King of the Wood

by Valerie Anand

  ‘And Le Mans?’

  ‘There wasn’t much left to burn when I got there. I made a gesture that cost nothing and pleased the in-habitants. Though I did it because I hoped…’

  ‘What did you hope, my lord?’

  ‘The rumours,’ said Rufus, ‘are like bad jokes. I can calm the sea and turn a knock-kneed nag into lightning; I can even make the common citizens of Le Mans like me. But I can’t damn well conquer Helias, can I? I couldn’t get him out of that last stronghold. I hoped that showing mercy towards Le Mans would bring him to me, make him ready to seek terms. Make him… give me his fealty. But no. He wouldn’t come.’

  ‘It’s being said…’Flambard stopped in mid-sentence.

  ‘What’s being said?’

  ‘I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing,’ said Flambard truthfully.

  ‘I don’t want you to say the right thing. I w… want you to say what you think, what you hear. I have people round me all day saying the right thing. I don’t need that from you.’

  ‘They’re saying, my lord, that you withdrew because although you could have brought Helias down by force, it would have meant that he was fetched to you in chains and you didn’t want that.’

  ‘Really?’ Rufus snorted again. ‘And do they – whoever they are – also say why I have this funny delicacy about Helias?’

  ‘I’d rather not…’

  ‘I p... pay you to do as you’re told. Answer me!’ Flambard had actually paled, a phenomenon which would have amazed most of his acquaintances. ‘They say it would give you no pleasure to see Helias in chains because you’d prefer him in your arms.’

  Rufus’ face darkened. But when his eyes met Flambard’s, it was like colliding with a wall. You made me say it, said Flambard’s gaze.

  ‘They were right,’ said Rufus bitterly. ‘I wanted a link with Helias that was real – fealty, friendship, if nothing more. Once, my friends threatened to leave me if I gave him Maine. But now that he’s seized it, they’d rather see him do me homage than sit behind his castle walls and laugh at me. And that is what he is doing. No, I didn’t want to bring him down by force. I wanted him to come to me. He would not, and so, like a fool, I backed out of Maine with nothing. And now I’ve come to understand what I didn’t know then, that I’ll never forget that. If I were back there now, it would be different. One day, it will be different. One day I’ll have him in my hands – oh yes, I will! – and then I shan’t ask him to be my lover, not now, or even my vassal. I’ll ask him instead how he’d like to be torn apart by wild horses. Now what is it?’

  Flambard had stiffened, mouth tightening. ‘My lord, I’m your confessor.’

  ‘And many a good chuckle we’ve had over my sins.’

  ‘But if you came to me and confessed that you had done what you suggest – or even that you had made such a threat to Helias when he was in your hands – there’s something I’d want to know.’

  Rufus had been sitting opposite Flambard. Now he left his settle and threw himself on his knees. ‘Give me your blessing, Father, for I have sinned. Confess me now, Ranulf. Yes, I want to see Helias’ limbs torn bleeding from their sockets. He has rejected me and made me look foolish. So what’s your question?’

  In the pale upturned eyes there was laughter. But the upward tilt of the face smoothed the flesh against the bone, making Rufus seem younger, more vulnerable. And below the flippancy there was an appeal for help. ‘Even I don’t laugh at everything,’ said Flambard gravely. ‘I should ask you, my son, whether if you carried out your wish, it would give you any joy?’

  ‘Joy?’ Rufus let out a yelp of mirth. ‘Of course not. It would be revenge, that’s all.’

  Flambard rarely touched his master but he was impelled now to take Rufus’ face between his hands. ‘I think,’ he said seriously, ‘that if you tried to carry out that threat, you would give way at the last and countermand your order. And that if by chance you were too late, you would fling yourself weeping on the corpse and embrace it. And what would that do for your reputation? Pursue your campaign against Maine next year if you must, my son, but not to that end.’

  ‘I must pursue it. I’ve started this war to get Maine and I can’t afford to lose this or any other war.’

  ‘Yes. But treat Helias as just another intransigent vassal.’ The shutters rattled violently. Rufus said nothing. ‘There are other things in the world besides Helias,’ Flambard said. ‘I know. But I can’t believe it. I try to fill my days. I’ve sent for Walter Tirel, to keep me company. I think about raising money. I laugh at your cunning schemes for getting it. I plan war to fill the emptiness.’

