Mistress of the Art of Death (21 page)

"Here," she said, "let's have a look at that confit of yourn. I got Matilda B.'s uncle in the kitchen; he's in the confectionary trade. Might be as he's seen the like."

It wouldn't do in Salerno, Adelia thought, as she trudged upstairs. In her parents' villa, her aunt made sure that servants not only knew their place but kept to it, speaking--and with respect--when spoken to.

On the other hand,
she thought,
which is preferable? Deference? Or collaboration?

She brought down the sweetmeat that had been entangled in Mary's hair and put it with its square of linen on the table. Simon shrank from it. Matilda B.'s uncle poked at it with a finger like pasty and shook his head.

"Are you sure?" Adelia tipped a candle to give better light.

"It's a jujube," Mansur said.

"Made with sugar, I reckon," the uncle said. "Too dear for my trade, we do sweeten with honey."

"What did you say?" Adelia asked of Mansur.

"It's a jujube. My mother made them, may Allah be pleased with her."

"A
jujube.
" Adelia said. "Of course. They make them in the Arab quarter in Salerno. Oh, God..." She sank into a chair.

"What is it?" Simon was on his feet.
"What?"

"It wasn't Jew-Jews, it was jujubes." She squeezed her eyes shut, hardly able to bear a renewal of the picture in which a little boy looked back before disappearing into the darkness of trees.

By the time she opened them, Gyltha had ushered Matilda B. and her uncle out of the room and then come back to it. Uncomprehending faces stared into hers.

Adelia said in English, "
That's
what Little Saint Peter meant. Ulf told us. He said Peter called across the river to his friend Will that he was going for the Jew-Jews. But he didn't. He said that he was going for the jujubes. It's a word Will can't have heard before; he translated it as 'Jew-Jews.'"

Nobody spoke. Gyltha had taken a chair and sat with them, elbows on the table, her hands to her forehead.

Simon broke the silence: "You are right, of course."

Gyltha looked up. "That's what they was tempted with, sure enough. But I never heard of un."

"An Arab trader may bring them," Simon pointed out. "They are a sweetmeat of the East. We look for someone with Arab connections."

"Crusader with a sweet tooth, maybe," Mansur said. "Crusaders bring them back to Salerno, maybe one brings them to here."

"That's right." Simon was becoming excited again. "That's right. Our killer has been to the Holy Land."

Once again, Adelia thought not of Sir Gervase nor Sir Joscelin, but of the tax collector, another crusader.

S
HEEP, LIKE HORSES
, will not willingly tread on the fallen. The shepherd called Old Walt, following his flock to its day's grazing on Wandlebury Hill, had seen a gap appear in its woolly flow as if an unseen prophet had called on it to divide. By the time he'd reached the obstruction it had avoided, the ongoing sea of sheep had become seamless once more.

But his dog had set to howling.

The sight of the children's bodies, a strange weaving laid on the chest of each one, had broken the tenor of a life into which the only enemy was bad weather, or came on four legs and could be chased away.

Now Old Walt was mending it. His dry, creased hands were folded on his crook, a sack over his bent head and shoulders, eyes like beads set deep, contemplating the grass where the corpses had lain, muttering to himself.

Ulf, who sat close by, said he was praying to The Lady. "To heal the place, like."

Adelia had moved some yards away, had chosen a tussock, and was sitting on it, Safeguard by her side. She'd tried questioning the shepherd, but, though his glance had swept over her, he had not seen her. She'd
seen
him not seeing her, as if a foreign woman was so far outside his experience as to be invisible to him.

This must be left to Ulf, who, like the shepherd, was a fenlander and therefore claimed a solid position in the landscape.

Such a weird landscape. To her left the land descended to the flatness of the fens and the ocean of alder and willow that kept its secrets. Away to her right, in the distance, was the bare hilltop with its wooded sides where she, Simon, Mansur, and Ulf had spent the last three hours examining the strange depressions in its ground, bending to peer under bushes, looking for a lair where murder had been done--and not finding it.

Light rain came and went as clouds obscured the sun and then let it shine again.

