Knight's Fee

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  And so it was for Herluin, sitting with the white ranks before him, to make the first move. He took his time, considering, then put out a long musician’s hand and moved one of the pawns forward.

  Randal heard the faint click, very sharp and clear, as he set it down.

  Hugh Goch, leaning his elbow among the thick, harsh hairiness of the great brown bearskin flung across his chair, took up a piece that glowed in the torchlight deep ruby red, and set it down in its new position with the same clear, decisive click.

  All his life, Randal was able to remember that scene in its every last detail, the torch making a ragged core of light in the heart of the crowding gloom, and in it, the intent faces of the two men, and their intent hands, and between them, on the magpie-chequer of the board, the two armies of fantastic shapes that marched and pranced and wavered to and fro, each with its finger of crowned or helmeted or horse’s-headed shadow moving beside it; the half-seen, half-lost glint of a bird with a serpent’s tail gold-embroidered on the bed hangings; the kingfisher fire in the heart of the jewel that held Hugh Goch’s cloak at the shoulder; the click and silence and click again of pieces picked up and set down, against the distant surf-sound of voices and bagpipe music from the Great Hall beneath their feet; the very smell of rosemary and hot resin from the torch in his sore and smarting hands. And yet, at the time, none of it seemed quite real. It was all like one of those dreams so vivid that when you wake the taste of them remains with you all day.

  His shoulder ached where Hugh Goch had all but torn it from the socket, his legs ached with weariness as the time went by, and his head swam a little with hunger and the strangeness of everything. Somehow he went on standing and standing, as the time crawled along, shifting his weight from one leg to the other and back again, trying to hold the torch steady so that it did not dribble or flare; and all the while, with an aching intensity, watching the board. He had never seen chess played before; until this evening he had never even heard of it. He had no knowledge of opening gambits, of a pawn sacrificed to better a knight’s position, of cunning combinations played out, and the skilled marshalling of pieces in the face of a devilish red attack and a menaced white king. He did not know what they were doing, these men with their intent faces and hovering, deliberate hands, only that they were moving about carved figures of kings and queens and little squat knights on horseback and high-mitred churchmen; and that in some way that he could not at all grasp, his whole life from that time forward as long as he lived, depended on the pattern that they made.

  At first they played easily, as it were lightly, leaning sideways to the board, pausing sometimes to drink, when a squire came in to pour more wine for them into the cups that stood at their elbows; sometimes talking with the people who wandered up from the Great Hall to see how the game was going. Presently de Bellême came up, his sword chape ringing on the circular stair, to lean on his brother’s shoulder and watch the play, pointing with a finger. ‘Watch out for your bishop.’ And a little later, ‘Ye-es, I’ve seen almost this game played out before – between Red William and Duke Robert.’ He laughed. ‘Maybe our Red King should challenge his brother to play for the lordship of Normandy and England. He might get the thing settled in that way; it seems he’s not likely to by tramping round the Duchy with his hired mercenaries as he’s been doing all this summer.’

  Hugh Goch looked up quickly, echoing the other’s laugh with that soft laughter of his that was like a snarl. ‘Have a care with that kind of talk, Great Brother . . . Maybe Red William feels something safer with a hired army behind him than with a dumb-sullen English rabble that trusts him as little as his Barons do, or as he trusts his Barons – and maybe with as good reason.’ A long, meaning look, lit with reckless amusement, passed between them, while Herluin pondered over his next move.

  Randal had some idea what they were talking about, at any rate in part, for he knew (had not the whole South Country been grumbling with it for a month past?) that Red William had called out the fyrd, twenty thousand English foot to serve with him against Duke Robert, and then sent his own chaplain, Ranulf Flambard, to meet them at Hastings and take from each man the ten silver shillings coat-and-conduct money provided by his district, and send him home again, while the money went to the King to hire mercenaries.

  ‘A trick such as last month’s at Hastings does not earn trust,’ de Bellême said. ‘And so, with bad blood between the King and his English, comes maybe, sooner or later, the chance that other folk may turn to good account. Watch out for your bishop, I tell you, or my minstrel will have you checked in three moves.’

