A Murderous Procession (30 page)

“Thirty paternosters, maybe thirty-two.” Having no clocks, Caronne people didn’t reckon time in minutes.

“Good boy.
Thomassia
.” She rushed to raise the rest of her household. “Quick, quick. The bishop’s tax inspector is coming. Follow Thomassia.”

Scrambling into their clothes as they went, Adelia, Boggart, Mansur, Rankin, and Ulf made their way down to the hall, Fabrisse’s priest with them.

Thomassia was already there, heading out of the entrance, waving her arms to spur the fugitives into a run. There was a momentary constriction at the end of the bridge as they were joined by the Cathar perfect while the Christian priest, still buttoning himself up, pushed past him to gallop down the hill toward his church. Then they were on a path that wound round the back of the castle and headed down toward the forest. On other tracks, they could see shepherds urging their flocks in the same direction, their huge white-coated Pyrenean dogs snapping at the animals’ heels to make them go faster.

Adelia picked Ward up—the shepherd dogs terrified him—and kept running. Ulf, Rankin, and Mansur brought up the rear, helping a lumbering Boggart to keep going.

The forest enfolded them, but Thomassia, holding her chest with the effort, kept on, eventually veering away from the track to wade through dead bracken until she came to a full stop facing an outcrop of rock draped with overhanging ivy. She pulled the thick fronds aside to reveal a cave and ushered them in. “Stay.”

Backing out, she arranged the ivy so that it recovered the entrance.

In the dimness, the deep voice of the Cathar perfect said: “She will return to the castle, brushing out our tracks as she goes. A good woman, Thomassia.”

Of them all, he was the least out of breath; he’d run with an easy lope, thin brown legs showing beneath the robe he’d tucked up into his belt. Stooping to try and get rid of the stitch in her side, Adelia gasped: “I suppose you’re used to this.”

“It has not been unknown.” He sounded amused. He gave a bow.

Adelia introduced herself and the others.

“What’s them people who live in caves. Troglodytes. That’s what we’re becoming,” Ulf grumbled. “Bloody troglodytes. Well, I suppose it gives us a day off work.”

It was a point and, like the peasants they were turning into, he and Rankin, Mansur, and Boggart used the time to doze.

Adelia, the only one with reasonable Catalan at her command, felt that she should be entertaining the perfect with conversation, but kept quiet, hoping the man wouldn’t raise a matter she dreaded.

He did. “You were at Aveyron with Ermengarde when she died,” he said.

“Yes.”

He surprised her. “I saw you. I was there also, a witness, hidden in the crowd. I sent up prayers for her soul, not that she needed them, the good, good woman. And I prayed for you and yours. I rejoice in your escape.”

Adelia said shortly: “You were brave to be there.” She changed the subject. “Have you any news of Sister Aelith?”

“We have sent her into the Pyrenees until she has recovered her courage to come back and resume her mission.”

“I hope she doesn’t.”

“She will. She is her mother’s daughter. She, too, was at Aveyron.”

“Oh, my God, tell me she wasn’t watching.”

“No. She stayed in one of our friends’ houses near the palace gates, but she wished to be in the vicinity, as close to her mother as possible.”

Adelia nodded. She could understand that.

Brother Pierre continued to talk.

“I’m sorry” Adelia roused herself from thoughts of the girl’s agony. “I didn’t catch that.”

“I said there was another one of Princess Joanna’s party there; Aelith saw him when he was going through the palace gates. Another witness to pray for Ermengarde, perhaps.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Someone she had seen with you, when you and the people who were sick arrived at her and Ermengarde’s cottage in the hills. I think that was what she said.”

“No,” Adelia said, “there wouldn’t have been anyone else we knew.”

“Oh, yes,” Brother Pierre said. “Aelith recognized him.”

Adelia felt the blood drain from around her mouth. Somebody they knew had watched Ermengarde burn. Somebody had seen them in chains—and had not reported back, had done nothing about it.

“What . . . ?” She couldn’t get the words out. She tried again: “What did he look like?”

“Who?” The perfect had reverted to other matters.

“The man Aelith saw. What did he look like?”

Brother Pierre shrugged. “She did not say”

But she’d recognized him as one of their own.