  ‘Emptiness?’

  ‘If I never see Helias again and sometimes I believe I won’t, there’s nothing else. Just things to fill the space with, like a starving man eating grass. Sometimes the idea of getting killed on campaign is almost pleasant. I’d be free of him then. Free of wanting, all the time.’

  ‘Unless you turn out to have an immortal soul after all. Then you might find that you were not free but trapped in an eternal tyranny.’

  ‘Tyranny! What a wonderful word for it,’ said Rufus. And then, in a whisper: ‘But if I have no immortal soul, then there would only be… the darkness.’

  There was a pause. Then Flambard lifted his hands away and made a rapid sign of blessing. Rufus went back to his settle. Both felt awkward. Flambard was disturbed by this fey mood. Unexpectedly he found himself wishing he had promoted the marriage with Edith after all. He had heard reports of her which suggested that he had underestimated her, that perhaps she could have managed Rufus. Perhaps she could have managed this.

  ‘You’re a trustworthy friend,’ said Rufus suddenly. ‘Sometimes I wish you were a closer friend even than you are.’

  Flambard shook his head. ‘Friendship can be damaged if it comes too close. And you have Tirel. What you really need, my lord,’ he said, with a grin, ‘is a nice, all- night orgy.’

  Outside, rain had been added to the wind. The air grew suddenly very cold. The gale backed to the north that night and drove a huge tide down the North Sea, surging ashore on the low-lying coasts of East Anglia and up the Thames estuary, wrecking ships, sweeping away the houses which had been so patiently reconstructed after the storms of 1093, carrying away the cattle herds which had been as patiently built up again, drowning crops.

  It subsided the next day, as if satisfied with the ruin it had caused, but the cold and wet went on, hunting down more victims, finding them readily among the homeless and hungry, who sickened and died with ease.

  Before Christmas, it had started to snow. It was a hard winter.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Four Horsemen

  February 1100

  Ralph took shelter in one of the other houses when Sybil’s time came but after a day and a night, Elfgiva sent for him, despite his protests that it was no place for a man.

  They had been hungry, all winter, and the bitter weather made it harder. With the carefully rationed grain, that part of the harvest which the deer had graciously left them, Ralph’s pay and the bowmaking money, and the deer stealthily poached by the men, they could keep alive. But there was not a mouthful to spare. He had watched Sybil grow huge with the greedy child which was none of his, while her arms and legs grew daily more sticklike with privation. ‘Save her, but if necessary let the child die,’ he told Elfgiva as she dragged him across the threshold.

  ‘You can do as much towards saving both of them as I can. Go on! She’s been calling for you.’

  Inside the house, although the fire trench was banked as high as possible, the cold was still intense. The room was lit by the firelight and by candles. Sybil crouched on the pallet, rugs cast over her for what little protection they could give. Her face was turned sideways and pressed into the straw pillow. She had no colour and although sometimes she seemed to shiver with cold, the tangled hair at her temples was soaked with sweat as well as tears. Her eyes were shut and she was moaning. ‘Take her hand,’ Elfgiva ordered him.
‘Here he is, Sybil. You’ll be all right now.’

  He found himself, all snow-spattered as he was, kneeling by the pallet and taking her cold fingers. ‘Sybil?’ he said. He shouldn’t be here. This was women’s mystery. The fingers clutched at him as a spasm seized her. ‘Good girl, do that again,’ encouraged Elfgiva. Sybil tried to speak but the word was ripped apart into a wail.

  Ralph heard himself saying what he would have said to a wounded comrade who was having a bone set. ‘Steady. It won’t be long now. Hold on to me. I’m here.’

  Sybil was convulsed again but differently, ominously, as though she were a doll shaken by some force outside herself. There was despair in her wail this time. Elfgiva caught Ralph’s eye and he saw her lips anxiously compress. ‘Fight!’ he said. ‘Yes, you can, you must! Fight back!’ He knew his eyes were showing his horror to Elfgiva and he dropped them. He pressed his forehead to the back of Sybil’s hand as though to pass encouragement and pleading directly from his mind to her body. The depth of his horror had startled him, as his jealousy had done last summer.

