Grave Goods aka Relics of the Dead

NINE

SHE TRIED BITING into the hand, but its owner kept it in place as he lifted her onto the bare back of a horse and climbed up behind her.

“Leave wrigglin’, blast you,” he said. Uselessly, she was kicking out with her bare feet. “You ain’t going to get hurt.”

She was not reassured-it wasn’t a reassuring voice, and its owner was clasping her too tightly-but after a while she stopped struggling. For one thing, it hurt her strained back; for another, it was useless. She sensed that there were several of them, whoever they were. The unshod hooves of their mounts made little noise, but their thudding suggested a cavalcade.

Rape? It was the great and immediate terror. Had she been earmarked for it? Or would they have rampaged into the inn taking any woman they found?

Wherever they were going, it was uphill; the incline was forcing her back against the strong-smelling coat of her captor. And it was quiet except for the song of nightingales and the occasional shriek of an owl.

They can do anything. God save me. How will Allie manage without me?

Was this what had happened to Emma and the others? To Mansur? It was even more frightening when the man removed his hand from her mouth-he knew there’d be no help forthcoming even if she yelled.

She tried to stay calm. “Why are you doing this?”

“You speak the darky’s jabber, don’t you? Can’t understand a bloody word he says.”

Mansur. They were taking her to Mansur, who was pretending he didn’t speak English, so he was in desperate straits or he would have tried to stop them from fetching her. At least it meant they were demanding her services and not her body.

Adelia’s heart rate slowed down a little. “What do you want?”

“You’ll see.”

“Not with this damned blindfold on, I won’t. Take it off.”

“Feisty, ain’t she?” There was more sniggering, but with another tug on her hair, the rag’s knot was undone.

Moonlight shone on trees and undergrowth and, as she looked round, a steep slope that fell away to a valley and the marshes. Which of the hills that reared up around Glastonbury they were on she couldn’t tell. “Where are we?”

“Never you mind.”

Wherever it was, it was their destination. She was lifted down from what she now saw was a donkey-they were all on donkeys, five men as shaggy-looking and as evil-smelling as the mounts they were tying to a stake.

Somebody lit a lantern. She was pushed, stumbling, over rough ground until, by the lantern’s light, she saw that they stood outside an outcrop, almost like an oriel window set into the hill, curtained from above by the trailing fronds of an alder fed by a spring that trickled down one side-a sylvan scene, its loveliness spoiled by a smell that Adelia knew too well.

The branches were pushed aside. Sitting in the entrance to a cave were three men, Mansur, a guard holding a knife on him-and Rhys the bard.

Adelia had forgotten that Rhys hadn’t come back to the inn; in all the upheaval, she’d even forgotten he existed. Her eyes were only for the Arab, and she fell on him, jabbering in Arabic. “Are you all right? Have they hurt you? We’ve been desperate…”

He was angry, though not with their captors. He gestured toward Rhys. “That son of a whore and a he-camel. I did not show that I understood them. I did not know he would tell them where to find you. May shaitan use his skull as a pisspot…”

Adelia had never heard Mansur swear like this, though she was relieved that he had the energy to do it. Of the two of them, Rhys, the betrayer, was the worse for wear, battered, on the edge of tears. “Taken my harp, they have,” he said. “You tell them they got to give me back my harp.”

It was a plea for a lost limb, and automatically Adelia said, “I will,” though her attention was for Mansur. “Have they hurt you?”

“I am well. They are ignorant fellahin, yet I think they mean no harm.”

“What do they want of us?”

One of the men had stepped between the two of them. “Stop your jabber.” A dirty finger was directed toward Mansur. “He’s a Merlin, ain’t he? A wizard? Talks to the dead, don’t he? An’ they talk back?”

“Er, up to a point,” Adelia told him cautiously.

“Tell him to chat with this un, then.” The man pushed past them to go farther into the cave, and with a tug removed a screen of withies that had been blocking its interior.

The stink of mortification intensified. The lamp was held higher so that she could see what lay inside. It was a skeleton.

“Chat to it?”

“ ’At’s right. Ask him where he’s been, what he was a-doing of afore he got dead.”

Great God, was that why Mansur had been kidnapped? A misinterpretation of his reputation? Did these men truly think that he, that anybody, could converse with a corpse?

In wonderment at the infinite credulity of the ignorant, Adelia raised her head to stare at the man. The beginning of dawn fell on a face that lamplight had merely disguised with shadows. She recognized it.

“You’re the baker,” she said. “You were at Wolvercote Manor.” She got to her feet in excitement. “Emma. The lady who went there. My friend. You know what happened to her. I saw you know it.”

Happenings were beginning to relate to each other. Rhys had found the man, talked to him, and, it seemed, given more information than he’d received.

