A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

“It has,” Mansur told her. “There are more Christian churches and fewer mosques. Fewer synagogues, also.”

She hadn’t noticed until now, but he was right; the ringing from the bell towers was louder than she remembered it, louder than the calls from muezzin.

To Ulf and Boggart, however, the mixture was astonishing. “I thought King Henry was liberal,” Ulf said. “Look how good he treats his Jews, but this… How’d this happen?”

“The Normans,” Adelia told him. “The Normans happened.”

And hardheaded, cutthroat adventurers they’d been.

Of genius.

Led by a couple of land-hungry brothers, the Hautevilles, they’d hacked both Sicily and Southern Italy into submission, taking it from Arab domination. They’d then promoted Arabs to be their advisers, along with every other intelligent race that could be of use to them. Dissension cost money and men to put down, ergo the Hautevilles ensured that there were no second-class citizens in their new realm to cause trouble. Thus, out of it, they’d made a kingdom that outshone any other, just as Sirius put all other stars in the night sky to shame.

“Mind you,” Adelia pointed out, “it’s a volatile mixture.” Sicilians were prone to flashes of extreme violence in family vendettas. The occasional minister might get himself assassinated, not because of his race or faith but because he’d made himself unpopular. “And there are back alleys where it’s not safe to go at night-nor in daytime, for that matter.”

Let it only change for the better, Lord. Let it live forever.

At last they reached the Harat al-Yahud, a great gateless arch-for what did the Jews here need to be gated against?-with the Star of David carved boldly into its stone.

Adelia found herself trembling; beyond it lay another of Sicily’s many worlds, her world; a different smell, henna blossom and caraway seeds, all the spices of the Song of Solomon; children playing catch amongst black-hatted men with ringlets poring over chess tables, matchmakers bargaining as they drank kosher wine, the drone of the Shemoneh Esreh prayer issuing from the synagogues.

And kindness; as the child of a revered visiting doctor, she’d had blessings showered on her, not to mention sticky abricotines and barfi badam from every sweetmeat seller she’d passed.

She clutched Mansur’s arm as they turned in to a street of tightly terraced houses. “They might be here, they might. They could have come for the wedding.” She turned to Deniz and pointed: “That’s the house we’ll be staying in.”

The Turk was in a hurry to get back to the admiral, so he left them.

But the door that always stood open to patients, whether they could pay or not, when Dr. Gershom and Dr. Lucia were in town was closed, so were the shutters.

With tenderness Adelia put out her hand to touch the mezuzah in its little barred niche in the doorpost. “They’re not here.” She could have wept.

There was a shriek from next door. “Adelia Aguilar. Is it you, little one?” She was enveloped in plump arms and a smell of cooking. “Shalom, my child, you are a blessing on my old eyes. But so thin, what have they done to you, those English?”

Here at least was comfort. “Shalom, Berichiyah. It is lovely to see you. How is Abrahe?” She made the introductions. “This is Berichiyah uxor Abrahe de la Roxela, an old, old friend. She keeps the key to our house and is good enough to look after it in my parents’ absence.”

Berichiyah dressed little differently from Sicily’s other respectable women-here, as everywhere else, Jews mainly adopted the wear of the country they lived in. The chinstrap of a stiff linen toque encircled the ample wrinkles of her face; the crease of an enormous bosom was apparent above the bodice of a stuff gown, its skirt pinned up above a petticoat, but nobody could have taken her for anything other than Jewish, and she would have been offended if they had.

“Aren’t they here, Berichiyah?”

“They wrote they might be coming, but maybe, maybe not.”

There was something chilling in the “maybes” that caused Adelia to ask sharply: “They’re not ill?”

“No, no, not ill. In their last letter, both well.” Berichiyah changed the subject. “Wait now, while I let you in. How long are you here? I hope long enough for me to put flesh on your bones.”

She disappeared and came back with a key. “Go in, go in. Everything is clean, the beds are aired. I will fetch Rebekah’s cot for the baby, her Juceff has grown out of it. Ten grandchildren have we got now, Adelia. Six boys, four girls. And a great-grandson-our Benjamin married the ax maker’s daughter last year…”

Theywere swept into a dark, shining interior that smelled of beeswax and astringent herbs.

“Is Abrahe well?” Adelia asked.

“Not well, my dear, not well at all. Now he has the gout, poor man, and even your father can do nothing for it.”

Berichiyah’s husband had enthusiastically embraced ill health for years, teaching his wife to read so that she could run the date-importing business that he’d inherited from his father, leaving her, while doing it, to provide for and bring up their many children whilst maintaining the fiction, as she did, that he was still head, if the ailing head, of the household.

“Exhausted, the lot of you. You will want to be quiet tonight, so I will bring you some stewed kid and tzimmes, enough for all. You remember my tzimmes, Adelia? But tomorrow night you eat with us.”

That happiness, however, was denied them.

STILL WEARING THE sheepskin coats from Caronne, they went out the next morning to purchase badly needed clothes. Adelia took them to the market square in La Kalsa, the working-class area of Palermo, where Mansur could find new robes and headdresses and she and Boggart and Ulf outfit themselves as well as buy clouts and a new shawl for young Donnell-and do it cheaply

Borrowing from the O’Donnell had worried her but he’d said: “Rest easy now, I’ll charge it to King Henry.”

“Oh, he’ll like that.”

It was while Boggart was poring over a stall carrying a selection of bright secondhand skirts that Adelia, holding Donnell, became transfixed by the booth next door. Four marionettes were being manipulated by people unseen behind the backcloth of a tiny stage. Palermo was famous for its marionettes; her parents had bought her one when she was a child, a wooden, painted little knight that she’d ruined by operating on it.

Here was another knight, presumably the epic hero Roland of Roncesvalles energetically clashing swords with a frightening-looking Moor. What caught Adelia’s eye, though, were not the humanoid puppets, but a comic mule and camel chasing each other round the left-hand side of the stage, legs kicking, their mouths opening to bite and shutting again.

Allie would love them.

Whether she could afford more of the Irishman’s money to buy both for her daughter was the problem.

“One though, eh, Donnell?” she asked the baby, whose eyes were fixated on the bouncing puppets. “The camel? The mule?”

That was when somebody pushed something between Donnell’s shawl and her hand.

Automatically feeling to see if the purse at her belt was still there, she whipped round to see the back of a dowdy-looking man disappearing quickly into the crowd.

“What is it, missus?”

It was a piece of paper-a substance still virtually unknown in England-sealed with two drops of unstamped sealing wax.

“To Mistress Adelia from her friend, Blanche of Poitiers, greetings,” she read out. “Be at the Sign of Jerusalem in the Street of Silversmiths within the hour.”

The script was looped and cursive. “I didn’t think Blanche could write,” Adelia said.

“She can’t,” Ulf said immediately “That’s Scarry, that is. Lurin’ you to your death, that’s what he’s doing.”

Ulf was suspicious of all males who looked at them sideways and kept his hand constantly on the hilt of his sword-another gift from the O’Donnell.

“He wouldn’t have found us this quickly. I’d better go; Joanna may need me.”

“At a bloody tavern?”

“You do not go without me,” Mansur said.