A Murderous Procession (3 page)

After that the voices stopped.

Gyltha and Mansur heard the bishop clump down the stairs to make up a bed for himself on a settle. Distressed beyond measure, they went to bed themselves. There was nothing to be done now.

The last revelers in the barn went home. Emma and Roetger returned to the manor house, their servants scattered to their various sleeping places.

Silence descended on Wolvercote.

ON A
WATER
BUTT
outside Adelia’s window where it has been crouching in shadow, a figure stretches its cloaked arms so that, for a second, it resembles a bat unfolding leather wings ready to fly. Noiselessly it jumps to the ground, overjoyed with what it has heard.

His God—and Scarry’s god is not the Christians’ God—has just granted him the boon of boons, as Scarry was sure He would, sooner or later. He has poured the elixir of opportunity into Scarry’s hands.

For Scarry’s hatred of the woman Adelia is infinite. During two years’ enforced exile from England, he has prayed to be shown the means of her destruction. Now, at last, the stink of his loathing has reached Satan’s nostrils and its incense has been rewarded.

Once, in a Somerset forest not too far from here, the woman killed Scarry’s joy, his life, his love, his mate, his Wolf. And Scarry has come back, with Wolf howling him on in his head, to rend her to pieces. How stupidly he has done it; how ineffectual. Arrows, pits, attempts to frighten her; she hasn’t even noticed; the two oafs who watch over her have seen to that.

Unworthy of an educated man, which is what Scarry is. A way of passing the time, really, until the true and only God should show him the way. Which he has, he has.
Dominus illuminatio mea.

Wolf never killed a female until she was squirming in terror and pain—the only state in which Wolf, or he himself, could have sexual congress with the creatures.
Timor mortis morte pejor.

“But now, Lord, in Your infinite wisdom, you have manifested to me all that I need to hear and see and learn that Your will and Wolf’s may triumph. The woman shall be reduced by slow torture, so much more satisfying, chop, chop, piece by piece
, a capite ad calcem.”

At this point Scarry is out of the view of the house, and he twirls as the shimmering, hot night enfolds him.

How curious that she didn’t ask her lover why the king was sending her to Sicily.

But he, Scarry, knows. By a great coincidence—no, not coincidence but, manifestly, by the workings of the Horned God in whose hand he rests—Scarry is intimately cognizant of the journey the woman is about to take.

And will be going with her.

EMMA
STOOD
IN
ADELIA’S
room wincing as she watched her friend furiously bundle clothes into a saddlebag. “My dear, you can’t go in rags like those.”

“I don’t want to go at all,” Adelia shouted. “I’ll never forgive him, never.” A veil tore on a buckle as it was pushed in with the rest.

“But you do realize
where
you’re going?”

“Sicily, apparently. And without Allie.”

“And
why
you’re going?”

“God only knows, some scheme of Henry’s. I tell you, Em, if I could take Allie, I’d stay there and never come back. Holding a child hostage … that’s what they’re doing, king and bloody bishop. I’ll never …”

“You’ll be accompanying Joanna Plantagenet to her wedding, so Rowley says.” Seeing Adelia’s incomprehension, Emma blew out her cheeks. “Henry’s daughter? Marrying the King of Sicily? Lord, ‘Delia, even you must know that. We’re all being taxed for it, damn him.”

A king was entitled to tax his people to pay for his daughter’s wedding, but it didn’t make him popular.

Adelia, whose few accounts were handled by Mansur and who listened to her patients’ physical complaints rather than their excise grumbles, didn’t know it.

She paused for a moment. “Joanna? She’s just a baby”

“Ten, I believe.”

“Poor little devil.” The thought of another poor little devil to be groomed for a good marriage broke Adelia’s anger and she sat down on her bed, almost weeping. “I’ll not forgive him, Em, he’s taking her away from me, and me away from her. Putting her in prison. And it is a prison, in more ways than one. My little one, my little one.”

“Rowley has his reasons, I’m sure.” Emma knew what they were—she’d heard them from the bishop himself only a few minutes ago.

“Oh, yes, marvelous reasons. He wants Eleanor to turn her into a … a prinking doll, drain her of all initiative.”

