by Mary Lide
Time passed. The winter dragged its wet, weary days, and in the following spring the lords of Cambray returned again. And so they did for several years . . . we settled to a custom that gave something to hope for, to expect. Until the year when all was changed. I know its date well enough, the year 1172, a year to be branded in my memories. In that year many things occurred that were to change all our lives. Bear with me. In telling you I must tell all, all, as I remember all: how Lord Robert came to be a man and took up man’s cares, how Hue knew himself at last, how the outside world came to bear down upon us at Cambray. And how the Lady Olwen grew to womanhood to torment me. Each of these things then so interwoven that each in turn must be unwound. As a stone thrown into a lake, so the ripples spread. Bear with me, I say, now shall we come to them, with their joys, their pains.
Also by Mary Lide
ANN OF CAMBRAY
GIFTS OF THE QUEEN
Mary Lide
HAWKS OF SEDGEMONT
SPHERE BOOKS LIMITED
SPHERE BOOKS LTD
Published by the Penguin Group 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Viking Penguin Inc., 40 West 23rd Street, New York, New York 10010, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books
Canada Ltd, 2801 John Street, Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R 1B4
Penguin Book (NZ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published in the United States by Warner Books, Inc. 1987
Published in Great Britain by Sphere Books Ltd 1988
Copyright © 1987 by Mary Lide All rights reserved
Made and printed in Great Britain by Richard Clay Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
TO MY DAUGHTERS AND SONS
Vanessa and Nellie, David, James, and Quentin
With love
A ROYAL QUEST
Table of Contents
Preface
HAWKS OF SEDGEMONT Dedication
Map
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Note
Chapter 1
I, Urien of Wales, bard to the Celts, high poet of the old peoples of this land, record these things. Out of a long silence I write them down, not in my own tongue but in the fashion of the Norman priests, that men who come hereafter should read and remember. It is for the lords and ladies of Cambray I write—Lord Raoul, the Lady Ann, their sons—whom I have served faithfully all my life and on whose behalf I would die. And most of all it is for their daughter, Lady Olwen, fairest of her race, to whom my devotion has long been pledged as if I were a knight born, who since I saw her first has been my love, my bane. . . . It is a long story I tell, a story with many threads; who knows now how they will unwind? Ambition, hate, revenge, the dark side of this world are woven here, and honor, love, loyalty their counterpart. These are the things I speak of, and of deeds, great and ignoble, and of the men, ignoble and great, who achieved them.
Now I know there will be those who out of spite or ignorance will claim that I, of no account, have twisted these twisted strands still more to serve myself, that ever self-seeking, I have thrust myself to the front and have bound myself to this noble family to enhance my reputation. Not so. Such rumors grow out of enmity. For this story brings but little credit to me and certainly nothing of happiness. Yet, although it is true that most of the men whose names are known and remembered here are men of deeds, achieving great things, so it is also true that there are other men who serve as watchers, recorders of events, who sit and let the world spin by. Such a one am I. You shall be my eyes, my voice. So the Lady Ann once laid a charge on me, so now I fulfill it full-fold. And that was wished on me by fate. For since I believe nothing in this life stands alone, and nothing is done that does not come back sometime, like ripples from a stone thrown into a lake, so it is that I, the least part of this chronicle, live to write it, am destined to be its witness and its testimony. And that, too, fate has willed on me.
Now, it is no secret, and I am the last to deny, that I am not highborn as men deem wealth and rank, and chance alone brought me to the notice of these noble lords, overlords of the lands of Cambray, earls of Sedgemont in England, counts of Sieux in France, names and titles to make the head spin around, as mine did when I first heard of them. Son am I of a kitchen slut, a serf, here at Cambray, who claimed a Norman of the castle guard fathered me (a claim he never took much upon himself, at least not enough to wed with her, although if kicks and blows be proof of paternity, he left his mark on me). So those who sneer that I have no right to mingle with the great have some justice on their side. Yet I believe this, too, that although each man is born to his destined place, at our birth the gods give us gifts to create us what we might be. So it was that my mother named me with an improbable Celtic name, to give me hope of some future greatness after all. Where, poor wench, dredged she up that “Urien”? A Celtic name for a hero king, unfitting for a bastard churl. “Famed lord, land’s anchor, boldest of warriors”—so the Celts sing of him and remember him. What possessed my mother in her birthing straw to give his name to her firstborn, except some equally improbable hope, some spark of prophecy, that hereafter it should also be said: Of all men the lords of Cambray chose to speak for them Urien the Bard, whose songs are known and loved throughout the land, whose name is known and remembered, even though he won no battles, nor fought in them. For are not bards counted as high in esteem among the Celtic folk as any king or prince, and are not poets the lords of this world, holding it and its follies in their hands? And in the end, are not words the only things worthwhile to last when swords are dulled and all those great warriors have turned to dust?
