There was sudden swift brushing through the undergrowth behind him, and he let the ivy swing back over the hole and spun round just as Bevis came thrusting through the tangle of willow-herb. Bevis’s face had a queer pearly whiteness and his mouth looked exactly like d’Aguillon’s as he halted and stood looking at Randal.
Randal gave a kind of whimpering yelp, like a puppy that is very frightened, and then stayed quite still. And so they stood, staring at each other.
‘I thought something was amiss, every since last night,’ Bevis said at last. ‘Where is my red amber?’
‘I didn’t – I don’t – I don’t know what you mean,’ Randal stammered. ‘I – oh no!’
For Bevis had taken a quick step towards him with fist upraised. ‘Don’t you?’ he said. ‘Don’t you?’ and there were queer little lights flickering in his eyes. And then the movement of the ivy that had not quite ceased swinging caught his eye and he looked beyond Randal, and saw the powdery trail of rotten wood and fungus powder down the bark of the old ash tree and lying at its foot. He looked at Randal once more, then reached out and thrust the ivy aside and saw the little hole with its freshly enlarged edges. He put in his hand and took out the piece of red amber. He stared at it, and then at Randal, his eyes wide and bright and his nostrils flaring above the clamped mouth. Then, still without taking his gaze from the other boy’s face, he thrust the thing down the front of his own tunic. And all the while there was no sound but the sucking of the stream under the bank and the deep song of the bees in the ivy bloom.
Then Bevis cried out at him in a strange voice full of furious grief, ‘Oh, Randal, why did you do it?’ and flung himself upon him like a wild beast.
In any ordinary fight, Randal would have held his own against Bevis, though the other boy was nearly two years older, than he was, simply because Bevis had learned to fight fair, and he had not. But this was not an ordinary fight. Bevis seemed possessed of a devil. It was as though he did not even feel the blows which Randal, sobbing as he fought, drove into his white, furious face. He knocked Randal down and when the younger boy scrambled to his feet knocked him down again. Randal’s nose was bleeding and his right eye was full of jagged stars; he was dazed and dizzied by the blows that seemed to come at him from all directions at once, and when he kicked or struck out, his blows no longer found Bevis at all. He was down on the ground now, with Bevis on top of him panting in his face; they were rolling over and over together in a vicious flurry of arms and legs; his head was being banged on the hard, exposed ash roots, and everything was going dim and blurred and far off . . .
And then suddenly it seemed that it was over, and the devil was out of Bevis. Randal waited for more blows, but they did not come. Slowly he humped himself on to his knees and crouched there, one shoulder leaned against the ash trunk, his head hanging, and the blood from his nose dripping splat – splat – splat, like the ripe mulberries that he had once seen dropping from a tree at Arundel and making crimson stains on the flagstones. Bevis stood over him, drawing his breath in a queer, whistling way.
‘Why did you do it?’ Bevis said again at last; but whereas the first time it had been simply a cry, this time it was a question that demanded an answer.
Still crouching against the ash trunk, Randal looked up at him slowly, and saw with fierce satisfaction that there was a broken bruise on the boy’s cheek-bone. ‘Because I hate you!’ he said hoarsely. ‘I hate you, Bevis D’Aguillon, you and your old bit of red stone that you go round showing to people like – like the king giving something to a beggar! I never asked you to tell Reynfrey you pushed me into the cider vat when I fell in all by myself! I never asked you to be sorry for me and – and kind to me because of my back! I don’t mind my back – I don’t mind being beaten.’ His furious torrent of words fell over itself and his voice cracked into a wail. ‘And all the while I thought – I thought –’
Slowly, the white rage in Bevis’s face gave way to bewilderment. ‘Randal, stop talking gibberish – I don’t understand. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Oh, yes, you do, because it’s true – it’s all true, isn’t it?’ Randal flung at him, sniffling through his bleeding nose.
‘No, it’s not, then!’ Bevis shouted. ‘You’re a horrible boy to think such things.’
