Upstairs, Rufus and Henry took up hasty battle stations behind the table and used what was left of the water to hurl at the foe as Curthose and his companions burst in. Then they hurled the earthenware bowls and the silver ewer. Curthose, declaring his intention to cripple Rufus for life and wallop Henry’s behind so that he’d eat his meals standing for a fortnight, braved the missiles, flung the table aside and closed in. Belleme and little Gilbert joined in. The rest, half-laughing, crowded at the door to watch.
After that it was a fight, an explosion of fists, knees, feet, elbows, oaths. Gilbert Clare, who retained some childish proclivities along with his angelic appearance, sank his teeth into somebody. Rufus hauled Curthose off a kicking, screeching Henry and was instantly grabbed by Belleme and thrown back against the wall. Lowering his head, he charged like a bull and drove Belleme back across the room to collide with the cupboard, which burst open, showering its contents round them. Belleme hit out. Rufus punched him back and the blow went through Belleme to send the cupboard crashing sideways. It caught in the wall-hangings and brought them down on top of the fight. Simultaneously battling Belleme and the enswathing folds of tapestry, Rufus heard as if from afar Cauchois’ voice shouting to someone to fetch their father.
The servant thus despatched was lucky, arriving at William’s lodgings just as the council finished. Brought up short by crossed pikes at the gate, he gasped out that Duke William’s sons were at Cauchois’ house, killing each other, and it seemed that William was with him instantly. The duke’s long legs outstripped him on the way back and the uproar was still in full flower when William raced, three at a time, up the stairs to deal with it.
The scene was now one of dramatic devastation, the furniture in ruins and the combatants fighting each other not only with fists and feet but with candlesticks and wrenched-off table legs, tripping and swearing amid the rucked remains of the tapestry and the scattered hazards of backgammon counters and little shiny shells. There was a good deal of blood about, from an assortment of injuries. FitzHamon, who had been in the crowd of onlookers at first, was now in the melee, having been hit by accident and lost his temper. Meulan had been drawn in too, and his sharp nose was streaming scarlet.
The duke opened his mouth to roar. As he did so, he saw his son Rufus barge a shoulder into Belleme and then the situation switched in an instant from the merely violent to the potentially deadly as Belleme wrenched out his dagger, the first to draw steel. Rufus’ eyes widened and then with a crackling surge of energy (the kind you sweated to teach your sons to produce and when you finally got it you boasted about them for days), he sprang, tore the dagger out of its owner’s hand and hurled it accurately through the nearest window. It splashed into the pond below to scatter frightened fish. That was enough. ‘Stop!’ bellowed Duke William, in the voice that never went unheeded.
They froze, struck into an instantaneous, gory tableau. ‘What the devil do you think you’re doing? Messire Cauchois, my sincere apologies. Curthose, you are the senior. What is all this about?’
Explanations came tumbling and not only from Curthose. The duke’s black eyebrows rose as the facts emerged. ‘All this…’he gestured at the wrecked room ‘…for a splash of water? And who do you suggest should compensate Messire Cauchois?’
‘It wasn’t just a splash of water,’ said Curthose furiously. ‘No? Then what was it, pray?’
‘It’s what was behind it.’ Curthose glared at his younger brothers. ‘They have no respect. I’m their elder and supposed to be your heir but they have no respect. They started it. Well, let them compensate Messire Cauchois. I can’t. What with?’ demanded Curthose, and his eyes met his father’s with a sulky defiance which had to do with a dispute quite unconnected with a splash of water or even the pretensions of a couple of younger brothers who didn’t know their place.
‘You attacked us! With a defiance equal to his brother’s, shaking all over and stammering with rage, Rufus exploded in his turn. ‘You’d have thought we’d thrown b… boiling lead over you instead of w… water, the way you came at us. It was nothing but a prank. We didn’t want all… all this!’ He waved an arm at the surrounding mayhem, a stocky, defensive boy, crimson with exertion and heat and violent feeling.
