hands had lifted the body of Jesus from the Cross.
She was shivering.
Mansur’s voice came through the gloom. “Can you see anything of a coffin?”
They were facing away from each other, far enough not to be touching, but the smell of the herbs that the Arab kept his robes in offset the reek in which the two of them stood, and she was glad he was there.
“I think I can,” she said. There was just enough light to see a slight difference in the blackness of earth in front of her. She put out her hand and felt a protrusion that was harder than the soil around it, though, as she pulled it out, only a small section came away from whatever it had been attached to. “Can you see any more? It would be as well to have more than one piece.”
Lord, this was a terrible place to be.
To comfort herself that there was still fresh air and life above them, she looked upward-and saw the light of day blotted out as earth came sweeping down the pit to bury them.
EIGHT
IT CAME AND IT CAME, a landslide of soil pouring down onto her head, into her eyes, rising to fill the space she stood in.
There was a constriction round her waist; Mansur was holding her up, shouting, “Where’s the rope? Find the rope.”
Desperately, she groped for it. “It’s not here.”
And then it was-all of it, loose, brushing her face as it slithered downward amid the falling earth. It had come away. It draped itself over her.
The avalanche stopped. Adelia blinked the muck out of her eyes. “Phew. Oh, dear God, that was close. The mound up on top tipped over.”
She looked down and saw that Mansur had been engulfed almost up to his shoulders; his elbows were at ear level as he continued to hold her above the debris. He was panting from the strain on his arms. “The steps, I can’t see.” Her body was obstructing his view.
She looked for the steps; they were behind her.
Then a shadow blocked out the light above and black earth engulfed her again, coming down in rhythmic, vicious plunges. They were being buried alive.
“Help us.” Screaming, she scrabbled at the side of the pit like a spider trying for a hold against a sudden rush of rain. “Help us, God help us.”
The coffin lid was closing on them.
She heard Mansur start to shout and then choke as earth entered his mouth. But still he held her up.
She shouted for him. “No.” And tried kicking out a space round his head so that he could breathe, but her legs could move only a few inches against the constraining earth. His grip weakened and she fell sideways, her lower body pinioned against his shoulders.
Wrenching her back, she squirmed so that she could get to him. One of his hands was still visible, its fingers outstretched. There was a patch of white, the top of his headdress, and she began digging round it, frantic, yelling, not knowing she was yelling, scooping earth, baling it away from that beloved face. “No, no, no!”
He was sinking, dear Christ, he was sinking, they were both sinking, and she couldn’t dig fast enough against the soil that trickled through her hands.
She felt her body arch as something tugged at the waist of her gown and began dragging her up. She thrashed against it; Mansur was choking; he must breathe-O God in Heaven, let her help him to breathe.
A voice shouted, “Keep still, damn you. I’ll pull you up.”
“No. Mansur. Mansur’s dying.”
“I can’t get to him until you’re out of the way, you stupid bitch. Keep still.”
She was too terrified to put a name to it, but it was a voice she’d once known, a loved voice she’d trusted. Even so, letting herself dangle as she was pulled upward was the most unwilling thing she’d ever done. Tears poured out of her eyes, and she kept screaming for Mansur.
The hand attached to her was in turn attached to a man with his feet planted on one of the steps. His other hand was holding that of a second man lying down on the pit edge, his arm extended as far as it would go.
She was hauled in like a fish that flapped in the sunlight trying to return to water. “Mansur, Mansur. It’s Mansur down there.”
“I’m getting him, aren’t I?” The snapping voice, unacknowledged but still familiar, addressed itself elsewhere. “Jesus, she’s got a rope round her. Get it off her quick.”
It took time, it took time. She was disentangled from the rope, knots were tied, things were done, but she was blind to everything except the thought of nostrils and throat blocked with soil; he’d be unconscious by now, beyond recovery in… how long, how long to suffocate?
She crawled to the edge and saw his fingers, a little picket fence sticking out of the blackness. Saw a hand grasp them. Heard the voice: “Pull. Again. Christ, I can’t get purchase.”
More time. A scrabbling as the rescuer heaved earth from round Mansur’s head and shoulders. One arm was free. A rope was looped round it. “Now pull, Walt, pull as you’ve never fucking pulled.”
The man at the top pulled, the man in the middle pulled, and slowly, like Lazarus from the dead, Mansur rose from the pit.
They laid him on the sweetgrass. He wasn’t breathing. Adelia fell on him, picking soil from his nostrils. She cleared his mouth and then puffed her own breath into it.
And felt his chest rise and fall. And crouched back on her knees to give thanks in three languages, to God, to Allah, to her foster father’s Jehovah, for the grace they had accorded her in letting this man live.
Somebody had fetched a ewer of water, and she used it to wash the rest of the earth from the Arab’s face and head. His kaffiyeh had come off in the struggle to leave the pit, and she, who had never seen him bareheaded, saw that he was becoming bald.
