Knight's Fee

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Bevis made her fast by her leash to the elderwood doorpost, and the great hound sat down quite unprotesting, for she was used to being tied up there. She was friends with Ship and White-Eye, and friends with the sheep, but no dogs save their own were allowed among the ewes at lambing time. She licked the hands of both boys, and lay down nose on paws with no more than a liquid whimper of protest as they turned away after the shepherd.

  Lewin heaved back the hurdle at the entrance to the big lambing fold, and they followed him in, Randal fixing the hurdle in place again behind them. He had spent many hours up at the lambing pens every year since he first came to Dean, and the scene was as deeply familiar to him as any other part of the Manor’s life; yet tonight, all at once, he was seeing it differently, with a new awareness that was almost painful, as though he had one skin less than usual: the deep bracken litter underfoot catching running gleams of light, coppery gold, from the lantern under Lewin’s rough cloak, the man-high hurdle walls laced thick with furze branches to keep out the wind, the huddled, woolly shapes of the waiting ewes through which they waded knee deep, feeling the faint, live warmth rise from them like the mist of their breath. Ship and White-Eye moved ahead, running quietly among the ewes, looking, just as surely as Lewin, to see that all was well; and the rest followed. Every now and then Lewin halted and stooped to feel a woolly body, or to let a meagre beam of light shine on to one of the ewes from the lantern that he kept so carefully shielded. ‘There’s some fools that goes swinging a lantern round among the ewes and then wonder that the lambs get trampled on,’ he said in that soft, caressing growl of his. ‘And there’s some, not much wiser, that reckons ’tis the light that terrifies them.’

  ‘And it isn’t?’ Randal said, bending with him over one of his charges.

  ‘Na, ’tis the shadows that the light casts . . . ’Tisn’t often, save in the hardest winters, that we get wolves on the hill nowadays, but a light carried heedless sets the shadows leaping and prancing and running – ah, just as the wolves must have come leaping round the folds in the winter nights way back; and the sheep remember.’

  The next ewe was standing head down to nuzzle at something on the ground, and as he let a careful gleam fall on her from the lantern, two little damp, sprawling shapes flashed out of the shadow into sharp-edged reality on the trampled, russet bracken. ‘Sa, sa, here’s one for the side-pens. Bravely done, my girl!’ Lewin gave the lantern to Randal, and scooping up the two limp creatures, turned towards the small hurdled-off pens round the sides of the fold, where the ewes were housed with their new-born lambs for the first day. The mother followed, bleating distressfully and sniffing at her nearest lamb, and Randal brought up the rear with the lantern carefully shielded under his own cloak.

  When they reached the pen, he uncovered the lantern at a word from Lewin, while the shepherd made sure that all was well with the ewe and persuaded the lambs to suck; and the fine rain that drifted across the top of the hurdles caught the gleam of it and became a spitting, golden smoke. Ship came thrusting into the pen, and his shadow, running sideways from him before the lantern, was suddenly the shadow of a wolf. Hurriedly Randal spread his cloak to shield the light, and the shadows came crowding in, jagged, leaping shadows of wolves that prowled beyond the corner of the eye; and Lewin’s crook lying beside him might have been a spear.

  Lewin glanced up from the ewe, and his eyes met Randal’s. ‘You see?’ he said.

  Perhaps it was remembering, as Lewin meant it when he spoke of the sheep remembering. It was gone now. Come and gone in the time that it took for the shadow of the boy’s cloak to swing across the little hurdled pen. And the shepherd got up, and held out his hand for the lantern, stowing it again beneath his thick sheepskin mantle. ‘She’ll do well enough,’ he said, and turned back to the main fold where Bevis was waiting with White-Eye.

  They finished the round of the lambing fold, found another lamb newly born, but nowhere any sign of trouble. ‘Looks like an easy night,’ said Lewin in rumbling content. They went into the big enclosure beside the other, where the ewes that had given birth within the last few days were folded at night with their lambs. Here, too, all was quiet. And in a while they went back to the bothy, where Joyeuse greeted them with softly thumping tail, before them the prospect of warmth and shelter, until presently Lewin would take down the lantern that he had just hung from the roof, and start the same round all over again. There was little rest for the shepherd folk at lambing time.

