A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

“No.” She raised her head, and her voice made everybody jump. “The BASTARD.”

AT THIS MOMENT, Scarry, too, raises his head as if a bugle call from far away had suddenly cleared it of its worms. Into the holes they have made has come knowledge.

“I know where she will be,” he says to Wolf

“Where?”

“Palermo. She will come to Palermo.”

“How do you know?”

“Because that was the assignment Henry gave her, to look after his daughter. I read her mind now, Wolf of mine; she is a dutiful woman, she will not want to fail her king.”

“And we will kill her there?”

“Yes, my dear.” Scarry’s smile is almost sane. “As the armies of Octavian and Mark Antony met on the battlefield of Philippi, so we shall meet her at Palermo.”

THE TAX INSPECTOR WENT, expressing strong dissatisfaction with the paucity of tithes he and his men were taking back to their bishop.

Young Master Pons, once more situated in the window of Caronne’s church, had watched them wend their way down the mountain, his bell beside him in case the thieving bastards should turn around and come back.

They did not; they disappeared as the sun was lifting from the cold earth beneath their horses’ feet.

It was the next day when he saw another figure leading a string of mules coming out of that same mist. His hand reached for the bell, and then drew it back.

He slid down the ladder and danced hopefully around the visitor-sometimes this man carried sweetmeats in his pack.

Together, they went up toward the castle.

Adelia was already in the kitchen so that she could use it before Thomassia came in to prepare breakfast for them all, boiling into a thick paste the gel dripping from the leaves of aloe vera that she’d cut into a basin. One of the Lizier sons had whispered in embarrassment to Mansur that he was suffering from “an itch” without defining in what area it was plaguing him. Mansur had passed on the message and Adelia, hoping that it was merely a genital rash and nothing worse, was compounding a soothing ointment for it.

“Time we go, lady,” a voice told her.

Adelia straightened her back. The goblin shape of the little Turk, Deniz, was standing in the doorway. She looked for the Irishman behind him, but Deniz shook his head. “Admiral at Saint Gilles still. We meet him later. You all come now. Pack. Quick.”

Although there wasn’t much for them to pack, the farewell to Caronne took time; it was difficult to express sufficiently their indebtedness and gratitude to so many people, and painful to leave them.

“We needn’t say good-bye yet,” Fabrisse said. “I’m coming with you as far as Salses. I hold a small chateau by knight’s fee off Raymond of Toulouse down there-or, rather, my lord of Caronne does. Deniz tells me the O’Donnell has procured my silk in Saint Gilles and his ship will deliver it to Salses before he sets off for Italy Na Roqua’s daughter-in-law will wet-nurse my lord until my return. In fact, we’ll take a couple of the Roqua men with us to carry back some salt, our supply is low.”

There was one very hard parting… Adelia saw the grief of it in two faces.

Rankin was the last to join them. As he came slowly down the stairs, bagpipes under his arm, she faced him. “You’re not coming with us,” she said.

“What ye jabbering, woman? Indeed I am.”

“No. You’re going to stay here and marry Thomassia.”

A light came into the Scotsman’s eyes. “I’ll not deny… but it’ll never be said of Rankin of the Highlands he was a dairty deserter.”

“It’s not desertion.” She’d brought enough trouble on him. “You have been a rock to us. We love you, but we’ll be safe now and Thomassia needs you. This is where you belong.”

“Ay, she’s said she’s willin’, the canty wee girl, and I’ve become rare fond of this clachan, but…”

Adelia kissed him. “There you are, then.”

Standing on the ramparts of the castle with Thomassia beside him holding the Count of Caronne, he played a wailing lament on his pipes to the little party as it went trickling down the mountainside like a tear on a giant’s cheek.

THREE

Twelve

“WHAT IS IT?”

“There’s a light out at sea. Flashing.”

Adelia got out of bed and joined Fabrisse at the slit window in the upper room of the Chateau de Salses’s keep where it looked out on the Mediterranean. “Must be from a ship,” she said helpfully

“Of course from a ship,” Fabrisse said. “The question is, whose?”

It could be the O’Donnell, who so far hadn’t turned up. It could be friendly smugglers. It could be a less friendly force ready to invade the Count of Toulouse’s territory It could be decidedly hostile pirates intent on pillage and rape.

If it was either of the last two, the Chateau de Salses was not equipped to hold them off. In fact, Adelia thought, it couldn’t have held off a couple of determined winkle pickers.

The Chateau de Salses, originally a fortress, was even more dilapidated than the Chateau de Caronne. Beautiful from a distance, Adelia had to grant it that. As she and the others had ridden down the hills toward it on that first day, it had looked like a large crenellated pink cake against the chill blue water lapping its seaward wall.

On closer inspection, defensive walls of the same dusty pink sandstone crumbled into the moat around them, bridges sagged, while a weedy bailey contained a tall keep/watchtower with an unsafe interior circling staircase, and some reed-thatched stables and working quarters.

“I can’t afford to keep it up,” Fabrisse had said cheerfully, if obviously, “even though it provides most of my income. We’re nearly on the border of Spain here and out of the way, so it’s useful for smuggling, though not enough.” Feeling she hadn’t done it justice, she added: “But at some point B.C., Hannibal brought his army through here on his way to Italy.”

Perhaps the elephants trampled it, Adelia thought. There didn’t seem to have been much renovation since.

“They’re signaling,” she said now, watching the light appear and disappear at erratic intervals.

“Question is, who to?” One never knew who skulked in the lonely hills behind them.

Leaving Boggart to sleep on, they lit a taper, wrapped themselves in cloaks, and went cautiously down the staircase, trying to avoid its missing steps, to the bailey

Deniz, who’d been keeping watch, was in muttered conversation with Johan on the seawall.

And that was another thing; at the Chateau de Salses there had been no sign of the knight whose service in war to Count Raymond of Toulouse, when called on, was the fee Fabrisse should pay for holding the castle. (Knowing Fabrisse, Adelia suspected that she gave her rent to Count Raymond in other ways.)

What it had instead was a flock of goats, and an elderly man with shrewd eyes and a clutch of grandsons whom Fabrisse had introduced as “my bookkeeper, Johan”-a euphemism, as it turned out, for the manager of her smuggling trade.

“Who is it, Deniz?” Fabrisse called softly