Vries and myself.”

Guiscard, too weak to mount a horse, rode in a palanquin that could go only at the pace of the slaves who carried it, so it was a long, slow train that began the journey across the parched countryside-and Guiscard’s condition worsened to the point where they couldn’t go on.

“We were midway, as far to go back as to continue, but one of Hakim’s men knew of an oasis a mile or so off the track, so we took Guiscard there and pitched our pavilions. Tiny place it was, empty, a few date palms, but, by a miracle, its spring was sweet. And that’s where he died.”

“I am sorry,” Adelia said. The dreariness descending on the man beside her was almost palpable.

“So was I, very.” He lifted his head. “No time to sit and weep, though. You of all people know what happens to bodies, and in that heat it happens fast. By the time we reached the Nile, the corpse would have been…well.”

On the other hand, Guiscard had been a lord of Anjou, uncle to Henry Plantagenet, not some vagabond to be buried in a nameless hole scratched out of Egyptian grit. His people would need something of him returned over which to perform the funeral rites. “Besides, I’d promised him to take him home.”

It was then, Rowley said, that he made the mistake that would pursue him to the grave. “May God forgive me, I split our forces.”

For the sake of speed, he decided to leave the two young hostages where they were while he and De Vries with a couple of servants made a dash back to Baharia, carrying the corpse with them in the hope of finding an embalmer.

“We were in Egypt, after all, and Herodotus goes into quite disgusting detail on how the Egyptians preserve their dead.”

“You read Herodotus?”

“His Egyptian stuff, very informative about Egypt is Herodotus.”

Bless him, she thought, prancing about the desert with a thousand-year-old guide.

He went on. “They were content with the situation, the boys, quite happy. They had Hakim’s two warriors to guard them, plenty of servants, slaves. I gave them Guiscard’s splendid bird to fly while we were away-they were keen falconers, both. Food, water, pavilions, shelter at night. And I did everything I could; I sent one of the Arab servants to Hakim to tell him what had occurred and where the boys were, just in case anything happened to me.”

A list of excuses to himself; he must have gone over it a thousand times. “I thought we were the ones taking the risk, De Vries and I, being just the two of us. The boys should have been safe enough.” He turned to her as if he would shake her. “It was their damned country.”

“Yes,” Adelia said.

From the bottom of the garden where the men were digging Simon’s grave came the regular scrape and scatter, scrape and scatter, of earth being lifted and discarded. They might have been three thousand miles away from the crucible of hot sand in which, by now, she could barely breathe.

A harness had been constructed to carry the palanquin containing Guiscard’s corpse between a couple of pack animals and, with only two mule drivers as accompaniment, Sir Rowley Picot and his fellow knight had ridden with it as fast as they could.

“It turned out there wasn’t an embalmer in Baharia, but I found some old shaman who cut the heart out for me and put it in pickle while the rest was boiled down to the skeleton.”

That had proved a lengthier process than Rowley was expecting, but at last, with Guiscard’s bones in a satchel and the heart in a stoppered jar, he and De Vries had set off back to the oasis, approaching it eight days after they’d left it.

“We saw the vultures while we were still three miles off. The camp had been raided. All the servants were dead. Hakim’s warriors had given a good account of themselves before they were hacked to pieces, and there were three bodies belonging to the raiders. The pavilions had gone, the slaves, the goods, the animals.”

In the terrible desert silence, the two knights heard a whimper coming from the top of one of the date palms. It was Ubayd, the older boy, alive and physically unhurt. “The attack had been at night, you see, and in the darkness he and one of the slaves had managed to shin up a tree and hide in the fronds. The boy had been there a day and two nights. De Vries had to climb up and unhook his hands to get him down. He’d seen everything; he couldn’t move.”

The one they couldn’t find was eight-year-old Jaafar.

“We were still scouring the place for him when Hakim and his men arrived. He’d received news that there was a raiding party loose in the land just about the same time that he’d gotten my message. He’d immediately ridden like a wind from hell for the oasis.”