Amused, Emma sat down beside her friend. She smoothed the silk of her gown over her swelling stomach. “My dear, whatever we think of a queen who fomented a rebellion against her king, we cannot accuse her of lacking initiative. Yet with it all, Eleanor keeps her femininity. She can teach Almeison a great deal.”

“What, for instance?”

“To keep her fingernails clean, for one thing. Courtesy, poetry, music. These things are not unimportant. I yield to nobody in my admiration for your daughter, but … I have to say it, ‘Delia … she is becoming farouche.”

“Farouche?”

“She spends too much time with animals. During the football game, she punched one of the Martlake boys so hard he lost a tooth. A baby tooth, I grant you, but …”

“He blacked her eye,” Adelia said, defensively

“Yes, but … my dear, you’re limiting her, don’t you see?” This was a lecture Emma had been meaning to make for some time; now she settled down to it. “It may be that when Allie’s older, she will want to marry well. The fact that she can deliver a punch is not recommended in politer families. Children must be prepared for their adult position. In a year or two, Pippywill have to leave me to become a page to the De Lucis and learn the skills of a knight. I shall miss him, miss him terribly, but it must be done if he is to take his place in society”

“It isn’t the same,” Adelia said. When young Lord Philip grew up, he would have the choice to explore his gifts, lead the life he wanted; his wife would have none.

Emma was fortunate in that this, her second marriage, was happy—her first had been enforced—but legally Roetger, as her husband, controlled the wealth she’d brought to it. Again legally, he could turn her out without a penny, was entitled to beat her—as long as he used only reasonable force—take her children away, and there would be nothing she could do about it. That Roetger wouldn’t do any of these things rested solely on the fact that he was a decent man.

And while Emma’s life of household management and entertaining suited her, it wouldn’t suit Adelia. Nor, she knew, would it suit her daughter.

“We’re helpless, we women,” she said, defeated.

Emma, who didn’t feel helpless at all, patted her. “It’s only for a year, then you can be reunited—Rowley has agreed to that.” She stood up, brisk. “Now there’s just time to furnish you decently for the journey. I’m going to pack some of my own clothes for you in a proper traveling box. My dear, you’ll be voyaging with a princess of England in the company of very important people. We don’t want to appear shabby, do we?”

So it was that at midday Adelia, looking elegant for once, and her daughter, considerably less so but with clean fingernails, rode out from Wolvercote Manor with an escort of Plantagenet soldiers, Gyltha, Mansur, and a lover to whom she still wasn’t speaking.

Emma, standing with Roetger at the great gates to wave her off, was beset by a sudden qualm. “Pray God in His mercy send them safe.”

In the lane outside, watching the departure, two Glastonbury men heard her prayer.

“Amen to that,” Will said, crossing himself.

SCARRY
IS
RIDING
along the same road that Adelia Aguilar is taking at that moment, though well ahead of her. Unlike her, he is not heading for Sarum but for Southampton, where he will join the company that she, too, must join before they take ship for Normandy.

Scarry hates that company, as he has hated his father, his mother, the prior of his seminary, everybody who hated him in turn for not being an ordinary mortal and taught him to hide it under his brilliance. Once more, he must mop and mow and play the idiot. Once more, he will know the constriction of assumed piety.

But for the moment, he is smiling because he is passing the spot where he first encountered his Wolf. His Road to Damascus, this road between Glastonbury and Wells. Then he’d been going the other way, on a dreary pilgrimage with his prior and other dreary souls to worship Glastonbury’s saints. As always he was concealing his hatred like a shameful, tumescent pustule, while a worm nibbled his brain, and the voice in his head chanted other, profane words to the hymns they sang as they went.

Yes, my lord prior, no, my lord prior, let us kneel before each wayside shrine as we go, praising a Deity that undoubtedly exists but not in the form you say he does; a God who knows only how to condemn, whose loving word is a lie.

They had been benighted, the road longer than they’d reckoned; they’d been afraid of the dark forest around them and were reciting Psalm 91 to avert the terror by night, as if regurgitating falsehoods however beautiful, however reassuring, could protect the credulous. when had their God ever shown the mercy He promised?

