“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 Figères.
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 Figères 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 Angoulême 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, mistress; they’re ill enough protected as it is ...”
“Of course you do, of course you do.”
“... but I’m sore concerned at leaving you without a guard.”
She smiled at him and pointed around her at a landscape in which nothing moved but hawks circling the sky. “Who’s going to hurt us?”
“True enough. Nobody ain’t even likely to knowyou’re here. Still, I ain’t comfortable in my mind. This ain’t nice country; got something nasty in its bones, I reckon.”
“We’ll be all right, Captain.”
He nodded. “God bless you, and God deliver my Scotsman.” Rankin, too, was among the patients, one of the sickest.
“I’ll do my best.”
He kissed her hand. “You allus do.”
Rowley also, was agitated at leaving her, but with the Bishop of Winchester near a state of collapse at this latest manifestation of God’s displeasure, he was the only capable Church official left to the princess. “Somehow, I’ve got to find out where Richard is. And find out where we are. And send back to Poitiers in case it’s had any messages for us from King Henry.”
“Go,” Adelia told him. “There’s nothing you can do here, in any case. I have enough men.”
He looked, frowning, toward the O’Donnell, who had already got fires going. “That’s what worries me.”
At the back of the shed, shivering male patients were washed down by Mansur and Sister Ermengarde—nuns being accepted as sexless—while in front of it a similar service was performed for the equally shivering women by Adelia and Sister Aelith, then the patients were put to regain warmth by the fires.
“You keep away Boggart.” Adelia wasn’t having her maid and the baby subject to possible contagion.
Inside, the O’Donnell, having sent Deniz to unpack their mule, had slung up a ship’s sail from the cowshed’s rafters to act as a partition and was collecting the timbers that had fallen from the ruined end in order to replace them.
Catching Adelia’s look, he swept off his cap. “Lady I’m a sailor and an Irishman, I can do anything.”
“Tormentil,” Adelia said, turning to Sister Ermengarde. “We’re going to need tormentil and lots of it.”
Armed with trowels and baskets, the two of them, accompanied by Boggart and Ward, began digging like badgers in a nearby meadow for the rhizomes of a yellow-petaled herb which, when shredded, powdered, and mixed with water, would provide the only astringent likely to act against dysentery.
“It is what I myself would have recommended,” Sister Ermengarde said. “And you have some opium for the worst cases? Splendid, splendid.”
Opium. For a moment, Adelia stared at this
Christian and then shook her warmly by the hand.
THE FERRYMAN’S DESCRIPTION of Figères as a town had been an exaggeration. Or perhaps the man hadn’t traveled much. It had a tiny priory, a granary and a water mill, some crumbling, corkscrew streets, and an equally crumbling, empty château above the river, and these, since they lay on the southernmost tip of Aquitaine and therefore constituted part of the lands of the King of England, had now been commandeered in his name. The Bishop of Saint Albans and Captain Bolt were in agreement that they would not take Princess Joanna farther until they could make contact with Duke Richard and be apprised of his situation. Their party, due to the absence of the sick, now numbered less than ninety people, too few to venture into disputed territory.
With this in mind, messengers were sent north, to Périgueux, to Poitiers, to civilization generally
All that could be done now was wait. The princess and her retinue were installed, though uncomfortably, in the château with the treasure chests, while Captain Bolt’s men, in tents, made a ring of canvas and steel around them.
The Bishop of Winchester and his chaplains and servants had to snuggle down in a priory whose prior and one monk eked out a living from the soil. Poor Prior James looked on as the royal sumpters examined its granary and barns, filled with the summer’s corn and hay and pronounced them able to feed the procession’s horseflesh for at least a fortnight.
For the first time in weeks, the work of administering to the princess and her train could be pursued in one place, so that Joanna and her nobles might pleasure themselves at leisure. She and her ladies cast their hawks upward at the myriad migrating geese flying overhead, the men went hunting or fishing in the Lot’s rich currents.
With all this to-ing and fro-ing it was possible for an individual to go missing for a day or more without comment....
SCARRY? HE ALSO has sent a message, a secret message carried by a well-bribed servant. A wonderful calm has descended on him as he sees the map of events that his Master has unrolled at his feet.
“Cathars,” he says. “O Great Being, thou hast provided Cathars for our purpose. They have been foretold, for who but You would have connived to put them in my way—and hers? It was Your hand that guided mine when I took her cross.”
For Scarry, though he has not traveled this remote area, knows its flavor. He knows that the Cathar heresy has begun creeping through it like tendrils of flame ready to burn it up and that the Church is afraid of its scorching.
He also knows, for they once met at a convocation at Canterbury, a Vatican-trained prelate who now, if Scarry’s memory is correct, serves the Bishopric ofAveyron, a diocese less than fifty miles away.
Scarry is not acquainted with the Bishop of Aveyron but he knows that man’s flavor, too, and it tastes much to Scarry’s liking. He is sure—for has it not been prearranged?—that his message to Father Gerhardt and his bishop will be received and acted upon with the enthusiasm belonging to all frightened, cruel, and self-serving men.
As for Excalibur, that lesser matter, it is as good as in Duke Richard’s hand already.
UP THE HILL, in the kitchen of the nun’s convent—little more than a cottage of milky gold stone surrounded by a large vegetable garden—young Sister Aelith and Boggart pounded rhizomes until their fingers bled. The dog Ward, having waited to be given food, had to go hunting for his own.
Down the hill ran a wooden gutter, constructed by the O’ Donnell and Deniz, bringing clean, cold water from a mountain stream.
