He licked up another blob of the stuff, crushing the pips between his teeth. ‘It is good!’
‘In all the Manor – in all this reach of the downs,’ Ancret said, ‘there is no bigger and sweeter fruit than you may find on the Hill of Gathering.’
‘The Hill of Gathering?’ Bevis said, questioningly.
‘Did I say the Hill of Gathering? It is an old name; folk do not use it any more.’
Bevis swallowed the last of his barley cake and sucked his fingers. ‘Maybe they call it the Hill of Gathering because of the great gathering that there must have been when they raised the barrow on the top – or maybe it’s because of the gatherings when they make the fires and the Sun Dance on All Soul’s Eve.’ They were all three looking up towards the hill, through the elder branches, seeing it withdrawn into its own shadows, its own secrets, dark against the sunset.
‘I wonder if it’s true,’ Bevis spoke again in a little while. ‘I wonder if there is a king buried up there with all his treasure about him; gold cups and crowns and arm rings under the bramble bushes.’
Randal said without knowing why, ‘It might be just a champion, with his sword.’
‘Whatever there is,’ Ancret said, sweeping round on them almost, for the moment, as though she were angry, ‘you let him sleep. There’s never aught but sorrow come yet to mortal man from the gold of Hollow Hills. Now let you be off, for it’s time and more than time that you were home to your supper.’
It was twilight as they came up towards the Hall, not by a driftway but over the fields, and just outside the weak place in the hedge, Bevis halted, holding out something that he had just fished from inside the front of his tunic.
‘Here,’ he said, shamefaced all at once. ‘Take it, Randal.’
All Randal could see in the ’tween light was a dark lump about the size of a walnut, but the moment he touched it, his fingers knew it by the light, live feel. So that was what Bevis had been doing with his knife and the pebble outside Ancret’s bothy: splitting his treasured piece of amber in two.
He stood with the thing in his hand, looking from it to Bevis and Bevis and back again. Then he shook his head. ‘You don’t – have to do that, Bevis.’
‘No,’ Bevis said. ‘That’s why I’m doing it. Not because I have to – because I want to.’ Suddenly he was in desperate earnest. ‘Then we shall both have a piece of red amber – don’t you see? Please, Randal.’
There was a long pause before Randal said gruffly, ‘All right,’ and then the moment after, in a small, hoarse rush, ‘I shall carry it with me always.’ And he thrust it into the front of his own stained and filthy tunic. Sybilla was not going to be at all pleased when she saw that tunic.
Sir Everard looked at their faces with interest when he saw them at supper, but made no comment. And that night Bevis and Randal spread their sleeping-rugs and hard, straw-stuffed pillows alongside each other again.
7
The Custom of the Manor
ALL WALES WENT up in flames that winter and they heard that Hugh Goch had called out almost every knight in the Honour of Arundel to follow him on a new, bloody campaign into the mountains. So the Lord of Arundel would have a better excuse than hunting in his Welsh forests, to account for being in the Marches when spring came. But de Braose was not a Marcher Lord, and so in the Honour of Bramber all was quiet as that winter went by.
The river woods that had been softly dark as smoke all winter broke out into the mealy gold of hazel, and the curlews were crying over the downs. D’Aguillon rode away to render his thirty days’ knight’s service at Bramber, leaving the boys in Reynfrey’s charge; and by the time he returned, the spring ploughing was upon them. The swallows came back to the great Manor barn, and soon after the swallows, a wandering friar, who said, ‘Have you heard the news? The news about Mowbray who sacked the Norwegian trading ships last year? Since the King summoned him to face his trial at the Easter Court, he has come out into open revolt! Arundel and de Lacy and William of Eu have all joined him, and most of the Marcher Lords. May the sweet Mother of God have mercy on us, for we are all sinful men!’
Randal went away by himself after that, and thought about the voices on the water stair that he had shut his mind to and managed not to think about for months, and would not tell even Bevis what was the matter.
Haymaking came, and then barley harvest. And a wandering minstrel came to sing for them at the boon feast afterwards, when the whole Manor supped with d’Aguillon in the Great Hall.
