01 - Murder in the Holy City

by Simon Beaufort

  Geoffrey looked away. She had a point. “May I ask my questions now?”

  “You may not!” she spat. “You did not believe me yesterday, and I have no wish to convince you today. Ask Lord Tancred, for I spoke with him at length. And ask the Patriarch, another with whom I conversed long and hard.”

  “I would rather hear what you have to say from yourself,” said Geoffrey.

  At his side, Roger gave a warning cough, and Geoffrey saw that people were beginning to gather in the street. He cursed himself for a fool. He should have anticipated the woman’s welcome would be far from friendly, and brought a larger force. The dog, sensing the menace in the air, began a low whining, and Geoffrey wondered how he had managed to acquire an animal to whom cowardice came so naturally. It slunk against the side of the building and rolled its eyes pathetically.

  “This could get nasty,” muttered Roger, fingering the hilt of his sword but not drawing it. “I wonder whether Courrances will ride by and rescue you a second time.”

  Geoffrey glanced behind him and saw that the crowd was beginning to edge closer. Unlike the day before, he and his men numbered only four, and this time none had bows. The crowd, growing by the moment, was already upward of thirty, and many carried weapons. The riot of the previous day, when those who were unarmed had been killed, had obviously been a bitter lesson, and they were now better prepared for their second encounter with the hated Crusaders.

  Geoffrey turned back to Melisende, his mind racing. “Would you have us cut down on your doorstep?”

  She shrugged. “You were quite happy to condemn me to the Patriarch’s dungeons, and to believe I was the murderer of that poor knight. Why should I be sorry to have my revenge?”

  They would find no mercy there. Geoffrey turned from her and drew his sword as the mob drew closer. His colleagues followed suit and drew theirs, standing in a line and preparing to sell their lives dearly. At least it is better than being trampled by Courrances’s destrier, Geoffrey thought irrelevantly. He took a deep breath and faced the crowd steadily.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Stop!” Melisende’s voice cut clearly through the ominous silence preceding the fight that was about to begin. “There has been enough killing here already.”

  “And it was all his fault,” cried a man with a long, curly beard pointing at Geoffrey. “He deserves to die.”

  “So he might,” replied Melisende. “But he is likely to take you with him. And more of your family and friends. He is a Norman knight and far more skilled at fighting than you. He may even escape and leave you dead behind him.”

  There was a mutter of consternation among the people, and a hurried exchange of views.

  “We will let the other three go if he stays,” said the man with the beard, indicating Geoffrey.

  Melisende looked at Geoffrey and raised her eyebrows in an unspoken question. He considered for a moment and then nodded at the bearded man. The chances of the four of them surviving an attack by the mob were not significantly greater than him alone, but if Geoffrey could keep them occupied, Roger might have sufficient time to fetch help from the citadel. Next to him, Roger, Helbye, and Fletcher, understanding nothing of the exchange in Greek, looked bewildered.

  “Go,” said Geoffrey to them. “They will not harm you. Fetch help from the citadel.”

  “Are you staying?” asked Roger, confused. “Will she talk to you?”

  “Yes, but not with you here. Go.”

  Roger shook his head. “Oh, no! I do not like this at all, lad. I do not trust her or them. As soon as we are gone, they will turn on you like savages.”

  Geoffrey squeezed his shoulder. “They will not. I can keep them talking while you fetch help.”

  “You are a dreadful liar, Geoff,” said Roger, standing firm. “I will not leave without you.”

  “Well, she will not talk to me as long as you are here. Take Helbye and Fletcher and go. Bring Hugh with the men who are practising in the bailey.”

  Reluctantly, Roger let his sword drop, and he motioned to the others to put away their weapons. Fletcher and Helbye exchanged a look of mutual incomprehension, and lowered their swords, although they certainly had no intention of sheathing them.

  Melisende eyed Geoffrey in amazement. “You know they will kill you,” she said in Greek. “You must have been walking in the heat too long.”

