And Rowley has got his Adelia, Adelia thought happily. Except that it doesn’t scan.
“To trip it, trip it, trip it, trip it, to trip it up and down.”
Coming toward them was a procession. Seeing it, Rhys laid his hand flat on the harp’s strings to quiet them. Everybody fell silent and pulled to the side of the road to let it go past as if it were a funeral.
The dowager sat easily and upright on a splendid bay, her eyes on the road ahead. Behind her came draft horses pulling two great carts piled with furniture, out of which stuck the scarlet and silver battle flags of Wolvercote. Behind those were straggled servants, some on horses, some on mules, some walking, driving cows and geese before them, all burdened with belongings, like refugees.
Which, Adelia supposed, they were. And she was sorry for all of them except the murderess in front.
Emma, however, rode out to meet her mother-in-law. “You could have stayed longer,” she said, quietly. “Where are you going?”
She might have been a piece of detritus dropped on the road. The dowager’s eyes didn’t flicker; her horse walked round the obstruction and continued on its way.
“Oh, dear,” Emma said, looking after it.
Rhys struck up again. “No ‘Oh, dear’ about it,” he said. “Sing again, lady.”
“Some walked and some did run, some loitered on the way. And bound themselves by kisses twelve, to meet next holiday.”
Adelia imagined the voices traveling joyously through the warm air to reach the ears of the woman who had just passed, and what agony they would cause her. Not enough recompense for six bodies that had once lain in a forest grave and were now buried decently in the Wells churchyard. But some.
They saw the quiver in the sky, like a heat haze over Wolvercote Manor, long before they reached it. By the time they had urged their horses into a canter and gained the gates, the quiver had been replaced by black smoke.
The manor was in flames. Its roof had already fallen in; some men with buckets were scurrying to and from the moat in an effort to save the outbuildings. In the air, pigeons wheeled unhappily, unable to land in the bonfire that had been their cote. A hay barn had gone up like tinder and revealed the church standing behind it, so far untouched.
There was nothing to be done. Buckets of water wouldn’t extinguish that inferno. The riders could only stay where they were and watch.
“The hag,” Roetger said. “She set a torch to it before she went.”
Adelia felt grief for a house that had been so lovely and so old. It had been like a seashell, allowing all to listen to hear the waves of its history. Now it was going and the waves would be silenced forever.
The men with buckets were standing back, giving up the battle.
“Dear, dear,” said Rhys. “Oh, there’s a pity, now. Such a pity.”
Emma said determinedly, “No, Rhys, it is not a pity at all.”
She turned to Roetger, smiling. “I would have torn it down in any case. I could never live where he’d lived. Nor her.”
“We will rebuild it,” Roetger said.
“Yes, new and twice as beautiful. Won’t we, Pippy? Everything new.”
After a while, taking Millie with her, Adelia left them and rode on toward Glastonbury.
There was definitely newness about. No corpses polluted the air today, because the trees that had held them were gone. Instead, a wide verge of timber-strewn grass ran between road and forest edge. Women were picking up fallen branches in their aprons and carrying them to their men to be chopped up for firewood. As Adelia and Millie went by, waving, they looked up and smiled.
At the top of the turning to Glastonbury high road, Adelia and Millie dismounted. Adelia bent down to pick up a fallen leaf and pressed it into Millie’s hand. “For Gyltha.” She enunciated it carefully, sticking it out her tongue at the “th.” It was a word Millie had learned by watching Adelia say it while patting Gyltha on the shoulder. Adelia hoped to teach her others. But how to indicate she wouldn’t be long? She pointed to the sun and moved her finger a fraction to the west, then blew a kiss to an imaginary child by her knee. “My love to Allie. Tell her I’ll be with her soon.”
Millie nodded and started off down the hill. At its bottom, Godwyn was sweeping dust out of the Pilgrim’s front door. He looked up, saw Millie coming toward him, and smiled for the first time since the marshes.
Good, Adelia thought. That will work out very well.
The abbey was silent, but there was life down the high street, where men were shifting the rubble that had been their houses, ready to rebuild them. Although he didn’t see her, she saw Alf expertly wielding an adze on a freshly cut beam.
Better than Noah, Adelia thought, and was happy.
Yes, there was newness in the air today.
Remounting, she rode on along the lane between the abbey wall and the foot of the Tor.
Up the hill, some men on horseback, their hands shading their eyes, were straining their necks to watch a peregrine falcon circling the sky. A hound barked, causing a cluster of pigeons to go flapping up into the air out of a copse of trees. The bird above them took on the shape of a bow notched with an arrow-and dived. The pigeons separated, and one of them, perhaps realizing its danger, flew low, but the falcon coming for it was a missile; talons out, it took the pigeon in midair with an impact that sheared off its head.
