At first light, when the green plover were crying over the downs, Randal got to his feet, cramped, cold and weary; and with Joyeuse still at heel, crept back to the Great Hall. The rest of the household were beginning to stir and must have noticed his absence, but they asked no questions. And now it was almost time to go and fetch Bevis from his vigil.
Randal and le Savage went together, the squire walking a little behind the knight.
The candles had guttered down to their prickets, and Bevis was kneeling exactly as they had last seen him. He did not move when they entered the church, indeed Randal did not think he even heard them. When le Savage stooped and touched his shoulder, he started, and looked up, blinking; then got slowly to his feet and stared about him, as though for the moment he was too dazed to be sure where he was. Then he saw Randal, and smiled ruefully and stooped and rubbed his knees.
They brought him up to the solar, with the first sunlight of a fine spring morning splashing through the tiny eastward-facing window, and stripped him naked, naked as the day he was born; they laid him on the sleeping bench, and piled the sheepskin rugs over him, carrying out the long, complicated ritual that went to the making of a knight; and all with scarcely a word between them, for it seemed one of those times when there is no use for words. A knight in the making was supposed to sleep before the next stage. Randal wondered if anyone ever managed it, unless from sheer exhaustion. Bevis lay still with his eyes closed, his breath just stirring the curly hairs of the fleece drawn to his chin. But Randal knew that he was only making the pretence of sleeping that custom demanded. Well, he would rest for a while, anyhow, after those long, cramped hours. Le Savage went down to the Great Hall where the morning meal of bread and perry would soon be on the tables; but Randal had no more wish for food than he had had last night. He set Bevis’s clothes and harness all in order to be put on again, then went and sat in the sunshine across the threshold of the open doorway, his back against the doorpost, his arms round his updrawn knees.
He heard a blackbird singing in the pear tree, and the deep, full-throated murmur of bees already busy in the fruit blossom, and little by little his head went down until his forehead was resting on his knees.
The next thing he knew was le Savage shaking his shoulder in kindly exasperation, and trumpeting into his ear. ‘Splendour of God! Is this the time to be sleeping and snoozing? How if de Broase comes, and our young knight not ready for him?’
Randal glanced at the sun and shook his head. ‘He’ll not be here yet. But it is time we started, all the same.’ He got up and crossed to the bed. Bevis’s eyes were open, looking up at him with a little smile. He flung off the heavy sheepskin and stretched his arms wide above his head in the way that he used to do on fine summer mornings when the two of them had slept out on the downs. His arms above the elbows were very white; all his body where the clothes covered it from the sun and wind was white as the flesh of a just-ripe hazelnut. He brought his hands down on Randal’s shoulders, laughing, and sprang up.
It took a good deal longer to arm him this time than it had done before, because of le Savage’s determined efforts to play his part, blundering about them like a good-natured bumble bee, mingling advice on the aims and behaviour proper to a knight, with hearty tugs on the wrong straps and laces at the wrong moment. They bore with him patiently, as though he were a well-meaning, very small child, but it was not easy. Presently Randal looked up from the sword belt. ‘Look, I’ve only slipped it through the buckle and under the loop, and not put the tang through. One pull, and it’s off.’
Le Savage snorted in approval. ‘Aye, aye, can’t spend half the day wrestling to get your sword belt off while the priest waits with his hands out, as I had to, I remember.’
While Bevis was being armed, they had heard the continual tramping of footsteps and the growing splurge of broad Sussex voices from below.
‘The whole Manor must be packed into the Hall by the sound of it,’ Randal said, standing up from his task. ‘And ’tisn’t only for free drink. I wonder if any of the old men among them are remembering that Sir Everard was an enemy overlord when they were young.’
Bevis looked at him as though it was a new idea. ‘I expect so,’ he said slowly, after a moment. ‘But maybe it’s only with their minds, not with their hearts. I hope it’s like that.’ He had begun to pace to and fro with that firm, slightly cumbered tread. He could not go down until de Braose came. He went and stared out of the window, leaning his mailed elbows on the sill.
