King of the Wood

by Valerie Anand

  ‘Those are my orders. A man-at-arms who can grab a loose horse and replace a fallen knight if necessary is a man who can help win a battle,’ said Helias. ‘Come with me.’ The horsemanship training could be worth watching. It was common enough to find the paddock gate clogged with interested onlookers. It was also common to find among them several who shouldn’t be there, such as the spitboy and three of the maidservants. But on this occasion, their intentness on whatever was happening within the paddock, and the unanimous gasp as Helias and Michel appeared and pushed through, indicated that something special was happening.

  Then, before they had reached the gate, they saw an equine profile, roman-nosed and foam-bespattered, with a white-ringed eye and a tossing mane, show briefly above the intervening heads. It vanished, to reappear almost instantly, facing the opposite way. The crowd gasped again. Erratic hoofbeats could be heard.

  ‘Elbow of God, I gave orders forbidding this!’ Helias shouted, and thrust the last two people out of his way so roughly that they fell. ‘Where’s their instructor? Gilles! What’s the meaning of this? Get that boy down! Jump, boy, jump!

  They were in front of the crowd now and could see. The blue roan horse in the middle of the paddock was bouncing stifflegged, the head with the angrily flattened ears now somewhere about the level of its fetlocks. The rider appeared to be attached to the saddle by witchcraft.

  But as Helias shouted again, the boy heard and obeyed, releasing the reins, sliding his feet out of the stirrups and toppling backwards. He fell rolling but came straight to his feet. The horse bounced away and then ceased to plunge. It stood still, head hanging and flanks heaving. The blue-grey hide was dark with sweat. The boy, shaking himself as if to make sure he was unhurt, went up and caught the dangling rein. The horse took no notice of him. He patted its neck and spoke to it. There was a cheer.

  ‘The last lad they played that trick on broke a leg,’ said Helias furiously to the knight instructor, who had stepped out of the crowd to face him. Sir Gilles was rather white. ‘And there’s another whose right arm’ll never straighten again. I’m training soldiers. One-armed bowmen and ex-pensively drilled cripples I wish for as much as I wish for an attack of smallpox. I don’t like seeing good horses ruined, either. Boy!’ He swung to face the paddock once more. ‘Put your hand under the saddle!’

  The lad did so. He drew it out again and looked at something in his palm. He came across to Helias, leading the horse, and extended his hand. The sharp-edged nut that lay there told its own story. ‘If I’d realised, I’d have jumped at once, sir. I’m sorry.’ He was slightly out of breath but not too much. He was a thin, olive-skinned youth with long wrists that suggested imminent height. His sweat-soaked hair was black and his eyes so dark they almost qualified for the same description.

  The instructor said: ‘I came a little late this morning. This was in progress when I arrived. I too must apologise. But my rapscallions like to take a rise out of newcomers and this particular newcomer has put their noses out of joint with his shooting scores. He’s good with a bow.’

  ‘And on a horse, apparently. Where did you learn to ride like that?’ said Helias to the boy.

  ‘I used to help one of my father’s neighbours break in colts. He bred destriers. I like horses, sir.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Ralph des Aix, sir.’

  ‘It’s him!’ said Michel in Helias’ ear. ‘It’s the same boy!’

  ‘But you’re not going to be a knight, Ralph?’

  ‘No, sir. Well, my father isn’t, you see.’

  ‘You have a horse of your own?’

  ‘No, sir, just a pony.’

  ‘So when someone offered you a ride on a good-looking horse, you were eager to accept. Who owns this blue roan?’ Helias demanded.

  There was an awkward silence before another boy, a thickset lad a little older than Ralph, came forward. ‘He’s yours?’ Helias asked.

  ‘I… yes, sir.’ The youth, like Gilles, was rather white. Helias was not easily made angry; his temperament was sunny. But his wrath when it did happen could be devastating. Those who instructed the lads of La Fleche used him as an example. ‘Don’t waste your strength. Be like Helias. When you strike, strike to kill.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Helias, ‘that the horse used to be yours. He’s Ralph’s now. You can manage on borrowed mounts till your father provides you with another. It’s your own fault. Take that animal to the stable and rub him down, Ralph. I want no more of this.’ He was addressing Sir Gilles and the other boys now. ‘Ever. Be quiet.’ The blue roan’s erstwhile owner was attempting to plead for some other penalty. ‘Take charge of your class, Sir Gilles, and make them work. I want every single one of them too exhausted to stand by the end of the day.’

