I remembered the blade that the bov Simon had been polishing, and wondered whether it had been his dead master’s. ‘Were his companions in the tent when he went?’
The man shrugged. ‘I do not think so. I saw Quino and Odard return later, near dusk. I heard they had been working near the bridge. The Provencal, Rainauld, I have not seen.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘If you remember any other facts which seem important, any other men or women who visited Drogo, you may find me in the Byzantine camp.’
The old man did not respond to my words – I guessed he would sooner seek me at the Caliph’s palace in Baghdad than in a camp full of Greeks. Instead, he gazed at the cloth I held in my hand, still stained with the rabbit’s blood. ‘Will you keep that?’
I looked at it in surprise. ‘If you want it . . .’
Before I could finish my sentence, his clawing fingers had snatched it from my hand. With a glance of gratitude, he pressed it into his mouth and began sucking the blood from the fabric. We left him to his feast.
I did not want to delay any longer in the Norman camp; we hurried away, back towards our own lines. I still had Drogo’s body in my possession, and I suspected it might benefit me to examine it in daylight before his companions buried it. We walked quickly, ignoring the angry glares that followed us.
‘You think the woman has something to do with this,’ said Sigurd.
‘I think the woman
‘Someone with whom armour might have got in the way,’ Sigurd suggested.
‘Perhaps.’
‘I guarantee you it was no woman who swung the stroke that killed him. His neck was almost cut clean through. Even a man the size of Bohemond would need a sound arm to manage it.’
‘A man aroused by passion might find the strength,’ I said.
Sigurd tipped back his head and laughed, prompting yet deeper scowls on the faces that we passed. Doubtless they thought we mocked them. ‘I see. Demetrios Askiates, the famed unveiler of mysteries, needs only an hour speaking with two men and a boy to discover all. Drogo and the woman were lovers; she came to his tent and arranged to meet him in that dell; he went there unarmed, but was ambushed by a rival, perhaps with the woman’s connivance. Find the woman, find the rival, and Normans and Provencals and Greeks will all be friends again. Is that your answer?’
‘It seems as plausible as any,’ I said testily. ‘I would have thought you of all men might favour a simple solution.’
‘Indeed I do. And I do not think you need invent a jealous lover to explain why an unarmed man was killed in a place surrounded by thousands who are impoverished, starving, and desperate. Would you ever walk out of the camp alone and unprotected?’
‘Of course not.’
‘He would not be the first from this army to be murdered for whatever gold he carried – he would probably not even be the hundredth. Franks or Turks, Christians or Ishmaelites: there is not one of them within fifty miles who would not kill for food.’
I sighed. ‘Nonetheless, for the good of the army, Bohemond demands that the murderer be found.’
Which in Sigurd’s eyes, I thought, was probably an overwhelming reason not to find him.
We crossed through our camp, to the lower slopes of the mountain which reached into the plain of Antioch. To my left, I could see the vast expanse of farmland stretching flat as marble to the horizon; on my right, on an outcrop above, the tower they called Malregard looked down on the St Paul gate. The Normans had built it soon after we arrived, and though it had been stout enough then, the winter storms had beaten it until its stones were black and skewed. It leaned off the mountain like a falcon on its perch, poised for the hunt, and even four months on I shivered every time I passed under it.
A little way north-east of the tower, beside the stump of a myrtle bush long since turned to firewood, we reached the cave. We had discovered it by chance when a troop of Turks had used it to ambush us; after we had defeated them, Sigurd had put it to use as our armoury. It had only been intended as a temporary expedient, to keep off the rain until the city fell, but as the months passed it had gained lamps, benches, and even a ramshackle wooden door hinged into the cliff. As we approached I saw a Varangian in armour sitting on a boulder before it, spinning his knife in the dirt.
‘Sweyn! Has anyone tried to disturb our Norman?’
The Varangian jumped to his feet at the sound of his captain’s voice. ‘Only one. She said you sent her.’ His words faded as he saw Sigurd’s withering stare. ‘She’s inside.’
Sigurd pulled his helmet from his head, but he still needed to crouch low to pass through the opening of the cave. Even I had to stoop a little. I followed him past the blushing guard, into the damp, stony air within. It was more a tunnel than a cave, extending some thirty feet back into the mountain, and I stepped carefully to avoid tumbling on the shields and quivers of arrows stacked across the floor.
The passage darkened near the middle, where the daylight receded, but it was quickly illuminated again by the lamp which had been lit at the far end. By its light, I could see the body of the Norman still laid out on the bench where we had left him, though the blanket which had covered him now lay in a heap on the floor. Before him, a slender figure with bare arms dabbed at his neck with a cloth.
She turned as we approached. ‘Demetrios. I feared it might be the Normans come to bury him.’
She spoke lightly, despite the debased corpse on the bench – but then, she was a physician, and must have seen equal horror many times in her calling. She was dressed simply, as ever, in a honey-yellow dress tied about her waist with a silk belt, and an ochre
‘Doubtless the Normans will come soon, once they discover where we have hidden him,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here, Anna?’
‘Seeing what the dead may tell us. Look.’
I stepped forward, pinching my nose against the odour of the decay which had already started despite the chill surroundings. I had not expected to find the man thus. Anna had stripped him of all his clothes, leaving only a round leather pouch on a string around his neck: the rest of him lay naked, entirely exposed in death. It would have been hard enough to stomach on my own, but to see it with a woman, and with Anna of all women, seemed deep sacrilege. Clearly the fire which had warmed his soul was long extinguished, so that his skin turned blue with cold – could the dead feel cold? – while the drying-out of his flesh had curled his limbs back like the edges of paper before a flame. I could hardly bear to look at the shrivelled, yellow-stained organs of his loins, nor at the blood-crusted rent in his neck, nor yet at the twisted pull of his face. I stared at his feet, and leaned on the cave wall for strength.
‘And what do the dead tell you?’ Sigurd at least could find a voice, though it was far distant from his usual thunder.
‘That he was killed by a mighty blow to the neck.’ Neither of us had the humour to mock the evidence of that statement. ‘What do you think, Sigurd? Was it an axe or a sword which struck that blow?’
Sigurd shrugged, reluctant to look too closely. ‘It seems too clean for an axe wound,’ he said eventually. ‘More like the slice of a sword. It was not a Varangian, though,’ he added more confidently. ‘We would have cut the head clean through.’
‘Only a knight would carry a sword,’ I said.
‘Or someone who had stolen one.’
‘Then there is the purse.’ Anna lifted the leather pouch over the corpse’s mutilated neck and pulled the string open, tipping a handful of silver Frankish denarii into her palm. The broad outstretched wings of angels were stamped on the coins’ faces.
I turned to Sigurd. ‘So much for your thief.’
‘He might have been interrupted by the boy.’
‘The man who inflicted this death on a knight would not have been troubled by a servant.’
‘More curious still are the marks,’ Anna interrupted. ‘Look at his brow.’
I held my hand before me to block the sight of the man’s eyes, which still stared upward at the rocky ceiling,