‘If blossom is anything to go by, we should have a good crop of pears this year, and enough perry to make the whole Manor drunk at Christmas. I wish de Braose would come; my belly is full of foam.’
De Braose came at last, with a nearing tramp of hooves that swung into the garth and clattered to a halt before the door. They heard the trampling and snorting of horses, the ring of a sword chape on stone. Reynfrey’s voice sounded in greeting, and then de Braose’s level, rather harsh tones and the jingling tramp of mailed feet. In the solar the old knight and the young, unmade knight and the squire looked at each other. Time to go down.
The Hall was as full of Manor folk as it was at Christmas, when they entered it a few moments later, the ten men of the levy standing together in a knot as though they felt themselves already a little apart from the rest. Even Lewin Longshanks stood just within the doorway, leaning on his crook, huge and quiet as always, and seeming to dwarf the whole place. The Lord of Bramber stood on the slightly raised dais, three other grey-mailed Bramber knights with him, and Adam beside them in the old brown habit that even looked as though it smelled of mice.
There was a stir as they crossed the threshold and every face from de Braose’s to the boy who scared the crows turned towards them. Le Savage gave Bevis a small friendly push, and he walked forward alone as he had walked last night towards the Lord’s Table and the glimmering candles. It came to Randal, watching, that the business of being made a knight was one of the lonely things of life, like being born, or dying.
Bevis mounted the low steps of the dais; Randal saw him give a quick tug to his sword belt, and drew a breath of relief as it fell open in his hand. Bevis laid d’Aguillon’s great sword in little brown Adam’s hands, and knelt down to take his vows. Adam fumbled with the sword, blessing it, then set his free hand on Bevis’s bowed, dark head and bent over him a little. Bevis took his vows very quietly, so quietly that Randal could scarcely catch the words; it seemed as though he were making them to something deep within himself, and there was no need for anyone else to hear.
His vows taken, he rose, and knelt again, this time to de Braose, and set his joined hands between those of the Lord of Bramber. And this time the whole Hall heard him clearly enough, as he took the vassal’s oath to his feudal Lord.
‘Here, my Lord, I become liege man of yours for life and limb and earthly regard, and I will keep faith and loyalty to you for life and death; God helping me.’
He remained a moment kneeling at his Lord’s feet, then rose and turned to take his sword again from Adam. Le Savage stepped forward to belt it on him, and Randal, standing in the doorway, suffered a stab of jealousy. The old fool was fumbling and bumbling with the buckle. He felt Bevis’s exasperation as though it were his own and it was all he could do not to start forward and take the strap from the man’s fat fingers. But the thing must be done by a knight, and not a mere squire. It was done at last, and Bevis turned to kneel once again, with bowed head, before the Lord of Bramber; and while the whole Hall held its breath, de Braose leaned forward and gave him a blow with his mailed hand, between neck and shoulder.
‘Rise, Sir Bevis d’Aguillon.’
Bevis blundered to his feet a little blindly.
There was a long silence, while it seemed to Randal that the almost painful solemnity drained out of the air; and they heard, as he realized they must have been hearing it all along, the horses being walked up and down outside.
Bevis was looking round him as though in search of something
or somebody. His eyes lit on Randal by the door, and clearly he had found what he was looking for, and for the moment nobody else in the Great Hall, including de Braose, mattered in the least to either of them.
The Manor folk, his own folk, were thronging round d’Aguillon now, even up on to the dais with de Braose still standing there fiddling with his riding gloves. And as Randal with a sudden joyful sense of having found again something that he thought was lost thrust his way through at last to Bevis’s side, the Lord of Bramber brought his hand down once more on the shoulder of his newest knight, laughing. ‘Now what about the stirrup cup that you promised me two years since, Sir Bevis? One cup of wink to drink damnation to Robert of Normandy, and I must be away. The ships are ready and we sail on the fourth morning from now if the wind holds. Get your fellows down to Shoreham by the morn’s morning.’
15
The Wealden Blackbird
IT WAS STRANGE, but in after years that summer of his first campaign which should have been vivid in his mind with the sharp-edged vividness that belongs to all First Times, never stood out much in Randal’s memory. It was as though all the time something within him knew that next summer, not this, was to be the one that mattered.
