Knight's Fee

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Randal shook the beading rain from the horn-scaled shoulders of his hauberk, and crossed the floor to kneel among the hounds and sprawling baby, holding out the packet that he had brought from his wallet.

  ‘De Braose greets you, and sends you this, my Lady.’

  She leaned quickly forward and took the packet from him, her plump face alight with eagerness – for the marriage, made by Red William for his own ends, had grown to be a happy one, and the Lady Aanor, who had first come to Bramber riding her big white mare as lightly as a boy, was running to soft, sweet fat, like a full-blown rose in the sunshine.

  ‘You are welcome twice over, then, once for yourself, and once for what you bring!’ she said, and made a little gesture to him to rise, before she took her scissors to break the yellowish wax with its impress of de Braose’s seal, and opened the crackling sheet of parchment.

  Randal got to his feet again, and stood looking down at the embroidered stuff that flowed from her lap to the floor. He saw an oak tree with three acorns and seven leaves, a hare and a fallow doe beneath it, a bird in its branches, all worked in those sombre greys and russets and dim violet colours, and one unexpected note of brilliant blue in the bird’s wing that was like the sudden flashing out of blue and silver from the grey tumble of storm-clouds that had greeted him for a brief moment in the courtyard.

  But the brightness had fled onward, and the Great Chamber was already darkening with the next storm of rain. The shutters of the weather windows were closed against the wind and wet, and the rain rattled on them and drove hissing down the slanting smoke vent into the fire, making the ash logs spit and steam; but under the steam and the smoke that billowed into the room, the hollow heart of the fire seemed to glow all the brighter, red gold, the colour of Randal’s red amber – Bevis’s red amber – with the sun behind it.

  There was another note of fire colour in the Great Chamber, flaming out of the greyness by one of the open windows. It teased at the corner of Randal’s eye until he raised his head and glanced towards it, and saw Gisella sitting in the deep embrasure, watching him, with the grey storm-rain driving behind her head, and the back-wash of the wind fretting the wisps of bracken-red hair about her face.

  He had not seen her since the evening in the Castle garden, a year and a half ago. Bevis and he had not come up to Bramber at all last winter, there had been so much to do at Dean. And when they had come up to the Castle in the spring, with preparations in full spate for Henry’s second invasion of Normandy, she had not been there. He remembered vaguely having heard that she had gone home on a long visit to help with an elder sister’s wedding; he remembered still more vaguely that at the time he had been sorry. But with so much else happening, he had scarcely thought of her since. He remembered that evening in the Castle garden now, sharply and painfully, even to the way the shadows of the budding quince tree had danced, and the dry aromatic scent of the sprig of rosemary that she had given him. And because Bevis was dead, the memory hurt him unbearably, as the sudden dazzle of blue and silver in the courtyard had hurt him, so that he swerved away from it in his mind and would not remember at all, and stared back at Gisella with almost hostile eyes.

  Gisella in the window met his look, puzzled. She seemed to be waiting for something, and then he saw her give up waiting. She cocked up her chin with a sudden resolve, and laying aside her spindle and distaff with its load of saffron wool, got to her feet and came to stand before him.

  ‘I will take your helmet for you,’ she said, and put up her hands to the strap that held it to his mail coif.

  But Randal’s own hands were before her, and he stepped back a pace until his heel struck against the raised stone of the hearth. ‘Na, I can do well enough for myself.’ He freed the buckles with a savage tug, and pulled off the heavy, nut-shaped headpiece.

  Two bright patches flamed up on Gisella’s cheek-bones, and he saw the war-light that he remembered of old flickering in her eyes. ‘Are you afraid that I shall dint your precious helmet? You are not the first knight that I have unharnessed, Sir Randal!’

  Randal looked at her again, quickly, startled by her words. ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Well, of course I know who I have unharnessed and who not! Does it seem that I am quite a fool?’ she retorted, wilfully misunderstanding him.

  ‘No, I meant – about my being a knight.’

  ‘You are, are you not, in spite of telling me that you never would be?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Gisella hesitated, her eyes moving over him with a kind of ruthless, detached interest, and returning to his face. ‘I do not know. You don’t look like a squire any more – and that sword; it’s no squire’s blade.’

