Tasters 24

Père Raimond She missed him as she would a limb. For nine years he had been her teacher and her father both, and she could barely remember the time before that. Her life had begun on the day he bought her.

Raimond de Sorules paid one Paris lire for the starveling urchin. He'd heard her singing in the market place, seen her scrabbling in the kennel for the rotten fruit thrown at her by those who thought it funny, and he followed her home. The mother was only too willing to be rid of her.

He scrubbed her in the horse trough at his inn. When he'd got the dirt off, most of it, washed her matted hair and de-loused her, he stood the small trembling body on a barrel and walked around it with a critrical eye, frowning at the raw weals on her knobby back and the bruises and bug-bites on her shins, ribs and arms.

The stable man sold him a pot of smelly salve. It stung, and tears rolled down her face, although she made no sound. He put one of his own shirts on her, far too big, but it would do for the time being. A length of twine served to girdle it so she wouldn't trip on the hem, and the inn-keeper's wife, sorry for the big-eyed waif, plaited her hair in one long, thick braid and tied it with a twist of wool.

That night she ate her fill for the first time in all her seven years.

He made a nest of pillows for her in his bed. Seeing the stark terror in her eyes, he set the great hard bolster firmly between them, but she didn't sleep. Nor did he, and all that night, in the darkness, he could feel her desperate stare.

'Why do they always look like that?'

'Who? Like what?' Arteys turned his head in time to see the small-eyed man going out the door.

'Like rats. Pointy faces and noses that almost twitch. Spies.'

'Spies?' Arteys, startled, looked back to him.

'The bad ones, at least. I suppose there must be good ones.'

'But we don't know them because they don't look like rats?' Arteys suggested, amused.

'You have it.' The man drank from his mug and nodded appreciatively. 'Good ale. You'd think Suffolk could afford better.'

'Ale?'

'Spies. Or maybe the fellow was Dorset's.' He twitched his head slightly toward the men to whom he now mostly had his back. With his voice pitched under the alehouse's general noise, he was safe from being heard by them. 'Dorset is the cheap-souled sort of bastard who'd hire a rat-faced spy instead of better. It was with that kind of idiot-wittedness he and his brother, God stomp his soul a bit before saving it, made fools of themselves all over France. You don't remember me, do you?'

Until that moment Arteys had not but said suddenly, 'Joliffe. You were in my father's household awhile.' About the time of Lady Eleanor's disgrace

John glanced back and caught a glimpse of the stylite outlined against dark clouds. He would not care to be standing up there in such weather. As if in response to the thought, a sheet of wind-driven rain swept across the forum. John grabbed a loose fold of Philo's voluminous clothing and hurried him faster across the rain-slick cobbles.

Philo's outraged protest at being handled in such an undignified manner was drowned by a ground-shuddering thunderclap shockingly close by. The rain quickened to a choking deluge as if an angry deity had picked up the sea abnd emptied it out onto the city.

Through the roar of the storm and the ringing in his ears John heard shouting and screams. Someone's been hit by lightning, he thought immediately. Then he realized he no longer grasped Philo's robe.

'Philo!' He turned back, convinced for an irrational instant that his companion had been struck. But Philo was a few paces away, staring up, shielding his eyes from the rain.

Others, heedless of the downpour, also looked towards the heavens, pointing. As his hearing recovered from the thunderclap, John could discern, amid the onlookers' curses and cries of terror, a frenzied, metallic clanking.

Atop the pillar, the styliye flailed his arms wildly, their motion whipping his chains against the platform's railing. The man's arms were on fire ...