Grave Goods aka Relics of the Dead Read online

  Grave Goods aka Relics of the Dead

  Ariana Franklin

  Starred Review. Set in 1176, Franklin's excellent third Mistress of the Art of Death novel (after The Serpent's Tale) finds Adelia Aguilar, a qualified doctor from the School of Medicine in Salerno, in the holy town of Glastonbury, where Henry II has sent her to inspect two sets of bones rumored to be those of Arthur and Guinevere. Henry is hoping that an unequivocally dead Arthur will discourage the rebellious Welsh. The bones have been uncovered by the few monks, under the saintly Abbot Sigward, who remain after a terrible and mysterious fire devastated the town and abbey. Adelia's party includes her loyal Arabian attendant, Mansur, whose willingness to play the role of doctor allows Adelia to be his translator and practice the profession she loves; and Gyltha, Mansur's lover and the caretaker of Adelia's small daughter, Allie. Eloquently sketched characters, including a ragtag group of Glastonbury men down on their luck, and bits of medieval lore flavor the constantly unfolding plot.

  Ariana Franklin

  Grave Goods aka Relics of the Dead

  The third book in the Mistress of the Art of Death series, 2009

  Aka Relics of the Dead

  To Datchworth

  ONE

  “And God was angry with His people of Somerset so that, in the year of Our Lord 1154, on the day after the feast of Saint Stephen, He caused an earthquake that it might punish them for their sins…”

  Thus wrote Brother Caradoc in Saint Michael’s chapel on top of Glastonbury Tor, to which he’d scrambled, gasping and sobbing, so as to escape the devastation that God with His earthquake had wrought on everything below it. For two days he and his fellow monks had been up there, not daring to descend because they could still hear aftershocks making their abbey tremble and look down, appalled, at more giant waves submerging the little island villages in the Avalon marshes beyond it.

  Two days, and Caradoc was still wet and had a pain in his poor old chest. When the earthquake struck and his fellow monks had scampered from the shivering abbey, making for the Tor that was always their refuge in times of danger, he’d run with them, hearing Saint Dunstan, strictest of saints though dead these one hundred sixty-six years, telling him to rescue the Book of Glastonbury first. “Caradoc, Caradoc, do your duty though the sky falls.”

  But it was bits of masonry that had been falling, and Caradoc had not dared to run into the abbey library and fetch the great jewel-studded book-it would have been too heavy for him to carry up the hill anyway.

  The slate book that was always attached to the rope girdle round his waist had been weighty enough, almost too much for an old man laboring up a five-hundred-foot steeply conical hill. His nephew Rhys had helped him, pushing, dragging, shouting at him to go faster, but it had been a terrible climb, terrible.

  And now, in the cold, dry but unshaken shelter of the chapel that Joseph of Arimathea had built when he’d brought the cruets containing Christ’s sacred blood and sweat from the Holy Land, Brother Caradoc did his duty as the abbey’s annalist. In feeble taper light and apologetically using Saint Michael’s altar as a table, he chalked this latest event in Glastonbury ’s history onto slate pages so that, later, he could transcribe them onto the vellum of the Great Book.

  “And the Lord’s voice was heard in the screams of people and the squealing of animals as the ground undulated and opened beneath them, in the fall of great trees, in the toppling of candles and the roar of resultant flames as houses burned.”

  The pain in his chest increased, and the shade of Saint Dunstan went on nagging him. “The Book must be saved, Caradoc. The history of all our saints cannot be lost.”

  “I haven’t got to the wave yet, my lord. At least let there be some record of it.” He went on writing.

  “Loudest of all, our Lord spoke in the noise of an approaching wave that raised itself higher than a cathedral in the bay and ran up the tidal rivers of the Somerset Levels, sweeping away bridges as it came and drowning all in its path. Through His mercy, it only reached the lower reaches of our Abbey so that it still stands, but…”

  “The Book, Caradoc. Tell that idle nephew of yours to fetch it.”

  Brother Caradoc looked to his fellow monks, immobile and huddled for warmth on the choir floor, some of them snoring. “He sleeps, lord.”