Inside, the cowshed hospital echoed with cries. Dust-moted beams of light coming through its ramshackle roof fell on thirty-four prostrate men and women squirming in agony Bunches of lavender, peppermint, thyme, and rue hung from every available nail, and others were tucked into the nurses’ robes. Reed fans were needed to cool the fevered patients, all of whom had to be kept clean as well as being given constant drinks of tormentil infusion.
Filled chamber pots were hurried away washed, and brought back in an endless, exhausting chain.
Nurses fought for their patients’ lives; patients fought for their own—some harder than others.
The little laundress who had come across Brune’s body died quickly, as if the shock of that discovery had weakened her will. She was followed by the morose blacksmith who, of all the men—and men made up the majority of the sick—found the humiliation and powerlessness of his illness too much to bear.
Ulf, whose physical and mental constitution had been strengthened by his upbringing in the food-rich, dogged-minded fenlands of Cambridgeshire, bared his teeth like a tiger at the grim reaper hovering over him.
It was especially the older men with a background of poverty like the Scotsman Rankin before he’d become a mercenary under Captain Bolt, whose spirits wavered under the onslaught.
“Canna,” he said as Adelia, with one arm under his neck and the other holding a beaker to his lips, tried to force him to drink.
“Yes, you can.” She was learning to understand his speech. “And you’re going to. What will Captain Bolt do without you? What will I?”
At first, the sight of Mansur’s head with its kaffiyeh bent over them caused some sufferers to panic, but eventually his imperturbable calm soothed them and they clung to him in their pain. The Irishman, on the other hand, told jokes to the sick as he tended them and, though they grated on Adelia’s ear, they seemed to enchant both patients and nuns to the good of both.
It was a tug of war, and the strain for those pulling against Death on behalf of their patients tired them to the last fiber. Adelia and Sister Ermengarde rarely left the cowshed but took alternate rests on a hay bale when they dropped.
Rowley and a servant came every day from Figères, to bring bread and clean linen and so that those desperate to unburden themselves of their sins could do so to a bishop in case they went to their God unshriven.
Jacques the harness maker and Pepé, one of the cooks, died and were buried in graves that O’Donnell and Deniz hacked into the limestone of the hillside, but by the fifth day those who were going to survive were recovering including Rankin.
TWO MEN ARE meetíng by night at a quiet crossroads halfway between Figeres and the town of Aveyron. Their horses are tethered to a fallen walnut tree while they walk and talk, heeping their voices low even here, where there are only owls and foxes to hear them.
“All this can be delivered, ”Scarrysays, “for the Bishop of Saint Albans is Henry of England’s representative and he has been summoned to negotiate between all parties. What secret decisions are made amongst them I shall know of.”
Scarry is selling power, for knowledge of what goes on at the innermost conferences of the great is above rubies to those with ambition. And Scarry’s price is cheap, as he makes clear but insists on—fifty gold coins and the mere ruination of one particular soul.
“Unless that is done, your master can go whistle for news that will advantage him,” he says, pleasantly.
Father Gerhardt is aware that his master does not like whistling, nor will pass up an opportunity that may well prove golden, as well as delivering an old enemy into his hands.
“It shall be done,” Father Gerhardt tells Scarry. “And now, where is the bitch?”
Scarry tells him. Father Gerhardt’s bitch is not Scarry’s bitch. But since a burning always makes good entertainment, he will attend that of them both.
ROWLEY AND LOCUSTA brought visitors with them; Lady Petronilla and Mistress Blanche had come on behalf of Princess Joanna to inquire after the patients’ health.
Adelia looked up from spooning vegetable broth into the groom Martin’s mouth, to see what looked like two ravishing butterflies settling their wings outside the cowshed door—well outside.
Lady Petronilla stayed there, enumerating to the O’Donnell the gift of goodies the princess had sent. “Some girdle bread, fig and raisin custards—the Figères monks are masters of custards—oh, and some lavender oil to put on poorly heads.”
Damn, Adelia thought, I was hoping f
or some meat.
Blanche, however, ventured into the cowshed, a clove pomander held close to her elegant nose.
“There’s no plague here,” Adelia told her sharply
“It’s not a rose garden, either,” Blanche said equally sharply
It wasn’t, but it was clean and tidy. The rows of palliasses were now on boards with legs that kept them off the ground; there were fresh straw pillows for the patients to rest their heads on. Mangers that erstwhile cows had fed from were now lined with grasses and filled with dried herbs.
She resumed spooning broth into Martin’s mouth while the lady-in-waiting strolled along the beds, asking benign royal questions: “How long have you been a mule driver, my man. Really?” “I’ve seen you before, haven’t I? Hadwisa, of course. We’ll soon have you better, Hadwisa.”
She lingered, watching Adelia. “How many of our people have you lost?”
“We’ve saved thirty out of thirty-four, thank you very much.”
But it appeared that Mistress Blanche had not meant to be critical. “When the flux attacked one of my father’s castles, half the sufferers died.”
“Ah,” Adelia said, still put out. “I suppose he didn’t have a witch and a Saracen looking after them.”
Surprisingly, Mistress Blanche smiled. “Perhaps it would have been better if he had.”
Well, well, a compliment.
Adelia said: “The true saints are the two nuns who took us in. I would introduce you, but they’re returning some of the chamber pots we borrowed.”
“How tasteful. The princess shall be visiting you tomorrow, she can thank them then.”
When the two women had gone, attended by Locusta, Adelia waited until the bishop and his flock had finished their prayers, then asked him to bring strong beef broth with him tomorrow: “We haven’t been able to give the patients meat since we came; the sisters are vegetarians.”
Rowley nodded. “I was afraid they were.”
“Why? What’s wrong with that?”