The Serpent's Tale (24 page)

If she expected applause, she didn’t get any. But she smiled; she was sure of her charm. “My good and faithful vassal, Lord Wolvercote, is a man of war, yet he is also a man of love, as shall be witnessed by his marriage to one of your own within a day or two, a celebration to which everyone here shall be invited.”

That didn’t get any applause, either, but from somewhere deep within the congregation, somebody farted. Loudly.

The men-at-arms turned their heads this way and that, looking for the culprit, but, though a shiver swept through the crowd, every face remained stolid.

How I love the English,
Adelia thought.

The Abbot of Eynsham was on his feet, retrieving the situation by administering a blessing. At the “go in peace,” the doors opened and they were allowed to file out between a phalanx of armed men who directed them to go home without talking.

B
ack in their room, Gyltha tore off her cloak. “Are they all gone daft, or is it me?”

“They have.” She put Allie onto the bed; the child had been bored by the proceedings and had fallen asleep.

“What’s to be gained by it?”

“Infighting,” Adelia said. “He’s making sure he’s queen’s champion before she can get another. Did you see Schwyz’s face? Oh, poor Emma.”

“‘Queen’s champion’?” scoffed Gyltha. “If Godstow wasn’t for Henry Plantagenet before, it bloody is now—that’s what the queen’s champion’s gone and done.”

There was a knock on the door.

It was the mercenary, Cross, truculent as ever. He addressed Gyltha but pointed his chin at Adelia. “She’s got to come along of me.”

“And who are you? Here, you’re one of them.” Angrily, Gyltha pushed the man out onto the steps. “She ain’t going anywhere with you, you pirate, and you can tell that bloody Wolvercote I told you so.”

The mercenary staggered under the assault as he held it off. “I ain’t Wolvercote’s, I’m Schwyz’s.” He appealed to Adelia. “Tell her.”

Gyltha kept pushing. “You’re a bastard Fleming, whoever you be. Get away.”

“Sister Jennet sent me.” It was another appeal to Adelia; Sister Jennet was Godstow’s infirmarian. “The doctor wants you for summat. Urgent.”

Gyltha ceased her assault. “What doctor?”

“The darky. Thought he was a bargee, but turns out he’s a doctor.”

“A patient,” Adelia said, relieved. Here was something she could deal with. She bent down to kiss Allie and went to get her bag. “Who is it? What’s the trouble?”

Cross said, “It’s Poyns, ain’t it?” as if she should know. “His arm’s bad.”

“In what way bad?”

“Gone sort of green.”

“Hmmm.”
Adelia added her bundle of knives to the bag’s equipment.

Even as they left, accompanied by Ward, Gyltha was giving the mercenary little shoves. “An’ you bring her back as good as she goes, you scavengin’ bugger, or it’s me you’ll answer to. And what about your bloody curfew?”

“Ain’t my curfew,” Cross shouted back. “’S Wolvercote’s.”

It was in operation already. Ward gave a grunt in reply to the bark of a fox somewhere out in the fields, but apart from that, the abbey was quiet. As they skirted the church and turned up by the barn, a sentry stepped out of the doorway of the little, round pepper pot of a building that served as the convent’s lockup.

The flambeau above the doorway shone on his helmet. He had a pike in his hand. “Who goes there?”

“Infirmary, mate,” Cross told him. “This here’s a nurse. Pal of mine’s poorly.”

“Give the password.”

“What bloody password? I’m a queen’s soldier, same as you.”

“In the name of Lord Wolvercote, give us the password, see, or I’ll run you through.”

“Listen here, friend…” Avoiding the pike, Cross shambled up to the sentry, apparently to explain, and hit him on the jaw.

He was a short man, Cross, but the taller sentry went down as if poleaxed.

Cross didn’t even look at him. He gestured to Adelia. “Come
on
, will you?”

Before obeying, she stooped to make sure the sentry was breathing. He was, and beginning to groan.