  ‘It was Bevis’s sword,’ he told her after a moment.

  Her face changed in the swift way it had, all the sparkle of temper draining out of it. ‘Oh no!’ she said quickly and softly. ‘Bevis – is Bevis -?’

  He looked at her with dull eyes. She was outside the dark barrier of his misery, and he could not reach her, even if he had wanted to.

  ‘Bevis is dead,’ he said, and turned his shoulder on her. He saw the Lady Aanor look up from her letter, and forestalled her kindness as he might have shielded a raw wound from someone’s too searching touch, saying roughly, ‘My Lady, I have letters also for Sir Herbrand the Seneschal. Give me leave now to go and find him.’

  The storm blew and drenched itself out in the night, and the world had turned gentle when Randal set out next morning for Dean. The tall elms by the Mill stood up, half bare already, but lamp gold against the tawny paleness of the downs beyond, and the dog-rose tangle among the hazel bushes was set with the scarlet flame-points of rose hips as though to light him on his way through the quiet, grey morning as he rode up from the ford. But Randal saw nothing of that. To him it was dusk, under a sunset sky that was like the echo of a brighter sunset somewhere else; and he rode with ghosts, hounds long dead that came running to meet him, and old Sir Everard’s voice calling to them, ‘You will let them know through half Sussex that the Lord of Dean comes home!’ A long-legged boy in russet hose dropping out of the pear tree by the gate . . .

  ‘The Lord of Dean comes home.’

  It was the thrusting and barking of real hounds about him now, as he swung down from the saddle in the Hall garth, and he realised that he must have come right through the village without seeing it at all – or rather, seeing it across twelve years. The hounds fawned about him, Joyeuse carrying an old shoe of Bevis’s in her mouth. The household was gathering in the wake of the hounds. Randal stood with his arm curved over the warm grey arch of Swallow’s neck, and looked back into their eager, questioning faces, and knew that this was the worst moment of all. He heard their voices without knowing what they said. He did not know if he answered them; but if not, they must have read his news in his face, for he felt his own grief reaching out to engulf them too. He saw them standing back from him a little, staring at him, without noisy sorrow, in a silent and almost sullen grieving, after the manner of the Saxon kind. He saw Adam Clerk’s face among the rest, white and stricken and suddenly very old. Reynfrey’s big hand was on his shoulder, and he felt it shaking; Sybilla, making less outcry than for many smaller griefs, though the tears trickled down her fat cheeks, was bidding him come in, promising him something to eat. Odd how one still had to eat . . .

  But the worst thing of all was Joyeuse pattering round him, looking for something – someone – who was not there. She nudged the old red shoe against his legs, whimpering, but would not give it to him when he stooped for it. It was not for him she had brought it. He fondled her head, seeing the greyness of her muzzle, and realised for the first time that Joyeuse was old. They had called her Joyeuse, though it was a sword’s name and not a hound’s, because she had been such a joyous puppy; but now she was old and grey-muzzled and not joyous any more.

  ‘He is not coming,’ Randal told her, choking; and she looked up into his face with a piercing whine, trying to understand. ‘No good
looking; he will not come again – poor old lass, not any more.’

  Suddenly he had had all that he could bear. ‘I – am not hungry,’ he told Sybilla. ‘Give me some supper when I come back – someone look after Swallow . . .’ and he turned and strode blindly out from the garth, round the end of the little flint-walled church, and up towards the downs.

  Joyeuse followed a little way at his heels, then turned with a distressed whimpering and padded back towards the Hall, and Randal went on alone.

  There were goldfinches on the seeding thistles and wild marjoram beyond the garth, jewelling the grey day with their forehead-rubies and the blink of gold on their quivering wings, but Randal did not see them, he did not see the familiar upward sweep of the downs that was tawny as a hound’s coat, silvering as long, cool swathes of air went by. He climbed on, blindly, leaving the tilled land and the woods behind him, into the emptiness. He did not know, he did not even question in his own mind whether it was the downs or Lewin Longshanks that he was going to; in a way they were the same thing in his mind. Strength and unchangingness; and he needed them now . . .

