The first blue mists of the September evening were beginning to rise, though the swallows still swooped and darted in the last of the sunlight about the battlements of Tinchebrai and over the heads of the two opposing armies encamped below. Randal, on his way back from seeing to Durandal, who like most of the spare horses was picketed at an outlying village, paused where the woods fell back a little, to glance out over the wide valley of the Orne. He could see the great castle still flushed fiercely tawny by the westering sunlight, though the huddled roofs of the little town at its foot were already dimming into blue and violet shadows, and the faint blue twilight and the autumn mists were creeping out from the oakwoods to mingle with the smoke of countless cooking fires that made a drifting haze of their own all across the great camp. Knowing where to look for them among all the other tents, the awnings and flying banners, the crowded fires and horse-lines, he could just make out the big, checkered tents of the Counts of Maine and Brittany, each pitched among their own men, and closer at hand, on a knoll of rising ground in the midst of the English camp, that had been an orchard before they cut most of the trees down to make room for it, the great weather-worn, crimson pavilion of Henry himself.
It was more than a fortnight since the English army with its Cenommanian and Breton allies had come out of the oakwoods by the wild road north from Domfront, and settled down to besiege this great Castle of William de Mortain – de Mortain, Lord of Pevensey in his day, until, like de Bellême, he had forfeited his English lands for rebellion against the King, and, also like de Bellême, had made common cause with Duke Robert in revenge. More than a fortnight – the smell must be getting somewhat thick in Tinchebrai by now, Randal reckoned. Well, one way or the other, it looked as though the siege could not last much longer, not now that Duke Robert had brought up his own forces to relieve his henchman’s stronghold. They couldn’t see the Norman camp from here, it was hidden by the oakwoods, but awareness of it seemed to quiver like thunder in the air over the whole valley; and every soul in the English camp knew that somewhere – not in the great crimson pavilion, but out between their two armies, maybe in the lea of a beanstack or under a poplar tree by the track side – Brother Robert and Brother Henry were met this evening as they had met between their armies before, to talk of terms.
Would anything come of it this time? Randal wondered. Fiercely he hoped not, as most of the camp were hoping not. Nothing save fighting could settle the thing in the long run, but one great battle now might do it, the one great victory that Bevis had spoken of, that would bind Norman and Saxon together in the common bond of Englishry. Was that what was coming tomorrow?
The chatter of a magpie from the woods behind him called him back from tomorrow, and he remembered that it was no part of a squire’s duties to be standing thinking his own thoughts on the fringe of the war-camp. He strode on again, whistling tunelessly as he went, casting wide through the edge of the woods so as to come down from above on the derelict tanning shed where Bevis and a handful of other young knights had taken up their quarters; it was quicker so, than trying to make one’s way through the teeming thickness of the camp.
But without knowing it, he must have made a cast wider than usual, and so he came on a place in the woods that he had not found before, a small clearing among the denseness of the moss-floored oakwoods, and in it a hovel of wattle and daub under a ragged thatch that gave somehow the effect of a filthy old straw hat pulled over its eyes, squatting amid seven gnarled and ancient apple trees, two bee skeps and a tethered goat. On one of the trees, and only one, the apples were already ripe; small, greyish apples with a scent of fennel about them that reached his quick nose even as he checked and stood looking up into the lichened branches. It was one of the tasks of a squire to forage for his lord, but in any case the idea of apples, the crisp juiciness of apples, at the end of that dusty day – Normandy seemed to him dustier than England – would have pulled Randal up in his tracks. While he stood there, a woman came out through the smoky darkness that hung like a curtain at the doorway of the hovel, with a wooden milking pail in her hand.
She was a very old woman, scrawny and twisted as one of her own ancient apple trees, with her head tied up in a folded cloth and little bright black eyes in a face all fallen together and made up of earth-coloured wrinkles. She checked at sight of Randal, and fixed him with a bright, beady stare, blowing her crumpled and toothless mouth in and out, but she did not seem surprised at his appearance; probably he was not the first of his kind to pass that way, and he rather wondered that she had managed so long to keep the goat.