Rowley’s great head went down as if to receive coals of fire. “He didn’t blame me. Hakim. Not a word, not even later when we found…what we found. Ubayd explained, told the old man it wasn’t my fault, but these last years I’ve known whose fault it was. I should never have left them; I should have taken the boys with me. They were my responsibility, you see. My hostages.”

Adelia’s fingers covered the gripping hands for a moment. He didn’t notice.

When, eventually, Ubayd had been able to speak of it, he’d told them that the raiding party had been twenty to twenty-five strong. He’d heard different languages spoken as the slaughter below him went on. “Frankish mainly,” he’d said. He’d heard his little cousin cry to Allah for help.

“We tracked them. They had a lead of thirty-six hours, but we reckoned that they’d be slowed by all the loot. On the second day we saw the hoofprints of a lone horse that had broken away from the rest and turned south.”

Hakim sent some of his men after the raiders’ main party while he and Rowley followed the tracks of the single horseman.

“Looking back, I don’t know why we did that; the man could have veered off for a dozen reasons. But I think we knew.”

They knew when they saw the vultures circling over a single object behind one of the dunes. The naked little body was curled in the sand like a question mark.

Rowley had his eyes shut. “He’d done such things to that little boy as no human being should look on or describe.”

I looked on them, Adelia thought. You were angry when I looked on them in Saint Werbertha’s hut. I described them, and I’m sorry. I am so sorry for you.

“We’d played chess together,” Rowley said, “the boy and I. On the journey. He was a clever child, he used to beat me eight times out of ten.”

They’d wrapped the body in Rowley’s cloak and taken it to Hakim’s palace, where it was buried that night to the sound of ululating, grieving women.

Then the hunt began in earnest. Such a strange chase it was, led by a Moslem chieftain and a Christian knight, skirting battlefields where the crescent and the cross were at war with each other.

“The devil was loose in that desert,” Rowley said. “He sent sand-storms against us, obliterating tracks, resting places were waterless and devastated either by crusader or Moor, but nothing was going to stop us, and at long last we caught up with the main party.”

Ubayd had been right, it was a ragtag.

“Deserters, mainly, runaways, the prison sweepings of Christendom. Our killer had been their captain, and in carrying off the boy, he’d also taken most of the jewels and abandoned his men to their own devices, which weren’t much. They hardly put up any resistance; most of them were silly with hasheesh, and the rest were fighting among themselves over the remaining booty. We questioned each one of them before he died: Where’s your leader gone? Who is he? Where does he come from? Where will he make for? Not one of them knew much about the man they’d followed. A ferocious leader, they said. A lucky man, they said.”

Lucky.

“Nationality means nothing to scum like those; to them he was just another Frank, which means he could have originated anywhere from Scotland to the Baltic. Their descriptions weren’t much better, either: tall, medium-height, darkish, fairish-mind you, they were saying anything they thought Hakim wanted to know, but it was as if each saw him differently. One of them said he had horns growing out of his head.”

“Did he have a name?”

“They called him Rakshasa. It’s the name of a demon. Moors frighten naughty children with it. From what I could gather from Hakim, the Rakshasi came out of the Far East- India, I think. The Hindus set them on the Moslems in some ancient battle. They take different shapes and ravage people at night.”

Adelia leaned out and picked a lavender stalk, rubbing it between her fingers, looking around the garden to root herself in its English greenness.

“He’s clever,” the tax collector said, and then corrected himself. “No, not clever, he has instinct, he can sniff danger on the air like a rat. He knew we were after him, I know he knew. If he’d made for the Upper Nile, and we were sure he would, we’d have taken him-Hakim had sent word to the Fatimid tribes-but he cut northeast, back into Palestine.”

They picked up the scent again in Gaza, where they found he’d sailed from its port of Teda on a boat bound for Cyprus.

“How?” asked Adelia. “How did you pick up his scent?”

