Caradoc experienced anguish for the drowned people and animals, for the ruined hayricks, cornfields-it would be a hard summer for the survivors, and an even harder winter.

Yet holy Glastonbury still stood. Beautiful, beautiful it was, crystalline under the bright new moon reflected in its skirt of floodwater, an island of glass. The Island of Glass.

Sucking in breath that couldn’t fill his lungs, he turned his eyes to the graveyard awaiting him.

A flicker of movement caught his eye. Three cowled figures were pulling on ropes that dragged something up the slope from the abbey’s great gate. Too far away for him to hear any sound they made, they seemed like ghosts. And perhaps, Caradoc thought, that is what they are-for what human could be abroad and busy in this devastation when even the owls and nightingales were silent?

He couldn’t make out what it was they were hauling-it had the shape of a great log, or a canoe. Then, as the figures came to the fissure in the ground that the earthquake had opened, he saw what it was. A coffin.

They were lowering it into the fissure. Now they were kneeling, and from the throat of one of them came a great shriek. “Arthur, Arthur. May God have mercy on your soul and mine.”

There was a moan from the dying monk. “Is King Arthur dead, then?”

For Caradoc, though a Glastonbury monk these thirty years, had believed that King Arthur was merely resting, waiting, until he was called to rise and fight the devil’s hordes once more. And he rested here.

Avalon was Glastonbury, Glastonbury was Avalon, the Isle of Glass indeed, and Arthur slept somewhere among these hills, with their hidden caves and crystal springs. Arthur the brave, Arthur of the Welsh, who’d resisted the seaborne invaders and kept the flame of Christianity flickering in Britain during its Dark Ages.