  He saw Lewin from a long way off, sitting on the crest of Long Down against the drifting sky, with the Dean sheep grazing in a quiet grey crescent in the steep coombhead below him, and in the same instant the shepherd stirred, put up one arm in a slow, wide gesture of greeting, and got to his feet. He did not come loping down over the rolling fall of turf to meet him, but remained quietly leaning on his crook, with the dogs crouched on either side, to wait for his coming. And Randal, returning the greeting gesture, climbed slowly on and up. He climbed straight through the flock, the sheep raising their heads as he passed to stare at the armed man in their midst, then returning peacefully to their grazing.

  The two men came together on the broad downland ridge with nothing higher than themselves save a kestrel hanging in the sky above them. The big, fair shepherd in his sheepskin mantle, with the quiet of the high and lonely places about him; the young knight still in hauberk and helm with his shield strap creaking across his shoulders, still mired with yesterday’s long, hard riding, haggard and red-eyed. They stood looking at each other for a few moment, without any further greeting. then Lewin asked in his gentle growl, ‘Where’s d’Aguillon, then?’

  ‘Dead,’ Randal said. It sounded such a little word, in the immensity of the downs.

  In the silence that followed, he heard suddenly the faint shish-shish-sh of those long, cool swathes of air moving through the tawny grass, and the thin, shining song of a lark lost somewhere high overhead.

  ‘Aye, I thought it might be that,’ Lewin said at last, his quiet gaze still on the younger man’s face.

  How they came, soon after that, to be sitting side by side on the sloping turf, Randal never knew, save that when one was not going anywhere or doing anything, it always seemed more natural to sit than stand on the slow, quiet swells of the downs. There they sat, with the prick-eared dogs, Lewin with his crook lying beside him, Randal dandling his great sword across his knees. Lewin glanced aside at it, after they had kept silent for a good while. ‘D’Aguillon’s sword.’

  ‘He gave it to me,’ Randal said.

  ‘When was he killed then? Was it at Tince – Tinchebrai? We heard there was a great battle at a place called Tinchebrai.’

  ‘Aye, at Tinchebrai. It was a great fight – broke the power of Normandy.’ In a dead, level voice he began to tell the other how it had been. ‘Henry dismounted most of his army to take the shock of the Norman charge – so that in a way we fought as Harold’s men fought at Hastings. It was queer, that. We held the charge and we pressed on against the Norman foot, and the battle began to break up; but a squadron of their horse came against de Braose’s men – de Coucy was one of them.’ He turned a little to look at the gravely listening man beside him. ‘Always de Coucy as though even in the chances of war his fate was woven with Dean’s. I was close behind Bevis and saw it all happen. Another Norman took him first, and while his sword was busy to the full, de Coucy took him cross-wise and cut him down before I could reach him to cover him with my shield, and the horse –’ he bowed his head for a moment on to his sword arm that lay across his updrawn knees. ‘The horses trampled on over him. He died before evening.’

  Lewin said, ‘You killed de Coucy?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Randal said very gently. ‘I killed de Coucy,’

  A long time passed before either of them spoke again. Presently one of the sheep wandered too far from the rest of her kind. Lewin pointed her out to the dogs beside him, and they streaked away, running silently, belly to ground, to head the straggler back into the flock, and then, their task accomplished, returned to fling themselves down again, panting beside their master. Then Lewin said, ‘Who is the new Lord of Dean?’

  The skies had begun to break up, and faint blurs of brightness to drift across the downs. Far below them and a mile away, a ragged wing of sunshine brushed across the thatched roofs of the Manor Hall and its byres and barns, waking the colour of the three great fields, fresh from the autumn ploughing, and the gleam of the tall straw-stacks in the garth.

  ‘I’m afraid I am,’ Randal said.

  It was so long before Lewin answered that he looked round. The shepherd was watching him with those far-sighted, very blue eyes of his, that met his own haggard gaze and held it in a long, considering scrutiny. At last he nodded. ‘That’s as it should be. ’Tis a thankless time any stranger would have of it, I’m thinking, but the Manor will accept you. Aye, and for more than that barley-coloured thatch of yours.’

