MISTRESS OF THE ART OF DEATH (2007) 2007 Historical Dagger; 2008 Macavity Award for Best Historical NovelIn medieval Cambridge, England, four children have been murdered. The crimes are immediately blamed on the town's Jewish community, taken as evidence that Jews sacrifice Christian children in blasphemous ceremonies. To save them from the rioting mob, the king places the Cambridge Jews under his protection and hides them in a castle fortress. King Henry II is no friend of the Jews-or anyone, really-but he is invested in their fate. Without the taxes received from Jewish merchants, his treasuries would go bankrupt. Hoping scientific investigation will exonerate the Jews, Henry calls on his cousin the King of Sicily-whose subjects include the best medical experts in Europe-and asks for his finest "master of the art of death," an early version of the medical examiner. The Italian doctor chosen for the task is a young prodigy from the University of Salerno. But her name is Adelia - the king has been sent a mistress of the art of death. Adelia and her companions - Simon, a Jew, and Mansur, a Moor-travel to England to unravel the mystery of the Cambridge murders, which turn out to be the work of a serial killer, most likely one who has been on Crusade with the king. In a backward and superstitious country like England, Adelia must conceal her true identity as a doctor in order to avoid accusations of witchcraft. Along the way, she is assisted by Sir Rowley Picot, one of the king's tax collectors, a man with a personal stake in the investigation. Rowley may be a needed friend, or the fiend for whom they are searching. As Adelia's investigation takes her into Cambridge's shadowy river paths and behind the closed doors of its churches and nunneries, the hunt intensifies and the killer prepares to strike again . .
Excerpt:
Here they come. From down the road we can hear harnesses jingling and see dust rising into the warm spring sky.
Pilgrims returning after Easter in Canterbury. Tokens of the mitered, martyred Saint Thomas are pinned to cloaks and hats-the Canterbury monks must be raking it in.
They're a pleasant interruption in the traffic of carts whose drivers and oxen are surly with fatigue from plowing and sowing. These people are well fed, noisy, exultant with the grace their journey has gained them.
But one of them, as exuberant as the rest, is a murderer of children. God's grace will not extend to a child-killer.
The woman at the front of the procession-a big woman on a big roan mare-has a silver token pinned to her wimple. We know her. She's the prioress of Saint Radegund's nunnery in Cambridge. She's talking. Loudly. Her accompanying nun, on a docile palfrey, is silent and has been able to afford only Thomas à Becket in pewter.
The tall knight riding between them on a well-controlled charger-he wears a tabard over his mail with a cross showing that he's been on crusade, and, like the prioress, he's laid out on silver-makes sotto voce commentaries on the prioress's pronouncements. The prioress doesn't hear them, but they cause the young nun to smile. Nervously.
Behind this group is a flat cart drawn by mules. The cart carries a single object; rectangular, somewhat small for the space it occupies-the knight and squire seem to be guarding it. It's covered by a cloth with armorial bearings. The jiggling of the cart is dislodging the cloth, revealing a corner of carved gold-either a large reliquary or a small coffin. The squire leans from his horse and pulls the cloth straight so that the object is hidden again.
And here's a king's officer. Jovial enough, large, overweight for his age, dressed like a civilian, but you can tell. For one thing, his servant is wearing the royal tabard embroidered with the Angevin leopards and, for another, poking out of his overloaded saddlebag is an abacus and the sharp end of a pair of money scales.
Apart from the servant, he rides alone. Nobody likes a tax gatherer.
Now then, here's a prior. We know him, too, from the violet rochet he wears, as do all canons of Saint Augustine.
Important. Prior Geoffrey of Saint Augustine's, Barnwell, the monastery that looks across the great bend of the River Cam opposite Saint Radegund's and dwarfs it. It is understood that he and the prioress don't get on. He has three monks in attendance, and also a knight-another crusader, judging from his tabard-and a squire.
Oh, he's ill. He should be at the procession's front, but it seems his guts-which are considerable-are giving him pain. He's groaning and ignoring a tonsured cleric who's trying to engage his attention. Poor man, there's no help for him on this stretch, not even an inn, until he reaches his own infirmary in the priory grounds.
A beef-faced citizen and his wife, both showing concern for the prior and giving advice to his monks. A minstrel, singing to a lute. Behind him there's a huntsman with spears and dogs-hounds colored like the English weather.
Here come the pack mules and the other servants. Usual riffraff.
Ah, now. At the extreme end of the procession. More riffraffish than the rest. A covered cart with colored cabalistic signs on its canvas. Two men on the driving bench, one big, one small, both dark-skinned, the larger with a Moor's headdress wound round his head and cheeks. Quack medicine peddlers, probably.
And sitting on the tailboard, beskirted legs dangling like a peasant, a woman. She's looking about her with a furious interest. Her eyes regard a tree, a patch of grass, with interrogation: What's your name? What are you good for? If not, why not? Like a magister in court. Or an idiot.
