A Murderous Procession (22 page)

“Yes, my lord. And the foreigners captured with Ermengarde? Our bargain with the informant was to ensure that they suffer the same punishment, but I have to tell you”—Gerhardt said this with reluctance—”they persist in their story that they are all servants of Henry Plantagenet.”

“And
they
are? Tell me again.”

Father Gerhardt consulted his list. “A youth purporting to be a pilgrim—the cross he carried was of interest to our informant, if you remember, and as it was of no account our men let him have it. A female servant who is pregnant …”

The bishop stopped using his butter knife in order to wave it. “Pregnancy does not absolve her. Root and branch, Gerhardt, root and branch. Remember that.”

“Yes, my lord. Then there is a mercenary speaking a language nobody can understand. Also a Saracen, and a woman who interprets for him.” Gerhardt looked up. “She is the woman our informant is eager to have destroyed—if the others die with her, so be it. Surely no Christian king would inflict wharf rats like that on his daughter?”

The bishop shrugged. “I wouldn’t put it past this one from what I’ve heard, not Henry Yes, I have no doubt they are who they say they are.”

Father Gerhardt was taken aback, not so much by fact, but that his bishop was making no bones about it. “Yet do we need to worry about his opinion?” he asked. “A priest killer?”

“Ah, but a priest killer who’s done penance for Becket and been accepted back into the fold.” The bishop poured himself another glass of wine while he considered. “I wonder. Can we afford to offend the King of England?”

“If we don’t, we lose a spy who can take us into the center of the king’s web. Moreover”—a flash of Father Gerhardt’s canines showed his happiness at imparting a nugget he’d been hugging—”my lord, I can tell you that the Bishop of Winchester and others in the princess’s party complain that the Saracen and his woman are witches. They say the two have brought bad luck on them. They would not be unhappy to lose them.”

“Witches, eh?” The bishop liked that.

“Yes, my lord. Apparently, the Saracen’s woman has fed a love potion to the other bishop, Rowley of Saint Albans, so that he lusts after her and will hear no word against her.”

“I thought she was supposed to be plain.”

“She is, my lord, which only emphasizes the strength of her magic.”

“A Jezebel,” mused the bishop.
“‘And Jezebel was cast down, and the dogs did eat her, and no more of her was found than the skull, and the feet, and the palms of her hands.’
A gratifying image, I’ve always found. So wholesale, don’t you think?”

“Indeed, my lord.” Gerhardt refused to be diverted. “Nor does this harlot wear a cross. Both she and the maid are dressed as Cathars. In any case, they’ve spent time with Ermengarde and so will have been infected.”

The bishop smiled. He was fond of the principle of
post hoc ergo propter hoc.
So useful.

Father Gerhardt raised flailing arms in appeal to Heaven. “When, O Lord,
when
wilt thou grant us full crusade against this cancer?”

Whenindeed, the bishop thought. Increasingly severe anti-Cathar edicts had been issued by the Vatican for over thirty years without, so far, calling for a crusade against the heretics. Yet crusade was the only option, as the bishop knew; the infection was becoming a plague.

A new order was needed. A man to raise the Holy Cross against the Cathars in the teeth of the Pope, begin God’s righteous slaughter.

Lying in his bed at night, the Bishop of Aveyron sweated into his silk sheets. If it was successful it would take him high, perhaps to the throne of Rome itself. Failure … ?

Tapping his teeth, the bishop looked up at the depiction of the Garden of Eden on his ceiling. He was particularly fond of it; the artist had let himself go as far as Eve’s naked body was concerned. “This informant, we’re certain of him, are we?” he asked.

“A valuable man, my lord. As I said, he is privy to what passes between the English bishops and their king; he will be in Sicily when Saint Albans arrives after negotiating with Barbarossa and the Lombards. What are a witch and a ragbag of nonentities to set against that?”

But the Bishop of Aveyron’s careful mind had made itself up; he hadn’t got where he was today by being rash.