  The game went on again, and gradually, as it laid a stronger hold on the players, their faces grew more absorbed, they straightened little by little from their lounging positions and sat square to the table; the wine was left untouched at their elbows, and they ceased to be aware of onlookers. Presently de Bellême shrugged and strolled off down to the Hall again, where the strolling jugglers were still amusing the company. And then at last, a long time later – but Randal had lost all count of time by then – Herluin took up one of his knights and made a move wit it that seemed no different from the many moves that had gone before, and set it down with a small decisive click, and said, ‘Check, Montgomery.’

  ‘Ah? What?’ Hugh Goch snapped, dropping back his own hand which had been poised for a move. His gaze went quickly, questioningly, over one after another of the pieces, while Herluin suddenly relaxed in his place, watching him with a little smile hovering behind his cool, light eyes.

  Hugh Goch’s white face seemed for the moment to darken and narrow. Then, abruptly, he laughed, and crashed up from his great chair, oversetting several of the pieces as he did so.

  ‘Checkmate is it? Checkmate to the Lord of Arundel? Aye well, so it is; and the brat is yours now. Take and do what you will with him.’

  A few moments later he had gone striding from the room, shouting for his squires, and Herluin rose and stretched until the small muscles cracked between his shoulders, looking down at Randal where he stood gazing dazedly up at him, the torch dribbling unheeded in his numb hands. ‘What a thing is life, that it can be changed by moving a few carved ivory pieces on a chequered board – or even by dropping half a fig on a horse’s nose, eh, Imp?’

  A square, came running to clear the chess-board, and the minstrel swung round on him, saying with a flick of one long forefinger towards Randal, ‘I have just won this from your Lord; will somebody take and feed it, and put it in whichever of the wall chambers has been made ready for me.’

  The squire looked startled and resentful, and muttered something about the wall chambers being for the family, and sleeping in Hall like everybody else.

  Herluin’s brows drifted upward. ‘But then I am not “everybody else”, and it pleases me not at all to sleep with the common herd of squires and the like. I am de Bellême’s minstrel, my good boy. If no chamber has been kept for me, then I fear, I greatly fear, that you must dispossess someone else, even as your Lord has dispossessed his saintly stepmother . . . Meanwhile I am away to snatch at mouthful of fresh air before sleeping time.’

  And so in a while, without any clear idea of how it came about, Randal found himself, his stomach full of bread and cold sucking pig, lying curled at the foot of a bed of skin rugs and piled rushes in a narrow chamber in the thickness of the wall, opening off the guardroom stair. It was pitch dark, for there was no window to see the white star through, and a curtain of some heavy stuff hung over the entrance. The darkness itself was like a curtain – a black curtain that hung close before Randal’s face as he lay staring into it, and made the air thick to breathe. He heard distant sounds, a snatch of song from the guardroom below, the murmur of movement and voices from the Great Hall where those who slept there would be settling for the night, the scream of a hawk. But they were all muffled and far off. Here in the darkness there was no sound at all, no familiar stirring of hounds in the straw; nothing but his own breathing. And quite suddenly he began to be fri
ghtened again. A new fear now. So much – a whole life-time of things – had happened to him since he lay on the gatehouse roof at noon, that now, alone in the dark, dazed and bewildered by the rush of events, he was not sure whether any of it had happened at all. But if it had been a dream, was he awake now, or still tangled in it like a fly in a cobweb? And if Hugh Goch was a dream, then Herluin must be a dream too. He could not bear that Herluin should be only a dream. Panic was rising in him, and he began to whimper a little, threshing about on the piled rugs of the bed. His outflung hand found the corner of a soft, thick leather bag with something hard inside it; he reached out farther, exploring in the darkness. Herluin’s harp that someone had brought in – he remembered now – and laid on the bed. He could feel the shape of it inside the thick, soft leather of the bag, and the raised scratchiness where the leather was enriched with gold and silver threads.

  Comforted, he must have fallen asleep on the instant, for he heard no footsteps on the guardroom stair, but between one moment and the next the curtain over the entrance was thrust back, and light flooded into the narrow chamber, and Herluin was on the threshold holding up a rushlight that glimmered like a star.