On the wide verge between us and all these people (even on the Great North Road, even in this year of 1171, no tree shall grow less than a bowshot's distance from the road, in case it give shelter to robbers) stands a small wayside shrine, the usual home-carpentered shelter for the Virgin.
Some of the riders prepare to pass by with a bow and a Hail Mary, but the prioress makes a show of calling for a groom to help her dismount. She lumbers over the grass to kneel and pray. Loudly.
One by one and somewhat reluctantly, all the others join her. Prior Geoffrey rolls his eyes and groans as he's assisted off his horse.
Even the three from the cart have dismounted and are on their knees, though, unseen at the back, the darker of the men seems to be directing his prayers toward the east. God help us all-Saracens and others of the ungodly are allowed to roam the highways of Henry II without sanction.
Lips mutter to the saint; hands weave an invisible cross. God is surely weeping, yet He allows the hands that have rent innocent flesh to remain unstained.
Mounted again, the cavalcade moves on, takes the turning to Cambridge, its diminishing chatter leaving us to the rumble of the harvest carts and the twitter of birdsong.
But we have a skein in our hands now, a thread that will lead us to that killer of children. To unravel it, though, we must first follow it backward in time by twelve months. . . .
Pilgrims returning after Easter in Canterbury. Tokens of the mitered, martyred Saint Thomas are pinned to cloaks and hats-the Canterbury monks must be raking it in.
They're a pleasant interruption in the traffic of carts whose drivers and oxen are surly with fatigue from plowing and sowing. These people are well fed, noisy, exultant with the grace their journey has gained them.
But one of them, as exuberant as the rest, is a murderer of children. God's grace will not extend to a child-killer.
The woman at the front of the procession-a big woman on a big roan mare-has a silver token pinned to her wimple. We know her. She's the prioress of Saint Radegund's nunnery in Cambridge. She's talking. Loudly. Her accompanying nun, on a docile palfrey, is silent and has been able to afford only Thomas à Becket in pewter.
The tall knight riding between them on a well-controlled charger-he wears a tabard over his mail with a cross showing that he's been on crusade, and, like the prioress, he's laid out on silver-makes sotto voce commentaries on the prioress's pronouncements. The prioress doesn't hear them, but they cause the young nun to smile. Nervously.
Behind this group is a flat cart drawn by mules. The cart carries a single object; rectangular, somewhat small for the space it occupies-the knight and squire seem to be guarding it. It's covered by a cloth with armorial bearings. The jiggling of the cart is dislodging the cloth, revealing a corner of carved gold-either a large reliquary or a small coffin. The squire leans from his horse and pulls the cloth straight so that the object is hidden again.
And here's a king's officer. Jovial enough, large, overweight for his age, dressed like a civilian, but you can tell. For one thing, his servant is wearing the royal tabard embroidered with the Angevin leopards and, for another, poking out of his overloaded saddlebag is an abacus and the sharp end of a pair of money scales.
Apart from the servant, he rides alone. Nobody likes a tax gatherer.
Now then, here's a prior. We know him, too, from the violet rochet he wears, as do all canons of Saint Augustine.
Important. Prior Geoffrey of Saint Augustine's, Barnwell, the monastery that looks across the great bend of the River Cam opposite Saint Radegund's and dwarfs it. It is understood that he and the prioress don't get on. He has three monks in attendance, and also a knight-another crusader, judging from his tabard-and a squire.
Oh, he's ill. He should be at the procession's front, but it seems his guts-which are considerable-are giving him pain. He's groaning and ignoring a tonsured cleric who's trying to engage his attention. Poor man, there's no help for him on this stretch, not even an inn, until he reaches his own infirmary in the priory grounds.
A beef-faced citizen and his wife, both showing concern for the prior and giving advice to his monks. A minstrel, singing to a lute. Behind him there's a huntsman with spears and dogs-hounds colored like the English weather.
Here come the pack mules and the other servants. Usual riffraff.
Ah, now. At the extreme end of the procession. More riffraffish than the rest. A covered cart with colored cabalistic signs on its canvas. Two men on the driving bench, one big, one small, both dark-skinned, the larger with a Moor's headdress wound round his head and cheeks. Quack medicine peddlers, probably.
And sitting on the tailboard, beskirted legs dangling like a peasant, a woman. She's looking about her with a furious interest. Her eyes regard a tree, a patch of grass, with interrogation: What's your name? What are you good for? If not, why not? Like a magister in court. Or an idiot.
On the wide verge between us and all these people (even on the Great North Road, even in this year of 1171, no tree shall grow less than a bowshot's distance from the road, in case it give shelter to robbers) stands a small wayside shrine, the usual home-carpentered shelter for the Virgin.
