Now here, on a journey down a sacred tor, for the first time, she was granted a gift, the childhood of a common country boy who had climbed trees and stolen birds’ eggs, who had scrumped apples from other people’s orchards and hidden from angry gamekeepers. Or perhaps because the danger was more than a clout on the ear, she became a soldier in enemy territory, using a landscape to escape discovery and get home.
Whatever it was, she loved it.
At the beginning they went fast, dodging from tree to tree in case someone in the hunt had sight and hearing as long as Toki’s. The blare of horns was louder now. Adelia could hear her name being shouted, the calls coming closer through the hot air.
Having exhausted the search of Wearyall Hill, Rowley was leading his men straight to the Tor.
“On your bellies, lads,” Will said quietly. To Adelia, he said, “You goin’ to give us away?”
“No.”
Just in case, he kept close to her, knife in hand. Two of the other men were paired with Mansur and Rhys, ready to silence them if they cried out.
Wisely, the hunt had gone to the top of the hill and begun circling downward in spirals.
The tithing and prisoners made for cover, crawling, feeling the reverberation of the hunt’s hoofbeats through their hands and knees.
It was wonderful; it was a game, it was
the
game; it was life at primitive level; it was how a species survived by craft and fear. For Adelia absorbed some of the terror of the tithing as they crawled, her back prickling with exposure, as if her life as well as theirs depended on concealment, all the while being filled with the joy of a
wild thing using its habitat. She was a weasel undulating through the fragrancy of grass; she was a snake with sweet earth beneath her belly; a clump of tall, purple loosestrife was a hiding place, a patch of inhospitable gorse to be despised.
As the hunt grew closer, she became an outlaw among outlaws, her teeth exposed in a snarl, as if they had a knife between them. She’d never played hide-and-seek, but deep inside the dark, crumbling interior of a hollowed oak, she watched Rowley ride by within ten feet of her, crying her name—and she would no more have called out to him than a boar in its lair would have snorted to attract the hounds.
When he’d passed, she looked up to where Will was lying across a branch above her. Their eyes met with mutual respect, and she knew that whatever happened, he would not kill her now, just as he knew she was not going to betray him. They were feral creatures; together they had outwitted the hunt.
On a promontory with a view of the abbey and marshes, the tithing—for they were all frankpledged now—watched its pursuers set off for Chalice Hill.
“Rest a bit,” Will said, and nodded toward the abbey, from which came a faint plainchant. “They’ll be finishing terce any moment.”
So it was the third hour of daylight, one hundred and eighty minutes since Adelia had been introduced to Eustace’s cave, and not one of them she wouldn’t look back on without a ferocious joy.
As she waited, lying flat, Will on one side, Alf on the other, the primeval drained out of her and, with a pang of regret, she resumed the mind and shape of Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, Medica of the Salerno School, mistress of the art of death and agent to King Henry II of England, anxious friend to a missing woman, lover of a man who loved God and his king more than he did her… .
“Here they come, look,” Will said as four black beetle-like figures emerged from the ruin of the church. “Bugger, I forgot as it’s third Friday of the month.”
For the beetles were not returning to the Abbot’s kitchen; one of them was walking toward the abbey pier, where the unmistakable shape of Godwyn awaited him at the oars of a rowing boat. “Off to Lazarus,” Will said. “Old abbot’s a-taking communion to them lepers.”
“Well,
they’re
not worrying about me,” Adelia said, slightly miffed at the abbey’s placid reaction to her and Mansur’s disappearance.
“Reg’lar as Christmas. Every three weeks, off he do go to keep them lepers’ souls in trim, nothin’ to come in the way of it.”
“Saint he is,” Alf said. “Buggered if I’d go.”
“Leprosy isn’t all that contagious,” Adelia murmured.
“What’s that mean?”
“You don’t catch the sickness quickly.”
“I ain’t bloody riskin’ it, I tell you that.”
“I’m sorry for the poor sods,” Toki said. “Fancy rottin’ away on a lump o’ mud as you can’t get off of.”
“But can’t they walk off it?” Adelia wanted to know. From up here the mosaic of sedge, reed, and fen woodland with their differing greens that surrounded the islands’ low humps looked firm enough, while surely those streams and lakes reflecting the enamel blue of the sky could be swum or waded.
“Not allowed,” Toki told her. “The law. An’ they ain’t got no boat.”
