Grave Goods aka Relics of the Dead

FOURTEEN

RIDING A SEDATE PALFREY and with Millie up behind her, Adelia trotted along the road to Wells at the head of a cavalcade.

In one of her horse’s saddlebags was a summons to appear at the Bishop’s Palace before King Henry of England. Sticking out of the other bag was a long, thin woven contraption, more usually used for carrying fishing rods, containing an object for which the monarchy and abbeys of Europe would give their eyeteeth-or certainly other people’s.

Captain Bolt, who’d come to the Pilgrim to fetch her and Mansur, had looked at it sideways, but she’d declined to tell him what was in it. “A surprise gift for the king,” she’d said, and had been ashamed to be saying it.

When Gyltha and Mansur had been called to the inn’s dining table to look on Excalibur and learn who it was that lay in the cell on the Tor, she had seen the flame in Roetger’s and Emma’s eyes leap into theirs like the reflection of a beacon on one hilltop sending its signal to the next.

After that, silence. Nobody had spoken of it, as if the knowledge was sufficient and would be cheapened by commentary.

Rhys, Celt that he was, had perhaps the greatest claim to know, but he’d not been told in case the wonder could not be encompassed even in song.

Adelia realized then that whoever Arthur and his sword had fought, or whatever they had fought for, didn’t matter; their legend was enough, encapsulating an ideal around which a nation could cohere. No religion on earth, no message of universal brotherhood, could fill people’s aching need for a hero who was peculiarly theirs. That Arthur had no grounding in verifiable history, as had the Franks’ Charlemagne or Spain ’s El Cid or the Arabs’ Omar bin AlKhattab-“How can you enslave people when they were born free?”-was irrelevant; somewhere, somehow, his beacon had caught hold and its glimmer had survived centuries of otherwise impenetrable darkness.

A fairy tale, she’d thought with despair, yet I am the keeper of it. The oriflamme had been passed to her, whether she wanted it or not, believed in it or not.

And I am about to betray it.

For Adelia had favors to ask, and the sword in the fishing basket was to be the exchange-it was as well to have something to offer Henry Plantagenet as it was to possess a long spoon when treating with the devil-frequently the same thing.

“How did the king receive my lord Mansur’s report, captain?” Adelia asked.

“They tell me he was… disappointed, mistress.”

“Is that a euphemism for biting the carpets?”

Captain Bolt didn’t know what a euphemism was, but she gathered that her translation fit the scene exactly, though, since the report had been handed over to the king in the middle of the Channel at the time, his teeth would have been grinding on planks.

Excalibur was to be not just a peace offering but a bargaining counter, and she felt dreadful about it, as if she was selling the Matter of Britain for a mess of pottage.

He’d better be worthy of it, she thought. But oh, how he would exploit his dead Arthur, kill the dream of the Welsh, use Arthur’s bones to rebuild Glastonbury, beating a drum like any marketplace hawker to attract crowds to that quiet little hillside cell.

So Adelia, unusually indecisive, rode to Wells dreading the choice she must make when she got there.

It was partly because she was tired. When Emma and Roetger had been summoned to the assize some days before, taking Pippy with them, she had expected to spend the time restfully with Allie. So she had, but it was then, as if they had been waiting for her mind to be unguarded, that images of the past weeks had invaded it like savage dogs, spoiling the hours on the marshes with the memory of Sigward and Hilda walking into quicksand, sending her down into the tunnel at night, and making her kill Wolf over and over again.

In the middle of it, she and Mansur had been called to the abbey wall to demonstrate Eustace’s innocence to the bishop of Saint Albans and the twelve men with him-the jury that was to pass judgment on the tithing when they appeared at the assize. It was easier than she’d expected it to be; the jurors were all local countrymen familiar with traps and, though at first they looked askance at Mansur, had accepted the word of the bishop that the Arab was a royal investigator, an expert, with a warrant from the king to look into the matter of the Glastonbury fire-after all, King Henry, being a foreigner himself, was expected to be peculiar in his choice of servants.

“I’d hoped that the case would be dropped now that the abbey has withdrawn its accusation of Eustace,” Rowley had told Adelia, “but the fire was such a colossal event that the justices must pursue it. The tithing has been summoned to appear.”

In her turn, she had hoped that Rowley would be able to spend the night with her; she needed the comfort of his body not just for its own sake but to ward off the nightmares. However, he couldn’t be spared from his duties at the Wells assize and had ridden back to them with the jury in tow.

It was no help to her troubled state of mind as she rode along the forest road on this pleasant, sunny morning to find that pieces of human flesh, a leg here, a torso there, were hanging from the branches of trees lining the route.

Captain Bolt and his men had cleansed the forest thoroughly of Wolf’s remaining brigands and anyone else who had no explanation or license to justify being there. “Up before the verderers’ court, sentenced, and then chop-chop,” the captain said graphically.

“Do they have to be so… displayed?” Adelia asked.

“King’s orders,” Bolt said. “Make any other bug… brigand think twice afore doing likewise.”

And this, Adelia thought, is the king I considered civilized.

Well, he had been; he’d saved her life once when the Church would have condemned her; he could charm, make her laugh; he was introducing new and finer concepts into English law, but there was still an underlying savagery that marked him as a man of his time when she’d hoped for more.

He muddles me, she thought wearily. Shall I give him his dead Arthur? Or not?

Loggers were already cutting the trees back to the statutory bow’s length from the road so that the air rang with the thud of axes and smelled nicely of raw wood-except for an occasional whiff of putrefying flesh as the cavalcade passed a piece of it.

Behind the leading horses-some way behind because the presence of a king’s officer bothered them-rode the tithing on their donkeys and, in Captain Bolt’s opinion, considerably lowering the tone.

Alf had got his voice back. Adelia could hear his and the others’ comments as they rode-and hoped that the captain’s helmet kept them from his ears. They were attempting to identify the owners of the bloodied pieces.

“Reckon as that’s a bit of Scarry, Will?”

“Never. Scarry’s arms had black hair on ’em. Looks more like Abel’s. Abel had them sort of twisty fingers.”

“So he did.”

To Adelia’s regret, Gyltha had remained behind at the Pilgrim. Allie had been reluctant to part from her lurcher and, since the dog was canis non grata among the hunting fraternity to be expected in attendance at the assize, Gyltha had said she’d stay with the child. “Anyway, I seen enough of Wells, bor, that’s too noisy.”

“That’s not like you.” Gyltha loved excitement.

“Wait til you get there. Ain’t room to breathe.”

A female companion had been needed for propriety’s sake, so Millie’s services had been called in. How much the girl understood of the drawings with which Adelia had tried to indicate both the journey and its purpose, it was difficult to tell.

Gyltha had been right about Wells; the noise of its hubbub could be heard a mile off.

The traveling assize was a visitation to be dreaded, a new idea of King Henry II’s, so everyone had been told, to introduce in the goodness of time a common law throughout the land rather than the piecemeal and frequently prejudiced judgments by the local courts of sheriff, baron, and lords of the manor, which, while the assize was in situ, were as good as overridden.