Clutching her head, Adelia tried to reconstruct the events of the day when the dysentery had struck. Ulf had been taken ill on the road, others had started to fall, Locusta had gone looking for somewhere to take them …

He’d come back with Sister Aelith, yes, that’s right; she remembered him and the little Cathar coming down the hill, the offer of the cowshed as a hospital. And then … what happened then? There’d been a discussion, Dr. Arnulf saying it was the plague … who else had been there in the road that Aelith had seen?

The perfect was becoming concerned for her: “Are you unwell, my child?”

Adelia got up and ran to where Ulf was sleeping. She shook him. “Who else was there?”

“Eh?”

“On the road, that day … the dysentery … when we first met Aelith … who else was there?”

“What’re you talking about?”

Adelia told him.

Ulf took in a deep breath of satisfaction. “What did I say? Didn’t I say there’s been a snake in the grass all along?”

“But who is it?” She shook him. “Who was there that morning?”

The others were awake now.

“She wouldn’t have seen Joanna or the other ladies, they were ahead,” Mansur said.

“No, this was a man.”

Boggart chimed in. “There was Bishop Rowley . . .”

“We can discount him.”

“... Captain Bolt.”

“It wasn’t him. Who else? Bishop of Winchester, of course, but he’s unlikely . . .”

“Admiral O’Donnell.”

“Yes.”

“That pesky doctor . . .”

“Arnulf yes. Go on.”

“Them two chaplains, the silly one and the other. Never liked either of ‘em.”

“Might it have been one of our patients?” Mansur suggested. “There were plenty of them.”

“God help us,” Adelia said, “I don’t know.
I don’t know.”

“It was Scarry,” Ulf said. “Been him all along. Ain’t he clever? Murderin’ and poisoning everybody’s mind against you so that they was glad to abandon you to Aveyron, and us, too.”

She gave a moan and stumbled away from them. She felt ill.

She knew that she’d been afraid,
and had been all along,
to believe that a malignant being was after her; it put her at the center of everything, a protagonist in a Greek tragedy pursued by a revenging Fury.

It’s not me, it’s not me.

But it was her, she could see it now; she, and only she, had been the reason why so many had died in the pursuit. Blundering, stupid, deliberately blind, she might as well have been a Medea leaving the bodies of slaughtered children behind her.

Somebody had wanted to destroy her, had inflicted the persona of “witch” upon her so that the people she’d traveled with had been prepared to let her and four beloved people suffer at Aveyron.

Facing it now was like being slammed against a wall.
I can’t think about it.

But this was where avoidance stopped.
You have to think
about it.

After a while she sat down and began to consider in the only way she was capable of—as a doctor diagnosing a sickness by its symptoms and history

When had it begun? The horse, oh yes, the horse. It had been poisoned.

What next? Brune, poor Brune. No, first there had been Sir Nicholas, whom she’d cursed and who’d been killed because of it.

The death of a horse, the theft of her cross, the murder of two innocent people, betrayal to the Cathar-hunting Aveyron and its result—
not that, not that, but of
course
that
—another murder, a woman dying in flames. Oh, God, she had led him to Ermengarde.

All this engineered by a mind so careful, so skilled in its cunning, so disordered that Adelia’s reasoning brain couldn’t encompass all that it had done, let alone
why
it had done it. Only that it was insane.

And then she thought:
But it didn’t begin in Normandy …

It had started in England, in that faraway happiness on Emma’s estate with Allie, with sane men and women and a football match. The poison had been there.

And then she thought again:
But it didn’t begin there, either
...

Its beginning, for her, was in a Somerset forest, where two outlaws had pranced out from the trees; green-and-black, fantastical pagan bodies that had rustled with the leaves they wore, and she had killed one to save her own life and that of the men she was with, and earned the lasting hatred of the other.

The dimness of this cave with its filtered light was not unlike that of the glade where Wolf had skewered himself and Scarry had keened for him in Latin.

And this is where he has brought me; all the wayfrom there to here.

She heard a light snoring; the perfect had gone to sleep. The three men were talking quietly …

“It was Scarry, I tell you. Been him all along. Only enemy she’s ever made.”

