to take me with him."

Friar Mathieu sighed and shook his head. "And so young. Jesus, be
merciful." He turned to John and spoke to him in a soft, reasonable
voice. Rachel sensed that the priest was chiding the Tartar gently.
John's answer was a series of short phrases, shrill with anger. He
finished by slicing the air with his hand in a gesture of flat refusal.
Rachel's heart grew heavy with despair.

"He will not listen to me," said the friar. "He thinks he has a right to
take you. His customs are not ours."

"But you are a priest. Does he not have to do what you tell him?"

"Sometimes he does what I tell him to, because he _is_ a Christian, and
I have been his companion and confessor for some years. But he is more
Tartar than Christian, and Tartars keep many women."

Rachel's limbs turned to ice. "Does he think he owns me?"

Colder than the rain pouring down on her was the terror of being torn
from the few friends she had, to be used for pleasure by a man who could
not even speak to her. She put her hands to her face and started to sob
heavily.

A burst of loud laughter from John made her look up. At first she
thought he was laughing at her tears, but he was pointing at Cassio's
dangling body. Still chuckling, he said something to Friar Mathieu.

"He says that man used to be the stud bull hereabouts. Now he is dead
beef."

Rachel shook her head. "He has no pity for Cassio--nor for me." Filled
with revulsion, she thought she would rather die than spend the rest of
her life with that brute.

Friar Mathieu looked off into the distance. "That is how it is with the
Tartars."

Rachel shuddered. To John, Cassio was just a bundle of rags to be
laughed at, and she was a plaything to be dragged through the world.

"Please help me get away," she begged Friar Mathieu. "I think I will
kill myself if I have to stay with him."

Friar Mathieu closed his eyes in pain. "Do not talk that way, my child.
Every person's life belongs to God."

Another voice boomed down at them from above, speaking a language Rachel
had heard before but did not know. The sour-faced man with the big nose
peered at them out of a cavernous hood. The French cardinal. He towered
over them on a great black horse. Rachel shuddered at the sight of him.

"Pardonnez-moi, votr'Eminence," said Friar Mathieu calmly. He went on,
in what must have been French, to say something which she supposed from
his gestures was about John and her.

The cardinal's