Ariana Franklin: A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

She wasn’t beautiful, he’d seen camels more graceful than her as she stumped along, glaring at fokking plants in case they’d be of use to her fokking patients. And never a look in his direction; the only smile on her for that fokking useless bishop, lighting up the world with it.

Why would I die for that one? Because, O’Donnell, you poor bastard, the moment you saw her, her dimensions fitted exactly into the empty space in your misbegotten soul, and there’s damn all you can do about it.

BETTER PLACED THAN all of them to have a view of the congregation below, another pair of eyes looks down from behind one of the artful pillars of the cathedral’s northern clerestory.

The monkish usher, who’d asked the eyes’ owner what he wanted up there and tried to impede him reaching it, lies on the steps of the concealed staircase with gushing holes where his own eyes had been.

The thing that had once possessed an identity of its own, and is now a dead man called Wolf, gives a red-tongued yawn. There is no need for him to concern himself; she will be revealed to him, just as the path that has led him to this place has been cleared for every step he’s taken against her in the last 1,000 miles.

He lets drops of the usher’s blood drip from his knife onto the floor, then peers into the congregation below. It is merely a matter of waiting. She will be shown to him.

IN THE ZIZA PALACE, Ward had been fed and watered-at arm’s length-by the servant Rafiq, and then shut in the Lady Adelia’s bedroom until she should return.

For a while the dog slept, then began snuffling at the door which, when it opened to allow a servant to come in with a duster and horse-tail polish, he slithered out of, unseen. He was good at slithering, an art that he’d perfected at the Ziza, where dog-hating servants tended to give him a surreptitious kick if they saw him.

Until he came to the entrance hall, he went unnoticed. Its great doors were open to allow fresh air through the hall’s tunnel vaulting and into the rest of the palace, though guarded by the scimitared sentries, men who, in Ward’s experience, were harder kickers than most.

He made a dash for it and, hearing the shouts behind him, skirted the pool outside at a speed that left him panting as he gained the slope to the busy streets. There the stinks were delicious. Flattening and weaving to avoid the boots of passersby, Ward enjoyed them, forgetting Adelia and adding his own contribution.

But now, ah, here was a scent he recognized; it wasn’t Adelia’s but one equally familiar and pleasing. The dog began the arduous job of detecting it from a thousand others so that he could trace it; sniffing, occasionally making a false cast, but finding it again, following the route that Mansur had taken to the cathedral.

THE BISHOP OF WINCHESTER was making the most of his allotted part in the wedding by droning Latin supplications at a length that matched the other Latin drones preceding his.

The mass of bodies in the cathedral was producing a heat that had encouraged an usher to open its doors in the hope that fresh air might dispel the sleep overcoming most of the congregation.

In fact, the only invigorating part of the ceremony so far had been when Duke Richard revealed the provenance of the sword he carried. He’d lacked grace in doing it but, adapting the words from the Book of Samuel with which the priest Ahimelech had given the sword of Goliath to David, he’d handed Henry of England’s gift to William and mumbled: “Ecce hic gladius Arturi regis. Behold, great king, I give you Excalibur.”

The woman next to Adelia had grabbed at her with hennaed fingers: “Excalibur. Did he say Excalibur ? ”

“Yes.”

“Arthur is here, then. Arthur has come to us.” It was a susurration on every breath so that, for a moment, the very saints in their plaques seemed to whisper a name that would make Sicily invulnerable.

Again, Adelia had looked for Ulf but, again, couldn’t see him.

After that, the ceremony once more degenerated into ordeal by boredom, and Adelia wondered how Joanna and William were surviving it on their knees, knowing, God help them both, that it was to be succeeded by another immediately afterward when they moved to the palace’s shimmering Palatine Chapel for Joanna’s coronation.

Adelia’s eyelids drooped and, being so tightly wedged between other women, she was able to doze standing up.

She woke up when a clear voice said: “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, take and wear this ring as a sign of my love and faithfulness.”

They were exchanging rings. Joanna was married.

Hopefully, Adelia looked to her left where the side door led to the cathedral’s cloister. Only a moment ago, it seemed, the afternoon winter had been shining through it; now it was diminishing into twilight. The day was nearly over.

Not the ceremony, however; the congregation wasn’t to be released yet; not until Joanna and William had signed a register of their marriage.

She felt a jab in the ribs from the lady next to her, whose temper, despite the joy of Excalibur, had not been improved by heat or overcrowding. “Is that you? Kindly control yourself.”

Adelia, equally irritable, denied any lapse in good manners. But there was undoubtedly a sudden and awful smell. She looked down at her shoes to see that they were being rolled on by Ward in his pleasure at having discovered them. “I’m afraid it’s my dog.”

“Then get rid of it before we all faint.”

Adelia managed to reach down and gather Ward up. The chance of reaching the side door through her packed neighbors seemed remote, but, though they tutted and exclaimed behind their veils, a waft of Ward sent the ladies stepping back on one another’s feet in their eagerness to clear an exit for him.

“You,” Adelia said, when she’d gained the cloister, “what am I going to do with you?”

She pulled one of her long silk sleeves out of her cloak and knotted its end round the dog’s collar. If he wasn’t to infect the cathedral again, she would have to wait until the service inside was over and the others could rejoin her, which might well be another half hour or longer.

The sky had turned gray at the onset of evening, with occasional gusts of wind that blew dust along the cloister; it would be a cold wait.

It was then that she thought of the marionettes at the stall in La Kalsa’s piazza. She could now afford both the mule and the camel, probably the fighting men as well, though Allie would be less interested in them than the animals. This empty time was as good a moment to buy them as any; tomorrow might be taken up with other matters, seeing Rowley, going home, perhaps.

Well, damned if she’d return to England without a present for her daughter. And La Kalsa wasn’t far away; she could be there and back in no time…

THE SUDDEN DISTURBANCE among the female guests had drawn attention to a woman leaving the cathedral with a horrible-looking dog in her arms.

On the men’s side of the nave, Mansur began struggling through impeding bodies to reach her, his flailing arms making a passage for Ulf and Dr. Gershom behind him.

Up in the clerestory, behind their filigree screen, Dr. Lucia and Boggart, with Donnell in her arms, started up and headed for the stairs.

The Irishman hadn’t seen Adelia go, but, alarmed by Mansur’s sudden movement, he began making his own way out.

From his higher position in the choir, the Bishop of Saint Albans saw all this, and something more-the shadow of a figure with a knife in its hand slipping along the clerestory.

I’ll never get to the side door in time.

Go the front way and the hell with everything.