“What about the black-avised buzzard who stole the cross off us in the cowshed, was
that
Scarry?”

“Don’t bloody know what Scarry looks like, do I. Never saw the bugger.”

Excalibur.
Another theft, not of a life this time, but of something Henry had entrusted to her, as he’d entrusted his daughter. Scarry had taken both so that she had failed in the one thing she prided herself on—her duty.

Mansur was kneeling in front of her. “I know you,” he said. “It has not been your fault.”

“No.” She raised her head, and her voice made everybody jump. “The
BASTARD
.”

AT
THIS
MOMENT
, Scarry, too, raises his head as if a bugle call from far away had suddenly cleared it of its worms. Into the holes they have made has come knowledge.

“I know where she will be,” he says to Wolf

“Where?”

“Palermo. She will come to Palermo.”

“How do you know?”

“Because that was the assignment Henry gave her, to look after his daughter. I read her mind now, Wolf of mine; she is a dutiful woman, she will not want to fail her king.”

“And we will kill her there?”

“Yes, my dear.” Scarry’s smile is almost sane. “As the armies of Octavian and Mark Antony met on the battlefield of Philippi, so we shall meet her at Palermo.”

THE
TAX
INSPECTOR
WENT
, expressing strong dissatisfaction with the paucity of tithes he and his men were taking back to their bishop.

Young Master Pons, once more situated in the window of Caronne’s church, had watched them wend their way down the mountain, his bell beside him in case the thieving bastards should turn around and come back.

They did not; they disappeared as the sun was lifting from the cold earth beneath their horses’ feet.

It was the next day when he saw another figure leading a string of mules coming out of that same mist. His hand reached for the bell, and then drew it back.

He slid down the ladder and danced hopefully around the visitor—sometimes this man carried sweetmeats in his pack.

Together, they went up toward the castle.

Adelia was already in the kitchen so that she could use it before Thomassia came in to prepare breakfast for them all, boiling into a thick paste the gel dripping from the leaves of aloe vera that she’d cut into a basin. One of the Lizier sons had whispered in embarrassment to Mansur that he was suffering from “an itch” without defining in what area it was plaguing him. Mansur had passed on the message and Adelia, hoping that it was merely a genital rash and nothing worse, was compounding a soothing ointment for it.

“Time we go, lady,” a voice told her.

Adelia straightened her back. The goblin shape of the little Turk, Deniz, was standing in the doorway. She looked for the Irishman behind him, but Deniz shook his head. “Admiral at Saint Gilles still. We meet him later. You all come now. Pack. Quick.”

Although there wasn’t much for them to pack, the farewell to Caronne took time; it was difficult to express sufficiently their indebtedness and gratitude to so many people, and painful to leave them.

“We needn’t say good-bye yet,” Fabrisse said. “I’m coming with you as far as Salses. I hold a small chateau by knight’s fee off Raymond of Toulouse down there—or, rather, my lord of Caronne does. Deniz tells me the O’Donnell has procured my silk in Saint Gilles and his ship will deliver it to Salses before he sets off for Italy Na Roqua’s daughter-in-law will wet-nurse my lord until my return. In fact, we’ll take a couple of the Roqua men with us to carry back some salt, our supply is low.”

There was one very hard parting … Adelia saw the grief of it in two faces.

Rankin was the last to join them. As he came slowly down the stairs, bagpipes under his arm, she faced him. “You’re not coming with us,” she said.

“What ye jabbering, woman? Indeed I am.”

“No. You’re going to stay here and marry Thomassia.”

A light came into the Scotsman’s eyes. “I’ll not deny … but it’ll never be said of Rankin of the Highlands he was a dairty deserter.”

“It’s not desertion.” She’d brought enough trouble on him. “You have been a rock to us. We love you, but we’ll be safe now and Thomassia needs you. This is where you belong.”

“Ay, she’s said she’s willin’, the canty wee girl, and I’ve become rare fond of this clachan, but . . .”

Adelia kissed him. “There you are, then.”

Standing on the ramparts of the castle with Thomassia beside him holding the Count of Caronne, he played a wailing lament on his pipes to the little party as it went trickling down the mountainside like a tear on a giant’s cheek.