By the time Adelia reached the group, the falcon was back on its owner’s wrist, only its wicked little beak, shining like steel, visible under its plumed hood.
“Good day, my lord.”
With great care the falconer transferred the bird to its austringer’s gauntlet, then, telling his men to wait for him-“This lady and I have private business to transact”-joined Adelia and together they rode up the hill.
“You’ve a very nasty temper, you know,” said Henry Plantagenet. “You must learn to control it.”
Adelia was wondering what would become of her reputation in the royal household. “Yes, my lord. I’m sorry, my lord.”
“I hear Lady Wolvercote won her Morte d’Ancestor.”
“But has lost the house.” She told him of the dowager’s revenge.
“Ah,” the king said. He cheered up. “Well, more work for the law courts. Now then, where’s this cave?”
Adelia had some trouble finding it again. With Eustace gone to his grave and with the tithing rebuilding their lives, there was no sign of its occupancy; up here, one bushy outcrop with a spring looked like another. After a couple of false casts, however, she dismounted to pull aside the fronds that hid the entrance and the man who’d been waiting for them.
“Good day, Mansur,” Henry said.
“Good day, my lord.”
Inside, the elfin cave worked its magic and nobody spoke.
Looking around, the king crossed himself and climbed through the hole in the back wall that Mansur had made. After a while, Adelia joined him.
One king was kneeling in prayer by the prone skeleton of another. Green light coming through the split in the rock above shone on them both and the untroubled pool at their feet.
Adelia looked at the living man with tears in her eyes.
Will you, too, become a legend? No, the Church will see to that. Future generations living under the legacy you’ve given them will remember you only for the murder of Becket.
Eventually, Henry II stood up and cleared his throat as if he, too, had been crying. The sound echoed. “He’s not very big, is he?”
“He was a Celt, I suppose,” Adelia said. “One of the short, dark ones.”
“A warrior, though. Look at those wounds. At peace now, God rest him.”
“Yes.” But crowding into her mind came visions of the thousands of pilgrims, as they would come crowding into this cave in real life, of the tawdry relic stalls that would be set up outside alongside the money changers, those descendants of rapacious men whom Jesus had once turned out of Jerusalem’s Temple.
Henry sighed. “Requiscat in pace, Arturus.” He turned and clambered back through the hole.
Outside the cave, he reached for the reins of the horses drinking at the spring, then let them drop. He looked down, toward Glastonbury “You know,” he said, reflectively, “the Welsh aren’t being as obstreperous as they were, the bastards. They’re finding my laws have some advantages.”
“Are they?”
“Yes, they are.”
He took up the reins and dropped them once more. “And that one in there”-he nodded toward the cave-“he’s practically a dwarf. People’ll expect a giant; they’ll be disappointed.”
Adelia’s heart skipped a beat.
The King of England gave another sigh. “Mansur?”
“My lord?”
“Wall him up again; let him sleep on.”
“Wait.” Adelia went back into the cave and through the hole and retrieved the sword from the pool to which Mansur had returned it. Coming out again into the light, the weapon dazzled like a sunburst. She laid it across her palms and knelt. “My lord, here is Excalibur. It belongs to the greatest heart of the age, which makes it yours. You are the Once and Future King.”
The two of them walked their horses back down the hill, chatting.
From where he lay under the shadow of a juniper bush, a man known as Scarry watched them go. At least, he didn’t watch the king, because he didn’t know it was the king. He watched Adelia, and his eyes were those of a stoat waiting to kill-a stoat that spoke Latin.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I HAVE SET the story of the “finding” of Arthur and Guinevere’s grave at Glastonbury fourteen years earlier than the chroniclers who tell us it happened in 1190, but there is good reason to believe it wasn’t as late as they say, because the Glastonbury monks also “found” Excalibur-it was known as Caliburn then, but I’ve used the now-familiar name-and the sword was undoubtedly in the possession of Henry II before his death, which was in 1189.
Eventually, Henry sent Excalibur as a present to his friend and future son-in-law, the King of Sicily. When I asked John Julius Norwich, that fine historian of Norman Sicily, if he knew what happened to it after that, he said he didn’t. But, he told me, it is interesting that there is a strong tradition of the Arthurian legend in the area of Mount Etna.
Nobody knows what Excalibur looked like, of course, and my re-creation of it is based on the wisdom and writings of an old and dear friend, the late Ewart Oakeshott, who has been acknowledged on both sides of the Atlantic as the great authority on medieval weaponry.
That a sword from the age attributed to Arthur (circa the mid-sixth century) and earlier could survive intact is due to the fact that thousands of them have been preserved in peat bogs or river bottoms where they have been recovered. To quote Mr. Oakeshott’s Records of the Medieval Sword (The Boydell Press, 1991), “A sword falling into deep mud, free from stones or organic material