‘I’m not so horrible as you are!’ They were both shouting now, shouting and glaring and ridiculous; but to them it was not ridiculous. ‘You’re the most horrible boy in all Sussex, for all that Sybilla thinks you’re so wonderful!’
There was a little silence, and then Bevis squatted down on his haunches, close to the other boy. ‘Did Sybilla fill you up with all this?’
Randal nodded. ‘At least – she was talking to Cerdic; it was after Luffra stole the sucking-pig, and she thought I’d done it, and I heard –’ He choked. ‘I heard all she said.’
‘Sybilla is a fool,’ said Bevis as his grandfather might have said it. ‘She’s a fat fool – and you’re a worse one for paying any heed to her.’
Randal did not answer. They squatted staring at each other among the tangle of the past summer’s willow-herb. Far off across Muther-Wutt Field they heard someone whistle to a dog, the low of a plough ox, the ring of hammer on anvil from the smithy, and above them the bees were busy in the ivy bloom. At last Bevis said, ‘Well, of course I was sorry about your back; wouldn’t you have been sorry about mine? It – made me feel I wanted to hit somebody. But it wasn’t anything to do with that, my showing you my bit of amber.’
Randal scowled at him out of the one eye he could still use. ‘Why did you, then?’
‘Because of the goldfinches, I suppose. And then you fell in the cider vat and we all started laughing; and after that everything was friendly, until – until –’
His voice trailed away, and the bee-haunted silence settled on them again. Strange things were happening in Randal. Something swelling up big and painful in his chest. So Bevis had wanted to be friends after all, and he had spoiled everything by stealing the red amber, spoiled it before it was well begun.
‘Bevis,’ he said in a small cracked whisper, ‘oh, Bevis,’ and could say no more, because there did not seem anything more to say, and because his throat was full of tears as well as the taste of blood.
And then the wonderful thing happened; for Bevis suddenly reached out and laid his arm across his shoulders and began to shake him, the small, easy, companionable shake that means friendliness as well as exasperation. The queer, pearly look had quite gone from his face.
‘Don’t you ever go listening to people like Sybilla again!’ he said. ‘Do you hear me? Don’t you ever –’ He stopped shaking. ‘I’ve made a wicked mess of your face! Come on, let’s wash off the worst of the blood, and then we’ll go down to Ancret and ask her to salve it. Sybilla’s hands are heavy, and besides she asks too many questions.’
They dropped down by the twisted alder roots on to the tiny spit if shingle, and set to work to clean up, in the swift, icy, downland water that smelled of watercress.
When they had got rid of as much of the blood as they could, both from themselves and the front of Randal’s tunic, they set off to visit Ancret – the same Ancret who had heard Valiant’s hoof-beats in the wind, on the morning of the day that d’Aguillon came home. Randal had heard stories about Ancret, queer stories, and he knew that she was herb wise, and doctored all the ills of the Manor. He knew that she had been Bevis’s foster mother after his own mother had died, and that Bevis loved her, and he had seen her in the distance, about the village and the Manor lands, but he had not gone to see her in her own place before.
The shadows were lengthening as they crossed the familiar driftway that led up from the ford to the village, and headed southward, for Ancret lived withdrawn from the rest of the Manor folk, away beyond the cultivated land, within the fringe of the woods below the Bramble Hill. A thrush flew out of a hazel bush as they stepped out of the trees into the little clearing that was Ancret’s herb plot; nothing else mo
ved, not even the air. In that first moment Randal would not have thought that there was a cottage there at all, save for the dark oblong of a doorway in the side of a little green mound in the midst of the clearing, and the whisper of woodsmoke, curling out through a hole in the top to mingle its blue tang with the wet wood and fallen leaf and coming frost smells of the autumn evening. Certainly he did not see anyone besides himself and Bevis in the clearing, until there was a movement by the door, under the elder tree that grew there, and he saw, in the way that a sudden movement will show a herd of fallow deer where there was only dappled sunlight the moment before, that there was a woman standing there. A woman in a faded, grey-green kirtle exactly the colour of the bothy’s turf roof behind her, who looked as though she had known that they were coming, and was waiting for them.