Abbot Sigward and Godwyn, apparently, when they visited that poor congregation, had to secure their punt to Lazarus’s landing stage by a lock to which only they had the key.
“As for walkin’,” Will said, “you don’t walk the Avalon marshes less’n you been born on ’em. Not then, neither. There’s quog devils
out there as’ll grab your feet and suck you down, an’ you ain’t never sure where they are ’cos they’re shifting buggers, pop up anywhere them quog devils will.”
“Yet I’ve seen people on stilts… .”
But stilt walkers, Adelia was told, never went that far out, being aware of the risk. Anyway, Lazarus inhabitants had learned by tragic experience not to try and escape.
“There’s more’n one leper as tried to get off ain’t never been seen again.”
The beetles that were brothers Aelwyn, James, and Titus moved about the grounds, carrying out odd jobs, netting trout from the pool for the fish stew—for it was Friday and only fish was on the menu.
On its promontory, the tithing waited with animal patience until the monks should withdraw into the Abbot’s kitchen and, while it waited, passed comment on the men it watched.
“Old Titus’ll be wanting his dinner soon, greedy bugger.”
“An’ his ale. Old abbot sent poor Useless off for getting drunk, but he don’t know the half of what Titus topes when he ain’t looking. Could drink Useless under the table any day, Titus could.”
“Look at old James potterin’ about. Bet he’s talking to hisself. Mad as a weasel, James is, an’ nasty with it when he’s roused.”
Will nudged Adelia. “Bet you don’t know as why Brother Aelwyn di’n’t want you and the darky messin’ about in the graveyard.”
“No. Why?”
“ ’Cos he’s got two babies buried in it.”
“Babies?”
Will smirked. “Babies. Oh, there was carryin’s-on with women in the old days, so they say, for all them monks was supposed to be virgins, an one of ’em had twins an’ old Aelwyn give ’em to her.
Left ’em on the abbey’s doorstep, she did. There was a right to-do about it. Had to bury ’em in the monks’ own graveyard.”
“Dear God, how did the babies die?”
Will, with some reluctance, admitted that as far as was known, the twins had met a natural death.
Listening to them, Adelia began to see the fire’s great scar spread over the abbey as a stain representing human frailty and misery.
There was, however, nothing but good words for Abbot Sigward. “Wasn’t no carryin’s - on after he were elected,” Will told her. “Not a bad old boy, for a monk.”
“Fancy leavin’ a rich living so’s you got to say prayers all day,” Toki said incredulously.
“Did it for to remember his son as died fighting the bloody Saracens,” Alf said. “Right upset about that, Sigward was. ’S a wonder he never sent to have the body brought back. Sir Gervase over at Street, he was brought back and put in Street Church with his legs crossed and his sword an’ all.”
“Cut up too bad by them black bastards p’raps, nothin’ left to bring back. Or maybe he never had no friends to carry him home. Might’ve died a hero but didn’t live like one. Weedy little bugger he was. Hilda never reckoned him much, said he was a milksop, always blubberin’ an’ saying he was cold.”
“Crusades suited him, then,” Will said. “Hot out them parts, ain’ it?”
“About as hot as here,” Adelia told him. She picked a dock leaf to protect her bare head from sunstroke and another to brush the flies away from the sweat on her face. “Aren’t those blasted men
ever
going to go in to dinner?”
“S’pose the darky proves Useless di’n’t do it, an’ we can bury
the poor bugger,” Toki said to Will. “Where we going to throw his knife?”
“In the river, acourse.”
“Which one?”
Will shrugged. “The Brue, I reckon. Liked fishin’ in the Brue, Useless did. ’F you ask me, that’s where King Arthur threw Excalibur like as not. Useless’d want his old knife to go the same.”
“You’re throwing his knife into the river?” Adelia inquired.
“Got to,” Will said, shortly.
“Why?”
“ ’Cos it’s got to go back.”
She was interested. In her beloved fens, fishermen were often getting their lines caught in rusting weapons, then, carefully and with a prayer, throwing them once again into the waters, obeying a time-fogged legend, almost an instinct, that held that a great warrior’s sword or shield, however valuable, must be returned to the mystery that had given it its power. Her foster father, on his travels, had found the custom everywhere in the east. “A very ancient ritual,” he’d told her, “an offering to the gods on behalf of the soul of the dead owner.”
