Pavane sm-35

by Keith Roberts

  The Captain gabbled, repeating a list learned by rote. ‘Two sakers throwing three pound ball, powder and wads for them. Some handguns, snaphaunces; not much more than fowling pieces, M’Lord. The great gun Growler, from the King’s arsenal; the culverin Prince of Peace, transferred on His Majesty’s instructions from the garrison of Isca.’ Henry sniffed and rubbed the tip of his nose with the back of his glove. ‘Well, I shall shortly be a prince of peace myself; and I dare say I shall do my share of growling too before the day is through. Have the pieces brought to the main gate, along with what shot and powder they have. Clear a waggon for the arms, and levy mules or horses for the great guns. See to it, Captain.’

  The officer saluted and turned back, bellowing for his aides; Henry raised his arm and swept it down in the signal for general advance. At his shout Father Angelo crabbed forward, nearly parting company with his mount in the process. ‘Quarters in the village, Father,’ said Rye and Deal wearily. ‘At the worst we could have a lengthy stay. And secure me this time hot water and a flushing toilet, or I’ll send you back to Rome in charge of a crap cart. And you won’t be riding it either my friend, I promise you that; you’ll be running between the bloody shafts…’

  The banners and the eagles spread out, bright in the sunlight, as the column cantered across the heath.

  Sir John Faulkner, seneschal of Corfe Gate, woke early from a restless sleep. Sunlight from the fenestella six feet above his head slanted across the little bedchamber, fighting the chill that tended to gather in the room even in the height of summer. The great keep was always cool; for the sun at its hottest could scarcely reach through a dozen feet of Dorset stone. A week before the Lady Eleanor, mistress of the place, had moved her people from the lower baileys to make room for the soldiers flocking in and the refugees begging shelter; the household was still unused to the primitive conditions of the donjon. The seneschal rubbed his face, filled a bowl and washed, swilling the water down the sluice beneath the window. He dressed, grateful for the touch of fresh linen on his body, and left the chamber.

  Outside, a circular stairway wound up through the thickness of the wall. He climbed it, placing his feet at the sides of the treads; generations of wear had scooped the steps into hollows that were traps for the unwary. At the top of the spiralling way a door, loosely closed by a lanyard, gave access to the roof. He unfastened the becket and stepped through, leaned on the parapet and looked down between the massive crenellations at the surrounding country. Five miles to the south the Channel stretched away in a pearly haze; out there on a clear day keen sight might make out the shape of the Needles, guarding the western tip of the Isle of Wight. The Devil sat there once in the long-ago, heaved a rock at Corfe towers, and dropped it short on Studland beach. The seneschal smiled slightly at the fancy and turned away.

  Northward were the heights of the Great Plain, pale in the dawn light, grey and vague like the uplands of a kingdom of ghosts. Close to the castle rose the huge swellings of Challow and Knowle, its flanking hills; and all round was the heath, blackened in places by summer fires, flat and sullen and immense, a sour expanse that would grow nothing, supported nothing except roving bands of croppers. He could see the smoke from one of their camps threading up in the distance. Nearer at hand he looked down on the ribbed grey roofs of the village, the farm that stood just beyond the wet ditch. As he watched a lorry coasted to it, off-loaded two churns, and puffed away round the shoulder of the motte towards the Wareham Road.

  Almost unwillingly, he lifted his eyes to the semaphore tower on the crest of Challow Hill. As if it had been waiting for a cue, the thing began to move; the jerky ‘Arms up, arms down’ of the Attention signal. He knew it would be answering another far across the heath; so far that only the Guildsmen, with their wonderful Zeiss binoculars, could translate accurately the letters and symbols of the message. Way across the land the chain of towers would be moving, lifting their jointed arms, banging them back. Attention, Attention…

