“And it can make its wearer invisible if he needs to be,” parroted Emma, “and it changes color in the presence of poison, doesn’t it, Roetger? And it can cure anything, including piles.”
Her champion frowned at her. “It has great power.”
“Ye-es,” Adelia said.
Still, Roetger didn’t take the sword out of its scabbard. He talked of tang, fuller, weight, balance, how the hilt was attached to the blade, the “lifestone” set into the hilt, edges so perfectly formed that they might have been fashioned with a file rather than hammered in a forge.
“This weapon a god makes,” he said. “Wayland the Smith himself, maybe.”
“What’s that little ring thing there, at the bottom of the hilt?”
“Ach now,” Roetger said in the tone Adelia’s foster father had used when she’d asked an intelligent question. “It is the oath ring, the ring of a great chieftain.”
“You see,” Emma chipped in, “Roetger says-he knows everything about the history of swords-he says that when one of a chieftain’s or king’s men took an oath of allegiance, he knelt and kissed that ring.”
Rhys the bard had sung of a sword. “One among them finest of all, A ring on the hilt, valor in the blade, and fear on the point…”
“Ye-es.”
“Look, then,” Roetger said. He laid aside his crutch to pick up the sword as if he must be straight to handle the thing. He asked Adelia to stand up. Flicking the sword free of its scabbard, he held it out to her.
It was a rebirth. Apart from where it had been nicked, the blade gleamed as if new from the smithy.
Rhys had sung: “Tempered in blood of many a battle, Never in fight did it fail the hand that drew it, Daring the perils of war, the rush of the foe, Not the first time, then, its edge ventured on valiant deeds.”
“But look, look,” Roetger insisted. “See the fuller.”
Adelia, who knew nothing of weaponry, supposed the fuller to be the grooved bit running down the blade. She went nearer and saw a design like curling water. “What’s that?” Letters had been etched into the pattern.
“Look closer,” Roetger said.
Adelia squinted. “Is that an A?… R, T…”
“Arturus,” the champion said.
There was silence.
A chill over her skin rose goose bumps along Adelia’s arms and up her back. She couldn’t speak.
Emma was bouncing in her chair, squeaking with joy like a child.
“Excalibur.” In his reverence, Roetger began to sob. “What else? Where else? Are we not in Avalon?”
“But…” Adelia stared from face to face. “But that means… the body on the hill…”
“Yes,” Roetger said simply.
Emma, too, was sobbing. “The once and future king,” she said.
Roetger flung up his hand so that the weapon in it glowed amber in the light. Then he held it out to Adelia on his palms. Tears still fell, but he was smiling. “Mansur says it was passed to you. I am not worthy; it belonged to a great heart, and to a great heart it must go.”
“He wants you to have it,” Emma said. “You have the greatest heart we know.”
FOURTEEN
RIDING A SEDATE PALFREY and with Millie up behind her, Adelia trotted along the road to Wells at the head of a cavalcade.
In one of her horse’s saddlebags was a summons to appear at the Bishop’s Palace before King Henry of England. Sticking out of the other bag was a long, thin woven contraption, more usually used for carrying fishing rods, containing an object for which the monarchy and abbeys of Europe would give their eyeteeth-or certainly other people’s.
Captain Bolt, who’d come to the Pilgrim to fetch her and Mansur, had looked at it sideways, but she’d declined to tell him what was in it. “A surprise gift for the king,” she’d said, and had been ashamed to be saying it.
When Gyltha and Mansur had been called to the inn’s dining table to look on Excalibur and learn who it was that lay in the cell on the Tor, she had seen the flame in Roetger’s and Emma’s eyes leap into theirs like the reflection of a beacon on one hilltop sending its signal to the next.
After that, silence. Nobody had spoken of it, as if the knowledge was sufficient and would be cheapened by commentary.
Rhys, Celt that he was, had perhaps the greatest claim to know, but he’d not been told in case the wonder could not be encompassed even in song.
Adelia realized then that whoever Arthur and his sword had fought, or whatever they had fought for, didn’t matter; their legend was enough, encapsulating an ideal around which a nation could cohere. No religion on earth, no message of universal brotherhood, could fill people’s aching need for a hero who was peculiarly theirs. That Arthur had no grounding in verifiable history, as had the Franks’ Charlemagne or Spain ’s El Cid or the Arabs’ Omar bin AlKhattab-“How can you enslave people when they were born free?”-was irrelevant; somewhere, somehow, his beacon had caught hold and its glimmer had survived centuries of otherwise impenetrable darkness.
A fairy tale, she’d thought with despair, yet I am the keeper of it. The oriflamme had been passed to her, whether she wanted it or not, believed in it or not.
And I am about to betray it.
