A Murderous Procession Read online

  “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.”

  “I have, beloved. I shall.”

  IT HAD BEEN ARRANGED between bishop and king that they should meet at Sarum Castle, but, as Rowley’s party rode along one of the straight Roman tracks that led to its hilltop across a wilting Wiltshire Plain, they saw a rider galloping toward it on yet another, with more men on horses tearing after as if they were pursuing him before he could reach its safety.

  His clothes were nondescript, and in the speed of his going, his short cloak was blown parallel to his horse’s back.

  “Henry,” Rowley said with admiration and dug in his spurs to meet up with the King of England.

  By the time Adelia and the others joined them, the two men had dismounted and were in conversation. Adelia saw no reason to interrupt them and stayed on her palfrey, but the king strode over, took its reins to lead her apart.

  He didn’t greet her, he rarely did, as if there was a special relationship between them that found courtesy unnecessary; it had little to do with sexual attraction—though there was a breath of that—more with the sense of equality he extended to her. Which could be charming but which Adelia, chafing under it today, decided was spurious; he merely had a regard for those who proved useful to him.

  As she always did when he called on her, she thought: I’m a Sicilian, I am not his subject. I can refuse to do what he wants.

  And knew, again, that she was helpless; she was in England, he was its king and refused to give her a passport, thus imprisoning her in a country that had trapped her even further during the years she’d spent in it by winding tentacles of love and friendship around her.

  He extended a calloused hand and helped her down from her horse. “I gather the good Bishop of Saint Albans hasn’t told you why you’re summoned.”

  “No.” Damned if she was going to “my lord” him, being no more pleased with him than she was with Rowley

  “Lovers’ quarrel?” Henry showed his ferocious little teeth; he delighted in her illicit relations with his favorite bishop.

  Adelia said nothing.

  He kept on walking so that they progressed farther and farther away from the group behind them. “You’re to accompany Princess Joanna to her wedding in Sicily.”

  “If I can take my daughter with me, I shall be delighted,” she said. Get the rules established from the beginning. Then, because she couldn’t resist knowing, she said: “Why?”

  “To keep an eye on her health, woman, why else? I’m investing a lot in this marriage. I want the child to arrive in Palermo not only safe but well.”

  “The princess surely has her own medical adviser.”

  Henry II snorted. “She’s got Eleanor’s. As I remember he’s the fat bastard who cut out the fistula on my arse when we were in Poitiers and turned it putrid. Couldn’t ride for days. Eleanor has no judgment when it comes to doctors; she’s never been ill in her life.”

  “There must be better ones.”

  “There’s you. Or rather, officially there’s Mansur. You two can play your usual game. Winchester will be leading the party, a saintly man, and a good bishop, but not broadminded enough to accept a female as a doctor.”

  “He’s broadminded enough to accept an Arab?”

  The king displayed his teeth again. “He balked a bit, but I told him. ‘You wait ’til you get to Sicily,’ I said. ‘You’ll be hobnobbing with Jews, Saracens, plus various other heretics—and all of them government officials. Get used to it,’ I said.”

  Aha, she’d found the weakness in his plan. She said: “What you have overlooked, Henry, is that when I pose as Mansur’s assistant, most people take me for his mistress—and the Bishop of Winchester’s not likely to let a trollop near the princess.”

  “Oh yes he will. I’ve preserved your virtue ...” He paused. “... such as it is. I’ve told him that the Lord Mansur is a eunuch with a perfectly respectable female assistant who interprets for him. Our good bishop needn’t be made aware of the fact that Mansur speaks better English than he does. The poor old bugger blinked, but he knows eunuchs aren’t capable of pleasuring trollops—or any other woman come to that.”

  “They are, actually,” Adelia said.

  The king ignored her. She received a nudge in her ribs. “I’m even giving you and Mansur a nice fat purse of money to go with you.”

  That was a novelty. Henry counted every coin.

  When she didn’t respond, he said: “Thought of everything, haven’t I?”

  “About my daughter ...”

  Apparently, he didn’t hear her. “There’s another matter I want you to keep an eye on.... You remember a certain sword you found in a cave on Glastonbury Tor two years ago and gave to me?”

  “Excalibur?”

  “For God’s sake, woman. Hush, will you?” The king looked back, but the two of them had progressed out of earshot of the group behind them.

  “Excalibur?” Adelia said more quietly.

  “Yes, well, that’s proved another pain in the arse. I should never have put the damned thing on display The new Abbot of Glastonbury wants it back, Canterbury says it’s theirs, the Welsh are wittering for it, even the Holy Roman Empire is claiming it as a right, God knows why And the Pope wants me to go on crusade with it, as if waving it around will bring the bloody infidels to their knees saying sorry”

  Despite herself Adelia was disarmed; he could always make her laugh and admire; only this Plantagenet could call the most famed sword in Christendom a pain in the arse.

  So far he’d managed to resist papal attempts to make him join other rulers fighting in the Holy Land; he said he had enough trouble holding together an empire of which England was only a small part, the rest of it running from the border of Scotland to the Pyrenees.

  He’d told her once: “Go on crusade and some bugger pinches your throne whilst your back’s turned.”

  Adelia’s acquaintanceship with Excalibur had been equally fraught. Not realizing at the time that the skeleton she’d found in a little tomb deep in the rock of Glastonbury Tor was King Arthur’s—knowledge and proof had come later—nor that the sword lying nearby was his, she’d been holding the dirty, encrusted but still sharp weapon when she’d been attacked.

  She’d raised it to defend herself—it had seemed to leap in her hand of its own accord—and Wolf, that would-be rapist and killer, had speared himself on it.

  In the end, they’d left Arthur’s quiet bones undisturbed, but Excalibur she’d given to Henry, another king who, for all his faults, was bringing an enlightenment and order to his little realm of England which, apart from the Kingdom of Sicily, her h
ome, existed nowhere else in the world.

  The murder of Thomas à Becket, apparently at the king’s instigation, had cast a shadow over the Plantagenet’s reign but, in the opinion of some—including Adelia—that intransigent archbishop had deliberately sought martyrdom by opposing every reasonable reform Henry had tried to introduce for his people’s good. If anybody should inherit that symbol of the Arthurian legend, she’d thought at the time, it was Henry II.

  Now he would give it away.

  However, she saw that he was in difficulty, and said so.

  “I hope you do,” he told her. “That artifact conveys power. It’s like the Holy Grail. Anybody who has it can claim to be the descendant of Arthur, defender of Christianity against the forces of darkness, and have thousands flocking to his banner.” He paused and for the first time in their acquaintance, Adelia saw him embarrassed. “There are ... princes ...” He took a breath. “Certain princes who’d like to get their hands on it, a contingency that would be ... unwise.”

  Princes? And then she thought: Dear God, he means his sons.

  Young Henry had already made one attempt to overthrow his father and it was said that the younger boy, Richard, was even more ambitious for power than his brother.

  The king became brisk. “Anyway, I’m sending it with Joanna to give to my future son-in-law and good luck to him. He’s an ally, bless him, and he’s fighting the same enemy as I am. He’ll need Excalibur....”

  “What enemy?” She hadn’t heard that Sicily was at war with anyone.

  He hesitated, then he said: “It’s a battle of wills, not arms. You’ll see when you get there.”

  “Very well, my lord,” Adelia prompted. “But why is this my concern?”

  “Because you’re taking it with you. Well, not you personally; I’m having it put inside a cross and given to someone else to carry.” Adelia got another royal nudge in the ribs. “I’m told you’ll be pleased by my choice of crucifer. He’s a surprise for you.”

  “Thank you. But, again, how is that my concern?”