Assisi
25 March, 1230

                                                                                    Simone della Rocca Paida scanned the alley where the friars would emerge. Come on; come to me now, you verminous church mice. Let’s be done with this sorry business. The knight straightened in his saddle and loosened his sword in its scabbard.  His tongue had gone dry as wool.
      The crowd made him edgy. All morning spectators had streamed into the piazza, ignoring the ankle-deep muck and the hint of another downpour to come. The chief administrator of the city, Mayor Giancarlo, had declared a holiday and no mere spring shower, nor even the barrier erected overnight, could spoil their festive mood. Giancarlo’s civil guards had dragged timbers and marble blocks from the new basilica’s half-completed upper church to create a low wall across the square. Now, the guards shunted the townspeople behind it like fish into a holding pond, where they squirmed and wriggled for a prime view. The din increased with the congestion. Those who strained to hear the chant­ing of the friars above the noise wasted their effort. They could only fix their eyes in the same direction as Simone.
      At last the knight saw the incense boiling from the alleyway. A tall crucifix bobbed above the smoke and the skullcaps of the boys who swung the censers as the procession entered the square. Too late now for misgivings.
      Simone had mounted his horsemen to face the clearing from the porch of the upper church. He nodded to the other riders and placed his helmet over his head, brushing the tuft for luck. His hand twitched over the hilt of his sword while he squeezed his knees against his horse’s ribs. He swallowed hard against the dryness in his throat and nudged the animal slowly forward, into the space between the people and the procession.
      The hooves sucking at the mud with each step, the deceptively gentle pinging of the knights’ armor, hardly ruffled the chant as a double file of cardinals in red cassocks and copes inched like a brilliant centipede along the boards laid across the piazza. Neither they, nor the ermine-cloaked bishops who followed, showed the slightest alarm as the horses plodded nearer. Nor did the people crossing themselves and genuflecting behind the barricade.
      And why should they? These were the warriors of the Rocca Paida, the hilltop fortress that protected the city from danger. Everyone had heard the rumor that the Perugians planned to kidnap the saint’s remains. Or so Simone hoped. Surprise would be his best ally.

      Behind the bishops marched the friars and, at the heart of their column, the coffin bearers. They crossed the piazza along the ledge of the embankment that marked its southern boundary. The crucifix, cardinals and bishops had already disap­peared down the dirt path leading to the lower church and waited in formation in the courtyard outside.
      Simone’s moment had come. When the coffin tipped down the path also, he yelled, “Adesso! Now!” and dug his spurs into his mount. The animal bolted into the line, smashing out with its front hooves as he’d trained it to do in battle. Bone snapped and a friar disappeared under the charge with a cry of pain; another dove over the embankment to avoid the huge horse. Simone grinned beneath his helmet and slashed wildly with his blade. As he swung his mount in a slow circle, he saw the civil guards skir­mishing with a cluster of men trying to scale the spectator barricade.
      “Seal the top of the path,” he called to the rider beside him. Two of his horsemen had already started down after the coffin, herding the pallbearers toward the lower courtyard. At first the friars cooperated, rushing for the sanctuary of the church and the protection of the mayor who waited at the base of the path with the rest of his civil guard. But instead, Giancarlo’s men used their pikes to scatter the prelates from the courtyard in a flurry of miters and cloaks and gathered skirts, fighting their way upward toward the coffin. Too late the friars realized they were caught in the pincers of a trap.
      Simone plunged his horse down the hillside alongside the path. Just below him, a friar seized a guard by the arm, scream­ing shrilly. The man sent him hurtling off the path with a blow from his metal gauntlet and Simone’s horse had to leap the tumbling figure as it skidded headfirst down the hillside.
      The knight looked back only when he reached the bottom of the hill. The friar’s cowl had flown off, freeing a long black braid. The Roman widow! Damn her! She had no business marching with the friars. Blood spurted from her cheek as she finally managed to right herself, but she seemed neither to notice nor care. She shook her fist and her green eyes blazed at him. “How dare you, Simone?” she shrieked. “How dare you steal our saint?”
      The knight inhaled sharply, hearing himself accused by name. He wished again that the mayor had hired warriors from another city to do this dirty work.
      He wheeled and galloped for the church door. The guards had the coffin now, peeling off one last friar, small as a boy, who clung to the lid with all his strength. That would be Leo the dwarf, Simone guessed from his size. With the plank box surrounded, Giancarlo’s men wedged in behind Simone while the churchmen pelted them with curses. The knight jumped from his horse and flipped the reins to one of the guards.