  He walked away. Michel came with him. ‘I want him. I want him!’ said the huntsman ravenously. ‘No one rides like that unless he can think like a horse. If he can think like a horse, he can think like a hound, or a deer. I want him!’

  ‘Grilled, with a wine sauce?’ Helias laughed. ‘His training as a huntsman isn’t to interfere with his training in arms, mind. But he might be better living to some degree apart from the rest for a while. I daresay he can look after himself, but nevertheless, it might be wise. He can share your quarters. Make your arrangements with Sir Gilles so that he attends training sessions. Apart from that, he’s yours.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Visitors by Night 1087

  The weather was kinder for a few seasons but in 1086 came more storms and men said it was heaven’s wrath on the unseemly inquisitiveness of the Conqueror, for that was the year when he held the Great Survey of all the manors in his kingdom. As a prelude, it soon became clear, to raising taxes. Chenna’s Tun suffered considerable privation from them. The following spring was cold and a sense of foreboding set in, which even the fires of Beltane could not lift.

  Four nights after Beltane, a barking dog roused the Chenna household.

  Struggling up on his elbow, Young Chenna was aware that his wife was already sliding her feet to the floor and that beyond the curtain which roughly divided the house his father too was scrambling up. ‘Get out there and see what it is! Brindle don’t carry on like that for nothing!’ Old Chenna shouted. His son, yanking on hose and jerkin in the dark, plunged out.

  The dog stood on stiffened legs, at the full extent of his chain, barking steadily and pointing towards the west, where the track along the stream vanished into the water-laced tract which they called the Brook Wood, which faded at its southern edge into the Hoar Woods. ‘Quiet, Brindle. What’s the matter? I can’t hear nothing.’ The moon was high and full, riding clear of the treetops, casting a cold and even light on the thatched roofs of the Tun, turning the stream to silver. Among the other cottages on the far side of the water, another dog yelped and a door banged. Brindle burst into renewed clamour and now, at last, Young Chenna felt it, the vibration in the ground; horses, coming through the Brook Wood.

  The riders cantered in along Chenna’s side of the river. They pulled up and swung out of their saddles, three of them. Young Chenna gentled the dog again and faced them. One held the horses; the others came up to him. ‘Inside,’ one of them said shortly, in guttural English.

  He led them in, silently. He knew them; everyone for miles knew them. They were the King’s Foresters, tough, Norman-bred men whose fathers had come to England in someone’s following at Hastings or soon after, who’d found themselves employment as the king’s bullies, enforcing his Forest Law. Inside the house, rushdips had been lit. Old Chenna stood defiantly beside his daughter-in- law. ’Ditha had pulled a gown on and thrown a shawl round her, and was in the act of tying her straw-coloured hair roughly back. She looked terrified.

  ‘What’s all this, disturbing folk in the middle of the night?’ Old Chenna demanded belligerently.

  He used the broadest local dialect but the Foresters understood it. They needed to, for from the very first, from the day after Hastings, almos
t all the English had been resolutely stupid, to the point of idiocy, about learning their new masters’ tongue. Though, as the Foresters said to each other, they were cunning enough about evading the law.

  ‘It’s news to us,’ said the senior Forester, in his own crude accent, ‘that being out of bed of a night worries the likes of you. Especially when it’s moonlight. Someone took a deer last night, not a mile from here.’

  ‘Did they now?’ said Old Chenna sourly. ‘And how’d you know, if you weren’t there? And if you were there, why don’t you know who did it? Coming here in the middle of the night, trying to catch honest folk out…’

  ‘Hark at Messire Clever,’ said the younger Forester. ‘We found the bloodmarks on the ground in the morning and the trail into the wood, where something was carried, in this direction, by a man with boots on. And we found an arrow, where somebody missed his shot and couldn’t find his shaft afterwards. Misleading thing, moonlight. Stand back against the wall, all of you. We’re going to search. If we find nothing here, we’ll search the other houses.’