  “Let the others go,” said Geoffrey to the bearded man. “I will stay.”

  The bearded man nodded agreement, and Geoffrey gave Roger a shove to set him on his way. Unhappily, Roger began to walk, Fletcher and Helbye following, white-faced but steady. The dog looked at Geoffrey, seemed to hesitate, and then, sensing which option was safest, slunk after the others. The crowd parted to let them through. Geoffrey watched until they had rounded the corner, and turned to face the people, sword at the ready. Perhaps he was destined to be torn apart by a mob after all.

  The crowd was still, regarding him silently. He stared back at them, and found that most were unable to meet his eyes. He felt sweat coursing down his back as the sun blazed down, and wondered how he might distract them for sufficient time to allow Roger to dash to the citadel for reinforcements. But already the hostility emanating from the crowd had lessened, and here and there, people had put their weapons away. Geoffrey wondered why. He was alone and surely could not present that formidable a target.

  “What are you waiting for?” he asked of the bearded man.

  “We must stop this,” the man said, so softly that Geoffrey thought he had misheard. He turned to the people around him. “Go home. This is not how we behave. We are not Crusaders!”

  For a moment, nothing happened, and then an old lady at the front turned and began to walk back up the street. The sound of a door closing after her was as loud as a clap of thunder in the following silence. Then the bearded man pushed through the crowd and walked away. Others followed, some gratefully relieved that trouble had been averted, and others clearly disappointed in their plans for revenge. It was not long before Geoffrey stood alone in the empty street.

  “You were lucky, Norman!” said Melisende behind him, leaning up against the doorjamb and folding her arms. “You should be thankful these are God-fearing people and not like the unholy rabble you call knights, or you would be dead by now.”

  Geoffrey swallowed, and felt a weakness in his knees. He wondered whether he would have the strength to find Roger before the large Englishman descended on the street with all the fury the citadel could muster. He was surprised to find his hands were unsteady, something that seldom happened, even after the most bloody of battles.

  “You are in no danger now,” she said, indicating the deserted street with a nod of her head. “You can leave.”

  “Will you answer my questions first?” he asked.

  She put her hands on her hips and gazed at him in disbelief, before letting out a great peal of laughter. Geoffrey felt the unsteadiness in his limbs begin to recede as irritation took over.

  “You are incorrigible!” she said. “You are delivered from the jaws of death by a whisker, and you persist in pursuing the very path that led you there in the first place. Very well. What do you want to know?”

  It took a moment for Geoffrey to bring his mind back to the business at hand, and he thrust his hands through the slits in the sides of his surcoat lest their trembling should reveal to Melisende how shaken he was. He took a couple of steps away from her, so that anyone still watching him from the dispersed crowd could not misconstrue their conversation for one that might be considered threatening.

  “You say you went out to see your uncle, and when you returned, John—the knight—was dead in your house?”

  “Yes,” she replied, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “That has not changed since yesterday.”

  “Tell me again what you did when you came home.” He wanted to know whether she had pulled the dagger from the body in horror, as suggested by Hugh, or whether it had been beside the body on the floor.

  �
�I went to pour water to clean my feet,” she said, with a heavy sigh, “as I told you yesterday. They were hot and dusty after walking through the city. Then I drank some wine and walked upstairs. The body was, as you saw, lying on its stomach. It was like a nightmare, like something from the scenes when the Crusaders took Jerusalem and killed so many people. I could not believe it was real, and I wondered whether someone might be playing some dreadful practical joke. I took the dagger in my hands and pulled, to see if it were really embedded in his back as it seemed, or whether it was cunningly arranged to look so. I saw it was real, and then I ran outside to call for help.”

  “What happened to the dagger?”

  She frowned. “I do not remember. Perhaps I dropped it in the bedchamber. No! I must have carried it with me. I think I flung it from me at some point.”

  “So where is it now?”