Then, out of the dark trees had come the terror, not blackness but light in the form of capering, semi-naked men, outlaws bearing torches and swords, laughing as they robbed and killed.

In recollection, Scarry laughs with them. Some of his fellow pilgrims had got away but he’d stood still, bemused, not so much terrified as amazed by the killers’ liberation from the restraint that Christianity demanded.

Their leader—Wolf, my darling, my zest—had stuck his sword into the prior’s belly and, as he stripped the jeweled cross from the neck, had looked up, grinning, into Scarry’s eyes.

Recognition had leaped between them, two souls connected since long before the Great Pretender had been crucified, a lightning bolt that had burst the pustule and released Scarry from its pain.

The demand had been made. Scarry can no longer recall whether it issued from Wolf’s mouth or was spoken by this new God manifesting Himself in the mingled shrieks of mirth and terror of that moment.

Come with me and I shall set you free. What blasphemy, what a glorious overthrowing. What liberation.

And he, Scarry, had answered the call. With his eyes fixed on those of this wild and marvelous creature, he had lifted his knee and stamped his boot down hard into the face of his whimpering prior, silencing the old fool and his God forever.

Then he and Wolf had danced away, the others following with the booty, leaving the road for a scented, untracked forest where they could suck the honey from each other’s body, and where no law ran except their own, no rites but those due to the satanic leaf green, goatlike God they worshipped. Male maenads they had been, ad gloriam, horned beasts of a horned deity, rending living animals and humans into pieces, raping, robbing, unstopped, unstoppable, feared and unfettered, their psalms the shrieks of the dying, their altar a butcher’s block.

Until she came. She and the jackasses with her, searching for erstwhile, lost companions that had been rotting in the leaf mold of a glade where they’d been slung days before, once he and Wolf had finished with them.

He can see her in that glade now, can Scarry; innocuous, worthless, like all females, yet, like all females, inspiring the godlike, lustful, exultant rage that must be slaked on her flesh as he’d wished to slake his on his mother.

Mirabile visu. A fawn caught in the thicket.

“First me and then you, eh, Scarry?” Wolf had said lovingly.

“You and me, Wolf, you and me.” It was how it had always been.

And, while Scarry pranced and watched, Wolf advanced on the offering, telling her what had been done to those she’d come looking for; the entertainment they’d provided before they’d died, the rapture of their bleating. Is agnus, ea caedes est.

Then, unbelievably, a piece of iron had connected her and Wolf, not a penis but a sword she’d had hidden. It linked them, the hilt in her hand, its point in Wolf’s chest.

Now Scarry, as he rides, weeps and whispers what had been his cry as he’d gathered the coughing, bubbling, beloved body in his arms. “Te amo. Don’t leave me, my Lupus. Come back. Te amo! Te amo!” But Wolf died that night, and the Horned Being with him.

Later, she’d sent soldiers who’d cleared the forest and hung severed pieces of Wolf’s pack from its branches.

Not Scarry, though. Using the woodcraft Wolf had taught him, he’d slipped away, to track and hill her who’d expelled him from his Garden of Eden. But she’d been too well guarded.

Eventually, desolate, a lost lamb, he’d been forced to return to the fold of the Christian God who’d triumphed, pretending he’d escaped from the outlaws’ attack on the pilgrimage, so jarred by its savagery and the murder of the good prior that he’d become a hermit in the wilderness for a while, beseeching mercy for himself and the souls of the dead.

They’d believed him. They’d rewarded him for his piety. His high connections had given him responsibility in which he had acquitted himself.

For, see, Scarry is now a shade that can adapt itself to its surroundings, blending with the devout, his prayers more pure than any others, his rant against sin louder than a trumpet. He feigns a naivete that charms.

For two years he has played his enforced role as an innocent in the virtue of Christian life, suffering it, hating it. But horned Gods do not die, and neither do their Chosen Ones. These last days, in his return to the forest, Wolf has taken up residence in Scarry’s brain, reminding him of their glorious abandonment and of the woman who ended it. “Bring her down,” Wolf says. “Kill her in My Name. You have the means.”