The day after Bevis was made a knight, they marched out with their ten archers down the marshy river valley through the downs to Shoreham, where the horse transports were waiting. They embarked with the rest of de Braose’s following, and sailed on an oyster-pale morning tide. They joined a great and ever-growing fleet at sea, and glimpsed among them a vessel flying a pennant like a licking gold flame, which someone said was the King’s. Most of them, Randal included, and all the horses, were miserably seasick. And then there was Normandy, dusty already in a dry spring. Henry landed at Barfleur in the Cotentin; his old Lordship called in his vassals and the allies – Flanders, Main, Anjou and Brittany – that he had been making for a year and more past, and marched on Bayeux. So Bevis and Randal went into their first battle together, after all. And through that early summer, with the last apple blossom falling and the fruit setting in the Normandy orchards, at Bayeux and Caen and on the rough march to Falaise, Randal gained the experience of a shield-squire, riding into action behind his knight; always a line of squires behind the knights, each to second his own lord in every way, help him if he were thrown, carry his spare lance, receive his prisoners, and in between whiles, maybe strike a blow or two on his own account. Randal came to know the sights and sounds and smells of battle, the dust kicked up by the horses, the rank smell of sweat and the sharp smell of blood, the flying thunder of hooves and the tempest-roar of shouting and the weapon-ring; the vicious sound that an arrow makes, passing within a hand’s span of your ear.
When the English army returned home soon after harvest, he had seen his full share of fighting, and had the fading scar of a sword-cut on his forearm to compare with Reynfrey’s; but still, none of it seemed very important. They came home with nine of the ten men they had marched out with, leaving Alfwine the ploughman dead before Caen, and the wailing of Alfwine’s widow remained ever after the thing that Randal remembered most sharply about that summer’s campaigning.
The whole campaign had left nothing settled either way. And next summer it would be all to do again. Henry would not leave matters as they stood; he could not. It must be a fight to the finish between Brother Henry and Brother Robert, now. And according to whichever of them went down, so would Normandy be master of England, or England master of Normandy.
The Manor grumbled when the preparations for war began again, as every Manor in the Kingdom was grumbling, and always had grumbled at such times. ‘Ten men short, we were, last harvest and seemingly we’ll be getting this one in ten short again – na, eleven, counting Alfwine . . . If our Norman over-lords want fighting, let ’em have it to themselves, wi’out troubling the poor folk . . .’
Bevis, hearing two of them in this strain, told them with a flash of angry impatience, ‘If you had not all talked like that when your Harold, that you sing so much about, called you to arms forty years ago, maybe you’d not have had us Normans with our wars to trouble you now!’
The villeins withdrew into silence. More than anything else, they were shaken by Bevis having spoken of ‘us Normans’ when it had been ‘us English’ with him all his life, as with their old Lord, and on one Manor at least, the grumbling ended.
The swallows were late that year, but they came at last to nest again in the great barn. The May Fire blazed on the crest of the Bramble Hill, and in the midst of making ready for war, it was time for sheep shearing. And then there came a day in early June that was the last day before they marched again to join the King’s army. Bevis and Randal were both of them far more sharply aware of tomorrow’s march than they had been the year before, maybe because then there had been Bevis’s knighthood to think about as well. But they did not speak of it much to each other until darkness came, and they went out together as they always did, escorted by Joyeuse who had long since made it clear to the other hounds that it was her place and hers alone to go with her Lord on his evening round, for a last look at the horses before they slept. It had been raining off and on all day, a soft growing-rain that whispered through the river woods and dripped from the Hall thatch, but it had passed now, and the deep, still darkness was breathing with the scents of wet, refreshed earth; and as they came out from the stables, Bevis checked a moment, sniffing his head up like a hound’s, and said, as he had done so often when they were boys, ‘Come away, Randal; there’ll be a moon later, and we can’t waste tonight snoring in the rushes.’