Of course—now she remembered—she’d heard Rhys singing of Excalibur being returned to the lake from which a lady’s arm had once proffered it.
So the custom persisted. Pagan but, still, beautiful.
At last the abbey grounds emptied. The tithing moved down the hill, still keeping to cover, and approached what remained of the abbey wall.
Will pointed to an area of blackened rubble. “Tha’s where Useless’d go under the wall, look, only you can’t see the hole now acause the fire brought the stones down on it.”
“Then remove them,” Adelia told him. “The lord doctor wishes to see the actual burrow.”
And Adelia realized that for once she need not command through Mansur; these men belonged to a level of society so low that its women had to work at jobs other than that of a wife in order for their families to survive, holding a place of their own as fellow laborers in the fields, as ale brewers, laundresses, market sellers, maybe even as thieves, bringing in money that earned them a position of their own. Only the upper classes, where ladies were dependent on their lords, could afford to regard women as inferior. Now that she, Adelia, was accepted by the tithing as trustworthy, it was not unnatural for its members to have decisions made by a female.
Still, it was better to stick to the pretense; one of them might give her away.
With some effort, the stones were cleared to reveal a curve in the ground that once had allowed the late Eustace to creep under the wall. “Like this, see.” Alf fell flat, prepared to give demonstration in case the lord Mansur and his interpreter didn’t understand the burrowing procedure.
Adelia stopped him. “Don’t. The doctor believes there’s a trap on the other side.”
“Gor, old Useless didn’t have no trouble with traps.”
“I think he had trouble with this one,” Adelia said. She pushed Alf aside and took his place. “Get me a stick.”
A stick was brought and Adelia, crouching in the depression, extended it gingerly so that she could use it to sift through the cinders and newly grown weeds on the abbey side of the wall.
Something clinked.
And there it was. Not a noose such as tightened around the neck or leg of vermin but a spring trap, now buckled by heat yet
still recognizable as the terrible thing it was, and still with the chain that had been riveted to one of the stones in the wall.
Brother Christopher had become exasperated by the nighttime human rabbit that kept nibbling away at the abbey’s stores, and, ignoring the command that the Church must not shed blood, he’d made sure he caught it this time.
The tithing was shocked. “I’ll kill that there monkish bastard when he gets back,” Will said.
“What he want to do that for?” Alf wanted to know. “Useless din’t do no harm, just a sip o’ wine to keep him happy, odd turnip or lettuce here or there. Bugger it, richest abbey in the world could afford a bit o’charity, cou’n’t it?”
But Brother Christopher had not thought so; he’d laid in the grass outside Eustace’s burrow a mechanism consisting of a pair of steel jaws triggered by a spring and welded it into place, so that Eustace, pulling himself out of the burrow, had put a hand on the base, causing the trap’s teeth to jump together in a wicked bite on his fingers.
It wasn’t a mantrap such as the one Adelia had once seen—and still tried not to remember—holding someone else in its jaws; this was smaller but, in its way, had proved just as fatal.
In her mind, she heard the snap as it closed, saw Eustace struggling without effect to dislodge it from its fastening …
“But that don’t prove nothing,” Will said, having given it thought. “They’ll say as how he got
in
some other way, set the fire, an’ was trapped comin’
out
.”
“The doctor doesn’t think so,” Adelia said, nodding at Mansur, who nodded back. “Eustace used his own knife to cut off his own fingers; he wouldn’t have done that unless his life depended on it, would he?”
The tithing shook its head. A man didn’t deliberately lose the
use of his right hand unless he was in extremis. Eustace would have waited until somebody released him and taken his punishment, which, under a compassionate abbot, might not have been too severe.
“No,” Adelia went on, “Eustace
had
to free himself. He was coming in through the burrow ready to do his thieving. Look …” She used the stick again to stir through the weeds and found the proof she knew had to be there, and nearly collapsed with relief that it was. “Look.” She exposed three knobbles of charred bone. “Those are his fingers.”
They still didn’t understand.
She said, “The fingers are on the abbey side, pointing toward it. If … Don’t touch them, Alf; they’re our proof where they are… . Don’t you see, if Eustace had been returning from the crypt they’d have been on the
other
side of the trap. It caught him as he was going
in
. I think,
the doctor thinks
, the fire had already started and was spreading toward this wall. If he hadn’t sliced off his fingers, he’d have been burned alive.”