‘Aye, our Red King was lavish enough with the noose and the branding iron,’ d’Aguillon said, drawing Matilda’s soft ears out like wings on either side of her head. ‘A stronger hand for dealing with his own Barons than he has for Normandy, seemingly.’
Laef grinned in his sandy beard. ‘Maybe he’ll not need to take Normandy with the strong hand, after all. There are more ways than one, so I’ve heard, of killing a cat.’
‘So-o?’ D’Aguillon’s hands checked on Matilda’s twitching ears. ‘And what might you mean by that?’
Laef Thorkelson looked round at him, his elbows on his knees. ‘Last November, Pope Urban, being taken with a vision, preached a Crusade at Clermont.’
‘And?’ said Sir Everard.
‘Long before Christmas, Duke Robert was chafing to take the Cross. The thing is veritably cut to his measure, fighting, adventure and the hope of plunder besides – and all in God’s sweet name. But to take the Cross, he must first come to some sort of settlement with Brother William. Also, he must have money. So – it is beautifully simple – they meet and come to terms. Robert has pledged his Duchy to William for ten thousand marks. So William has Normandy while Robert is away smiting Saracens’ heads from their shoulders; and if Robert comes not back, he has Normandy still, and if Robert comes back – why then, William is within the gates, and it is Robert, even if he can raise the ten thousand marks again, who must drive him out.’
In the silence that followed, a burned log fell with a rustle into a red hollow on the hearth. Joyeuse whimpered in her sleep, chasing dream hares, her paws and muzzle fluttering, and Bevis stroked her tawny flank, then went on burnishing the heavy, nut-shaped helmet.
‘And all this is sure?’ Sir Everard said at last.
‘Have I ever brought you news that was faulty?’
‘Not so far as I remember.’ The corners of the knight’s grim mouth quirked a little ruefully. ‘It is news that concerns all England and much of Christendom somewhat closely; but the thing that I am chiefly wondering at this moment is – how are the ten thousand marks to be raised?’
‘Not out of Red William’s pouch. By you and de Braose and le Savage of Broadwater . . . All England is to pay another Dane Geld, so they say. Glad am I, and give thanks to Thor and the White Kristin, that my plough cuts its furrow in the salt sea, and no King may tax my acres.’
Sir Everard sat a moment staring into the fire, while Matilda whimpered and nosed at his hand, wanting to have her ears pulled again. Then he said, ‘Ranulf Flambard must be taking great pleasure in life. I hope Red William is sufficiently grateful to his Chancellor who squeezes England for him like a ripe fig. Aye well, if ’tis more than three shillings the hide, we must do without the new yoke of plough oxen for a while.’
‘Pass it on to your villeins and make them pay for their own field strips,’ suggested the sea captain.
Sir Everard looked up from the fire, with the odd gentleness at the corners of his wolftrap mouth that came there sometimes, but not often. ‘Who have had the same poor lambing season as my own . . . I’ve held Dean for half a lifetime, friend, but not in that way.’
And in a while they returned to an earlier part of their talk, and the knight was asking, ‘What of young Henry? Does he take the Cross with Robert, or join William to help him reive away Robert’s Duchy?’
‘So far as I have heard, neither, but bides him quiet in his own Castle of Domfront, which is about all that the other two have left him.’ Laef Thorkelson let out a harsh bark of laughter like the bark of a dog-seal on a foggy night. ‘Na na, you cannot blame the young one for the times that he has joined whichever brother offers the best chance for his sword, against the third, since whenever they make common cause it is to turn against him. Munin and Hugin! What a brood of wolves, these sons of the old Conqueror! Brother ready to tear brother’s throat at a word!’ And then, with a sudden change of mood, he leaned across and brought down a hand like a hammer on d’Aguillon’s bent shoulder. ‘Not such brothers were we, in the days of our hot youth, eh, old lad?’
And now at last they were away into the sort of talk that Randal had hoped for. Wonderful talk of steep green northern seas, and icebound lands where the sun never set all the summer long nor rose in the winter days; of hunting great white bears for their skins, and the strange flickering lights that played across the northern sky like a vast diadem of flame in the winter nights, and made a sound like the rushing of mighty wings overhead. Strange, heady talk that flashed and flickered like the northern lights in the small, firelit room where the rushing of wings was the spring gale roaring in from the sea over steep miles of English downland.
