It had been autumn out in the woods, but it seemed full winter now, and they put up the shutters and huddled close about the hearth, stretching out their feet among the dogs who lay blinking at the flames. Often after supper Sir Everard played chess with the boys, as part of their education, or sometimes Adam read to them from his treasured Lives of the Saints. But tonight they had a guest, and instead of chess or reading, they turned to him for news of the outside world.
And so, sitting with his back propped against the blackened kingpost of the Hall, his face with its pale, brilliant eyes now lit, now lost, in the flare and the fall of the firelight, Sir Thiebaut talked. He talked well and interestingly, telling them the latest news of the Crusade that was now sweeping to the very gates of Jerusalem, speaking the great names, of Duke Robert himself, of Raymond of Toulouse and the bold Tancred, talking of the sieges of Nicaea and Antioch, the battle of Dorylaeum (the names sang themselves like a charm, like the runes on a Norseman’s sword). And all the while Randal, heel-squatting against Luath’s warm, rough flank, watched his face in the red light of the fire; that queer half-memory still teasing and tugging at him with the certainty that somewhere he had known Sir Thiebaut de Coucy before.
He talked of London too, of the splendours that were to be found there, a little condescending in his manner, while the Sussex draughts set the rushes eddying on the floor and blew the acrid smoke into one’s eyes.
‘If Saxon Harold could rise from his grave now, my Faith! His one eye would start clean from his head to see the change that Norman power and skill has wrought in London.’
Randal, still watching the man’s face, felt the Saxon half of him stiffen, the hair rise a little on his neck like a hound’s when it is angry. One did not speak so of Harold Godwinson here in this corner of Sussex where so many of the Manors had been his own. And Sir Everard seemed to feel the same, for as though to cover the other man’s slip of courtesy that had set the house churls bristling, he said quickly, ‘Doubtless London is a fine city, these days. To us, with all Andred’s Weald between, it seems like a city of another world. But even here in our remoteness, we hear things from time to time. Is it true that they have built a stone bridge across the Thames?’
‘Aye. That is Ranulf Flambard’s handiwork. These two years past he has been raising for our Red William such a city as no King in Christendom can better.’ He laughed at the back of his high-bridged nose. ‘Indeed, ’tis so that I am in these parts – on Flambard’s behalf, to beat up your Sussex Barons into providing me more drafts of craftsmen to work your Sussex oak for the roof of the great new Hall at Westminster . . . Say now, have you any skilled woodwrights or trained dressers of stone on the Manor?’
Sir Everard’s stern gash of a mouth quirked a little at the corners. ‘Edda who can build and patch a flint wall, and Wilfram who can make a wagon wheel with any man in Sussex, but not such, I think, as would serve to work the roof of the King’s Hall. Why do you need more workmen suddenly at this stage of the work?’
‘To hurry it to its finish. You will have heard the rumour that the King comes again in the spring? Red William has as good as finished his campaigning in the Norman Marches; and what is there, once Normandy is safe, but to return to England? Aye, and once returned, there are those who prophesy that he is to be crowned again – and where but in his own new Hall? That would mean a bishopric for Ranulf Flambard, and Ranulf Flambard knows it.’
‘But why crowned again?’ Sir Everard said. ‘Once knighted, one does not kneel a second time for the accolade.’
The stranger shrugged. ‘He has been crowned before, yes; with the crown of England alone; but see you, now he has made all again as it was in his father’s day, he is King of England and Count of Maine and Duke of Normandy.’
‘Only Duke of Normandy until Robert rides home from his Crusade.’
‘Why as to that, there may be two thoughts concerning the matter: Brother Robert’s and Brother William’s.’
The two men looked at each other in silence, and then, as though to change the subject, Sir Thiebaut glanced about him at the faces in the firelight, and said in a tone of faint amusement, ‘You have a strangely shrinking household, Sir Everard. Surely there are fewer of us round the fire than rose from supper a while since.’
