The Serpent's Tale Read online

  “I’ve only been thinking of myself, haven’t I?” Adelia said.

  “And the baby,” Gyltha said, reaching over to pat her. “And a fair bit of his lordship, I reckon. Me, I’ll follow where he goes and happy to help.” She had raised their venture to a plane that left Adelia ashamed and exposed to her own resentment. Even now, she couldn’t give credence to the reasoning that caused them to be doing what they were doing, but if the bishop, who did, was right and they could prevent civil war by it, then she, too, must be happy to give of her best.

  And I am, she thought, grimacing. Ulf is safe at school; Gyltha and Mansur and my child are with me. I am happy that Bishop Rowley is happy in a god who has taken away his lusts. Where else should I be?

  She shut her eyes and gave herself up to patient endurance.

  Another great lurch woke her. They’d stopped. The canvas was lifted, letting in a draft of wicked cold and showing a face blue and bearded by ice. She recognized it as the messenger’s; they had caught up with him. “Are we there?”

  “Nearly, mistress.” Jacques sounded excited. “His lordship asks, will you come out and look at this?”

  It had stopped snowing. A moon shone from a sky full of stars onto a landscape almost as beautiful. The bishop and the rest of his entourage stood with Mansur in a group at the beginning of a narrow, humped stone bridge, its parapets perfectly outlined in snow. Loud water hidden by the drop on the left suggested a weir or millrace. To the right was the gleam of a smooth river. Trees stood like white sentinels.

  As Adelia came up, Rowley pointed behind her. She looked back and saw some humped cottages. “That’s the village of Wolvercote,” he said. He turned her so that she was now facing across the bridge to where the stars were blanked out by a complexity of roofs. “Godstow Abbey.” There was a suggestion of light coming from somewhere among its buildings, though any windows on this side were dark.

  But it was what was in the middle of the bridge that she must look at. The first thing she saw was a saddled horse, not moving, head and reins drooping downward, one leg bent up. The groom, Walt, stood at its head, patting its neck. His voice came shrill and querulous through the stillness. “Who’da done this? He’s a good un, this un, who’da done it?” He was more concerned for the horse than for the dead man sprawled facedown in the snow beside it.

  “Robbery and murder on the King’s Highway,” Rowley said quietly, his breath wreathing like smoke. “Plain coincidence and nothing to do with our purpose, but I suppose you’d better look, bodies being your business. Just be quick about it, that’s all.”

  He’d kept everyone else back like she’d taught him; only the groom’s footprints and his own showed going to the bridge in the snow, and only his returned. “I had to make sure the fellow was dead,” he said. “Take Mansur with you for the look of it.” He raised his voice. “The lord Mansur can read traces left on the ground. He speaks little English, so Mistress Adelia will interpret for him.”

  Adelia stayed where she was for a moment, Mansur beside her. “What time is it, do you know?”

  she asked in Arabic.

  “Listen.”

  She unbound her head from its muffler. From the other side of the bridge, solitary, faraway, but clear over the rush of noisy water, came a sweet female voice raised in a monotone. It paused and was answered by the disciplined response of other voices.

  She was hearing a chime of the liturgical clock, an antiphon. The nuns of Godstow had roused from their beds and were chanting Vigils.

  It was four o’clock in the morning, near enough.

  Mansur said, “Was not the galloper here earlier?

  He may have seen something.”

  “When were you here, Jacques? The doctor wants to know.”

  “In daylight, mistress. That poor soul wasn’t lying there then.” The young man was aggrieved and upset. “I delivered his lordship’s message to the holy sisters and rode straight back across the bridge to rejoin you all. I was back with you before the moon came up, wasn’t I, my lord?”

  Rowley nodded.

  “When did it stop snowing?” From what she could see of the body, there were only a few flakes on it.

  “Three hours back.”

  “Stay here.”

  Mansur took up a lantern, and they went forward together to kneel by the body. “Allah, be good to him,” Mansur said.

  As her foster father had taught her, Adelia took a moment to pray to the spirit of the dead man who was now her client. “Permit your flesh and bone to tell me what your voice cannot.”

