Knight's Acre

by Norah Lofts

  Lady Astallon’s second letter informed Sybilla that Richard had outgrown his first outfit of the Astallon green velvet and that he had, of his own accord, taken lessons in reading and writing. Proof of that was at the foot of the page. RICHARD TALLBOYS, carefully and plainly written.

  I should be glad. I am glad. But this is not what I am waiting and watching for.

  TWELVE

  Gravely, for both were men of dignity, Selim, the new king of Zagelah, and Hassan ben Hassan laughed in their beards and congratulated themselves. They had hatched and put into action the perfect plot. There would be no civil war, as might have resulted from an uprising; no interference from Abdullah’s brothers-in-law which would have resulted from an assassination. The Christians had attacked Zagelah, killed Abdullah and most of his loyal adherents—all bad Moslems; Selim of Andara had simply happened to be in the city at the time and strong enough to rally the faithful and gain a great victory. And Selim’s inheritance by conquest was backed by his legitimate claim. He was kin to Abdullah.

  And this was only a beginning. A reformed and purified Zagelah would presently move against Escalona and reclaim it.

  ‘And that,’ Selim said, ‘will bring the Christians against us.’

  Against his will he had been impressed by the performance of the Count and his small company. Fools, all of them; but for so few they had done a vast amount of damage. A matter of training and equipment. He had begun, even on that first day, to toy with the possibility of forming a squadron of his own, similarly trained and armoured. With this in view he had issued an order to take prisoners when possible, to house them and feed them well. Despite this only one had survived—the man with the burnt hands.

  Just upriver from Andara Selim owned a marble quarry, worked by slaves of almost every nationality; most of them were seamen who had been captured by the Barbary pirates and offered for sale in the port’s slave market. Selim, as a strict Moslem, would not own another as a slave and since, despite comparatively good treatment, his slaves seldom lived long, he was always in the market for able-bodied men. He now sent a messenger galloping to Andara with instructions to bring back an English slave.

  Sir Godfrey’s hands were beginning to heal. The Moorish treatment for burns was very peculiar; in England the practice was to smear a burn with some kind of fat and then to exclude the air. Here it was immersion of the burnt part in cool, slightly salted water. At first touch the water stung, then the coldness seemed to numb the pain. The burns were then exposed to the air, immersed again. An endless repetition.

  The pain was the least of his woes. He was bereaved and he was a prisoner in a heathen land. In a Christian country his ransom price would by now have been fixed and James and William and Alys—and maybe a friend or two—would be getting the money together. Here there was no hope. He lived in a state of utter dejection, not even noticing that he was being well-treated. His thoughts went round and round, like an ox treading corn. I shall never see Sybilla or the children again. I shall never go home. Robert is dead. His death was horrible. I shall never see…

  The English slave—his name was John Barnes and he was one of the few men who worked in the quarry without developing the cough which was a death sentence—wore the quarry uniform, a pair of short drawers, a sleeveless shirt and a pair of rope-soled sandals. His grizzled hair was neatly trimmed, his face freshly shaven. He looked well-fed but his face had the tallowy pallor of long exclusion from fresh air or sunlight. Sir Godfrey looked to be in worse case. They had taken away his armour and the quilted garment he wore under it and given him a long, Arabic-style gown, once white, now soiled. The good treatment that Selim had ordered had meant, to his Arab gaolers, enough to eat and no active ill-usage but not the use of a comb or a razor. His hair was rough and clotted and he had just enough beard growth to make him look dirty.

  ‘Th’art English, lad?’

  ‘Yes. I’m English.’

  John Barnes said, hastily, furtively, ‘Do what th’art towd, lad. No matter what.’ Then they both waited. Selim, in Arabic, spoke to John Barnes and he in turn spoke to Sir Godfrey.

  ‘What’s thy name, lad?’

  ‘Godfrey Tallboys. Sir Godfrey Tallboys.’

