Adelia ignored the sarcasm. “Clean will do,” she said.
At the door she turned and addressed the little doctor: “And if you’re supposed to be treating that wound, get those leeches off it and put on some bog moss-there’s plenty of the bloody stuff in the valleys; we’ve been squelching through it for two days.”
THE BATH TURNED OUT to be a washtub of enormous proportions, and the soldiers who hauled it up to the two rooms allocated to their guests at the top of a tower, along with great ewers of hot water, were out of breath and resentful when they got it there.
An inexorable Adelia sent them back down for soap and towels.
The beds, when they arrived, were rickety, but the straw and blankets that came with them were clean.
After a long night’s sleep, Adelia woke up feeling better, if chastened by the memory of her behavior toward a king whose empire stretched from the borders of Scotland to the Pyrenees. Apparently, though, it was even yet having its effect, for a polite knock on the door heralded the entrance of the emperor’s bastard son, Geoffrey, still amused.
He was carrying an armful of women’s clothing. “We, er, liberated these from one of the Welsh chieftain’s wives,” he said. “Don’t worry, she has others, though I’m afraid the lady favors rather more avoirdupois than you do, but it was that or a mail shirt.”
Adelia clutched her blanket more closely about her-last night she’d thrown everything she’d been wearing out the window. Luckily, Allie’s extra clothes had been included in Gyltha’s pack, along with Mansur’s, and were fit for them to wear. “I’m grateful, my lord.”
“Was the breakfast to your satisfaction? The cook’s Welsh as well.”
“Congratulate him for me,” she said. Skewered lamb, the tastiest she’d ever eaten, along with buttermilk and a form of cake called bara brith so rich that even Mansur hadn’t been able to finish all of it.
“Then when you’re dressed, my lord king would be happy to receive you and my lord Mansur. Only when you are ready, of course.” The young man went to the door and then turned back. “Oh, and one of our lads carved this for the little one.” He knelt to put his face on a level with Allie’s and handed her a wooden doll.
Allie curtsied nicely. “I’ll call him Poppy, like the ones on the roof.”
“Poppies?”
“She’s referring to the flowers decorating the battlements,” Adelia said, getting angry again. “The ones separated from their stalks.”
“Ah, yes.” The young man’s eyes were on Allie, but he spoke to Adelia. “You see, little one, they were already picked. The king doesn’t take the heads off poppies unless they’re dead.” As he turned to leave, and Allie began playing with her doll, he added, “Hangs a few, of course, to encourage the others, but on the whole he’s magnanimous to his flowers.”
“Nice lad that,” Gyltha said, when Geoffrey had gone. She began unfolding the clothes he’d brought. “Gawd help us.”
With Mansur behind her, Adelia waded down the stairs in a skirt and bodice that had been pinned up and belted to enable her to keep them on. Since, at her age, it wasn’t respectable to go bareheaded, she also wore the Welshwoman’s headdress, an elaborate affair with something like curtaining on either side, which rested heavily on her ears.
Casually, to the page who was leading the way, she asked, “Is the bishop of Saint Albans in the castle?”
“He was, mistress, but he’s gone to Saint David’s to treat with the Welsh bishop.”
The king’s chamber had been cleared of chieftains and servants but retained the king, a scribe writing at the table, dogs, hawks, and the softly singing harpist. The page ushered them in, announced them, and then stood at attention with his back to the door.
Still dictating, Henry Plantagenet stumped up and down on legs that were becoming bandy from days of traveling his empire on horseback. As usual, he was dressed hardly better than one of his grooms, but, again as usual, he generated a power that sent out an almost palpable energy.
Mansur salaamed, and Henry nodded at him, then walked round Adelia, studying her swamping attire. “Can you hear me in there?”
“Yes, my lord. Thank you, my lord.”
“You’re a rude and graceless woman, you know.”
“Yes, my lord, I’m sorry, my lord.” She looked at the king’s arm on which the soft, vividly pale-green flower heads of sphagnum moss were held in place by a bandage. “How’s your wound?”
“Better. Ready for some employment now?”
“I suppose so, my lord.”
“See that fellow there?” The king jerked a thumb at the harpist. “Name’s Rhys something-or-other. He’s a bard. Comes from an unpronounceable bloody hole on the coast.” He might have been introducing an interesting breed of hound. “Stand up, Rhys, and greet the lord Mansur and Mistress Aguilar.” To Adelia, he said, “He started this business, so he’s going to accompany you to Glastonbury.”
Rhys rose and bowed vaguely in Adelia and Mansur’s direction.
“ Glastonbury?” Adelia was shrill. “My lord, I was already going to Glastonbury, or at least nearby. Lady Emma of Wolvercote and I were on our way to Wells. You could have sent a messenger and saved yourself trouble.”
And me God knows how many bone-shaking miles, she thought. What business?
“Master Rhys is going to tell you a story, aren’t you, Rhys?” Henry said, his attention still on the bard as if about to make him do a trick for the visitors. “And in the name of God, don’t sing it.” To Adelia and Mansur, he said, “The bugger keeps singing.”
“About Uncle Caradoc, is it?” Rhys asked.
“Of course it is, you clown. What else are you here for? Tell them.”
