A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

“Nor me.”

“Nor me.”

Adelia looked at Boggart. “We can hardly take the baby.”

“Well, I ain’t leaving him, and I ain’t leaving you.” She added: “And we ain’t leaving Ward on his own here, neither.”

Ah, well…

The Sign of Jerusalem stood, or rather leaned, end-on to the silversmiths’ street down an alley deserted except for a vulture energetically pecking at the carcass of a dead cat. It didn’t look like a tavern, more a shack due for demolition; the crusader cross on its sign was barely visible under peeling paint, and its shutters were barred up.

Mansur’s hand went to the dagger at his belt. Ulf drew his sword. “Don’t reckon this place gets much custom,” he said.

Ward made a halfhearted attempt to scare off the vulture but gave up when it ignored him.

The man who opened the door to Mansur’s rap wasn’t a landlord either, to judge from his tabard, which was embroidered with two golden lions bringing down two golden camels, the arms of Sicily’s kings ever since their conquest of the Moslems.

He stood well back to bow them in. “Mistress Adelia?”

“Yes.”

He picked up a lit lantern from a dusty table and opened his other hand to show Adelia a ring.

She nodded and turned to the others. “It’s Blanche’s.”

“And who are you?” Ulf wanted to know.

“I am your guide. Be good enough to follow me.” The man spoke Norman French with a Sicilian accent. He indicated an open trapdoor with a short flight of steps leading downward into darkness.

“We ain’t going nowhere less’n we know where,” Ulf told him.

“Really? It was understood that Mistress Adelia has an enemy and it were better her whereabouts were not known. Follow me, please.”

The steps were slippery. Ulf, still carrying his sword, went first, followed by Mansur, to whom Adelia passed down Baby Donnell before giving a hand to Boggart. They had to wait while Ward made an ungainly descent.

“Exciting this, ain’t it, missus?” Boggart said nervously.

The bravest of the brave, that girl. Adelia could only pray she wasn’t leading her into more trouble; this passage might be out of One Thousand and One Nights, but it could lead to a sultan angry at being given a damaged bride.

It was a long tunnel that led eventually to steps up into a garden and a grilled gate in a wall guarded by fearsome, turbaned, baggytrousered guards with scimitars.

Mistress Blanche was waiting for them, trembling with nerves. “He says he’ll see you, Delia. I haven’t told him, only that you saved her life. He remembers your father well. If you explain, tell him, then, perhaps…”

“Explain?”

Blanche grabbed Adelia’s neck with two hands as if she would shake it. Instead, she hissed into her ear. “The scar, woman, the scar. Persuade him, beg him, tell him how lovely she really is.”

“She is lovely”

“In our eyes, but he’s expecting perfection.” She fell back, crossing herself. “I can’t bear her to be rejected. Mary, Mother of God, let him understand.”

The guide was gesturing to them to hurry. Blanche, it appeared, was going no farther. In that case, Adelia decided, neither were Boggart and the baby; whatever was coming, they must have no part in it. “Look after Boggart and Donnell for me,” she said. “And the dog.”

Blanche nodded and wrung Adelia’s hand as if sending her to war, then turned away, dabbing her eyes.

At a nod from the guide, the guards opened the gate and they were in a pillared walkway running beside a little tiled square, like an atrium, with a fountain playing in it.

Into a great and gilded chamber. More terrifying but obliging guards, more chambers, until the last-largest and most gilded of all-from which, even through the door, they could hear the noise, like a thousand birds twittering at once in a giant aviary.

Adelia’s eyes met Mansur’s. She knew what was beyond the door; the kings of Sicily might be Normans, but they had adopted-and obviously still kept-this most Arab of customs.

The door was opened. Inside was an enormous room full of women, some of them elderly, most of them young and olive-skinned, all beautiful and all in billowing silk, for though the night outside the filigree bars on the windows was cold, these were tropical birds and were kept warm by fifty or more chased lamps and braziers.

Some lay on divans, but most were playing games or dancing or wheeling in acrobatics. Their guide stopped; he was going no farther. He put out an arm to halt Ulf, whose mouth had sagged open as he looked in. “Not you,” he said.

Mansur patted Ulf on the head. “This is a harem,” he said, “and you are a whole man. Enter, and these guards will have to kill you.”

Ulf was drooling. “Be bloody worth it,” he said.

He was left behind, and the doors closed on him as Mansur and Adelia stepped in.

The room stilled for a moment at the sight of Mansur, as did the chatter, but then the kaleidoscope came to life again, reassured by the presence of one who’d been instantly identified as another eunuch.

In one corner of the room, some of the young women were working at silk looms; it looked an incongruous activity amongst all this recreation, though the owners of the slim hands shuttling back and forth seemed happily engrossed in what they were doing.

A tall eunuch, who’d been strumming a long-necked lute, put the instrument down and came toward them, touching his forehead and breast. “As-salaam aleikum.”

“Wa aleikum salaam,” returned Mansur.

The man relapsed into perfect Norman French. “Lord, Lady, I am Sabir, most humbly at your service. And now, Gracious Ones, if you would be good enough to follow me…” He gestured to one of the harem’s older women. “Rashidah shall chaperone the Lady Adelia.”

Adelia had begun to wonder whether the king was going to receive them in the chamber to which selected ladies from the harem were summoned for his sexual pleasure, but the room they entered had no samite drapes, no couches, no erotic pictures. A magnificent, claw-footed desk stood in its center. Books and scrolls lined three of the walls, and a superb tapestry depicting hunters in full cry through a forest in which peacocks wandered covered the fourth.

This was the office of a Norman king, not an Arabian sultan.

But it wasn’t a king sitting behind the desk; it was a frog. The hood of a burnous framed features with the smooth, greenish pallor of an amphibian. Either the princess’s kiss to her king had reversed the fairy story, or this was not the king.

The man stood up, showing that he was squat. He salaamed, gesturing for them to take the two chairs on the opposite side of the desk, and greeted them in Norman French that had a lisp to it.

“May I present myself? I am Jibril, emir secretary to the Musta’iz, the Gracious One, who will join us in a minute. Lord Mansur, you honor us. As for the Lady Adelia, you have been much missed from this kingdom. The King of England’s gain was our loss; it was with deep regret that seven years ago I signed the permission to send you to him, knowing we were losing a most accomplished doctor and that our esteemed Doctor Gershom would be losing a daughter.”

He bowed. His eyes were the only things about him that weren’t froglike. They directed themselves from beneath the pouched skin like skewers.

Adelia bowed back. It was you, was it?

“May I hope that your return to us is permanent?”

“I’m afraid not. I have to go back, I have left my child behind.” She had a sudden fear that they weren’t going to let her leave.

But Jibril said: “So we understand. May you be happily and safely reunited with her.”

“Thank you.” They have spies everywhere, she thought, they even know