Mistress of the Art of Death (6 page)

Prior Geoffrey sighed. "Master Roger heard the dread word 'crucifixion' and snapped at it like a ferret. Here was something new. Not merely an accusation of torture such as Jews have ever inspired...I beg your pardon, Master Simon, but it has always been so."

"I fear it has, my lord. I fear it has."

"Here was a reenactment of Easter, a child found worthy to suffer the pains of the Son of God and, therefore, undoubtedly, both a saint and a miracle-giver. I would have buried the boy with decency but was denied by the hag in human form who poses as a nun of Saint Radegund."

The prior shook his fist toward the road. "She abducted the child's body, claiming it as hers by right merely because Peter's parents dwell on land belonging to Saint Radegund.
Mea culpa,
I fear we wrangled over the corpse. But that woman, Master Simon, that hellcat, sees not the body of a little boy deserving Christian burial but an acquisition to the den of succubae she calls a convent, a source of income from pilgrims and from the halt and the lame looking for cure. An
attraction,
Master Simon." He sat back. "And such it has become. Roger of Acton has spread the word. Our prioress was seen taking advice from the money changers of Canterbury on how to sell Little Saint Peter relics and tokens at the convent gate.
Quid non mortalia pectora cogis, auri sacra fames!
To what do you not drive human hearts, cursed craving for gold!"

"I am shocked, my lord," Simon said.

"You should be, Master Simon. She has a knuckle taken from the boy's hand that she and her cousin pressed on me in my travail, saying it would mend me in the instant. Roger of Acton, do you see, wishes to add me to the list of cures, that my name might be on the application to the Vatican for the official sainting of Little Saint Peter."

"I see."

"The knuckle, which, such was my pain, I did not scruple to touch, was ineffective. My deliverance was from a more unexpected source." The prior got up. "Which reminds me, I feel the urge to piss."

Simon put out a hand to detain him. "But what of the other children, my lord? The ones still missing?"

Prior Geoffrey stood for a moment, as if listening to the blackbird. "For a while, nothing," he said. "The town had sated itself on Chaim and Miriam. The Jews in the castle were preparing to leave it. But then another boy disappeared and we did not dare to move them."

The prior turned his face away so that Simon could not see it. "It was on All Souls' Night. He was a boy from my own school." Simon heard the break in the prior's voice. "Next, a little girl, a wildfowler's daughter. On Holy Innocents Day, God help us. Then, as recently as the Feast of Saint Edward, King and Martyr, another boy."

"But, my lord, who can accuse the Jews of these disappearances? Are they not still locked in the castle?"

"By now, Master Simon, Jews have been awarded the ability to fly over the castle crenels, snatching up the children and gnawing them before dropping their carcasses in the nearest mere. May I advise you not to reveal yourself. You see"--the prior paused--"there have been signs."

"Signs?"

"Found in the area where each child was last seen. Cabalistic weavings. The townsfolk say they resemble the Star of David. And now"--Prior Geoffrey was crossing his legs--"I
have
to piss. This is a matter of some moment."

Simon watched him hobble to the trees. "Good fortune, my lord."

I was right to tell him as much as I did,
he thought. We have gained a valuable ally. For information, I traded information--though not all of it.

T
HE TRACK TOWARD
the brow of Wandlebury Hill had been made by a landslip that breached part of the great ditches dug out by some ancient peoples to defend it. The passage of sheep had evened it out and Adelia, a basket on her arm, climbed to the summit in minutes without losing breath--to find herself alone on the hilltop, an immense circle of grass dotted currantlike with sheep droppings.

From a distance, it had appeared bald. Certainly the only high trees were down its side, with a clump along one easterly edge, and the rest was covered with shrubby hawthorn and juniper bushes. The flattish surface was pitted here and there with curious depressions, some of them two or three feet deep and at least six feet across. A good place to wrench your ankle.

To the east, where the sun was rising, the ground fell away gently; to the west, it dropped fast to the flat land.

She opened her cloak, clasped her hands behind her neck, stretching, letting the breeze pierce the despised tunic of harsh wool bought in Dover that Simon of Naples had begged her to wear.