Knowing that a Golgotha was nearby had affected natural sound: the song of warblers, leaves trembling in the rain, the breeze creaking an ancient apple tree, the puffing of Simon the townsman as he stumbled. The crisp sound of sheep tearing mouthfuls of grass had, for her, been overlaid by a heavy silence still vibrating with unheard screams.

She'd been glad of an excuse when, far off, she saw the shepherd, the priory's shepherd--for these were Saint Augustine sheep--and had gone with Ulf to talk to him, leaving the two men still searching.

For the tenth time, she went over the reasoning that had brought them all to this place. The children had died in chalk, no doubt of it.

They had been found on silt--down there, on a muddy sheepwalk that led eventually to the hill. And, what's more, found on the very morning after the hill had been disturbed by an ingress of strangers.

Ergo, the corpses had been moved in the night. From their chalk graves. And the nearest chalk, the only possible chalk outcrop from which they could have been carried in the time, was Wandlebury Ring.

She looked toward it, blinking away rain from the latest shower, and saw that Simon and Mansur had disappeared.

They would be scrambling among the deep, dark avenues, made darker by overhanging trees, that had once been the hill's encircling ditches.

What ancient people had fortified the place with those ditches and for what purpose? She found herself wondering if the children's was the only blood that had been shed there. Could a place be intrinsically evil and attract to itself the blackness in men's souls as it had attracted the killer's?

Or was Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar as prey to superstition as an old man muttering spells over a stretch of grass?

"Is he going to talk to us or not?" she hissed at Ulf. "He must know if there's a cave up there. Something."

"He don't go up there no more," Ulf hissed back. "Says Old Nick dances on that of nights. Them hollows is his footprints."

"He allows his sheep up there."

"Best grazing for miles this time of year. His dog's with 'em. Dog allus tells un if aught's amiss."

An intelligent dog, and a mere lift of its lip had sent Safeguard cowering.

She wondered which lady the shepherd was praying to. Mary, mother of Jesus? Or a more ancient mother?

The Church had not managed to banish all the earth gods; for this old man, the depressions on the hilltop would be the hoofprints of a horror that predated Christianity's Satan by thousands of years.

Into her mind's eye came the picture of a giant horned beast trampling on the children. She grew cross with herself in consequence--what was the matter with her?

She was also becoming wet and cold. "Ask him if he's actually seen Old Nick up there, blast him."

Ulf put the question in a low-voiced singsong that she couldn't catch. The old man replied in the same tone.

"He don't go near, he says. And I won't blame un. He seen the fire o' nights, though."

"What fire?"

"Lights. Old Nick's fire, Walt reckons. The which he dances round."

"What sort of fire? When? Where?"

But the staccato of questions had disturbed the peace the shepherd was making with the spirit of the place. Ulf gestured for quiet and Adelia returned to her contemplation of the spiritual, good and bad.

Today on the hill, she had been glad that beneath her tunic was the little wooden crucifix that Margaret had given to her, though it was for Margaret's sake that she always wore it.

It wasn't that she had anything against the faith of the New Testament; left alone, it would be a tender and compassionate religion; indeed, on her knees beside her dying nurse, it had been Margaret's Jesus she had beseeched to save her. He hadn't, but Adelia forgave him that; Margaret's loving old heart had grown too tired to go on--and at least the end had been peaceful.

No, what Adelia objected to was the Church's interpretation of God as a petty, stupid, moneygrubbing, retrograde, antediluvian tyrant who, having created a stupendously varied world, had forbidden any inquiry into its complexity, leaving His people flailing in ignorance.

And the lies. At seven years old, learning her letters at Saint Giorgio's convent, Adelia had been prepared to believe what the nuns and the Bible told her--until Mother Ambrose had mentioned the ribs...

The shepherd had finished his prayers and was telling Ulf something.

"What does he say?"

"He's saying about the bodies, what the devil done to them."

It was noticeable that Old Walt addressed Ulf as an equal. Perhaps, Adelia thought, the fact that the boy could read raised him to a level in the shepherd's eyes that obviated the difference in their ages.

"What's he saying now?"

"He's saying the which he never saw the like of it, not since Old Nick was here last time and did similar to some of the sheep."

