Knight's Fee

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Duke Robert, Randal knew, was in command of the Norman centre, William de Mortain of the vanguard and de Bellême of the rear. De Bellême . . . Looking out over the empty strip of corn and bean-fields between, to the dun-dark masses of the Norman cavalry with the farther woods behind them, he remembered with sudden, startling vividness the white face under the flame of red hair that was just a little darker than Hugh Goch’s, the voice with its hint of mockery that was just a little darker, too. And where de Bellême was, there would de Bellême’s minstrel be also. Odd to think of Herluin somewhere among those waiting enemy ranks – or maybe, since he was a singer of songs and no fighting man, with the camp servants and the baggage train. But Taillefer, the Conqueror’s minstrel, had ridden with him at Hastings – had led the charge, singing one of the songs of Roland, tossing up his sword and catching it again as he rode. He could imagine Herluin doing that, Herluin with his casual, loose-limbed grace and drawling courage. He could imagine how the sword would flash in the sunlight, bright as the images of the Song of Roland . . .

  But there was no sun, nothing bright and flashing save the notes of a Norman trumpet blowing thin on the fitful wind, for the end of the waiting time and the onset of battle.

  Randal felt his heart tighten under his breast-bone as the trumpet echoed away into silence between the oakwoods, and in its place came the sudden, swelling thunder of horse’s hooves rolling towards them. The English ranks braced themselves for the shock, the dismounted knights and squires of the foremost ranks settling each his spear butt under the hollow of his instep as though to take the shock of a charging boar. Randal, crouching to his own spear with the rest, saw with painful acuteness how the pattern of the hauberk rings across Bevis’s slim, braced shoulders slid with the tensing of the muscles underneath. Then the whole Norman van led by de Mortain was upon them. The English ranks shuddered under the blow of a breaking sea, but stood firm, and a roar burst up from both sides as defiance and counter-defiance and the blood-rousing battle-shout was flung to and fro above their heads.

  How long that phase of the battle lasted Randal never knew; it was a thing without form and without time; a blind, slow reeling back and forth of two great armies locked together like two wild beasts that have found a hold but cannot shift it to a death grip. It might have been a few heart-beats of time or a whole day before he became dimly aware of a fresh outburst of cries and shouting, a fresh sweep of drumming hooves away to the right, and supposed that the Bretons and Cenommanians were charging in on the flank. But he saw nothing of all that, and after the one moment, thought nothing of it either. For him, Tinchebrai Fight was the trampling struggle of the mere handful of men and horses nearest about him, and the sudden fierce exultation as he realised that they were no longer reeling to and fro over the same ground, but the English were moving forward, slowly but remorselessly forward, after the golden flame that was the King’s banner.

  It was no longer the time for spears, but out swords and drive home the slow, deadly charge that was gathering momentum as a wave; drive forward, plough forward into the Norman foot, following the King’s banner, and the gold and azure of de Braose’s lion; and above them, no swallows now, but the dark deadly flights of arrows lacing the pale September sky.

  ‘Bramber!’ They were shouting all about him.

  ‘Bramber!’ Randal roared at the full pitch of his lungs, his chin driven down behind his shield, and his sword busy in his hand.

  And then, seemingly out of nowhere, a flying squadron of Norman cavalry crashed down upon them, and the world exploded into a tangled and swirling welter of pounding hooves and slashing sword-iron and savage, up-flung horses’ heads with wild eyes and flaring, blood-filled nostrils. Randal saw a horseman stoop from the saddle at Bevis, and as Bevis sprang to meet him, he heard, even above the vicious uproar of battle, the crash and grind of blade on blade. And in the same instant another Norman swung his horse down on them and assailed the young knight on his unprotected side. As in some horrible dream, Randal, locked in desperate combat on his own account, saw the man lean from the saddle with upswung blade, and the crashing blow that tore away Bevis’s shield and bit deep into his shoulder. He saw Bevis stagger and go down, beaten to his knees. And even as, breaking through the guard of his own enemy, he sprang forward to cover him, the second Norman spurred forward his snorting and wild-eyed steed, trampling the crumpled figure under the great, round hooves.

  It was all over almost before it was begun, but for one jagged instant of time that had the intensity of a lightning flash, Randal saw the face of the second Norman. In the heat of battle, and part covered as they were by the mail coif and the helmet with its broad nasal, he might not have known the snarling features again, but there could be no mistaking the livid criss-cross scar on the left cheek, that his own dagger had set there.