“Nevertheless, we must be sure. The Plantagenet is soft toward heretics, yet his arm is long and on the end of it there is a hammer. There is no need to anger him at this stage. Feelers, Gerhardt, we shall put out feelers; nothing too definite on either side. All we need to know from the princess’s officials is: If we have found some heretics wandering in the hills and consequently disposed of them, shall they be missed? Will that fit the situation?”

“From what I gather, the answer will be no, my lord.”

“I gather that, too. But hold off until we get it. As for our ‘perfect,’ you may proceed as planned.” He smiled again; this time his priest knew he wasn’t joking. “Bring the town in to witness it.”

“Where do you want the prisoners lodged, my lord? The dungeons?”

The bishop tapped his teeth. “No, let them have a view of what they may expect. Clear out the tower room and put them up there for now. Set trustworthy guards, mind. Sometimes I think the contagion has infected my own palace.”

When Gerhardt had gone, his lord poured himself another glass of the vintage from his vineyard near Carcassonne and sipped it while he engineered a new vision of Ermengarde, his black-clad tauntress, this time tied to a stake with faggots laid around her feet.

He saw himself thrusting a torch into the wood like a penis into her parts and sighed because, alas, that pleasure must be left to the executioner. One day, though, yes, yes, one day, the flames he’d light would consume them all … men, women, and children.

This really was most excellent wine.

AND
SCARRY? He’s been very busy.

As he promised, he led the heretic hunters to the cowshed. He saw Mansur, Rankin, and Ulf go down fighting. He watched the capture of the women up the hill. Then he began looking for something.
He found it—lying in one of the mangers where Ulf had left it. A rough, wooden cross.

Now, back at Figeres, he is levering out some of the nails that hold together
a
rough-looking cross. He is doing it quietly, so that no sound escapes from the spartan monk’s cell in which he is lodged.

He takes off the crosspiece and applies an eye to the resultant space. What he sees, packed carefully in horsehair, is a sword pommel gleaming with amethysts. Incautiously, he neighs with satisfaction.

There is a call from the cell next door: “Are you unwell, brother? I heard you cry out.”

“I am well, brother, I thank you. I was carried away by the glory of my God.”

“Amen to that. Good night, brother.”

In reinserting the nails by hammering them with his fist so as to make no more noise, he tears his hands, a fact that he only notices because he can smell the blood.

He doesn’t feel pain much anymore, does Scarry. On the other hand, his sense of smell has become excellent, returning him to his days in the forest with Wolf, when they could sniff their quarry through all other conflicting scents, hunt it down, play with it before they killed, and then dance in its split paunch, animal or human.

He puts his bloody hand up to his nose, just to make sure it is there.

With luck and opportunity, he should soon be savoring the odor of a woman’s burning flesh.

ADELIA
HAD
HER
FOOT
in Boggart’s lap and was hoping very hard that it hadn’t become infected by the thorns the girl was teasing out of it.

Ulf was pacing up and down, up and down, getting on everybody’s nerves. “There was some other bugger in the cowshed when they got us. He was looking for something while the bastards were tyin’ us up. I reckon it was my cross.”

“We know,” Mansur said wearily. “The one comfort is that he will be unaware of what’s inside it.”

Ulf turned on him. “
But he did.
I keep telling you, he asked for it particular. He
knew.
And he wasn’t one of them who took us over the mountains, he disappeared once they’d got us down.”

“Didn’t you recognize his voice?”

“No, kept his bloody cloak over his bloody mouth, didn’t he.”

“Leave it, laddie,” Rankin told him. “There’s nae thing we can do about it. For now, let’s save our breath to cool our
parritch
.”

What
parritch
was, Adelia had no idea, but she was grateful to him; the Scotsman was proving as firm a rock as Mansur.

A grizzled man with a face like a battered turnip. The march over the hills must have been hard for him who’d been so ill, harder for him than Ulf, who had youth on his side. All the way, he’d muttered strange and incomprehensible oaths to himself and his eyes under their curled, upsweeping gray brows suggested that, if his hands were free, his captors would be dispossessed of certain limbs, but, and this was strangely comforting to Adelia, he showed lack of surprise at the situation in which he found himself. Maybe life in the Scottish Highlands combining with that as one of King Henry’s mercenaries had weathered him against anything it could come up with.