  Reading the semaphores was not officially the province of the seneschal; down in the third bailey a scurry of movement told him the guards had already alerted the household’s Signaller-Page. The boy would be hurrying from his room, rubbing his eyes maybe, message pad in hand. The seneschal watched the movements of the arms, lips shaping the numbers as they formed, mind translating the cryptograms to which generations of Signallers had reduced the king’s English. ‘Eagle Rye one five,’ he read. ‘North-west ten, closing.’ That would be My Lord of the Cinque Ports, with his hundred and fifty men; he was nearer than the seneschal had thought. Nine dead,’ said the thing on the hill. ‘Nine.’ That was bad; the Pope’s lieutenant was evidently determined to enhance his reputation for ruthlessness. There followed a call sign; Sir John heard cables rattle as Eleanor’s Signaller worked the arms of his tower. ‘Yield your guns,’ said the grid’ repeater briefly. ‘Give yourselves into captivity. Messengers en route.’ Then that was all. The arms dropped with a final clash; the tower fell austerely silent.

  The watching man sighed and instinctively his hand went to the amulet round his neck. He turned the little disc in his fingers, tracing the outline of the symbol carved on it. Down below the kitchen chimneys smoked, pails clanked as the cows were milked in their stalls. Those of the household who had been in sight of the tower had paused momentarily when its arms started to move, and all would have heard the clatter of their own answer; but no commoners could read the language of the Guild, and they had soon bent to their tasks again. Eleanor would have to be told. He ducked back down the stairway, hunching his shoulders automatically to prevent banging his head on the low ceiling. His mouth was set grimly. This was the thing that had been ordained a thousand years; an era was about to come to an end.

  The Lady Eleanor was already up and dressed. A board had been set out for her in one of the chambers opening off the Great Hall; she was taking breakfast in an alcove beneath a window set with quarrel-panes of coloured glass. She rose when she saw her seneschal, and watched his face. He nodded briefly in answer to the unvoiced question. ‘Yes, my Lady,’ he said quietly. ‘He will come today.’

  She sat back, no longer conscious of the food in front of her. Her face and worried

  eyes looked very young. ‘How many men?’ she asked finally.

  ‘A hundred and fifty.’

  She waved a hand, conscious suddenly of her incivility. ‘Please sit down, Sir John. Will you take wine?’

  He leaned back in the window seat, resting his head against the glass. ‘Not at present, thank you, my Lady…’

  He watched her, and no one could have told the expression in his eyes. She stared back seeing how the lights stained his hair and cheek with colour, gold and rose and blue. She pulled at her lip, and twined her fingers in her lap. ‘Sir John,’ she said, ‘what am I to do?’

  He didn’t answer for a time; and when he did speak there was no help in the words. ‘What your blood dictates, my Lady,’ he said. ‘You will follow your breeding, and your heart.’

  She got up again quickly and walked away from him to where she could see the Great Hall shadowed and forbidding, the gloomy power of the vast crosswall, the dais where in ancient times the family sat at meat, the gallery where minstrels used to play. She touched a switch beside the chamber door; a solitary electric lamp flicked on in the roof, throwing a wan pool of light on the coarse flags of the floor, and suddenly the place seemed fitter for the dead than the living. Somewhere a chain-hoist rumbled; the Signaller-Page ran into the hall, stopped short when he saw his mistress. She took the message he carried, smiling at him, turned back with the flimsy in her hand. She said broodingly, ‘A hundred and fifty men…"

  She walked back to her chair, sat with her hands folded in her lap, and stared at the table in front of her. ‘If I open to him,’ she said indistinctly, ‘I shall run behind his pack train like a soldiers’ drab. I shall lose my living and my home, most certainly my decency and probably my life. But I can’t fight Pope John. To war with him is to take
on all the world… Yet this is his man come to try me.’

  The seneschal said nothing; she hadn’t expected him to answer. She sat still a long time and when she looked up there were tears in her eyes. ‘Close the gates, Sir John,’ she said, ‘and get our people in. Advise me when these messengers arrive, but do not grant them entry.’ He rose quietly. ‘And the guns, Lady?’

  ‘The guns?’ she said sombrely. ‘Take them to the gate by all means, and shot and powder for them. So far we will do as he desires…"

  Through all the passages and high walks of the place the drums throbbed, beating to quarters.