“Never you mind who I am. Get that bloody wizard to work.”

“Tell me about Lady Emma. What happened to her?”

“Him first.” The baker nodded toward the object in the cave. “Then maybe I will.”

It was at least admission that the man had information. She asked, “What do you want to know?”

“What happened to him. What killed the poor bugger. ’Cos we don’t think as he did what they say he did.”

“What was he supposed to have done?”

The baker brandished a knife at her. “Ask him, I’m telling you, aren’t I? Afore I cut all three of you into pig meat.”

“Ask him what?”

But Mansur had not been wasting his time; supposedly unable to understand English, he had accrued a great deal of information by listening as his captors talked among themselves. In Arabic, he said, “The dead man is the Eustace who is supposed to have set the abbey fire.”

“And what is he to them?” Adelia asked in the same language.

“They have to answer for his crime. Already four of their number are in gaol awaiting the coming assize in Wells. These others expect that they may be arrested at any moment and brought to book for arson. They are Eustace’s”-Mansur paused because he had to say the next word in English, there being no Arabic equivalent for it-“frankpledge.”

The baker was startled at hearing the word. “Here, how’d that black bugger know about our frankpledge?”

“Oh, be quiet,” Adelia said crossly. The man was getting on her nerves. “I expect Eustace told him.”

There was a new respect in the eyes of the men standing around her. “He’s good, ain’t he?” one of them said.

Frankpledge. An English legal system to keep order-an alien concept to Adelia when she’d arrived in the country. It was a way of enforcing the law and policing the common people-upper classes were exempt-by grouping every male over the age of twelve into a unit of ten, known as a tithing, that was responsible for a misdemeanor or felony committed by any of the others.

Periodically and with rigid efficiency, the courts held a “view of frankpledge” all over the country, during which each member of a tithing had to reaffirm his oath that he would bring to the bar of justice any of his nine fellows who had committed an offense, that he was answerable for their behavior as well as his own, that he would pursue them if they fled their crime. The penalty was a fine in accordance with the severity of the offense.

It was an old law, rooted in Anglo-Saxon custom, and Adelia, who had seen innocent men lose their homes through the wrongdoing of one of their tithing, thought it unfair. She’d questioned Prior Geoffrey about it, but he had shrugged his shoulders. “Mostly it works,” he’d said.

Obviously, it was working here. These five men-nine if you counted the four who’d been remanded-were responsible in law for the corpse in the cave. If they couldn’t prove it innocent of destroying the biggest abbey in England, their punishment didn’t bear thinking about.

That they had committed the crime of kidnapping in pursuit of that laudable aim didn’t seem to have occurred to them.

“Why do you believe your friend didn’t start the fire?” she asked.

The baker apparently thought that this was another matter the late Master Eustace could settle. But a younger man who’d been employing his time with his hand up the skirt of his tunic, nervously scratching his testicles, answered for him. “See, Useless never took a light into the abbey when he needed a drink. Like a fox, Useless was; he could see in the dark.”

“ ’S right,” said another, even younger. “Maybe he’d filch a bit here or there, swig of wine, p’raps…”

The baker hit him. “Don’t tell her that, Alf, you fucking booby.”

“But he wouldn’t never start a fire,” Alf insisted.

“These are not honest fellows,” Mansur told Adelia. “I have listened to their talk. Petty criminals, poachers, all of them, so far undiscovered. This cave is their haven in time of trouble. They seem to have had a fondness for this Eustace, bringing food to him here, winking at his thieving as long as it did not reach the ears of the sheriff. Now that he has been accused of arson, they are frightened of what will happen to them.”

“Not desperados, then,” Adelia said. “Just desperate.”

“Yes, but desperate men are dangerous men. We must be careful.”

“How? How can we prove anything one way or the other?”

“I do not know.”

“Neither do I. From the look of him, he’s been dead some time.”

“Over a month. They found him lying here dead a day or two after the fire. They did not know what to do. Then they heard that a wizard who listened to bones would be arriving.”

“You.”

“Me. They waited for me. The body has decomposed.”

“Well, it would, wouldn’t it?” In the heat of this summer, decomposition would have set in quickly. The withy screen that had held off hungry animals hadn’t been proof against flies.

“You two goin’ to jabber all day?” In his impatience, the baker was brandishing a knife. “I’ll cut you, I swear I’ll have your tripes out. Get in and talk to the poor sod, will you? And you”-he turned on Rhys, whose ceaseless lament had provided a counterpoint all through the discussion-“shut up about your fucking harp.”

