By the time Adelia reached the group, the falcon was back on its owner’s wrist, only its wicked little beak, shining like steel, visible under its plumed hood.

“Good day, my lord.”

With great care the falconer transferred the bird to its austringer’s gauntlet, then, telling his men to wait for him-“This lady and I have private business to transact”-joined Adelia and together they rode up the hill.

“You’ve a very nasty temper, you know,” said Henry Plantagenet. “You must learn to control it.”

Adelia was wondering what would become of her reputation in the royal household. “Yes, my lord. I’m sorry, my lord.”

“I hear Lady Wolvercote won her Morte d’Ancestor.”

“But has lost the house.” She told him of the dowager’s revenge.

“Ah,” the king said. He cheered up. “Well, more work for the law courts. Now then, where’s this cave?”

Adelia had some trouble finding it again. With Eustace gone to his grave and with the tithing rebuilding their lives, there was no sign of its occupancy; up here, one bushy outcrop with a spring looked like another. After a couple of false casts, however, she dismounted to pull aside the fronds that hid the entrance and the man who’d been waiting for them.

“Good day, Mansur,” Henry said.

“Good day, my lord.”

Inside, the elfin cave worked its magic and nobody spoke.

Looking around, the king crossed himself and climbed through the hole in the back wall that Mansur had made. After a while, Adelia joined him.

One king was kneeling in prayer by the prone skeleton of another. Green light coming through the split in the rock above shone on them both and the untroubled pool at their feet.

Adelia looked at the living man with tears in her eyes.

Will you, too, become a legend? No, the Church will see to that. Future generations living under the legacy you’ve given them will remember you only for the murder of Becket.

Eventually, Henry II stood up and cleared his throat as if he, too, had been crying. The sound echoed. “He’s not very big, is he?”

“He was a Celt, I suppose,” Adelia said. “One of the short, dark ones.”

“A warrior, though. Look at those wounds. At peace now, God rest him.”

“Yes.” But crowding into her mind came visions of the thousands of pilgrims, as they would come crowding into this cave in real life, of the tawdry relic stalls that would be set up outside alongside the money changers, those descendants of rapacious men whom Jesus had once turned out of Jerusalem’s Temple.

Henry sighed. “Requiscat in pace, Arturus.” He turned and clambered back through the hole.

Outside the cave, he reached for the reins of the horses drinking at the spring, then let them drop. He looked down, toward Glastonbury “You know,” he said, reflectively, “the Welsh aren’t being as obstreperous as they were, the bastards. They’re finding my laws have some advantages.”

“Are they?”

“Yes, they are.”

He took up the reins and dropped them once more. “And that one in there”-he nodded toward the cave-“he’s practically a dwarf. People’ll expect a giant; they’ll be disappointed.”

Adelia’s heart skipped a beat.

The King of England gave another sigh. “Mansur?”

“My lord?”

“Wall him up again; let him sleep on.”

“Wait.” Adelia went back into the cave and through the hole and retrieved the sword from the pool to which Mansur had returned it. Coming out again into the light, the weapon dazzled like a sunburst. She laid it across her palms and knelt. “My lord, here is Excalibur. It belongs to the greatest heart of the age, which makes it yours. You are the Once and Future King.”

The two of them walked their horses back down the hill, chatting.

From where he lay under the shadow of a juniper bush, a man known as Scarry watched them go. At least, he didn’t watch the king, because he didn’t know it was the king. He watched Adelia, and his eyes were those of a stoat waiting to kill-a stoat that spoke Latin.

I HAVE SET the story of the “finding” of Arthur and Guinevere’s grave at Glastonbury fourteen years earlier than the chroniclers who tell us it happened in 1190, but there is good reason to believe it wasn’t as late as they say, because the Glastonbury monks also “found” Excalibur-it was known as Caliburn then, but I’ve used the now-familiar name-and the sword was undoubtedly in the possession of Henry II before his death, which was in 1189.

Eventually, Henry sent Excalibur as a present to his friend and future son-in-law, the King of Sicily. When I asked John Julius Norwich, that fine historian of Norman Sicily, if he knew what happened to it after that, he said he didn’t. But, he told me, it is interesting that there is a strong tradition of the Arthurian legend in the area of Mount Etna.

Nobody knows what Excalibur looked like, of course, and my re-creation of it is based on the wisdom and writings of an old and dear friend, the late Ewart Oakeshott, who has been acknowledged on both sides of the Atlantic as the great authority on medieval weaponry.

That a sword from the age attributed to Arthur (circa the mid-sixth century) and earlier could survive intact is due to the fact that thousands of them have been preserved in peat bogs or river bottoms where they have been recovered. To quote Mr. Oakeshott’s Records of the Medieval Sword (The Boydell Press, 1991), “A sword falling into deep mud, free from stones or organic material that might trap oxygen or allow it to penetrate the close covering of mud, will initially become covered all over with a coating of rust, but as time passes the chemical interaction of this rust with the surrounding mud covers all the surface of the metal with a flint-hard coating of goethite which, once formed, prevents any further corrosion and so yields up to the archaeologist (or treasure hunter with his metal detector) a well-preserved weapon, sometimes in almost pristine condition. This coating or patina can be removed… by long and arduous work with abrasives.”

In the book, I have Roetger bringing definition back to Excalibur with a pickled preserve-not as mad as it sounds. Once, steering me round his private collection, Mr. Oakeshott showed me an incredibly ancient and marvelous sword dug up from a Kentish bog that he’d restored to a condition its Viking master would have recognized. He’d tried cleaning off its patina first with lemon, then with vinegar, to no avail. “Do you know what did it in the end?” he asked. “A bottle of Worcestershire sauce.” Which, as far as I’m concerned, pace its manufacturers, is runny preserves.

The Arthurian legend accreted stories over the centuries, which is why I have been scrupulous not to mention the Holy Grail or Lancelot and his affair with Guinevere-all later additions to the story.

Where I have used artistic license is in changing the date of the great fire that destroyed Glastonbury Abbey in 1184 to the time of my story-again, eight years earlier.

After the fire, appeals for funds were sent out and the monks of Glastonbury traveled Europe in a money-raising campaign-there’s nothing new under the sun, not even advertising.

Incidentally, since the pyramids between which “Arthur’s grave” was found no longer exist, I’ve taken their description from the writings of the twelfth-century annalist William of Malmesbury, who saw them when he visited Glastonbury.

And the skeletons of two babies were found in the monks’ graveyard. How they got there can only be speculation.

What does still exist is a tunnel leading from a cellar in Glastonbury’s fourteenth-century George and Pilgrim’s Hotel (I’ve put my twelfth-century Pilgrim’s Inn on the same site on the assumption that there was always a hostelry there) to somewhere in the abbey grounds-we don’t know exactly where, because it is blocked halfway through under the High Street and hasn’t been excavated.