      “You’ll burn in hell for this, Simone!” some­one bellowed close to his ear. He turned and raised his sword, but the Bishop of Assisi held up the cross that hung around his neck to ward him off. Simone bit into his bottom lip and ducked into the church. The mayor joined him immedi­ately. Just inside the doorway, the wool merchant waited alongside the castellan from Todi commune.
      “Set down the coffin,” Giancarlo shouted to his men. Then he shoved them back outside to defend the courtyard. With the guards gone, he and the knight lifted a heavy beam across the door. The mayor leaned against the carved panel, breathing hard, while Simone raised his helmet and wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his quilted gambeson. Only when the knight sheathed his sword did he notice the drying streaks of crimson on the blade. Worse and worse, he thought blackly.
      The dark entrance and the muffling of the confusion outside the church settled his nerves. He glanced around at the blanched face of the castellan, the disdain curling on the merchant’s lips, the mayor’s rigid jaw, wondering why each had involved himself in this sacrilegious business. He suspected the merchant would happily sell off the relics, bone-by-hallowed-bone, albeit they were the remains of his only brother.
      A voice rang from the far end of the nave: “Hurry. Bring the coffin here.” Two friars, the master builder Fra Elias and his lackey, waited on either side of the main altar. A circle of torches flamed from the stanchions behind them, recalling to Simone the bishop’s threat of hellfire. The torchlight cast Fra Elias’ shadow out into the church, where it projected far larger than the light-boned conspirator who had plotted the theft. Simone’s face flushed with heat, despite the chill draft in the church. He wondered whether Elias could shrive him before they left the church, even though he’d been an equal partner in this sin. He dreaded the prospect of facing that mob outside with his soul in mortal peril.
      When the four men reached the front of the nave, they found the main altar moved off its base and a deep excavation scooped from the rock beneath. The men settled the box onto ropes laid out parallel to the hole and, with the help of the friars, lowered it into the sarcophagus. They tossed the ropes in behind the coffin. Then Elias twisted one of the ornate, miniature pillars on the back of the altar until it clicked. The massive block ground in a heavy rotation over the hole. Finally the friar scuffed at the dirt around the marble base, smoothing it with his sandal.
      “The workmen began tiling the apse yesterday,” he said. “They’ll cover this area tomorrow. There’ll be no trace. No one will know where he rests.”
      He dropped to one knee beside the altar, inclining his head in the general direction of the sarcophagus. “No trace, Padre Francesco,” he repeated in a satis­fied whisper. “Your secret remains your own.”

      Simone thought back to the meeting at Giancarlo’s palace when this friar Elias had argued that the body must be hidden, even from the faithful, to protect it from relic hunters. He doubted the man’s motivation from the first. The way the knight read the situation, Elias still seethed from the election he’d lost after San Francesco’s death. The brotherhood had named another friar to succeed the saint as minister general of their Order ― an aged, spiritual man, but one who possessed less administrative skill than filled Elias’ little finger. Elias had turned defeat to advantage, however, when the pope asked him personally to build this basilica. Now he had deflected his consolation prize against his detractors and hidden the Order’s most-prized relics where they would never be found. Next time, the brothers would think twice about voting against him.
      After he’d smoothed the area around the altar, Elias signaled to his lackey: “Fra Illuminato, fetch the coffer.”
      The young man disappeared into the shadows of the tran­sept. When he returned a moment later, he carried a small, golden reliquary. Elias raised the lid and took out a ring set with an etched, pale blue stone. He slid it onto his finger while his assistant handed identical rings to the others.
      “This day is formed the Compari della Tomba, the Brother­hood of the Tomb,” Elias said. “Let us swear under pain of death never to reveal where these bones lie.”
      “And death equally to any man who discovers this place by chance,” Giancarlo added grimly. “As God is our witness.”
      “As God is our witness,” the others repeated. They raised their ringed fists high into the torchlight and brought their hands together. Each opened his fingers to grasp the wrist of his neighbor.
      “Amen! So be it!” they shouted in unison.