  Deep down in the marble quarry near Andara, John Barnes had heard nothing about the doings in the outer world. All he knew was that he had been brought out into the open, had a ride on a horse and several very good meals because his services as a translator were needed. But he knew what it meant when a man prefixed his name with Sir; and he did not use the familiar lad again until the very end.

  He obeyed his master’s instructions. Selim was offering Sir Godfrey an honourable post. All he had to do was to train men to fight in the Christian way; overlook the making of armour, copied from that taken from the bodies of dead men; show men how to school horses. Arcol had made his mark. In that narrow, balconied street with Sir Godfrey crouched in the gutter beside Lord Robert’s armour—removed too late—and the charred body, Arcol had behaved valiantly as a destrier was trained to do, if for any reason his rider was smitten down; four iron-clad hoofs, strong teeth. It was, in fact, to Arcol that Sir Godfrey owed his life. His spirited resistance had gained that moment of time for the order from the centre to penetrate—a few prisoners…

  ‘No,’ Sir Godfrey said, hearing the proposition but not giving it long thought. Connive with these infidels, against his own kind. No!

  John Barnes said, ‘Best think it over, Sir Godfrey. They have a whip, the khurbash, I’ve tasted the rope’s end, twice. It’s nothing compared. Save thysen.’

  ‘Tell them, No.’

  ‘Th’art a fool, Sir Godfrey. They’ll beat thee. Me too, they’ll say I didn’t tell thee proper…’ The man’s tallowy pallor took on a greyish tinge and out of Sir Godfrey’s despair, deep enough to welcome death in whatever form—I shall never see Sybilla and the children again; never go home. Robert is dead—and so many more; all my friends—a tiny bud of something else started.

  ‘If you stand still,’ Sir Godfrey said, ‘I’ll show them other-wise.’

  He clenched his fists and the new frail skin on the inner side of his hands crumpled and split. He hit John Barnes twice, light but telling blows; right fist to the left of the chin, jerking the head back, left just under the right ear.

  It was the only indemnity that he could give his fellow-countryman. And as, under the first blow, John Barnes’ head jerked, he said, ‘Thanks, lad.’

  ‘A spell in the quarry may make him think again,’ Selim said.

  The quarry just outside Andara was an awesome place. When God made the world out of darkness and chaos He had laid down a streak of pink marble at the base of a limestone ridge. It ran sideways and inwards. The Romans, in their day, had tapped its upper, outward end and done well, for this marble was of peculiar beauty, pink, its colour shading from palest rose to deepest, not flecked or striped. It had been greatly in demand for palaces and temples. Later for churches and ornate mansions. Besides its colour it had another unique feature; it was layered, slab on slab, like the leaves of a book and the interleaving limestone layers often produced garnets. As the centuries went by the productive working face of the quarry retreated into the hillside and, by the time Sir Godfrey went to work there, there was, between the ordinary daylight world and the pink marble, a series of caverns and tunnels, emptied of their treasure, providing excellent living accommodation and workrooms for slaves. There were air shafts, conduits for water, plentiful lighting by means of lamps that burned olive oil. It even had a climate of its own, equable and unaffected by either winter’s snows or summer’s baking heat. From a slave-owner’s point of view, it had yet another advantage; it had only one entry.

  Into this subterranean world Sir Godfrey Tallboys was conducted, as hundreds of other men had been, to live and to work and to die. Perhaps, in his case, not to die; for an order came with him. Light labour only and no ill-treatment; the King might have another use for him.

  He was set to wo
rk with some old men, a few survivors of the regime, or weak men racked by coughs, or men who in more vigorous work had suffered accidents. The “light work” consisted of polishing small pieces of marble, the debris of the quarry’s produce. The marble was brittle; sometimes a slab broke as it was heaved out of its matrix, sometimes one was dropped. Nothing here was wasted. A little jagged piece no bigger than a thumbnail was marketable for use as part of a mosaic floor or patterned wall. The polishing was done with a woollen rag, dipped first into oil and then into a grey abrasive powder.