‘You’ll have heard that the King has marched north?’ said the minstrel, tuning his harp. ‘Oh yes, almost three months ago. Fé! Don’t you ever hear anything in this corner of Sussex? He’s got Mowbray, they say – captured him by a trick outside his own walls, and made his Lady yield up the castle to save her Lord’s eyes. Very fine eyes, so I’ve heard, but they’ll not be much use to him now, save to show him his prison walls or maybe the shadow of the noose dancing.’
Autumn came, and the nights were full of droning dorbeetles, and they brewed the year’s perry. Winter came and went, and Sir Everard rode for Bramber again, to return thirty days later with the news that the King had brought Mowbray and his rebellious Barons before his Christmas Court at Gloucester. ‘Aye,’ he said, kicking his spurs beside the fire, and shaking the rain from his heavy war mittens, ‘it seems that the loyal Barons dealt out hanging and mutilation with generous hands – the more so, maybe, because for the most part they would have been on the rebel side themselves, had they been more sure of success.’ He generally spoke to his varlets as though they were grown men. ‘Arundel? Arundel got off with a fine, being maybe too powerful even for the King.’
So it was finished, Randal thought, finished and done with as though he had never heard those voices on the water stair; and he felt as though he had escaped from something. He was wrong, quite wrong, but it was to be years before he knew it, and meanwhile, life was good.
He and Bevis were up on Long Down one wild evening not long after Easter; the second Easter of his life at Dean. They had been hoping to take out Bevis’s new sparrow-hawk and fly her at starlings – Randal had no hawk of his own yet, but Bevis was going to help him catch and train one next spring, when Sir Everard judged that he would be old enough – but the wind had got up since morning, a wild wind with flurries of rain and bursts of sunshine on its wings, that set the cotters’ geese scurrying and stripped the early fruit blossom and roared like a furnace in the river woods. Hopeless weather for hawking, but not the kind of weather when one could bear to remain indoors; and so they had come up to Lewin the Shepherd, their particular friend, on Long Down where he had just brought the sheep up to their summer pasture, now that the lambing season was over.
They were huddled one each side of him in the shepherd’s cave that he had made for himself in the heart of a thorn clump. He had two or three caves in different parts of the Dean sheep runs, but this one up on Long Down was the best. From outside there was nothing to be seen at all but the blackthorn tump, greyish white now with its fleece of blossom, but crawl under the low branches and you were in a sort of lair, part hollowed out of the ground, part out of the blackthorn tangle overhead, lined with straw and old skins, snug from the wind and the rain that drove across the shoulder of the down, yet with the whole countryside open before you.
And what a countryside, from up here on Long Down! Craning forward, Randal could look southward to the sea, northward to the Weald, Andred’s Weald far below him, rolling away into the distance – the vast oak forests that cut this high down country of Sussex off from the rest of England far more surely than the sea cut it off from Normandy. Ahead of him the world fell away into the sweeping whorls and hollows of the river valley, then rose again like the waves of a slow sea gathering themselves to the crest of Thunder Barrow full four miles away, with nothing between him and it, but the emptiness of wind and rain and flying sunshine, and the wings of a sailing gull. Far below, and a mile or more away, he could make out the huddled roofs o
f Dean with its three great fields running to the river woods and the marshes seaward. And on the long curved slopes of the coomb-head below them, sheltered somewhat from the wind, Dean’s sheep grazed in a quiet, grey crescent, watched over by Lewin and his dogs.
There were three dogs in the shepherd’s cave, for beside Lewin’s two, Bevis had brought up his new hound puppy, Joyeuse, one of Matilda’s last litter. With three dogs and three humans in it, the little cave was somewhat close quarters; but to Randal it seemed to have a deeper feeling of shelter than a proper house could ever have, shelter as a wild thing in its lair might feel it. And when the sunshine that for the moment had been all about them fled on, and suddenly the next shower was hushing overhead, with never a drop coming through – three days of steady rain, Lewin had once told him, before it came through the roof of a properly built cave – he shivered luxuriously and pressed his shoulder closer against Lewin’s in its oily-smelling sheepskin cloak.