Oh, well, it had been a password of sorts.

“I’m coming.”

S
ister Jennet was imperiling her immortal soul by bringing in on one of her cases a man she thought to be a heathen doctor. Nor was she doing it any good, either, by acquiescing to the presence of his “assistant,” a woman whose relationship with the bishop had caused speculation among the sisterhood.

Yet that same bishop during his visit had spoken of the skill and scope of Arab medicine in general and of this practitioner in particular, and if she was religious, Sister Jennet was also a doctor manqué; it was against every instinct of her nature to watch one of her patients die from a condition about which she could do nothing but a Saracen could.

The tug and counter-tug of the battle within her was apparent in the anger with which she greeted Adelia. “You took your time, mistress. And leave this dog outside. It’s bad enough that I have to countenance mercenaries in the ward.” The infirmaress glared at Cross, who cowered.

Adelia had seen infirmaries where Ward’s presence would have improved the smell. But not here. She looked around her; the long ward was as clean as any she’d encountered. Fresh straw on its boards, the scent of burning herbs from the braziers, white sheets, every patient’s head cropped close against lice, and the ordered bustle of the attendant nuns suggesting that here was efficient care for the sick.

She shut Ward outside. “Perhaps you would tell me what I can do.”

Sister Jennet was taken aback; Adelia’s manner and plainness of dress were unexpected in a bishop’s moll. Somewhat mollified, the infirmaress explained what she required of Dr. Mansur. “…but we are both imprisoned in the damned Tower of Babel.”

“I see,” Adelia said. “You can’t understand him.” Mansur probably understood quite well but could not move without her.

“Nor he me. It is why I sent for you. You speak his tongue, I understand.” She paused. “Is he as skilled as Bishop Rowley declared him to be?” At the mention of the name, her eyes flickered to Adelia’s face and away.

“You will not be disappointed,” Adelia promised her.

“Well, anything is better than the village barber. Don’t stand there. Come along.” She glared again at the mercenary. “You, too, I suppose.”

The patient was at the far end of the ward. They’d put woven screens of withies round the bed, but the smell coming from beyond confirmed the reason for Sister Jennet’s need of unchristian help.

He was a young man, his terror at his surroundings enhanced by the tall, white-robed, dark-faced figure looming over him. “It don’t hurt,” he kept saying. “It don’t hurt.”

Mansur spoke in Arabic. “Where have you been?”

Adelia replied in the same tongue. “Summoned to church. We’re under military rule.”

“Who are we fighting?”

“God knows. Snowmen. What have we got here?”

Mansur leaned forward and gently lifted a covering of lint from the boy’s left arm.

“No time to waste, I think.”

There wasn’t. The mangled lower arm was black and discharging stinking, yellow pus.

“How did it happen?” Adelia demanded in English—and added, as she so often had to, “The doctor wants to know.”

Cross spoke up. “Caught it under a cartwheel on the march to the tower, clumsy young bugger. Put some ointment on it, can’t you?”

“Can you leave him his elbow?” Mansur asked.

“No.” The telltale signs of necrosis were already racing upward beyond the joint.

“We’ll be lucky if we can save his life.”

“Why did the little woman not do it herself earlier?”

“She can’t. She’s not allowed to shed blood.”

The Church’s proscription against surgery was absolute. Sister Jennet could not disobey it.

Mansur’s hawklike nose wrinkled. “They would leave him to die?”

“They were going to send for the Wolvercote barber.” The horror of it overcame her. “A
barber
, dear God.”

“A barber who sheds blood? He need not shave me, Imshallah.”

Even had he been called in, the barber would have had to do his work in the kitchen to avoid offending God’s nose with bloodshed in the area of the sacred cloister. Now, so would Adelia. This added tussle of medicine versus her religion caused such turbulence in Sister Jennet that she made arrangements for the operation in a rap of furious orders, and watched Mansur carry her patient out of the ward as if she hated them both. “And you,” she shouted at the despised Cross, “you crawl back to your kennel. They don’t want you.”