Like the mills of God it ground slowly-it had been in Wells more than two weeks with no sign of finishing yet-and it ground extremely small, listening to appeals, plaints, and pleas; inquiring into the state of the county and the business of practically everybody in it; hearing accusations of murder, rape, theft, and robbery; even making sure that the smallest bakery and alehouse were giving fair and uniform measure.

It was certainly new to Somerset, which had dreaded it. The justices, great and awe-ful lords of thousands of acres, with their own castles in both England and Normandy, had to be accommodated, not to mention their servants and the hundreds of clerks necessary for their work. Where to put them?

The choice had fallen on Wells, the biggest town in the county.

And now, God have mercy on us, the king had come to see his terrible assize in action, even to sit on its benches. Where to put him?

At last the bishop of Wells had delivered up his palace to his royal master and gone to bed with a headache.

The streets were congested. Barred carts were still bringing in men and women from gaols in far-flung parts of the county to face their trials. Judges’ clerks were scurrying everywhere, summonses at the ready. Official ale tasters, staggering slightly, supped at inn doorways to make sure there wasn’t too much water mixed with the brew’s barley and yeast. Bakers stood by their ovens while their farthing loaves were tested for the standard weight. Hucksters with licenses carefully displayed shouted their wares. Jugglers, acrobats, and storytellers were taking the opportunity to entertain the crowds. Horses were being traded; so were marriageable young women. Many people had journeyed for miles to catch a glimpse of their king.

Captain Bolt and his men cleared a way through with the flat of their swords.

In a vast field outside the Bishop’s Palace, the itinerant justices-the earls, barons, and bishops whom Henry trusted to administer his laws-sat on benches in the shade of striped awnings, the accused, the witnesses, and juries in front of them. Executioners stood to their gallows beside tables holding blinding irons and axes.

Clattering over the bridge crossing the bishop’s moat, Captain Bolt’s cavalcade trotted through the rose-scented orderliness of the bishop’s gardens to draw up outside the grandeur of the Bishop’s Palace.

Mansur helped Adelia and Millie dismount and took the long basket out of the saddlebag. “Keep tight hold of it,” Adelia told him.

A groom took their horses but flinched at the sight of the tithing’s donkeys. “I ain’t putting them mokes in my stables.”

Captain Bolt produced a summons. “The bishop of Saint Albans wishes to see these men.”

“What, them?” The groom looked from the seal to the tithing, then to Mansur. “And him?”

“Just get on with it,” the captain said.

The exchange had to be repeated several times before they were allowed up the steps of the palace and into its entrance hall. They waited while the bishop of Saint Albans was fetched. The tithing used the time to wander around and stare at the hall’s decoration and ornaments, watched by the majordomo with the air of a man whose carpets were being trampled by a flock of muddy sheep.

“Look at that, Will.” Alf was staring at a particularly fine tapestry. “That’s Noah building the ark, ain’t it?”

“ Lot of needlework gone into that, Alf. Fetch all of ten shilling, I reckon,” Will said knowledgeably.

“Well, he ain’t going to get the ark built that way; he’s holding the adze all wrong.”

Rowley came striding toward them. In full mitered regalia, he looked imposing but tired. He bowed to Mansur. “What on earth have you got there?”

“It is a basket for holding fishing rods,” Mansur answered truthfully, in Arabic. Other people were listening.

Rowley raised his eyebrows but accepted it. He bowed in Adelia’s direction and nodded at the tithing. “Come along.”

Captain Bolt said, “My lord, I got to present Mistress Adelia here to the king soon as possible.”

“The king is in conclave with the papal legate and will be for some time yet,” Rowley told him. “In the meantime, the lady must translate for my lord Mansur, should it be necessary. We shan’t be long.”

He led the way out and along a back path going to the field of judgments. It was like threading a way through hundreds of scattered bees. Juries, that innovation demanded by the king, buzzed their accounts to the judges of what they knew of the accused and the case. A woman was up for having badly beaten her neighbor for throwing mud at her washing on a clothesline…

“But we do reckon as there’s always been bad blood betwixt ’em,” the foreman was saying, “ Alice havin’ previous attacked Margaret over the matter of a milk jug. Both as bad as each other, we reckon…”

Adelia would have liked to linger to hear the judgment on Alice and Margaret, but Rowley was hurrying her.

Further on, a wretch was being ordered to leave the realm, the jury having declared that though he’d been acquitted of rape because his accuser couldn’t prove it, to their personal knowledge he was of bad character and a pest to all women.

Adelia found herself softening toward Henry Plantagenet. How much fairer it was to employ a jury rather than throwing people into ponds to see if God made them float (guilty) or sink (innocent)-a form of trial the king hoped to get rid of eventually.

She heard the judge say, “And his goods to be confiscated to the Crown.”

Well, yes, that too. Always the opportunist, Henry, when it came to money.

Adelia was followed by Millie, whose darting eyes were taking in what her ears could not. They reached their destination, an ash tree under which a judge on a dais was bad-temperedly flicking a fly whisk in front of his sweating face. Four men were being brought out of a nearby very crowded pound, which held the day’s accused-Adelia assumed they were the remainder of Eustace’s tithing who’d been kept in custody.

A tonsured clerk sat by the judge at a lower table, a high pile of scrolls in front of him.

Will, Alf, Toki, Ollie, and the tithing member whose name Adelia had learned was Jesse were pushed alongside their fellows by an usher with the dimensions of a Goliath.

The clerk picked up one of the scrolls. “My lord, this is a frankpledge case wherein the abbot of Glastonbury accused a certain Eustace of Glastonbury belonging to this tithing before you of having started the great fire…”

The judge glared at the tithing. “I expect he did, the monster. They all look like arsonists to me.”

“Yes, my lord, but…”

“And those rogues there kept me waiting.” The judge pointed at Will’s group. “That’s an offense in itself.”

“Yes, my lord, but the charge has been withdrawn.”

“Withdrawn?” It was the bark of a vixen robbed of her whelps.

“Both the abbot of Glastonbury and Eustace being dead, my lord, and…”

The judge’s choler abated slightly. “Good man, Abbot Sigward. Met him at Winchester one Easter. Saintly man.” He gathered himself. “But because accuser and accused are dead doesn’t mean Eustace didn’t do it, nor that these rogues should be let off their pledges for him.”

“Apparently he didn’t do it, my lord.”

“He didn’t? How do we know? Did anybody see him not doing it? The fire was a tragedy; somebody’s got to pay for it.”

“Yes, my lord, but…”

Rowley stepped forward. “I represent the abbey in this case, my lord. Its monks are still in mourning for their abbot and cannot appear. On their behalf, the charge is withdrawn.”

The judge got up and bowed. “My lord bishop.”

“My lord.” Rowley bowed back. “It has been proved that Eustace was innocent of the fire…”

“Who by?” The judge was refusing to let go of his prey.

“It was started by one of the monks accidentally.” Rowley produced a document from a pocket attached to the gold cord around his waist. “This is the deposition by a Brother Titus…”

“Taking the blame out of Christian charity, no doubt. You sure this Eustace didn’t have a hand in it?”