‘It is good up here! Better than sitting round the fire in Hall, cracking last year’s nuts!’
‘Why so late in the day to come up, then?’ Lewin Longshanks said in his deep, gentle, grumbling voice, never taking his gaze from the sheep below him in the coomb-head. ‘’Tis a’most time to be going home again, before you’ve well come, I’m thinking.’
‘We couldn’t get off earlier,’ Bevis said, sitting with the puppy’s leash twisted round his wrist. ‘It’s the day for the Manor Court, and grandfather likes us both to be there in Hall while he gives his judgements – he says it’s part of our training. And such a lot seems to have piled up while he was at Bramber. Alfwine and Gyrth squabbling about their boundaries again, and Cerdic wanting leave to graze two more geese on the common grazing, now that he has another son, and Gudram claiming the Custom of the Manor that he should be forgiven six boon-days’ work because the gale before Easter blew down his best apple tree. Quite a lot of them were things that Reynfrey could have dealt with just as well but –’ his voice was suddenly thoughtful. ‘They won’t go to Reynfrey if they can help it, they save it all up for grandfather.’
Lewin turned on him a pair of very blue eyes that were wrinkled at the corners as the eyes of seamen and shepherds often are, though he was still quite young. ‘Reynfrey is a Norman,’ he said simply.
There was a little sharp, surprised silence, and the Bevis said, ‘So is grandfather.’
‘D’Aguillon is d’Aguillon, and Reynfrey is his paid man.’
‘Reynfrey is kind enough, and just,’ Bevis said hotly. ‘Grandfather wouldn’t have him for his steward if he was not.’
‘But d’Aguillon is d’Aguillon of Dean,’ said Lewin, and somehow the argument was unanswerable.
Nobody spoke for a while, and then Lewin broke the silence again. ‘I mind my grandfather claiming the Custom of the Manor from Wulfthere, our Thegn, when his apple tree blew down, the year before Hastings’s fight.’
Hastings again. The Senlac that Reynfrey talked about sometimes, if you could get him into the right mood, stripping up his sleeve to show the long, white, puckered scar on his forearm. Senlac to the Normans, Randal thought, Hastings to the Saxon kind. ‘Lewin, were you at Hastings fight?’
‘I? – I was six years old on the day that Harold died. I remember Wulfthere riding off with his sons and house-carls, their weapons keen for war . . . I remember the women weeping. And then later came d’Aguillon your grandfather, and Reynfrey with a bloody clout round his sword arm, but never the old Thegn and his son again.’
‘I’m glad grandfather forgave Gudram his six boon days,’ Bevis said, after a while.
The rain had swept on now, and the sun was out, dazzling the wet blackthorn blossom. ‘The shadows are growing long,’ Lewin said. ‘Time you were away home, and the flock gathered in.’ He drew his long legs under him and ducked out from the cave, the boys and dogs behind him, and cupping his hands about his mouth, sent a long-drawn folding call echoing down the valley.
‘Coo-oo-oo-o-up! Coo-om along! Coo-oo-o-up!’
They knew that he would have no more time for them today, and took their dismissal in good part, for they were used to being sent packing by Lewin whenever he had had enough of them. Besides, it must be drawing on towards supper time. So they took their leave, doubtful if he even heard them, and set off for the distant huddle of roofs that was home. They walked quietly until they were through the flock, keeping Joyeuse on the leash, but once clear of the sheep, Bevis slipped her free and they ran, boys and hound puppy, laughing and shouting with the wind behind them, racing the long cloud shadows that swept along the shoulder of the downs.
When they burst into the firelit warmth of the Hall, with sticks and dead leaves and wet, torn-off petals of pear blossom and the first spatterings of the next rain squall clinging about them, they found the household already gathering for supper, and a stranger there with Sir Everard. At least he was a stranger to Randal; a fat man with pale blue eyes in a round, weather-beaten face; who wore his sandy hair in braids like a woman over the shoulders of his stained and greasy leather tunic, and had beads of red coral round his neck and copper rings on his bare arms. But Bevis greeted him as Laef Thorkelson, and asked if his ship was at Bramber.