“The jewels. He’d taken most of Guiscard’s jewels. He was having to sell them one by one to keep ahead of us. Every time he did, word got back through the tribes to Hakim. We were given his description-a tall man, almost as tall as me.”

At Gaza, Sir Rowley lost his companions. “De Vries wanted to stay in the Holy Land; anyway, he wasn’t under the obligation that I was; Jaafar hadn’t been his hostage, and he hadn’t taken the decision that got the boy killed. As for Hakim…good old man, he wanted to come with me, but I told him he was too ancient and anyway would stick out in Christian Cyprus like a houri among a huddle of monks. Well, I didn’t put it like that, though such was the gist. But there and then I knelt to him and vowed by my Lord, by the Trinity, by the Mother Mary, that I’d follow Rakshasa if necessary to the grave and I’d cut the bastard’s head off and send it to him. And so, with God’s help, I shall.”

The tax collector slipped to his knees, took off his cap, and crossed himself.

Adelia sat still as stone, confused by the repulsion and the terrible comfort she found in this man. Some of the loneliness into which she’d been cast by Simon’s death had gone. Yet he was not another Simon; he had stood by, perhaps assisted in, questioning the raiders; “questioning” undoubtedly being a euphemism for torture until death, something Simon would not and could not have done. This man had sworn by Jesus, whose attribute was mercy, to exact revenge, was praying for it at this minute.

But when she had covered his clawing hand, the back of her own had been wetted with his tears and, for a moment, the space that Simon had left had been filled by someone whose heart, like Simon’s, could break for the child of another race and faith.

She composed herself; he was getting up so that he could pace while he told her the rest.

Just as he had taken her with him on his every step across the wasteland of Outremer, now she went with him as, still carrying his relics of the dead, he followed the man they called Rakshasa back through Europe.

From Gaza to Cyprus. Cyprus to Rhodes-just one boat behind, but a storm had separated chase and chaser so that Rowley had not picked up the trail again until Crete. To Syracuse, and from there up the coast of Apulia. To Salerno…

“Were you there then?” he asked.

“Yes, I was there.”

To Naples, to Marseilles, and then overland through France.

A more curious passage no man ever took in a Christian country, he told her, because Christians played so little part in it. His helpers were the disregarded: Arabs and Jews, artisans in the jewel trade, trinket makers, pawnbrokers, moneylenders, workers in alleys where Christian townsmen and women sent their servants with objects for mending, ghetto dwellers-the sort of people to whom a pursued and desperate killer with a jewel to sell was forced to apply for money.

“It wasn’t the France I knew; I might have been in a different country altogether. I was a blind man in it, and they were my knotted string. They’d ask me, ‘Why do you hunt this man?’ And I would answer, ‘He killed a child.’ It was enough. Yes, their cousin, aunt, sister-in-law’s son had heard of a stranger in the next town with a bauble to sell-and at a knockdown price, for he must sell it quickly.”

Rowley paused. “Are you aware that every Jew and Arab in Christendom seems to know every other Jew and Arab?”

“They have to,” Adelia said.

Rowley shrugged. “Anyway, he never stayed anywhere long enough for me to catch up with him. By the time I got to the next town, he’d taken the road north. Always north. I knew he was heading for somewhere particular.”

There were other, dreadful knots in the string. “He killed at Rhodes before I got there, a little Christian girl found in a vineyard. The whole island was in uproar.” At Marseilles there’d been another death, this time of a beggar boy snatched from the roadside, whose corpse had suffered such injuries that even the authorities, not usually troubled by the fate of vagabonds, had issued a reward for the killer.

In Montpellier another boy, this one only four years old.

Rowley said, “‘By their deeds ye shall know them,’ the Bible tells us. I knew him by his. He marked my map with children’s bodies; it was as if he couldn’t go more than three months without sating himself. When I lost him, I only had to wait to hear the scream of a parent echoing from one town to another. Then I took horse to follow it.”

