Mistress of the Art of Death

They’d wrapped the body in Rowley’s cloak and taken it to Hakim’s palace, where it was buried that night to the sound of ululating, grieving women.

Then the hunt began in earnest. Such a strange chase it was, led by a Moslem chieftain and a Christian knight, skirting battlefields where the crescent and the cross were at war with each other.

“The devil was loose in that desert,” Rowley said. “He sent sand-storms against us, obliterating tracks, resting places were waterless and devastated either by crusader or Moor, but nothing was going to stop us, and at long last we caught up with the main party.”

Ubayd had been right, it was a ragtag.

“Deserters, mainly, runaways, the prison sweepings of Christendom. Our killer had been their captain, and in carrying off the boy, he’d also taken most of the jewels and abandoned his men to their own devices, which weren’t much. They hardly put up any resistance; most of them were silly with hasheesh, and the rest were fighting among themselves over the remaining booty. We questioned each one of them before he died: Where’s your leader gone? Who is he? Where does he come from? Where will he make for? Not one of them knew much about the man they’d followed. A ferocious leader, they said. A lucky man, they said.”

Lucky.

“Nationality means nothing to scum like those; to them he was just another Frank, which means he could have originated anywhere from Scotland to the Baltic. Their descriptions weren’t much better, either: tall, medium-height, darkish, fairish-mind you, they were saying anything they thought Hakim wanted to know, but it was as if each saw him differently. One of them said he had horns growing out of his head.”

“Did he have a name?”

“They called him Rakshasa. It’s the name of a demon. Moors frighten naughty children with it. From what I could gather from Hakim, the Rakshasi came out of the Far East- India, I think. The Hindus set them on the Moslems in some ancient battle. They take different shapes and ravage people at night.”

Adelia leaned out and picked a lavender stalk, rubbing it between her fingers, looking around the garden to root herself in its English greenness.

“He’s clever,” the tax collector said, and then corrected himself. “No, not clever, he has instinct, he can sniff danger on the air like a rat. He knew we were after him, I know he knew. If he’d made for the Upper Nile, and we were sure he would, we’d have taken him-Hakim had sent word to the Fatimid tribes-but he cut northeast, back into Palestine.”

They picked up the scent again in Gaza, where they found he’d sailed from its port of Teda on a boat bound for Cyprus.

“How?” asked Adelia. “How did you pick up his scent?”

“The jewels. He’d taken most of Guiscard’s jewels. He was having to sell them one by one to keep ahead of us. Every time he did, word got back through the tribes to Hakim. We were given his description-a tall man, almost as tall as me.”

At Gaza, Sir Rowley lost his companions. “De Vries wanted to stay in the Holy Land; anyway, he wasn’t under the obligation that I was; Jaafar hadn’t been his hostage, and he hadn’t taken the decision that got the boy killed. As for Hakim…good old man, he wanted to come with me, but I told him he was too ancient and anyway would stick out in Christian Cyprus like a houri among a huddle of monks. Well, I didn’t put it like that, though such was the gist. But there and then I knelt to him and vowed by my Lord, by the Trinity, by the Mother Mary, that I’d follow Rakshasa if necessary to the grave and I’d cut the bastard’s head off and send it to him. And so, with God’s help, I shall.”

The tax collector slipped to his knees, took off his cap, and crossed himself.

Adelia sat still as stone, confused by the repulsion and the terrible comfort she found in this man. Some of the loneliness into which she’d been cast by Simon’s death had gone. Yet he was not another Simon; he had stood by, perhaps assisted in, questioning the raiders; “questioning” undoubtedly being a euphemism for torture until death, something Simon would not and could not have done. This man had sworn by Jesus, whose attribute was mercy, to exact revenge, was praying for it at this minute.

But when she had covered his clawing hand, the back of her own had been wetted with his tears and, for a moment, the space that Simon had left had been filled by someone whose heart, like Simon’s, could break for the child of another race and faith.

She composed herself; he was getting up so that he could pace while he told her the rest.

Just as he had taken her with him on his every step across the wasteland of Outremer, now she went with him as, still carrying his relics of the dead, he followed the man they called Rakshasa back through Europe.

From Gaza to Cyprus. Cyprus to Rhodes-just one boat behind, but a storm had separated chase and chaser so that Rowley had not picked up the trail again until Crete. To Syracuse, and from there up the coast of Apulia. To Salerno…

“Were you there then?” he asked.

“Yes, I was there.”

To Naples, to Marseilles, and then overland through France.

A more curious passage no man ever took in a Christian country, he told her, because Christians played so little part in it. His helpers were the disregarded: Arabs and Jews, artisans in the jewel trade, trinket makers, pawnbrokers, moneylenders, workers in alleys where Christian townsmen and women sent their servants with objects for mending, ghetto dwellers-the sort of people to whom a pursued and desperate killer with a jewel to sell was forced to apply for money.

“It wasn’t the France I knew; I might have been in a different country altogether. I was a blind man in it, and they were my knotted string. They’d ask me, ‘Why do you hunt this man?’ And I would answer, ‘He killed a child.’ It was enough. Yes, their cousin, aunt, sister-in-law’s son had heard of a stranger in the next town with a bauble to sell-and at a knockdown price, for he must sell it quickly.”

Rowley paused. “Are you aware that every Jew and Arab in Christendom seems to know every other Jew and Arab?”

“They have to,” Adelia said.

