But Sybilla caught them just as they were letting themselves into the storeroom under the solar, where, among all the other things, the clothes kists lived, threw up her fat hands in horror and also decreed clean tunics and washing, but not in the stream and not without fuss.
Sybilla oversaw the household and the cooking, and Bevis and his clothes so far as he allowed anybody to do that. Now she shooed the boys into the storeroom as though they were chickens and dared them to disappear again while she fetched the water that she had been heating for kale broth over the Hall fire. And they stood in the middle of the beaten earth floor, not daring to move for fear of where their drips might go, exchanging rather hesitant grins and rubbing one foot over the other, until she came back, lumbering from leg to leg and panting as she always did, for she was very fat.
‘Ah, now, I did think at least you’d have had the sense to take off those sopping rags while I was away!’ she scolded, setting down the great crock. ‘Dear o’ me! However am I to get these stains out? And me with my hands full enough already and naught but those lazy sluts to help me –’
It was when they were stripped that Bevis, standing a little behind the other boy, said suddenly, in a tone sharply drained of all laughter, ‘Randal – let’s look at your back.’
It was the first time that he had seen Randal stripped, for they slept in their shirts, and it was too late in the year for river bathing except when one was really uncomfortably dirty.
‘Why – what is amiss with it?’ Randal asked in a small, guarded voice.
‘It’s all stripy. Did they – beat you a lot at Arundel?’
‘Lovel beat me sometimes, like the other hounds.’ Randal screwed his head over his shoulder in an attempt to see his own back. He had not been beaten since Herluin won him from Hugh Goch, and that was more than two months ago now. ‘Does it still show, then?’
‘Didn’t I say? It’s all stripy.’ Bevis sounded almost angry. And then in quite a different tone, thoughtful and a little wondering, ‘I never saw anybody with their backs all stripy before . . . Yes I know, Sybilla, I’m coming.’
Sybilla clucked and scolded all through scrubbing them, and seeing them into fresh shirts and clean woollen tunics smelling of the herbs they were stored with to keep out the moths, then threw the dirty water out of the door, where it deluged a flurry of indignant hens; and finally surged away, leaving them to follow or not as they chose. There was no question of locking up, too many people had things in the storeroom that they might need to get at, and the door was not secured in any way save by a stout pin to keep out the hounds; things such as war bows that had to be kept close were locked in the great armoury kists against the wall.
Randal was hitching at his tunic, pulling it up through his belt in the Saxon way; it was Bevis’s and too big for him, but he had not a second tunic of his own until Sybilla or one of the other women found time to make him one.
‘Bide a moment,’ Bevis said, rooting in the little carved kist that held his clothes and belongings. ‘Something to show you.’ He straightened and turned round, holding whatever it was in his hand, gently and carefully, as though it were alive. ‘Look now.’
It was an irregular lump of something roughly the size and shape of two walnuts joined together, and of a dark, dusty greyish-reddish colour that looked as though there was some other colour underneath.
‘Take it in your hand,’ Bevis said.
Randal took the thing, puzzled; he had expected it to weight like a stone, but it weighed like a feather. ‘What is it?’
‘Red amber – a piece of very old red amber. A man called Laef Thorkelson who goes long voyages to the other end of the world gave it to me. It’s a sort of magic; when you warm it, a sweet smell comes out, and when you rub it very hard in your hands something wakes up in it that pulls things towards it – threads and flakes of chaff and things. There isn’t anything in here, but I’ll show you another time. Laef Thorkelson called it the Gold of the Sea.’
‘Gold?’ Randal said, still staring at the dark lump.
‘Hold it up and look at the light of the doorway through it.’
Randal, with a puzzled, half-frowning glance at the other boy, did as he was bid, and instantly caught his breath in wonder and delight, the same delight that he had felt in the goldfinches, but somehow sharper because the thing was more strange. For as the light struck through the dark lump in his hand it was transmuted. It became a thing of flame, like a flower when the sun strikes through it, shadowed and dimmed at its edges, burning with all the fires of life at its heart. Herluin had said that Randal had no music in him, and nor had he, not so much as would serve to set two notes together in their right order; but something in him answered to the smoky flame in the heart of the amber as the music-maker and word-weaver in Herluin might answer to a new song of Roland that no one had ever heard before.