  “When doesn’t he?” Saint Dunstan asked with some justice. “Either sleeping or singing unsuitable songs, that boy. He’ll never make a monk. Kick him awake.”

  Gently, Brother Caradoc prodded a pair of skinny young ankles with his foot. “Rhys, Rhys. Wake up, bach.”

  He was a good boy in his way, Rhys the novitiate, a lovely tenor, but Saint Dunstan was right, the lad cared more for singing profane songs than psalms, and the other monks constantly berated him for it, keeping him busy to cure his idleness. Tired out now, he merely grunted and slept on.

  Well, well, let him rest. Caradoc began writing again. He hadn’t yet recorded the fissure in the graveyard. Yes, he must put that in. For as he’d run from the quaking buildings, he had seen a deep hole opening up in the abbey’s burial ground between the two pyramids that had stood in it as long as time had gone. “As if,” he wrote, “the end of the world had come and the Almighty had sounded the Last Trump so that the dead might rise from their graves.”

  “The Book,” Saint Dunstan shouted. “Caradoc, would you leave the record of our days to looters?”

  No, he couldn’t do that. So Brother Caradoc put down his chalk and, though his shivers were becoming uncontrollable and the pain across his chest an iron bar, he made for the door of the chapel and began stumbling down the winding terrace of the Tor. He knew now that the last trump had sounded for him and that even if he couldn’t save the Book, he must die trying, or at least take his last breath in the beloved abbey that had been his home.

  A lot of precious breath it cost him as he wavered downward, falling over hummocks, his gasps sending sheep galloping, but gravity was on his side, and it propelled him down to the gate, which swung open at his touch under the chevroned Norman arch and into the grounds. He staggered onward as far as the vegetable garden, where he collapsed among Brother Peter’s lettuces, unable to go farther.

  Now he could peer down the incline toward the towering church. There had been damage; the old bell tower had collapsed, and gapes showed where some corners were sheared away. The waters that circled the grounds had not reached so far; therefore, the Great Book and all the relics of the saints would still be untouched. Beyond them, though, the village outside the walls was still and smokeless, its pasture littered with dirty white lumps that were the corpses of sheep.

  Caradoc experienced anguish for the drowned people and animals, for the ruined hayricks, cornfields-it would be a hard summer for the survivors, and an even harder winter.

  Yet holy Glastonbury still stood. Beautiful, beautiful it was, crystalline under the bright new moon reflected in its skirt of floodwater, an island of glass. The Island of Glass.

  Sucking in breath that couldn’t fill his lungs, he turned his eyes to the graveyard awaiting him.

  A flicker of movement caught his eye. Three cowled figures were pulling on ropes that dragged something up the slope from the abbey’s great gate. Too far away for him to hear any sound they made, they seemed like ghosts. And perhaps, Caradoc thought, that is what they are-for what human could be abroad and busy in this devastation when even the owls and nightingales were silent?

  He couldn’t make out what it was they were hauling-it had the shape of a great log, or a canoe. Then, as the figures came to the fissure in the ground that the earthquake had opened, he saw what it was. A coffin.

  They were lowering it into the fissure. Now they were kneeling, and from the throat of one of them came a great shriek. “Arthur, Arthur. May God have mercy on your soul and mine.”

  There was a moan from the dying monk. “Is King Arthur dead, then?”

  For Caradoc, though a Glastonbury monk these thirty years, had believed that King Arthur was merely resting, waiting, until he was called to rise and fight the devil’s hordes once more. And he rested here.

  Avalon was Glastonbury, Glastonbury was Avalon, the Isle of Glass indeed, and Arthur slept somewhere among these hills, with their hidden caves and crystal springs. Arthur the brave, Arthur of the Welsh, who’d resisted the seaborne invaders and kept the flame of Christianity flickering in Britain during its Dark Ages.

  It had been Caradoc’s joy that he could serve God in the place where Arthur had been brought to be mended from his wounds after the last great battle.

  Was he dead, then? Was great Arthur dead?

  The earth trembled again, lightly, like a dog settling itself to sleep. Caradoc heard other voices, this time calling his name. An arm went under his head, and he looked up into the frightened eyes of his nephew.