  His arrival aroused no interest—less, in fact, than a strange cow would arouse in a field of cows. There was here the apathy of hopelessness which he fully shared. Wait for the next meal, wait for bedtime, wait for death.

  There were two meals a day, always enough for everybody. In the morning, rice with small chunks of meat; in the evening, rice with sugar and bits of dried fruit.

  There was provision for nature’s other need, not unlike the garderobes of castles, except that here the outlets were small. There were guards or overseers who carried whippy canes and used them freely on anybody who had not turned enough jagged bits into smoothly polished pieces. Each man’s finished work lay by his feet at the end of the day and every day Sir Godfrey’s pile was smaller than any other but he was not caned.

  There was nobody to whom he could speak. No Englishman here. The guards shouted or scolded in Arabic which Sir Godfrey did not understand or intend to learn. He did what the others did.

  For a full fortnight.

  At the end of the second week, in accord with the deadly, soul-killing routine, he was taken out into the air, blinking and blinded as they all were by the sunshine. But he saw…

  There, dark and yawning the great arch, entry and exit to the quarry, and immediately before it the hard-trodden ground, a space where laden men and laden donkeys delivered what the quarry needed and took away what the quarry produced. Herded by the guards, shouting in Arabic and using their canes freely, Sir Godfrey and those who worked with him turned to the left. And there was half a meadow and beyond a stretch of river. Half a meadow because it had been carved away, made into a pool, curving inwards.

  For the first time since he had been taken in that narrow, balconied street, Sir Godfrey’s eye for terrain went to work.

  The pool was a semicircle carved out of the river bank and separated from the river by an iron grille, slightly wider than the opening of the pool into the river. Upstream, downstream the iron grille, very spiky, reached into the green meadow.

  If I could swim!

  With that thought he began to live again.

  The fortnightly bath was a ritual. Gang by gang, on differing days, all the slaves of the Andara quarry were taken out, stripped, made to go into the water, brought back, clad in clean clothes, given into the barber’s hands to be shaven and shorn. Not for their comfort, who cared? A guard against lice and all the other things which unwashed bodies produced.

  The pool, Sir Godfrey thought in the mind that had begun to work again, is shaped like a C; the grille that separates it from the river extends, ten, twelve feet upstream, downstream. Are those points guarded?

  It seemed not. So he worked it out. All that he needed to do was to go into the far edge of the pool, step out on to the bit of grass confined by the iron grille, run across it, plunge into the river and swim. Swim down to Andara, find a ship with an English name. The masts and spars of the ships in the harbour were visible from the pool.

  His time in captivity in Zagelah, his fortnight of sedentary work, had slackened his muscles. That must be put right. He started his surreptitious exercises; stretching and bending, swinging his arms, flexing his legs, first thing in the morning, last thing at night. Not enough. He took to wolfing his food and thus gaining a few seconds in order to perform his antics, which his fellows watched with complete lack of interest, and every time he went to the garderobe place he stayed a little longer than was necessary. He observed that every now and then one of the men he worked with was assailed by cramp and with yelps and grimaces of pain would stand up from his working posture and stamp about to relieve it. He had not yet suffered this affliction himself but he now pretended to, as often as four or five times a day. His pile of finished work was still always the smallest but he was still never caned. In this place, as in all others under Selim’s control, an order once given remained in force until it was rescinded.

  There was a legend in the quarry that once upon a time a slave had attempted to escape on the way to the bathing pool; on the trodden forecourt he had turned right instead of left, thrown himself on a waiting mule and galloped off. It was a long time ago but the guards were always particularly vigilant at that point. Once the slaves were in the water they relaxed a little, nobody could escape from the pool; all they had to do was to see that the slaves went far enough in and really washed themselves. On his second visit Sir Godfrey investigated the depth of the water. It grew deeper as it neared the grille. He waded out until it was chin high—that was about the centre; another step and he could feel the buoyancy of the water. He had never swum himself but he had seen it done. You kept your nose and mouth above water and made certain movements with arms and legs. He began to practise such movements. It was slow work, it was hit and miss, but his whole heart was in it and he made progress.

