Rowley’s great head went down as if to receive coals of fire. “He didn’t blame me. Hakim. Not a word, not even later when we found…what we found. Ubayd explained, told the old man it wasn’t my fault, but these last years I’ve known whose fault it was. I should never have left them; I should have taken the boys with me. They were my responsibility, you see. My hostages.”

Adelia’s fingers covered the gripping hands for a moment. He didn’t notice.

When, eventually, Ubayd had been able to speak of it, he’d told them that the raiding party had been twenty to twenty-five strong. He’d heard different languages spoken as the slaughter below him went on. “Frankish mainly,” he’d said. He’d heard his little cousin cry to Allah for help.

“We tracked them. They had a lead of thirty-six hours, but we reckoned that they’d be slowed by all the loot. On the second day we saw the hoofprints of a lone horse that had broken away from the rest and turned south.”

Hakim sent some of his men after the raiders’ main party while he and Rowley followed the tracks of the single horseman.

“Looking back, I don’t know why we did that; the man could have veered off for a dozen reasons. But I think we knew.”

They knew when they saw the vultures circling over a single object behind one of the dunes. The naked little body was curled in the sand like a question mark.

Rowley had his eyes shut. “He’d done such things to that little boy as no human being should look on or describe.”

I looked on them, Adelia thought. You were angry when I looked on them in Saint Werbertha’s hut. I described them, and I’m sorry. I am so sorry for you.

“We’d played chess together,” Rowley said, “the boy and I. On the journey. He was a clever child, he used to beat me eight times out of ten.”

They’d wrapped the body in Rowley’s cloak and taken it to Hakim’s palace, where it was buried that night to the sound of ululating, grieving women.

Then the hunt began in earnest. Such a strange chase it was, led by a Moslem chieftain and a Christian knight, skirting battlefields where the crescent and the cross were at war with each other.

“The devil was loose in that desert,” Rowley said. “He sent sand-storms against us, obliterating tracks, resting places were waterless and devastated either by crusader or Moor, but nothing was going to stop us, and at long last we caught up with the main party.”

Ubayd had been right, it was a ragtag.

“Deserters, mainly, runaways, the prison sweepings of Christendom. Our killer had been their captain, and in carrying off the boy, he’d also taken most of the jewels and abandoned his men to their own devices, which weren’t much. They hardly put up any resistance; most of them were silly with hasheesh, and the rest were fighting among themselves over the remaining booty. We questioned each one of them before he died: Where’s your leader gone? Who is he? Where does he come from? Where will he make for? Not one of them knew much about the man they’d followed. A ferocious leader, they said. A lucky man, they said.”

Lucky.

“Nationality means nothing to scum like those; to them he was just another Frank, which means he could have originated anywhere from Scotland to the Baltic. Their descriptions weren’t much better, either: tall, medium-height, darkish, fairish-mind you, they were saying anything they thought Hakim wanted to know, but it was as if each saw him differently. One of them said he had horns growing out of his head.”

“Did he have a name?”

“They called him Rakshasa. It’s the name of a demon. Moors frighten naughty children with it. From what I could gather from Hakim, the Rakshasi came out of the Far East- India, I think. The Hindus set them on the Moslems in some ancient battle. They take different shapes and ravage people at night.”

Adelia leaned out and picked a lavender stalk, rubbing it between her fingers, looking around the garden to root herself in its English greenness.

“He’s clever,” the tax collector said, and then corrected himself. “No, not clever, he has instinct, he can sniff danger on the air like a rat. He knew we were after him, I know he knew. If he’d made for the Upper Nile, and we were sure he would, we’d have taken him-Hakim had sent word to the Fatimid tribes-but he cut northeast, back into Palestine.”

They picked up the scent again in Gaza, where they found he’d sailed from its port of Teda on a boat bound for Cyprus.

“How?” asked Adelia. “How did you pick up his scent?”

“The jewels. He’d taken most of Guiscard’s jewels. He was having to sell them one by one to keep ahead of us. Every time he did, word got back through the tribes to Hakim. We were given his description-a tall man, almost as tall as me.”

At Gaza, Sir Rowley lost his companions. “De Vries wanted to stay in the Holy Land; anyway, he wasn’t under the obligation that I was; Jaafar hadn’t been his hostage, and he hadn’t taken the decision that got the boy killed. As for Hakim…good old man, he wanted to come with me, but I told him he was too ancient and anyway would stick out in Christian Cyprus like a houri among a huddle of monks. Well, I didn’t put it like that, though such was the gist. But there and then I knelt to him and vowed by my Lord, by the Trinity, by the Mother Mary, that I’d follow Rakshasa if necessary to the grave and I’d cut the bastard’s head off and send it to him. And so, with God’s help, I shall.”

The tax collector slipped to his knees, took off his cap, and crossed himself.

Adelia sat still as stone, confused by the repulsion and the terrible comfort she found in this man. Some of the loneliness into which she’d been cast by Simon’s death had gone. Yet he was not another Simon; he had stood by, perhaps assisted in, questioning the raiders; “questioning” undoubtedly being a euphemism for torture until death, something Simon would not and could not have done. This man had sworn by Jesus, whose attribute was mercy, to exact revenge, was praying for it at this minute.

But when she had covered his clawing hand, the back of her own had been wetted with his tears and, for a moment, the space that Simon had left had been filled by someone whose heart, like Simon’s, could break for the child of another race and faith.

She composed herself; he was getting up so that he could pace while he told her the rest.

Just as he had taken her with him on his every step across the wasteland of Outremer, now she went with him as, still carrying his relics of the dead, he followed the man they called Rakshasa back through Europe.

From Gaza to Cyprus. Cyprus to Rhodes-just one boat behind, but a storm had separated chase and chaser so that Rowley had not picked up the trail again until Crete. To Syracuse, and from there up the coast of Apulia. To Salerno…

“Were you there then?” he asked.

“Yes, I was there.”

To Naples, to Marseilles, and then overland through France.

A more curious passage no man ever took in a Christian country, he told her, because Christians played so little part in it. His helpers were the disregarded: Arabs and Jews, artisans in the jewel trade, trinket makers, pawnbrokers, moneylenders, workers in alleys where Christian townsmen and women sent their servants with objects for mending, ghetto dwellers-the sort of people to whom a pursued and desperate killer with a jewel to sell was forced to apply for money.

“It wasn’t the France I knew; I might have been in a different country altogether. I was a blind man in it, and they were my knotted string. They’d ask me, ‘Why do you hunt this man?’ And I would answer, ‘He killed a child.’ It was enough. Yes, their cousin, aunt, sister-in-law’s son had heard of a stranger in the next town with a bauble to sell-and at a knockdown price, for he must sell it quickly.”

Rowley paused. “Are you aware that every Jew and Arab in Christendom seems to know every other Jew and Arab?”