Randal’s head was still singing with it, like the echo of harp song, when at last it was time for bed, and he went with Bevis to bring up the little dried apples and late night cups of wine for Sir Everard and his guest. But under the singing, the thing that he was really thinking about, was the old Norman knight in his Hall saying, ‘I’ve held Dean for half a lifetime, but not in that way’; and Saxon Lewin, in his shepherd’s cave on Long Down, saying, ‘d’Aguillon is d’Aguillon of Dean’; and the six days’ boon work that Gudram had been forgiven because it was the Custom of the Manor. He thought about those things, which were really one thing, a good deal.
8
All Souls’ Eve
THEY HAD BEEN down in the river woods, helping Lewin Longshanks to make hurdles for the lambing pens, and now they were on their way home. The woods were very still, with the stillness of an autumn day drawing on towards evening, frost-scented, leaf-mould-scented, woodsmoke-scented where they had been burning-scrub, and the boys, with Joyeuse running ahead like a tawny shadow, loped along through the stillness without disturbing it save by the occasional contented cracking of a hazel nut. The blackberries were over, but there were still nuts in their green-frilled cups to be found on the hazel bushes, and Bevis and Randal gathered them as they went along and cracked them in their teeth, picking the milky, brown-skinned kernels from among the broken shell shards, and crunching happily.
Two and a half years had gone by since Gudram claimed the Custom of the Manor when his apple tree blew down. Good years, and very full ones. And this one the best yet, Randal was thinking, remembering bitter cold night-time visits to Lewin at the lambing pens, hot summer evenings spent lazy by the river with nothing stirring in all the valley save the plop of a water rat under the bank, the joy of the first time his hawk came back to the lure after making its kill . . . Bevis had been made a squire at summer’s end, on the very same day that they had heard of Hugh Goch’s death in Wales, shot through the eye in a skirmish with Norse raiders.
‘The Old Lion led the Norman centre at Hastings,’ Lewin said softly into his golden beard, when the news came. ‘Now the cub dies of an arrow through the eye, as Harold Godwinson died.’ And he gave one of his own ewe lambs to Steyning Priory as a thank offering.
So Hugh Goch was dead, and de Bellême was Lord of Arundel after him, and Randal wondered whether perhaps now he would see Herluin again. But de Bellême had been campaigning with the King all this while, helping secure the Marches of Normandy, and had not yet come to take possession of his English lands. Maybe later he would come – there was a rumour that the King was returning in the spring – and Herluin with him. It was not so very far from Bramber to Arundel . . . It would be good to see Herluin again. He had known that for quite a while now. Little by little through the four years since it happened, he had come to understand that it had not, after all, been betrayal, when de Bellême’s minstrel changed his mind.
They had reached the place where the woods opened, and slowed to a halt, turning as by common consent to look up at the Bramble Hill that Ancret had once called the Hill of Gathering. There was a little wind stirring on the Bramble Hill, though down here on the edge of the river woods the air was still. Randal could see the shivering and frowing of the bushes and bramble domes that crowded thick about the long green barrow up there against the sky, and on the lev
el space before the barrow, the dark, beehive shape of furze branches and piled brushwood, for once again it was All Souls’ Eve. Tonight, as soon as dusk fell, the fire would be lit, and almost every soul on the Manor, and as many as could get away from the Manors round, would be up there dancing with home-made torches kindled at the blaze, making of themselves a great spinning wheel of light in the autumn darkness.
‘I wish d’Aguillon would let us join in the Sun Dance,’ he said suddenly, using the name for it that he had heard Ancret use, and Bevis after her.
Bevis nodded, still staring upward with eyes narrowed into the westering light. ‘So do I, in a way, but they wouldn’t really want us up there. It’s – a thing you have to be part of, not just join in from the outside.’ He laughed. ‘And poor old Adam Clerk would nigh on throw a seizure, I’m thinking. He is upset enough every year, as ’tis, because grandfather will not stop the fires altogether.’
‘Yes, but I don’t see why,’ Randal said seriously.
‘I suppose because he’s a Christian priest and thinks it is his duty to stamp out all that has to do with the Old Faith. But the trouble is that there is such a lot of the Old Faith, and he’s such a very gentle stamper!’