The clerk intervened, beckoning to twelve men who’d been standing by. “My lord, to make sure, a jury was summoned and has been to the abbey to see the proof of Eustace’s innocence…” The usher gestured to twelve men who’d been waiting nervously nearby.

In the judge’s opinion, they didn’t rate much higher than the tithing, being of the same class. “Summoned by good summoners, were they?”

“Excellent, my lord, and have been to view both the abbey fire and the evidence.”

“There was evidence, then?”

The jury foreman stepped out. “My lord, that dark gentleman there showed us and explained… It was all to do with fingers an’ a trap, very clever it was…”

The judge had turned his attention to Mansur. “A Saracen? And what’s that he’s holding? Some outlandish weapon?”

The foreman pressed on. “Course, the lady had to tell us what he was saying, her bein’ able to jabber the same language as what he does…”

“Speaks Arabic, does she?” The judge’s eyes rested on Adelia. “Probably no more Christian than he is. And they’re witnesses?”

“My lord,” the bishop of Saint Albans said, “the lord Mansur is used by the king as his special investigator…”

“Where does he find them?” the judge asked the sky. And then, “I don’t care if he’s used by the Angel Gabriel. It’s up to the jury here. If they’re satisfied…”

“We are, my lord. Eustace di’n’t do it.”

“Oh, very well.” But the judge was still looking for a loophole. “However, gentlemen of the jury, can you vouch for the good character of this tithing?”

There was a dreadful pause. Toki’s hand went under his tunic and he began scratching like a dog sent mad by fleas.

“We ain’t sure as how they’ve been a-livin’ since their homes was burnt down,” the foreman said cautiously, “but nothin’s known against ’em, not really known like. An’ Will of Glastonbury, that one there, he’s a prize baker.”

The judge sighed. “Then they are quit.” His clerk handed him a scroll and he scribbled a signature on it. “We are obliged to the bishop of Saint Albans for his attendance. Call the next case.”

The next case, a man whose feet were hobbled, was being lifted out of the pound by the usher to face the judge. A new panel of jurors shuffled into the shade of the tree.

The tithing stood where it was for a moment, bemused, before Will stepped forward and proffered a grimy hand to the judge. “Very obliged, my lord.” The usher pushed him away.

Alf was running after the foreman of the departing jury, trying to kiss him.

Will doffed his cap to the bishop, grunted at Mansur and Adelia, and slouched off.

“That’s all the thanks you get,” Rowley said. It was the first time he’d spoken to Adelia today; he’d barely looked at her.

Affectionately, she watched the tithing disappear into the crowd. “A jury,” she said. “King Henry, for these men, for all who are on trial, I thank you.”

“The greatest lawgiver since Solomon,” Rowley said, and then winked. “Mind you, it’s lucrative. But better all the fines and confiscated goods in Henry’s pocket than anyone else’s.”

A clerk was trying for the bishop’s attention. “My lord, you are listed to sit on the Lord of Newcastle’s case. If you’d follow me…”

With a wave of his hand, Rowley was gone.

And that’s how it will be, Adelia thought, no recognition in public, brief moments, impermanence. Still, Allie and I will be happy to opt for that.

Captain Bolt was stamping with impatience. “The king, mistress…”

Adelia took the long basket from Mansur. Mentally, she apologized to the bones on the Tor: You see, Henry is your inheritor after all; look at the justice he has brought to your island.

At the palace, the majordomo led the captain, Adelia, Mansur, and Millie up a beautiful staircase to a long, heavily windowed gallery containing an equally long line of people. Benches had been set for them.

“Petitioners,” Captain Bolt said disgustedly. “How long we going to have to wait? The king wanted to see this lady urgent.”

“The lord king is with the papal legate, mistress,” the majordomo said. “When he’s finished… Oh my God, will you stop that bloody pig shitting on the floor?”

It was a nice floor, tiled with ceramic coats of arms. It was a nice pig, if unstable as to its digestion. The large countrywoman holding it on a lead nodded amiably, lifted it onto her lap, and wiped its bottom with her sleeve.

“Does she have to be here?” the majordomo begged a royal clerk who stood at the door of the receiving room with a scroll in his hand and a writing desk hanging from his neck. Adelia had seen him before; she tried to remember his name.

“All petitioners, the king said,” the clerk told him. “She’s a petitioner. Maybe the pig is.”

“I’ll go and petition a bloody bucket and cloth, then,” the majordomo said bitterly.

Most of the gallery’s occupants, a motley lot, were anxious, their mouths moving as they rehearsed what they would say to the king. Only the countrywoman, with a sangfroid to shame nobility, seemed at ease.

Adelia and Millie took a seat next to her. The open windows of the receiving room where the king was in discussion allowed its occupants’ exchanges to drift along the outside sunny air and through the open windows of the gallery, though only Henry’s voice could be heard clearly. It rasped on the ear at the best of times-and this, obviously, was not a good time.

“I won’t have it, Monseigneur. I’m not going to take out their tongues nor cut off their balls, nor any other part of their anatomy. And I’m certainly not going to execute them.”

The legate’s reply was lower and more controlled. Adelia caught the word “heretics.”

“Heretics? Because they oppose the sale of indulgences? I don’t like the sale of indulgences. I was taught sins were paid for in hell, not by a handful of cash to the nearest priest. Does that make me a heretic?”

Another murmur.

Adelia could see the clerk at the door was becoming nervous-Robert, that was his name, Master Robert.

“You do it, then.” The king’s voice again. “Let the Church punish ’em… oh, I forgot, you can’t do it, can you? The Church can’t shed blood, but it’s happy to see heretics skinned alive by a civil court. Not your criminal clerks, though, oh, no, you won’t do that. I’ve got a case in Nottingham, six-year-old boy assaulted by a priest. Try the accused in your court, I told the bishop, and if you find him guilty, which you will, hand him over to mine-we’ll see he doesn’t bugger anybody ever again. But oh, no, he’s a priest; can’t touch a priest, that’s purely a Church matter-so the bastard’s free to do it again.”

Don’t mention Becket, thought Adelia, wincing. Don’t give them cause to best you again.

Winning the argument with his king might have cost Archbishop Becket his life, but it had gained him sainthood-and the continuing inviolability of the clergy from civil prosecution.

The door to the receiving room was opening. A fat, angry man in the robes and scarlet hat of a cardinal emerged from behind it. Adelia caught a whiff of scent and sweat as he lumbered past. The Plantagenet stood in the doorway, balefully watching him go.

“Um,” Master Robert said unhappily.

“What,” his king shouted at him.

“Well, we’re on rather thin ice here, my lord. The monseigneur does represent the Pope. And the Pope-”

“Can put England under interdict if I won’t punish its heretics, thank you, Robert, I know. How many of these bloody heretics are there?”

“Three, my lord.”

Henry sighed. “All right, then. Tell the executioner to brand an H on their foreheads and let ’ em go. See if that satisfies His Holiness. The iron’s not to penetrate too deep, mind.”

“Yes, my lord.” Master Robert made a note. “I fear you will have to attend the branding; the cardinal will then at least be able to report to the Pope that you sanctioned the punishment by your presence.”