  He lay facedown, too neatly for someone who’d fallen off a horse, legs straight, arms splayed above the head, cloak and tunic down over his hams. His cap, like his clothes, was of good but slightly worn wool, and it lay a few inches away, the brave cockpheasant feather in it broken.

  She nodded to Mansur. Gently, he raised the wavy brown hair from the neck to touch the skin. He shook his head. He’d attended on enough corpses with Adelia to know it would be impossible to estimate the time of death; the body was frozen—had begun to freeze the moment life left it, would stay frozen long enough to delay the natural processes.

  “Hmm.”

  Expertly, acting together, they turned the corpse over. Two half-shut brown eyes regarded the sky with disinterest, and Mansur had to force the frozen lids down over them.

  He was young: twenty, twenty-one, perhaps less. The heavy arrow in his chest came from a crossbow and had gone deep, probably being driven farther in by the fall that had broken its flights. Mansur held the lantern so that Adelia could examine the wound; there was blood around it but only a few smears on the snow occupying the space that the body had vacated when it was turned.

  She guided Mansur’s hand so that the lantern illuminated the corpse’s neck. “Hmmm.”

  Ascabbard with a sword still in it was attached to a belt with a tarnished buckle engraved

  with a crest. The same crest had been embroidered on a gaping, empty purse.

  “Come along, Doctor. You can do all this when we take him to the nunnery.” Rowley’s voice.

  “Be quiet,” Adelia told him in Arabic. He’d hurried her all the way from Cambridge; now he could damn well wait. There was something wrong here; perhaps it was why Rowley had called for her to investigate it, some part of his mind noticing the anomalies even while part was intent on another murder altogether.

  There was an anguished plea from Walt, the groom. “This here poor bugger’s in pain, my lord. Naught to be done. ’S time he was finished.”

  “Doctor?”

  “Wait, will you?” Irritably, she got up and went over to where the horse and the groom stood, regarding the ground as she went. “What’s the matter with it?”

  “Hamstrung. Some godless swine cut his tendon.” Walt pointed to a slash across the horse’s leg just above the hock. “See? That’s deliberate, that is.”

  The snow here was bloodied black and showed that the animal had thrashed around before managing to rise on its three uninjured legs.

  “Can it be mended?” All she knew about horses was which end you faced.

  “He’s hamstrung.” Answering stupid questions from a woman no better than she should be added to Walt’s anger.

  Adelia returned to Mansur. “The animal has to be dispatched.”

  “Not here,” he said. “The carcass will block the bridge.” And bridges were vital; not to repair them, or to render them unusable, was a hostile act causing such hardship to the local economy that the law came down heavily on those who committed it.

  “What in hell are you two about?” Rowley had come up.

  “There’s something wrong here,” Adelia told him.

  “Yes, somebody robbed and killed this poor devil. I can see that. Let’s load him up and get on.”

  “No, it’s more than that.”

  “What is?”

  “Give me time,” she shouted at him, and then, realizing, “the doctor needs time.”

  The bishop blew
out his cheeks. “Why did I bring her, Lord? Answer me that. Very well, let’s at least see to his horse.”

  Adelia insisted on going first, slowly leading the way past Walt and the crippled animal and down the other side of the bridge, Mansur beside her holding the lantern so that light fell on the ground at each step.

  Everything that was not white was black; boot marks, hoofprints, too jumbled to be distinguished from one another. There’d been a lot of activity where the bridge rejoined the road near the great gatehouse of the convent. A lot of blood.

  Mansur pointed.

  “Oh, well done, my dear,” she said. Under the shadow of heavy oak branches lolling over the convent wall, clear prints led to others—writing a story for those who could read it. “Hmm. Interesting.”

  Behind her, the bishop and groom soothed the jerkily limping horse as they led it, discussing where it should be put down. Would the nuns want the carcass? Good eating on a horse. But butchery and skinning would be arduous in this weather; better to cut its throat among the trees where the convent wall bent into a forest. “They can get it later if they want it.”