Stooping, Mansur and Adelia went into the cave. Which, if it hadn’t been for its contents and the odor rising from the earth beneath them where putrefying juices had soaked into it, would have been beautiful. The rising sun shone straight into it-so, Adelia thought, wherever we are, we are facing directly east-lighting the elfin green of delicate ferns growing from the rock, giving a sparkle to a drip of water from the roof that ran in a channel to join the bigger flow outside.

Caverns like this one were a feature of Glastonbury ’s peculiar countryside; indeed, the abbey made money from sick pilgrims who paid to be healed from drinking the waters of what were claimed to be sacred springs. Adelia had hoped to visit one of them when she had time, to test the properties of its holy water. However, this secret place was not one of the sanctified springs-and now was most definitely not the moment.

She and Mansur knelt on either side of their patient, meeting each other’s eyes for a moment, then bending their heads to say their prayers. Whatever this man had done, he had paid for it in a lonely death.

“Get out of the doorway,” Adelia demanded of the men clustering around the entrance. “The doctor needs more light. Bring it.”

The lantern was handed in, and the cave entrance became decorated with peering heads, the bodies staying obediently outside.

The skeleton was still clothed, if bloodied rags qualified as clothes. Its one decent possession was a short, empty scabbard attached to the string that served it as a belt. The knife belonging to it lay a little way away from the left hand; the right hand had been wrapped in leaves and moss that were now in a disgusting condition.

There was a protest from the cave entrance as Mansur started to undress the bones.

Sharply, Adelia quelled it. “Be quiet. Do you want the doctor to do his job, or don’t you?” She’d lost interest in anything except the cadaver before her, and woe betide anybody who tried to divert her concentration.

The bones had become disarticulated, and Mansur was able to pick up the skull so that they could examine its back and front. It bore no injury, unlike the heads in what Adelia still thought of as the Arthur-and-Guinevere coffin.

They left the site of the most obvious injury-the right hand-until they had checked to see if there were others.

Mandible, neck, scapulas, rib cage, spine, pelvis-all correct.

Femur… “Hmm.” Adelia raised her head. “Did he limp?” The left patella had an old fracture.

There was delight from the doorway. “Fell off a roof when he were a nipper, never could walk proper after. He’s telling you things already, ain’t he?”

This had to stop. “Listen to me,” Adelia said, “Master Eustace is not talking to my lord Mansur; his soul has passed on to wherever it is going. The doctor can only read what the bones are showing him.”

“Oh, reading. Ain’t magic, then?”

“No.”

The testicle scratcher said admiringly, “Still, reading…” It was a skill none of them possessed and, though a disappointment, was yet an activity rated as marvelous.

Fibula, tibia.

Now they looked to the arms: humerus, radius, ulna. Finally, they unwrapped the hand.

“How did he lose these fingers?” Adelia asked.

She was answered by a surprised chorus from the entrance.

“Didn’t know as he had.”

“What fingers?”

“Had all his bloody fingers last time I saw him.”

There was a move to enter and look for the lost digits, as if Eustace had mislaid them somewhere and they might find them tucked away at the rear of a shelf.

“Get back,” Adelia snarled. “Which of you saw him last?”

“That’d be me,” Alf said. “Brought him up a collop of venison for his supper…”

The baker smacked him again. “You want us up afore the fucking verderers?”

Adelia became worried. She was learning altogether too much about these men, and it was unlikely they would leave Mansur and her alive to be in possession of the knowledge. If they’d brought venison to Eustace, the deer they’d cut it from had most definitely not been theirs to kill. In the eyes of hunt-loving kings and nobles, deer poaching was the most heinous crime in the legal calendar, and the verderers, guardians of their chases, held courts from which a poacher could be sent to have his limbs cut off and hung among the trees of the forest in which he had offended.

“… an’ he had all his fingers then,” Alf finished defiantly. “Night before the fire, that was. What’s he done with ’em?”

“Mmm.”

Mansur said quietly to Adelia in Arabic, “Have you noticed what is at the rear of this cave?” He angled the lantern so that its light reached deep into the interior and fell on not a rock face but a slightly convex wall built of tightly packed stones.

Adelia experienced a moment of sickness, remembering another such wall in Cambridge that had shut in a living, erring woman whom the Church had seen fit to punish with entombment.

Sharply, she called out, “What’s behind the stones at the back here… the lord Mansur wants to know.”

“Never you mind,” the baker shouted back. “None of your business.”

But the voice of Alf, bless him, said, “Eustace’s dad went and rebuilt that wall after the earthquake, didn’t he, Will? Keeps the demon in.”

“Demon?”

“Nasty demon back there. Came screamin’ out at Eustace’s dad when the wall fell down in the earthquake and Eustace’s dad had to shut it in again. Never the same after that, Eustace’s dad wasn’t.”