The king spat. “He’ll be lucky he doesn’t have to report that I shoved the iron up his arse… Oh, very well, tell me when the executioner’s ready. Now then, who’s next?” He caught sight of the pig. “What’s that doing here?”

“I believe Mistress Hackthorn has a petition, my lord.”

“No, I ain’t.” The countrywoman raised her bulk off the bench, still holding the pig. “I come for to say thank you, I have. This here porker’s a present for you, King Henry, dear soul.”

“Is it?” Henry went up to her, intrigued. “What for?”

“My lad Triffin, master. Lord Kegworth, him as owns Gurney Manor, he said as our tenement was his. He said as my Triffin weren’t a freeman of it and took it away from un. The which was a lie, us holding that land since the time of King Harold…”

Henry looked toward Master Robert.

“Ah, yes, my lord,” the clerk said, searching his notes. “A plea by a Master Hackthorn of Westbury that he was unjustly dispossessed of his land by Lord Kegworth. He purchased a writ of Novel Dissiesin, and the matter was put two days ago to a jury of his peers, who had knowledge of the case before the justices…”

“Was it?” asked Henry, suddenly delighted. He looked at Mistress Hackthorn. “How much did the writ cost you?”

“Two shilling, master. The which ’twas worth it for them… what’s that they do call theyselves? A jury?”

“Twelve good men and true,” Henry said, nodding.

“An’ so they was, master. We’d a been homeless else. Saw the right of it, they did, an’ give the land back to us. For which we do be grateful and hope as you’ll accept this porker for our thanks, master, our sow havin’ farrowed nicely this spring so’s we got this un to spare.”

“God, I love the English,” Henry said. “Madam, I am honored.”

The pig was handed over and the king carried it into the receiving room, shouting “Next” over his shoulder.

“That’s you, mistress,” Master Robert told Adelia.

Captain Bolt bowed and went on his way, duty done.

Followed by Millie and Mansur, Adelia went in and leaned the basket against the wall next to the door. The clerk followed her, shutting the door behind them and hurrying to close the windows.

It was a lovely room, very large and sunlit, with a molded ceiling that took Adelia’s breath away. Tables, chairs, and chests were carved and polished so that they seemed to writhe with a life of their own, a jeweled astrolabe, bronzes… The bishop of Wells did himself well.

Henry had put his mark on it. Scrolls and parchments with hanging seals littered every surface. His favorite hawk sat on a perch, below which were its droppings; two muddy gazehounds lay stretched out before the enormous marble fireplace.

The king was richly dressed for once, but Adelia, knowing him, guessed he’d been out hunting at dawn.

He put the pig down. The two gazehounds raised their heads to look at it and then, at a word from their master, closed their eyes again.

There was a splatter as the pig made its contribution to the bishop’s Persian rug. The smell of manure overpowered the scented potpourri in the bishop’s rose bowls.

Henry patted it fondly. “My sentiments exactly,” he told it.

“Mistress Adelia,” his clerk prompted him.

“I know who it is,” the king said nastily. There was the briefest of salaams to Mansur and an even briefer nod at Millie before he clicked his stubby fingers and Master Robert put the scroll that was Adelia’s report into them. “I saw the bishop of Saint Albans this morning, mistress-he’s looking very spry. Been giving him his oats, have you?”

Adelia compressed her lips; there would be worse to come. She’d lost the king money-the most heinous sin to be perpetrated against a man who needed to employ armies-but, Lord, he was offensive. This is the last time I work for him, she promised herself, the very last time.

He waved the scroll at her. “I’ve a good mind to make you eat this. What I wanted when I sent you to Glastonbury was Arthur and Guinevere. What have I got? Two sodomites.”

“You asked for the truth, my lord,” Adelia told him. “You have it. What you do with it is your affair. They can be resurrected as Arthur and Guinevere, I suppose.” Henry wasn’t the only one who could be rude.

It made him crosser. “Not by me, mistress, not by me. I also have a regard for the truth. If I hadn’t, you could have stayed in the bloody fens where you belong. If they were sodomites, they’ll have to remain sodomites.”

He was right, of course; she shouldn’t misjudge him, but it was as if the mutual respect he and she had established over these last five years had vanished. The blue eyes looking at her through their almost invisible ginger lashes might have been regarding a stranger.

“Yes, my lord. I’m sorry, my lord.”

“You should be.” He thought a bit. “Mind you, when I’m dead I wager the abbey’ll resurrect them as Arthur and queen.”

He glanced back at the letter. “What’s all this about Abbot Sigward and quicksand?”

“Suicide, my lord. Out of remorse for the murder of his son-it’s all there. However, the bishop of Saint Albans has informed the monks that it was an accident.”

“A pity. I liked Sigward; he was on my side. God knows who they’ll want to elect now. You realize this is going to cost me? Where’s the money coming from to rebuild that blasted abbey now, eh?”

“I’m sorry, my lord.”

The king went on reading. “ ‘I would wish that Godwyn, landlord of the Pilgrim, might suffer no more grief than he already has…’ God’s knees, woman, he was accomplice to his wife’s attempted murders… You’ll be asking that Cain be let off for killing Abel next.”

“Even so, my lord, the man was instrumental in saving the life of Emma, Lady Wolvercote, and her child…”

“Ah, yes, the rich young widow.” The king’s face, looking at her sideways, became that of a predator. “I’ve had some pleasing offers for her.”

Alarmed, Adelia said, “My lord, you promised me you would not sell her in marriage. She wishes to wed her champion, I beg you to allow-”

“That was before I got a sodomite instead of King Arthur.” He tapped the scroll. “We’ll see. In view of this, I may have to husband my resources. Now then, about the dowager Wolvercote… ‘You, who prize justice above all things’… yes, yes… ‘right this great wrong… What do you want me to do about the woman? Throw her out of her manor?”

“It would be only just, my lord. She sent her own daughter-in-law and the others to their death…” Adelia heard her voice become shrill and tried to lower it. “Only the mercy of God and her champion’s good right arm saved Emma and her child…”

“Can you prove it?”

Why did he keep interrupting? Prove it? Adelia tried to think.

Wolf got a message from there saying as there’d be a rich lady and party a-leavin’ of Wolvercote… Will’s words. The assassin who’d received the message was dead. The person who’d taken it would have been one of the dowager’s most trusted servants and was unlikely to testify against her. The tithing’s knowledge was therefore hearsay. Anyway, disreputable as they were, their evidence would hardly stand up against that of a respected, well-connected, and rich Somerset aristocrat.

Adelia shook her head. “I doubt it.”

“So do I.”

“But it’s not fair.” It was the shriek Allie used when she was crossed. “My lord, she as good as murdered six people.”

Henry shrugged. “It may not be fair, but if I step in and evict her without evidence it would be something worse, it would be injustice. I must abide by the law of the land like everyone else or we revert to tyranny and from there into chaos. Law is my contract with my people.”

And what of the contract with me? Adelia thought. What of the dealings between individuals, promises, the return for loyal service, even a bloody thank-you?

And then she saw the king look toward Master Robert and wink.

