CHAPTER TWELVE
The procession blew down the wide street. The lamps and candles hung from it like pale fruits, but it came like a long wave of sombre weather, a dark wind. The priesthood wore dull crimson habits and dull gold cowls, tarnished as if under water. Censers smoked and imparted an oily fragrance. Boys in livid white sang in high voices above the bells. A carriage passed behind funeral horses with stained-glass eyes, then another, and another. The earl or duke rode among armed mailed men. A greenish storm of cloaks swirled about them.
Where the wide street led into another a flight of broad stairs came down from an upper thoroughfare. Ciddey stood on the stairs, holding herself upright, waiting.
As the priests and the carriages unfurled, she tossed away her hair, combing it with her fingers. When she saw the mailed men, she searched their ranks, looking for her assailants of the previous night. But she found it hard, nearly impossible to recall their individual appearances. Within the processional crowd every face looked blurred. Even the face of the duke-earl, riding in his rich regalia among his men. He was expressionless, his features like old embroidery in a faded tapestry.
Nevertheless: “My lord!” Ciddey cried out, raising her small fists. “I beg your mercy! My lord, hear me!”
And then, in a terrible series of moments, she became aware the procession was unhaltable, that she was to be ignored. She felt both panic and bruised ego. She uttered a scream of frustration and flung herself off the stair against the nearest horse.
For a second, she could not seem to catch hold of it, could not even seem to feel it. Then her senses came clear, and she clung to a mane, and to a booted leg. Looking up, she recognised after all the face of one of the bravos from the wood.
“Sir,” she called, “I beg you. Please listen to me.”
The man looked down, and gradually seemed to see her, as if he revived from a strange insomniac sleep. But if he remembered their former dealings he gave no signal. He tried to thrust her away.
“Sir,” she wailed, “I’m well-born. I need to speak to your lord. I must warn him. He’s in danger.”
“Oh yes,” said the mailed rider. A red jewel dazzled gruesomely, as it had beside the pool when he had lifted the broadsword to slash at her. As it had when the sword had somehow, miraculously, done her no harm. “They all say that. Let me speak to the lord, they say. Just five minutes. We have penalties for obstruction here.”
Insanely, clinging to the horse and to his leg, she was being pulled backward, borne away with the procession. The rider had stopped trying to dislodge her. He leered at her.
“You don’t understand. Someone’s coming to your town. He’s a murderer. He’ll kill us all.”
“Up you come,” said the rider, and hauled her onto the saddle in front of him. He had done that last time, too. Did he really not recall? “I might kill him first,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, “I’d like that.”
“What else do you like?”
“Let me speak to your master.”
“You’re a newcomer. You can’t speak to the duke.”
“I’m Ciddey. Don’t you recall me?”
“This is Tulotef. I can’t recall every girl I’ve nodded to on the street.”
It was curious. The man seemed to have grown more positive, more human, the more she talked to him. And the riders around her were also less indefinite. They were laughing together now, or staring about, with hauteur. The horses snorted. Even the bells sounded more intense. Ciddey tried to turn her head, but the rider cuffed her. A sentence rose to her lips, and she could no longer deny it, though she shied from its meaning as she said it.