  She glanced around, as though it might appear on the ground in the street. “I have no idea. Someone must have picked it up.”

  “For what purpose?”

  She eyed him sceptically. “I imagine to sell. A year ago, these people lost most of their possessions to looters. Who can blame them if they took the dagger? It was a horrible thing, anyway, covered in big, ugly jewels. Like something a Norman might own,” she added defiantly.

  “It had a curved blade,” said Geoffrey, “and Norman blades are generally straight. I would show you mine if I did not think your neighbours would misread the gesture and rush out to kill me.”

  She looked at him in surprise and laughed again. Geoffrey looked at her closely for the first time, suddenly aware that she was an attractive woman. She had straight black hair that fell like a curtain down her back, longer than the veil she wore over it, and her eyes were light brown, like honey. When she laughed, and the hard lines around her eyes and mouth disappeared, she looked very young, although Geoffrey judged her to be in her mid-twenties.

  “They would not harm you now,” she said. “Your courage in saving your friends shamed them into letting you go.”

  “I was sending them for help,” he said. “Do you know no French at all?”

  “Enough to know you are not being wholly truthful,” she said. “You must have known that you would have been dead long before your friends had time to run to the citadel and return with help.”

  Geoffrey knew no such thing, since he had detected a hesitancy in the crowd from the start, and had been fairly certain he could stall them from attacking until Roger returned. But Melisende’s conviction that he could not made him wonder whether he had been overconfident in his negotiating abilities. Still, he thought to himself, at least he would have delivered Roger and the others from an unpleasant fate had the crowd not shown such unprecedented morality.

  “How do you come to know Greek?” Melisende asked. “It is not a skill most of the barbarians in the citadel possess.”

  “I learned it in Constantinople,” he said, wondering whether Roger had reached the citadel and thinking that he might well miss him if they chose to travel different routes. Then Roger would attack the street, and there would be more killing and looting.

  “While you were sacking it?” she asked, the laughter gone from her face again.

  “No. I find learning conjugations while I pillage very distracting,” he replied. “I visited Constantinople long before the Crusaders went there. And why are you here? When did you come?”

  “What has this to do with the dead knight?” she said abruptly. She stared at him for a moment. “You may be courageous, and you may be able to learn the languages of the people you oppress, but you are still a Norman, and you still condemned me to the Patriarch’s dungeons without a second’s hesitation. If that poor monk had not been killed when I was incarcerated, I might have been executed as a murderer by now. Had you thought of that? I was innocent! And please do not patronise me by saying that if I were innocent I had nothing to fear. You know as well as I do that innocence or guilt is immaterial once the doors close behind a prisoner in this city!”

  “Quite a speech,” he said, deliberately casual to annoy her. The fact that she was correct was beside the point. He wondered what had happened to Melisende Mikelos to make her so aggressive and disagreeable. He had the feeling that she was somewhat disappointed that the crowd had backed away from attacking him, despite her paltry attempts to dissuade them. He had been wrong in arresting her the day before—clearly he had, since she seemed to be innocent of the charge of murder—yet the feeling that she had not been entirely truthful with him persisted. But regardless, he knew he would gain nothing of value from her, and it would be prudent to leave before they annoyed each other any further.

  He gave her one of his most winning smiles. “Thank you for your help. I hope this is the last you will hear of this affair. Goodbye.”

  He gave her a small bow and turned, leaving her standing on her doorstep, her temper boiling at the way in which he had dismissed her grievance so casually. She watched him walk away, aware that all along the street others watched too, some glad they had not killed a knight with the inevitable retribution it would have brought, and others bitterly resentful they had not dispatched all four of them while they had the chance.

  What an irritating, arrogant man, she thought, noting the confident stride all Norman nobles seemed to master from birth. But at least he had talked to her in Greek, and not simply spoken French louder and louder until he thought she understood, as most knights would have done—had they bothered to address her courteously at all.