Rowley shrugged. “Anyway, he never stayed anywhere long enough for me to catch up with him. By the time I got to the next town, he’d taken the road north. Always north. I knew he was heading for somewhere particular.”

There were other, dreadful knots in the string. “He killed at Rhodes before I got there, a little Christian girl found in a vineyard. The whole island was in uproar.” At Marseilles there’d been another death, this time of a beggar boy snatched from the roadside, whose corpse had suffered such injuries that even the authorities, not usually troubled by the fate of vagabonds, had issued a reward for the killer.

In Montpellier another boy, this one only four years old.

Rowley said, “‘By their deeds ye shall know them,’ the Bible tells us. I knew him by his. He marked my map with children’s bodies; it was as if he couldn’t go more than three months without sating himself. When I lost him, I only had to wait to hear the scream of a parent echoing from one town to another. Then I took horse to follow it.”

He also found the women Rakshasa left in his wake. “He has an attraction for women, the Lord only knows why; he doesn’t treat them well.” All the bruised creatures Rowley had questioned refused to help him in his quest. “They seemed to expect and hope he would come back to them. It didn’t matter; by this time, anyway, I was following the bird he had with him.”

“A bird?”

“A mynah bird. In a cage. I knew where he’d bought it, in a souq in Gaza. I could even tell you how much he paid for it. But why he kept it with him…perhaps it was his only friend.” There was the rictus of a smile on Rowley’s face. “It got him noticed, thanks be to God; more than once I received word of a tall man with a birdcage on his saddle. And in the end, it told me where he was going.”

By this time hunter and hunted were approaching the Loire Valley, Sir Rowley distracted because Angers was the home of the bones he carried. “Should I follow Rakshasa as I had sworn? Or fulfill my vow to Guiscard and take him to his last resting place?”

It was in Tours, he said, that his dilemma took him to its cathedral to pray for guidance. “And there Almighty God, in His wonder and grace and seeing the justice of my cause, opened His hand unto me.”

For, as Rowley left the cathedral by its great west door and went blinking into the sunlight, he heard the squawk of a bird coming from an alley where its cage hung in the window of a house.

“I looked up at it. It looked down at me and said good-day in English. And I thought, the Lord has led me to this alley for a purpose; let us see if this is Rakshasa’s pet. So I knocked on the door and a woman opened it. I asked for her man. She said he was out, but I could tell that he was there and that it was him-she was just such a one as the others, draggled and frightened. I drew my sword and pushed past her, but she fought me as I tried to go up the stairs, clinging to my arm like a cat and screaming. I heard him shout from the upstairs room, then a thump. He’d leapt out of the window. I turned back down, but the woman hampered me all the way, and by the time I regained the alley, he’d gone.”

Rowley ran his hands over his thick, curly hair in despair at describing the fruitless chase that had followed. “In the end, I went back to the house. The woman had left, but in the upstairs room the bird was fluttering in its cage on the floor where he’d knocked it down as he jumped. I picked the cage up and the bird told me where I would find him.”

“How? How did it tell you?”

“Well, it didn’t give me his address. It looked at me out of that wattled, cocky eye they have and said I was a pretty boy, a clever boy-all the usual things, their banality made shocking by the knowledge that I was hearing Rakshasa’s voice. He had trained it. No, there was nothing special in what it said but in how it said it. It was the accent. It spoke in a Cambridgeshire accent. The bird had copied the speech of its master. Rakshasa was a Cambridgeshire man.”

The tax collector crossed himself in gratitude to the god who had been good to him. “I let the bird prattle through its repertoire,” he said. “There was time enough now, I could take Guiscard to Angers. I knew where Rakshasa was heading; he was going home to settle down with what remained of Guiscard’s jewels. So he did and so he has, and this time he shall not escape me.”

Rowley looked at Adelia. “I’ve still got the cage,” he said.

“What happened to the bird?”

“I wrung its neck.”

The gravediggers had left, unnoticed, their work done. The long shadow of the wall at the end of the garden had reached the turf seat.

Adelia, shivering from the chilly descent of evening, realized she had been cold for some time. Perhaps there was more to say, but at the moment she could not think of it. Nor could he. He got up. “I must see to the arrangements.”

Others had seen to them for him.

A sheriff, an Arab, a tax collector, an Augustine prior, two women, and a dog stood at the top of the steps outside the house as Simon of Naples in his willow coffin, preceded by torchbearers and followed by every male Jew in the castle, was carried to his place beneath the cherry tree at the other end of the garden. They were invited no nearer. Under a waxing, gibbous moon the figures of the mourners appeared very dark and the cherry blossom very white, a flurry of suspended snow.

The sheriff fidgeted. Mansur put his hands on Adelia’s shoulders and she leaned back against him, listening more to the cascade of the rabbi’s deep notes as he repeated the ninety-first Psalm than able to distinguish its words.

What she disregarded, what all of them paid no attention to because they were used to a noisy castle, was the sound of raised voices down by the main gates to which Father Alcuin, the priest, had taken his discontent.

There, having listened to it, Agnes had left her hut and run into town, and Roger of Acton had begun to persuade the guards that their castle was being desecrated by the secret burial of a Jew in its precincts.

The mourners under the cherry tree heard it; their ears were attuned to trouble.

“El ma’aleh rachamim.” Rabbi Gotsce’s voice didn’t falter. “Sho-chayn bahm-ro… Lord, filled with Motherly Compassion, grant a full and perfect