Joyeuse, who had been foraging to and fro in the undergrowth, came trotting up with a piece of rotten wood in her mouth, rippling with proud delight from her moist, mushroom-pink muzzle to the tip of her sweeping, golden tail. They had taught her to retrieve for them when they went hawking or shooting, and retrieving for Bevis – it was always Bevis she brought the fallen birds to, even when it was Randal’s arrow or hawk that had made the kill – had come to be so much a part of her that when there were no dead birds, she brought him sticks and flints and anything else that she could find. Bevis took the bit of wood from her, laughing; it was part of a rotten birch branch, with fungus that looked like a scatter of red-hot sparks clinging to it, and stooped and caught her muzzle in his hands and shook it, while she danced about him with lashing tail, and a few moments later they were on their way again, the matter of the Sun Dance quite forgotten.
Presently they came over the shallow neck of the woods that ran up between North and South Fields, and saw in the distance their own Mill, and the ford of the Dean stream above it. The few elm trees by the Mill stood up tall and stately golden, the hazels and alders by the ford kindled to a more russet fire by the setting sun: the whole wide, wooded valley wound its way up to Bramber touched with apple colours, bonfire colours, as though the woods too made their Sun Dance, and the faint mist of the frosty evening was already rising blue as bonfire smoke under the trees. Among the hazel scrub that half hid the track from the ford, there was a flicker of movement, and a glint of sharp emerald colour that was alien to the tawny hues of All Souls’ Eve.
‘Look, Bevis,’ Randal said, ‘there’s someone coming up from the ford.’
Bevis looked in the same direction. ‘Stranger, by the look of him. I wonder whether he’s for us, or only heading down the river for Durrington or Broadwater – come on, let’s go and see.’
They whistled Joyeuse to heel, and went swinging down through the hazel scrub at top speed, for in their world strangers were always an event.
The man whom they met on the river track rode a fine bay palfrey, and his tunic, with its long, trailing sleeves turned back with fur, showed lizard green under the darkness of his cloak. A man with a plump, smooth face and brilliant, colourless eyes on either side of a surprisingly thin, high-bridged nose. But his voice, though smooth like his face, and with the barest trace of a lisp in it, was pleasant enough when he spoke, reining in his horse as the boys and hound reached him.
‘God’s greeting to you. I am a stranger in these parts. Can you tell me if I am on the right road to Shoreham?’
Bevis shook his head. ‘You are on the wrong side of the river for Shoreham, sir. You should have crossed over at Bramber.’
‘I had a feeling that was the way of it. I was misdirected by some fool of a villein. Would I have the flogging of him.’ The man showed his teeth for a moment, then turned the furious grimace into a smile, and shrugged. ‘Assuredly this is not my fortunate day – which comes, maybe, of journeying on All Souls’ Eve. If I turn back now I shall not be in Shoreham, it ’tis as far as they say, until long after dark, and to crown all else, Grisart here is working loose a shoe. Whose Manor am I on now?’
‘This is Dean, sir,’ Bevis said. ‘My grandfather, Sir Everard d’Aguillon, holds it from de Braose. In his name I bid you most welcome to all that the Manor can yield, both for yourself and your horse.’
‘Ah, a cup of wine, maybe, while your Manor smith sees to Grisart . . .’
Bevis smiled, with the quick back-toss of the head which was so much a part of him. ‘I am very sure that my grandfather will not be content to lose your company before morning, if your business in Shoreham will wait until then.’ He set his hand on Grisart’s bridle. ‘Come, this track to the right leads up to the Hall.’
Randal had said nothing all the while, looking up at the stranger knight under his brows. There was something he had known before about the man, and yet he was sure that he had never seen the plump, smooth face until this moment. The half-memory made him uneasy, because mingled with it was a queer feeling of evil, a feeling of a shadow falling across him, across all Dean.
The man had wheeled his horse into the track that led up towards the village, Bevis walking at his stirrup and Joyeuse running ahead, and Randal fell in behind them, still frowning. He never took that track, even now after four years, without remembering the first time, and feeling again something of that lovely, unexpected sense of home-coming. He felt it now, so sharply that it hurt him.