For a moment nobody answered. Randal thought of the brushwood pile that he and Bevis had seen on the Bramble Hill. For some while past he had been aware of one after another of the household folk rising and melting away after Ancret into the darkness, and he was sure that Sir Thiebaut had been aware of it too.
Adam Clerk broke the silence, twisting his thin hands together in deep distress. ‘I do try – I do most humbly and truly try to bring them with a whole heart to Christ, but they come to Mass on Sundays and Saints’ Days, and turn at all other times to their Horned God, no matter how hard I strive to make them see that he is the Devil. And Ancret is the worst of them, for all that she gives the wax from her bees to make candles for our little church. It is my fault – I am sure that it is my fault – but really I do not see what more I –’ His eye fell on Bevis raking in the hot ash with his dagger, and he shook his head. ‘Even the boys burn nuts in the fire to read their futures when they should be thinking, on this night of all the year, of their immortal souls!’
‘So?’ The amusement deepened in Sir Thiebaut’s silken voice. ‘I had thought it might be that. Do you dance round a sacred thorn tree? Or is it a Fire Festival, hereabouts?’
Sir Everard rose, touched the little clerk’s drooping shoulder kindly in passing, and turned to the lower end of the Hall. ‘Come to the door and see what we do hereabouts.’
Bevis and Randal had risen too, the hounds all about them, and slipped ahead to raise the heavy doorpin and have the door open for the Lord of Dean and his guest; and a few moments later they were all outside in the darkness of the foreporch. It was very cold, with the tang of frost sharp in the air, and a little mean wind that had risen with the coming of dusk; and below in the darkness of the river woods the owls were crying. Southward, upward of two miles away, the Bramble Hill rose blackly against the crackling brightness of the stars; blackly, but wearing a feathered crest of fire. And even as they watched, flecks of light brilliantly and deeply coloured as the heart of the red amber seemed to break off from the main brightness and go circling and swooping about the dark shoulders of the Hill.
The Sun Dance had begun.
Randal was standing very close to Sir Thiebaut, and as the man moved, huddling his cloak around him, it seemed to the boy that a faint, sweet, animal scent stole out from under the dark folds. It was very faint, the merest ghost of a perfume put on days ago. The warmth of the hearth fire must have woken it, but in the Hall it had been masked by the stinging tang of woodsmoke that blunted one’s nose. There was no woodsmoke out here, and instantly Randal knew it for what it was, the animal sweetness of musk.
Even as he realised it, Sir Thiebaut spoke again. ‘So – a Fire Festival indeed! Doubtless the sun will be greatly encouraged to return in the spring, thereby.’
And now that it had no face to it, now that Randal was standing in the dark with the scent of musk in his nostrils, the voice did the rest; a smooth voice with a trace of a lisp, so smooth that there was about it an odd suggestion of hairlessness. The voice that he had heard on the water stair at Arundel, four years ago!
His heart began to race, and the scent of musk suddenly made him want to retch. He pressed back against the doorpost behind him, telling himself that it didn’t matter now, it couldn’t matter. The plot to kill the King and set his cousin in his place was three years dead, and though, seemingly, this man had been one of the lucky few to slip through the net afterwards, his being here could not matter now, could not possibly bring any harm to Dean. His sense was telling him all that, desperately, over and over again, but far down below the level of sense, he was struggling like a fly in a spider’s web, caught in horrible dark, sticky strands that reached out to him from the old life behind
him, struggling but unable to get free. It only lasted a moment; then he took a deep breath and told himself not to be a fool, and straightened from the doorpost.
Sir Thiebaut must have asked some question while he was not listening, maybe something about the Hill itself, for Sir Everard was saying, ‘It has been in some sort a sacred hill, and the Manor has made its fires there since before the memory of the oldest man in the valley and his grandfather before him. There’s a legend of a king buried in the green howe up there, with all his treasure about him, and whether that was aught to do with the thing, I would not be knowing, I who am mere Norman. I doubt if they know themselves.’