“Weren’t much before it,” came the voice of the testicle scratcher, gloomily.

Mansur and Adelia exchanged looks. The earthquake again. There had been a good deal more than just seismic activity around Glastonbury on that day twenty years ago.

Will was yelling at them to get on with it, so nothing could be done to find out what lay beyond the wall at the moment, but Adelia promised herself that she’d come and look when there was an opportunity. It might have nothing to do with anything. On the other hand, it might.

At the moment, though, she had other business. At a nod from her, Mansur gathered the remains of Eustace’s right hand and took them out into the open air for them both to examine in the light of a dawn that was promising another hot day.

“Hmm.”

This was peculiar. The proximal phalanges of the middle fingers had been cut through so that the upper joints were missing, leaving the thumb and little finger intact, like two sentinel trees guarding the stumps of three that had been felled.

Had every skeleton in Glastonbury been hacked about?

“A sword fight?” Mansur asked.

“Mmm. I’d have expected a sword, being long, to have swiped all the fingers off. It’s almost… I don’t know… It’s almost as if he’d proffered the three middle fingers to be cut off, keeping the thumb and little one bent away from the blow.”

She thought some more. “Keep talking.” It was vital to maintain the pretense that Mansur was in charge. He impressed these men; she did not. Besides, should the two of them manage to leave alive, she didn’t want the spreading of a rumor that a witch was at work in Glastonbury.

“Can you tell what happened to this man?” Mansur asked, “because if you cannot… They have told us too much.”

“I know.” She reverted to English. “My lord doctor wishes to see Eustace’s knife.”

The men fell over themselves in the rush to retrieve it for him. “Right sharp, this is,” said one of them. “Always kept it honed, did our Useless.”

They gave it to Mansur, who, still talking, held it so that Adelia could see it as well. The blade was certainly sharp, but there was a nick in the center of it.

“When did that happen?” she asked.

Alf opened his mouth but received another hit from the baker-obviously, Eustace’s knife had been damaged in another nefarious activity. “Year since,” the baker told her, “and never you mind how.”

Squinting, putting her head close to the damaged stumps of the hand, making sure that Mansur also made a show of examining them, Adelia saw a v-shaped splinter at the end of the third finger’s middle phalange where some of the bone hadn’t been cut through entirely, as if, instead, it had been ripped free of whatever had caught it. God, how terrible. The pain…

“I think he did this himself,” she said in Arabic. “I think Eustace used this knife to cut his own fingers off.”

“Why?”

She shut her eyes to bring up a mental picture of a hand outstretched, then opened them again to look carefully at the still-extant bone of the little finger. Yes, there was a scrape down one side of it.

Mansur kept talking.

“The lord doctor wishes to know how Eustace got over the abbey wall when he went thieving,” Adelia said in English. “Presumably it was high. Did he climb it?”

The baker blustered. “Who says he went thieving?”

But Alf, the terminally truthful Alf, now enslaved by the Arab’s reading powers, said, “With his leg? Couldn’t climb pussy, could Useless. Burrowed under, he did, like a bloody rabbit.”

The testicle scratcher chimed in. “Gor, di’n’t old Brother Christopher hate them rabbits. Got at his lettuces. Ooh, he hated them coneys, old Brother Chris, well, hated everything, really. Set noose traps for bloody everything-foxes, badgers, birds… Useless always complained about them noose traps. Got in his way. He knew where they were, though. They never caught our Useless.”

Adelia nodded. Rabbits were comparatively new to England, having been introduced by Norman lords for their fur and meat, but, thanks to the escapees from the warrens in which they were kept, they were rapidly becoming a pest to gardeners everywhere.

And she’d learned something else. These men around her were well acquainted with the routine of the abbey and with the movements of its brethren who, before the fire, had tended and tried to guard it-presumably, if they poached its deer and, like Eustace, stole from it, they had to be.

But their knowledge could have come from only one source-the lay brother, Peter. Rhys could be absolved for chattering. Peter and the baker were closely related, had to be; their likeness was too strong for it to be otherwise. From Peter they’d heard of Mansur’s supposed skill with the dead and, without reckoning the consequences, had kidnapped him. When they couldn’t understand him, they’d returned to kidnap her because she could.

“Show us,” she said. “My lord Mansur wishes to see where Master Eustace got into the abbey grounds.”

“What bloody good’ll that do?” the baker wanted to know.

“A lot.” Adelia indicated Mansur. “This great reader of bones”-Keep stressing his powers-“thinks that he may, only may, be able to prove that your friend did not set the fire. But now he demands two things. First, that you will then let the two of us”-she remembered Rhys, who was still singing sadly to himself-“the three of us, go unharmed. Second, you shall then tell us what you know of our friend, Lady Emma.”

