Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

“Mead. You need a Saxon constitution to survive mead.” He pulled her to her feet. “Come along, you’ll have to dance it off.”

“I don’t dance. Shall we go and kick Brother Gilbert?”

“You tempt me, but I think we’ll just dance.”

The hall had been cleared of its tables. The gentle musicians of the gallery had transformed into three perspiring, burly men on the dais, a tabor player and two fiddlers, one of them calling the steps in a howl that overrode the squealing, laughing, stamping whirl on what was now a dance floor.

The tax collector pulled Adelia into it.

This was not the disciplined, fingertip-holding, toe-pointing, complex dancing of Salerno ’s high society. No elegance here. These people of Cambridge hadn’t time to attend lessons in Terpsichore, they just danced. Indefatigably, ceaselessly, with sweat and stamina, with zest, compelled by savage ancestral gods. A stumble here or there, a wrong move, what matter? Back into the fray, dance, dance. “Strike.” Left foot to the left, the right stamped against it. “Back to back.” Catch up one’s skirt. Smile. “Right shoulder to right shoulder.” “Left circle hey.” “Straight hey.” “Corner.” “Weave, my lords and ladies, weave , you buggers.” “Home.”

The flambeaux in their holders flickered like sacrificial fires. Bruised rushes on the floor released green incense into the room. No time to breathe, this is “Horses Brawl,” back, circle, up the middle, under the arch, again, again.

The mead in her body vaporized and was replaced by the intoxication of cooperative movement. Glistening faces appeared and disappeared, slippery hands grasped Adelia’s, swung her: Sir Gervase, an unknown, Master Herbert, sheriff, prior, tax collector, Sir Gervase again, swinging her so roughly that she was afraid he might let go and send her propelling into the wall. Up the middle, under the arch, gallop, weave.

Vignettes glimpsed for a second, and then gone. Simon signaling to her that he was leaving but his smile-she was being revolved with speed by Sir Rowley at that moment-telling her to stay and enjoy herself. A tall prioress and a small Ulf swinging round on the centrifuge of their crossed hands. Sir Joscelin talking earnestly to the little nun as they passed back-to-back in a corner. An admiring circle round Mansur, his face impassive as he danced over crossed swords to an intoned maqam . Roger of Acton trying to make a circling carole go to the right: “Those that turn to the left are perverse, and God hates them. Proverbs twenty-seven.” And being trampled.

Dear Lord, the cook and the sheriff’s lady. No time to marvel. Right shoulder to right shoulder. Dance, dance. Her arms and Picot’s forming an arch, Gyltha and Prior Geoffrey passing under it. The skinny nun with the apothecary. Now Hugh the huntsman and Matilda B. Those below the salt, those above it in thrall to a democratic god who danced. Oh, God, this is joy on the wing. Catch it, catch it.

Adelia danced her slippers through and didn’t know it until friction burns afflicted the soles of her feet.

She spun out of the melee. It was time to go. A few guests were leaving, though most were congregating at the sideboards on which supper was being set out.

She limped to the doorway. Mansur joined her. “Did I see Master Simon leave?” she asked him.

He went to look and came back from the direction of the kitchen with a sleeping Ulf in his arms. “The woman says he went ahead.” Mansur never used Gyltha’s name; she was always “the woman.”

“Are she and the Matildas staying?”

“They help to clear up. We take the boy.”

It seemed that Prior Geoffrey and his monks had long gone. So had the nuns, except for Prioress Joan, who was at a sideboard with a piece of game pie in one hand and a tankard in the other; she was so far mellowed as to smile on Mansur and wave a benediction with the pie over Adelia’s curtseyed thanks.

Sir Joscelin they met coming in from the courtyard where firelit figures gnawed on bones.

“You honored us, my lord,” Adelia told him. “Dr. Mansur wishes me to express our gratitude to you.”

“Do you go back via the river? I can call my barge…”

No, no, they had come in Old Benjamin’s punt, but thank you.

Even with the flambeau burning in its holder on a stanchion at the river’s edge, it was almost too dark to distinguish Old Benjamin’s punt from the others waiting along the bank, but since all of them, bar Sheriff Baldwin’s, were uniformly plain, they took the first in line.

The still-sleeping Ulf was lain across Adelia’s lap where she sat in the bow; Safeguard stood unhappily with his paws in bilge. Mansur took up the pole…

The punt rocked dangerously as Sir Rowley Picot leaped into it. “To the castle, boatman.” He settled himself on a thwart. “Now, isn’t this nice?”

A slight mist rose from the water and a gibbous moon shone weakly, intermittently, sometimes disappearing altogether as over-arching trees on the banks turned the river into a tunnel. A lump of ghastly white transformed into a flurry of wings as a protesting swan got out of their way.

Mansur, as he always did when he was poling, sang quietly to himself, an atonal reminiscence of water and rushes in another land.

Sir Rowley complimented Adelia on her boatman’s skill.

“He is a Marsh Arab,” she said. “He feels at home in fenland.”

“Does he now? How unexpected in a eunuch.”

Immediately, she was defensive. “And what do you expect? Fat men lolling around a harem?”

He was taken aback. “Yes, actually. The only ones I ever saw were.”

“When you were crusading?” she asked, still on the attack.

“When I was crusading,” he admitted.

“Then your experience of eunuchs is limited, Sir Rowley. I fully expect Mansur to marry Gyltha one day.” Oh, damn it , her tongue was still loose from the mead. Had she betrayed her dear Arab? And Gyltha?

But she would not have this, this fellow , this possible murderer, denigrate a man whose boots he was not fit to lick.

Rowley leaned forward. “Really? I thought his, er, condition would put marriage out of the question.”

Damn and blast and hellfire, now she had placed herself into the position of having to explain the circumstances of the castrated. But how to put it? “It is only that children of such a union are out of the question. Since Gyltha is past childbearing age anyway, I doubt that will concern them.”

“I see. And the other, er, condolences of marriage?”

“They can sustain an erection,” she said sharply. To hell with euphemisms; why sheer away from physical fact? If he hadn’t wanted to know, he shouldn’t have asked.

She’d shocked him, she could tell; but she hadn’t finished with him. “Do you think Mansur chose to be as he is? He was taken by slavers when he was a small child and sold for his voice to Byzantine monks, where he was castrated so that he might keep his treble. It is a common practice with them. He was eight years old, and he had to sing for the monks, Christian monks, his torturers.”

“May I ask how you acquired him?”

“He ran away. My foster father found him on a street in Alexandria and brought him home to Salerno. My father specializes in acquiring the lost and abandoned.”

Stop it, stop it , she told herself. Why this wish to inform? He is nothing to you; he may be worse than nothing. That you have just spent the time of your life with him is nothing.

A moorhen clooped and rustled in the reeds. Something, a water rat, slid into the water and swam away, leaving a wake of moonlit ripples. The punt entered another tunnel.

Sir Rowley’s voice sounded in it. “Adelia.”