“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.
They left the site of the most obvious injury-the right hand-until they had checked to see if there were others.
Mandible, neck, scapulas, rib cage, spine, pelvis-all correct.
Femur… “Hmm.” Adelia raised her head. “Did he limp?” The left patella had an old fracture.
There was delight from the doorway. “Fell off a roof when he were a nipper, never could walk proper after. He’s telling you things already, ain’t he?”
This had to stop. “Listen to me,” Adelia said, “Master Eustace is not talking to my lord Mansur; his soul has passed on to wherever it is going. The doctor can only read what the bones are showing him.”
“Oh, reading. Ain’t magic, then?”
“No.”
The testicle scratcher said admiringly, “Still, reading…” It was a skill none of them possessed and, though a disappointment, was yet an activity rated as marvelous.
Fibula, tibia.
Now they looked to the arms: humerus, radius, ulna. Finally, they unwrapped the hand.
“How did he lose these fingers?” Adelia asked.
She was answered by a surprised chorus from the entrance.
“Didn’t know as he had.”
“What fingers?”
“Had all his bloody fingers last time I saw him.”
There was a move to enter and look for the lost digits, as if Eustace had mislaid them somewhere and they might find them tucked away at the rear of a shelf.
“Get back,” Adelia snarled. “Which of you saw him last?”
“That’d be me,” Alf said. “Brought him up a collop of venison for his supper…”
The baker smacked him again. “You want us up afore the fucking verderers?”
Adelia became worried. She was learning altogether too much about these men, and it was unlikely they would leave Mansur and her alive to be in possession of the knowledge. If they’d brought venison to Eustace, the deer they’d cut it from had most definitely not been theirs to kill. In the eyes of hunt-loving kings and nobles, deer poaching was the most heinous crime in the legal calendar, and the verderers, guardians of their chases, held courts from which a poacher could be sent to have his limbs cut off and hung among the trees of the forest in which he had offended.
“… an’ he had all his fingers then,” Alf finished defiantly. “Night before the fire, that was. What’s he done with ’em?”
“Mmm.”
Mansur said quietly to Adelia in Arabic, “Have you noticed what is at the rear of this cave?” He angled the lantern so that its light reached deep into the interior and fell on not a rock face but a slightly convex wall built of tightly packed stones.
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.”
