“Why?” Abbot Sigward said. “For one thing, I am ready for whatever our good Hilda has in that basket.”
With one hand on Brother James’s trembling shoulder, he led them to the building he’d come out of. It was the only one left standing in the enormous acreage of the abbey’s grounds—a lovely sculpted square of ashlar stone turned a warm yellow by the sun, with a tiled, conical roof rising to an elaborate chimney.
“Once the Abbot’s kitchen,” he said, ushering them in, “now our residence.”
Three quarters of England’s population would have been glad of it as a residence, Adelia thought. She wouldn’t have minded it herself. It was spacious and cool and functional, though the mason who’d built it hadn’t been able to resist lavishly sculpting stone leaves and fruit into the ceiling’s eight ribs, which curved to meet in a central airhole.
Steps in a corner, where a bucket stood, led down to a dark glint of water. Another corner accommodated vats. A cat was curled up in a pen that also contained a goat. The fireplace beneath the airhole was empty.
Two monks, each with a pestle cupped in one arm, stood by a plain deal table, pounding herbs. One was fat, the other thin.
They glanced up at the visitors, their eyes guarded as they looked from Mansur to Adelia and Gyltha, to Allie, and finally to Rhys.
“Oh, dear God,” said the thin one. “He’s back.”
Rhys bobbed. “ ’Allo, Brother Aelwyn. You remember me, then?”
“Oh, yes,” Brother Aelwyn said.
There were introductions all round. The fat monk was Brother Titus, and his attention, once he’d nodded to them, was on the contents of Hilda’s basket as she began laying them on the table, especially the leather bottle of ale.
“You see,” Abbot Sigward said to Mansur, “we laid a penance on ourselves by sending Brother Patrick, who was our kitchener, to the abbeys in Normandy so that he might beg them for rebuilding money—he has the gift of charm, has Patrick, and an interest in cuisine that will match theirs. Consequently, we are left barely able to cook our own meals. All but one of our lay brothers have departed to find employment elsewhere… .”
“Deserted, you mean,” Brother Aelwyn said viciously. “The rats ran away. They think God’s curse is on us.”
“I’m afraid they do,” the abbot said, “and perhaps it is, but at least we are blessed by our sister Hilda’s sustenance.” He smiled at the Pilgrim’s landlady and then at Mansur. “And by your presence, my lord.”
He looked more closely up at the Arab, who remained staring stolidly down at him, unspeaking. To Adelia he said, “Do I gather that the sage does not speak English?”
“I am afraid I must be the doctor’s interpreter and assistant,” Adelia said, using the ploy that had served the two of them well. It was a relief to find Abbot Sigward happy to accept the pronouncements of a Saracen, but she knew that such tolerance would not be extended to her. Prior Geoffrey, bless him, was the one churchman prepared to recognize her skill, but even he only because it had saved his life.
She asked if they had any knowledge of a lady missing with her companions.
They had not. None of them had left the abbey since the fire. “We are the guardians of the few holy relics we managed to save from its burning, you see,” the abbot said, adding, “I am sorry for your anxiety; these are concerning times.”
“Don’t worry about that now, Father,” Hilda told him. “See, I’ve brought ham cured just as you like it, and my quince preserve.” She was noticeably proprietorial toward the abbot, brushing dust off his shoulder, filling a plate for him, producing a napkin that she tried to push into his hand. Nobody else had existed for her since he’d appeared on the scene.
“Any sign of that useless devil as Wells set on us, Father?” she asked.
Indulgently, the abbot fended off the napkin. “We mustn’t assume that Eustace is our arsonist, my dear, nor that the bishop of Wells intended him to be so, though our belief lies in that direction and we have had to tell the sheriff so. But no, so far we have not discovered him.”
“Course he did it,” Hilda argued. “Brother Aloysius said so afore he died, didn’t he? Saw him a-coming from the crypt as it flamed, didn’t he?”
“He said something.”
“He shall burn in hell if he did not in life,” Brother Aelwyn said, “and who else but that satanic bishop would rejoice to see Glastonbury a bonfire? Of course it was Eustace.”
To the still-fussing Hilda, the abbot said, “My dear, it would be discourteous to eat while our guests do not, and I can see that they are eager to be about the king’s business.”