Cambray lies on the western edges of the Norman world, along the marcher lands between England and those Celtic principalities that men call Wales (although that is more like a Saxon name and not the one we use ourselves). It is a simple border castle, Cambray, with its great square keep and encircling walls. Built of stone by a Norman lord, it stands on the edge of a wild and spreading moor above the cliffs of the western sea. A quiet place was it as I remember it in my childhood, at the end of the sixth decade of the twelfth century after Christ, when he who is now England’s King, Henry, second king of that name, also known as Henry of Anjou, claimed his island kingdom was at peace (although he won that title and that crown after many years of civil war so bitter that even today men turn pale at the thought of that anarchy, as it is called, and pray to God never to know its like again). But in my childhood, as a serf at Cambray, it seemed a quiet place. I knew nothing then of these civil wars and their aftermath, and might have lived out my life there in obscurity had not the lords of Cambray come back.
The first Norman settled there was Falk, who built the castle and married with a Celtic wife. Their daughter was the Lady Ann, only child of this union to survive, and Earl Raoul of Sedgemont was both her husband and her overlord. The story of the Lady Ann of Cambray you may kno
w, how she met and loved and warred with that earl, and how at last they came to terms, made peace themselves, were wed to beget sons, after the turmoil and fret of their early lives. Lord Raoul had many lands and many cares. In due course these took him far from this western border, and by the time I was born, he and his family seldom came to Cambray but traveled, as is the way of great lords, turn and turn about to their other estates. Yet when that autumn they returned, I think, in their hearts his wife and children still thought of Cambray as their home. So that whatever else may be said of us, at least we share this in common, these noble lords and I: having Celtic mothers, Norman sires, and bound somehow to these moorlands, these wild cliffs, perhaps even against our will.
I cannot tell you exactly what year, what date the family first returned, except that Henry of Anjou had then been king for some twelve, thirteen years or so and we were all still children, the Lady Ann’s two sons, her daughter, Olwen, and I. We do not keep records at Cambray, as do monks, whose quill pens are busier listing facts and numbers than hopes or fears or those other human thoughts that fill human hearts and give meaning to time. At Cambray we watch the seasons, note the shiftings of the tide, the phases of the sun and moon, as do all countryfolk wherever I have been. So I can tell you that these lords returned in the autumn of a year in which the harvest had been especially bountiful, the summer long and dry, the spring wet to set the seed.
That summer I had spent time with the other village lads in the foothills along the moors, old enough then to watch the sheep and goats (tasks I did so badly or so seldom as already to earn myself harsh names for laziness, incompetence, and worse). That summer a calf had been born at Cambray with two heads, an omen of great portent, and that spring twice the sea had receded farther than any remembered, to come surging back inland farther again than ever in living memory. And I was old enough to know my place, far beneath the notice of these fine lords. Yet old enough, too, to have a sense of something else, to feel. . . what? A promise, a questing, an improbable hope to take me from this kitchen straw and set my dreams above the clouds. And old enough to feel that same desire, that same quest, in other men, even before they knew it themselves. . . .
Well, then, to tell you of it for memory’s sake, that September day, the young lords of Cambray had been hunting on the moors, not the first time they so hunted but certainly the first time I saw them return, those fine young lords and their guard, whose presence drew me like a moth to candle flame. That day I had been set to clean out the stableyard, had already taken my share of cuffs for loitering; so when they came clattering in with their huntsmen, I was nothing loath to lean on my fork and watch them to my heart’s content. This was a Norman hunting party, sweating in their heavy leather coats, red-faced and important. Huntsmen shouted and cursed; hounds circled, whimpering about the horses’ heels; servitors scurried to draw in the wooden sledges on which they had stacked the game, killed for sport, although the venison brought would grace the table in due course.
Lord Hue rode at their head, for all that he was second son. That was his way. His long hair flying red beneath the headband that he wore, dressed in the flamboyant style he liked—embroidered jerkin, bejeweled cloak, its material ripped and stained by the thickets on the moor he had forced his horse through. He rode the best hunter that Cambray could provide and pivoted it around to make the pages jump out of his path. That, too, was his style. I had heard of him; who at Cambray had not? He could ride anything that had four legs, was brave and generous in good humor, could fill a room with laughter when he chose. But he was also moody, so they said, full of black thoughts; and when he was angry, he was dangerous. I sensed at once his black mood that day. I heard the huntsmen mutter that he had ridden hard to outpace them all, had brought down more game than anyone; yet when he turned, I saw across his broad shoulders, along his horse’s flank, the smears of mud that showed he had fallen. And marked, too, the way his head jutted out, his mouth was set, and how he beat with a whip against the side of his boots. I felt a shiver of fear run down my spine. Without noise, almost without movement, I dropped the fork and slid into the safest place I could find, behind the stable door in the bales of straw. I knew enough of anger to avoid it if I could; I knew enough to know it always looks for some scapegoat.
