CHAPTER 54
Faisal ibn Mansour, a Moorish physician in the employ of a Christian lord, Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar, had his mind on more pleasant thoughts than the stony route beneath his mule's hooves, when he and his escort came upon the scene of the massacre.
One moment, he was imagining the pleasures of home — the comfort of a couch, as opposed to the chaffing of this saddle, Maryam's quiet smile as she rubbed his feet, the laughter of their children in the room beyond — the next he was gazing at the bodies, strewn around the crossing place like so many discarded rag dolls.
'Allah be merciful!' he gasped, and drew rein so abruptly that the mule threw up its head and sat back on its haunches, almost unseating him. Kites and buzzards circled in the sky above, and as the new travellers approached the river, two black griffon-vultures took ponderous wing from the body they had been tearing apart. The birds flapped to the nearest tree and sat in the low branches, biding their time.
Faisal scrambled down from his mule and hastened to examine the bodies to see if anyone still lived. They were Christian pilgrims, he could see at a glance. Nuns and a monk, a minstrel, merchants and traders. Their clothing was sober, but of good quality. None of them wore a purse, nor was there any jewellery to be seen. There were hoofprints in the soft earth of yesterday's rain, but no sign of any horses. It was plain to Faisal that these pilgrims had been murdered by one of the bands of robbers that preyed on groups heading through the mountains towards the shrine of St James.
He shook his head in dismay as he moved from one to the other, laying his hand against their throats to check for the life-beat, holding a small mirror before their lips to see if they breathed, although in his heart of hearts, he knew that none would.
Generally, Faisal had an optimistic view of human nature. When you served such a man as Lord Rodrigo, whom the Moors knew as El Cid, you could not help but see your fellow man as worthy, but sometimes, such as now, the small, grey-bearded physician would wonder at the savagery which lurked in human nature too. Even with all his medical skills, it was not something that Faisal could cure.
Two soldiers of Faisal's escort had pulled some more bodies out of the water. A man and a woman, both of them arrow-shot. Shaking his head, tugging at his neat beard, Faisal went to inspect them. The woman had taken an arrow beneath the left shoulder blade, straight through the heart. Probably she had died even before she had hit the ground. She was slender, with a delicate, oval face and dainty features. The robbers had plundered her corpse as they had done all the others, but they had missed something. Her right fist was tightly clenched, and when Faisal gently prised it open, he discovered a small, jewelled reliquary pressed against her palm. The Christians, he knew, set much store by these objects, often reverencing them more than they did their God. He could understand that they were a focus and a comfort, but was glad that his own belief required no such props.
He shook his head over her body, and, having tugged out the arrow head, laid her flat and composed her limbs. Then he turned to the final corpse, and discovered with a sudden lurch of his stomach that the young man was still alive and watching him out of glazed, dark brown eyes.
'Bring me blankets, quickly!' Faisal commanded over his shoulder. 'This one lives, but I do not know for how long!' He knelt down in the grass beside the young man and laid his lean palm against the water-dewed neck. The pulse was steady, if somewhat slow, and was cause for reassurance. The Moor drew a sharp, curved knife from his belt.
'No, no,' he soothed, pressing down firmly with the flat of his hand as the brown eyes widened and the young man fought to rise. 'I am here to help you.' His tone, if not the meaning of his words, was understood, for the wounded pilgrim ceased to struggle and lay still except for the rigours of cold which shook his body.
Faisal eyed the two arrow shafts quilling the victim's tunic, one in the arm, the other in the side, and briefly deliberated whether to remove them, or leave them in situ. The one was likely to cause poisoning, the other excess bleeding, depending on angle and internal damage. He was accustomed to dealing with this kind of injury; he had cut his surgeon's teeth on just such wounds when travelling with Lord Rodrigo's army.
The soldier returned with the blankets. Faisal spread them over the pilgrim's right side, leaving the left bare to the exploration of his knife. The Moor cut away the blood-soaked sleeve, and slit the side seam of the tunic and shirt so that he could assess the damage. The arm injury was obviously a flesh wound. The tip of the arrow had pierced skin and muscle, but Faisal could tell from the amount of blood on the tunic that it was not too serious.
'This will hurt,' he said, and when the young man looked at him with a questioning frown, repeated the words haltingly in the language of the Franks.
The dark eyes flickered, the throat moved in a swallow. 'Do what you must,' the pilgrim said huskily.
Faisal gripped the arrow shaft firmly in his two hands and smartly snapped it off. The young man arched, his breath catching and then hissing raggedly through his teeth. Faisal reached into the pouch at his waist, withdrew a small flask, and removing the stopper, dripped a clear liquid onto the site of the wound which had begun to ooze blood under the movement of the arrow shaft. This time, the injured man's body leaped like a bounding gazelle.
'I am sorry to hurt you,' Faisal said, 'but this will keep your wound clean until I have time to probe the rest of the arrow from your flesh. I must look at the other one now.'
Faisal did not know if the pilgrim had heard him through the pain. His eyes were clenched shut, and his breathing was a series of unsteady sobs.
The soldier who had brought the blankets, a man in his thirties whose name was Angel, squatted on his haunches and looked across the body at the physician. 'Is he going to live?'
Concentrating intently upon his patient, Faisal did not look up. 'It is hard to tell. He is strong to have survived thus far, and he is conscious, he knows what I am doing and he is able to respond. It depends upon how much more punishment his body can take. He is chilled to the bone, and I can do no more for him now except remove the length of these shafts for travelling and keep him warm. I dare not start probing for the arrow heads out here.' Although talking to the soldier, Faisal was also talking out his thoughts for his own benefit.
'Will he be able to sit a horse?'
'He will have to. He is not heavily built. I will sit behind him on the mule and hold him in place.' Faisal's strong, brown hands moved dextrously to the second arrow shaft, buried in the young man's side.
Angel grimaced. 'Is he gut shot?'
'I do not think so, he would be screaming and writhing if he were, and his condition is too good for a man with a pierced belly. I think,' he added slowly, his words keeping pace with his examination, 'that he is very lucky. It is like the arm wound – through the skin and flesh of the side without touching any vital organ.' He broke off the second shaft, and then leaned over to sniff at the site of entry. 'I feared that perhaps the point had entered a kidney, but there is no smell of urine,' he muttered. 'Yes, it may be that he will survive.' Faisal proceeded to anoint the second wound with the clear liquid, and again, his patient reacted strongly, then shuddered and was still.
Angel looked anxiously at Faisal. The physician checked his patient's wrist and then the bare young throat. 'He is merely unconscious, and better so, I think, if we are to journey with him.' He fingered the rich woollen cloth of the pilgrim's tunic, typical of the finest fabric that the northern Franks produced, and then frowned as he felt something flat, hard and round under his touch. It was a token, or a coin of about the circumference of his little fingertip. He found more of them, identical in size, spread throughout the lining of the tunic. Robbers might have seized his money pouch, but it seemed that the young man was still not without his resources, and Faisal was willing to hazard that the coins would amount to a small fortune.
Angel had been watching the physician's exploration with ever-widening eyes. 'I wonder who he is.'
'If Allah wills it in his mercy, he will live to tell us.' Faisal rose to his feet, and tugged thoughtfully at his beard. 'He looks to me like a Frankish merchant, and a wealthy one. Nor would I say that the pilgrim road was his only business in our country. A handful of silver would be more than enough to see him comfortably to Compostella. I think that Lord Rodrigo should involve himself with this one.
Benedict tried to move and found that he could not. Someone had taken two nails, each a foot long, and