He also found the women Rakshasa left in his wake. “He has an attraction for women, the Lord only knows why; he doesn’t treat them well.” All the bruised creatures Rowley had questioned refused to help him in his quest. “They seemed to expect and hope he would come back to them. It didn’t matter; by this time, anyway, I was following the bird he had with him.”

“A bird?”

“A mynah bird. In a cage. I knew where he’d bought it, in a souq in Gaza. I could even tell you how much he paid for it. But why he kept it with him…perhaps it was his only friend.” There was the rictus of a smile on Rowley’s face. “It got him noticed, thanks be to God; more than once I received word of a tall man with a birdcage on his saddle. And in the end, it told me where he was going.”

By this time hunter and hunted were approaching the Loire Valley, Sir Rowley distracted because Angers was the home of the bones he carried. “Should I follow Rakshasa as I had sworn? Or fulfill my vow to Guiscard and take him to his last resting place?”

It was in Tours, he said, that his dilemma took him to its cathedral to pray for guidance. “And there Almighty God, in His wonder and grace and seeing the justice of my cause, opened His hand unto me.”

For, as Rowley left the cathedral by its great west door and went blinking into the sunlight, he heard the squawk of a bird coming from an alley where its cage hung in the window of a house.

“I looked up at it. It looked down at me and said good-day in English. And I thought, the Lord has led me to this alley for a purpose; let us see if this is Rakshasa’s pet. So I knocked on the door and a woman opened it. I asked for her man. She said he was out, but I could tell that he was there and that it was him-she was just such a one as the others, draggled and frightened. I drew my sword and pushed past her, but she fought me as I tried to go up the stairs, clinging to my arm like a cat and screaming. I heard him shout from the upstairs room, then a thump. He’d leapt out of the window. I turned back down, but the woman hampered me all the way, and by the time I regained the alley, he’d gone.”

Rowley ran his hands over his thick, curly hair in despair at describing the fruitless chase that had followed. “In the end, I went back to the house. The woman had left, but in the upstairs room the bird was fluttering in its cage on the floor where he’d knocked it down as he jumped. I picked the cage up and the bird told me where I would find him.”

“How? How did it tell you?”

“Well, it didn’t give me his address. It looked at me out of that wattled, cocky eye they have and said I was a pretty boy, a clever boy-all the usual things, their banality made shocking by the knowledge that I was hearing Rakshasa’s voice. He had trained it. No, there was nothing special in what it said but in how it said it. It was the accent. It spoke in a Cambridgeshire accent. The bird had copied the speech of its master. Rakshasa was a Cambridgeshire man.”

The tax collector crossed himself in gratitude to the god who had been good to him. “I let the bird prattle through its repertoire,” he said. “There was time enough now, I could take Guiscard to Angers. I knew where Rakshasa was heading; he was going home to settle down with what remained of Guiscard’s jewels. So he did and so he has, and this time he shall not escape me.”

Rowley looked at Adelia. “I’ve still got the cage,” he said.

“What happened to the bird?”

“I wrung its neck.”

The gravediggers had left, unnoticed, their work done. The long shadow of the wall at the end of the garden had reached the turf seat.

Adelia, shivering from the chilly descent of evening, realized she had been cold for some time. Perhaps there was more to say, but at the moment she could not think of it. Nor could he. He got up. “I must see to the arrangements.”

Others had seen to them for him.

A sheriff, an Arab, a tax collector, an Augustine prior, two women, and a dog stood at the top of the steps outside the house as Simon of Naples in his willow coffin, preceded by torchbearers and followed by every male Jew in the castle, was carried to his place beneath the cherry tree at the other end of the garden. They were invited no nearer. Under a waxing, gibbous moon the figures of the mourners appeared very dark and the cherry blossom very white, a flurry of suspended snow.

The sheriff fidgeted. Mansur put his hands on Adelia’s shoulders and she leaned back against him, listening more to the cascade of the rabbi’s deep notes as he repeated the ninety-first Psalm than able to distinguish its words.