  He gathered himself like an animal to the kill, flung back his hampering shield, and sprang.

  De Coucy had just time to recognise his assailant, just time to see death coming at him in the white, blazing face of the young squire, and no more. Randal sprang sideways under his guard and flung himself across the horse’s withers, making the great brute plunge and rear. He had hurled the man back half out of the saddle by the impact of his own body against him, his left arm was round him as de Coucy’s sword arm flew wide, and for one instant they glared face to face, even as the Norman toppled sideways from the saddle with Randal still clinging to him: down and down among the plunging hooves of battle. They were broken apart by the fall, but Randal, falling uppermost, was on his knees almost before he hit the ground. He flashed up his own sword and brought it hissing down on de Coucy as he struggled to rise. The blade hacked through the rings of the Norman’s hauberk, through flesh and bone, and he slumped back, his head all but smitten from his shoulders, while his great horse plunged away riderless into the mêlée.

  Randal, struggled up through the trampling press, knew no hot joy of vengeance, he had waited for so long, no thought for anything save Bevis. But the fight had closed over between him and the place where Bevis had fallen, and he was being picked up and borne along like a bit of flotsam on the slow, resistless flood of the English advance. There could be no beating against the flood; nothing to do but go on. He went on. The smell of blood was in the back of his nose and a crimson mist of it swimming before his eyes, and only one thought in his bursting heart – if Bevis were dead, to avenge him on the whole Norman army. The red, uncaring, berserker fury of his forefathers woke in him and roared up like flame, and he forgot that he was anything but a high wind and an avenging sword. He thrust forward into Bevis’s place, into the ranks of the knights storming at the tasselled heels of de Braose’s golden lion, into the mass of the Norman infantry that had already begun to crumble and break apart.

  English Henry’s new formation had proved its worth. They said that de Bellême and the rear squadron had been swept clear off the field, that Duke Robert had been captured by Waldric, Henry’s Chancellor, and de Mortain by the Bretons. They said that four hundred knights had been killed or captured besides countless men-at-arms and foot soldiers. But none of it had any meaning for Randal. The sun that had begun to make a brightness in the breaking sky was still high above the low wooded hills, for at the last it had not taken many hours of this Michaelmas Eve to reverse the work of that other Michaelmas Eve, forty years ago; and he was squatting beside Bevis, who had been carried back to the derelict tanning shed where they had made their headquarters last night.

  The shed was crowded with wounded; but Bevis had demanded to remain outside, telling the men who carried him that he had liefer do his dying in the open air. So he lay under the great hornbeam, by the scar of the last night’s fire, with his head and shoulders propped on his high, crimson saddle. He was still in his hauberk; they had unhelmed him and twisted a mass of rags round his shoulder to staunch the bleeding, and that was all. Gervase, nursing a gashed arm of his own, knelt at his other side, and a little knot of Dean men had already
gathered, and stood leaning on their bow-staves in silence close by; but Randal was not aware of them at all, only of Bevis.

  ‘But you’ll mend,’ he was saying, desperately, stupidly, as though by repeating it he could force it to be true. ‘You’ll do well enough by and by. You’ll be all right, Bevis –’

  But he knew, all the time, that Bevis would not be all right.

  ‘De Coucy’s horse – trampled on me. I’m – about broken in half as well as – bled white. Shan’t last till evening, old lad.’

  Randal’s fists were clenched and driven together in his sense of utter helplessness as he looked down into the grey, sweat-streaked face of his foster-brother.

  Bevis turned his head slowly on the high, red saddle, to return the look, frowning with the effort that even that small movement cost him. ‘Randal, I – something I want to tell you.’

  Randal nodded, his gaze never leaving the other’s face.

  ‘You remember once when we – were lads, I asked you what – you would do if ever your chance of knighthood came, and – you said you’d refuse because you – couldn’t furnish your helm?’

  Randal nodded again, wordlessly. How odd that that had once seemed to matter.

  ‘You’ll be – able to furnish your helm – after all. I have spoken with de Braose oh, long ago, and he – it is in my mind that he will give you Dean to hold in my stead.’

  There was a long, long aching silence. They heard the distant sounds of the camp and the spent battlefield, the voice of the little stream, and the soft stirring of wind in the mazy branches of the hornbeam; but all from far off, beyond the borders of their own stillness. Then Randal said dully, ‘But I am not a knight.’

