A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

Now, back at Figeres, he is levering out some of the nails that hold together a rough-looking cross. He is doing it quietly, so that no sound escapes from the spartan monk’s cell in which he is lodged.

He takes off the crosspiece and applies an eye to the resultant space. What he sees, packed carefully in horsehair, is a sword pommel gleaming with amethysts. Incautiously, he neighs with satisfaction.

There is a call from the cell next door: “Are you unwell, brother? I heard you cry out.”

“I am well, brother, I thank you. I was carried away by the glory of my God.”

“Amen to that. Good night, brother.”

In reinserting the nails by hammering them with his fist so as to make no more noise, he tears his hands, a fact that he only notices because he can smell the blood.

He doesn’t feel pain much anymore, does Scarry. On the other hand, his sense of smell has become excellent, returning him to his days in the forest with Wolf, when they could sniff their quarry through all other conflicting scents, hunt it down, play with it before they killed, and then dance in its split paunch, animal or human.

He puts his bloody hand up to his nose, just to make sure it is there.

With luck and opportunity, he should soon be savoring the odor of a woman’s burning flesh.

ADELIA HAD HER FOOT in Boggart’s lap and was hoping very hard that it hadn’t become infected by the thorns the girl was teasing out of it.

Ulf was pacing up and down, up and down, getting on everybody’s nerves. “There was some other bugger in the cowshed when they got us. He was looking for something while the bastards were tyin’ us up. I reckon it was my cross.”

“We know,” Mansur said wearily. “The one comfort is that he will be unaware of what’s inside it.”

Ulf turned on him. “But he did. I keep telling you, he asked for it particular. He knew. And he wasn’t one of them who took us over the mountains, he disappeared once they’d got us down.”

“Didn’t you recognize his voice?”

“No, kept his bloody cloak over his bloody mouth, didn’t he.”

“Leave it, laddie,” Rankin told him. “There’s nae thing we can do about it. For now, let’s save our breath to cool our parritch.”

What parritch was, Adelia had no idea, but she was grateful to him; the Scotsman was proving as firm a rock as Mansur.

A grizzled man with a face like a battered turnip. The march over the hills must have been hard for him who’d been so ill, harder for him than Ulf, who had youth on his side. All the way, he’d muttered strange and incomprehensible oaths to himself and his eyes under their curled, upsweeping gray brows suggested that, if his hands were free, his captors would be dispossessed of certain limbs, but, and this was strangely comforting to Adelia, he showed lack of surprise at the situation in which he found himself. Maybe life in the Scottish Highlands combining with that as one of King Henry’s mercenaries had weathered him against anything it could come up with.

When, just now, she’d felt obliged to apologize for it, he’d patted her hand and said: “Aye well, as we say back hame, a misty morning may yet become a guid clear day”

Ulf continued to chafe and pace. “There was something about him. Never saw his face, but the way he moved… I swear I’d seen the cut of him before. Jesus Christ, where was it?”

It was a rhetorical question and one he’d put so many times that nobody bothered with it. He gave up and turned his attention to the turret room’s two unglazed windows. “Both big enough for us all to get out, despite the mullions,” he said, “iffen we had some rope.”

They didn’t have any rope, and one window overlooked the square some dizzying hundred feet below, while the drop from the other one was at least fifty feet onto some palace roofs.

Now he was looking out at the square and adding a commentary to the sound of hammering and sawing that the others could hear perfectly well.

“Building a bloody dais,” he said bitterly “That’s so the nobs won’t miss anything, I suppose. Gawd, they’re putting canvas over the top, ‘case the bastards get rained on. Why’n’t they hang out some bloody bunting while they’re about it?”

The boy was torturing himself-and them-for losing Excalibur. Adelia waited until Boggart had bound her foot with a piece of cloth torn from her petticoat, and then hopped over to where he was standing. She put her arm round his shoulders. “We’re all tired, let’s get some sleep.”

“Only one stake so far,” he said.

She looked out with him; the stake stood in the center of the square, commanding it like a maypole. The piles of wood around its base formed a platform. Five other stakes were stacked ominously against one of the walls.

“Not us, then,” Ulf said. “Not yet.”

“It won’t be. We told them who we were. They’ll have sent word to Princess Joanna or Rowley-I told them he was at Carcassonne. The name of King Henry must carry some weight, even here.”

“Where’ve they put Ermengarde?”

“I don’t know.” The Cathar had been taken away immediately after questioning.

“What treacherous bastard gave away where she was?”

Adelia didn’t know that either.

“I liked her,” Ulf said.

“We all did.” Were talking of her in the past, she thought.

“You reckon as Aelith got away?”

“I think so. Dear God, I hope so.”

“What’d them women do to earn this? Apart from acting like Christians?”

“I don’t know.”

Eventually, Ulf was persuaded to lie down with the others on the floor.

It was cold up here. The five of them hadn’t even been provided with straw, let alone beds. There’d been no food, nor drink, either. The one convenience was a bucket that had been thrown in after them.

However, after that long and terrible march, the imperative was sleep; Mansur, Rankin, and Boggart were already succumbing to it. Watching Ulf’s dour young face relax, Adelia, agonized, thought of his grandmother and what she would say if she saw him now. And Boggart with the new life inside her… And Allie, always Allie. Are you asleep, little one? Don’t miss me. Be happy.

How had they all come to this?

Ever prepared to assume guilt, Adelia went over the circumstances that had led them here… back, back to accepting Henry Plantagenet’s commission in the first place… but she hadn’t accepted it, he’d forced her into it… back to the education and foster parents who had made her into a person ill-starred and at odds with everything the world demanded of womanhood… back to being born at all into such a world.

Boggart’s ministrations had eased her foot, but Adelia’s shoulder was hurting.

She untied the cord from about her waist and made it into a sling in which to rest her arm. Then, wrapping her cloak around her against the cold, she shuffled to find a comfortable position on the boards of the floor, and lay down, using Boggart’s now-ample rump as a pillow…

She was in a classroom back in the Salerno medical school and a high, pedantic voice from someone she couldn’t see was lecturing on the subject of burning at the stake.

“Better for the victim if the wood is piled high up to his or her armpits, thus providing a quick death from the inhalation of smoke…”

It was a relief to be woken up by the grind of a turning key in the lock of the door. The only light in the room was from the star-sprinkled sky outside the window. Two of the men who’d dragged them over the mountains came in. One had a spear at the ready; the other-he was the one who’d been kind to Boggart and given them