  Kneeling there, he traced in memory the course of his life with Sybil. He had pitied an unhappy child and been seduced by a beautiful one, in whom he had glimpsed a queen for the Tun. He had brought home a girl who was a child again, whose homesick whimperings had annoyed him, yet renewed his pity and certainly demanded so much attention from him that she had done something to keep him from brooding over Rufus and his lost position.

  And then had come the knowledge that someone else desired Sybil too, and he had found that the passion which had overtaken him in the stable at Fallowdene was alive and thriving. And in the resultant ugly quarrel, he had again discovered the queen… but this time grown to a woman, truly royal, and kind…

  And very human. Sybil who only half-believed in Herne was his crutch, his anchor against those heady, perilous hours in the Wood when it seemed as though Herne were not only real but had possessed him, filling his human body and brain with something they were not shaped to contain. He raised his head and said clearly: ‘If you die and leave me, Sybil, I shall break in pieces. Don’t die. Don’t go away from me!’

  There was another contraction, stronger. ‘Again!’ shouted Elfgiva. ‘Aha, we’ll win yet, see if we don’t! I want more light.’ She turned to light another candle.

  ‘And don’t you,’ panted Sybil, dragging him near with sudden strength, and whispering while Elfgiva’s back was turned, ‘die and leave me either! Promise!’

  ‘Hush, you need your breath.’

  ‘Promise!’

  ‘One more thrust and we’re there. Come on, my girl!’ Elfgiva had set the candle nearby and returned to her task. ‘Come on!’ Sybil arched, gasped, wailed and faltered. ‘Push!’ commanded Elfgiva.

  ‘Go on! Ralph gripped her hands, giving her his strength now through his fingers, keeping her in the world with them, in lieu of the promise he dared not make.

  The reminder had all but robbed them both of that strength. He shuddered. He had tried, all winter, not to think about that. He had known since his initiation what the Kingship of the Wood could mean. But that final meaning had not been invoked for centuries. He had not thought it would be awakened in his day. Rufus had once confided to him his fear of the ultimate darkness. He knew now what Rufus meant.

  Elfgiva exclaimed: ‘It’s a boy!’

  He supposed she knew what she was talking about. The baby looked to Ralph like a mandrake root covered with blood. But Elfgiva seemed to think it was as it should be .and would eventually grow up to be a man. If starvation, lung-fever or the end of the world which Father Ilger apparently thought was imminent didn’t get in first. When Elfgiva wiped its head, there was a thin dark fuzz to be seen. Dark? It wouldn’t resemble Cild, then. Thank Herne for that. He would be able to manage, make some sort of showing as a father to this Wood-hatched cuckoo, to do what the Tun expected, in fact.

  Sybil was in the sleep of exhaustion. She had lost too much blood but Cild and Osmund were on a poaching expedition which should mean meat tomorrow. Elfgiva said that if Sybil had some nourishing food soon, it might work miracles.

  The light was fading as he went outside. He had been offered supper by Oswin’s wife. Underfoot, the slush which had half melted that day in a weak sunlight was turning crisp again. It would freeze anew tonight. In the dusk, the white-shrouded forest was an army of ghosts. The wind was bitter.

  Two figures were running towards him from the other cottages, beyond the stream. They halted at the far side of the plank bridge, waiting for him. As he reached them, he recognised Penna and Osmund. ‘Osmund, you’re back. What luck? Sybil has a son and Elfgiva says…’

  He saw their faces, and stopped.

  ‘The Foresters,’ Osmund said. ‘We was running, Cild and me, to pick up a deer we’d shot. He was out in the open before me. I was still back in the thicket. They caught him bloodyhanded, just as he squatted down by the carcase. They’ve got him. They’ve got Cild!’

  In the five years since Rufus had dismissed him to Chenna’s Tun and the life of just another Knight Huntsman, Ralph could count on the fingers of one hand the times he had been as near to the king as he was today and never, in all those years, had he had Rufus’ undivided attention as he had it now.

  But these privileges had been grudgingly given. It had taken silver he could ill spare to get himself to the foot of Rufus’ dais, squeezed in as an unimportant supplicant at the end of a formal audience.