“We do,” Adelia told her. “He…er, he knows the password.”

However, the procession of doctor, patient, doctor’s assistant, her dog, mercenary, and two nuns bearing clean linen and palliasse went unchallenged as it emerged via the door from the infirmary chapel and turned left toward the kitchen.

Adelia let the others go in first and caught Cross by the front of his jerkin before he could enter. She was going to need him; the patient would be less frightened if Cross, his friend, were present. She didn’t like Cross much—well, he didn’t like her—but she thought she could trust him to keep silent. “Listen to me, that boy’s arm has to come off, and I…”

“What you mean ‘come off’?”

She kept it simple. “There’s poison spreading up your friend’s arm. If it gets to his heart, he will die.”

“Ain’t the darky going to say magic words over it or summat?”

“No, he’s going to amputate, cut it off. Or rather, I am going to do it for him but…”

“Can’t. You’re a woman.”

Adelia shook him; there wasn’t time for this. “Have you seen the state of the doctor’s hands? They’re in bandages. You will hear him talk and see me work but…”

“He’s going to tell you what to do, is that it?” Cross was slightly reassured. “Here, though, what’s my lad going to do without his bloody arm?”

“What’s he going to do without his bloody life?” Adelia shook the man again. “The point is…you must swear never to tell anybody,
anybody
, what you see tonight. Do you understand?”

Cross’s unlovely, troubled face cleared. “
Is
magic, ain’t it? The darky’s going to do sorcery, that’s why the nuns ain’t allowed to see.”

“Who’s your patron saint?”

“Saint Acacias, a’course. He always done well by me.”

“Swear on him that you will not tell.”

Cross swore.

The kitchen was deserted for the night. The nuns prepared its enormous chopping block with the palliasse and clean sheets for the patient to lie on, then bowed and left.

Young Poyns’s eyes were goggling in his head and his breathing was fast; he was feverish and very frightened. “It don’t hurt. It don’t hurt at all.”

Adelia smiled at him. “No, it wouldn’t. And it won’t, you’re going to go to sleep.” She got the opium bottle and a clean cloth out of her bag. Mansur was already lowering her net of knives into the bubbling pot of water hanging from a jack over the fire; hot steel cut better than cold.

The light in the kitchen, however, was insufficient. “You,” she said to Cross. “Two candles. One in each hand. Hold them where I tell you, but don’t let them drip.”

Cross was watching Mansur raise the knives from the pot and take them out of the net with his bandaged hands. “You sure he knows what he’s doing?”

“Candles,”
Adelia hissed at him. “Help or get out.”

He helped; at least, he held the candles, but as she put the opium-soaked cloth over the patient’s face, he tried to intervene. “You’re smotherin’ him, you bitch.” Mansur held him back.

She had a few seconds; the boy must not breathe the opium too long. “This arm has to come off. You know that really, don’t you? He may die anyway, but he can’t live if I don’t operate right away.”

“
He’s
telling you what to do, though?” Cross had begun to be overawed by Mansur, who, with his strength, his robe, and kaffiyeh, was impressive. “He’s a sorcerer, ain’t he? That’s why he talks funny.”

“You’ll have to appear to be instructing me,” Adelia said in Arabic.

Mansur began gabbling in Arabic.

She had to work fast, thanking God that opium grew plentifully in the Cambridgeshire fens and she had brought a good supply but measuring its benignity against its danger.

The world shrank to a tabletop.

Since he had to keep talking, Mansur chose as his theme
Kit b’Alf Layla wa-Layla,
also known as
The Book of a Thousand Nights.
So an Oxfordshire convent kitchen rang with the high-pitched voice of a castrato recounting in Arabic the stories that the Persian Scheherazade had concocted for her sultan husband three hundred years earlier in order to delay her execution. He’d told them to Adelia as a child and she had loved them. Now she heard them no more than she heard the pop and crackle of the fire.