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.
Which it probably didn’t-not to her.
It mattered to Adelia.
At the sound of footsteps outside, she shot through the door, swearing in Arabic, ready to berate any damned monk in her path. But it was Gyltha and Allie waiting for her.
“Come and see this…” Adelia began, and then stopped. There was a look on Gyltha’s face.
“We been up there.” Gyltha jerked her head toward the upper pasture without taking her eyes off Adelia’s. “We went to see the mule.”
“Oh, yes?”
“An’ she started to cry.” Another jerk of the head, this time down at Allie. “Said she was sorry as how she’d been nasty to little Pippy, and why wouldn’t he come and see her.”
“Yes?”
“An’ I said, ‘We’ll find him, pigsy. Him and his mama’ve been held up on the road.’ And she said, ‘No, he’s here. That’s his pet mule.’ An’ I said, ‘Can’t be.’ And she said…”
Adelia crouched down to put herself on a level with her daughter. “Why do you think it’s Pippy’s mule, darling?”
“ ’Cos it is,” Allie said. Tears were still on her cheeks. “It’s Poly-carp. Pippy used to like him best of all because he could feed him and he didn’t bite like the others.”
“How do you know it’s Polycarp?”
“ ’Cos it is,” Allie said again. “He’s got a nick in his ear and a bit of rain rot on his rump-like a strawberry patch. Wilfred said they would put seaweed on it.” She cheered up. “Just near his arse.”
“You’re sure?”
“It’s Polycarp.” Allie was getting irritated with the interrogation.
Adelia looked up to meet Gyltha’s eyes.
“She ain’t never wrong when it comes to animals,” Gyltha said.
“No,” said Adelia slowly. “No, she isn’t. Oh, dear God.”
SEVEN
I THINK BROTHER PETER bought the animal for us at Street’s market,” Abbot Sigward said cautiously. “We shall ask him.” He called to the man who was still scything the top pasture, beckoning for him to come down.
“Our stables went up in the fire, you see,” he told Adelia. “All our horses burned to death.” He put a hand to his eyes as if shielding them from a sight too awful to remember. There was a general shudder from the other monks. “After that a mule was all we could afford.”