De Coucy made a small, abrupt movement, and the smoothness of his voice sharpened a little, as he took up the one word that really interested him. ‘Treasure! It would be gold, think you?’
‘Gold, I imagine, and fine weapons which have ever been the treasure of the fighting man – if indeed it be not merely the gold of legend.’
‘But do you tell me that you have never taken measures to find out?’
‘I have never felt the smallest desire to find out,’ Sir Everard said simply.
‘Ah, you are wasted on this greedy world. You should be in Steyning Priory,’ said the smooth, faintly-amused voice. ‘Faith! If it were on my land I’d have every villein on the place to work, and the whole barrow laid open to the sky.’
‘It would have gone hard with our fields the while. Besides, if men that we have forgotten laid a king’s treasure there with their dead King, it was not done that men of a later year might dig it out and put it to their own uses. If it is only the gold of legend, then ’twould be a pity to rob it of its shining.’
‘Such niceties are beyond me,’ Sir Thiebaut said impatiently, then deliberately lightened his tone, and shrugged, half laughing, and shivered. ‘But to each man his own affairs . . . It is cold out here, my friend. In Heaven’s name let us go back to the most pleasant warmth of your fire.’
Randal took his chance as the others turned back to the firelight, and slipped out into the night, and round the end of the Hall towards the stables. His heart was still beating uncomfortably fast, and the palms of his hands were sticky despite the cold, and he knew that he was running away from something; but he always ran away from things.
Bevis found him squatting in the dark, safe shadows of Swallow’s stall a while later, and demanded with worried exasperation, ‘Randal, what is amiss with you tonight?’
Randal shook his head. He had never kept anything from Bevis except this one thing. But if he told him about Sir Thiebaut he might feel that he must tell Sir Everard, and Sir Everard might feel it his duty to tell de Braose, and who knew where the thing might end. He was afraid, desperately afraid of what might happen if the old evil were woken up and dragged into the daylight.
‘I felt sick,’ he said. ‘I ate too much eel pie for supper, and I felt sick.’
And that was a kind of running away, too.
9
The Hawking Party
SIR THIEBAUT RODE off next morning, leaving behind him a feeling like an evil taste lingering in the mouth. But little by little the day-to-day life of the Manor closed over the whole incident, and at last even Randal almost forgot about him.
The King returned in the spring, and at Whitsun he was crowned a second time. Crowned in his great new Hall at Westminster, under the roof of Sussex oak. And Ranulf Flambard duly received the Bishopric of Durham. ‘King of England, Duke of Normandy and Count of Maine’ ran the Red King’s titles. But with the first autumn gales came the news that Brother Robert was on his way home from Jerusalem.
Christmas came, and then it was New Year; a new year and a new century.
‘An old world has passed and a new world stepped into its place in the last hundred years,’ Sir Everard said to Bevis and Randal as they walked back from Midnight Mass in the tiny, flint-walled church, ice crackling in the ruts underfoot, and checked to watch the winter fires of Orion swing low above the Bramble Hill. ‘And what this new, untouched century holds for men, God, He knows. But I think that before it is half spent, there will be no more talk of Saxon and Norman, but only of English. I shall not see that, my children, but you may – you may.’
‘You – don’t think the world is going to end this year, as they say?’ Bevis said, as though the words stuck a little in his throat. So many people believed that, but somehow it had not seemed so near until the New Year was actually upon them.
‘No,’ Sir Everard said simply. ‘I do not. It seems to me that so many things are beginning now, and I cannot believe that God would let them spring, only to cut them down before they come to flower.’
At the end of January Sir Everard received the usual yearly summons to Bramber. In the earlier years, before Bevis was a squire, he had gone unattended on his month’s knight’s service, and then last year he had taken Bevis. And now Randal, miserably grooming Valiant until the old war-horse’s flanks shone like copper, was facing the prospect of being left behind alone once more.
