The Serpent’s Tale

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, hoof-prints, 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 said.

“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