They did not. Part of that night they spent with Lewin Longshanks up at the summer sheep fold. Later, moving on again, they made a wide cast over the downs that brought them at last valleyward again by the bluff, out-thrust shoulder of the Bramble Hill. The smell of the summer dawn was already in the air, but the moon that had risen now swung high over the downs in a glimmering harebell sky, and the world was bathed in a light that seemed tangible as silver water, so that Randal felt suddenly that if he held out his cupped hands he would feel it trickling between his fingers. Joyeuse, loping ahead of the two young men, and looking round from time to time to see that they were following, was silver too, with no hint of her daytime gold; a silver hound running through a silver night, like some great feather-heeled hunting dog of the Fairy People.
As they came down to the Bramble Hill, the valley began to open to them, and they checked, looking out and down over marsh and woodland and strip-patterned field, to where the Hall trailed its straggle of village down the side coomb, all lying asleep in the remoteness of the moonlight. No, not all asleep, for as they looked, from somewhere at the foot of the village, a flicker of warm yellow light blinked out, telling of a kindled lantern.
‘Someone is early astir,’ Bevis said.
‘Looks like Gudram’s cottage; he’ll be making ready to do you credit on the march – never one for a last-moment flurry, our Gudram.’
‘They’re good lads to lead, even if they do grumble,’ Bevis said, his pride in them lit with laughter.
‘We English always grumble,’ Randal said, still looking down through the elder scrub towards the tiny blink of gorse-yellow light. ‘We always grumbled and we always will.’
They moved on again, the old companionable silence falling between them once more. But after a while Bevis said, as though he had been following a train of thought, ‘We English . . . Randal, do you remember grandfather saying that one day there would be no more Norman or Saxon, but only English? If this summer brings us victory in Normandy – one great victory gained by Norman and Saxon English fighting side by side – I think it will do more than all else could do to hammer us into one folk.’ Another long silence, and then, thoughtfully. ‘That would be an odd kind of revenge for Senlac!’
The scar of the May Day Fire still showed black on the turf, and at their right hand the great barrow rose, still under the rustling of the night wind through its elder bushes, with the stran
ge potent quality of stillness that it always had – as though it shared in the stillness of the name-forgotten king who slept in the dark heart of it with his wrought gold and his weapons about him.
As Bevis and Randal, touched by its stillness as though it were a great wing that brushed over them, walked slower, and stopped, out of the darkness of the river woods below them rose one clear, perfect note of birdsong, long drawn and insistent, repeated again and again, then breaking into a shining spray of notes, a cascade of runs and phrases that seemed to shimmer on the ear. It was a song that the two young men standing up there among the bramble domes had heard often enough before; but surely it had never sounded quite like this, so that it was one with the white flood of moonlight and the smell of the elder flowers.
‘Oh, listen!’ Randal whispered, stupidly, for the whole night was already holding its breath to listen. ‘Listen, Bevis, it’s the nightingale.’
Bevis stood as though he were rooted, like the brambles and the elder scrub, into the hill beneath his feet. His head was up, his gaze not turned down to the dark woods below from which came the song but going out up the curving length of the dearly familiar valley to the long, low huddle of the Hall that he had been born in, under the steep stride of Long Down, and the Manor Mill by the ford. His thin face was remote and far off, as Randal glanced aside at him, as though he were hearing something else, something that was beyond the singing. In a little, he shook his head. ‘It’s a song spun from the moonlight. But if it were me up here in the hollow hill, and I were to wake tonight, it would not be the nightingale but the speckle-breasted thrush or our Wealden blackbird I’d be listening for, to tell me I was home again.’
Joyeuse, who had been rooting under an elder bush, came padding back to lay a rolled-up hedgehog at his feet. She was the only dog Randal had ever known who would carry a hedgehog without tearing her soft mouth to shreds. And Bevis stooped to fondle her head as she thrust against him. ‘Nay, now, leave poor Tiggy be; what harm has he ever done you? But thanks for the parting gift, all the same.’ He straightened up with a little shake of his shoulders and looked about him. ‘It’s been a good night, this one; the kind of night that is good to remember. But we must be getting back now, or we’ll be all unready when the time comes for the march.’