  “Look, bach,” Caradoc said, trying to point. “They are burying King Arthur. Three of his lords in hooded cloaks, see.”

  “Lie still now, Uncle,” Rhys said, and shouted up the hill to the other searching monks, “I’ve found him. Here, he’s by here.”

  “There, boy,” Caradoc said. “Between the pyramids, in the fissure. I saw them lower his coffin; I heard them mourning him.”

  “A vision, was it?” Rhys asked, peering toward the graveyard and seeing nothing.

  “A vision, clear as clear,” Caradoc said. “There’s sad it is that Arthur is dead.”

  “Whisht now, Uncle,” Rhys said. “There
’s help on the way.” To calm and comfort the old man, he began singing, not a hymn but a song that Welsh mothers sang to their children-a song of Arthur Pendragon.

  “… when the land rang with minstrels’ song the sharpening of weapons,the splash of oars coming into harbor, a ripple of water in the sea-cave… ”

  Caradoc’s eyes closed, and he smiled. “Good, good,” he whispered. “At least I shall lie where King Arthur lies. There’s company.”

  When the other monks came upon him, they found Rhys still singing as he cradled a dead man.

  They buried Brother Caradoc the next morning. If there had ever been a fissure in the graveyard, the earthquake’s last tremor had filled it in, for there was no sign of it.

  Nor did Rhys ap Griffudd tell anybody of what his uncle had seen. Rhys, who was not suited to be a monk and knew now that he never would be, was a Welshman through and through, and it would not do for these English to know that Arthur was dead.

  So for twenty-four years the two pyramids guarded the place where an old monk had seen Arthur buried, and nobody knew the importance of what lay between them.

  Until…

  …

  MARCH, A.D. 1176, and a wind hurtling down a ravine in Wales, blowing the haulms of reeds and the flare of torches in the same streaming angle as the hair on the severed heads that topped the line of poles leading up to the Plantagenet tents. It sent grass, leaves, and branches nodding in vehement agreement.

  With a spike through their Welsh brains, the heads couldn’t nod, though they revolved slightly so that their blank eyes shifted, as if dividing their attention between the bottom of the ravine, where English soldiers were digging burial pits, and a limping mailed figure who was dragging a woman up the steep slope toward the tents.

  As she was pulled level with the poles, the woman broke into a wail of Welsh lamentation, peering at each head and calling out what, presumably, were their names.

  The mailed man paused, puffing-she was a big lady to haul. “Look,” he said, “they were killed in battle. Battle. Understand? My lads got a bit carried away with their bodies, that’s all. The king doesn’t behead prisoners, at least not often-he’s a good king. Good.”

  But the woman was ignorant of English, no matter how loudly it was emphasized. “Duw, Duw,” she cried, lifting her arms to the sky. The man had to get behind her and push before she’d go farther.

  The opening of the bigger tent was lit from inside, outlining the figure of Henry II, who stood at its entrance, also mailed, also shouting-this time at a line of bound men being made to kneel in front of him-while a man-at-arms undid the king’s hauberk at the back and carefully peeled it off.

  “There was no point to this, you stupid bastards. No point.” To the interpreter at his side, the king said, “Tell ’ em that. Tell them I’ve made peace with their lord Deheubarth, or however the bugger pronounces it. They won’t have to pay any more taxes with me as their king than they pay him already.” He paused. “Well, not much more.” He pressed a cloth against his left arm to stop the bleeding. “Now look what they’ve done. Tell them I’ve had to mount an expensive campaign to put down their bloody rebellion, I’ve lost good men, they’ve lost good men, I won’t be able to use my shield arm for bloody days, and they’ll be taxed for it until their brains squeak-that’s if they’ve got any and if I don’t gouge them out. Tell ’ em that. Tell them Arthur is dead.”

  At the sound of the name, the kneeling prisoners raised their heads as one man and a shout of “Bywyd hir Arthur” rippled along the line.

  “Arthur live forever,” translated the interpreter, helpfully.