He led the way out of the kitchen. Everybody followed—Brother Titus reluctantly, and covering up the food on the table to keep it from the flies until he should return.
As they headed toward the ruined church, tension rose. The animosity toward Mansur was palpable. Brothers Titus and Aelwyn became even more sullen. Hysterically, Brother James begged his superior not to submit sacred Christian bones to the touch of a Saracen.
Hilda, especially, was on edge. “Them’s Arthur’s and Guinevere’s bones, everybody knows it,” she said over and over, as if by reiteration she could make them so.
Only Abbot Sigward kept his poise. They hadn’t known what to do with the skeletons, he said. “They deserve better housing than our kitchen, so we have built a temporary hut of withies for them on the site of the Lady Chapel, where we trust Saint Mary will watch over them.”
“Should have been
two
huts for decency,” Brother Aelwyn said.
“My dear, we’ve had this out,” his abbot told him wearily. “This couple have been lying side-by-side all this time; I won’t separate them now.” Suddenly, he winked. “After all, if legend is right, Arthur and Guinevere were respectably married.”
He stopped short of the site, gave Rhys permission to visit the graveyard, then bent down to talk to Allie. “It is time for you to go and play, little one,” he told her. “Old bones are not for the young.”
Allie opened her mouth to explain her experience with bones, but Gyltha, giving her a sharp nudge, said, “We’ll explore, shall us? See what we can find?” And to the abbot, “The child likes animals.”
“There’s a nice horsey up in the paddock,” Sigward said kindly.
“It’s a mule,” Allie said, but allowed herself to be led away.
“Explain, my lord,” Brother James was urging the abbot. “Tell this Saracen of Arthur’s abnormality not granted to ordinary men.” He turned to Adelia for the first time. “Tell your master, woman. Tell him that Arthur has six ribs, a grace given by Our Lord only to heroes.”
Oh, dear,
Adelia thought,
that old fable
. She said, “I think, sir, my Lord Mansur would instruct you that women and men have exactly the same number of ribs—six pairs, always six. The only way of telling a female skeleton from the male is by the pelvic bones.”
“Instruct me?” Brother James’s voice was high and became higher. “Instruct
me
? I take my instruction from the Word in Genesis:
‘So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and brought her to the man
.’ Adam had but five ribs, and so have all men, except those given a special dispensation by God, as Arthur has been.”
Don’t they ever feel their own chests
? Adelia wondered.
Why don’t they count the damn things
?
It was something she’d met over and over. Whoever had written Genesis was no anatomist.
Damn it
, she thought,
how can we make our investigation with an audience that’s not only on tenterhooks but ignorant as well
?
Abbot Sigward solved that for her. “Come along, my sons,” he said, “it is time for sext. And Hilda, dear soul, if you would finish grinding the wood bryony, for Brother James’s stiffness of the joints causes him suffering… .”
Within a minute, everybody had gone—Hilda eager to fulfill a request by the abbot.
Adelia and Mansur stood alone outside the hut of withies, a large, fresh, sweet-smelling hump in the charred rectangle that had once been a soaring monument to the Virgin.
Mansur bowed his head. Adelia knelt, as she always did, asking the dead beyond the door to forgive her for handling their remains. “Permit your flesh and bone to tell me what your voices cannot.”
When she stood up, Mansur said, “Can you sense it?”
“Sense what?”
They spoke in Arabic; it was safer for them, should they be overheard.
“We are on holy ground. This place is an omphalos.”
She couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d said it was Mecca. Mansur was not a man to show fervor; she had never known him to be awestruck before, and certainly not by anything Christian. His face was as impassive as ever, but that he should say he was finding in Glastonbury the same mystery that the ancient Greeks had attributed to the navel of their world in Delphi’s dark cave was extraordinary.
She sniffed the air and looked around her. Was she missing something? Henry Plantagenet, another man difficult to impress, had mentioned much the same thing.
If he and Mansur were right, she should be receiving a vibration from the air, a tingling in her body from standing on one of the world’s sacred centers, a place where the division between man and God was thinner than anywhere else.
