A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

“Young Aubrey found him first and began calling the ‘Found.’ Jesus, it was a fiasco, that hunt. Raining, dark as the Pit, too many men scattered among too many sodding trees, not knowing where one another was, me trying to round them up.”

Rowley took off his cap to claw his fingers through his hair, and she saw that his face was pinched by tiredness and grief.

“Anyway,” he said, “I heard Aubreys horn and spurred toward it. The boy… he’d unhitched Nicholas’s foot from its stirrup and put the body on the ground. He was crying over it. There was this great splinter in poor old Nicholas’s eye, so we reckoned his horse had bolted and crashed him into a branch and that’s what killed him.”

“But you don’t think so now?”

“Well… there was Ivo, Nicholas, no time to think anything. But when I was sitting by Ivo, trying to make sense of it all, it came to me that if it was the branch splinter that killed Nicholas, there should have been a lot of blood- and there wasn’t. Dead men don’t bleed; you taught me that.”

“Something else killed him first?”

“That’s what you’re here for. And get on with it, they’ll be bringing Ivo here soon.”

Adelia pushed back her cowl. For a moment, as she always did, she knelt by the body asking its forgiveness for her handling of it. The soul that had occupied it was absolved; the dead were sinless-also they were her business.

Whoever had done the laying out of the corpse had made a rushed job of washing it; there were green smears on the skin where the knight’s clothes had been torn as he’d been dragged through grass. Stones and brambles had left long lacerations in the flesh.

“Give me more light.”

Hot wax dripped onto unfolded layers of the winding sheet as Rowley picked up one of the stanchions and held it nearer. From behind her, in the darkness, came the regular, musical drip of water into its bucket.

“Hmmm.”

“What?”

“This.” Her fingers had found a flap of torn, corrugated skin on the upper left back and, beneath it, a hole. This was what had bled-and profusely; the negligent layers-out had left crusts of blood around it.

“Here.” Adelia’s fingers investigated deeper. “Something’s embedded itself. I can feel wood.”

She looked up. “Rowley I think it’s a spear shaft, very thin but, yes, I’m sure it’s some sort of shaft, certainly a dart of some kind. It snapped off when he was dragged but this is what killed him; he was speared.”

His voice shocked the quiet. “Fucking poachers.” His fingers went through his hair again, and he said more gently: “Jesus God, such an end for a man like this.”

“What will you do?”

“Tell the abbot he’s a bloody disgrace, letting poachers roam his purlieus shooting anything that moves.” He went stamping around in the darkness, casting verbal damnation on villains who went out to kill other men’s game, describing in detail the unpretty end of this one if Rowley Picot got hold of him.

Adelia heard the bucket kicked to Kingdom Come and go rolling across the tiles. She’d been hoping to wash her hands in its water.

She let him rave. There was something particularly terrible about death by mistake, and it was difficult to see what else this could be… darkness, rain; a peasant-hungry perhaps-concealed and waiting in the undergrowth, listening for the sound of animal movement; hearing the rush of something big; then the expert and very lucky throw of a homemade spear…

Nor was it uncommon. Her knowledge of English history was uncertain, but hadn’t one of the Conqueror’s sons, what was his name, been accidentally killed in similar circumstances? In the New Forest, that had been. Rufus, that was it. William Rufus. A king, no less.

When Rowley had quieted, she asked: “Do you want me to get the spearhead out? I’d have to go for my knives.”

“No. Let’s give him back his decency” He came back to help her.

When the last wrap was in place, she stayed on her knees awhile longer.

She looked up to find Rowley staring at her and was suddenly aware that her hair was tumbled about her shoulders and that she was beautiful, because she always was beautiful in his eyes.

“God help me, girl,” he said, and his voice was raw, “but I’d tip this poor devil off his catafalque, throw you on it, and take you here and now. The hell with my immortal soul-and yours.”

“I’d let you,” she said.

But there wasn’t time; even now they could hear feet sloshing through rain and voices chanting: “… every tear from their eyes; Death will be no more…”

Rowley had the door unbolted in an instant, and the procession came in, carrying Lord Ivo on its shoulders. “… and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”

Adelia covered her head and stood by the door to let the monks go by, then slipped away unnoticed.

THE ABBOT HAD a bad time of it. While his bailiffs rounded up for questioning every man on his estates capable of throwing a well-aimed spear, he had to consult with the two bishops as to what should be done with the corpses. Sent home or buried in situ?

In the end, their hearts were cut out and placed in lead-lined caskets for their squires and servants to take back to the families. A messenger went galloping to Henry Plantagenet to inform him that he had lost two of his most trusted men.

The interment of the rest of the flesh was conducted in pouring rain in the Saint Benoit graveyard, where Princess Joanna wept for her knights.

As Sir Nicholas was lowered into his grave, Father Guy and Dr. Arnulf looked toward where Adelia was standing. The chaplain was heard to say: “I hope that female is happy now, for was she not the one who cursed this good man?”

WHEN THE PROCESSION finally set off again, now reduced by twenty or so servants, the absence of Lord Ivo and Sir Nicholas was palpable. There was a sense of unease, less laughter. For all Sir Nicholas’s funny ways, he and Lord Ivo had radiated the stability and authority of their king and the lack made everyone else feel less safe.

The Bishop of Winchester was the most affected. He was noticeably more nervous than he had been; the Young King had failed the princess, and nowhere was tragedy come upon them. Echoing the words of his erstwhile host, he said: “Surely, we are accursed,” and confided to his intimates that he was beginning to believe that God was displeased with their enterprise.

This was passed along the line, where ill-wishers like Father Guy, the princess’s nurse, Edeva, and the head laundress, Brune, pointed out that of course God was displeased. Were they not sheltering in their company not only one of His avowed enemies, a Saracen, but his woman, who seemed to have the power to bring destruction on such men and animals who crossed her?

THE PROCESSION WAS now entering Aquitaine, the duchy named for its waters that had been Eleanor’s and which, after her marriage, had been passed to Henry Plantagenet, and which, since her imprisonment, was under the governorship of their second son, Duke Richard.

The weather cleared so that the sun shone, as if it could do no less for the daughter of the land’s beloved duchess.

Even the Bishop of Winchester cheered up. “We shall be safe now. The lionhearted duke meets us at Poitiers.”

There would be no lack of knights with Richard escorting his sister to Sicily he kept hundreds by him-not for the pretend war of tournaments, like his brother, but so that one day he could lead them to the real thing, crusade.

“Mad for it,” Rowley said of him, grimacing; he was no enthusiast for crusading, nor for Richard himself. “But first he’s got to pacify southern Aquitaine-and serve him right, he stirred it up in the first place. He thought its barons were being loyal to him when he led them against his father. In fact, of course, it was their chance to grab