‘It is beautiful!’ he whispered. ‘It’s so beautiful it’s as though it would burn your hands! It’s – it’s Sea Fire, not Sea Gold.’
‘Sea Fire,’ Bevis said consideringly. ‘Yes, that’s what it is! Oh, I knew you’d like it, Randal.’
They looked at it together a few moments in a shared silence of delight. Then Randal gave it back into the other boy’s hand.
It was a mere lump of dusty darkness again, the fires quenched, as Bevis stowed it away once more in the bottom of the kist. ‘I keep it hidden under my shirts and don’t show it to everybody, but you can see it whenever you like. Now come on, let’s take the hounds and run them up to Long Down and talk to Lewin and old White-Eye before supper.’
From that time forward, with nothing spoken on either side Bevis and Randal began to hunt in couples, and Randal’s feeling of having come to the place where he belonged returned to him.
And then a few days later he was lying up in the barn where the barley was stored to wait for threshing, and the big oxcart stood with its shafts pointing toward the rafters. Bevis had been captured by Reynfrey, who took the boys for sword and buckler practice, and set to hacking at a stake in the ground as though it was one of Duke Robert’s men. Reynfrey, standing by, would call out the different kind of strokes that were to be used, and it was good practice, but not exciting. More fun, Randal thought, stretching all out like a hound, to lie hidden among the gold of the stacked barley and the sharper yellow of the drying beans that filled the barn even on this grey and blustering autumn day with something of sunshine, listening to the wind soughing across the thatch, when you should be doing something else.
A speckled hen appeared in the barn doorway, looking round her with a bright purposeful eye, and strutting across to the loose pile of bean stalks in a dark corner, settled herself to lay an egg. She had three there already, but Randal, who had a fellow feeling for her, and might himself one day need not to be betrayed, had not betrayed her. Presently Cerdic the Oxherd came in and began to work tallow into the axles of the oxcart, which needed greasing, whistling as he worked, and all unaware of the boy peering down from the shadows between the unthreshed barley and the roof, and the little speckled hen watching him with an alert, gold-rimmed eye. It was all very pleasant and peaceful.
But Sybilla with a big rush basket on her hip surged into the doorway just as the hen arose with a triumphant cackling from the fourth egg. Sybilla pounced, with a speed surprising in anyone so fat, sent her streaking for the barn door with an outraged squawk, and gathered up the eggs, adding them to those already in the basket.
‘As if I hadn’t enough work already, without the hens laying in every corner of the garth!’
Cerdic laughed, rubbing the back of a tallowy hand across his nose. ‘Reckon you’d expect them to come and lay their eggs in rows on the Hall doorsill, then?’
Randal, unseen in the barley straw, grinned with delight. Sybilla snorted. ‘Get on with your greasing, and don’t try to be more of a fool nor you are already!’
‘Sour as a crab-apple,’ said Cerdic, reflectively.
She hitched the egg ba
sket higher on her hip. ‘Well, ’tis enough to make anybody sour. The nicest little suckling-pig all dressed for d’Aguillon’s supper, I turn my back on it for so long as it takes to go pull a few leaves from the bay tree, and now where is it? Gone!’
‘Gone?’ echoed Cerdic.
‘Stolen! And if you were to ask me who stole it, I should say that scrawny little ferret d’Aguillon brought home with him from Arundel! The boy hadn’t a-been here three days when I caught him stealing honeycomb!’
Randal, who, honeycomb or no, had seen Luffra behind the woodpile with the remains of a sucking-pig, on his own hurried flight from Reynfrey, was not grinning now.
Cerdic, who was big and patient like the oxen he worked with, had returned to his axle greasing, and said quietly over his shoulder, ‘Be there all that harm, in a child stealing honeycomb?’
‘Maybe not, so long as it is but honeycomb. But what d’Aguillon should want to bring him here for . . . Oh I’m sorry enough for the child. God be thanked there’s no child in this Manor has marks on his back the like of those there are on his – though I make no doubt he earned them with his thieving ways. But if I’m never to leave my kitchen for a breath of time with an easy heart . . .’