  ‘And you’ll find nought in any house here,’ said Old Chenna angrily. ‘Where could folk like us hide anything?’ He yanked back the leather curtain behind him. The curtains divided the house into three. In the front was the space where they cooked and ate. It had a stone fire trough with a roof louvre above, benches and a table, hooks on the wall for field implements and ox-harness, shelves for pots; ‘and them rows of earthenware jars on the floor have oil and flour and lard in, and not enough of any of ’em just now,’ Chenna informed the intruders.

  At the back were the two stuffy compartments used for sleeping. The one where Young Chenna and ’Ditha slept was cluttered, with ’Ditha’s personal chest on the floor by the bed and her loom and the rush basket she used for weeding in a corner. There was a wooden cradle too, full of unspun wool. ’Ditha had never quickened, not as the Maiden, nor since she and Young Chenna had been wed. Nor had anyone else been kindled by Young Chenna in the Wood. As yet, there was no new generation to succeed him.

  ‘But we’re young yet. There’s time,’ he had said when his father grumbled.

  Was there time still? He stood beside ’Ditha as the search proceeded and wished she had not tied back her hair, because he would have liked, just once more, to bury his face in it. He had begun to tremble.

  The search was carried out without heed to noise or destruction. The Foresters had brought torches which they lit at the embers of the fire, to illuminate their work better than the rushdips could. The pallets were hauled off the beds and ripped open with daggers, chests were opened and their contents flung out on the floor. The men plunged grimy hands into the storage jars and prodded the thatch with broom handles. Every time they passed close to ’Ditha, Young Chenna pulled her away, although they regarded this manoeuvre with obvious scorn.

  None of the Chennas would have given them credit for it, but the Foresters were respectable men in their own eyes. The English, thought the senior Forester as ’Ditha was jerked away from him for the third time, were not only stupid, cunning and lawless; they had minds like cesspools too. He had a perfectly good wife of his own, thank you very much, and Mabille at least washed her hair occasionally. Under his tread, he felt the texture of the floor beneath the thickly strewn rushes change. Stepping back, he kicked the area clear. ‘Oho, what have we here?’

  ‘We keep our salted pig meat barrels down there,’ said Old Chenna sullenly.

  There was a stout wooden lid and a plank-lined cavity beneath. It was about four feet by six, and five feet deep. It did indeed contain barrels. The younger man jumped down to examine them while his colleague squatted on the edge and held a torch for him. ‘Empty… some salt pork in this one… empty again…’

  ‘Satisfied?’ Old Chenna asked.

  ‘Not quite.’ The older man, crouching on the lip of the hole, leant down and banged the plank wall with his fist. He edged round and banged another wall. It sounded hollow. The man in the cavity used both hands to drag at the planking. It yielded easily. ’Ditha pressed close against her husband and felt the tremor in his body. ‘Well, well, what’s this, then?’ said the man in the pit, and out into the torchlight he dragged the deer carcase which had been snatched from the hook where it hung and thrust into hiding by Old Chenna and ’Ditha when Brindle gave the alarm. After it, he brought out the possession which was illegal for anyone living within forest jurisdiction, unless the king officially employed him to use one; a bow in working order. He handed the damning evidence up, and climbed out.

  ‘We were hungry!’ cried ’Ditha shrilly. ‘Grain’s nearly all gone and you can see we’ve hardly a mouthful left of the winter’s meat. We were hungry, I tell you!’

  Young Chenna stared at the Foresters and thought that their faces were different in feature, but amazingly alike in their expression of mingled satisfaction and implacability.

  He knew what it meant, but he could not yet believe it. A few minutes ago he had been safe in bed in ’Ditha’s arms. In his mind, he still was.

  They were going to take him away. If ever he returned, he would be blind or a cripple. Or both, like Blind Edric of Minstead who lacked eyes and hands alike since he was caught with a dead hind over his shoulder. His son and daughter-in-law had to feed him and lead him about, not that he went about much. He had become afflicted in his head and spent most of his days mumbling and cursing to himself by the hearth.