  “Doubt there’ll be much left by then, my lord.” It wasn’t only humans that appreciated the eating on a horse.

  Walt relieved the animal of its tack. There was a roll attached to the saddle protected by oilcloth. “Oo-op now, my beauty, oo-op.” Murmuring gentle equine things, he led it toward the trees.

  “Could we hide the body there as well?” Adelia wanted to know.

  “If we do, there will be not much left of that, either,” Mansur said.

  Rowley joined them. “Will you hurry up, you two. We’ll all be bloody icicles in a minute.”

  Adelia, who had shivered from cold all the way from Cambridge, was no longer aware of it. “We don’t want the body discovered, my lord.”

  The bishop tried for patience. “It is discovered, mistress. We discovered it.”

  “We don’t want the killer to find it.”

  Rowley cleared his throat. “You mean, let’s not tell him? He knows, Adelia. He shot a bolt into the lad’s chest. He’s not coming back to make sure.”

  “Yes, he is. You’d have seen it yourself if you hadn’t been in such a rush.” She nudged Mansur. “Look as if you’re instructing.”

  With Rowley between them, Mansur speaking of their findings in Arabic, and Adelia, on the other side, appearing to translate, they told him the story of a killing as the marks in the snow had told it to them.

  “We can’t be sure of the time. After it stopped snowing is all we can guess. Anyway, late enough this night for nobody to be about. They waited for him here, near the gates.”

  “They?”

  “Two men.” Rowley was pulled into the shadow of the oak. Footprints were just visible in the snow. “See? One wears hobnails, the other’s boots have bars across the soles, maybe clogs bound with strips. They arrived here on horseback and took their horses into those trees, where Walt has gone. They came back on foot and stood here. They ate as they waited.” Adelia retrieved a crumb of something from the ground, and then another. “Cheese.” She held them to the bishop’s nose.

  He recoiled. “As you say, mistress.”

  Vigils over, the convent was silent again. From deeper in among the trees of the forest came Walt’s prayer, “And the Lord have mercy on thy poor soul, if thee have one.”

  A long scream like a whistle, a heavy crash. Silence.

  Walt emerged, simultaneously wiping his dagger on his cloak with one hand and his eyes with the other. “Goddamn, I hates a’doing that.”

  The bishop patted him on the shoulder and sent him to join the others on the far side of the bridge. To Adelia and Mansur, he said, “They knew he was coming, then?”

  “Yes. They were waiting for him.” Even the most desperate robber didn’t loiter in the hope of a passerby in the early hours of a freezing night.

  They must have thought themselves lucky that the blizzard had passed, she thought, not knowing they were imprinting their guilt in the resultant snow for Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, medica of the renowned School of Medicine in Salerno, expert on death and the causes of death, to happen along and decipher it.

  For which they were going to be sorry.

  It had been a cold wait; they’d stamped their feet to keep warm. In her mind, Adelia waited with them, nibbling phantom cheese. Perhaps they had listened to the sound of Compline being sung before the nuns retired to bed for the three hours until Vigils. Apart from that it would have been quiet except for an owl or two, perhaps, and the shriek of a vixen.

  Here he comes, the rider. Up the road that leads from the river to the convent, his horse’s hooves muffled by the earlier snow but still audible in the silence.

  He’s nearing the gates, slowing—does he mean to go in? But Villain Number One has stepped out in front of him, the crossbow cocked and straining. Does the rider see him? Shout out? Recognize the man? Probably not; the shadows are dark here. Anyway, the bolt has been loosed and is already deep in his chest.

  The horse rears, sending its rider backward and tumbling, breaking the bolt’s flights as he falls. Villain Number Two snatches at the reins, leads the terrified horse to the trees, and tethers it there.

  “He’s on the ground and dying—a crossbow quarrel is nearly always fatal wherever it hits,” Adelia said, “but they made sure. One or other of them—whoever he was has big hands—throttled him as he lay on the ground.”

  “God have mercy,” the bishop saiThey want him to be identifiedd.