‘I had provocation!’ Curthose flung back at him. He turned to his father. ‘Well, are you going to deal with them for this? Or just say it doesn’t matter and make me look a fool again?’
‘Again?’ The black eyebrows went up still higher.
‘Yes, again! They despise me! And whose fault is that? I can’t expect them to look up to me, can I, when I’m the eldest son but I haven’t as much as a beanfield to call my own. I’m your heir but I live on your charity. I’m even shut out of councils though I’ve been a man for years.’ There was a silence. ‘You despise me yourself, don’t you?’ said Curthose at last. He sounded, incredibly, near to tears. ‘You always have. Always sneering at me, calling me Shortlegs. I ask you again, Father, are you going to deal with them for this? They haven’t even apologised!’ Sheer weariness unexpectedly descended on Duke William. What did one marry and raise up sons for, he wondered? They fought each other and their own sire for power, like young wild stallions. Vassals who were no kin to you could be more reliable than your own relatives. Sons or brothers, they were as bad as each other. (He had a half-brother, Odo, whom he had left in England to guard his back but who would assuredly stab him in it one day, when it looked advantageous.) Now there was this. ‘Rufus,’ he said.
‘Henry. Apologise if you please. My sons should be on good terms with each other.’
Rufus shook a vigorous head. ‘No. I would have at first but not now, not after all that about respect. We’re his brothers, not dust under his feet.’ He glanced at Cauchois. ‘I’ll apologise to you. But not to Curthose.’
‘Come.’ William’s voice was persuasive and even un-happy. One was vulnerable to one’s children. Men he had defeated at war, whose limbs he had lopped, would not have believed their ears. ‘It is very proper to apologise to Messire Cauchois and I shall myself see that he is recompensed. But you must also set yourself right with your brother, both you and Henry. And you, Robert, must accept the apology. That’s an order.’
There was a fiery pause. ‘Very well,’ said Rufus at length. ‘Sorry, Robert. Come on, Henry, say it too.’
‘Sorry,’ said Henry, as one who recites a lesson. ‘Robert,’ said the duke. ‘Rufus is offering you his hand.’
‘I can see.’ Curthose looked at the extended hand and knocked it aside. ‘So it doesn’t matter.’ His voice shook. ‘It was just a drop of water and it doesn’t matter. I told you why it matters but you never listen. It’s the insult, what they must think of me before they could behave like that, but you won’t see, will you? I’m your eldest son but I’ve nothing.' His head came up. ‘Well, that’s it. What you won’t give, I’ll take. I’ve waited long enough. I’m old enough to have made friends of my own, Father, perhaps you didn’t know? There are plenty of men who don’t care for you much, or the way you treat your sons, and they aren’t all paupers!’
"You threaten me?’ William roared. Conciliation vanished as if it had never been.
‘I’m saying goodbye to you,’ said Curthose. He glanced round. ‘Anyone’s welcome to come with me except my brothers.’ He marched across the room and tramped noisily down the stairs. As if released from captivity, three or four of his friends slid away from where they had placed themselves against the walls, and followed.
‘Where’s he going?’ asked Henry.
‘Not far,’ said William with a snort. ‘He won’t go far. You’d better set to and clear this mess up. And you, Rufus.’ He glared at his second son, who was still flushed and somewhat shaky. ‘Calm yourself. What’s the matter with you? You’ve given your temper a good gallop. That’s enough.’
It was one of the few times when William of Normandy was in error. He did not know it, but he had reached the time when his elder sons at least were beginning to grow bey
ond him. He had misinterpreted Rufus’ state of mind altogether. As for Curthose, it was two years before peace was made between him and William, and it was William who had to do the making.
CHAPTER FOUR
Wild Love 1079
The troubles of that alien Norman, their king, did not interest the inhabitants of Chenna’s Tun near Winchester, or the neighbouring communities of Truham and Minstead.
They had their own preoccupations, some of which stemmed from certain laws lately imposed upon their district, which was in the middle of what William called his New Forest and had been made subject to the full rigour of his game laws.
Other troubles sprang from the wet, raw winter which set in early in the October of 1078 and was still drearily in force the following April.