‘Well then, Englishman or Breton or whatever you be, and what is it that you’re wanting?’
‘Apples,’ Randal said. ‘A handful of apples for my knight.’
She let out a squawk of laughter and set down the pail. ‘Sa, sa, it is only a boy after all! How old is your knight?’
‘Two years older than I am,’ Randal told her with dignity.
She flung up her hands. ‘Does Henry of Coutances fight his wars with children, then?’
Randal would have protested hotly at this, but he had a feeling that to leave well alone, though bad for the dignity, was the way to get the apples he wanted. So he grinned cheerfully at the little old woman, standing with his feet planted wide apart, and towering over her, with his helmet, which he had unbuckled and pulled off, swinging in his hand.
‘Maybe – but give me the apples, old mother.’
She looked up at him slantwise like a bird. ‘Aye then, take as many as you can carry in that iron cap of yours, and give me a kiss for them. ’Tis a long and a weary long while since a fine young man kissed me.’
It seemed fair enough. Randal stooped, and put his free arm round her for good measure, the helmet still in his other hand. She smelled sour, but it was not the kind of sourness that a hound would have objected to, and nor did Randal. He kissed her, laughingly and kindly and clumsily, and stood back, grinning still.
The old woman cackled like a hen. ‘None so bad, my bold young squire! None so bad for the first time.’
Meeting the snapping, cackling amusement in her little black eyes, Randal felt himself flushing. ‘How do you know it was the first time?’
‘Easily enough! – Any woman could tell you as much,’ she said scornfully. Then, voice and manner abruptly changing, ‘Aye, but there’s another thing I’ll tell you that’s none so easy, about yourself,’ and before he knew what she was about, she had put up her old, clawed hands and taken his face between them, and drawn it down to look into his eyes. ‘When tomorrow’s sun goes down, you’ll be no man’s squire, but your own knight.’
Randal felt a little prickling chill in the back of his neck; but he laughed, and shook his head between her hands. ‘I shall never be my own knight. I’m the kind that stays a squire always. It costs money and acres to be a knight, and I have not anything of my own, save my sword and helmet.’
‘None the less,’ said the old woman very softly, ‘knight you will be, before another sun goes down, and as to the acres –’ Her voice trailed away; her hands were still on either side of his face, and he felt that he could not break from their hold on him, or maybe from the hold of her eyes. They were small, hard, bright eyes, their darkness very different from the shadowy darkness of Ancret’s eyes, and he saw the reflection of himself in them, and the leafy reflection of the apple branches behind his head. Yet suddenly he had again the feeling he had had once when Ancret held him so, of sinking down into their darkness as into dark water, only this time it was a darkness of rustling leaves. In another moment they would part and let him through and close again behind him, and he would see – he would know – something that he could not bear to know. Already he could see it dimly, moving to meet him through the leaves . . . And then a bird flashed across from branch to branch of the apple tree above him, so close that the beat of its wings was in his ears; the sudden movement broke the spell, or else, as Ancret had done, at the last instant she let him go. ‘Ah, but leave
that for now – leave that until the hour brings it,’ and she dropped her hands and stooped for the milking pail.
Randal stepped back, oddly shaken, and not sure why. For the memory of the uncanny moment was passing almost as soon as the moment itself.
‘If you can foretell the future, tell me if we shall join battle tomorrow,’ he said, jeeringly.
‘Oh, aye, there’ll be fighting,’ she told him, almost without interest. And something in her tone made him think again of Ancret, and Ancret’s people, watching the later folk come and go, conqueror following conqueror, like a little wind through the bramble bushes. But if tomorrow did not matter to her, it mattered to him . . .
‘Shall we win? Old mother, shall we win?’ The question stuck in his throat.
She shot her lips in and out at him. ‘Maybe you will, and maybe you will not. Have I not told you enough? Whoever has victory, I must milk the goat.’ The last words were tossed to him over his shoulder as she hobbled towards the tethered animal. ‘Away with you now. Fill your helmet and go.’