  ‘That is a thing that – can be amended.’ There was a shadow of laughter in Bevis’s face, an echo of it in the painful, breathless whisper that his voice had become. ‘You’re too – humble-minded, that’s – your trouble. You’ve proved yourself – well enough, all those two summers in Normandy. And today – they’ve been telling me how you – fought today. Like three men! Go you to de Braose and – ask for knighthood at his hands. He’ll – give it to you.’

  There was another silence, and then Randal said unsteadily, ‘I had sooner ask for it at yours.’

  ‘At mine? Nay now, that’s – foolishness fit for a woman. Stand you in better stead in – after years – to have it from the Lord of Bramber.’

  Randal shook his head, stubbornly, blindly. ‘I’m not very interested in after years, not now. If I am – if you judge me worthy of knighthood, let you give it to me, Bevis. I – don’t want it from anyone else.’

  Bevis lay looking up at him, his face very still under the shifting shadows of the leaves. Then he said, ‘Have it your own wilful way. Gervase, you’ll be his sponsor? Raise me up . . .’

  Gervase raised him against his shoulder. Randal came slowly to his knees, his head bent, lower, lower. He knew, through all his own body, the effort that it cost Bevis to raise his arm. He felt it fall in a light, fumbling blow between his neck and shoulder. So little ceremony needed, in the end, to make a knight; no ceremonial arming, no vigil – oh, but he had kept his vigil, a year and a half ago – nothing but Bevis’s spent hand falling on his shoulder in the accolade. ‘Sir Randal of Dean.’

  So Randal, who had never thought to be a knight, had his knighthood after all; and would have given all the world to be only Bevis’s squire again.

  Bevis looked about him at the Dean men, as Gervase laid him down, seeming to notice them for the first time.

  ‘Well, I’ve done my best for you both,’ he said. ‘Lord and villeins. Na na, don’t all of you look – as though it was end of – the world that we didn’t have – six years ago.’ And a little later ‘Will – somebody bring me some water?’

  One of the men – it was Gudram of the apple tree – took up the nut-shaped helmet and turned away to the stream, and came trudging back with it half full of water. This time it was Randal who raised Bevis against his shoulder, and taking the helmet from Gudram’s hand, held it to his foster-brother’s dry, white lips. Bevis drank a little but he could not keep it down. It came up again, beaded with dark grains of blood. Randal wiped the stain away, and did not lay him back but continued to hold him.

  Gervase had withdrawn a little, and sat nursing his arm, with his back to the hornbeam bole. No one moved among the Dean men, and amid the swarming life of the English camp, and the tramp of men bringing in more wounded, it seemed that Randal and Bevis were alone with each other as they had so often been alone on the high downs at home with only the green plover calling.

  ‘My sword –’ Bevis said after a while, his lips scarcely moving. ‘Grandfather’s sword – yours now, Randal.’

  Randal was still holding him when, an hour later, he opened his eyes once more and looked up into his face, with the quiet contented look of so many summer morning wakings.

  ‘Randal,’ he said again. Then his gaze drifted past the other’s face, into the brightening sky beyond the rustling branches of the hornbeam. ‘Look, the clouds are flying like banners above Long Down. We shall have wild weather tomorrow.’ He stretched himself all out with a long sigh, and turned his head in the hollow of Randal’s shoulder as though to sleep again.

  A soft gust of wind swooped at them under the hornbeam branches, setting the shadows flurrying, and when it died into the grass, Randal laid Bevis’s body down, with a stunned emptiness inside him as though something of himself had gone too. As he did so, the tramp of spurred feet checked behind him, and a shadow long in the westering light, fell across the grass. He looked up slowly, and saw de Braose standing beside him.

  ‘They told me d’Aguillon was wounded,’ he said. ‘I came as soon as might be.’

  ‘You’re just too late,’ Randal said. ‘Just – too – late, de Braose.’

  De Braose looked down at the body of his youngest knight. ‘So I see,’ he said in his narsh, clipped voice. The iron-grey gaze shifted deliberately to Randal. ‘Come up to me in my tent, in an hour’s time.’ And with a brusque nod, there being no more that he could do here, and many things that he must do elsewhere, he turned on his spurred heel and tramped jingling away.