‘I’d not think too hardly of the boy. He and the young Master seem good enough friends.’
‘Aye – since young Master saw his back.’ She shrugged with a kind of fond exasperation, and her voice grew faintly doting. ‘Soon as he saw Randal’s back, a’ course Bevis would do ought in the world to make it up to him. Dear o’me, the soft little heart he has – I mind me how when he was scarce four years old, he would ha’ given the little Sunday shoes off his own feet to old Horn down at the mill because he’d cut his foot on a bramble root.’
Cerdic grunted, his head between the wheel and the side of the oxcart, and Sybilla hitched up her basket again, saying, ‘Ah well, I can’t stand here chittering to you all day with the pottage only half made,’ and surged out.
Cerdic returned to his whistling, finished his greasing, and went out too, leaving the barn alone to the boy who lay with his head on his arms, hidden in the stacked barley.
Randal lay quite still for a long time. Once he thought he heard Bevis calling him, but he did not answer. He hated Bevis, he hated the whole world, but Bevis most of all. There was a feeling of black betrayal on him, worse, even than when Herluin had changed his mind. He lay there while the long hours passed and at last the light began to thicken and grow mysterious in the great barn, as it does before twilight, telling himself that he didn’t care. Presently he knew that it must be near supper time, and he was hungry; and because he didn’t care, of course he didn’t care, he slithered down out of his hiding-place, shook himself like a dog, and stalked out and across the Garth where the evening mist was just beginning to rise among the old crooked apple trees, towards the Hall.
If the storeroom door had been shut, he might not have done it, even then; but some careless soul had left the storeroom door ajar. It gaped, a little cramped oblong of darkness, in the angle made by the solar’s outside stair, as Randal came by. And he checked, half moved on, and checked again, staring in. The low undercroft was full of crowding shadows, but he could just make out, among the great armoury kists and new axe heads and spare bee skeps, the corner of Bevis’s little carved kist: the corner in which the lump of red amber lay, with its fires quenched in the dark, waiting for the light to waken it again.
He glanced round quickly. No one was in sight, though he could hear the voices of Sybilla and the other women at their cooking in the Great Hall. Then he slunk down the four steps into the narrow doorway. He was crying a little, though he did not know it, crying with a desperate sense of loss, as he eased up the lid of the kist, and thrust his hand inside. His fingers explored down through layer after layer of Bevis’s clothes and belongings, and at last, at the very bottom, met the lump of amber. He pulled it out with a gasp, and without waiting to look at it – there was not enough daylight left to wake the fire, anyway – stowed it inside his tunic and shirt where it lay, not cold like a stone but light and oddly living against his skin. Then he shut the lid of the kist again, and stole out, as secretly as he had come.
Just outside the postern door to the Hall, which opened from the foot of the solar stairs, Bevis all but ran into him.
‘Randal! I’ve been looking for you half the day! Where away have you been?’
‘Out,’ Randal said, and followed the other boy back into the Hall with his shoulders hunched and his head down.
That evening he was very clumsy in serving d’Aguillon at table. He spilled the salt, fell over Matilda, upset a cup of wine, and finally had his ears boxed by Reynfrey to teach him to attend to what he did; and when Bevis whispered to him, ‘I tipped a whole wheatear pie on the floor the first time I served at table,’ he turned his back on him. All evening he would not look at Bevis; had he done so, he might have been surprised at the puzzled and hurt look on the other boy’s face.
For the past three nights they had spread their sleeping-rugs and straw-filled pillows close together beside the fire, but tonight, when the time came for sleep, Randal waited until Bevis had spread his bed, and than took his own rug and pillow round to the far side of the hearth. Bevis had given up trying to talk to him by that time and so said nothing about this new arrangement. And Randal lay down and rolled over with his back to everybody.
As he did so, he felt the lump of amber against him. Tomorrow, before Bevis went to his kist and found it missing, he must find a safe hiding-place for it. A very safe place where Bevis would never find it; Bevis, who had everything, who, from his secure world could give the shoes from off his lordly feet to someone below him in the mud because they had cut their foot, who had shown him the red amber with fire in its heart, as the Lady Adeliza scattered largesse to a beggar, just because he was sorry about the stripes on his back.
