Free Grave Goods by Ariana Franklin

with some truth.
    Prior Geoffrey, on the other hand, loathed the book and departed from his usual respect for the dead by heaping opprobrium on the late Geoffrey of Monmouth. “Called himself a historian?” he would say. “The man had no more idea of history than a carrot. He made it up.”
    It infuriated the good prior that some, especially the females, among his flock paid more attention to Geoffrey’s
History
than to the Bible.
    “Oh, yes, they remember the story of Arthur killing some giant who’d been slaking his lust on a fainting maiden, but quiz them on what the Parable of the Sower is about and they can’t answer. Giants, I
ask
you. Geoffrey of Monmouth a great historian? Great liar, more like.”
    Yet here, Adelia thought, was Henry Plantagenet, most rational of men, giving credence to fairy stories and visions.
    He had to have an ulterior motive.
    Waiting to discover what it was, she was taken by the arm andled to the window so that she could look across the pleasant, though sadly churned up, valley of the River Usk.
    “Looks quiet, doesn’t it?” the king said. “But two days ago I had to carve my way through besieging Welsh lines a hundred thick to relieve young Geoffrey. And do you know whose name the bastards were shouting as we struck them down?”
    “King Arthur’s?”
    Henry nodded. “Arthur’s. The Welsh are supposed to be a Christian race, but their pagan little minds hold Arthur as a more immediate Messiah than Jesus, God rot them. They claim him as their own. He’s the one who will rescue them from what they see as the Norman yoke. And I’m not a Norman yoke, Adelia. For one thing, I’m an Angevin, and for another, I’m a bloody good peace-bringing, justice-giving king, if they’d only realize it.”
    She nodded. For all Henry’s sins, that was what he was.
    He turned away from her in order to look over his scribe’s writing and point out a correction. “Four 1’s in Llewellyn, Robert.”
    Then, as if in disgust with himself for doing it, he shook his fists in the direction of the ceiling. “Why do I have to bother with spelling their damn names, eh? I’ve more important things to do. I’ve got trouble in Aquitaine, Louis of France is being his usual pain in the arse, the sodding Scots need driving back over the border… and where am I? Stuck in a bloody bog, trying to stop rebellion spreading through the entire Welsh nation.” He struck the table, making the scribe’s inkwell jump and spill. “I haven’t got
time
to put out every little fire the belief in a living Arthur lights among the Celts.
Which it does.”
He glared at Adelia as if she’d refute it. “The bloody Bretons are already threatening revolt. It’ll be the sodding Cornish next. Damn all Celts.”
    “Ah,” Adelia said. Light had dawned, hence the coffin at Glastonbury. “You need Arthur to be dead.”
    “Exactly.” Henry’s anger left him and he became persuasive. “And that’s where you come in. You’re my clever little mistress in the art of death. Prove those bones are King Arthur’s beyond resurrection and I’ll double what I pay you.”
    “You don’t pay me,” Adelia said wearily.
    “Don’t I? Are you sure? Well, this time you’ll have a warrant enabling you and your company to receive every assistance and sustenance for as long as you require—expenses to be sent to the Exchequer.”
    As Adelia opened her mouth, the king’s forefinger wagged it shut. “Yes, I know,” he said. “Nobody’s going to accept the findings of a woman, but I’ve seen to it. Glastonbury’s been told that I’m sending them an expert in skeletons, my own Lord Mansur”—Henry bowed to the tall Arab, who salaamed back—“to authenticate the bones of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, if indeed those are what they are. The monks won’t like having a Saracen and a female on their sacred ground, but they can damn well put up with it.
And
I’ve sent ahead to the best inn in Glastonbury to accommodate