Randal stood for a moment looking after her, frowning a little as he tried to remember – something that he felt he had only just forgotten. Then he turned his attention to the apple tree, and picked his helmet full of little grey, fennel-scented apples. He hesitated when he had done, looking again towards the old woman, but as she still kept her back to him and had seemingly no more thought for him nor anything save her milking, he finally shrugged, called out to her, ‘God keep you, old mother. Thank you for the apples,’ and set off once more on his interrupted way back to the tan shed.
He walked with the apple-filled helmet in the hollow of his arm, not whistling any more; thinking. Had she spoken truth? Was he really to win his knighthood tomorrow? Oh, but how could he ever be a knight? He shook his shoulders and determined to think no more about it, and of course went on thinking, dreaming a little, as one does dream of the shining and impossible things happening . . .
When he got back to the tan shed the day had faded almost to dusk, and the fire of brushwood and heather snarls that burned in the wide, nettle-chocked entrance had begun to cast a fluttering, tawny light over the faces of the men gathered about it and up into the lower branches of the giant old hornbeam that grew before the door. Martin, Gervase de Machault’s squire, was roasting a rabbit over the fire on the point of his sword, and Gervase was there, and several of the young knights who had been squires with Randal and Bevis at Bramber. But of Bevis himself there was no sign at all.
‘He’s gone off to settle some trouble between his fellows and de Salynges’,’ Gervase told him, without much interest. Quarrels were common between the different Manors.
Randal hesitated, wondering whether he should go after him, and if so what he should do with the apples, and in that moment a square and freckled youth said, ‘Hé! I smell apples!’ and reached out to grab. Others followed the action, and Randal stepped back, laughing but determined. ‘Hands off, sirs! I forage for my own knight, not for you!’
‘How many have you eaten yourself?’ the freckled one demanded cheerfully. Wilfred was a Saxon. There were beginning to be a few Saxons and half Saxons among the young knights, these days; and, surrounded by Normans, he and Randal had always bickered together in friendly fashion when they were both squires. But it was not quite the same now that one of them was a knight.
‘Does my helmet look half-empty?’ Randal demanded, suddenly a little stiff.
One of the others sat forward, grinning in the firelight, his arms round his updrawn knees. ‘Squire Virtue! Don’t you like apples, then?’
And a third joined in the good-natured baiting. ‘Splendour of God, you shock me, Roger! Do you suggest that Randal would pleasure himself on apples meant for Bevis’s belly? Don’t you know that Randal would give Bevis his head if Bevis had a use for it? – Randal, wouldn’t you give Bevis your head if he asked you?’
Randal laughed, but felt himself flushing, and before he could answer the sally, Gervase struck in, saying as Randal had done a few moments before, ‘Hands off, sirs!’ Then with a grin towards his own squire, carefully turning the rabbit on his sword point, ‘I’d like to think Martin would do as much for me.’
It was full dusk by now, and growing misty. Below them the cooking fires of the main camp were a little blurred, and shadows of bowmen and men-at-arms came and went between them and the brightness. A shadow loomed up through the twilight, and took substance, and Bevis emerged into the firelight that jinked on his ringed hauberk and the nasal of his nut-shaped helmet. The others greeted him with a cheerful clamour.
‘Ohé Bevis! You’ve been a long time! Have your fellows slit the de Salynges throats to a man?’
‘Not quite,’ Bevis said, folding up beside the fire, tipping his head for Randal to unlace his helmet, ‘though there were knives out when I got there.’
‘Where there so?’ Gervase said. ‘And what did you do about that?’
‘Called them every name I could lay my tongue to in Saxon or Norman, and banged a couple of their silly heads together. All’s well now . . . That rabbit smells good.’
‘Never mind that rabbit,’ Wilfred sniffed. ‘’Twill do no more among this lot of us than to flavour the black bread. Here’s Randal come by a whole helmet full of apples and will not let us so much as smell one until you have already eaten your lordly fill.’