Ancret, who had come up to tend old Wulf for the ague, was crossing the Hall garth with a crock in her hand as they came in through the gate gap under the ancient pear tree. She turned to look up at the stranger, herself aloof as a shadow, drawing back her skirts a little as the horse went by. It was a strange, deep look, and when they were past, the man made a sign of the Cross, saying half-angrily, ‘That’s a darkling look to meet at the day’s end! I wonder you care to keep such a bird of ill-omen about the place.’
‘That is Ancret, my foster-mother,’ Bevis said quickly and a little hotly. ‘She is herb wise and heals all our ills hereabouts. I don’t think she would waste her magic putting the Evil Eye on anyone.’ But he too made the sign of the Cross, not for any fear of Ancret, but because it was not good to talk of the Evil Eye, especially towards dusk on the eve of All Souls.
The sound of horses’ hooves clattering to a halt before the Hall door brought Sir Everard from the storeroom, where he had been checking over the Manor’s stock of war-bows with Reynfrey. He greeted the stranger with the grave and somewhat stiff courtesy that he had for all guests, as Bevis held the stirrup for him to dismount. And a little later, while the older boy went indoors to help the stranger wash off his dust and see to the laying of an extra place at table, Randal was leading Grisart down through the village again in the direction of the smithy.
He waited, sitting on the horse-block outside, while Cissa, the little black-browed Manor smith, dealt with the loosened shoe; then he brought the big bay palfrey up to the Hall again.
By now it was the time of the evening that Lewin called owl-hoot, and in the long, thatched stable where all the Dean horses had their stalls it was already deep dusk, filled with the good scent of the horses and the evening hay in the managers, and the lazy sound of champing. Randal called for Elli the stable boy, and bade him light and bring the stable lantern and hang it in the spare stall, then fetch water and fill the empty manger, and while the bay, having drunk as much as he judged good for him, grew busy with the hay and beans, he fell to rubbing him down. Bevis came in before he was half-way through and set to work beside him. In public they were careful to keep up their relative position of squire and varlet, but in private they did all things together, as they had always done. Elli had gone off again to his supper, and they
were alone with the horses.
‘What is amiss, Randal?’ Bevis asked suddenly.
‘Nothing,’ Randal said, shaking out the big horse rug. ‘Have you heard what his name is yet?’
‘Sir Thiebaut de Coucy. Why? Do you know something about him?’
‘I? No I –’ Randal stumbled; ‘I don’t think so. Bevis – I don’t like him.’
‘I don’t like him either,’ Bevis said after a moment. ‘But he’ll be gone in the morning.’
They finished rugging Grisart, then turned towards the door, Randal carrying the lantern. At the next stall he checked, and went in for a good-night word with Swallow, his own horse. Swallow was grey; not the hard, iron colour of most grey horses, but a soft, smoky grey, deepening almost to black at ears and muzzle. Randal had loved him even before he was old enough to manage anything bigger than a pony, when the tall grey was just one of the Dean horses. It still seemed to him a wonder that Swallow was his, and just as the old sense of home-coming had hurt him earlier that evening, so now his joy in possessing Swallow was suddenly so piercing sharp that it hurt him too. He put his arm over the arch of the grey neck, as the horse whinnied softly and swung his head to greet him, and pressed his face a moment against the horse’s cheek, holding to him as though for comfort against this queer feeling of a shadow having fallen across them all, that he could not shake off.
Bevis had strolled on, pausing for a word with his own Durandal, and with the old war-horse Valiant in the end stall. Now he checked again in the doorway to call, ‘Come on, Randal. We shall be late for supper.’
And Randal gave Swallow a parting pat, and went after him.
The household was already gathered when they entered the Hall; d’Aguillon and their guest sitting at the high table, and the rest of the household, Ancret among them this evening, at the lower tables set up on trestles in the body of the Hall. It was a fast day, but with thick fish soup flavoured with saffron, and eel pies and kale and good, dark barley bread, and baked pears stuck over with sorrel and rosemary for the high table, nobody felt the lack of meat. And when the meal was over, and Bevis and Randal with the house churls to help them had cleared the tables and stacked the trestle boards away, they drew the benches to the central hearth, and settled with the Lord of the Manor and his guest and the hounds about the fire.