When, just now, she’d felt obliged to apologize for it, he’d patted her hand and said: “Aye well, as we say back hame, a misty morning may yet become a guid clear day”

Ulf continued to chafe and pace. “There was something about him. Never saw his face, but the way he moved … I swear I’d seen the cut of him before. Jesus Christ, where
was
it?”

It was a rhetorical question and one he’d put so many times that nobody bothered with it. He gave up and turned his attention to the turret room’s two unglazed windows. “Both big enough for us all to get out, despite the mullions,” he said, “iffen we had some rope.”

They didn’t have any rope, and one window overlooked the square some dizzying hundred feet below, while the drop from the other one was at least fifty feet onto some palace roofs.

Now he was looking out at the square and adding a commentary to the sound of hammering and sawing that the others could hear perfectly well.

“Building a bloody dais,” he said bitterly “That’s so the nobs won’t miss anything, I suppose. Gawd, they’re putting canvas over the top, ‘case the bastards get rained on. Why’n’t they hang out some bloody bunting while they’re about it?”

The boy was torturing himself—and them—for losing Excalibur. Adelia waited until Boggart had bound her foot with a piece of cloth torn from her petticoat, and then hopped over to where he was standing. She put her arm round his shoulders. “We’re all tired, let’s get some sleep.”

“Only one stake so far,” he said.

She looked out with him; the stake stood in the center of the square, commanding it like a maypole. The piles of wood around its base formed a platform. Five other stakes were stacked ominously against one of the walls.

“Not us, then,” Ulf said. “Not yet.”

“It won’t be. We told them who we were. They’ll have sent word to Princess Joanna or Rowley—I told them he was at Carcassonne. The name of King Henry must carry some weight, even here.”

“Where’ve they put Ermengarde?”

“I don’t know.” The Cathar had been taken away immediately after questioning.

“What treacherous bastard gave away where she was?”

Adelia didn’t know that either.

“I liked her,” Ulf said.

“We all did.”
Were talking of her in the past,
she thought.

“You reckon as Aelith got away?”

“I think so. Dear God, I hope so.”

“What’d them women do to earn this? Apart from acting like Christians?”

“I don’t know.”

Eventually, Ulf was persuaded to lie down with the others on the floor.

It was cold up here. The five of them hadn’t even been provided with straw, let alone beds. There’d been no food, nor drink, either. The one convenience was a bucket that had been thrown in after them.

However, after that long and terrible march, the imperative was sleep; Mansur, Rankin, and Boggart were already succumbing to it. Watching Ulf’s dour young face relax, Adelia, agonized, thought of his grandmother and what she would say if she saw him now. And Boggart with the new life inside her … And Allie, always Allie.
Are you asleep, little one? Don’t miss me. Be happy.

How had they all come to this?

Ever prepared to assume guilt, Adelia went over the circumstances that had led them here … back, back to accepting Henry Plantagenet’s commission in the first place … but she
hadn’t
accepted it, he’d forced her into it … back to the education and foster parents who had made her into a person ill-starred and at odds with everything the world demanded of womanhood … back to being born at all into such a world.

Boggart’s ministrations had eased her foot, but Adelia’s shoulder was hurting.

She untied the cord from about her waist and made it into a sling in which to rest her arm. Then, wrapping her cloak around her against the cold, she shuffled to find a comfortable position on the boards of the floor, and lay down, using Boggart’s now-ample rump as a pillow …

She was in a classroom back in the Salerno medical school and a high, pedantic voice from someone she couldn’t see was lecturing on the subject of burning at the stake.

“Better for the victim if the wood is piled high up to his or her armpits, thus providing a quick death from the inhalation of smoke….”

It was a relief to be woken up by the grind of a turning key in the lock of the door. The only light in the room was from the star-sprinkled sky outside the window. Two of the men who’d dragged them over the mountains came in. One had a spear at the ready; the other—he was the one who’d been kind to Boggart and given them water—carried a tray on which were five bowls, some stale rye bread, and a container of surprisingly good lamb stew.

“Ask ‘em when they’re going to let us go, the bastards,” Ulf told Adelia.

She repeated the question, without its embellishment.