  Henry of Rye and Deal reined his horse, and behind him the column of men boiled to a halt. A bare mile away the castle glared huge and close, smoke rising in columns from its walls; down the road, rutted between its tall banks, the messengers were galloping, trailing clouds of whitish dust that hung behind them dispersing slowly in the still air. Three sentences the couriers got out before Henry started to swear. His spurs tore gashes in the flanks of his horse; the animal leaped forward terrified, the column swirled and clattered in pursuit.

  The village square was packed with visitors, the taverns doing a bustling trade; the folk who had gathered to stare were scattered by the Lord of Rye and Deal. He hauled his horse in at the outer barbican, the animal lathered and running blood. The great gun Growler had indeed been brought down; but he was loaded and primed and his muzzle stared through the iron of the portcullis, and the culverin was flanking him. Behind the pieces a semicircle of men stood at ease, halberds grounded on the turf.

  ‘Clear that bloody bridge,’ bellowed the Pope’s lieutenant, revolving on his horse. ‘Captain, if those people won’t get off throw ’em in the ditch…’ Then to the guards, ‘What damn fool game is this? Open for Pope John…"

  One of the men inside the bailey spoke up stolidly. ‘Sorry, M’Lord. Orders of the Lady Eleanor.’

  ‘Then,’ swore the nobleman, voice rising on a high note of rage, ‘instruct Her

  Ladyship that Henry of Rye and Deal commands her presence to answer for her fornicating insolence…’

  ‘M’Lord,’ said the man inside, unmoved, ‘the Lady Eleanor has been informed…" Henry glared back. Turned to see his soldiers crowding the bridge, stared up at the great impassive face of the keep. Round the donjon the inner battlements flocked with men. He leaned forward to rattle with his crop against the bars of the gate. ‘By nightfall, my talkative friend,’ he said, breathing heavily, ‘you’ll hang by your heels for this, probably with your head over a slow fire. D’ye realise that?’ The guard spat deliberately at his feet.

  Eleanor took her time about coming. She had bathed and changed and dressed her hair; she would allow no hands to touch her body but her own, not even the hands of tiring-maids. She appeared holding the arm of the seneschal, her Captain of Artillery walking on her left. She wore a plain white dress, and her long brown hair was loose. A little wind moved across the bailey, blowing the hair and flattening her skirt against her thighs. Henry, who had lost enough face already, watched her, fuming. Twenty paces from the gate the others stopped and she came forward alone. She saw the horsemen on the bridge, the muskets and swords, the sea of tossing blue. She halted by the breech of the great gun, one hand resting on the iron. ‘Well, My Lord,’ she said in a low, clear voice. ‘What will you have of us?’

  Henry’s rages were famous and spectacular; spittle flecked his beard, the standersby heard him grind his teeth. ‘Deliver me this place,’ he shouted finally. ‘And your ordnance, and yourselves. In the name of your ruler Pope John, through the authority vested in me his lieutenant in these islands.’ She straightened her back, staring up at him through the gate.

  ‘And in the name of Charles?’ she asked cuttingly. ‘For my liege ruler is my King. So it was with my father and so with me My Lord; I took no vows before a foreign priest.’ He drew his sword, and pointed through the bars.’ That gun,’ was all he could speak.

  She still remained standing by the great gun, her fingers touching its breech and the wind moving in her hair. ‘And if I refuse?’

  He shouted again then, waving an arm; at the gesture a soldier spurred forward lifting a bag from the pommel of his saddle. ‘Then your liege-folk in this isle pay with their homes and their property and their lives,’ panted Henry, slashing at the cord that held the canvas closed. ‘It’ll be blood for iron, My Lady, blood for iron…’ The string came free, the bag was shaken; and down before her dropped the tongues and other parts of men, cut away as was the custom of Henry’s soldiers.

  There was a silence that deepened. The colour drained slowly from Eleanor’s face, leaving the skin chalk-pale as the fabric of her dress; indeed the more romantic of the watchers swore afterwards the blue leached from her very eyes, leaving them lambent and dead as the eyes of a corpse. She clenched her hands slowly, slowly relaxed them again; a long time she waited, leaning on the gun, while the rage blurred her sight, rose to a high mad shrilling that seemed to ring inside her brain, receded leaving her utterly cold. She swallowed; and when she spoke again every word seemed freshly chipped from ice. ‘Why then,’ she said. ‘You must not leave us empty-handed, My Lord of Rye and Deal. Yet I fear my Growler will be a heavy load. Would not your task be lightened if his charge were sent before?’ And before any of the people round her could guess her purpose or intervene she had snatched at the firing lanyard, and Growler leaped back pouring smoke while echoes clapped around the waiting hills.