‘Next year you will be a squire, and then you’ll be coming too,’ Bevis said wretchedly. He was more wretched about it even than Randal. And Randal nodded, and went on grooming Valiant’s tail, and said, ‘I shall have a fine time while you are away. I shall help Lewin with the lambing.’
But they both knew that next year would not be quite the same. For one thing, old de Braose’s son was being married this February, and though the wedding would of course be at the bride’s home, he would be bringing her back to Bramber, and there would be feasting and revelry, harpers and jugglers and merchants from foreign parts, hunting and hawking, and Randal would have loved the clash and colour and swarming life of it all. For another, at the back of everyone’s mind there was the thought, whether one believed it or not, that the world might indeed be coming to an end this year. That there might never be another February to be a squire and ride to Bramber behind Sir Everard.
Bevis said suddenly, as though he was thinking the same things, ‘I could not bear it to happen before grandfather makes you a squire.’
The two boys looked at each other across Valiant’s hind quarters. Randal didn’t think he could bear it either. ‘I don’t believe the world is coming to an end, not really,’ he said. ‘I’m sure Lewin doesn’t, or he would not have planted that new elder sapling in the sheep fold for sheep-medicine. No, I’ll get to be a squire, sure enough, and then – you’ll be a knight.’
There was a little silence while they both thought about that. And then, propping his shoulder against the side of the stall, Bevis said, ‘Randal – if you were to get your chance of knighthood too – say that one day we were to fight Duke Robert, and before the battle de Braose thought to make some more knights, and he sent for you and said, “Randal of Dean, I would that you receive knighthood of me this morning,” what would you do?’
‘Refuse,’ Randal said simply. ‘I have no land. I couldn’t furnish my helm.’
‘Not every knight holds land.’
Randal did not answer at once. He had turned his head, the harsh liveness of Valiant’s tail still under his hand, and was looking out through the stable door, across the garth where the hens were scratching after dropped corn, to the familiar tawny lift of the downs beyond the still bare branches of the pear tree by the gate, and suddenly he was wondering what it would be like to hold Dean. He had never, after the first baffled and rebellious days when he stole the red amber, envied Bevis his foster-brother for the things he had, only for the things he was; he envied him for being the sort of person who did not run away from things, but not because his grandfather was d’Aguillon of Dean. He did not envy him that, now, only he wondered for the moment what it would be like.
‘A landless knight is no better than a man-at-arms,’ he said at last. ‘I should not mind being an ordinary man-at-arms like my father, but I should hate to be a man-at-arms wearing a knight’s sword, having to sell it to whoever would feed me, maybe even my helmet my Lord’s property
and not my own; sitting in my Lord’s Hall, looking for insults from the very dogs, and seeing them everywhere.’
It was Bevis’s turn to be slow in answering, while Randal finished his task and put away the brushes and currycomb, and all the while outside they heard a green woodpecker laughing his first derisive laughter of the year. Then he said, standing away from the side of the stall, ‘I’m rising two years older than you, but sometimes you make me feel like a babe in swaddling bands, Randal.’
‘You haven’t run with the hounds in Arundel bailey with your eyes and ears open,’ Randal said. And then as though in some way their positions were reversed, and he was trying to comfort the other boy, ‘I don’t at all mind that I shall never be more than a squire, you know – so long as I’m your squire, that is.’ Something swole up in his throat and made him sound gruff, although his voice had only just finished breaking. ‘I shall like being your squire – and I’ll be the truest squire to you that ever knight had to carry his shield for him.’
And then that evening when they were both at work in the solar, burnishing Sir Everard’s ring-mail hauberk – it was always bright as a salmon skin, but they could not risk a speck of rust now – the old knight’s tall shadow fell upon them from the doorway.
‘Let me look,’ he said, bending down to watch them with the silver sand. ‘Sa, sa, the work is well done. But it is work for a squire. Why do you make Randal do half your work for you, Bevis?’