But the May Eve of that year was mild and clear, arousing hopes of betterment. There was an atmosphere about the three communities that day, an undercurrent of restless excitement. As evening drew on, people came often to the doors of their wood and wattle cottages, to see how near darkness was. Suppers were prepared, but they were small and eaten quickly.
In Minstead, fourteen-year-old ’Ditha could not eat her beans and rye bread though her mother tried to persuade her and her grandmother, who had a nutcracker chin and the most outspoken sense of humour for miles, recommended her to ‘stoke your fires well, wench, you’ll need them’. Her father was silent, leaving her to the women. Once, his mother-in-law looked at him sharply and said: ‘Perk up, lad, you’re not about to be bereaved.’
‘Ain’t I?’ he said shortly.
In Truham – which was not a village but a scattered group of smallholdings – a garrulous woman paused from sweeping her floor to say: ‘It’ll be grand knowing our daughter’s there but you be careful this time, old man. That first child of hers is that sickly and I reckon I know why. It’s because…’
‘That’s the fourth time you’ve said as much. And it’s the third time you’ve swept that danged floor.’
‘I can’t keep still, waiting.’
‘Can’t keep your tongue still, neither.’
‘You’re as restless as a hare in March yourself,’ said his wife, chuckling, and went to the door yet again, still carrying her broom, to look at the sky as the sun went down behind the forest. The fan of a great elm, the tall spikes of fir trees, were outlined in black against burning gold and warm saffron. ‘How long till we can start?’ she said softly.
Minstead was the largest of the three communities, but in certain respects Chenna’s Tun was the most important, and knew it. The Tun lay in a wide clearing, with a stream curving round the northern edge of its two fields. On one side of the stream stood four small dwellings and their outhouses. On the other side was a house somewhat larger although similar in fashion to the rest, with a couple of barns of its own.
In one of the smaller dwellings, the young woman whose mother in Truham had just spoken of her looked worriedly at the baby girl coughing on her cot. ‘I know Goda’s staying to see to the little ones since it’s the wrong time for her to go to the Wood, but I don’t like leaving her.’
‘There’s always things folk don’t like about these nights,’ said her husband. ‘But it’s the friction strikes the flint, they say.’ Like the woman in Truham, he pushed open the door to look at the flaring western sky. ‘I hope that there’s a good omen,’ he said. ‘We need one.’
Across the stream in the bigger house, Old Chenna, the head of the village, although not grand enough to call himself its lord, chaffed his son and said to the young man who was their guest: ‘It’s none so often we have a stranger who’s also a friend with us on these nights. It’s good. You’re welcome.’
In difficult English, for he was a Norwegian, travelling alone through England (for what purpose no one ever knew), the young man said: ‘What would you do – no, have done – if I were not a friend, as you put it?’
‘Turned churlish and sent you to the priest at Minstead for a night’s lodging,’ Chenna told him.
In Minstead, a blind cripple in one of the humbler houses sat mumbling and monotonously cursing by the fire, because he knew that tonight he would be alone and he was at once jealous and frightened.
And in the priest’s house, Father Ilger sat, shutters closed against that majestic sunset, preparing a sermon for the next day, hoping his flock were also decently indoors for the night and knowing perfectly well that they were not.
In the Tun, Old Chenna said: ‘Time I was on my way.’
Darkness came. The moon rose, near to the full, turning new thatch from gold to white, and the moist young leaves of the forest to glistening silver.
Under the trees, however, the darkness was intense. The figures in the rough hooded cloaks who now set out from the three communities carried horn lanterns.
The direction they took was southwards; those who lived north of the broad track from Winchester to the coast slipping quietly across it in the moonlight.
North of the road lay the Hoar Woods, tree-grown tracts separated one from another by wide grassy glades or stretches of heath, called Hoar because the trees were so ancient and ivy-enswathed.
