Had every skeleton in Glastonbury been hacked about?
“A sword fight?” Mansur asked.
“Mmm. I’d have expected a sword, being long, to have swiped all the fingers off. It’s almost… I don’t know… It’s almost as if he’d proffered the three middle fingers to be cut off, keeping the thumb and little one bent away from the blow.”
She thought some more. “Keep talking.” It was vital to maintain the pretense that Mansur was in charge. He impressed these men; she did not. Besides, should the two of them manage to leave alive, she didn’t want the spreading of a rumor that a witch was at work in Glastonbury.
“Can you tell what happened to this man?” Mansur asked, “because if you cannot… They have told us too much.”
“I know.” She reverted to English. “My lord doctor wishes to see Eustace’s knife.”
The men fell over themselves in the rush to retrieve it for him. “Right sharp, this is,” said one of them. “Always kept it honed, did our Useless.”
They gave it to Mansur, who, still talking, held it so that Adelia could see it as well. The blade was certainly sharp, but there was a nick in the center of it.
“When did that happen?” she asked.
Alf opened his mouth but received another hit from the baker-obviously, Eustace’s knife had been damaged in another nefarious activity. “Year since,” the baker told her, “and never you mind how.”
Squinting, putting her head close to the damaged stumps of the hand, making sure that Mansur also made a show of examining them, Adelia saw a v-shaped splinter at the end of the third finger’s middle phalange where some of the bone hadn’t been cut through entirely, as if, instead, it had been ripped free of whatever had caught it. God, how terrible. The pain…
“I think he did this himself,” she said in Arabic. “I think Eustace used this knife to cut his own fingers off.”
“Why?”
She shut her eyes to bring up a mental picture of a hand outstretched, then opened them again to look carefully at the still-extant bone of the little finger. Yes, there was a scrape down one side of it.
Mansur kept talking.
“The lord doctor wishes to know how Eustace got over the abbey wall when he went thieving,” Adelia said in English. “Presumably it was high. Did he climb it?”
The baker blustered. “Who says he went thieving?”
But Alf, the terminally truthful Alf, now enslaved by the Arab’s reading powers, said, “With his leg? Couldn’t climb pussy, could Useless. Burrowed under, he did, like a bloody rabbit.”
The testicle scratcher chimed in. “Gor, di’n’t old Brother Christopher hate them rabbits. Got at his lettuces. Ooh, he hated them coneys, old Brother Chris, well, hated everything, really. Set noose traps for bloody everything-foxes, badgers, birds… Useless always complained about them noose traps. Got in his way. He knew where they were, though. They never caught our Useless.”
Adelia nodded. Rabbits were comparatively new to England, having been introduced by Norman lords for their fur and meat, but, thanks to the escapees from the warrens in which they were kept, they were rapidly becoming a pest to gardeners everywhere.
And she’d learned something else. These men around her were well acquainted with the routine of the abbey and with the movements of its brethren who, before the fire, had tended and tried to guard it-presumably, if they poached its deer and, like Eustace, stole from it, they had to be.
But their knowledge could have come from only one source-the lay brother, Peter. Rhys could be absolved for chattering. Peter and the baker were closely related, had to be; their likeness was too strong for it to be otherwise. From Peter they’d heard of Mansur’s supposed skill with the dead and, without reckoning the consequences, had kidnapped him. When they couldn’t understand him, they’d returned to kidnap her because she could.
“Show us,” she said. “My lord Mansur wishes to see where Master Eustace got into the abbey grounds.”
“What bloody good’ll that do?” the baker wanted to know.
“A lot.” Adelia indicated Mansur. “This great reader of bones”-Keep stressing his powers-“thinks that he may, only may, be able to prove that your friend did not set the fire. But now he demands two things. First, that you will then let the two of us”-she remembered Rhys, who was still singing sadly to himself-“the three of us, go unharmed. Second, you shall then tell us what you know of our friend, Lady Emma.”
An older man who hadn’t spoken before said, “Here, we can’t let ’em go, Will, they’ll squawk on us.”
So the baker was called Will. Adelia kept her eyes on him. Because he was the most intelligent of the tithing, he was also the most frightened and, therefore, dangerous. But because he was the more intelligent, he must know that she had a weapon in her armory belittling anything in his-if she and Mansur could prove Eustace’s innocence, they had to be kept alive in order to prove it to the authorities.
“Who would believe you?” she said.
The answer was nobody. Lay proof before a court? Inarticulate men with dubious reputations, a difficult case to put, and no expert witnesses to call? An impatient judge-and all assize judges were impatient; they had too many cases to hear in too short a time-wouldn’t even bother to listen.
Adelia knew it. Will the baker knew it.
She waited.
He said, and for the first time he was placatory, “An’ you won’t squawk on us… you know, ’bout the venison and such, ’bout how we, er, invited you here?”
“No,” she said. And she meant it. So far they had done no real harm to Mansur or her or Rhys, and she was sorry for men so poor in education and goods. As it was, they would be punished for Eustace’s predations on the abbey-but that was nothing compared to the sin of setting fire to it.
“Swear?” Will asked.
“What on?”
And that, too, was touching. There was no Bible, no prayer book-these men had only seen such things in a church. But for them, this secret spring was as inexplicable and magical as any of those made famous by the abbey.
“Arthur’s spring, this is,” Alf told her. “It was Eustace’s dad found it, but he’s passed on and nobody don’t know it but us. Useless told us, di’n’t he, lads? Saw Arthur drinkin’ from it one night, kneelin’ he was, and a light shining from his kingly crown.”
“Useless saw a lot of things,” Will growled. “Purple snakes among ’em.”
So Mansur and Adelia and Rhys knelt, cupping their hands under the shining spiral of water and drinking from it, swearing by good King Arthur that if they could prove Eustace innocent of arson, they would not inform on anything else they had learned during their sojourn with the tithing.
Then, one by one, the tithing itself swore that if the good doctor and his assistant could prove Eustace innocent of arson, they would not cut the throats of said doctor and assistant.
“Nor mine, neither,” Rhys insisted.
Nor that of the bard, either.
“And you give me back my harp?”
And the tithing would give him back his bloody harp.
All very charming with the sun hot on the backs of their heads and the chirp of grasshoppers joining a winged chorus…
But what, thought Adelia, if I can’t prove anything?
The tithing’s prisoners had been brought to the cave by a circuitous route; the abbey was actually within walking distance, and there was a discussion about whether the donkeys should be left where they were and the descent of the hill made on foot.
The clear sound of a horn in the distance decided the matter. “Bastards,” said Will. “They’ve come looking for you.”
Rowley. He’d brought a hunt to scour the countryside for her.
Suddenly, she didn’t want to be found. Not yet. She had work to do, a puzzle to solve. She was mistress to the dead; a corpse had cried out to her.