  He was still dissatisfied with his physical shape; despite all his exertions it seemed to him that day by day his belly, which had been flat as a board, bulged a little more while his chest shrank. He began to wonder whether the food had anything to do with it. Most slaves in the quarry looked well-fed, though two meals a day was not really very much, and if you looked closely at the unvarying dishes—as he did—the amount of meat in the morning meal was very small indeed and the fruit pieces at evening were equally sparse. Was it the rice which made his belly bulge? He didn’t know, but he could find out. He began to pick out the meat and the fruit and eat only a spoonful or two of the plentiful rice. For some days he suffered hunger pangs, then they eased; but the bulge was, if anything, even more pronounced.

  In this place there was no day and no night; nor any way of telling one day from another; only the fortnightly cleansing marked the passage of time. The guards changed from time to time but they all looked and sounded alike and their behaviour varied so little that they might have been one man.

  Outside, the seasons progressed; the weather became warm, then hot, so that the bathing became a pleasure and there was no need for the guards to shout, ‘Farther!’ The grass in the meadow became yellow and brittle. July? August?

  Sir Godfrey knew that the attack on Zagelah had been made in mid-February. After that he had been too dejected to bother about time. Say he had come to Andara early in March. And say this was July. Five months. He should have been home by now. Sir Ralph had promised to go and see Sybilla and take her a message. He was not to say that it was war, not tournament, and for his own premature return he was to use the excuse of ill-health. Sybilla knew how long a journey lasted. She would be worried now.

  He must make his attempt as soon as possible, not wait until he swam better. Another consideration was that shipping was more plentiful in summer and voyages speedier.

  The guards, more observant than they appeared to be during the washing time, were now accustomed to the sight of one man venturing into the really deep water and performing antics. They were not worried; he could not escape by the grille which was heavily spiked and at its top turned inwards.

  It was an afternoon of somnolent heat; not a time for swift movement or swift thinking. He splashed about a little, sure now that it was just possible. He had only to heave himself out of the pool, run like a hare to the end of the grille, throw himself into the river.

  Now!

  He did it. As the water closed over his head he heard the shouting. He surfaced and clumsily struck out.

  What he did not know, and couldn’t know, was that some of the pink marble was transported downstream to the por
t in small boats. Somebody in one of these hit him over the head with an oar and dragged him aboard.

  Far less heinous offences than attempted escape were punishable by flogging but this man could not be flogged without the King’s direct permission. And Selim had lost interest in Sir Godfrey. For one thing Hassan hen Hassan, a firm traditionalist, had been opposed to the idea of new-fangled methods of fighting and found the thought of aping the unbelievers most repulsive. For another when, as he planned, he moved in on Escalona nobody had made so much as a murmur of protest. The nearest two great Christian lords were busy with their interminable squabble; and the King of Castile had other things than the loss of a small province to think about. Divorce, remarriage …

  In due time the new order came—Treat this man as you would any other.

  Sir Godfrey had regained consciousness in a place so dark and so narrow that when he had felt about a bit he had been seized with panic. He had drowned and they’d buried him alive.

  It was a rational assumption. During his time in Andara he had seen two men die and seen how casually their corpses had been treated—literally dragged out, feet first, with no more ceremony than would have been given a dead dog. His head hurt. He had no memory of the blow that had stunned him and thought that his head had been injured by similar rough handling.

  He felt about; stone under him, stone on both sides; then wood. Wood? Yes, wood. The lid of the coffin? The door to the vault? He hammered on it and shouted. There was no answer.

  A man not yet dead, but buried alive and soon to die, should make his peace with God.