  If what they did to him didn’t kill him, he thought wildly, he would kill himself. And then he saw beyond the immediate horror, to its wider implications. He would never make love to ’Ditha again, never have children now. Would never go swearing into the rain again to chase the pig out of the onion patch, never… the enormity of his loss, of the things that were going to happen to his body, swelled up in him. The muscles melted at the backs of his knees. He longed again, with humiliating desperation, to clutch ’Ditha and hide his eyes in her hair. His mouth worked.

  His father said: ‘Got it wrong, as usual. Don’t make me laugh. My son’s a good boy but shoot straight enough to kill a deer by moonlight? He can’t drive a nail straight. Always hammers his thumb. I shot that buck.’

  His mouth was drier than ash but Young Chenna heard himself croak: ‘Dad, you can’t even string my bow.’

  The senior Forester regarded Old Chenna wearily. ‘He thinks we’re criminals like him. Listen, old one, we’re here to take in the guilty, just the guilty. So you shot it, did you? Very well, then, if you shot it, string the bow you shot it with. Catch!’ He threw the bow at Old Chenna and his companion, in response to a nod, handed over the bowstring to go with it.

  Young Chenna stood three inches taller than his father and he was, indeed, young. Old Chenna’s muscle tone was fading as the years went by and the rheumatism had invaded his right shoulder. He wrestled with the bow, sweating, veins standing out on his forehead and tears pricking his eyes. The bow was in any case obviously meant for a taller man. The Foresters watched, cynically. ‘Enough,’ the senior said at last, taking the weapon away. ‘Bring the youngster.’

  Young Chenna had held on to his nerve just long enough to defend his father but now he broke. He fought, babbling, as they lifted him from his feet and carried him out, dangling between them. They trussed him and dumped him like a sack over the withers of one of the horses. ’Ditha ran after them and tried to tear their hands away from her husband but one of them caught hold of her and half-ran, half-threw her back into the house.

  She sank sobbing to the rushes, banging impotent fists on the floor. Her father-in-law slumped down beside her. The tears were running down the furrows in his face. ‘He’ll die, they nearly all die. We’ll curse the Norman at Lammas but what use’ll that be to us or to him? And who’ll follow me now? You quickened, yet, girl? Any life in you yet?’

  She shook her head. She would have turned to him for comfort or tried to offer it but in his misery he only wanted to be alone and he threw her out that night. Her old home had been in Mins
tead and she stumbled back, through the forest paths, by herself. Her family were as hungry as all the rest in the district and when she came pounding and wailing at their door at dawn, another mouth that would need feeding, they weren’t best pleased to see her, though they took her in.

  Young Chenna, as he had wanted and as his father had said would happen, died of his mutilations before the harvest was ripe. He was allowed to come home to die. When the Yule of Lammas was held in the forest, the worshippers gave form to their anger, asking Him who ruled in the Wood to avenge them, to destroy the Norman king whose laws had done this.

  But next day, lying on his pallet too heartsick to rise, Old Chenna knew that all the curses and invocations were only foolishness, that there was no power in the world to aid the humble and the weak, not Christ and not the Horned One either.

  Like the Christian God, the Horned One was a trinity, at different times king-god, or sacrificial victim or huntsman of souls. But in no aspect had he true power, Old Chenna said to himself, nor could he lend it to others. If you had no power in your own right, then you had none at all and that was that.

  He turned face down on the musty pallet and wished he hadn’t thrown ’Ditha out after all; he could have done with human company, someone to talk to him, clean the place up and cook for him. But he hadn’t even let her know when Young Chenna came home and he’d been told that when she found out, too late to see her husband before he died, she’d been very bitter. She wouldn’t come now and besides; it was said that at the year’s end she intended to marry a man from Minstead.

  The news that the Conqueror was dying reached Fulk of Anjou when he was in session, adjudicating on the disputes of his tenantry like any other feudal lord, except that his tenants were lords themselves, albeit less powerful than himself, and his manor currently included not only Anjou but, more or less, the province of Maine as well. The Conqueror had tried to settle the affairs of Maine and patch up a peace with his contentious eldest son at the same time. Fulk was to be overlord of Maine and Robert Curthose, on his father’s death, to hold the province under Fulk. Curthose, who wanted his lands immediately, had taken a less than grateful view of this arrangement.