Some of the riders prepare to pass by with a bow and a Hail Mary, but the prioress makes a show of calling for a groom to help her dismount. She lumbers over the grass to kneel and pray. Loudly.
One by one and somewhat reluctantly, all the others join her. Prior Geoffrey rolls his eyes and groans as he's assisted off his horse.
Even the three from the cart have dismounted and are on their knees, though, unseen at the back, the darker of the men seems to be directing his prayers toward the east. God help us all-Saracens and others of the ungodly are allowed to roam the highways of Henry II without sanction.
Lips mutter to the saint; hands weave an invisible cross. God is surely weeping, yet He allows the hands that have rent innocent flesh to remain unstained.
Mounted again, the cavalcade moves on, takes the turning to Cambridge, its diminishing chatter leaving us to the rumble of the harvest carts and the twitter of birdsong.
But we have a skein in our hands now, a thread that will lead us to that killer of children. To unravel it, though, we must first follow it backward in time by twelve months. . . .
THE SERPENT'S TALE (2008) Finalist 2008 Historical Dagger AwardRosamund Clifford, the mistress of King Henry II, has died an agonizing death bypoison-and the king's estranged queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, is the prime suspect. Henry suspects that Rosamund's murder is probably the first move in Eleanor's long-simmering plot to overthrow him. If Eleanor is guilty, the result could be civil war. The king must once again summon Adelia Aguilar, mistress of the art of death, to uncover the truth. Adelia is not happy to be called out of retirement. She has been living contentedly in the countryside, caring for her infant daughter, Allie. But Henry's summons cannot be ignored, and Adelia must again join forces with the king's trusted fixer, Rowley Picot, the Bishop of St. Albans. Adelia and Rowley travel to the murdered courtesan's home, in a tower within a walled labyrinth-a strange and sinister place from the outside, but far more so on the inside, where a bizarre and gruesome discovery awaits them. But Adelia's investigation is cut short by the appearance of Rosamund's rival: Queen Eleanor. Adelia, Rowley, and the other members of her small party are taken captive by Eleanor's henchmen and held in the nunnery of Godstow, where Eleanor is holed up for the winter with her band of mercenaries, awaiting the right moment to launch their rebellion. Isolated and trapped inside the nunnery by the snow and cold, Adelia and Rowley watch as dead bodies begin piling up. Adelia knows that there may be more than one killer at work, and she must unveil their true identities before England is once again plunged into civil war . . .
PROLOGUE
The two men's voices carried down the tunnels with reverberations that made them indistinguishable but, even so, gave the impression of a business meeting. Which it was. In a way.
An assassin was receiving orders from his client, who was, the assassin thought, making it unnecessarily difficult for himself, as such clients did.
It was always the same; they wanted to conceal their identities, and turned up so masked or muffled you could hardly hear their instructions. They didn't want to be seen with you, which led to assignations on blasted heaths or places like this stinking cellar. They were nervous about handing over the down payment in case you stabbed them and then ran off with it.
If they only realized it, a respectable assassin like himself had to be trustworthy; his career depended on it. It had taken time, but Sicarius (the Latin pseudonym he'd chosen for himself) was becoming known for excellence. Whether it was translated from the Latin as "assassin" or "dagger," it stood for the neat removal of one's political opponent, wife, creditor, without suspicion being provable against oneself.
Satisfied clients recommended him to others who were afflicted, though they pretended to make a joke of it: "You could use the fellow they call Sicarius," they'd say. "He's supposed to solve troubles like yours."
And when pressed for information: "I don't know, of course, but rumor has it he's to be contacted at the Bear in Southwark." Or Fillola's in Rome. Or La Boule in Paris. Or at whatever inn in whichever area one was plying for trade that season.
This month, Oxford. In a cellar connected by a long tunnel to the undercroft of an inn. He'd been led to it by a masked and hooded servant-oh, really, so unnecessary-and pointed toward a rich red-velvet curtain strung across one corner, hiding the client behind it and contrasting vividly with the mold on the walls and the slime underfoot. Damn it, one's boots would be ruined.
"The . . . assignment will not be difficult for you?" the curtain asked. The voice behind it had given very specific instructions.
"The circumstances are unusual, my lord," the assassin said. He always called them "my lord." It pleased them. "I don't usually like to leave evidence, but if that is what you require . . ."
"I do, but I meant spiritually," the curtain said. "Does your conscience not worry you? Don't you fear for your soul's damnation?"
So they'd reached that point, had they, the moment when clients distanced their morality from his, he being the low-born dirty bastard who wielded the knife and they merely the rich bastards who ordered it.
He could have said, "It's a living and a good one, damned or not, and better than starving to death." He could have said, "I don't have a conscience, I have standards, which I keep to." He could even have said, "What about your soul's damnation?"