  Randal crouched up in the straw, the harp held against his knees, blinking at the tall man as he came in and let the curtain fall again behind him.

  Herluin crossed the little chamber and set the rushlight on its pricket in a niche high in the rough stone wall, then turned, stretching and yawning, to look down at the small figure on the foot of his bed. The long, wide sleeves fell back from his upspread arms, revealing the brilliant lining like the blink of yellow on a goldfinch’s wings.

  ‘Now why did I never bethink me before, that I should keep a guard-dog?’ Herluin said, his gaze taking in the harp that Randal held against his knees. ‘Have you kept it safe for me all this while?’

  Randal nodded.

  Herluin sat down on the carved stool that, save for the makeshift bed, was the only piece of furniture, and stretched his long, loose legs all across the narrow space.

  ‘By what name do they call you? Or do they only whistle?’

  ‘Randal – I’m called Randal,’ the boy said hoarsely; and without knowing that he did so, crept close against the bony black knees, his gaze fixed on the minstrel’s face.

  ‘Randal. Hy my! What a man’s name for such a small imp,’ Herluin said, his face cracking into its winged and twisted smile, and put his hand on the boy’s rough head. ‘Aye, well, you’ll grow to it one day. Meanwhile I shall call you Imp.’

  3

  The Water Stair

  IN THE WORLD outside the strong walls of Arundel, things were stirring that autumn; a muttering of unrest from end to end of the Kingdom, a sudden flare of revolt in Wales. And in October, the King being too deep in his war with Brother Robert to handle any other troubles himself, Henry of Coutances, his younger brother, landed in England to deal with the disturbances.

  Randal heard of these happenings, as he heard the autumn wind siffling over the ramparts, and with as little thought. Indeed, he had not much thought to spare for anything, just then, from the strange experiences of belonging to somebody for the first time in his life.

  Soon, before winter closed the seaways, de Bellême would be sailing to take up his heritage in Normandy, and Herluin with him, and Randal with Herluin. Any day now, Hugh Goch would ride with Henry of Coutances, back to his Welsh wars; but meanwhile, it was glorious hunting weather, and both brothers remained at Arundel while the Wealden Forest flamed gold and russet in the October sunshine.

  The fine weather broke at last, some days after they heard of Henry’s landing, and a gale came booming up from the southwest, salt with the taste of the sea, and the grey, driving rain blotted out the downs behind its trailing curtains of nothingness. And at dusk the storm blew to the gates of Arundel a drenched and weary man on a drenched and weary horse.

  He was brought into the torch-lit Hall where half the folk and hounds of the Castle were gathered, waiting for the trumpets to sound their Lord in to supper; a tall bony man in an old leather gambeson black with the wet, who stooped a little as though from a lifetime of wearing heavy mail. And at sight of him, Herluin, who had been singing for them beside the fire – one of the songs of Roland – ceased his singing and laid down his little bright harp between one note and the next, and came to his feet in a kind of lazy bound.

  ‘D’Aguillon! Why, Sir Everard, by all that is most wonderful! And what do you, de Braose’s man, here in the Honour of Arundel?’

  The crowd had parted to make way for the newcomer, as he came through them to the fire, and Randal, looking up from where he squatted at Herluin’s feet, saw the knight’s very dark eyes lighten with pleasure.

  ‘Ohé, Herluin the Minstrel! I thought it was your voice. But I need not have doubted finding you here, knowing that de Bellême as soon moves without his minstrel as without his shadow . . . I have been up to Henry’s camp at Portsmouth, with words from de Braose about the Bramber levies – the old man grows too gouty for war; young Philip must lead them if they are called out. And now I am on my way home – or was, when the storm caught me.’ He was putting back the coif of his gambeson as he spoke, and the thick badger-grey hair flattened under its pressure sprang slowly erect. ‘Grace of God! What a storm! Already the ford is impassable and so I come to claim shelter until the floods sink and I can get across the Hault Rey and be on my road again.’

  ‘What word from Henry’s camp?’ someone asked.