"Our mission lies among the commoners of England, Doctor. If we are to mingle with them, learn what they know, we must appear as they do."

"Mansur looks every inch a Saxon villein, naturally," she'd said. "And what of our accents?"

But Simon had maintained it was a matter of degree that three foreign medicine peddlers, always popular with the herd, would hear more secrets than a thousand inquisitors. "We shall not be removed by class from those we question; it is the truth we want, not respect."

"In this thing," she'd said of the tunic, "respect will
not
be forthcoming." However, Simon, more experienced in deception than she, was the leader of this mission. Adelia had put on what was basically a tube, fastened at the shoulders with pins but retaining her silk undershift--though never one to swim in the stream of fashion, she'd be damned if, even for the King of Sicily, she tolerated sackcloth next to the skin.

She closed her eyes against the light, tired from a night spent watching her patient for signs of fever. At dawn the prior's skin had proved cool, his pulse steady; the procedure had been successful for the moment; it now remained to be seen whether he could urinate without help and without pain. So far so good, as Margaret used to say.

She started walking, her eyes searching for useful plants, noticing that her cheap boots--another blasted disguise--sent up sweet, unfamiliar scents at each step. There were goodies here among the grass, the early leaves of vervains, ale-hoof, catmint, bugle,
Clinopodium vulgare,
which the English called wild basil, though it neither resembled nor smelled like true basil. Once she had bought an old English herbal that the monks of Saint Lucia had acquired but couldn't read. She'd given it to Margaret as a reminder of home, only to reappropriate it to study for herself.

And here they were, its illustrations, growing in real life at her feet, as thrilling as if she'd encountered a famed face in the street.

The herbalist author, relying heavily on Galen, like most of his kind, had made the usual claims: laurel to protect from lightning, all-heal to ward off the plague, marjoram to secure the uterus--as if a woman's uterus floated up to the neck and down again like a cherry in a bottle. Why did they never
look
?

She began picking.

All at once she was uneasy. There was no reason for it; the great ring was as deserted as it had been. Clouds changed the light as their shadows chased one another briskly across the grass; a stunted hawthorn assumed the shape of a bent old woman; a sudden screech--a magpie--sent smaller birds flying.

Whatever it was, she had an apprehension that made her want to be less vertical in all this flatness. So foolish she'd been. Tempted by its plants and the apparent isolation of this place, tired of the chattering company she'd been surrounded with since Canterbury, she'd committed the error, the idiocy, of venturing out alone, telling Mansur to stay and care for the prior. A mistake. She had abrogated all right to immunity from predation. Indeed, without the company of Margaret and Mansur, and as far as men in the vicinity were concerned, she might as well be wearing a placard saying "Rape me." If the invitation were accepted, it would be regarded as her fault, not the rapist's.

Damn the prison in which men incarcerated women. She'd resented its invisible bars when Mansur had insisted on accompanying her along the long, dark corridors of the Salerno school, making her look overprivileged and ridiculous as she went from lecture to lecture, and marking her out. But she'd learned--oh, she'd learned--her lesson, that day when she'd avoided his chaperonage: the outrage, the desperation with which she'd had to scrabble against a male fellow student; the indignity of having to scream for help, which, thank God, had been answered; the subsequent lecture from her professors and, of course, Mansur and Margaret, on the sins of arrogance and carelessness of reputation.

Nobody had blamed the young man, although Mansur had afterward broken his nose by way of teaching him manners.

Being Adelia and still arrogant, she forced herself to walk a little farther, though in the direction of the trees, and pick a plant or two more before looking around.

Nothing. The flutter of hawthorn blossom on the breeze, another sudden dimming of light as a cloud chased across the sun.

A pheasant rose, clattering and shrieking. She turned.

It was as if he had sprung out of the ground. He was marching toward her, casting a long shadow. No pimply student this time. One of the pilgrimage's heavy and confident crusaders, the metal links of his mail hissing beneath the tabard, the mouth smiling but the eyes as hard as the iron encasing head and nose. "Well, well, now," he was saying with anticipation. "Well, well, now, mistress."