The bard stepped forward. A thin, droop-shouldered man with protruding teeth, he put Adelia in mind of an elongated rabbit. Despite the king’s injunction, his hand kept straying to his harp before he remembered and took it away again. Even so, his speaking voice, which belied his looks by being a pleasing tenor, had a lilt that was very nearly song, though the scribe at the table was unmoved by it and the bard’s tale was told against the scratching of a quill, as well as the sound of soldierly activity coming through the open window from the bailey below.
So, in semi-song, Adelia and Mansur were taken back twenty years ago to when Rhys had been an adolescent at Glastonbury Abbey. “Never suited to the monastic life, me,” he said. “No opportunity for true poetry.”
He told them of the earthquake that had struck the Somerset Levels in which Glastonbury stood. “Terrible, terrible it was, like the last trump trembling the heavens…” A hiss from the king moved him on. “And my good uncle Caradoc, dying he was, had a waking dream…”
“A vision,” the king said.
“Three hooded lords, see, bearing a coffin to the graveyard and burying it.”
“Between the two pyramids,” the king prompted.
“Two pyramids there are in the Glastonbury graveyard, very ancient, and Uncle Caradoc, he says to me, ‘Look, bach, look down there in the fissure. They are showing me where Arthur takes his long rest, and by God’s grace I have been witness to it. Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.’ And He did, for beautiful, beautiful was my uncle Caradoc’s ending…”
“God rest him,” Henry said, “and get on with it.”
“And the next morning we buried that good old uncle of mine, but no sign of another coffin, only disturbed earth all over the graveyard-result of the earthquake, see. Terrible, terrible, that earthquake, like the last days…”
Tapping his foot, the king said, “But you didn’t pass on what Uncle Caradoc had seen, did you?”
“No, oh, no.”
“We had to beat it out of him,” Henry said, looking at Adelia. “He’s been keeping it secret for twenty years. Only person he told was his mother.” He turned back to Rhys. “And why did you keep it a secret?”
“Well, there.” Rhys’s large, vague eyes became sly. “There’s some would believe…”
“And you’re one of them, you little bastard,” the king interrupted.
“…believe as it couldn’t have been the burial of King Arthur that my uncle Caradoc saw.”
“And why couldn’t it?”
“Well,” Rhys said, still sly, “there’s some credit that Arthur’s only sleeping, see. In a crystal cave at Ynis-Witrin, the Isle of Glass. Avalon.”
“Which is Glastonbury,” Henry said briskly. He gestured to the page at the door. “Take him down to the kitchen and feed him again.” To Adelia he said, “The bugger’s always hungry.” As the page ushered Rhys out, he shouted after him, “And don’t sing.”
When the door closed, the king said, “Well?”
“Yes, my lord,” said Adelia. “But well what?”
“I’ll tell you well what. He informed us of all this when we were at Cardiff-we’ve been dragging him round with us ever since-and right away I sent to Glastonbury’s abbot and told him to set his monks digging between the two pyramids in the graveyard and find that coffin.”
Adelia frowned. “So you think it was a real vision, my lord?”
“Of course it was real. The monks have found the thing.” Henry waved a parchment at her, setting its large seal swinging. “This is a letter from Abbot Sigward, informing me they’ve dug up a coffin sixteen foot down, exactly between the pyramids. Two skeletons in it, one big, one small, Arthur and Guinevere, God bless her. Two for the price of one.”
Adelia nodded carefully. “They dug it up after the fire, did they?”
“Well, of course they did-just after, otherwise the coffin would have been burned like everything else, wouldn’t it?”
“I see.”
Henry squinted at her. “Are you suggesting it’s a fraud?”
“No, no.” Nevertheless, she thought, it was a remarkably happy find for an abbey that had just lost everything else that would attract revenue.
“I’m glad to hear it. Abbot Sigward is an honorable man. He doesn’t actually claim it’s Arthur in that bloody coffin, but who else can it be? Haven’t you read Geoffrey of Monmouth?”
She had not, hadn’t needed to; she’d heard most of his book. In the forty years since Geoffrey’s History of the Kings of Britain had been written, it had gained unstoppable popularity. Apparently recording the descent of Britain’s kings over two thousand years and giving them an ancestry from the Trojans, those literate enough to read its Latin had passed on its stories to those who could not, wonderful stories of adventure and love and war and magic and religion-and most wonderful of all was the tale of King Arthur, who had stood against the pagan Saxon invaders and created a Golden Age of chivalry somewhere in the mist of Britain’s Dark Ages.
Arthur had caught the country’s imagination and still did. Tales of his prowess, his knights and battles, his marriage to Guinevere, her sexual treachery, were told by professional and amateur storytellers in palaces, on manors, in marketplaces, and around cottage fires.
At each inn Adelia had stayed in on her journey with Emma, somebody had been prepared to entertain the guests with one Arthurian legend or another, sometimes with embroidery that even Geoffrey of Monmouth wouldn’t have recognized. More than that, nearly every town and village they’d passed through laid claim to a shred of the legend, boasting of a local Arthur’s well, Arthur’s chair, Arthur’s table, Arthur’s mount, Arthur’s hill, Arthur’s quoit, Arthur’s hunting seat, Arthur’s kitchen…
His fame had even spread to the continent-Adelia could remember her foster mother in Salerno telling her about Arthur’s exploits on Vesuvius. The stories appealed to women like no others; Emma adored them. “Don’t you just love the bit where Uther Pendragon steps out of the darkness at Tintagel and seduces Ygraine?” she’d said.