  Now he shook the rain from his shoulder, and drew the old sheepskin rug across the opening of the bothy that was built of hurdles like the folds, and thatched with furze; and blew up the fire of crackling thorn branches in the hearth, made of a few stones, in the corner, and propped a pot of water to heat over it. Often there would be a motherless or ailing lamb before the fire, but not tonight. They huddled close, for the wind seeped through the hurdles for all the lacing of furze branches, Ship and White-Eye and Joyeuse lying nose on paws among their feet. Randal sat with his hunched shoulder leaning against Bevis who leaned companionably back, and stared a little sleepily into the fire, where a red hollow like the gaping mouth of a dragon had opened under the crackling thorn branches, and listened to the soft rush of the wind across the thatch.

  ‘And all the time, the wind blows over,’ he thought. ‘Ancret’s people, and the Saxons, and Harold dead at Hastings over yonder, and now the Normans: and all the while the wind blowing over the downs, just the same.’ Half asleep as he was, he was suddenly aware of the new life in the lambing pens, the constant watchful coming and going of the shepherd and dogs and lantern, as something not just happening now, but reaching back and back, and forward and forward, into the very roots of things that were beyond time.

  Something of the same mood must have been upon Lewin also, for when he had brought out the meal bag and tipped barley meal into the birchwood bowl, thrusting away the dogs’ soft, expectant muzzles, he rose – but he could not stand upright in the little bothy – rooted in the willow basket hanging from the roof, in which he kept his few personal belongings, and brought out something wrapped in a rag of yellow cloth.

  ‘I’ll show you a thing,’ he said to Randal. ‘Sitting here at nights I’ve had it in my heart to show you, a good while past. Showed it to the young master when he stood no higher than my belt,’ and as Randal looked up expectantly from the fire, and Bevis watched with the interest alight in his thin, eager face, he unfolded the yellow rag, and put into the boy’s hand a thing somewhat like a double axe-head made from flint, mealy grey and tawny with the outer weathering that flint gathers through the years – an axehead, but with no hole to take the haft, nor any flanges for binding it on.

  Without quite knowing why he did so, for he was not left-handed, Randal put out his left hand for it, and felt his fingers close over it as something infinitely familiar. But he had never seen such an object before.

  ‘What is it?’ he demanded.

  ‘What it is called I do not know, but with such things it is in my mind that men fought the wolf-kind, and maybe each other, very long ago. I have seen others turned up on the downs, but never one to equal that one. I found it up on Long Down, years ago, and kept it because it was made for a left-handed man, even as I.’

  Randal shifted it to his right hand, and found that it was true. One could use it perfectly well with the right hand, but it did not lie there happily, as in the left.

  ‘Left-handed, or one-handed.’ He did not know what made him say that. He leaned forward, looking at it in the light of the fire. And then, maybe because of the strange mood he was in, maybe because he was half asleep, maybe because of that dark thread of the old blood that Ancret had recognised, running in his veins, an odd thing happened. Once, in the outer bailey at Arundel, he had watched spell-bound while a wonder-worker who made live pigeons come out of an empty basket, had made a striped pebble picked up from the dirt where the fowls were scratching, grow in his hand without any visible change, into a yellow iris flower. He
could see now the shimmering, silken fall of the petals, the dark, hair-fine intricacy of the veining that sprang from the slender throat, the sheer, singing strength of the colour. And as the pebble had become a flower, so the thing he held was suddenly warm as though fresh from the knapper’s hand, and the outer crust of the centuries all gone like a little dust, leaving the beautiful, dark blue flint in all its newness. It was as though the thing flowered between his hands. He had an extraordinary sense of kinship with the unknown man who had first closed his fingers over that strange weapon, who had perhaps seen the wolves leaping about the lambing folds as he, Randal, had almost seen them for an instant tonight; an extraordinary feeling of oneness with Dean, of some living bond running back through the blue, living flint, making him part of other men and sheep and wolves, and they a part of him.