  “Yes, but here’s the interesting thing,” Adelia told him, as if everything else had been commonplace. “Now they drag him to the center of the bridge. See? The toes of his boots make runnels in the snow. They throw his cap down beside him— dear Lord, they’re stupid. Did they think a man fallen from his mount looks so tidy? Legs together? Skirts down? You saw that, didn’t you? And then, then, they fetch his horse to the bridge and slice its leg.”

  “They do not take him into the trees,” Mansur pointed out. “Nor the horse. Neither would have been found if they’d done that, not until the spring, and by then, no one could see what had happened to them. But no, they drag him to where the first person across the bridge in the morning will see him and raise the hue and cry.”

  “Not giving the killers as much time to get away as they might have.” The bishop was reflective. “I see. That’s ... eccentric.”

  “This is what’s eccentric,” Adelia said. They’d come up to the body again. At the bottom of the bridge where the others were gathered, somebody had made a makeshift brazier and lit a fire. Faces, ghastly in the reflection of the flames, turned hopefully in their direction. “You goin’ to be much longer?” Gyltha shouted. “Little un’s due a feed, and we’m dyin’ of frostbite.”

  Adelia ignored her. She still didn’t feel the cold. “Two men,” she said, “and they are poor, judging from their footwear. Two men kill our rider. Granted, they take the money from his purse, but they leave the purse, a good one that has his family crest on it. They leave his boots, his cloak, the silver buckle, his fine horse. What thief does that?”

  “Perhaps they were disturbed,” Rowley said. “Who disturbs them? Not us. They are long gone before we come up. They had time to strip this poor soul of everything he ... had. They do not. Why, Rowley?”

  The bishop thought it through. “They want him found.”

  Adelia nodded. “It is vital to them.”

  “They want him to be identified.”

  Adelia’s exhaled breath was a stream of satisfaction. “Exactly. It must be known who he is and that he is dead.”

  “I see.” Rowley considered. “Hence the suggestion that we hide his body. I don’t like it, though.”

  “But that will bring them back, Rowley,” Adelia said, and for the first time she touched him, a tug on his sleeve. “They’ve taken pains to have this poor young man’s death declared to the world. They’ll come back to find out why it isn’t. We can
be waiting for them.”

  Mansur nodded. “Some fiend intends to profit by this killing, Allah ruin him.”

  Adelia jiggled the bishop’s sleeve again. “But not if the boy seems merely to have gone away, just disappeared.”

  Rowley was doubtful. “There’ll be someone at home, worrying for him.”

  “If so, they’ll want his murderers found.”

  “He ought to be buried with decency.”

  “Not yet.”

  Pulling his arm from her grasp, the bishop went away from her. Adelia watched him go to the parapet of the bridge and lean over it, looking at the roaring water that showed white in the moonlight.

  He hates it when I do this, she thought. He was prepared to love the woman but not the doctor. Yet it was the doctor he invited along, and he must bear the consequences. I have a duty to that dead boy, and I will not abandon it.

  Now she was cold.

  “Very well.” He turned round. “You may be fortunate in that Godstow possesses an icehouse. Famous for it.”

  While the body was being wrapped in its cloak and its possessions collected, Adelia went to the fire to feed her baby.

  The Bishop of Saint Albans gathered his men around him to tell them what Dr. Mansur had discovered from reading the signs in the snow.

  “With the mercy of God, we may hope to catch these killers. Until then, not one of you—I say again, nobody—is to mention what we have seen this night. We shall keep this body reverently, but secretly, hidden in order to find out who comes back for it—and may God have mercy on their souls, for we shall not.”

  It was well done. Rowley had fought in Outremer on Crusade and found that men responded better for knowing what their commander was about than those merely given reasonless commands.

  He drew an assenting growl from the circle about him, the messenger’s particularly fervent— he and the others spent much of their lives on the road, and they saw the rider on the bridge as any one of themselves fallen to the predators infesting the highways. As Good Samaritans, they had been too late to save the traveler’s life, but they could at least bring his killers to justice.