An older man who hadn’t spoken before said, “Here, we can’t let ’em go, Will, they’ll squawk on us.”

So the baker was called Will. Adelia kept her eyes on him. Because he was the most intelligent of the tithing, he was also the most frightened and, therefore, dangerous. But because he was the more intelligent, he must know that she had a weapon in her armory belittling anything in his-if she and Mansur could prove Eustace’s innocence, they had to be kept alive in order to prove it to the authorities.

“Who would believe you?” she said.

The answer was nobody. Lay proof before a court? Inarticulate men with dubious reputations, a difficult case to put, and no expert witnesses to call? An impatient judge-and all assize judges were impatient; they had too many cases to hear in too short a time-wouldn’t even bother to listen.

Adelia knew it. Will the baker knew it.

She waited.

He said, and for the first time he was placatory, “An’ you won’t squawk on us… you know, ’bout the venison and such, ’bout how we, er, invited you here?”

“No,” she said. And she meant it. So far they had done no real harm to Mansur or her or Rhys, and she was sorry for men so poor in education and goods. As it was, they would be punished for Eustace’s predations on the abbey-but that was nothing compared to the sin of setting fire to it.

“Swear?” Will asked.

“What on?”

And that, too, was touching. There was no Bible, no prayer book-these men had only seen such things in a church. But for them, this secret spring was as inexplicable and magical as any of those made famous by the abbey.

“Arthur’s spring, this is,” Alf told her. “It was Eustace’s dad found it, but he’s passed on and nobody don’t know it but us. Useless told us, di’n’t he, lads? Saw Arthur drinkin’ from it one night, kneelin’ he was, and a light shining from his kingly crown.”

“Useless saw a lot of things,” Will growled. “Purple snakes among ’em.”

So Mansur and Adelia and Rhys knelt, cupping their hands under the shining spiral of water and drinking from it, swearing by good King Arthur that if they could prove Eustace innocent of arson, they would not inform on anything else they had learned during their sojourn with the tithing.

Then, one by one, the tithing itself swore that if the good doctor and his assistant could prove Eustace innocent of arson, they would not cut the throats of said doctor and assistant.

“Nor mine, neither,” Rhys insisted.

Nor that of the bard, either.

“And you give me back my harp?”

And the tithing would give him back his bloody harp.

All very charming with the sun hot on the backs of their heads and the chirp of grasshoppers joining a winged chorus…

But what, thought Adelia, if I can’t prove anything?

The tithing’s prisoners had been brought to the cave by a circuitous route; the abbey was actually within walking distance, and there was a discussion about whether the donkeys should be left where they were and the descent of the hill made on foot.

The clear sound of a horn in the distance decided the matter. “Bastards,” said Will. “They’ve come looking for you.”

Rowley. He’d brought a hunt to scour the countryside for her.

Suddenly, she didn’t want to be found. Not yet. She had work to do, a puzzle to solve. She was mistress to the dead; a corpse had cried out to her.

Will addressed the testicle scratcher. “How many, Toki? Where?”

The tithing became still so that Toki could look and listen. Adelia listened with them, hearing only a blackbird and the rush of the spring.

Slowly, scratching madly, turning 180 degrees from east to west, Toki said, “Fifteen horse, I reckon. No dogs. Don’t know how many foot. They’re quarterin’ Wearyall.”

“How long afore they get to us?”

Toki shrugged. “Depends where they go next. Could be here. Could be Saint Edmund’s, could be Chalice.”

These, with Wearyall, were the hills of Glastonbury; therefore, by a process of elimination, Adelia knew herself to be on the Tor, that strange cone, most sacred of all the hills rising out of the flatness around the abbey.

Damn. She didn’t want to spend all day skulking in a cave until the hunt had gone away, especially not with Eustace in it.

But she hadn’t reckoned on the tithing’s experience. It was used to pursuit; ignorant of most things, it had skills she hadn’t dreamed of.

“Quick, then,” Will said. He turned to her. “Keep your bloody head down. Yell and you’re dead. Tell the darky that.” He wheeled round on Rhys. “One peep out of you and I’ll break your neck and your fucking harp.”

The donkeys were shoved into the cave and the screen hidden with branches. It was decided that cover was thicker at the hill’s lower end, and that they should make for it.

The descent began. Adelia was to look back on it as among the luminous times of her life.

Few girls had a childhood; the imperative was to grow into womanhood with a woman’s skills as quickly as possible. In Adelia’s case, it had been to learn how to be a doctor and then an anatomist. Training hadn’t been imposed on her-her foster parents had tried to make her take up some amusement, but she had resisted them; study was the thing.

