A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

scrabbled for tubers in the blackened earth of their fields.

Rowley ordered a halt so that food and money could be distributed but he knew, as the victims knew, that Sept-Glane was dead.

IT WAS EARLY the next day after another night under canvas, that Ulf who’d been riding alongside Adelia, suddenly thrust his cross at her, got down from his mule, and ran toward a neighboring wood, clutching his stomach and vomiting.

Handing over the cross to Mansur, she dismounted and chased after him. The youth was squatting when she found him. “Get away” he groaned. “I’m dying.”

She hurried back to her horse for her medicine bag, passing other men and women running toward the trees on the same errand as Ulf.

By midafternoon the procession had been forced to halt as more and more of its people succumbed.

“You’ve got to find somewhere we can use as a hospital,” Adelia told Locusta. “And quickly”

“Around here?” The mountains on all sides, covered in the soft shrub that the natives called garrigue, were empty even of sheep.

Adelia pointed to a track that climbed to their right, eventually losing itself in distant trees from which issued a thin spiral of smoke. “Up there?”

She watched him put his horse at the hill, and then joined the emergency conference of bishops, doctors, chaplains, the Irishman, and Captain Bolt that had gathered in the middle of the stony road they’d been following.

Dr. Arnulf was shrill: “It is the plague. The princess must be got away immediately”

There was a squeak of alarm from Father Adalburt. “Plague?”

But Adelia had been asking questions amongst the servants, both sick and well. Yesterday it appeared, their ale had run dry and, while charity was being distributed in Sept- Glane’s fields, they had filled up a cask with water for themselves from one of Sept-Glane’s wells.

“My Lord Mansur doesn’t think it’s the plague,” Adelia said, carefully And explained, “Only those who drank the water are sick.”

There was a moment’s silence. Then: “Dear God,” Rowley said. “Richard poisoned Sept-Glane’s wells.”

“I’m afraid… Lord Mansur is afraid that he must have done.”

It was the standard practice of lords to deprive the enemy of fresh water during a war, an atrocity that visited more suffering on innocent villages caught up in it.

“It is the plague,” Dr. Arnulf insisted. “I shall accompany the princess and her household to Figeres. I shall administer my specific against contagion to her…”

The Bishop of Winchester fell to his knees: “God, God, how have we offended thee that Thou sendest this misfortune upon us?”

“How many of our people are ill?” Rowley wanted to know.

“Thirty-four,” Adelia said, “but Lord Mansur believes there will be no more. The rest of us drank from different ale casks.” (The elite had its own and better brew.) “If we hadn’t, if we’d drunk the water, all of us would be showing signs of the flux by now. Luckily, the princess has been unaffected.”

“We cannot take that risk,” Dr. Arnulf said, hurriedly. “I must accompany her to safety”

“Let him go, Rowley” Adelia said swiftly in Arabic. “He’ll just be a hindrance.”

“You’re going with him, I can tell you that much.”

An expression that Gyltha and Mansur knew well settled on Adelia’s face, making it squarer and heavier, a this-far-and-no-farther look. “I am staying with my patients.” Every word emphasized; she had failed in her duty to Brune, she wasn’t deserting again.

Her lover recognized defeat.

Locusta joined them, gasping from haste and with a young woman riding pillion behind him. “Nuns up there… Two of them. This lady is Sister Aelith, she says…There’s an unused cowshed…” He helped her dismount.

Sister Aelith bobbed to the company shrinking back slightly at the sight of Mansur-Languedoc’s occupation by the Moslem army one thousand years before had left a folk memory in which the word Saracen was still synonymous with ruin.

“He’s a doctor,” Locusta told her impatiently “Tell them, tell them what you told me.”

Sister Aelith bobbed again. “My mother says she is sorry to hear of your trouble and offers our old cowshed for those who are ill-she is cleaning it now.”

“Anything, Rowley We must get these people where I can treat them.”

Decisions were made, swiftly-the condition of the sick was becoming more and more pitiable and dangerous.

The princess, her retinue, treasure carts, and every healthy servant were ordered to go on to Figeres.

Dr. Arnulf couldn’t get them away fast enough.

Rowley was to help in getting the invalids to the cowshed and then maintain liaison between them and Figeres for as long as the illness lasted. Locusta was sent ahead to warn the town of the princess’s coming.

To everybody’s surprise-and Adelia’s distaste-O’Donnell said he, too, would stay. “For sure Lord Mansur’ll be needing another pair of manly hands. He’ll get two, for Deniz will be with me.”

The sick were urged up the track to what was to be their hospital-a transfer subject to pitiable stops that left an unsavory trail behind them.

Against a slope stood a typical Angouleme cowshed, with a half wall on one side that left it open to the air. Redundancy had tumbled one end to the ground, though the rest looked sturdy enough. Outside was a dew pond.

By the time Adelia and her patients arrived, the hard-baked earth floor had been swept and a woman, clad in black like the younger nun, was busily stuffing straw into sacks to make palliasses.

She came forward. She was a small, upright woman whose astute dark eyes, though she was not old, shone out of the deeply creased face of one who had been too much out in the sun, like winkles set in ribbed sand.

Rowley bowed to her and explained who they were and their situation. “May we know to whom we are indebted, Mother…?”

“Sister,” she told him. Her voice was unexpectedly deep and had the heartiness of a vocal slap on the back. “We are all brothers and sisters in this world. I am Sister Ermengarde. This is my daughter, Aelith. You need help? Splendid, you have found it. We are itinerants but, by the Mercy, we are settled here for a while. Since we keep no cows, this shed is at your disposal. Also, I have sent word to nearby villages to requisition every chamber pot they have.”

Thank the Lord, a practical woman. But even in her relief for a second it flashed across Adelia’s mind that there was something strange about the two nuns. To judge from their black robes, theywere Benedictines, but they wore no scapulas and their veils were merely scarves tied round their heads like those of peasant women.

Presumably they had chosen the religious life but hadn’t yet been officially incorporated into an order by their bishop. Peculiar, though, that they were itinerant; nuns usually stayed where they were put.

There was something else odd about them, something missing… Dammit, what did it matter? They were godsent.

The immediate concern was to get the patients cleaned of their vomit and bloody diarrhea; they’d need swabbing down and their clothes burned before they took to their clean palliasses, a process that necessitated a privacy separating the men from the women; in Adelia’s experience, embarrassment weakened a patient’s chance of recovery.

“Blankets,” she said, “and plenty of them. My lord bishop, if you would ride after the baggage train and bring some back…”

Rowley was off in an instant.

“… and fires. Admiral, if you and Master Deniz could start collecting wood.” She bowed to the elder nun. “Sister, I speak for my Lord Mansur who is the doctor among us…” and expounded her needs.

Within minutes, Sister Ermengarde had fetched what sheets and blankets she had and buckets of water were being lugged down from the well of the hidden convent higher up the hill.

Captain Bolt caught at Adelia’s arm. “Me and my men have got to go with the princess and the treasure,