  This was the true seisin. He had the oddest feeling that because he had earned some right that he had not had before, because, coward that he was, he had set out with the only weapon he had against Sir Thiebaut de Coucy, Dean itself was letting him in . . .

  The water in the pot began to bubble, and Lewin took it off and poured it into the bowl of barley meal, stirring with a stick as he did so, until he had a good steaming, porridgey mess, and added a lump of honeycomb – Ancret gave him a honeycomb from time to time – saying, ‘That is in honour of the day that you come back from Bramber. ’Tis not every night that White-Eye and Ship and I have our stirrabout sweet.’

  And Randal shifted, rubbing the firelight and the dust of sleep out of his eyes with his free hand, and grinned at Bevis who grinned back, and returned the strange flint weapon into the hand that Lewin held out for it. The warmth in it was only from the fire after all, and the flint was covered with the grey and tawny weathering of the years.

  But the feeling of being given seisin, of being let in, remained with him.

  11

  Witch Hunt!

  LIFE AT DEAN went on in its usual way. The swallows came back to the great barn. Bevis and Randal dammed the stream and dipped the sheep, taking their turn to stand waist deep in the cold water, heaving the terrified and struggling beasts off the hurdle jetty. Hay harvest came and went, and the barley in Muther-Wutt Field was almost ripe to the sickle.

  But under the surface of things, there was an uneasiness like thunder in the air, gathering ever more thickly as that spring and summer went by. People whispered together that maybe the end of the world was indeed coming. Strange things happened; omens and marvels. Last winter there had been strange lights in the northern sky; now a calf with two heads was born up at Durrington. People had queer, unchancy dreams and talked about them at half-breath afterwards; and as always when people were afraid, they turned back to the old gods. The Prior of Steyning complained of difficulty in getting the tithes in, or any work out of the Priory villeins, and on Lammas Eve, Adam Clerk came to Sir Everard in deep distress, having found the trunk of a certain ancient thorn tree on the Manor smeared with blood.

  The next day Sir Everard had some business with de Savage, over at Broadwater, and riding home with the two boys behind him as usual, just where the Bramble Hill dropped into the woods, they came upon Ancret gathering simples. They would not have seen her, but that she heard the soft thud of the hoofbeats on the track, and straightened and came down to meet them, trailing her dusty-coloured kirtle like a queen’s mantle through the dusty-coloured flowers of late summer, the wild marjoram and the swaying yarrow among the dusty hazel bushes. Randal thought, looking at her, that he had never seen anything human that took on the colour of her surrounds as perfectly as Ancret did. Only those deer’s eyes of hers, darker even than Sir Everard’s, were bright.

  Sir Everard reined up and greeted her courteously as he always did. And she returned the greeting, ‘God’s joy to you, Sir Everard,’ and stood waiting, her eyes on his face, as though she knew he had something to say to her.

  ‘Ancret,’ said Sir Everard after a moment, fidgeting with his sword belt, ‘if I had not met with you this evening, I should have come to your cottage. Adam came to see me yesterday with a tale of having found the big thorn tree below Long Down smeared with blood.’

  Randal, watching her, had a feeling of a curtain being drawn behind her eyes, though they remained as bright as ever.

  ‘Did he so, my Lord?’

  ‘Don’t pretend to me that you did not know about it,’ Sir Everard said sternly.

  ‘What would d’Aguillon have me do?’

  ‘Put a stop to it; it is dangerous.’

  Ancret came a step nearer, and laid her hand on Valiant’s neck, looking up into the knight’s face with those dark, curtained eyes. ‘This year is not like other years. This year the people are afraid. And when they are afraid, men turn back to the gods that they knew before ever they knew Christ. Be glad that it is no more than a cock’s blood smeared on a thorn tree.’

  There was a pause, Valiant standing stone still under Ancret’s hand, though Randal’s and Bevis’s horses fidgeted behind him, swishing their tails against the flies. Then, leaning down a little from his high saddle, Sir Everard asked quietly, ‘What is it, Ancret? Is it the End of the World, as the priests say?’