“His headdress,” she said. “Find his headdress.” He would be shamed without it; she couldn’t have him shamed.
Somehow it was produced. Shaking the earth from it and tenderly raising his head, she put it on him, arranging its folds as he would want.
He opened his eyes and she looked into them. “Do you know who I am, dear friend?”
“My sun and my moon,” he said.
She sat back and rested against the man who knelt behind her.
Time resumed. There was warmth and the smell of wildflowers and, above, a sky as blue as sailors’ trousers, the hum of bees, and-oh, God, how strange-the sound of plainsong coming from the ruins of a church where, unknowing, impervious holy men still celebrated the third hour of daylight, allowing the six-note hexagons of their song to bring order back to a universe in which, for her, there had been chaos.
Her eyes cleared. A little way away, a young man held the reins of three horses-he had a fluttering peregrine on his arm and was trying to soothe it. Looming over her with concern was a face she recognized. She smiled at Walt, an old friend, groom to the diocese of Saint Albans.
He smiled back. “A near thing, mistress.”
She rubbed the back of her head against the chest of the man holding her. “Hello, Rowley,” she said.
There was a huff of angry breath against her hair. “Don’t you hello me. In the name of Christ, how many more times have I got to rescue you from a pit? What in hell were you doing down there?”
“Just looking,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“Paying an unofficial visit to the abbot of Glastonbury, ready to arrange a peace between him and the bishop of Wells, flying my hawk over his grounds while I waited for him to finish terce, hearing screams from a hole in the graveyard and finding a woman squirming round in it like a bloody worm. Usual sort of morning.”
How I love him. Let him cradle me forever.
Abruptly, he let her go and she fell back on the grass as he stood up. He was the bishop of Saint Albans now, a man of God; that he had touched her at all was merely because she’d been in extremis. He said, “We shall give thanks to our Savior, who directed our steps to the rescue of these two souls in peril,” he said.
While he prayed, she put her hand over Mansur’s heart and felt a strong beat. She looked round her. Rowley wore hunting clothes and was still furious. A curly-coated water dog sat at his feet. Latin floated over the wall that hid the church. “Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum…” The service was nearly over.
When the monks emerged there was much exclaiming and concern over the accident. They wanted to take Mansur to the Abbot’s kitchen to wash and restore him, but he asked to be allowed to rest for a while, so they carried him into the shade of the church wall.
Adelia said she would stay with him.
Rowley frowned but had the sense to see that both of them needed a time of quiet. “There is much I need to discuss with Abbot Sigward,” he said, as if she’d said he should not.
“Then go and do it,” she told him.
“And I am engaged at Wells Cathedral this afternoon.”
She felt a flare of jealousy; God’s business must always supersede any care for her. With anger came recovery, and with recovery came the recall of another matter of importance. She said, coldly, “And while you’re about it, I should be obliged if you would make inquiries about Lady Emma Wolvercote.” Briefly, she told him the mystery of her friend’s disappearance, Allie’s recognition of the mule, her suspicion that there had been foul play. “It must have been somewhere round about.”
She could see he was not impressed.
“I doubt if a child of four can identify one mule from another,” he said. “Emma changed her mind about the meeting place. You should not take it amiss; she will be in touch when she’s ready.”
“Ask, will you?” Adelia spat at him. Her head ached.
“I shall.”
Yes, he will, she thought. She could trust him for that. She remembered that she owed him her life and Mansur’s, and changed her tone. “I am grateful, my lord bishop.”
He was so beautiful to her still, that was the trouble: the way he strode and talked, his nice hands, the eyes that could be easily amused-not bishop-like at all but lustworthy, blast him.
As he went, she heard him lecturing the abbot on the danger of keeping open pits in his ground, especially those with towers of earth beside them.
Mansur’s eyes were closed, and she shut her own, listening to him breathe. She had lost her hat somewhere in the pit and, vainly, she tried clawing some of the earth out of her dark blond hair. Her fingers encountered something substantial that had got entangled in it. With difficulty she retrieved it-a piece of wood that crumbled, as had the spar she had touched in the pit. It was proof, if she’d needed it, that her theory about Arthur and Guinevere’s coffin had been right.
It hadn’t been buried in the Dark Ages; wood from that time rotted in this earth. But the wood of Arthur and Guinevere’s coffin was much, much newer, which meant that the only time it could have reached sixteen feet down was during those few, so few, hours twenty years ago when the earthquake’s fissure had made such a depth available.
Rhys’s Uncle Caradoc hadn’t been vouchsafed a vision; he had seen an actual event.
Misery overtook her. For all her hardheaded search for the truth, something in Adelia had been touched by the golden rays of Arthur. Not so much by the legend itself as the fact that so strong a
