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 kno
w 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.”
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