They glanced up at the visitors, their eyes guarded as they looked from Mansur to Adelia and Gyltha, to Allie, and finally to Rhys.

“Oh, dear God,” said the thin one. “He’s back.”

Rhys bobbed. “ ’Allo, Brother Aelwyn. You remember me, then?”

“Oh, yes,” Brother Aelwyn said.

There were introductions all round. The fat monk was Brother Titus, and his attention, once he’d nodded to them, was on the contents of Hilda’s basket as she began laying them on the table, especially the leather bottle of ale.

“You see,” Abbot Sigward said to Mansur, “we laid a penance on ourselves by sending Brother Patrick, who was our kitchener, to the abbeys in Normandy so that he might beg them for rebuilding money-he has the gift of charm, has Patrick, and an interest in cuisine that will match theirs. Consequently, we are left barely able to cook our own meals. All but one of our lay brothers have departed to find employment elsewhere…”

“Deserted, you mean,” Brother Aelwyn said viciously. “The rats ran away. They think God’s curse is on us.”

“I’m afraid they do,” the abbot said, “and perhaps it is, but at least we are blessed by our sister Hilda’s sustenance.” He smiled at the Pilgrim’s landlady and then at Mansur. “And by your presence, my lord.”

He looked more closely up at the Arab, who remained staring stolidly down at him, unspeaking. To Adelia he said, “Do I gather that the sage does not speak English?”

“I am afraid I must be the doctor’s interpreter and assistant,” Adelia said, using the ploy that had served the two of them well. It was a relief to find Abbot Sigward happy to accept the pronouncements of a Saracen, but she knew that such tolerance would not be extended to her. Prior Geoffrey, bless him, was the one churchman prepared to recognize her skill, but even he only because it had saved his life.

She asked if they had any knowledge of a lady missing with her companions.

They had not. None of them had left the abbey since the fire. “We are the guardians of the few holy relics we managed to save from its burning, you see,” the abbot said, adding, “I am sorry for your anxiety; these are concerning times.”

“Don’t worry about that now, Father,” Hilda told him. “See, I’ve brought ham cured just as you like it, and my quince preserve.” She was noticeably proprietorial toward the abbot, brushing dust off his shoulder, filling a plate for him, producing a napkin that she tried to push into his hand. Nobody else had existed for her since he’d appeared on the scene.

“Any sign of that useless devil as Wells set on us, Father?” she asked.

Indulgently, the abbot fended off the napkin. “We mustn’t assume that Eustace is our arsonist, my dear, nor that the bishop of Wells intended him to be so, though our belief lies in that direction and we have had to tell the sheriff so. But no, so far we have not discovered him.”

“Course he did it,” Hilda argued. “Brother Aloysius said so afore he died, didn’t he? Saw him a-coming from the crypt as it flamed, didn’t he?”

“He said something.”

“He shall burn in hell if he did not in life,” Brother Aelwyn said, “and who else but that satanic bishop would rejoice to see Glastonbury a bonfire? Of course it was Eustace.”

To the still-fussing Hilda, the abbot said, “My dear, it would be discourteous to eat while our guests do not, and I can see that they are eager to be about the king’s business.”

He led the way out of the kitchen. Everybody followed-Brother Titus reluctantly, and covering up the food on the table to keep it from the flies until he should return.

As they headed toward the ruined church, tension rose. The animosity toward Mansur was palpable. Brothers Titus and Aelwyn became even more sullen. Hysterically, Brother James begged his superior not to submit sacred Christian bones to the touch of a Saracen.

Hilda, especially, was on edge. “Them’s Arthur’s and Guinevere’s bones, everybody knows it,” she said over and over, as if by reiteration she could make them so.

Only Abbot Sigward kept his poise. They hadn’t known what to do with the skeletons, he said. “They deserve better housing than our kitchen, so we have built a temporary hut of withies for them on the site of the Lady Chapel, where we trust Saint Mary will watch over them.”

“Should have been two huts for decency,” Brother Aelwyn said.

“My dear, we’ve had this out,” his abbot told him wearily. “This couple have been lying side-by-side all this time; I won’t separate them now.” Suddenly, he winked. “After all, if legend is right, Arthur and Guinevere were respectably married.”

He stopped short of the site, gave Rhys permission to visit the graveyard, then bent down to talk to Allie. “It is time for you to go and play, little one,” he told her. “Old bones are not for the young.”

Allie opened her mouth to explain her experience with bones, but Gyltha, giving her a sharp nudge, said, “We’ll explore, shall us? See what we can find?” And to the abbot, “The child likes animals.”

“There’s a nice horsey up in the paddock,” Sigward said kindly.

“It’s a mule,” Allie said, but allowed herself to be led away.

“Explain, my lord,” Brother James was urging the abbot. “Tell this Saracen of Arthur’s abnormality not granted to ordinary men.” He turned to Adelia for the first time. “Tell your master, woman. Tell him that Arthur has six ribs, a grace given by Our Lord only to heroes.”

Oh, dear, Adelia thought, that old fable. She said, “I think, sir, my Lord Mansur would instruct you that women and men have exactly the same number of ribs-six pairs, always six. The only way of telling a female skeleton from the male is by the pelvic bones.”

“Instruct me?” Brother James’s voice was high and became higher. “Instruct me? I take my instruction from the Word in Genesis: ‘So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and brought her to the man.’ Adam had but five ribs, and so have all men, except those given a special dispensation by God, as Arthur has been.”

Don’t they ever feel their own chests? Adelia wondered. Why don’t they count the damn things?

It was something she’d met over and over. Whoever had written Genesis was no anatomist.

Damn it, she thought, how can we make our investigation with an audience that’s not only on tenterhooks but ignorant as well?

Abbot Sigward solved that for her. “Come along, my sons,” he said, “it is time for sext. And Hilda, dear soul, if you would finish grinding the wood bryony, for Brother James’s stiffness of the joints causes him suffering…”

Within a minute, everybody had gone-Hilda eager to fulfill a request by the abbot.

Adelia and Mansur stood alone outside the hut of withies, a large, fresh, sweet-smelling hump in the charred rectangle that had once been a soaring monument to the Virgin.

Mansur bowed his head. Adelia knelt, as she always did, asking the dead beyond the door to forgive her for handling their remains. “Permit your flesh and bone to tell me what your voices cannot.”

When she stood up, Mansur said, “Can you sense it?”

“Sense what?”

They spoke in Arabic; it was safer for them, should they be overheard.

“We are on holy ground. This place is an omphalos.”

She couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d said it was Mecca. Mansur was not a man to show fervor; she had never known him to be awestruck before, and certainly not by anything Christian. His face was as impassive as ever, but that he should say he was finding in Glastonbury the same mystery that the ancient Greeks had attributed to the navel of their world in Delphi ’s dark cave was extraordinary.

She sniffed the air and looked around her. Was she missing something? Henry Plantagenet, another man difficult to impress, had mentioned much the same thing.