Now here, on a journey down a sacred tor, for the first time, she was granted a gift, the childhood of a common country boy who had climbed trees and stolen birds’ eggs, who had scrumped apples from other people’s orchards and hidden from angry gamekeepers. Or perhaps because the danger was more than a clout on the ear, she became a soldier in enemy territory, using a landscape to escape discovery and get home.

Whatever it was, she loved it.

At the beginning they went fast, dodging from tree to tree in case someone in the hunt had sight and hearing as long as Toki’s. The blare of horns was louder now. Adelia could hear her name being shouted, the calls coming closer through the hot air.

Having exhausted the search of Wearyall Hill, Rowley was leading his men straight to the Tor.

“On your bellies, lads,” Will said quietly. To Adelia, he said, “You goin’ to give us away?”

“No.”

Just in case, he kept close to her, knife in hand. Two of the other men were paired with Mansur and Rhys, ready to silence them if they cried out.

Wisely, the hunt had gone to the top of the hill and begun circling downward in spirals.

The tithing and prisoners made for cover, crawling, feeling the reverberation of the hunt’s hoofbeats through their hands and knees.

It was wonderful; it was a game, it was the game; it was life at primitive level; it was how a species survived by craft and fear. For Adelia absorbed some of the terror of the tithing as they crawled, her back prickling with exposure, as if her life as well as theirs depended on concealment, all the while being filled with the joy of a wild thing using its habitat. She was a weasel undulating through the fragrancy of grass; she was a snake with sweet earth beneath her belly; a clump of tall, purple loosestrife was a hiding place, a patch of inhospitable gorse to be despised.

As the hunt grew closer, she became an outlaw among outlaws, her teeth exposed in a snarl, as if they had a knife between them. She’d never played hide-and-seek, but deep inside the dark, crumbling interior of a hollowed oak, she watched Rowley ride by within ten feet of her, crying her name-and she would no more have called out to him than a boar in its lair would have snorted to attract the hounds.

When he’d passed, she looked up to where Will was lying across a branch above her. Their eyes met with mutual respect, and she knew that whatever happened, he would not kill her now, just as he knew she was not going to betray him. They were feral creatures; together they had outwitted the hunt.

On a promontory with a view of the abbey and marshes, the tithing-for they were all frankpledged now-watched its pursuers set off for Chalice Hill.

“Rest a bit,” Will said, and nodded toward the abbey, from which came a faint plainchant. “They’ll be finishing terce any moment.”

So it was the third hour of daylight, one hundred and eighty minutes since Adelia had been introduced to Eustace’s cave, and not one of them she wouldn’t look back on without a ferocious joy.

As she waited, lying flat, Will on one side, Alf on the other, the primeval drained out of her and, with a pang of regret, she resumed the mind and shape of Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, Medica of the Salerno School, mistress of the art of death and agent to King Henry II of England, anxious friend to a missing woman, lover of a man who loved God and his king more than he did her…

“Here they come, look,” Will said as four black beetle-like figures emerged from the ruin of the church. “Bugger, I forgot as it’s third Friday of the month.”

For the beetles were not returning to the Abbot’s kitchen; one of them was walking toward the abbey pier, where the unmistakable shape of Godwyn awaited him at the oars of a rowing boat. “Off to Lazarus,” Will said. “Old abbot’s a-taking communion to them lepers.”

“Well, they’re not worrying about me,” Adelia said, slightly miffed at the abbey’s placid reaction to her and Mansur’s disappearance.

“Reg’lar as Christmas. Every three weeks, off he do go to keep them lepers’ souls in trim, nothin’ to come in the way of it.”

“Saint he is,” Alf said. “Buggered if I’d go.”

“Leprosy isn’t all that contagious,” Adelia murmured.

“What’s that mean?”

“You don’t catch the sickness quickly.”

“I ain’t bloody riskin’ it, I tell you that.”

“I’m sorry for the poor sods,” Toki said. “Fancy rottin’ away on a lump o’ mud as you can’t get off of.”

“But can’t they walk off it?” Adelia wanted to know. From up here the mosaic of sedge, reed, and fen woodland with their differing greens that surrounded the islands’ low humps looked firm enough, while surely those streams and lakes reflecting the enamel blue of the sky could be swum or waded.

“Not allowed,” Toki told her. “The law. An’ they ain’t got no boat.”

Abbot Sigward and Godwyn, apparently, when they visited that poor congregation, had to secure their punt to Lazarus’s landing stage by a lock to which only they had the key.

“As for walkin’,” Will said, “you don’t walk the Avalon marshes less’n you been born on ’em. Not then, neither. There’s quog devils out there as’ll grab your feet and suck you down, an’ you ain’t never sure where they are ’cos they’re shifting buggers, pop up anywhere them quog devils will.”