But they paid for their rag of superiority, so he desisted. Instead, he said cheerily, "High or low, my lord. Popes, peasants, kings, varlets, ladies, children, I dispose of them all-and for the same price: seventy-five marks down and a hundred when thejob's done." Keeping to the same tariff was part of his success."
Children?" The curtain was shocked.
Oh, dear, dear. Of course children. Children inherited. Children were obstacles to the stepfather, aunt, brother, cousin who would come into the estate once the little moppet was out of the way. And more difficult to dispose of than you'd think . . .
He merely said, "Perhaps you would go over the instructions again, my lord."
Keep the client talking. Find out who he was, in case he tried to avoid the final payment. Killing those who reneged on the agreement meant tracking them down, inflicting a death that was both painfully inventive and, he hoped, a warning to future clients.
The voice behind the curtain repeated what it had already said. To be done on such and such a day, in such and such a place, by these means the death to occur in such and such a manner, this to be left, that to be taken away.
They always want precision, the assassin thought wearily. Do it this way, do it that. As if killing is a science rather than an art.
Nevertheless, in this instance, the client had planned the murder with extraordinary detail and had intimate knowledge of his victim's comings and goings; it would be as well to comply....
So Sicarius listened carefully, not to the instructions-he'd memorized them the first time-but to the timbre of the client's voice, noting phrases he could recognize again, waiting for a cough, a stutter that might later identify the speaker in a crowd.
While he listened, he looked around him. There was nothing to be learned from the servant who stood in the shadows, carefully shrouded in an unexceptional cloak and with his shaking hand-oh, bless him-on the hilt of a sword stuck into a belt, as if he wouldn't be dead twenty times over before he could draw it. A pitiful safeguard, but probably the only creature the client trusted.
The location of the cellar, now . . . it told the assassin something, if only that the client had shown cunning in choosing it. There were three exits, one of them the long tunnel, down which he'd been guided from the inn. The other two might lead anywhere, to the castle, perhaps, or-he sniffed-to the river. The only certainty was that it was somewhere in the bowels of Oxford. And bowels, as the assassin had reason to know, having laid bare quite a few, were extensive and tortuous.
Built during the Stephen and Matilda war, of course. The assassin reflected uneasily on the tunneling that had, literally, undermined England during the thirteen years of that unfortunate and bloody fracas. The strategic jewel that was Oxford, guarding the country's main routes south to north and east to west, where they crossed the Thames, had suffered badly. Besieged and re-besieged, people had dug like moles both to get in and to get out. One of these days, he thought-and God give it wasn't today-the bloody place would collapse into the wormholes they'd made of its foundations.
Oxford, he thought. A town held mainly for King Stephen and, therefore, the wrong side. Twenty years on, and its losers still heaved with resentment against Matilda's son, Henry Plantagenet, the ultimate winner and king.
The assassin had gained a deal of information while in the area-it always paid to know who was upside with whom, and why-and he thought it possible that the client was one of those still embittered by the war and that the assignment was, therefore, political.
In which case it could be dangerous. Greed, lust, revenge: Their motives were all one to him, but political clients were usually of such high degree that they had a tendency to hide their involvement by hiring yet another murderer to kill the first, i.e.,him. It was always wearisome and only led to more bloodletting, though never his.
Aha. The unseen client had shifted, and for a second, no more, the tip of a boot had shown beneath the curtain hem. A boot of fine doeskin, like one's own, and new, possibly recently made in Oxford-again, like one's own.
A round of the local boot makers was called for.
GRAVE GOODS (2009)
England, 1176. Beautiful, tranquil Glastonbury Abbey— one of England’s holiest sites, and believed by some to be King Arthur’s sacred Isle of Avalon—has been burned almost to the ground. The arsonist remains at large, but the fire has uncovered something even more shocking: two hidden skeletons, a man and a woman. The skeletons’ height and age send rumors flying—are the remains those of Arthur and Guinevere? King Henry II hopes so. Struggling to put down a rebellion in Wales, where the legend of Celtic savior Arthur is particularly strong, Henry wants definitive proof that the bones are Arthur’s. If the rebels are sure that the Once and Future King will not be coming to their aid, Henry can stamp out the insurgence for good. He calls on Adelia Aguilar, Mistress of the Art of Death, to examine the bones. Henry’s summons comes not a moment too soon, for Adelia has worn out her welcome in Cambridge. As word of her healing powers has spread, so have rumors of witchcraft. So Adelia and her household ride to Glastonbury, where the investigation into the abbey fire will be overseen by the Church authorities—in this case, the Bishop of St. Albans.
Excerpt:
“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 . . .
About the Author:
The author's website can be found at http://www.arianafranklin.com/. This is the pen name of British writer Diana Norman. A former journalist, Norman has written several critically acclaimed biographies and historical novels
Bookeemonster rating: 5 out of 5. Excellent series.
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