  Rufus regarded him with bored and dispassionate eyes, as if they were strangers. As though, thought Ralph with anger, Rufus’ stubby fingers had never caressed the moles on his Knight Huntsman’s chest, as though they had never fallen asleep in each other’s arms. Shocking words took shape in Ralph’s mind. ‘You didn’t look so dignified when you were climbing on my back. I’ve made you beg for things most men would be ashamed of wanting. Who do you think you are?’

  Rufus said coolly: ‘You have a request, Messire Ralph des Aix?’

  ‘I have, if it pleases you.’ (It wouldn’t). ‘I have come to ask your royal clemency for a prisoner…’

  He believed Cild to have fathered Sybil’s child and for that, he hated Cild.

  And when he knew that the Foresters had taken him, he was riding for the Chief Forester’s base at Lyndhursl Manor, in the hope of rescuing the man he loathed, before an hour had passed. He was King of the Wood, of the Tun, and the Tun expected it. He was a knight, with more power than his predecessor Chenna had ever had and must use that advantage if he could.

  Forest offenders were usually taken to Lyndhurst first. They would be held there till the Forest Justices came round, if this were to be soon. If not, they would be taken on to Winchester, which was more secure, to wait. As far as Ralph knew, the Justices had just finished with the area. He wanted to get to Cild before Cild vanished into the bowels of Winchester Castle. He rode through an icicle-hung forest where every branch was outlined on its upper edge with an inch of snow. His breath blew away in pale vapour and his feet went numb in his boots. He warmed them, however, kicking his heels for a day at Lyndhurst, waiting to get speech with someone in authority. Only to learn when at last he did, that the Justices were still in Hampshire, still in session at the Sheriffs manor Ringwood, eight miles to the west, and that Cild had been taken straight there. ‘Too many of these offences lately,’ said the Norman official, who had never had to resort to crime to eat. ‘The Justices are staying on. They ought to be on their way to the Midlands by now.’

  He rode to Ringwood, head down through a blizzard. On the way it occurred to him to wonder, not why he was taking so much trouble for Cild – by the mores of the Tun he had no choice; the King of the Wood need not love his people but was compelled to defend them – but why it did not after all seem to be against his will. At Lyndhurst, fretting hour after hour, he had found that his anxiety was no dutiful pretence. He was afraid for Cild and truly desired to save him.

  The answer came back at him from the air, like the
stinging snowflakes. Cild was his benefactor. Cild had not wronged him for he had done only what was customary in the Wood. Outside it, he had done no more than glance admiringly at Sybil. What he had done instead was to hunt deer for her sake and be seized for it. And it was Cild’s mother Elfgiva who now watched by Sybil’s bed, who had brought her through this far and who depended on him to save her son if he could.

  When he got to Ringwood, it was mid-morning and the court was sitting.

  He had seen Forest Courts before. As a king’s man, in the days before the Tun, he had given evidence at one or two. Even then, at the Forest Courts, or when foraging for provisions, commandeering food from villages when the king was on the move, he had never been quite at ease and the Tun had taken from him any belief he had ever had that he was different from the thick-accented, roughly-clad, frightened creatures who owned the snatched provisions, or were accused of stealing deer. Now when he heard them stammer and saw them scan the hall and its implacably well-armed, well-fed officialdom, seeking escape as the blinding iron or the wrist-severing axe came nearer, it was their minds he entered and not those of the officials.

  He demanded from the Chief Clerk the names of those whose cases had already been heard and found to his relief that Cild was not among them. He waited at the back of the hall, ready to march out as soon as Cild appeared, to plead for him or if necessary buy him free with the last pieces of silver the Tun could scrape together.

  There were fifteen cases still to go and only one day left. The Sheriff and the Justices all wished to get away to other business. Twelve of the fifteen were convicted and taken away, struggling and bellowing, to mutilation. Cild had still not been brought out. The session was being closed. Ralph pushed his way back to where the Chief Clerk sat.

  ‘…of Chenna’s Tun? I don’t recall…’ the Clerk, in his prim dark official gown, flipped through the contents of his desk and at last discovered a note scrawled on a slate. ‘Oh yes, a late arrival. No time for him this session. All today’s cases were extras. Quite disgraceful. What are times coming to?’