The room skewed and fragmented. It was Wolf’s forest with the beast coming at her, it was the Pilgrim’s tunnel, and she was wading through it. She was watching two figures walk into the Avalon marshes…

“Goddamn you, Henry,” she screamed. “You send me into hell and I get nothing… nothing… I’ve seen terrible things, terrible, terrible things, I work for you… but never again; this is the last time I’m evicted from my fens… never again, never. I’m not your subject; you’re not my king… I’m tired and I’m poor and I want to go home.” She collapsed, weeping, into a chair to drum her heels on the floor like a thwarted child.

The silence in the room was awful.

He‚ll kill me, Adelia thought. I don’t care.

After a long while, reluctantly, she opened her eyes and met Mansur’s, full of concern. Millie was crouching beside her, holding her hand. The room’s silence was because Henry was no longer in it. Instead, a young man wearing the floppy cap of a lawyer was standing by the door.

The gazehounds were watching her. The pig farted in sympathy. Master Robert was pouring some wine from a silver jug into a silver cup. He crossed the room and gave it to her, supporting her hands while she drank it. He looked unperturbed, as if it were the norm for people to throw fits in the Plantagenet’s presence.

“The king has left to attend the branding of the heretics, mistress.”

“Has he?” she asked dully.

“It is not something he welcomes. I fear it put him into a teasing mood.”

“Yes.”

“But if you will follow Master Dickon here, he will take you to Lady Wolvercote. Master Dickon is the lawyer who represents her.”

Master Dickon took off his cap, twirling it in an elaborate and low bow. “You come along of me, miss. Hot, ain’t it? Do anybody down, this heat would.”

Mansur took Adelia’s arm with one hand and picked up the fishing basket with the other, and, with Millie behind them, they followed the lawyer past the petitioners and down the staircase.

“Do you really want to go home?” Mansur asked in Arabic.

While she’d been screaming, she had; she’d wanted safety, the calm of her foster parents’ house, and the discipline of the School of Medicine, where decisions were based on cold fact, where there was no moral quicksand, where the brain controlled emotion, where she would not risk her immortal soul by living in sin, where there was a king who left her alone.

“Do you?” she asked back, tiredly.

“I have thought of it,” he said, “but I have Gyltha.”

And so have I, Adelia thought. And you, who are my rock, and Allie, and a man I love and who loves me even though it imperils our chance of God’s grace.

Oh, but she was tired of feeling, the gift-or curse-that England had imposed on her. Whether it was better than no feeling at all, at this very moment she wasn’t sure.

“You did not give the king Excalibur,” Mansur said.

“He didn’t give me anything, either.”

Adelia’s experience of lawyers in Salerno had been of bearded old men who talked of digests, codices, and the Summa Azonis, the Roman law they’d learned at the great University of Bologna. Master Dickon was of a kind she hadn’t met before, homegrown, young, lacking breeding but not intelligence, and very unlawyerlike in that he wanted to impart knowledge rather than obscure it. The son of a Thames lighterman, he had been taught a good hand in a school run by his uncle, and had begun his working life as a mere scrivener in the Chancery, where his ability had come to the notice of the Chancellor himself, and was put to the study of English law.

All this was imparted over his shoulder in a London accent as he led the way down to the entrance hall.

“See, mistress, this is my first case of the Morte d’Ancestor writ, only third in the country far as I know.” He was almost bouncing with the excitement of it.

“Death of an ancestor?” asked Adelia, confused.

“You ain’t heard of it? Oh, mistress, you got to know about Morte d’Ancestor; magical Morte d’Ancestor is.” He looked around and saw a niche in which they could all stand while he explained the magical writ. He seemed unruffled by the presence of Mansur and included both him and Millie in his talk, using English on the presumption that they didn’t speak Latin. His admiration was for Henry Plantagenet, something Adelia had noticed before among native, lower-born Englishmen, who had a greater regard for their king than the Norman nobility, having benefited from his laws and, if they were intelligent, promotion to posts formerly reserved for sons of the nobility.

“Ooh, but he’s crafty is our King Henry,” Dickon said. “See, he’s not a lover of Roman law, and I ain’t, either-too much inquisition, too stuck with them old Byzantines, too many delays. What he’s doing, see, is using Anglo-Saxon law, what our great-granddads was accustomed to. He’s like a baker, if you understand me, using good English dough and trimmin’ it, kneadin’ it, reshapin’ it, and flourin’ it with a touch of genius. One of these days every court in the land’ll be using it.”

“And Morte dAncestor?” Adelia asked, not seeing where all this was going, nor sure she wanted to.

“Ah, Morte dAncestor.” In Master Dickon’s mouth it was an incantation. “It’s the latest of the king’s writs. He’s given us the writ of Right and Praecipe and Novel Dissiesin and now”-he saw Adelia’s mystification-“see, they’re all ways of bypassing the other courts and giving a plaintiff the right to royal justice, not in the lords’ or the sheriffs’ or the manors’ but straight to the king’s. A law available to everybody, see. You purchase a writ that suits your case.”

“How much did the writ cost you?” the king had asked Mistress Hackthorn.

In her disenchantment, Adelia asked, “So you have to buy justice?” How typical of Henry, she thought.

Master Dickon frowned. “On a sliding scale, what you can afford, like. But it ain’t so much a matter of buying justice as purchasing the king’s aid in getting it quick. Using the old way, decisions can take years. Now, in the case of Lord Wolvercote versus the dowager Lady Wolvercote, your Lady Wolvercote’s purchased Morte d’Ancestor for her lad. Well, I advised her o’course, her being a woman and Lord Wolvercote being a minor.”

“She did?” Adelia had heard nothing from Emma and Roetger since their departure for Wells; now here they were-Emma, at any rate-with a case, a writ, and a lawyer. “Not a trial by battle?”

“Mistress.” Dickon was pained. “That’s Dark Ages, that is. I don’t take on trials by battle, too chancy. This is a writ.”

A stripling with a clerk’s cap flapping about his ears was tugging at Master Dickon’s sleeve. “They’re a-coming, master.”

“Oops, oops. Better hurry. Judges are coming in.”

At a smart pace, they were made to follow the stripling, Adelia wondering if the boy’s mother knew her child was a lawyer’s clerk.

The case of Lord Philip of Wolvercote versus the dowager Lady Wolvercote, being of considerable local interest, had attracted nearly as large a crowd as a trial by battle; an usher had to clear the way through to what, in its way, was another arena. A scalloped awning sheltered the high dais of the judges at that moment taking their seats. On the grass before them, several yards apart but facing each other, had been set two ornamented chairs. Pippy, having bowed to the judges, was in one, his short legs dangling. In the other sat his grandmother.

A hand grasped Adelia’s arm. “I didn’t want to tell you until it was decided; it was to be a nice surprise if we won. And it’s been such a rush. But I’m so glad you’re here.” Emma’s eyes never left her son. “Look at him, he’s behaving beautifully. Isn’t he sweet?”