But Bevis would not have the red amber any more; everything else, but not the red amber. Randal would have that; all the fire and beauty of the red amber for himself, because he could never have any of the other things.
6
The Wise Woman
WHEN HE WOKE in the morning he had thought of the perfect hiding-place in his sleep.
All he needed was the chance to slip off on his own for a while, but at first it seemed that he was never going to get it. For after the early morning spent as usual over the writing tablets and trying to read Latin from a book with Adam Clerk, and after dinner in the Great Hall, Sir Everard summoned both boys to walk out with him to see how the autumn ploughing was going on in the South Field. Alfwine was ploughing with the big wheeled ox-plough that the whole Manor shared, his boy far ahead leading the patient, wide-horned oxen, and the cloud of gulls wheeling and crying in his wake. At the head of each furrow, where the field ran up towards the downs, the earth that turned up from the shear was mealy pale, but as the furrow went valleyward, the soil grew richer, until just above the edge of the River Woods it was deep, leaf-mould brown, with a glint of almost harebell colour where the light touched it.
The lovely and unexpected sheen of colour waking on the slabby darkness of newly turned earth made Randal think again of the flame springing up in the red amber where there was no flame before. He pressed his hand secretly against his stomach over the belt, and felt the light hardness of the amber lying there. He must find a chance to take it down to the hiding place before Bevis found that it was gone . . .
Both the chance and need were upon him sooner than he expected, for when they came into the Hall garth again Reynfrey was waiting for a word with d’Aguillon about the choice of beasts for the autumn slaughtering, and Sybilla called to Bevis from the Hall doorway. ‘Master Bevis, Master Bevis! Where is your shirt with the blue chevron bands?’
‘In my kist,’ Bevis called back.
‘’Tis not, then, for I’ve looked all through.’
‘It must be!’ Bevis said – they had closed in from shouting distance now.
<
br /> ‘Go you and find it, then.’
‘I will,’ said Bevis, and he disappeared in the direction of the storeroom.
D’Aguillon was deep in discussion with his steward, and with a little sick lurch of the heart, Randal caught his chance, and disappeared in the opposite direction.
There was no time to be lost. Any moment now, Bevis would find that his treasure was gone. He wriggled through the weak place in the garth hedge that Bevis had shown him, and ran. He was making for the woods that licked in a long tongue up the steeply-winding coomb following the course of the chalky stream. They were mostly of stunted oak, hazel and hawthorn and elder, but in one place an ancient pollarded ash leaned out across the stream, and it was for this ash tree that Randal was making. A faint honey scent and a humming sound like the song of bees round the hive on a summer evening reached him even before he pushed his way through the tangle of dry hemlock stalks and seeding willow-herb, to emerge on the bank where the ash leaned out over the water. It was the same scent, the same sound that had first drawn him to the place, days ago; for the stunted shape of the old tree was mantled in ivy and the ivy was in flower, though the oaks and alders were brown with autumn and growing bare, and the bees and wasps and drone flies had gathered to this last harvest of the year.
Randal reached up, and pushed aside a hanging swathe of ivy, pollen-powdery and sticky with the nectar of the green-gold flower balls, disturbing a painted butterfly as he did so, and felt underneath. Yes, there it was, a little hole in the ash trunk, just large enough to take four fingers. It was dry and tindery inside so that one could easily scratch it bigger with a bit of sharp stone. He had meant to show it to Bevis . . . In frantic haste he searched about, found a bit of flint of the sort he wanted in the stream bank, and set to work. The hole had to be big enough to take his hand holding the amber, so that he could get the treasure out again as well as pushing it in. Fungus-speckled flakes of rotten wood crumbled away and fell, light almost as dust to the foot of the tree, and he got a splinter under his thumbnail and had to stop to suck it; and then at last the hole was big enough. He fished the lump of amber up through his neck-band, and thrust it into the crumbling, rough-edged hole, and settled it inside. Presently he would plaster up the opening with earth and moss, and it would be quite in the dark again. He had not looked to see the fire wake in it since he stole it out of Bevis’s kist. Stole, stole, stole! He chanted the word inside himself. He was Randal the Thief; very well then . . .