“Yet I’ve seen people on stilts…”

But stilt walkers, Adelia was told, never went that far out, being aware of the risk. Anyway, Lazarus inhabitants had learned by tragic experience not to try and escape.

“There’s more’n one leper as tried to get off ain’t never been seen again.”

The beetles that were brothers Aelwyn, James, and Titus moved about the grounds, carrying out odd jobs, netting trout from the pool for the fish stew-for it was Friday and only fish was on the menu.

On its promontory, the tithing waited with animal patience until the monks should withdraw into the Abbot’s kitchen and, while it waited, passed comment on the men it watched.

“Old Titus’ll be wanting his dinner soon, greedy bugger.”

“An’ his ale. Old abbot sent poor Useless off for getting drunk, but he don’t know the half of what Titus topes when he ain’t looking. Could drink Useless under the table any day, Titus could.”

“Look at old James potterin’ about. Bet he’s talking to hisself. Mad as a weasel, James is, an’ nasty with it when he’s roused.”

Will nudged Adelia. “Bet you don’t know as why Brother Aelwyn di’n’t want you and the darky messin’ about in the graveyard.”

“No. Why?”

“ ’Cos he’s got two babies buried in it.”

“Babies?”

Will smirked. “Babies. Oh, there was carryin’s-on with women in the old days, so they say, for all them monks was supposed to be virgins, an one of ’em had twins an’ old Aelwyn give ’em to her. Left ’em on the abbey’s doorstep, she did. There was a right to-do about it. Had to bury ’em in the monks’ own graveyard.”

“Dear God, how did the babies die?”

Will, with some reluctance, admitted that as far as was known, the twins had met a natural death.

Listening to them, Adelia began to see the fire’s great scar spread over the abbey as a stain representing human frailty and misery.

There was, however, nothing but good words for Abbot Sigward. “Wasn’t no carryin’s – on after he were elected,” Will told her. “Not a bad old boy, for a monk.”

“Fancy leavin’ a rich living so’s you got to say prayers all day,” Toki said incredulously.

“Did it for to remember his son as died fighting the bloody Saracens,” Alf said. “Right upset about that, Sigward was. ’S a wonder he never sent to have the body brought back. Sir Gervase over at Street, he was brought back and put in Street Church with his legs crossed and his sword an’ all.”

“Cut up too bad by them black bastards p’raps, nothin’ left to bring back. Or maybe he never had no friends to carry him home. Might’ve died a hero but didn’t live like one. Weedy little bugger he was. Hilda never reckoned him much, said he was a milksop, always blubberin’ an’ saying he was cold.”

“Crusades suited him, then,” Will said. “Hot out them parts, ain’ it?”

“About as hot as here,” Adelia told him. She picked a dock leaf to protect her bare head from sunstroke and another to brush the flies away from the sweat on her face. “Aren’t those blasted men ever going to go in to dinner?”

“S’pose the darky proves Useless di’n’t do it, an’ we can bury the poor bugger,” Toki said to Will. “Where we going to throw his knife?”

“In the river, acourse.”

“Which one?”

Will shrugged. “The Brue, I reckon. Liked fishin’ in the Brue, Useless did. ’F you ask me, that’s where King Arthur threw Excalibur like as not. Useless’d want his old knife to go the same.”

“You’re throwing his knife into the river?” Adelia inquired.

“Got to,” Will said, shortly.

“Why?”

“ ’Cos it’s got to go back.”

She was interested. In her beloved fens, fishermen were often getting their lines caught in rusting weapons, then, carefully and with a prayer, throwing them once again into the waters, obeying a time-fogged legend, almost an instinct, that held that a great warrior’s sword or shield, however valuable, must be returned to the mystery that had given it its power. Her foster father, on his travels, had found the custom everywhere in the east. “A very ancient ritual,” he’d told her, “an offering to the gods on behalf of the soul of the dead owner.”

Of course-now she remembered-she’d heard Rhys singing of Excalibur being returned to the lake from which a lady’s arm had once proffered it.

So the custom persisted. Pagan but, still, beautiful.

At last the abbey grounds emptied. The tithing moved down the hill, still keeping to cover, and approached what remained of the abbey wall.

Will pointed to an area of blackened rubble. “Tha’s where Useless’d go under the wall, look, only you can’t see the hole now acause the fire brought the stones down on it.”

“Then remove them,” Adelia told him. “The lord doctor wishes to see the actual burrow.”