Geographically, it was striking, she’d give it that—extraordinary sudden hills rearing up out of the plain as if to protect the abbey’s back, the flats of salt marsh in front giving it a tang of the sea. Undoubtedly, there was a natural magnetism that had pulled people to worship a presence here long before Christ had set foot on his native heath.
She couldn’t feel it. The sun shone hot on her head; birds twittered as they colonized the poor ruins. The scents of June were overcoming the stink of ash. Wildflowers were beginning to push through devastated ground. She was grateful to God for such blessings. But mystery? Not for her, to whom all mystery must have an explanation.
And she was sorry for it; perhaps the lack was in her, an inability to succumb to the divine.
I just don’t feel it.
She smiled up at Mansur, envious of an exhilaration that left her untouched. “Are you ready?” she asked him.
“I am ready.”
They went in together.
Light dappled through the loose weave of the hut’s roof onto two catafalques formed by piers of blackened tiles built to hold up two long pieces of stone like altars. Between them was a long coffin shaped like a canoe, its lid on the ground by its side.
Heavy cloths covered both sets of remains, and somebody had put pots of buttercups at the head of each, a shining yellow donation
from the living to the dead that brought tears to Adelia’s eyes. Here was a shrine; she was reluctant to disturb its peace.
They stood for a moment. From the hole that had once been a church’s nave, the monks were chanting, their disciplined voices chopping up the sweet, linear sound of Rhys’s song coming from farther away.
After a long moment, Mansur carefully lifted the cloth from the bigger of the two shapes. Adelia heard him take in a breath, and she took one herself.
Whoever these bones had belonged to, he’d been magnificent in life, nearly six and a half feet tall—a commanding height at any time, and one that during the Dark Ages would have inspired legend.
If he’d died in battle, it had been at the hand of a ferocious enemy; the skull was staved in, cracks radiating out from the hole like an egg tapped with a heavy spoon. Instant death. The ribs, the
six
ribs, had become flailed so that they had been broken and detached from the chest wall.
“Allah grant that he maimed his opponent before he went down,” Mansur said.
“We mustn’t, we must
not,
assume he was a warrior,” Adelia told him; she’d never known her friend to get carried away like this.
“What else could he have been?”
“Perhaps it was an accident.” It sounded inglorious, even unlikely, but she was determined not to jump to conclusions.
It seemed appropriate that a woman should uncover the smaller skeleton. Adelia lifted the cloth and then let it fall from her hands onto the floor, unheeded. “Oh,
God,
who did this?”
There was a hole in the skull similar to the man’s, but that was not all of it—this skeleton had been cut into two pieces, chopped twice, once just below the ischium and then at the hips, so that where the pelvis and sacrum should have been there was a gap.
The entire pelvic structure, from the lower vertebrae to the top of the femur, was absent, as if whoever had done it had wanted to take revenge on femininity.
And they’d laid her out as if this was normal, as if it was natural that the tops of her legs should emerge directly from her spine.
Adelia’s voice rose into a screech. “Who did this?
Who did this?”
“Things are done in a battle,” Mansur said sadly, “even to women.”
Perhaps they were. “But they didn’t mention it,” Adelia shouted. “Plenty of fuss about Arthur’s bloody ribs, but no word about this … this mutilation of Guinevere. Oh, she’s a mere woman, it doesn’t matter.”
And then she realized that she had named the skeletons, which she should not have done. If she was to do the job the king had set her, they had to remain unclassified until she had more to go on.
“Maybe the bones fell away before she was put into the coffin,” Mansur said.
“They were hacked off,” Adelia told him. “Look here.” She pointed to the splintered top of the femurs. “And
here
.” The lowest remaining vertebra had been cleaved in half.
Mansur tried to soothe her. “It would have been done after she was dead,” he said.
“How do you know? How can you possibly know that?”
And if it
had
been done postmortem, she thought, was it by some woman-hating monk? Were female reproductive organs too unclean to lie in ground reserved for holy men?
She felt a ferocious protection for the woman this had been; the skeleton was so … so dainty. Perfect little teeth grinned up at her, slender hand and finger bones lay quietly on the catafalque, as if the appalling infliction on the lower body no longer mattered.