She was a small woman, slight and narrow-boned, but standing there under the elder tree she looked tall. Randal was to find later that she always looked tall, that if she wore her rough homespun cloak with the great earth-coloured patch where she had torn the hem, it fell about her like a queen’s mantle. All he saw now was that she had dark eyes – dark and full and bloomed with light like a deer’s, in a narrow, work-worn, weather-browned face; and that her hair, hanging in thick braids over her shoulders, had cloudy lights in the darkness of it, the colour of the ripe elderberries, and was much younger than the rest of her, like a girl’s hair.
‘Good fortune be to you, fosterling,’ she said.
‘Good fortune come with me, Ancret my foster-mother.’ Bevis returned, as they halted before her.
‘You have come, then,’ Again it was as though she were expecting them. She looked from Bevis to Randal and back again. ‘So, there has been the fine blood-letting. How did that come about?’
‘I hit him,’ Bevis said, and shut his mouth exactly like his grandfather.
Ancret looked at the bruise on his cheek, and the laughter shimmered at the back of her dark eyes. ‘It is my mind that he hit you also.’
‘Well, of course he did.’ Bevis rubbed the place and then hurriedly stopped as he found how sore it was. ‘But mine’s only a bruise and ’twill mend quickly enough on its own. I’ve brought him to you to put his face to rights, Ancret.’
She stooped and took up a pitcher that stood beside the door. ‘Then go you and draw me some water from the well,’ and as he took the pitcher from her and went to do her bidding, she turned full to the younger boy for the first time. ‘And you, come your ways in with me, Randal.’
She must have heard his name long before this, from the other Manor folk, but it made him feel a little queer all the same, to hear her call him by it, with her strange dark eyes upon him, and for a moment he was not sure that he wanted to go into the bothy that was like a little green mound; he had always heard that the fairy kind lived in mounds. But he remembered that she was Bevis’s foster-mother, and the laughter was shimmering again behind her eyes. So he nodded, and followed her down the three earthen steps through the low, dark doorway.
Inside it was not so dark after all, for the bothy faced west: the evening light came in down the steps and the smoke hole was so big that he could see a patch of milky sky and the shadow-flash of a bird’s flight across it. The fire burned on a raised hearth in the centre of the round house-place, and little barley cakes were baking on the hot hearthstone, adding their own friendly, new-bread smell to the heavy smell of earth and the blue reek of woodsmoke and the aromatic tang of nameless herbs.
Ancret made him sit down on a stool at the foot of the steps where the light from the doorway fell strongest, and taking the pitcher from Bevis, when he brought it dripping from the well, she poured a little into a bowl and set it to heat in the hot fringes of the fire. Then she fetched a bundle of leaves from somewhere in the farther shadows, where it seemed to Randal that there were many strange things hanging that he could not quite see, and took seven leaves from the bundle and set them to seethe in the water. And all the time she spoke no word. Randal had hoped that Bevis would come in too, when he had brought the water, but Bevis had gone out again, and he could hear him hammering something, a sound like a woodpecker but sharper, tap-tap-tap, all the while they waited, he on his stool and Ancret standing withdrawn into herself beside the hearth, for the water to boil. Tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap.
When the steam rose and the surface of the water crept and dimpled, Ancret took the bowl from the fire with a piece of cloth wrapped round her hand, and broke other herbs into it, and shook cold water into it from her fingers until it was cool enough to use. Then she stripped back Randal’s tunic, and with the leaves themselves bathed the bruises on his arms and body and face. She bathed his black eye, which was the sorest of his hurts, last of all, and then laid her hand over it, and said in a tone of authority, as though to someone or something that he could not see,
‘Out fire and in snow,
In weal and out woe.
Sorrow of flesh bid you go.
In the name of St. Luke of the Ox’s Horns.’
She kept her hand there a long time, and it seemed to Randal that a lovely coolness flowed out of her fingers, soothing away the fiery throbbing that had been there before. And when at last, with a long sigh as though something had gone out from her, she took her hand away, he saw, squinting out of his usable eye, that the palm and finger tips were reddened as though she had scorched them.
