Despite the trail, it would have been easy to miss the cave with its curtaining of branches if it hadn’t been for a pile of mule manure hardening in the sun outside it.
The removal of the withy screen caused Gyltha to hold her nose and protest at the stink. “Me and you’ll stay outside, miss,” she told Allie, but Adelia felt this was too hard; what child could resist a secret cave? Besides, Eustace’s bones had been reunited and covered with a patched cloak belonging to Ollie, the most silent member of the tithing.
Allie was enchanted by the place. She knelt with her mother to send up a prayer for Eustace’s soul, listening to and asking questions about the circumstances of his death, but then, since there was more wildlife outside the cave than in it, eventually joined Gyltha in order to explore the hillside while Adelia and Mansur got to work on dismantling the wall.
It wasn’t easy. It curved slightly outward, and whoever had built it in the first place had shaped the stones so that they would fit against one another almost with the tightness of tongue and groove, while Eustace’s father, however frightened he’d been of the demon, had put it up again in exactly the same way.
It took a quarter of an hour to lever out the first stone and, though removal became easier after that, it was an hour before there was a hole big enough to squeeze through.
In none of that time did Mansur or Adelia look inside; the lantern’s beam had been only enough to play on their work-and there was a stillness in the interior that made the idea of peeking somehow disrespectful.
The air coming from the hole they made was surprisingly fresh-no corruption here, nor was it completely black inside; they were aware merely of dimness.
“A saint’s tomb?” asked Mansur.
Adelia shrugged, refusing to be seduced by the undoubted air of sanctity here-the Arab had felt the same about the abbey. She picked up the lantern, and Mansur helped her climb through the hole.
She was in what was, or had been, a cell-a large, hollow cairn built within the hill. The earthquake of twenty years ago had caused it to shift, bringing damage. Where the beautifully packed stones of the wall and roof should have begun descending to complete the shape of a circular beehive, they had fallen down to reveal rough rock behind them.
Cracks had opened not only in the ceiling but in the hillside above it so that thin beams of sun, green from infiltrating ferns and moss, pierced the dimness here and there like spears of sunlight through tiny arrow slits.
In the center was a pool so still that it might have been a mirror. Mansur’s struggle to get his long body through the gap sent a shiver over its surface.
Beyond it, from the fallen stones of the opposite wall, dangled a skull.
Oh, God, please, Adelia thought, not another murder.
Here was Eustace’s father’s demon.
The skull had been cleaved nearly down to the forehead and was held together only by a circlet of metal like a woman’s headband, though this had been dislodged slightly so that it was worn at a rakish angle, as if Death was trying to be jolly. It stared, grinning, down at the pool where its perfect reflection grinned back up at it, making two demons.
A drop of water from the roof plinked into the pool like a note from Rhys’s harp. Again, the water shivered so that the demon in it rippled outward before resuming the shape of its twin.
After a long while, Mansur strode round the pool. Gently, his mouth moving silently in an Arabic prayer, he lifted the skull with two hands to put it on the ground, then began poking among the mess of stones. He crooked a finger at Adelia.
She’d been transfixed and had to blink and shake her head before she could join him.
There were other things among the stones: rotting shards of wood, bones, a battered helmet-also sliced in two at the top and corresponding to the wound on the skull where a blow from an ax or a sword had cleaved both the metal and the head that wore it.
Adelia put her hand into the pool to test its depth and found sand at the bottom. Sand? Had the sea once come up as high as this and then retreated?
She took the Arab by the arm and indicated that the two of them should leave.
When they were in the outer cave, Mansur said, “The wood in there was a bier. He was lain on it, I think. He has been treated with respect.”
“Possibly.”
Hearing their voices, Gyltha called from outside to ask what they’d found. They went to join her in the open air.
“A warrior, we believe,” Mansur told her.
“Possibly,” said the cautious Adelia again. “Certainly, he was killed by that huge dint on his head. He could be a saint-weren’t some of those killed in battle when the Danes came?”
Neither Mansur nor Gyltha had enough historical knowledge to answer her. But Mansur said, “Why, then, do the monks not know of him?”
It was a good point, and, certainly, the cell did not look like a saint’s inhumation.
“We’re talking about him as if he were very old,” Adelia said, realizing it for the first time.
“He was in there before the earthquake,” Mansur pointed out.
“But how long before the earthquake? Is he a victim only just previous to Arthur and Guinevere down there? Damn, I wish we could put a date to him.”
“Blow that,” Gyltha told her. “You ain’t got responsibility for every bugger found dead round here. Anyway, I’m a-going to take a squint at un.”
They let her go inside and waited for her, watching Allie take off her boots to splash her bare feet in the spring, letting the frog go from her hands into the water.
When, eventually, Gyltha rejoined them, she was subdued.
“What do you think?” Adelia asked her.
“I think as we should put the poor soul together and wall un in again. Leave un in his peace. Don’t seem right else.”
She was right; she usually was. So that is what they did.
