The Serpent’s Tale

might be harsh for those at its bottom end, but it was at least a protection. Adelia, who had been brought up both protected and privileged, was being told what happened when order crumbled and civilization went with it.

“Nor it weren’t no good praying to God. He weren’t listening.”

Men gave way to basest instincts, Gyltha said. Village lads, decent enough if controlled, saw those controls disappear and themselves became thieves and rapists. “Henry Plantagenet, now, he may be all sorts, but with him a’coming king it stopped, d’you see. It stopped; the ground was put back under us. The crops grew like they had, the sun come up of a morning and set of nights, like it should.”

“I see,” Adelia said.

“But you can’t know, not really,” Gyltha told her. “Rowley do. His ma and pa, they was commoners, and they lived through it like I did. He’ll move mountains so’s it don’t happen again. He’s seeing to it so’s my Ulf, bless him, can go to school with a full belly as nobody’ll slit open. Bit of traveling? Few snowflakes? What’s that?”

“I’ve only been thinking of myself, haven’t I?” Adela 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 cock-pheasant 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.”

A scabbard 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.”