But south of the road was a district where the trees were just as old, and grew closely and continuously for miles. The forest here was so deep and tangled that even the Foresters rarely came there. The king’s huntsmen beat through it perhaps once in the year, when the king was at Brockenhurst, and charcoal burners used a clearing there occasionally; that was all. The tracks, such as they were, were made by deer.
On one such track the hooded figures now moved, in twos and threes, and single file. They went, however, with more boldness than they could have mustered on most nights of the year. This night, they were privileged and need not fear the stealthy rustlings in the undergrowth, or the enmity of the non-human sentience which pervades all woods by right from dusk to sunrise. Tonight, they were themselves a part of that sentience.
They went silently, for the winter rains had soaked last year’s fallen leaves, and the leafmould was soft enough to deaden footfalls. They went unhindered for though the path was faint, it had received unobtrusive attention, a bough pruned here, a rough place smoothed there, or a fallen tree shifted out of the way. They walked for a long time. The trysting place was deep in the woods.
The clearing opened up with a flicker of firelight (the ash pile that lay permanently in the charcoal burners’ clearing was not all due to the manufacture of charcoal). They were glad to see the fire for despite their conviction that tonight the perils of wolf and demon were withdrawn, the lanterns had done no more than show the ground just before their feet and they had come all that way with invisible companions. It was all too easy to let one’s imagination slip, to think that the presence breathing just behind you might, in the darkness, have… changed… into someone or even something else.
And yet they had come here to change into other creatures. Where the path entered the clearing, a curious heap of objects lay. As each figure came in, it snuffed its lantern and, stooping, set it down, taking an object from the heap in exchange. Shadowy hands were raised to shadowy heads. And when they walked out into the firelight, their human faces were gone.
They had the heads of goats, crowned with stubby horns. Their eyes gleamed through the slits of leathern masks. As they went, they loosed their cloaks and dropped them. And so came, naked but for the masks, past the fire and to the feet of the Being they had come to worship.
On the far side of the clearing, there was a fallen log of elm, its bark gone years ago, its wood bleached with weather. On it as on a throne, hands at rest on thick thighs, sat their Lord.
His worshippers were as goats. But He, above the throat, was stag. The firelight sparkled on the fourteen ivory points of his spreading antlers. They tipped in acknowledgement as each worshipper kissed his king’s bare feet.
Having done so, the worshippers sat on the ground in a semi-circle before Him, old folk and children (though none younger than about ten were pres
ent) at the back.
When all were seated, the royal Being said: ‘Does any challenge the right of the King?’
No one answered. The fire whispered and crackled. At length a second ritual question was asked. ‘Before this Feast of Beltane begins, are there any declarations?’
This was answered. ‘Bloody forest laws,’ said a broad Hampshire voice, oddly mundane in that fugitively lit clearing and in that gathering, which was part human and part beast and yet touched with something that was neither.
‘Yes,’ said the King, and his voice was deep and hollow. His accent too was rustic but ceremonious phrasing garnered through centuries lent him dignity. ‘Not only can we lose eyes or hands for taking a deer. Now we learn that we cannot even fence our land. We shall be hard put to it to defend our corn from the deer this year. As if the weather of the past year were not trouble enough. Let us then dedicate this Beltane to the confounding of the Norman and his laws. The forest has its own powers when it cares to use them. The Norman lost his son in it, five years gone. Remember that while you dance. Remember that while you love. Bring forth the Maiden.’
There was pushing and giggling and a figure was thrust to its feet. The slender childish body under the goat mask was that of a girl. She was shivering.
‘There is nothing to fear,’ said the King and the smile in his voice drew a ripple of laughter from the rest. ‘We all come to it but for monks and nuns and they do not attend Beltane. It’s a rare May Eve when the Maiden is truly so but tonight she is and this is her Initiation. And not only hers. Chenna the Young, my one living son, who one day will wear the antlers and sit upon my throne unless my house is cast from it by challenge, also tonight becomes truly one of our company. In recognition of the future, I yield the Maiden to him. Stand up, my son.’ A youth rose, nervously. At the back of the assembly, one of the older folk began a low, disturbing rhythm on a drum. ‘Where is the goat?’ asked the King.
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