Rebuilding the whole cell was out of the question; it was going to be time-consuming enough to close up the entrance hole. It was equally impossible to reassemble the bier, so they made a platform from branches to keep the skeleton from the bare ground. Sorting through the rubble, they discovered most of his scattered bones.
They found other things: shin guards not unlike the greaves worn by present-day knights, a brooch of lovely workmanship that had once pinned a cloak to the shoulder of a tunic and, Mansur said, might turn out to be gold if it were cleaned, the brass neck of a bottle, of which the leather had long rotted.
There was also a barbaric twisted torque, again probably of gold, from which hung a wheeled cross. He hadn’t been robbed, then, but on the other hand, there were no precious grave goods among the stuff they’d found, such as would have been buried with a great chieftain. Apart from the torque, everything was battered and utilitarian.
Yet somebody had built this secret chamber and hidden him.
Allie came clambering through the hole. “Look, look, I’ve found a toad.”
It was the first time anybody had spoken inside the cell; the adults had worked in silence. Automatically, they hushed her.
With the others’ help, Adelia began to reassemble the skeleton on the platform while Allie splashed water from the pool over the toad’s warty skin to cool it. It hopped away from her and buried itself in the sand of the pool’s bottom. Plunging after it, she said, “Ow, there’s a stone in here.” She began grubbing for what she’d stepped on and came up with a dripping sword.
“Let me see,” Adelia said.
It wasn’t an impressive weapon, almost black, with a nick in its blade, and surprisingly light so that it swung easily in her hand.
“What they bury that in the pool for?” Gyltha wanted to know.
“It’s the custom, I believe,” Adelia told her, remembering that the tithing intended to throw Eustace’s knife into the Brue.
At last, they had done what they could. The skeleton lay neatly on the platform, greaves in place, the torque round its neck. They put the brooch on its chest, covered it with the helmet, and folded the hands on top. The remains of the bottle were put at its side.
Gyltha looked at him. “Warrior he may have been, but he weren’t very big.”
He was decidedly short. Even Adelia was taller.
“But bless un anyway,” Gyltha said.
Mansur had become proprietorial about the body, and objected when Adelia proposed to take the sword back to the inn with her. “He was a fighter, he should keep it with him.”
But Adelia was still concerned that somebody had found it necessary to hide this man’s corpse from sight; she would be happier to be sure of when he had died. Knowing nothing about swords, she wondered if they had fashions, like women’s clothing, which could put a date to this one. There must be somebody who could tell her.
She and Gyltha and Allie left Mansur to block in the hole. When he’d finished, they sat silently outside the cave to eat their provisions and drink from the spring’s pure water.
That night Adelia dreamed again. A lovely, elegiac dream. At first.
She stood with armored knights on the shore of the Brue, just beyond Glastonbury ’s marketplace. Somewhere, women’s voices sang a lament. One of the knights raised his arm, holding a sword aloft for a moment so that the moon shone on its long blade and the jewels in its hilt.
The lament rose to a scream: “Arturus, Arturus. Rex quondam, rexque futurus.”
The knight sent the sword spinning high into the air, where it made a long arc, flashing black and silver as it turned. There was a plume of water, and Excalibur swirled out of sight.
Now the voices sank to a rhythmic moan that kept time with the dip of oars from a boat shaped like a swan.
The rowers were hooded in black, but the woman in the prow, her back to the shore so that Adelia couldn’t see her face, was in white. As the boat reached the bank, one of the knights stepped forward-he had an ax in his hand…
“No.” With a grunt of effort, Adelia woke herself up before she had to see Guinevere’s body severed once more.
For a while she lay, sweltering and resentful. I’m not a dreamer; I don’t believe in dreams. What are you telling me?
She got up, still chuntering with discontent. Lord, how I hate Avalon. Too beautiful, too terrible. Once and future kings-you can keep them.
She snatched her green tunic off its hanger because it was the nearest and coolest clothing to hand, put it on, stepped into her shoes, checked to see that Allie was still asleep, and tiptoed out.
Millie lay on a bed of rags under the landing’s barred window, tossing and turning in her sleep. She’d thrown off her coverlet so that the moonlight shone on her naked back. Which was striped.
Oh, God, they whip her.
Adelia blundered down the stairs, rammed back the bolts of the door to the courtyard, and went out, gulping in air little fresher than that inside.
A white figure was sitting on the wellhead parapet, and for a moment she thought Guinevere had come to haunt her.
It was Mansur. He had the sword from the cave in his hand and was musing over it.
She went and sat beside him. “Can’t you sleep, either?” His dreams must be as awful as hers-he was the one who’d nearly been buried alive.
He shook his head.
“Mansur, that child Millie has been whipped.”
He sighed. “They are not good people here, I think.”
She sighed with him. “Do you still believe Glastonbury to be the omphalos?”
“Yes,” he said, “I fear that it is.”
Patting his hand, she said, “Go to bed, old friend. Go to Gyltha; she’s the world’s only true navel.”
He rose and bowed to her. “Are you coming up?”