He was. But if this was a battle of sorts, the child looking happily around was outclassed by the woman opposite him; the dowager had all the dignity. With her pale, immobile face set round by its black wimple, she might have been a statue of contrasting marble. She also had more lawyers standing beside her, men who looked like lawyers in contrast to Master Dickon, now taking his place beside Pippy.

A voice spoke from the dais in the flat, thin timber of age that nevertheless traveled to the spectators and beyond. “Sheriff, has Philip of Wolvercote given you security for prosecuting his claim?”

“That’s Richard De Luci,” Emma breathed. “The Chief Justiciar himself. Oh, dear, this is so weighty. Should I be putting Pippy through it?”

The sheriff of Somerset, a florid, harassed-looking man in robes as scalloped as the awning over his separate bench, stood up. “He has, my lord.”

“And have you summoned by good summoners twelve free and lawful men from the neighborhood of Wolvercote Manor ready to declare on oath whether Lord Ralph of Wolvercote, father of the aforesaid Philip, was seized of his fee of the aforesaid manor on the day he died?”

“I have, my lord.” The sheriff waved toward a box nearby into which twelve men had been crammed like milk churns into a cart.

“Who speaks for them?”

One of the men extricated himself sufficiently to stand up. “I do, my lord. Richard de Mayne, knight, holding twelve virgates in the parish of Martlake. My land marches with Wolvercote’s on the north.”

“Have you and the others viewed the manor in this case?” The Chief Justiciar of England, like his voice, was thin. His head, which resembled a snake’s, moved slowly in the direction of his questions, giving the impression that it would strike at a lie like an adder at a frog.

“We have, my lord, and of our own knowledge we can say that Lord Wolvercote was receiving the rents and services. He died elsewhere, but we are in accord that he owned the manor at the time and that after his death his mother took possession of it, having previously occupied a dower house in the parish of Shepton.”

“That’s one answered,” Emma said. At Adelia’s look, she explained. “Two questions. Morte d’Ancestor asks just two questions… I can’t stand this, I swear I’m going to faint.”

Suddenly a new voice, a contralto, floated across the field, as unimpassioned as De Luci’s but considerably more beautiful. “My son was unlawfully hanged for treason by the king you serve.”

The Justiciar’s head turned by inches toward the dowager’s chair. “My understanding is that your son was hanged for murder, madam, not treason. However, that matter is not in question here. Nor, as a woman, are you permitted to speak in this court. Address your remarks through your counselor.”

The intervention had caused a flurry among the lawyers surrounding the dowager’s chair, the eldest among them speaking urgently into her ear. He put a warning hand on her shoulder, but, with one white finger, the dowager flicked it away.

The Chief Justiciar hadn’t finished. “Master Thomas, your client has been summoned three times to attend before us, and only now has she appeared.”

“I do not recognize the authority of this court.” Again, the dowager’s voice rang out.

This time Master Thomas’s hand clamped on the woman’s shoulder and would not be removed. “My lord, my client begs your mercy. The procedure is new to her, as indeed it is to us all. Her age confuses her.”

There was a murmur of sympathy from the crowd; liked or not, the dowager was a woman of Somerset, a county that regarded even the adjoining Devonshire as a foreign land. “What you at?” somebody cried out, “comin’ down from Lunnon to bully that poor old soul.”

De Luci ignored the shout. “And now, Sir Richard…”

“Dear God, here it comes.” Emma’s grip on Adelia’s arm became painful. “The second question.”

“… can you attest that the plaintiff is the heir to Lord Ralph of Wolvercote?”

There was a shifting among the jurors in the box.

The dowager’s lawyer stepped forward. “My lord, my client rejects that he is. She will swear on oath that there was never a marriage between the plaintiff’s mother and her son and that accordingly, the plaintiff is an impostor or a bastard or both.”

The crowd turned its attention to the little boy in the chair. Impervious to what was going on, he was beginning to be bored and had taken a piece of string from his sleeve and was playing cat’s cradle with it.

Emma’s and Adelia’s eyes met, agonized.

The dowager was right in essence; if a bride had to give consent, as according to the law she must, then Emma had never been married.

Abducted by Wolvercote, who wanted her fortune, from the Oxfordshire convent where she was being educated, her abductor’s hand had been placed over her mouth as she struggled to say “No” to the priest bribed to pronounce them married.

In effect, Pippy was the illegitimate child of rape.

Here was Master Dickon’s turn, and he stepped forward. He was enjoying the moment, and it was noticeable to Adelia that he was also softening his London speech. “My lord, we have produced a witness before the jury and a sworn statement from an unimpeachable source that there was indeed a marriage and that my client was subsequently born nine months later.”

“Has such a witness and such a statement been produced?” De Luci asked the jury.

Sir Richard was wriggling. “Well, they have, my lord, but we’d be glad to hear them again, to see what you think.”

“It is not what I think, it is what must be proved to you. However, we will allow a repetition.”

Master Dickon’s stripling dashed into the crowd and came back lugging a little old man in the long tunic of a priest.

Dickon introduced him to the judges. “This is Father Simeon, my lord, a priest of Oxford who will attest that he conducted a ceremony of marriage between the late Lord Wolvercote and Emma, daughter to Master Bloat, a vintner of Abingdon.”

“Mother of God, I can’t bear to look at him,” Emma whispered. “He was there; he said the words.” The memory made her retch.

In Wolvercote’s effort to secure Emma’s fortune for himself, Father Simeon had been just what he wanted, one of the Church’s derelicts who, having lost any cure or parish of his own, begged his bread at the tables of the charitable, and gave his blessing to anybody who’d buy it with a pot of ale. His tunic was filthy, his tonsure almost obscured by stubble, and he shook, with nerves or old age or drink, possibly all three.

Where had Master Dickon managed to find him? Adelia wondered. And was it worthwhile? The man was hardly a credible witness.

However, Father Simeon was producing a document as tattered as himself, proving that in the distant past he had been properly ordained.

“He’ll have to maintain that the marriage was legal,” Adelia reassured Emma, “or he’ll admit that he presided over an unlawful ceremony.”

“But will they take his word? Will they want papers? I don’t remember any certificate-I doubt that old pig can even write.”

Since some of the jury couldn’t read, the proof of Father Simeon’s priesthood had to be read out to them and then passed up to the judge.

The crowd listened with intent; nearly as good as trial by battle, this was.

At a nod from De Luci, Master Dickon began questioning his witness. On the feast of Saint Vintula in the year of Our Lord 1172 had Father Simeon solemnized a marriage between Ralph, Lord of Wolvercote, and Emma Bloat?

The priest’s shakes became more pronounced, and he was ordered to speak up. “Yes, yes,” he managed. “Yes, I did. Lord Wolvercote… yes, I remember perfectly, he asked me to marry them, and I did.”

“And was the marriage solemnized according to the law of the land?”

“Yes, it was. I’m sure it was, perfectly.”

Master Dickon nodded to the judge and handed over his witness to interrogation by the more formidable Master Thomas.

Was Emma Bloat’s father there to give his daughter away? If not, why not? Had all the solemnities been legally performed? Had a declaration been posted on the church door? Why had Lady Wolvercote not been informed of her son’s marriage?