  Yes, Randal thought, the Manor would accept him. In an odd way it had already done so on the night that Lewin showed him the nameless flint weapon, the night that he had seemed, for one instant that was outside time, to see the shadows of the wolves leaping about the lambing fold . . . His thoughts turned, as always when he remembered that night, to Ancret, who belonged to the world that he had glimpsed then. Ancret with her ancient wisdom and her ancient magic, who had been Bevis’s foster-mother. And he drew his legs under him to get up. ‘I must go to Ancret. I should have gone to her first, before someone else told her about Bevis.’

  ‘No hurry for that, then. You’ll not find Ancret on the Manor, no more.’

  Randal checked his movement to get up, and looked at the older man with startled eyes. ‘Not find her? Not – dead too?’

  ‘Na, na.’ Lewin shook his head. ‘Cerdic saw her walking up over the shoulder of the Bramble Hill, way back a moon and more gone by – ’bout the time of Tinchebrai Fight, I reckon. Her didn’t come back, and her won’t now.’

  Randal said, ‘But she’s part of Dean!’

  ‘Aye, her’s part of Dean; a villein, tied to the land like the rest of us,’ Lewin agreed, watching his new Lord. ‘Send after her and fetch her back, if you can find her.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ Randal said wearily, his arm across his updrawn knees, and his forehead on his wrist. He was remembering, against the darkness of his closed eyes, Ancret’s face as he had seen it that first time of all, shadowy against the berry-laden branches of the elder tree, hearing her voice as she told Bevis that she would always be there for his finding, so long as he needed her. So long as he needed her. She must have known when she walked up over Bramble Hill and away, that her foster-son’s need of her was finished, and he would not come seeking her again. She must have known how it would be, that first time of all. He remembered her hands on either side of his face and her eyes holding his own, so that he seemed to be sinking down into the darkness of them, down and down . . . ‘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.’

  Why had she not hated him? Knowing what she knew even then, why had she not hated him? The answer came to him in Ancret’s voice, remembered across twelve years, but clear as though the words were murmuring that moment in his ear, sounding in the faint soughing of the air through the long grasses. ‘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 again, and marry and mingle, but we know that all things pass, like a little wind through the bramble bushes.’

  Only the downs went on, the downs, and life itself, whatever happened to the people who lived it. The wolves leaping about the lambing folds, and the men with their spears; Harold dead at Hastings, and Bevis at Tinchebrai, and all the while, the little wind blowing over the downs, and harvest following seed-sowing, and the new life coming at lambing time. In a few days, he thought suddenly – and the thought woke in him as unexpectedly as the blue of the bird’s wing flashing out from among the dun and grey and violet colours of the Lady Aanor’s embroidery – he would take time off from the autumn work of the Manor, and go up to Bramber and get word with Gisella again. He did not get as far as thinking that now he was a knight, standing well with de Braose and holding his own Manor, her father would likely enough give her to him if he asked. It was much too soon for that. He simply thought that he would go and get word with Gisella again, and tell her that he had carried her sprig of rosemary through those two long, blood-stained summers in Normandy. But not how he had parted with it; that was between himself and Bevis, for all time.

  ‘It’s a good Manor,’ he said. ‘Looks as though we’re ready for the autumn sowing.’

  Historical Note

  The mowbray revolt of 1095 really did happen, and Hugh Goch was caught up in it, just as I have told in Knight’s Fee. All the other campaigns and uprisings in the background of the story are historical. In 1094 there was a great rising of the Welsh, and in the next year William Rufus marched into North Wales, but the expedition had little effect; in 1096, having lent his brother, Duke Robert of Normandy, the money he needed to go on the First Crusade, he crossed the Channel to hold the Duchy while the Duke was away. In the spring of 1097 more Welsh troubles called him back, and again he marched into Wales, but when the revolt died down in the autumn, he returned to Normandy and set himself to secure and make strong the Norman borders. That done, he returned triumphantly to be crowned a second time in his new Westminster Hall. But less than a year later, on 2 August 1100, he was shot while hunting in the New Forest; and it was for his younger brother Henry to hold England.