  The heavy charge, fired at point-blank range, blew away the belly of the horse and took both Henry’s feet off at the ankles; animal and rider leaped convulsively and fell with a mingled scream into the dry ditch. As if by common consent the crossbows of the defenders played first on them; within seconds they were still, pierced by a score of shafts. The grapeshot, ploughing on, spread ruin among the soldiers on the bridge, tore furrows from the buildings of the village square beyond. Shrieks sounded, echoing from the close stone walls; the harquebusiers fired into the struggling mass on the path; the Captain rode away, leaning from his horse while his blood ribboned back across the creature’s rump. Then it finished, dying men whimpering while a thin haze of smoke drifted across the lower bailey towards the Martyr’s Gate.

  Eleanor leaned on the gun and bit her wrist like a child at what she had done. The seneschal was the first to reach her; but she shoved him away. ‘Take up that dirt,’ she said, pointing to the ditch. ‘And bury it inside the bailey walls. I will have my right of faldage from Pope John…’ Then she staggered; he caught her, lifted her and carried her to her room.

  For most of her life Eleanor, only daughter of Robert, last of the Lords of Purbeck, had lived in seclusion in the great hall set between the hills. She was a strange child, secretive and shy, beloved of the Fairies who according to popular report assisted at her very conception. Though practical and level-headed in other respects, Eleanor never made any attempt to scotch the rumours of her paranormal origin, seeming instead to take pleasure in them. ‘For,’ she would explain, ‘my father often told his guests the tale of how he rode north that day to bring my mother home. When he ran out and jumped on his horse everybody was convinced he’d taken leave of his senses; but he always claimed it was the People of the Heath that drove him to it, showing him visions so beautiful they sent him completely wild.’ Then her face would cloud; for Margaret Strange had died in childbirth, and Eleanor felt very keenly the loss of the mother she had never known.

  Too keenly sometimes for her father’s peace of mind; Robert, who never remarried, brooded over the child’s imaginings. Once, when she was very small, she walked in her sleep. It was on a night of wind, with a full gale roaring up from the Channel barely five miles away; one of those nights when the nervous of the household kept to their rooms, swearing they heard the laughter of the Old Ones in the gusts that hissed and droned round the high stones of the keep. Eleanor’s nurse, looking in to see the child was quiet, found her room empty; a hue and cry was raised,
and the whole great complex of buildings searched. They found Eleanor high in the donjon, at the head of an ancient stairway unused for years. Her eyes were closed but as they reached her they heard her calling. ‘Mother,’ she shouted. ‘Mother, are you there…’ They led her down, careful not to startle her; for it was well known that such walkers were under the spell of the Old Ones, who took their souls very easily if they woke. Eleanor herself seemed oblivious of the whole affair; but it was not so. She referred to it days later, when her nurse was dressing her. ‘My mother was very pretty, wasn’t she?’ she said; then thoughtfully, ‘She wanted to play; but she had to go away…’ Robert frowned when he heard, and pulled his beard and swore; the girl was packed off to relatives in France, but when she came back six months later she was very little changed.

  As a child Eleanor was frequently lonely; for the castle contained no other children of her own age except the children of the serving people, from whom she was largely excluded by barriers of rank and class. Most of her days were passed quietly in the company of her nurse and later her tutor, from whom she learned the several languages of the land. She proved to have a quick and receptive brain; she soon mastered the Norman French and Latin that had remained the tongues of the cultured world, even more quickly the churl talk of the peasants. It worried her father slightly to hear the old syllables bang and splatter from her lips; but because of it she was greatly respected by the few commoners with whom she came in contact. Indeed she seemed to identify herself more with the ordinary people of the countryside than with those of her own rank; which in a way was understandable considering that she was only partly of noble blood.