“It was very snowy, you see,” Father Simeon pleaded. “I do remember that, very snowy. People couldn’t get through the drifts, I myself… Yes, I’m sure I put a notice on the door, but the snow, yes, I’m sure I did… but the snow, you see.”

“Were there witnesses?” demanded Master Thomas-he used the Latin: testes adfuerunt.

Father Simeon was floored. “What?” he asked.

Adelia groaned.

With a graceful outstretching of his arms, Master Thomas appealed to the judge. “Is this the man we are supposed to believe?”

De Luci brought his head round to the jury. “Do you believe him?”

Sir Richard consulted with his fellows. “Well, he’s a bit… well, my lord, his memory…”

Again Master Dickon stepped forward, waving a document. “My lord, if I might assist the court. I have here an affidavit from the abbess of Godstow in the county of Oxfordshire, a lady renowned for her piety and probity. She is elderly, my lord, though still keen in her wits, and could not make the journey to this court, for which she apologizes. Her affidavit has already been read to the jury, but if your lordship would care to peruse it.”

His lordship did. The document was passed up to him.

“Good God,” Adelia whispered. “Mother Edyve.” It was from her convent that Emma had been abducted. “How? Who?” Oxfordshire was a long way away; there hadn’t been time…

“The king,” Emma told her. “I thought you knew. The moment he received your report, he sent messengers galloping to search out that swine of a priest along with others to secure Mother Edyve’s affidavit. Apparently, Master Dickon says, Henry saw the chance of using this Morte d’Ancestor writ in my case. It’s his pride and joy; he and Lord De Luci spent sleepless nights shaping it, according to Master Dickon.”

So that was why Henry Plantagenet had winked at his clerk. A teasing mood. He’d known all along. Kept his precious writ up his sleeve…

“I’ll kill him,” Adelia said.

The Justiciar of England was reading. “Mother Edyve, abbess of Godstow, attests here that shortly after the supposed marriage, both bride and groom attended Christmas festivities at her abbey and that Lord Wolvercote in her hearing addressed the plaintiff’s mother as ’wife.’”

All strictly true as far as it went, but did it go far enough?

Adelia was gripping Emma’s arm as hard as Emma grasped hers.

De Luci raised his reptilian head. “I have to declare an interest in this matter. The abbess of Godstow is known to me.”

“A good woman, my lord?” Sir Richard asked.

“A very good woman.”

“Good enough for us, then.” Sir Richard looked at the nodding heads around him. “My lord, we are prepared to declare that the late Lord Wolvercote was legally married to the plaintiff’s mother and that Philip of Wolvercote is the legal issue of said marriage and, therefore, heir to the Wolvercote lands and appurtenances.”

Master Dickon uttered an unlawyerlike whoop. Adelia and Emma collapsed on each other. The new Lord Wolvercote looked up from his cat’s cradle, surprised by the noise. Dowager Wolvercote remained in her chair. Angrily, Master Thomas flung his cap on the ground, picked it up, put it back on, and began talking urgently to his client, who might have been deaf, a stone effigy.

“The writ’s two questions having been answered to the satisfaction of this jury,” De Luci went on, “this court grants immediate seisin of Wolvercote Manor to the plaintiff.” He rose.

The lovely contralto belled out across the field. “I recognize neither this court nor its judgment. You, De Luci, are a Plantagenet puppet.”

Over the crowd’s gasp, Master Thomas began pleading for his client to be given time to remove her chattels from the disputed manor.

But the Lord Chief Justiciar of England had gone.

Master Dickon came struggling through the press to Emma and Adelia. Emma turned and kissed him on both cheeks. Roetger came hauling himself to her; she kissed him, too, before running onto the field to pick up her son and hold him high. “We’ve won, Pippy Oh, you were so good.”

Master Dickon wiped the sweat off his brow. “Nasty moment or two there,” he said, “but the dowager saying she didn’t recognize the court did it for us. I knew we was home; judges don’t like that.”

“Is that it?” Adelia asked him. “Emma’s won? She can move into the manor?”

“Any time she likes,” the young man told her. “Better take bailiffs with her, of course. But no, that ain’t it. The dowager will appeal, for sure, contesting the marriage and the lad’s legitimacy. All to be seen to later. More work for us.” Master Dickon rubbed his hands in anticipation of the fees he’d earn.

“Then I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you, mistress?” Dickon flung out an arm in the direction of the field from which people were departing and where only the dowager sat, staring over the heads of her clustering lawyers as if they were midges. “No blood on that grass, is there? Lady ’Em didn’t have to use force to get her son’s rights, nor didn’t the dowager use force to defend what she thinks is hers. No battling. No wounds. Just a writ from the king. A temporary measure so’s the apparent heir can be in possession of his property while the arguments over it can be sorted out legally. To keep the peace, d’you see?”

“I see.”

“Barons don’t like it, of course-takes authority away from their courts and makes a common law available to everybody, but they ain’t prepared to go to war over it, Lord be thanked. Oooh, he’s a cunning old lawmaker is Henry.”

“Yes,” Adelia said, and then paused. “Master Dickon, could you provide me with pen and ink? I must write a letter to the king.”

ON THEIR WAY to view Pippy’s new property, Emma’s pure soprano soared into the blue sky accompanied by birdsong, her bard’s harp, her son’s tremolo, Roetger’s basso profundo, and the trot of their horses’ hooves.

“Come lasses and lads, take leave of your dads, and away to the maypole hie.”

Adelia swayed in her saddle to the tune while Millie, behind her, smiled at a jollity she couldn’t hear.

Emma broke off to lean over and touch her lover’s knee. “I didn’t consent to him, dearest, ever.”

Roetger took her hand and kissed it. “I know you did not, brave girl.”

“There ev’ry he has got him a she, and the minstrel’s standing by…

Emma broke off again. “So really, we have gained by an old priest’s lie.”

“That worries me not at all,” Roetger told her.

“God’s justice to womankind,” Adelia said.

“For Willy shall dance with Jane, and Stephen has got his Joan…”

And Rowley has got his Adelia, Adelia thought happily. Except that it doesn’t scan.

“To trip it, trip it, trip it, trip it, to trip it up and down.”

Coming toward them was a procession. Seeing it, Rhys laid his hand flat on the harp’s strings to quiet them. Everybody fell silent and pulled to the side of the road to let it go past as if it were a funeral.

The dowager sat easily and upright on a splendid bay, her eyes on the road ahead. Behind her came draft horses pulling two great carts piled with furniture, out of which stuck the scarlet and silver battle flags of Wolvercote. Behind those were straggled servants, some on horses, some on mules, some walking, driving cows and geese before them, all burdened with belongings, like refugees.

Which, Adelia supposed, they were. And she was sorry for all of them except the murderess in front.

Emma, however, rode out to meet her mother-in-law. “You could have stayed longer,” she said, quietly. “Where are you going?”

She might have been a piece of detritus dropped on the road. The dowager’s eyes didn’t flicker; her horse walked round the obstruction and continued on its way.

“Oh, dear,” Emma said, looking after it.

