“One of his islands is a leper colony now,” Hilda said, still pointing seaward. “That’s how good he is. Bought the Pilgrim for Godwyn and me, and gave an estate over to lepers. Lazarus Island, we call it. Godwyn do row him over so’s he can give them communion and take supplies.”

Mansur shuddered. “Allah commend the good man,” he said in Arabic. “I could not do that.”

Adelia commended him, too. She did not share Mansur’s horror for sufferers of a disease that her foster father had taught her was not as infectious as popular revulsion accorded it, though it was terrible enough in its slow and creeping death from the tips of the limbs to the whole body, but she could understand why the law was strict in segregating them in order to protect the healthy. For once, it was the Christian Church-an institution with which she was usually at odds-that she admired for its provision of leprosaria, refuges where patients received medical and spiritual help, even respect, since they were suffering for their sins while living and would, therefore, find quick redemption in heaven.

So Abbot Sigward was one of those who treated lepers generously, was he? Adelia found herself liking the man more and more.

For one thing, he was prepared to give Mansur and herself facility in their investigation that his fellow monks would have denied them.

“Against some opposition from my brothers, I have kept open the grave where we found the skeletons,” he said, greeting them. “Do you wish to examine it? And the coffin?”

“Let the dead rest, Father,” Hilda pleaded, interrupting. “Them’s Arthur’s and Guinevere’s bones, you know it. Let ’em rest in peace.”

The abbot patted her on the shoulder but kept his eyes on Adelia, who, after pretending to consult the Arab, said, “Dr. Mansur is grateful to you, my lord, and will be glad to look at those things in the goodness of time, but first he will concentrate on the skeletons.”

“And what can they tell him?”

Again, Adelia spoke to Mansur in Arabic, and again received a reply. “Not much, he fears,” she told Sigward honestly. “Putting a date to bones may be difficult.”

“Even to eliminating the possibility that they are not Arthur’s and Guinevere’s?” The abbot winked. “That is the doctor’s purpose, is it not? And the king’s?”

Adelia smiled back at him. “It’s a gamble, my lord.”

“Ah, gambling.” The abbot’s face creased into that of a tortured man. “Gambling was one of my sins when I was in the world, and still is, though pride was a greater-and one I pray that a merciful God will forgive me. By the way, there is no need to address me as ‘my lord’; I am a servant now.”

“He shines, that one,” Mansur said, watching Sigward walk away, gently propelling Hilda with him.

“He does,” Adelia agreed.

They went into the hut and stared at the two skeletons. The damage to that of the female reminded Adelia horribly of her nightmare.

“What do we do?” asked Mansur.

“I don’t know. If we could find out how old they are… perhaps comparing them to bones we know to be old would help.”

“The graveyard?”

“The graveyard.”

After peering to see if anyone was about, they crossed the ruined nave of the great church and scrambled over the tumbled stones of its southern wall, a part of which was tall enough to hide what lay on the other side.

Neither the fire nor, yet, Brother Peter’s scythe had touched the abbey’s burial place. The gravestones had the pleasant higgledy-piggledy untidiness of a country churchyard. Being in the full path of the early sun, butterflies were adding to the color of its wildflowers, and bees were at work among some bluebells growing in the shade of a young oak leaning over the small wall that marked the graveyard’s southern boundary.

What made the place different, what skewed its bucolic restfulness into something alien, were the pyramids. Adelia had thought that the word must refer to conical gravestones, but these were pyramids-much smaller versions of the ones her foster father had drawn during his visit to Egypt and shown to her, but still too large and belonging to a more savage environment and a hotter sun than this; they were un-English, disturbing.

They didn’t match, either-another attack on the eye. The tallest was more than twenty-five feet high, and stepped to its peak in five courses of stone; the other stood about eighteen feet, consisting of four stories. Each was covered in writing that Adelia couldn’t decipher-more like runes than script, messages from a darker age.

Between them stood another pyramid, this time a teetering mountain of earth that had been displaced from the yawning hole beside it.

Adelia went to the edge.

The pit was a rectangle, at least sixteen feet deep and wide enough to accommodate the steps cut into one of its sides. The monks had gone down a long way to find Arthur’s coffin.

“They must have dug like badgers,” Adelia said, peering into it. She stepped back quickly; the pit smelled of contaminated earth.

Mansur was already on his way down, examining the sides as he went. Bits of bone stuck out where the diggers had cut through the earth, showing that for one thousand years succeeding generations of dead monks had been buried on top of one another.

“Also, there is wood,” he called up. “Some were in coffins, some were wrapped in just a winding sheet, I think. What do you want?”

Suddenly, she didn’t want anything. “Mansur, we’re grave robbing.”

Her foster father, she knew, had bought dubiously acquired skeletons from dubious men in order to teach his students anatomy, but what was she advancing by desecrating these dead? Not science, not medical knowledge, merely a chance for an abbey to acquire riches and a king to get his dead Arthur.

“We shouldn’t do this,” she called down, and she heard Mansur spit in disgust at her vacillation.

He began climbing up again, but as he reached the top of the steps he held out his hand. On its palm was a small knobble of bone.

“It must be old because it was at the bottom,” he said. “A bit of a foot, I think. Use it.”

It was actually the distal phalanx of a second toe, and Adelia stared at it for some time, tapping her teeth in indecision before finally snatching it. “We can always stick it back on,” she said.

After all, if she could find a method for dating bones, it would be a contribution to the world’s knowledge.

Nevertheless, guilt followed her back to the hut, and when, two hours later, Brother James surprised the two of them at work and stared at the mess they’d made as if they had committed an obscene act, Adelia blustered an innocence she didn’t feel. “We’ve said prayers… Abbot Sigward gave the doctor license… The king requires… ”

But apparently Brother James underwent periods of calm, and this was one of them. He merely looked sad. “May God forgive you for what you do,” he said.

“I hope He will.”

In fact, the bone had been useless. Adelia had shaved a sliver off it and an exactly similar slice off Arthur’s toe-neither had displayed an interior any different to the other.

She and Mansur had pounded each sliver to dust and put it in the bowl of the tiny scales she’d brought with her-proving only that they weighed the same. They’d poured parts of the two sets of dust into water, then vinegar, with no reaction from either. Both were the same age or, as she’d feared, there was no way of gaining a comparison.

“You see,” Brother James said, still lingering, still sad, “people need King Arthur, they need the dream of him. I need him.”

“Why?” Adelia asked. “Why do you need him?”

“He flew his banner in the battle against savagery,” Brother James said, “but he must come back to win the war. There is still savagery in this world. Nobody knows that better than I do.”

He wandered off.

“It is as good a reason as any,” said Mansur, watching him go. “All should battle against evil. Islam still fights under the Prophet’s flag, Allah cherish it.”