It seemed that the thing was finished, and he got off the stool, and stood looking up at her with a vague idea – he was too battered by all that had happened both within him and without, to think of anything very clearly – that he should thank her. But before he could find the words she took his damaged face between her hands and bent to look into his eyes, holding them with her own, so that he could not look away. ‘You’re no Norman, like Bevis my fosterling and no Saxon either, despite your hair. What are you, that Sir Everard brought home with him?’
‘My mother was a Saxon lady, and my father was a Breton man-at-arms,’ Randal said.
‘Breton? So – the old blood comes back,’ Ancret said musingly. ‘Breton-Briton, Briton-Breton . . .’ Then as Randal looked at her, frowning in bewilderment, she smiled. ‘The Saxons drove out your kind, many and many of your kind that fled across the narrow seas and took refuge in the place they called Brittany; but when the Saxons’ time was done, the old blood came flowing back at the heels of Count Alain of Brittany, to Hastings over the chalk yonder, on the day that Harold died.’ It was almost as though she were singing now, crooning to herself rather than to him. ‘But we, who are an older people still, who were an old people when they raised the grave mound on Bramble Hill in the days when the world was young, we see the conquerors come and go and come again, and marry and mingle, but we know that all things pass, like a little wind through the bramble bushes. There are few of us, of the pure blood, left now, but something of our blood runs dark, dark like the veining in an iris petal, through all the people that come after. Even through you, under your thatch of Saxon hair.’ How dark her eyes were, so dark that you felt as though you might lose yourself in them as in the stillness of deep water. ‘Aye, the old blood runs strong, and comes into its own again; you should know that, you that Sir Everard brought home on his saddle bow.’ In another moment, he felt, the dark, still water would close over his head and he would know something – something that he did not want to know. Then, in the very instant before it happened, she let him go, turned him to the little doorway that was mostly in the roof, and said, ‘Out, after the other one.’
When he climbed up into the last of the sunset, Bevis was sitting on the sloping turf edge of the roof, with his knife in one hand and a heavy flint in the other. He stuck the knife back in his belt and sent the flint skittering away into the bushes, and drew his legs up with his arms round his knees. Randal scrambled up beside him – the roof came down so low that he only had to put his hands on the edge and give a little hop – and settled himself with his legs swinging. He was not quite sure what they were waiting for
, but he was content, with a content like the quietness after a storm, to be with Bevis and do whatever Bevis wanted. And in a few moments Ancret came out after them with two of the barley cakes hot from the bakestone and dripping with some dark, sweet, pippy mess which Randal had never met before.
‘There,’ she said, giving one to each of them, ‘never say that Ancret sent you away hungry – though indeed it must be near your supper time, up to the Hall.’
Bevis looked at her contentedly, already licking the dribble of dark sweetness round the edge of his cake. ‘I wish you still lived up at the Hall, Ancret.’
She stood with one hand on the branch of the elder tree that arched above them all, smiling a little secret smile. ‘I lived for years up to the Hall, herded among other folk, for your sake, little fosterling, because I love you. Now I live my own life again in my own way, and when you want me, it is you who must come to find me. I shall always be here for your finding – while you need me.’ The smile that had been secret flashed open in her dark, narrow face, ‘I – and my bramble syrup.’
So that was what it was, this dark, sweet, pippy stuff. Randal took a bite of barley cake and chewed, then licked a blob of the syrup from his thumb, his tongue enjoying the sweetness even while the deeper part of his mind was still full of the things that had happened between himself and the boy beside him. Through the berry-laden branches of the elder tree he could see Bramble Hill against the sky, and the turf hummock on its crest that Ancret said ‘they’ had raised when the world was young, and the other hummock of brushwood and furze roots that the Manor folk had been raising for days now, ready to be lit on All Souls’ Eve, Reynfrey said, as the fires had been lit up there every All Souls’ Eve and every May Day Eve since before the memory of man. All bloomed with shadows now, shadows crowding among the bushes and the bramble domes, quiet under a windy sky that was suddenly flying with the manes and tails of wild horses.
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