And Adelia realized that for once she need not command through Mansur; these men belonged to a level of society so low that its women had to work at jobs other than that of a wife in order for their families to survive, holding a place of their own as fellow laborers in the fields, as ale brewers, laundresses, market sellers, maybe even as thieves, bringing in money that earned them a position of their own. Only the upper classes, where ladies were dependent on their lords, could afford to regard women as inferior. Now that she, Adelia, was accepted by the tithing as trustworthy, it was not unnatural for its members to have decisions made by a female.

Still, it was better to stick to the pretense; one of them might give her away.

With some effort, the stones were cleared to reveal a curve in the ground that once had allowed the late Eustace to creep under the wall. “Like this, see.” Alf fell flat, prepared to give demonstration in case the lord Mansur and his interpreter didn’t understand the burrowing procedure.

Adelia stopped him. “Don’t. The doctor believes there’s a trap on the other side.”

“Gor, old Useless didn’t have no trouble with traps.”

“I think he had trouble with this one,” Adelia said. She pushed Alf aside and took his place. “Get me a stick.”

A stick was brought and Adelia, crouching in the depression, extended it gingerly so that she could use it to sift through the cinders and newly grown weeds on the abbey side of the wall.

Something clinked.

And there it was. Not a noose such as tightened around the neck or leg of vermin but a spring trap, now buckled by heat yet still recognizable as the terrible thing it was, and still with the chain that had been riveted to one of the stones in the wall.

Brother Christopher had become exasperated by the nighttime human rabbit that kept nibbling away at the abbey’s stores, and, ignoring the command that the Church must not shed blood, he’d made sure he caught it this time.

The tithing was shocked. “I’ll kill that there monkish bastard when he gets back,” Will said.

“What he want to do that for?” Alf wanted to know. “Useless din’t do no harm, just a sip o’ wine to keep him happy, odd turnip or lettuce here or there. Bugger it, richest abbey in the world could afford a bit o’charity, cou’n’t it?”

But Brother Christopher had not thought so; he’d laid in the grass outside Eustace’s burrow a mechanism consisting of a pair of steel jaws triggered by a spring and welded it into place, so that Eustace, pulling himself out of the burrow, had put a hand on the base, causing the trap’s teeth to jump together in a wicked bite on his fingers.

It wasn’t a mantrap such as the one Adelia had once seen-and still tried not to remember-holding someone else in its jaws; this was smaller but, in its way, had proved just as fatal.

In her mind, she heard the snap as it closed, saw Eustace struggling without effect to dislodge it from its fastening…

“But that don’t prove nothing,” Will said, having given it thought. “They’ll say as how he got in some other way, set the fire, an’ was trapped comin’ out.”

“The doctor doesn’t think so,” Adelia said, nodding at Mansur, who nodded back. “Eustace used his own knife to cut off his own fingers; he wouldn’t have done that unless his life depended on it, would he?”

The tithing shook its head. A man didn’t deliberately lose the use of his right hand unless he was in extremis. Eustace would have waited until somebody released him and taken his punishment, which, under a compassionate abbot, might not have been too severe.

“No,” Adelia went on, “Eustace had to free himself. He was coming in through the burrow ready to do his thieving. Look…” She used the stick again to stir through the weeds and found the proof she knew had to be there, and nearly collapsed with relief that it was. “Look.” She exposed three knobbles of charred bone. “Those are his fingers.”

They still didn’t understand.

She said, “The fingers are on the abbey side, pointing toward it. If… Don’t touch them, Alf; they’re our proof where they are… Don’t you see, if Eustace had been returning from the crypt they’d have been on the other side of the trap. It caught him as he was going in. I think, the doctor thinks, the fire had already started and was spreading toward this wall. If he hadn’t sliced off his fingers, he’d have been burned alive.”

Again, she saw Eustace, helpless, flames licking through the grass toward his face, desperately sawing with his knife through his own gristle and bone to get free, tearing the flesh of his little finger away from the tooth of the trap that had nicked the edge of its proximal phalanx.

She watched him wrap the dreadful injury in moss and grass and blunder his way up the hill to die of blood loss or poisoning, praying to God or perhaps to Arthur for a relief that never came.

“Poor old Useless,” Alf said quietly.

“An’ you’ll clear him for us?” Will asked.

“Yes,” Adelia told him, “I shall tell the bishop of Saint Albans, and he will tell the sheriff.”

She bent over the trap, mentally going over its evidence once more, clearing away the weeds in order that the position of the burned finger bones could be seen more clearly.

Mansur shouted.

She turned round, alarmed.

The tithing had gone. Where the men had been seconds ago, there were merely burned stones and the rise of a hillside. It was as if the sun had melted them away.

“Come back, come back,” Adelia yelled. “You haven’t told me about Emma.” But her scream raised nothing but a flight of warblers from the undergrowth.

The only thing to show that the tithing had ever been present was the harp nestling in Rhys’s arms.