  Henry Plantagenet exhaled with violence. “I know what it means.” He extended his wounded arm. “The bastard who did this was shouting it. They all shout it. Tell them Arthur is dead. I’m as proud of him as the next man, but he lived about seven hundred years ago and… There you are, Bishop, and who in hell is this?”

  The lady from the hill had arrived in the tent with her companion.

  Rowley, bishop of Saint Albans, lifted off his helmet, then the coif beneath, and rubbed his nose where the nasal had chafed it. “I believe she’s from the village down the valley, my lord. She was wandering among the dead-looking for her son, I think.”

  “It seems she’s found him,” Henry said-the woman had cried out and thrown herself at one of the prisoners, toppling him over in her joy. “Yes, that’s his mother, all right…” For now the woman had taken to slapping the prisoner around his head with some force. “You usually like ’em slimmer and younger.”

  Saint Albans ignored the slur. “My lord, one of our men down there, he speaks a bit of Welsh, he seems to think she’s got something valid to tell us and wants to ransom her son with it.”

  “What in hell can she possibly… oh, all right. Fulk, take the others away, all except that one and the lady. And send up that pill-pissing butcher who calls himself a doctor.”

  Fulk signaled to two of his men, who began kicking the prisoners to their feet. “Do you want me to hang them, my lord?”

  “No, Fulk, I don’t,” Henry told him wearily. “I want to enlist them. I want them to teach my bloody archers a thing or two, and they can’t do that with their necks stretched.”

  As the prisoners were taken away, the king turned to Rowley and gestured to an unusually long bow propped in a corner. “How do they do it? I tried and I could hardly bend that damn thing, but those wizened little bastards pull it back as easily as a pump handle.”

  “It’s a skill we’ve got to learn, no doubt about that,” Rowley said. He set about taking off his chausses.

  “And the penetration… one flight just missed me and hit a tree. I pulled it out later. Nine inches in, it was. I swear, nine inches into solid oak. If it hadn’t been for the wind…”

  “That’s what saved me; the wind swerved mine and took off most of its force.” The bishop looked morosely at the calf of his leg. “Still went in, though, and, damnation, it’s taken a couple of links in with it.”

  “That’ll need cauterizing, then,” the king said, cheering up. “And now, Owain, my boy, what are those two yammering about?”

  The interpreter, an elderly border Welshman with the gift of making himself near invisible, had been attending to the conversation of mother and son in the tent entrance, most of it pursued by the woman. “Interesting, my lord. Urging him to tell you about Arthur, so she is. Something about Glastonbury and a vision…”

  “Arthur?” The king, who’d collapsed onto a stool, sat up.

  “What I can make of it, my lord-the son’s not a soldier by rights-he was with the holy men at Glastonbury a time ago, and she wants him to tell you something that happened, a vision, a burial, I can’t make it out at all…”

  “ Glastonbury? He can speak English?”

  “So it would seem, my lord, but he’s reluctant…”

  Henry turned to a crouching page. “Fetch a block. And fetch Fulk back. Tell him to bring an ax.”

  Apart from the sobbing pleas of the mother to her son, the tent fell quiet. Every now and then the wind from outside sent the burning logs of the brazier into a flare so that the shadows of the men who sat round it sharpened and then faded again.

  The entry of the doctor and his assistant added the smell of drying blood-their hands and apron were covered in it-to that of bruised grass, sweat, and steel.

  “How’s De Boeuf?” the king asked.

  “I have hopes of him, my lord. Thirty stitches but, yes, I have hopes.”

  “And Sir Gerard?”

  The doctor shook his head. “I’m afraid not, my lord.”

  “Shit,” the king said. When the doctor took his arm to examine it, he jerked it away. “Attend to my lord bishop first. His leg’ll need cauterizing.”

  “So will that arm, my lord. The cut’s gone deep.” The doctor picked up the brazier’s poker and stuck it into the glowing ash.

  Accompanied by the page, who was weighed down with an ax, Fulk came in, cradling three feet of tree trunk like a baby. He set it down, relieved the page of the ax, and, at a nod from his king, dragged the prisoner to the block, shook him so that he folded to his knees in front of it, and showed him the ax. The blade gleamed in the firelight.