"Oh." A wolf or something.

"Says he'd hoped he'd seen the last of the bugger then, but he's come back."

What Old Nick did to the sheep.
Sharply, Adelia asked, "What did he do?" And
then
she asked, "What sheep? When?"

Ulf put out the question and received the answer. "Year of the great storm, that was."

"For God's sake. Oh, never mind.
Where did he put the carcasses?
"

A
T FIRST
A
DELIA AND
ULF used tree branches as spades, but the chalk was too friable to be raised in chunks, and they were reduced to digging with their hands. "What we looking for?" Ulf had asked, not unreasonably.

"Bones, boy, bones. Somebody, not a fox, not a wolf, not a dog...some
body
attacked those sheep, he said so."

"Old Nick, he said."

"There isn't any Old Nick. The wounds were similar, didn't he say?"

Ulf's face went dull, a sign--she was beginning to know him--that he hadn't enjoyed hearing the shepherd's description of the wounds.

And perhaps he should not have heard it, she thought, but it was too late now. "Keep digging. In what year was the great storm?"

"Year Saint Ethel's bell tower fell down."

Adelia sighed. Seasons went by uncounted in Ulf's world, birthdays passed without recognition, only unusual events recorded the passage of time. "How long ago was that?" She added, helpfully, "In yuletides?"

"Weren't yuletide, were prim-e-rose time." But the look on Adelia's chalk-streaked face urged Ulf to put his mind to it. "Six, seven Christmases gone."

"Keep digging."

Six, seven years ago.

That, then, was when there had been a sheep stall on Wandlebury Ring. Old Walt said he used to shut the flock in it overnight. Not anymore, not since the morning he'd found its door torn open and carnage in the grass around it.

Prior Geoffrey, on being told, had discounted his shepherd's tale of the devil. A wolf, Prior Geoffrey had said, and set the hunt to find it.

But Walt knew it wasn't a wolf; wolves didn't do that, not
that.
He had dug a pit at the bottom of the hill, away from the grazing, and carried the carcasses down one by one to bury them in it, "laying them out reverent," as he told Ulf.

What human soul was so tormented that it would knife and knife a sheep?

Only one. Pray God, only one.

"Here we go." Ulf had uncovered an elongated skull.

"Well done." On her side of the pit they'd made, Adelia's fingers also encountered bone. "It's the hindquarters we want."

Old Walt had made it easy for them; in his attempt to give peace to the spirits of his sheep, he had arranged the corpses neatly in rows, like dead soldiers on a battlefield.

Adelia dragged out one of the skeletons and, sitting back, laid its tail end across her knees, brushing away chalk. She had to wait for another shower to pass before the light was bright enough to examine it. At last it was.

She said, quietly, "Ulf, fetch Master Simon and Mansur."

The bones were clean, the wool no longer clinging to them, consistent with them having lain here for a long time. There was terrible damage to what, in a pig--the only animal skeleton with which she was familiar--would have been the pelvis and pubes. Old Walt had been right; no toothmarks, these. Here were stab wounds.

When the boy had gone, she felt for her purse, loosened the drawstring, brought out the small traveling slate that went everywhere with her, opened it, and began to draw.

The gouges in these bones corresponded to those inflicted on the children; not caused by the same blade, perhaps, but by one very similar, crudely faceted like the end of a flattish piece of wood that had been whittled to a point.

What in hell's weaponry was it? Certainly not wood. Not a steel blade, not necessarily iron, too roughly shaped. Sharp, though, hideously sharp--the animal's spine had been severed.

Was this where the killer's shocking sexual rage had first shown itself? On defenseless animals? Always the defenseless with him.

But why the hiatus between six, seven years ago and this last year? Compulsions like his could surely not be held in for so long. Presumably, they hadn't been; other animals had been killed elsewhere and their death put down to a wolf. When had animals ceased to satisfy him? When had he graduated to children? Was Little Saint Peter his first?

He moved away,
she thought.
A jackal is always a jackal.
There have been other deaths in other places, but that hill up there is his favored killing place. It is the ground where he dances. He's been away, and now he's come back.