  Geoffrey strode up the street, hoping that the weakness he still felt in his knees was not apparent to the people he knew were watching him. He rounded the corner and was confronted by Roger, who was livid.

  “What was all that about?” he demanded. “What were you thinking of, sending us off and facing that mob alone? They might have killed you!”

  “I told you to go to the citadel for help!” exclaimed Geoffrey in horror. “Why did you not go?”

  He imagined the mob closing in on him, while he had struggled to buy time for Roger to come with reinforcements. And all the time Roger would have been watching from around the corner, not understanding a word that was said. The thought made his blood run cold.

  “I had no idea what was going on with all that jibber-jabber in Egyptian …”

  “Greek.”

  “Greek, then. It is all the same heathen babble.” Roger was silent for a moment, and then relented. “So what did she tell you?”

  “Nothing,” admitted Geoffrey. “Nothing that she did not say yesterday. In fact, it was all a waste of time, and we should not have gone there at all.”

  “We should have spent the afternoon in one of them cool brothels,” said Helbye. “Or in a drinking house sipping cold ale.”

  “Where are we off to now?” asked Roger, slipping into step beside Geoffrey. “An Egyptian encampment outside the city walls, perhaps, or a snake pit? Somewhere as accommodating as the last place we visited?” He grinned; his fury was clearly forgotten, and for him, the business was over. Geoffrey still felt a residual anger that Roger had not done as he had been asked, and he envied Roger’s ability to shrug off ill feelings with such gay abandon.

  He gave Roger a weak smile. “We know John lived at the citadel, but according to the notes of the Patriarch’s scribes, Sir Guido had recently moved into the Augustinian Priory near the Holy Sepulchre. He was apparently considering giving up knightly duties to become a monk.”

  “Was he heat-struck or something?” asked Roger, clearly nonplussed. “Why would he want to do anything as stupid as that?”

  “He would not be the first,” said Geoffrey. “Several knights and soldiers joined the priesthood when they reached Jerusalem. Not everyone came on Crusade for the loot and the fighting.”

  Roger looked unconvinced, and Geoffrey wondered what the burly Englishman would think if he became aware of Geoffrey’s own misgivings about his knightly obligations.

  They walked in silence. The sun was still
fiercely hot, although its intensity had started to fade. Geoffrey felt slightly light-headed, but did not like to admit so to the others. The effects of his near escape were beginning to take their toll, and he wanted nothing more than to lie down in his own chamber and sleep. Helbye asked that he be allowed to stop to buy water from a man carrying two leather buckets suspended from a yoke over his shoulders, but Geoffrey sensed something untoward in the man’s evident enthusiasm for selling it to them, and refused permission. He bought some for the dog, and felt vindicated when the animal declined it after a single sniff.

  They were received politely but coldly by the Augustinians at their premises near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but at least they were invited to sit for a while in the cool of a marble chamber. While Geoffrey marvelled at the delicate patterns set into the stone, the others sipped appreciatively at the fine red wine they were brought.

  “What do you want with us?”

  Geoffrey turned at the hostile voice and saw an obese man in the robes of an Augustinian Canon standing in the doorway. The Canon had a bright red face that clashed unappealingly with his greasy ginger hair.

  “We are investigating the murder of Sir Guido of Rimini on behalf of the Advocate,” replied Geoffrey, coldly polite. “I would be grateful if you would answer some questions.”

  The Canon’s manner softened somewhat. “Ah, yes. Poor Brother Salvatori.” He caught Geoffrey’s puzzled expression and hastened to explain. “Sir Guido was going to take major orders with us. He had already moved his belongings here, and had taken the name Brother Salvatori in readiness. He spent most of his time here, praying and following our daily routines.”

  “Did he leave at all? Did he have any visitors?”

  “Not that I know of,” said the Canon. “He was serious in his intentions and, once he had moved here, he seldom left.”

  “Seldom? That implies he did leave from time to time.”

  “Well, perhaps he did once or twice,” said the Canon dismissively. “What does it matter?”