Adelia experienced a deep weariness--at her own stupidity, at what was to come. She had resources; one of them, a wicked little dagger, was tucked in her boot, given to her by her Sicilian foster mother, a straightforward woman with the advice to stick it in the assailant's eye. Her Jewish stepfather had suggested a more subtle defense: "Tell them you're a doctor and appear concerned by their appearance. Ask if they've been in contact with the plague. That'll lower any man's flag."

She doubted, though, whether either ploy would prevail against this advancing mailed mass. Nor, considering her mission, did she want to broadcast her profession.

She stood straight and tried loftiness while he was still a way off. "Yes?" she called sharply. Which might have been impressive had she been Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar in Salerno, but on this lonely hill, it did little for a poorly dressed foreign trull known to travel in a peddler's cart with two men.

"That's what I like," the man called back. "A woman who says yes."

He came on. No doubt about his intention now; she dropped, groping into her boot.

Then two things happened at once--from different directions.

Out of the clump of trees came the
whoom-whoom
sound of air being displaced by something whirling through it. A small ax buried its blade in the grass between Adelia and the knight.

The other was a yell from across the hill. "In the name of God, Gervase, call your bloody hounds and go down. The old girl's champing at her bit."

Adelia watched the knight's eyes change. She leaned forward and, with an effort, pulled the ax from the ground and stood up with it, smiling. "It must be magic," she said in English.

The other crusader was still shouting for his friend to find his dogs and go down to the road.

The discomfiture in this one's face changed to something like hatred, then, deliberately, to disinterest as he turned on his heel and strode away to join his fellow.

You've made no friend there,
Adelia told herself.
God, how I
loathe
being afraid. Damn him, damn him. And damn this damned country; I didn't want to come in the first place.

Ill-tempered because she was shaking, she walked toward a shadow under the trees. "I told you to stay with the cart," she said in Arabic.

"You did," Mansur agreed.

She gave him back his ax--he called it Parvaneh (butterfly). He tucked it into the side of his belt so as to be out of sight under his robe, leaving his traditional dagger in its beautiful scabbard on display at the front. The throwing ax as a weapon was rare among Arabs but not for the tribes, and Mansur's was one of them, whose ancestors had encountered the Vikings that had ventured into Arabia where, in exchange for its exotic goods, they had traded not only weapons but also the secret of how to make the superior steel of their blades.

Together, mistress and servant made their way down the hill through the trees, Adelia stumbling, Mansur striding as easily as on a road.

"Which of the goats' droppings was that?" he wanted to know.

"The one they call Gervase. The other's name is Joscelin, I think."

"Crusaders," he said, and spat.

Adelia, too, had little opinion of crusaders. Salerno was on one of the routes to the Holy Land and, whether going out or coming back, most soldiers of the crusading army had been insufferable. As pig-ignorant as they were enthusiastic for God's work, those going out had disrupted the harmony in which different creeds and races lived in Sicily's kingdom by protesting against the presence of Jews, Moors, and even Christians whose practices were different from their own, often attacking them. On the way back, they were usually embittered, diseased, and impoverished--only a few had been rewarded with the fortune or holy grace they'd expected--and, therefore, just as troublesome.

She knew of some who'd not gone to Outremer at all, merely staying in Salerno until they'd exhausted its bounty before returning home to gain the admiration of their town or village with a few tall tales and a crusading cloak they'd bought cheap in Salerno's market.

"Well, you scared that one," she said now. "It was a good throw."

"No," the Arab said, "I missed."

Adelia turned on him. "Mansur, you listen to me. We are not here to slaughter the populace...."

She stopped. They had come to a track, and just below them was the other crusader, the one called Joscelin, protector of the prioress. He had found one of the hounds and was bending down, attaching a leash to its collar, berating the huntsman who was with him.

As they came up, he raised his head, smiling, nodded at Mansur, and wished Adelia good day. "I am glad to see you accompanied, mistress. This is no place for pretty ladies to wander alone, nor anyone else for that matter."