  ‘I do not think so. But this is a strange year, and strange things moving in it.’ She hesitated, as though making up her mind whether or no to say something more. Then she said, ‘In the time that it takes for the news to come through Andred’s Weald, we shall hear that the King is dead.’

  Sir Everard straightened in the saddle with a jerk. ‘That kind of talk is folly. How can you know, before the messenger arrives?’

  ‘I dreamed last night that I saw a red-haired man lying under an oak tree, with an arrow in his heart,’ Ancret said simply, ‘and his blood soaked down into the roots of the tree, and the tree strengthened and put out new leaves, so that he and the tree were one.’

  A few days later they heard that the Red King was dead, shot while hunting in the great New Forest that he had made for his pleasure.

  Some people said that his friend Sir Walter Tyrrell, who had been with him that day, and was not to be found afterwards, had shot him, either by accident or sick, like most of England, of his harsh rule. Some believed that Brother Henry, who had lately joined him in England, had loosed the arrow. Certainly he had been quick and purposeful in action after his brother’s death, securing the fealty of as many of the leading Barons as he could gather in two days, and crowned at Westminster on the third, before the Archbishop of York could get to him, so that the thing must be done by the Bishop of London. But still, deep under these surface reasons for the King’s death, ran a dark whisper that no man spoke aloud. Red William had belonged to the Old Faith, scarcely paying even lip service to the faith of Christ, all men knew that; and he had red hair, even as the man under the oak tree of Ancret’s dream. Red, the colour of fire, of blood, of sacrifice. Was it not always a red-haired man who died for the life of the people?

  The new King issued promises of just government to his Kingdom; he flung the hated Ranulf Flambard (no longer Bishop of Durham) into the Tower gaol; he brought back the gentle old Archbishop of Canterbury, whom William had hounded into exile. Late that autumn he took for his Queen Eadgyth, the orphan daughter of Malcolm of Scotland, who was descended through her mother from the great King Alfred whose White Horse of Wessex still had power to set men’s hearts aflame. Most of his Norman subjects mocked at the marriage, but when the news reached Dean, Sir Everard, standing at the head of the South Field to see the great ox-plough turn at the autumn ploughing, said to Bevis and Randal beside him, ‘Our Henry may be his brother’s murderer, but he is a wise man as well as a strong one. Did I not once say to you that the time will come when there will be no more Norman or Saxon, but only English? This marriage, for all that the fools among us laugh at it, will help to make one England.’ He paused, watching the wheeling cloud of gulls behind the plough. ‘Already we begin, a little, a very little, to be one people. And I think that before so very long, maybe even bef
ore another harvest time comes round, we shall need all the unity we have if we are not to fall under the Norman’s heel again.’

  ‘How odd,’ Randal thought, watching him. ‘He has forgotten that he is Norman himself.’ But both boys knew what he meant. William was dead, and Robert home from his crusade and sitting in his Duchy again without even having to pay back the ten thousand marks for which he had pawned it. But assuredly he would not be content to sit there long, while for the second time a younger brother wore the crown of England.

  ‘It is between the two brothers, now that William is gone to his account,’ Sir Everard said after a while, ‘and neither will rest until one is the death or the master of the other.’

  But all that seemed very far away from the ordinary men in the fields, more concerned with the winter wheat than the affairs of their lords. The year that had seemed so strangely fated was passing; they felt that the shadow which had lain so dark across the land was slipping away behind them. They were no longer afraid, and so they left the old gods, and went to church again; and because the clergy preached hell fire and their consciences were tender, they grew afraid as they had not been before, of those among them who still danced for the Horned One in the woods or smeared honey on an oak tree. So there were a few witch hunts, and folk looked askance at any old woman they passed gathering simples in the lanes, and made the Horns with their fingers to avert evil. Even Ancret, going into Steyning to sell her spare honey, found that the folk were careful not to meet her gaze or step in her shadow, though on the Manor they had too many memories of warts charmed away and fevers cooled by her for any such folly.

  Summer came again, a still summer evening with sheep shearing over and the hay making almost done. And the time of which Sir Everard had spoken, when Saxon and Norman English must stand together or fall again under the spurred heel of Normandy was almost come.