As the cavalcade passed her, one of Arthur’s knights drew his sword and cut her in half. The blood from the severed waist filled the tunnel, catching Adelia in its torrent and carrying her, struggling, deeper into the earth.
When she woke up, it took a moment before she found out that the dampness making her clothes stick to her was not Guinevere’s blood but her own sweat.
The light of a big moon coming through the window like pale roadway was the only cold thing in the room. She got up to look out again. The street below was deserted; she leaned forward so that she could see the marketplace. It was as empty as ever.
Where is he?
Almighty Father, keep him safe.
Somebody coughed. It was a human cough.
He’s come back.
Adelia ran out of the room, jumped over the sleeping Millie, skipped down the stairs, and drew back the bolts on the courtyard door. There was nobody outside. Hurrying, she went into the street. “Mansur?”
Her arms were grabbed. Somebody put a hand over her mouth; somebody else whipped a rag over her eyes, tying it tightly and catching her hair in the knot so that it pulled against her scalp.
“Nice of her to come an’ meet us,” a man said. “Save us goin’ in to get her.” There was a general snigger.
S
HE 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.