  When he was gone, Randal turned his attention with a dull, conscious effort to the Dean men, where they stood looking to him now to make the decision and tell them what to do.

  ‘Ulf, go you and find out where they are taking the slain. The rest of you go down to the cooking fires and get something in your bellies, you’ll be needing it. Come back after; we shall have to carry him somewhere – wherever it is.’ And as they trailed heavily away, and only Gervase was left, sitting against the grey bole of the hornbeam, he bent again over Bevis’s body. There was something that he must do before he took the great sword, something that to him mattered even more. He slipped his hand into the breast of the loosened hauberk, and pulled out the little washleather bag which Bevis wore round his neck, and from the bag, bloodstained now, Bevis’s nut of red amber. It lay dark in his hand, keeping its secret, until a gleam of the westering light striking through it woke a spark of old fire even as he watched. He dragged up the little bag that hung round his own neck, opening it with fumbling fingers, and took out his own piece that was twin to the other; precious, half magic Gold of the Sea that Laef Thorkelson had brought from half the world away. As he did so, something else spilled out with it; a sprig of rosemary, dried and crushed, its flowers shrivelled to brown wisps that crumbled at a touch. He picked it up, and the aromatic ghost of a fragrance came up to him from between his fingers, bringing for an instant other ghosts with it; the narrow, waking garden at Bramber, a girl with red hair . . . With a sudden confused feeling that the thing was in some way precious, he dropped it with his own half of the red amber into the bag round Bevis’s neck and slipped it back inside the loosened hauberk, over Bevis’s quiet heart.

  Bevis’s half of the red amber he stowed in his own breast. Then he set to unbuckling the great sword with the d’Aguillon seal
cut in the hilt.

  17

  Knight’s Fee

  IT WAS SUNSET, and the clouds which Bevis had seen as flying like banners from Long Down, were banners indeed: vast, tattered, gold and purple, fire-fringed banners of victory streaming all across the sky, as Randal made his way through the camp towards de Braose’s tent. The wind had begun to rise, and smoke from the cooking fires billowed all across the camp, and he heard snatches of talk around him that had the same ragged, shining torn-off quality. An old knight, leaning on his sword, cocked an eye upward and said to another beside him. ‘Splendour of God! Will you look at that sky! Just such a sky we had on the evening after Senlac fight, as though Harold’s golden banners had been caught up in the sunset.’ And an archer, squatting with his bow-stave across his knees beside one of the great cooking fires, spat contentedly into the flames, and announced to the world at large, ‘Eh, lads, if ever Norman cries Senlac after us in the roadway, I reckon we just turn and cry ‘Tinchebrai’ in his teeth, from now on.’

  Randal heard them as he strode by, but as though they came from a long way off, outside some black barrier that walled him in. He had left Bevis lying with the dead in the Abbey Church below the Castle, and the stunned emptiness that had been all he felt at first was beginning to wake into intolerable pain. He wanted to crawl away into the woods, away from all men, like an animal that has its death hurt. But de Braose had bidden him come in an hour, and the habit of obedience had been drilled into him.

  De Braose’s pavilion was pitched not far from the greater one of the King, which stood dark and empty now, for Henry supped in Tinchebrai tonight. The entrance flaps were looped back, and the flames of the dead apple branches burning on a field hearth just inside seemed in the shadows to echo the streaming banners of that fiery and victorious sky. The aromatic scent of the woodsmoke reached Randal before ever he came to the threshold, stealing out to swirl and eddy with the autumn wind through what were left of the apple trees. Squires were setting out the trestle table for de Braose’s own supper, while two or three camp curs who had wandered in in the hope of bones and gristle later, were sniffing expectantly among the rushes. Several knights were gathered there already; among them Randal saw vaguely the round, red face and kindly, rueful eyes of le Savage of Broadwater. And de Braose himself, his helmet off and his coif hanging loose about his neck, stood by the fire, face to face with a tall man in black, sombre as a monk, save that no monk would wear garments of the outlandish sort – a slender, loose-limbed creature with pale, mocking eyes, and a lock of mouse-coloured hair hanging limply across a high sallow forehead: nothing changed in twelve years, save that the bitter, laughing, twisting lines of his long, mobile face were bitten a little deeper than when Randal saw them last, and he carried no little gilded harp, but wore a sword belt and an empty sheath of fine, embossed leather, the sword that had evidently been in it propped against the bench behind de Braose.