But the one they called Roger, sobering all at once, said, ‘Never mind the rabbit or the apples. Is there any news?’
‘Yes.’ Bevis ducked his head out from under the helmet as Randal lifted it off, and pulled back the mail coif from his flattened dark hair. ‘Henry’s back in camp. No terms.’
‘So—’
‘So we fight tomorrow.’ He cocked up his head as he spoke, his eyes full of little dancing lights from the fire. ‘Listen – you can hear it running through the camp, now.’
They listened, all of them sober for the moment. Randal, leaning back on his knees to lay Bevis’s helmet beside his shield against the fire-dappled bole of the hornbeam, heard the voice of the little stream that had once fed the tan pits, and beyond it the evening voice of the great camp that seemed, even as he listened, to rise and quicken and take on a new urgency. So the old woman had been right in that at least . . . Oh, but it was an easy guess, anybody’s guess. When he had asked her who would have the victory, which was a harder thing, she had turned sour and gone to milk the goat. And as for the other things she had said – there was a sudden flutter of wings among the branches of the hornbeam, as of a bird disturbed in its roosting by the firelight and the voices, and he half remembered something – something that had to do with the old woman . . . then lost it again as Gervase said quietly, ‘It’s Michaelmas Eve tomorrow. I’d forgotten; but one of our old men-at-arms was saying that it was forty years ago on Michaelmas Eve that the Conqueror landed at Pevensey.’
‘Forty years to turn the tables,’ someone else said, and all round the fire the young men looked at each other.
Then Bevis stretched his arms above his head, his thin face splintering into laughter. ‘That’s for tomorrow. Meanwhile – apples! Where are those apples of yours, Randal?’
The moment passed, and a little puff of laughter caught from Bevis blew in behind it, for it seemed to them good to take life none too seriously on the eve of battle. And in a little they were all munching the small, grey, fennel-scented apples from Randal’s helmet that stood propped beside the fire, while they waited for the rabbit to finish scorching.
16
Michaelmas Eve
IT SEEMED ODD to be waiting on foot to meet the shock of the Norman charge. Always, until now, the time of waiting for battle had meant to Randal the smell of horses, the uptossed mane and ceaseless, restless trampling; Swallow fidgeting under him, and nervously flicking tail of Bevis’s war-horse just ahead. But the Saxon in him found it familiar, all the same. ‘This is the way my mother’s folk waited for war. This is the way we waited at Hastings, forty years ago.’ And he wa
s glad of it because it meant going into battle with one’s own men, instead of being cut off from them in another part of the battle line, as had to happen if one’s own men were foot soldiers. He was as proudly and harshly aware of the Dean men somewhere among the archers of the ranks behind him, as he was of Bevis standing spear in hand just in front.
Henry had dismounted his whole vanguard, indeed most of his army save for the Breton and Cenommanian cavalry on the left, and formed them into a solid phalanx to confront the Norman cavalry. It was only partly the old Saxon battle formation, for the men who had waited dismounted with Harold at Hastings had formed a single line of wedges; and this solid phalanx, built up of three such lines close behind each other, was of the Byzantine school. The combination was a new thing that had not confronted Duke Robert’s cavalry before, and whether it was a good thing or a bad only that day’s fighting would show.
Away ahead of him through the spears, through the blue and green, russet and crimson of lesser banners, Randal caught the golden gleam of the King’s banner, lifting and spreading sideways on the dry, gusty wind, and only a little behind it the blue and gold of the lion battle badge that de Braose had taken after his father. It was a day of changing lights and eddying, dust-laden wind, this Michaelmas Eve; a day of pale, dry colours, the weather-worn stones of the great Castle itself that frowned out over the two armies, and sombre, gold-flecked darkness of the oakwoods, the fading tangle of wild marjoram along the river banks, and the stubble of the spent corn-land, all a little paler than usual. And ever among the two great armies, no depth of colour nor spark of light on hauberk ring or shield boss; only the constant dry, dusty movement of banners and pennoncels in that little fretting wind, and the darting to and fro of swallows overhead.
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