What she disregarded, what all of them paid no attention to because they were used to a noisy castle, was the sound of raised voices down by the main gates to which Father Alcuin, the priest, had taken his discontent.

There, having listened to it, Agnes had left her hut and run into town, and Roger of Acton had begun to persuade the guards that their castle was being desecrated by the secret burial of a Jew in its precincts.

The mourners under the cherry tree heard it; their ears were attuned to trouble.

“El ma’aleh rachamim.” Rabbi Gotsce’s voice didn’t falter. “Sho-chayn bahm-ro… Lord, filled with Motherly Compassion, grant a full and perfect rest to our brother Simon under the wings of Your sheltering presence among the lofty, holy, and pure, radiant as the shining firmament, and to the souls of all those of all Your peoples who have been killed in and around the lands where Abraham our Forebear walked…”

Words, thought Adelia. An innocent bird can repeat the words of a killer. Words can be said over the man he killed and pour balm on the soul.

She heard the hit, hit, hit of earth being thrown onto the coffin. Now the procession was filing up through the garden to go out of its gate and, although she was not a Jew and a mere woman at that, each man gave her a blessing as he passed the foot of the steps on which she stood. “Hamakom y’nachem etchem b’toch sh’ar availai tziyon ee yerushalayim. May God comfort you among all the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.”

The rabbi paused and bowed to the sheriff. “We are grateful for your beneficence, my lord, and may you be spared trouble because of it.” Then they were gone.

”Well,” Sheriff Baldwin said, brushing his gown, “we must get back to work, Sir Rowley. If the devil does indeed find work for idle hands, he will discover none here tonight.”

Adelia expressed her gratitude. “And may I visit the grave tomorrow?”

“I suppose so, I suppose so. You might bring Senor Doctor here with you. All this worry has produced a fistula that makes my sitting uncomfortable.”

He looked toward the gate. “What is that turmoil, Rowley?”

It was ten or so men armed with a variety of domestic weapons, garden forks, eel glaives, led by Roger of Acton, and all of them feverish with a rage that had been pent up too long, all rushing into the garden screaming in so many different curses that it took a moment to distinguish the theme of “child-killer” and “Jew.”

Acton was coming to the steps, waving a flambeau in one hand and a garden fork in the other. He was shouting. “The Jew shall be sunk in the pit he hath made, for the Lord has redeemed us from his filth. We have come to cast him out from our inheritance. O fear the name of the Lord, thou traitors.” His mouth sprayed spit. Behind him, a big man was brandishing a wicked-looking kitchen cleaver.

The other men were scattering in a search and he turned to them. “Find the grave, my brothers, so we may execute our fury upon his carcass. For ye have been promised that he who chastiseth the heathen shall not be corrected.”

“No,” Adelia said. They had come to dig him up. They had come to dig Simon up. “No.”

“Trollop.” Acton was ascending the steps, the fork pointing at her. “Thou hast gone a-whoring after the child-killers, but we shall not bear thy shame anymore.”

One of the men was standing by the cherry tree, shouting and gesticulating at the others. “Here, it’s here.”

Adelia dodged Acton as she went down the steps and began running toward the grave. What she would do when she got there was not in her mind-she could think only of stopping this terrible thing.

Sir Rowley Picot went after her, Mansur just behind him, Roger of Acton on his heels, the other intruders running to intercept. Everybody met in a crashing, howling, punching, beating, stabbing, trampling confluence. Adelia went down under it.

Such violence was unknown to her; it wasn’t the pain but the whacking shock of men’s sudden, furious strength. A boot broke her nose; she covered her head while above her the world fractured into jagged pieces.

Somewhere a voice dominated all, steady and commanding-the prior’s.

Bit by bit, the shards fell away. There was nothing. Then there was something and she was able to stagger to her feet and see figures retreating from the place were Rowley Picot lay with a cleaver end down in his groin, blood overflowing from around the buried part of its blade.