  ‘That Mowbray of Northumberland has plundered four Norwegian trading ships, and is likely to make trouble when the King calls him to account for it,’ d’Aguillon said briefly.

  There was a little silence, then someone said with a reckless laugh, ‘Well, with matters as they are at present that’s as likely a thing as any other to set spark to stubble.’

  D’Aguillon bent to hold cold, rain-wet hands to the blaze, the steam already wisping up from his sodden gambeson, while one of the squires hurried to fetch him a cup of wine. No one commented on the last speaker’s words.

  For two days more the storm raged. The gale beat wild wings about the Castle, and the rain fell spitting and sizzling into the fire; and they lived by torchlight with the shutters drawn across the high Hall windows slamming and rattling in the gusts, because with the windows open they would have been flooded as well as blown inside out. As it was, they would have been smothered with the smoke that billowed down the smoke-vent, if it had not been for the draught that wailed along the floor stirring the dusty rushes. Randal could have lain much more snug in his old corner of the kennels, tucked down under the shelter of the curtain wall, but now that he belonged to Herluin, and had the right to sit in the rushes and the icy draughts at the minstrel’s feet, nothing would have induced him to sit elsewhere.

  On the third morning they woke to broken skies and a sunrise laced with thin, watery fire, and by the evening the sky was clear save for great sheep’s-wool clouds trailing their shadows across the valley from one rim of the downs to the other. And Herluin said to the stranger knight, laying aside his harp in its bag of embroidered leather, and stretching as he rose, ‘Come away on to the downs for a mouthful of air before supper. We have been too long mewed in the dark like moulting falcons.’

  ‘Say rather like smoked hams hung too long in the chimney corner. Surely I will come.’ Sir Everard scuffled his feet in the rushes, and got up also, hitching at his sword sheath.

  Randal, squatting in the rushes, cleaning Herluin’s spare pair of shoes, sprang to his feet and tugged at the minstrel’s wide-falling sleeve imploringly. ‘I also! My Lord, take me too, and Bran and Gerland!’

  And so a while later, with Randal and the great feather-heeled hounds flying ahead, the minstrel and the old knight passed out through the castle gates, and turning northward, set their faces to the long slope of the downs.

  The wind was not as strong as it had been, but up on the downs behind Arundel it still came booming up through the oak wo
ods, and the seagulls whirled overhead like blown leaves. On the edge of the oak woods a great dyke, blurred by time until it was curved and gradual as the trough of a wave, cut across the shoulder of the downs, made – but Randal knew nothing of that – by the Bronze men, two thousand years before, to guard their turf-banked fortress where Arundel Castle stood now. And by and by the two men fell to walking to and fro along its lip, while Randal, scrambling down into it, found a spot that was warm as summer, with the westering sun spilling down the bramble-choked slope at his back, under the wind that whirled the flocks of brown leaves overhead and laid the long grass at the edge of the dyke over all one way; and squatting down there, began to pick fleas out of Gerland’s brindled coat, while the old hound lay and groaned in ecstasy. Leaving Bran and Gerland – the other hounds too, but Bran and Gerland most of all – was the one thing that he was going to hate in leaving Arundel. Would anyone bother to pick the fleas out of Gerland’s coat when he was gone? The thought made him extra thorough now; but between fleas he watched the two men walking to and fro, the one lithe and loose-knit, his mantle flying black wings about him, the other stiff and soldierly in his old gambeson, with his sword gathered in his arms as he walked. He wondered what they were talking about, and wished that the wind were the other way so that he might hear. He was not at all sure that he liked the strange knight, who had a mouth like a trap and the kind of eyes that you could not lie to.

  From the seaward end of their walk, where the land began to drop too steeply for comfort, Herluin and Sir Everard could look down over the marshes and the estuary, and see where the Hault Rey came looping out through the downs, round the last sinking shoulder of the hill-side on which the town and Castle stood. The river was still in tawny spate, but already it did not reach so far up the half-drowned alders as it had done that morning, and the wind-ruffled water that spread in great lakes all across the marshy valley seemed shrinking almost while they watched.