For Adelia had favors to ask, and the sword in the fishing basket was to be the exchange-it was as well to have something to offer Henry Plantagenet as it was to possess a long spoon when treating with the devil-frequently the same thing.
“How did the king receive my lord Mansur’s report, captain?” Adelia asked.
“They tell me he was… disappointed, mistress.”
“Is that a euphemism for biting the carpets?”
Captain Bolt didn’t know what a euphemism was, but she gathered that her translation fit the scene exactly, though, since the report had been handed over to the king in the middle of the Channel at the time, his teeth would have been grinding on planks.
Excalibur was to be not just a peace offering but a bargaining counter, and she felt dreadful about it, as if she was selling the Matter of Britain for a mess of pottage.
He’d better be worthy of it, she thought. But oh, how he would exploit his dead Arthur, kill the dream of the Welsh, use Arthur’s bones to rebuild Glastonbury, beating a drum like any marketplace hawker to attract crowds to that quiet little hillside cell.
So Adelia, unusually indecisive, rode to Wells dreading the choice she must make when she got there.
It was partly because she was tired. When Emma and Roetger had been summoned to the assize some days before, taking Pippy with them, she had expected to spend the time restfully with Allie. So she had, but it was then, as if they had been waiting for her mind to be unguarded, that images of the past weeks had invaded it like savage dogs, spoiling the hours on the marshes with the memory of Sigward and Hilda walking into quicksand, sending her down into the tunnel at night, and making her kill Wolf over and over again.
In the middle of it, she and Mansur had been called to the abbey wall to demonstrate Eustace’s innocence to the bishop of Saint Albans and the twelve men with him-the jury that was to pass judgment on the tithing when they appeared at the assize. It was easier than she’d expected it to be; the jurors were all local countrymen familiar with traps and, though at first they looked askance at Mansur, had accepted the word of the bishop that the Arab was a royal investigator, an expert, with a warrant from the king to look into the matter of the Glastonbury fire-after all, King Henry, being a foreigner himself, was expected to be peculiar in his choice of servants.
“I’d hoped that the case would be dropped now that the abbey has withdrawn its accusation of Eustace,” Rowley had told Adelia, “but the fire was such a colossal event that the justices must pursue it. The tithing has been summoned to appear.”
In her turn, she had hoped that Rowley would be able to spend the night with her; she needed the comfort of his body not just for its own sake but to ward off the nightmares. However, he couldn’t be spared from his duties at the Wells assize and had ridden back to them with the jury in tow.
It was no help to her troubled state of mind as she rode along the forest road on this pleasant, sunny morning to find that pieces of human flesh, a leg here, a torso there, were hanging from the branches of trees lining the route.
Captain Bolt and his men had cleansed the forest thoroughly of Wolf’s remaining brigands and anyone else who had no explanation or license to justify being there. “Up before the verderers’ court, sentenced, and then chop-chop,” the captain said graphically.
“Do they have to be so… displayed?” Adelia asked.
“King’s orders,” Bolt said. “Make any other bug… brigand think twice afore doing likewise.”
And this, Adelia thought, is the king I considered civilized.
Well, he had been; he’d saved her life once when the Church would have condemned her; he could charm, make her laugh; he was introducing new and finer concepts into English law, but there was still an underlying savagery that marked him as a man of his time when she’d hoped for more.
He muddles me, she thought wearily. Shall I give him his dead Arthur? Or not?
Loggers were already cutting the trees back to the statutory bow’s length from the road so that the air rang with the thud of axes and smelled nicely of raw wood-except for an occasional whiff of putrefying flesh as the cavalcade passed a piece of it.
Behind the leading horses-some way behind because the presence of a king’s officer bothered them-rode the tithing on their donkeys and, in Captain Bolt’s opinion, considerably lowering the tone.
Alf had got his voice back. Adelia could hear his and the others’ comments as they rode-and hoped that the captain’s helmet kept them from his ears. They were attempting to identify the owners of the bloodied pieces.
“Reckon as that’s a bit of Scarry, Will?”
“Never. Scarry’s arms had black hair on ’em. Looks more like Abel’s. Abel had them sort of twisty fingers.”
“So he did.”
To Adelia’s regret, Gyltha had remained behind at the Pilgrim. Allie had been reluctant to part from her lurcher and, since the dog was canis non grata among the hunting fraternity to be expected in attendance at the assize, Gyltha had said she’d stay with the child. “Anyway, I seen enough of Wells, bor, that’s too noisy.”
“That’s not like you.” Gyltha loved excitement.
“Wait til you get there. Ain’t room to breathe.”
A female companion had been needed for propriety’s sake, so Millie’s services had been called in. How much the girl understood of the drawings with which Adelia had tried to indicate both the