Behind Lord Hue came his older brother, Lord Robert of Sieux, a tall, quiet boy, as unlike his brother as chalk to cheese, taller by a head, fair-haired, gray-eyed. They said of him that in looks and build he was already his father’s twin, although I had never seen the great earl himself. But even I could tell Lord Robert was tall enough to wear a man’s hauberk and carry a man’s sword. He was perhaps fifteen or so, almost a man, then, two years older than his younger brother, his lineage stamped on him from the long, thin face with its firm-cut mouth and chin to sea-gray eyes that looked out arrogantly over the high cheekbones, a Norman lord from head to foot. Seeing both brothers together, you would not have thought them come from the same stock. Even their voices were not alike—Lord Robert’s curt and clipped, a Norman voice; Hue’s a border accent with a border lilt, all Celt. Or so the castle maids declared, giggling together when he passed, eyeing him for all that he was young. They did not eye the older brother thus. Of Robert they said that he had a heart of stone and that, sometimes suffering in his limbs from some numbness, legacy of a childhood malady, his heart was numb, insensible to their charms. They never said that about Hue. And even they today had sense to keep to themselves, out of the way.
Lord Robert sat and smoothed his horse’s mane. That was his way, to watch and think, to contemplate before he moved. They said that he could make a horse do whatever he wanted, without words, that he spoke but little, but when he did, men heard. They said, too, that he was a swordsman, steady as a rock, dependable and just, yet cold also, and dispassionate. But when Hue, on his horse, beat with his whip, saying nothing, that was a danger sign.
After a while, when the older men, the castle guard in the red and gold of Earl Raoul’s household, had dismounted, had had their squires hold their cloaks and unstrap their spurs, then Robert, too, swung off his horse and took the whip into his own hands. He held it up. From the cracks between the bales of straw, I could see what it was—not whip at all, but a heavy, carved piece of wood or stake, curved in a strange shape, with a snarl of twine wound round it to make a trap.
Now wood is scarce at Cambray. The moors behind us are nearly bare of trees; only a few stunted ones, blown out of shape by the westerly gales, grow there. I recognized the wood at once. I had spent many hours searching for such a piece, had found it left by those spring storms, carved oak, torn from the prow of some ship, half buried in the sand, and had hidden it away behind the corn bins for a purpose of my own. Who had taken it and used it in this form? But there was worse. For as Lord Robert began patiently to unwind the string, coiling it carefully as he freed each knot, Hue leaned forward in his saddle in his intent way, as if coiled himself with rage.
“And who,” he said, so low you scarce could hear and yet could sense the fury behind the words, “who took my own bowstring to bring me down?”
There was a sudden hush. The village boys were forever setting snares to catch rabbits and smaller game; such is permitted in a border fort, where food is scarce and ways are wild, although not permitted, even I knew, in most Norman households, where hunting is the lord’s prerogative. But to set a snare where horsemen might be tripped, and to use a bow line to tie the net . . . what kind of madman would do that? And I had heard of Hue’s bow, no ordinary hunting one but given him this year by a Celtic prince, a great longbow made of elm, as tall as himself. They said he already could pull it and send the arrow through a plank of wood. A special gift, then, a Celtic warbow from a Celtic warlord. To tamper with it alone would have been to risk punishment. To have used it in this wise to unhorse an earl’s son was madness indeed. Again I felt apprehension prick my spine. I had never set a snare in my life, knew nothing of horses or horsemanship, had thought to use the wo
od sometime to fashion a thing out of it. Suppose now someone remembered that the wood was mine? There was but one whom they called “mad” at Cambray.
Lord Robert had finished separating line from stake. He balanced them both as if weighing them in his long, thin hands.
“A child’s work,” he said after a while, “some castle brat. Leave well alone.” And for a moment he held Hue’s gaze. Now much of what was said and done that day went past me at the time; it was only afterward, with age, that I could give sense and substance to words and looks, but there was nevertheless something in Robert’s tone that made me remember who he was. The Earl of Sedgemont has many lands, but only one son is his heir, only one who should order us. I think Hue remembered it, too. A flush darkened his usually fine skin, a spate of curses burst out that matched poorly with those almost childish red, full lips. Perhaps it was the mention of a castle brat, as if his brother put him on a par with a child; perhaps it was that quiet voice, Norman-precise, that made his own outburst the more raucous; but I think it was something else, a tension between them, like blood running beneath the skin, so that suddenly, a word, a hint, could send the younger brother flaring wild. He snatched at the wood and hurled it with all his might. It crashed against the open stable door, showering splinters down upon the straw.
“If castle brat,” he said in a hoarse voice, “I’ll haul him forth, to trip me in a rabbit hole. I’ll whip his half-breed hide, Celtic bastard, cowering in the dung.”
The horses snorted and reared back; dogs jumped and barked. The older men, already on their way to guardhouse and keep, as I think Lord Robert had meant, spun around. Behind the bales I flinched myself, both at the noise and at the words. Most of the men at Cambray are half-bred; he was a half-breed himself, and usually proud of his Celtic heritage. Yet there was a loathing in his voice that day, when he spoke of things Celt, which I remember now and feared then, for it was turned in part against himself. I thought, sweet God, he’ll kill someone yet, and felt fear start upon me like a sweat. As much as the outside world, a castle needs a whipping boy. That, too, was a role the fates had given me; I already anticipated my part. A figure half fell, half slid beside me in the straw, so unexpected I started up, but it pulled me down.