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offering our authentications and testaments. This grand fraud here in Glastonbury was to be our swan song, after which we would disband and go our separate ways, once the abbey’s bursar had divided up the spoils with us.
    At least, that was the plan …
    During the sermons, one of the fettered mad folk started to cry out like a squallyass and had to be removed next door, into the patched-up ruins of the nave. The prior, sensing he was losing his audience, declared: “
Miraculum magna videbis!
” “Now miracles will be seen!”
    The relics were announced: from Saint Aidan and the Lindisfarne saints, Saint Indracht and Saint Beonna, Saint Patrick of Ireland … the list went on and on. We’d been told at dinner the previous night that before the canonization of Thomas à Becket, Glastonbury was the richest in relics, with twenty-two entire saints (well, almost entire—a half of Saint Aidan was claimed by the monks of Iona, and another bit was in Durham, but almost half of such a powerful saint was better than a whole minor martyr), and so its coffers used to overflow. But following the rise of the cult of Saint Thomas, and the great fire, Glastonbury’s fortunes had been on the wane. And you could see how the congregation hung back, dissatisfied with the array of worn-down saints, waiting as the reliquaries were disposed about the chapel under the watchful eye of the warden. Pilgrims had been known to try to steal a souvenir here and there; one man got caught with a mouthful of Saint Beonna after bending to kiss the bones.
    Finally, out came the ornamented box that our clever carpenters, Hammer and Saw, had made. Amazing that tin, shined up right, could look so much like silver.
    The canons opened the reliquary so that the pilgrims could view the bones of Arthur’s strong right arm. All round the Lady Chapel there was a great intake of breath. Rumours of the cures the hero-king had brought about, all the way from Cornwall to the Somerset moors, had been reaching them for weeks. At Newton St. Cyres a dead boy who had fallen down a well was restored to life. In Ottery St. Mary a pox-struck woman was instantly cured. In Chard a deaf man was suddenly granted the gift of angel-song. In Charlton Mackrell all manner of ailments had been cured by the drinking of water that was run over the bones. Agues and poxes, quinsy and falling sickness: all banished by the king’s sword-arm.
    And so here they were, the hopeless and helpless: those for whom doctors had achieved nothing but a miraculous lightening of the wallet; those who had tried remedies, from boiled snails to dog spit and everything in between; who’d been bled and leeched and covered in foul-smelling poultices; who’d prayed to all the saints for babies, for straight limbs, a stiff prick or a cure for baldness, all to no avail. Now it was down to King Arthur.
    The pilgrims poured forward. Squabbles broke out. The Moor made a signal, and a twisted little man who had been pushing himself around on a wheeled trestle with hands shod in wooden pattens suddenly untwisted his distorted limbs, got up from his handcart on legs that now appeared sound and walked into the crowd. People touched him for luck, the next best thing to the holy bones being someone in whom the mana ran strong.
    A man blind from birth, as he had sworn in the catalogue of penitents, stared about with an idiotic grin. “Ah, the colours! The colours hurt my eyes! Praise the Lord! Crimson and gold, azureand green. Are those trees that grow out of the pillars, or have the stones come to life before my new eyes?”
    Don’t overegg the pudding, Will
, I thought.
    A possessed man came to his senses and started to sing the
Te Deum
.
    A leper peeled foul sores from his arm, revealing unmarked skin beneath.
    All was going beautifully, the merchants and nobles pressing ever greater oblations upon the overwhelmed church officers. The money was pouring in. A commotion behind me caused me to turn, to find