She shook her head in wonder. “Does it work?”

“To perfection.” He thought about it. “Well, nearly always. I never heard of a hostage paying the penalty while I was there, though I gather the early crusaders could be somewhat hasty.”

He was eager to reassure her. “It’s an excellent thing, you see. Keeps the peace, helps both sides understand each other. Those Moorish baths now-we men of the West would never have known about them if some high-born hostage hadn’t demanded that one be installed.”

Adelia wondered how the system worked in reverse. What did the European knights, of whose cleanliness she had no great opinion, teach their captors in return?

But she knew this was wandering from the point. The narrative was slowing. He doesn’t want to arrive at it, she thought. I don’t want him to, either; it will be terrible.

“So I took hostages,” he said.

She watched his fingers crease the tunic on his knees.

He had sent an emissary to Al-Hakim Biamrallah at Farafra, a man who ruled over most of the route he would have to take.

“Hakim was of the Fatimid persuasion, you see, a Shia, and the Fatimids were taking our side against Nur-ad-Din, who wasn’t.” He cocked an eye at her. “I told you it was complicated.”

With the emissary had gone gifts and a request for hostages to ensure the safe passage of Guiscard, his men, and pack animals to the Nile.

“That’s where we were going to leave them. The hostages. Hakim’s men would pick them up from there.”

“I see,” she said very gently.

“Cunning old fox, Hakim,” Rowley said in tribute, one cunning fox to another. “White beard down to here but more wives than you could shake a stick at. He and I had already met several times on the march; we’d gone hunting together. I liked him.”

Adelia, still watching Rowley’s hands, nice hands, grip and grip again like a raptor’s on a wrist. “And he agreed?”

“Oh, yes, he agreed.”

The emissary had returned minus the gifts and plus hostages, two of them, both boys: Ubayd, Hakim’s nephew, and Jaafar, one of his sons. “Ubayd was nearly twelve, I think; Jaafar…Jaafar was eight, his father’s favorite.”

There was a pause, and the tax collector’s voice became remote. “Pleasant boys, well-mannered, like all Saracen children. Excited to be hostages for their uncle and father. It gave them status. They regarded it as an adventure.”

The large hands curved, showing bone beneath the knuckles. “An adventure,” he said again.

The gate to the sheriff’s garden creaked and two men came in carrying spades, and walked past Sir Rowley and Adelia with a tug of their caps and on down the path to the cherry tree. They began digging.

Without comment, the man and woman on the turf bench turned their heads to watch as if observing shapes across a distance, nothing to do with them, something happening in another place entirely.

Rowley was relieved that Hakim had sent not only mule and camel drivers to help with Guiscard’s goods but also a couple of warriors as guards. “By this time, our own party of knights was diminished. James Selkirk and D’Aix had been killed at Antioch; Gerard De Nantes died in a tavern brawl. The only ones left of the original group were Guiscard and Conrad De Vries and myself.”

Guiscard, too weak to mount a horse, rode in a palanquin that could go only at the pace of the slaves who carried it, so it was a long, slow train that began the journey across the parched countryside-and Guiscard’s condition worsened to the point where they couldn’t go on.

“We were midway, as far to go back as to continue, but one of Hakim’s men knew of an oasis a mile or so off the track, so we took Guiscard there and pitched our pavilions. Tiny place it was, empty, a few date palms, but, by a miracle, its spring was sweet. And that’s where he died.”

“I am sorry,” Adelia said. The dreariness descending on the man beside her was almost palpable.

“So was I, very.” He lifted his head. “No time to sit and weep, though. You of all people know what happens to bodies, and in that heat it happens fast. By the time we reached the Nile, the corpse would have been…well.”

On the other hand, Guiscard had been a lord of Anjou, uncle to Henry Plantagenet, not some vagabond to be buried in a nameless hole scratched out of Egyptian grit. His people would need something of him returned over which to perform the funeral rites. “Besides, I’d promised him to take him home.”

It was then, Rowley said, that he made the mistake that would pursue him to the grave. “May God forgive me, I split our forces.”

For the sake of speed, he decided to leave the two young hostages where they were while he and De Vries with a couple of servants made a dash back to Baharia, carrying the corpse with them in the hope of finding an embalmer.

“We were in Egypt, after all, and Herodotus goes into quite disgusting detail on how the Egyptians preserve their dead.”

“You read Herodotus?”

“His Egyptian stuff, very informative about Egypt is Herodotus.”

Bless him, she thought, prancing about the desert with a thousand-year-old guide.

He went on. “They were content with the situation, the boys, quite happy. They had Hakim’s two warriors to guard them, plenty of servants, slaves. I gave them Guiscard’s splendid bird to fly while we were away-they were keen falconers, both. Food, water, pavilions, shelter at night. And I did everything I could; I sent one of the Arab servants to Hakim to tell him what had occurred and where the boys were, just in case anything happened to me.”

A list of excuses to himself; he must have gone over it a thousand times. “I thought we were the ones taking the risk, De Vries and I, being just the two of us. The boys should have been safe enough.” He turned to her as if he would shake her. “It was their damned country.”

“Yes,” Adelia said.

From the bottom of the garden where the men were digging Simon’s grave came the regular scrape and scatter, scrape and scatter, of earth being lifted and discarded. They might have been three thousand miles away from the crucible of hot sand in which, by now, she could barely breathe.

A harness had been constructed to carry the palanquin containing Guiscard’s corpse between a couple of pack animals and, with only two mule drivers as accompaniment, Sir Rowley Picot and his fellow knight had ridden with it as fast as they could.

“It turned out there wasn’t an embalmer in Baharia, but I found some old shaman who cut the heart out for me and put it in pickle while the rest was boiled down to the skeleton.”

That had proved a lengthier process than Rowley was expecting, but at last, with Guiscard’s bones in a satchel and the heart in a stoppered jar, he and De Vries had set off back to the oasis, approaching it eight days after they’d left it.

“We saw the vultures while we were still three miles off. The camp had been raided. All the servants were dead. Hakim’s warriors had given a good account of themselves before they were hacked to pieces, and there were three bodies belonging to the raiders. The pavilions had gone, the slaves, the goods, the animals.”

In the terrible desert silence, the two knights heard a whimper coming from the top of one of the date palms. It was Ubayd, the older boy, alive and physically unhurt. “The attack had been at night, you see, and in the darkness he and one of the slaves had managed to shin up a tree and hide in the fronds. The boy had been there a day and two nights. De Vries had to climb up and unhook his hands to get him down. He’d seen everything; he couldn’t move.”

The one they couldn’t find was eight-year-old Jaafar.

“We were still scouring the place for him when Hakim and his men arrived. He’d received news that there was a raiding party loose in the land just about the same time that he’d gotten my message. He’d immediately ridden like a wind from hell for the oasis.”