Rhys struck up again. “No ‘Oh, dear’ about it,” he said. “Sing again, lady.”

“Some walked and some did run, some loitered on the way. And bound themselves by kisses twelve, to meet next holiday.”

Adelia imagined the voices traveling joyously through the warm air to reach the ears of the woman who had just passed, and what agony they would cause her. Not enough recompense for six bodies that had once lain in a forest grave and were now buried decently in the Wells churchyard. But some.

They saw the quiver in the sky, like a heat haze over Wolvercote Manor, long before they reached it. By the time they had urged their horses into a canter and gained the gates, the quiver had been replaced by black smoke.

The manor was in flames. Its roof had already fallen in; some men with buckets were scurrying to and from the moat in an effort to save the outbuildings. In the air, pigeons wheeled unhappily, unable to land in the bonfire that had been their cote. A hay barn had gone up like tinder and revealed the church standing behind it, so far untouched.

There was nothing to be done. Buckets of water wouldn’t extinguish that inferno. The riders could only stay where they were and watch.

“The hag,” Roetger said. “She set a torch to it before she went.”

Adelia felt grief for a house that had been so lovely and so old. It had been like a seashell, allowing all to listen to hear the waves of its history. Now it was going and the waves would be silenced forever.

The men with buckets were standing back, giving up the battle.

“Dear, dear,” said Rhys. “Oh, there’s a pity, now. Such a pity.”

Emma said determinedly, “No, Rhys, it is not a pity at all.”

She turned to Roetger, smiling. “I would have torn it down in any case. I could never live where he’d lived. Nor her.”

“We will rebuild it,” Roetger said.

“Yes, new and twice as beautiful. Won’t we, Pippy? Everything new.”

After a while, taking Millie with her, Adelia left them and rode on toward Glastonbury.

There was definitely newness about. No corpses polluted the air today, because the trees that had held them were gone. Instead, a wide verge of timber-strewn grass ran between road and forest edge. Women were picking up fallen branches in their aprons and carrying them to their men to be chopped up for firewood. As Adelia and Millie went by, waving, they looked up and smiled.

At the top of the turning to Glastonbury high road, Adelia and Millie dismounted. Adelia bent down to pick up a fallen leaf and pressed it into Millie’s hand. “For Gyltha.” She enunciated it carefully, sticking it out her tongue at the “th.” It was a word Millie had learned by watching Adelia say it while patting Gyltha on the shoulder. Adelia hoped to teach her others. But how to indicate she wouldn’t be long? She pointed to the sun and moved her finger a fraction to the west, then blew a kiss to an imaginary child by her knee. “My love to Allie. Tell her I’ll be with her soon.”

Millie nodded and started off down the hill. At its bottom, Godwyn was sweeping dust out of the Pilgrim’s front door. He looked up, saw Millie coming toward him, and smiled for the first time since the marshes.

Good, Adelia thought. That will work out very well.

The abbey was silent, but there was life down the high street, where men were shifting the rubble that had been their houses, ready to rebuild them. Although he didn’t see her, she saw Alf expertly wielding an adze on a freshly cut beam.

Better than Noah, Adelia thought, and was happy.

Yes, there was newness in the air today.

Remounting, she rode on along the lane between the abbey wall and the foot of the Tor.

Up the hill, some men on horseback, their hands shading their eyes, were straining their necks to watch a peregrine falcon circling the sky. A hound barked, causing a cluster of pigeons to go flapping up into the air out of a copse of trees. The bird above them took on the shape of a bow notched with an arrow-and dived. The pigeons separated, and one of them, perhaps realizing its danger, flew low, but the falcon coming for it was a missile; talons out, it took the pigeon in midair with an impact that sheared off its head.

By the time Adelia reached the group, the falcon was back on its owner’s wrist, only its wicked little beak, shining like steel, visible under its plumed hood.

“Good day, my lord.”

With great care the falconer transferred the bird to its austringer’s gauntlet, then, telling his men to wait for him-“This lady and I have private business to transact”-joined Adelia and together they rode up the hill.

“You’ve a very nasty temper, you know,” said Henry Plantagenet. “You must learn to control it.”

Adelia was wondering what would become of her reputation in the royal household. “Yes, my lord. I’m sorry, my lord.”

“I hear Lady Wolvercote won her Morte d’Ancestor.”

“But has lost the house.” She told him of the dowager’s revenge.

“Ah,” the king said. He cheered up. “Well, more work for the law courts. Now then, where’s this cave?”

Adelia had some trouble finding it again. With Eustace gone to his grave and with the tithing rebuilding their lives, there was no sign of its occupancy; up here, one bushy outcrop with a spring looked like another. After a couple of false casts, however, she dismounted to pull aside the fronds that hid the entrance and the man who’d been waiting for them.

“Good day, Mansur,” Henry said.

“Good day, my lord.”

Inside, the elfin cave worked its magic and nobody spoke.

Looking around, the king crossed himself and climbed through the hole in the back wall that Mansur had made. After a while, Adelia joined him.

One king was kneeling in prayer by the prone skeleton of another. Green light coming through the split in the rock above shone on them both and the untroubled pool at their feet.

Adelia looked at the living man with tears in her eyes.

Will you, too, become a legend? No, the Church will see to that. Future generations living under the legacy you’ve given them will remember you only for the murder of Becket.

Eventually, Henry II stood up and cleared his throat as if he, too, had been crying. The sound echoed. “He’s not very big, is he?”

“He was a Celt, I suppose,” Adelia said. “One of the short, dark ones.”

“A warrior, though. Look at those wounds. At peace now, God rest him.”

“Yes.” But crowding into her mind came visions of the thousands of pilgrims, as they would come crowding into this cave in real life, of the tawdry relic stalls that would be set up outside alongside the money changers, those descendants of rapacious men whom Jesus had once turned out of Jerusalem’s Temple.

Henry sighed. “Requiscat in pace, Arturus.” He turned and clambered back through the hole.

Outside the cave, he reached for the reins of the horses drinking at the spring, then let them drop. He looked down, toward Glastonbury “You know,” he said, reflectively, “the Welsh aren’t being as obstreperous as they were, the bastards. They’re finding my laws have some advantages.”

“Are they?”

“Yes, they are.”

He took up the reins and dropped them once more. “And that one in there”-he nodded toward the cave-“he’s practically a dwarf. People’ll expect a giant; they’ll be disappointed.”

Adelia’s heart skipped a beat.

The King of England gave another sigh. “Mansur?”

“My lord?”

“Wall him up again; let him sleep on.”

“Wait.” Adelia went back into the cave and through the hole and retrieved the sword from the pool to which Mansur had returned it. Coming out again into the light, the weapon dazzled like a sunburst. She laid it across her palms and knelt. “My lord, here is Excalibur. It belongs to the greatest heart of the age, which makes it yours. You are the Once and Future King.”

The two of them walked their horses back down the hill, chatting.

From where he lay under the shadow of a juniper bush, a man known as Scarry watched them go. At least, he didn’t watch the king, because he didn’t know it was the king. He watched Adelia, and his eyes were those of a stoat waiting to kill-a stoat that spoke Latin.