Laef Thorkelson! Randal’s ears pricked at the name. So this was the man who went long voyages to the other end of the world, and had given Bevis the piece of magical red amber. Almost without being aware of it, his hand went up to feel the little bag hung round his neck under his tunic, in which he always carried the half of the red amber that Bevis had given him. And the huge, sandy stranger standing in the firelight seemed just a little larger than life, as he gazed up at him.
Laef Thorkelson stood with his feet planted wide apart as though they gripped the leaping deck of a ship, and grinned down at Bevis. ‘Aye, safe and fast in the lea of the downs, under the Castle. And maybe tomorrow I shall sell de Braose a pipe of wine or a damascened blade; but meanwhile here come I to warm myself at the Dean hearth fire again – and find you a good span taller than when I saw you last.’ His small, bright eyes, wrinkled at the corners as Lewin’s were, turned from one boy to the other, and he said to Sir Everard standing beside him, ‘It seems that your household has increased; I mind me there was but one whelp when last I came this way.’
It was Bevis who answered, before his grandfather could do so, flinging an arm across Randal’s shoulder. ‘He came to us from Arundel, more than a year back, and his name is Randal and he is my friend and will be squire with me by and by.’
After supper in the great Hall, which Laef Thorkelson with his great laughter made to seem as full as it did when the whole Manor supped with d’Aguillon at Christmas or Easter or the boon feasts between, the Lord of Dean and his guest settled before the fire in the solar. Bevis and Randal had been allowed to come too, and now they squatted in the firelight, Randal busy oiling and burnishing Sir Everard’s sword, while Bevis, with Joyeuse asleep against his knees, did the same for the nut-shaped helmet. For some time now it had been their task to keep d’Aguillon’s war harness in good order, and it was a task that they loved, for it made them feel as though they were squires already.
Randal was glad that he had got the sword this time. It was a huge and beautiful sword, forged by the armourers of Saragossa, who were the best armourers in Christendom or beyond it; the firelight played on the blade like running water, and d’Aguillon’s seal was cut into the fine reddish stone of the pommel. D’Aguillon sat on the foot of the low sleeping bench, with Matilda between his knees, the bitch crooning with half-shut eyes as he gentled her ears; and Laef Thorkelson, merchant and sea captain, sat in d’Aguillon’s carved chair, with his great feet stretched to the fire. And so, sitting with the flicker of the burning logs on their faces, the two men talked companionably, the talk of old friends. They were very old friends, and it seemed that Sir Everard had even made one voyage to the far north with Laef Thorkelson in their early days. ‘That was in the beginning of time,’ he had said, speaking of it at supper, ‘
when I was young and not bound by wife or bairns or holding of English acres.’ But just now they were discussing the news of the outside world, which was disappointing to Randal who had hoped for adventures and marvels and sea dragons, from the man who had given Bevis the red amber with fire at its heart.
He turned Sir Everard’s great sword over to come at the other side, laying the wave-rippled blade across his knee, and set to work again with the oily rag, huddling closer to the fire as a fresh gust boomed against the house. The shutters rattled and the smoke drove down the chimney in a billowing cloud that made them all cough. Then the smoke cleared, and Bevis leaned forward over the helmet in his lap and flung another log on the fire, and the flames leapt up, reaching even to the corner where Tyri, Sir Everard’s Norway goshawk, sat on her bow perch with her black and white mutes striping the wall behind her.
And at that moment, out of the quiet rumble of voices that he had long ago ceased to listen to, the name that even now could make Randal’s heart lurch unpleasantly, caught his ear.
Hugh Goch!
‘The King would have done well to remember that de Lacy and Hugh Goch are Marcher Lords.’ It was Sir Everard who spoke. ‘And that the Marches are ever the quickest part of his Kingdom to spark into revolt.’
Laef Thorkelson chuckled. ‘Lucky for Hugh Goch to get out of that affair with no more than a fine, when William of Eu paid for his part in it with his ears and most of his fellows found their way to the Tower or the scaffold.’