Knight's Acre

by Norah Lofts

  Despite an exceptionally active day, Sir Godfrey slept little. He would take the risk; he would not take the risk. It could be a trap: it could be a chance. In the end he decided to keep the rendezvous but to go armed, so that if it were a trap he could kill himself rather than be taken and doomed to slow death by impalement.

  As in all slave communities there was here, in the palace of Zagelah, a natural caution about allowing slaves to handle, for any length of time, anything that might be used as an offensive weapon. Slaves worked as armourers, as smiths, as builders, but they were always closely supervised and the tools they used carefully checked. Slaves whose work entailed a certain amount of freedom were not allowed to carry even that ordinary thing—a knife for the cutting of meat at table. Usually their meat and their bread was cut for them but if they were served with a dish which made a knife essential, some rather blunt, round-ended knives were counted out and counted in again. Such precautions were not taken for fear of slave revolts—very rare occurrences—but as a guard against slaves fighting between themselves or, in a moment of madness, turning upon an overseer who was indulging in a little persecution. Not all of them were as easy going as Ermin who, next morning, when Sir Godfrey said that his pruning knife was blunt, told him to take it along and get it sharpened.

  After that came the problem of concealing it. He managed by tying a piece of cord high on his left arm and pushing the knife into it, as though it were a belt. After that all his movements were very careful, for he honed the knife until it had the shape and sharpness of a sword.

  He was in the market place again when the call to prayer rang out and he prostrated himself with the others. Then, as the last market activity broke out, he turned into the street of the shoemakers in search of what sounded somewhat unlikely—a blind man following that trade. He was easily found, a man not particularly old but with eyes as white as pebbles. He sat on a stool near the front of a small booth whose walls were hung with shoes of many colours and slippers richly embroidered.

  ‘I want a pair of red shoes, lined with blue.’

  ‘Red. With blue? The custom is to match leather and lining as nearly as possible.’

  ‘It is my fancy. Red, lined with blue they must be.’

  ‘Then it will be a special order. And such things take time. Be so good as to tell me—if I give you my attention, shall I keep other customers waiting?’

  ‘There are no other customers.’

  ‘Then follow me.’ He walked briskly, and with the confidence of a full-sighted man, to a door at the back of the shop. There was a long dark passage; cooking smells, women’s voices. Sir Godfrey slipped his left arm free of his jacket and retrieved his knife.

  ‘Ten steps down,’ the blind man said. At the foot of them he pulled aside a curtain and Sir Godfrey saw a little room, with a door and a window looking on to a street, parallel to but at a lower level than the street of the shoemakers. It contained a divan upon which sat an Arab woman, a veiled, shapeless bundle.

  ‘Is it right?’ the blind man asked.

  ‘You have done well.’ Her voice was harsh, rather unpleasing, a voice accustomed to making itself heard above the noises of the market. ‘Burn the clothes and you will have done,’ she said. On the divan beside her lay a pile of clothes, white, reasonably but not too conspicuously clean, the clothes of a fairly prosperous peasant, and a hat of woven straw.

  ‘Dress,’ she said. ‘I will wait by the donkey.’

  She moved heavily, a fattish, middle-aged woman, he judged.

  Dressed—and now with a girdle into which he could push his knife—he went out to the quiet sunny street. It was very different from the streets adjoining the market and something about it—Silly to think that it was the street where Robert had died and Arcol had fought and he had been taken, but it was very like it.

  ‘Pull the hat farther down,’ the woman said, ‘and get on to the donkey.’ It was an animal in fair condition, but rather small, and it wore the usual panniers. ‘Crouch a bit, you are too tall. Don’t talk unless you must, pretend to be half asleep.’

  The gateway again. No challenge this time. They turned right—northwards. He sat, uncomfortably hunched, eyes half-closed. The woman talked sometimes, always in that grating voice, so exactly like other women’s. They had only one theme; what wickedly low prices produce taken to market fetched and what wickedly high prices were charged by those who sold things country people must buy. Here and there people turned off from the road, taking trails and paths that led to their various villages or holdings. Every departure thinned the crowd. When only three other groups were left, the woman stopped the donkey and said in a loud, complaining voice. ‘And now this misbegotten son of the one-eyed one has a stone in his shoe.’

  Nobody else stopped; why should they.

  There was no trail or path leading off here. Groves of olives on both sides. She pulled the donkey to the left hand side of the road and, once in shelter of the trees said, ‘Here we take to the hills. You take this—’ she loosened one pannier and handed it to Sir Godfrey who had thankfully dismounted. The other she shouldered herself and set off, leading the way and moving with a swiftness surprising in so heavy a woman.

  The donkey, relieved of its triple burden, sighed with relief and began to follow. He had not had a happy life but he had learned that those who used him—however unkindly—provided, at the end of the day, food and water.

  They were now at a point slightly north of the pass between Zagelah and Escalona, where the mountains could be called mere hills. The ground rose steeply and the belts of vegetation succeeded one another less gradually. Olives, rough pasture, gorse, pines, bareness. At one patch of pasture, with a little stream—one of the tributaries of the Loja—running through it, the donkey decided to halt. Across this little stream the woman jumped like a mountain goat. Presently their headlong, upland flight brought them to another, wider and deeper. Into this she plunged, not bothering to lift her skirts, and walked upstream for several yards before stepping out on the farther bank. He followed. There, behind an out-jutting rock she halted, put down her pannier and said in a voice only slightly breathless, ‘That should defeat the hounds—if they bring them out.’

  It was the first time she had spoken since the helter-skelter uphill climb began. She had led the way, seemingly certain of her direction and he had ploughed along behind, far less nimble. Now he was astonished because she spoke in a different, far more pleasant, voice than she had used before.

  ‘I am most deeply grateful to you,’ he said. ‘Who sent you to guide me?’ He was dazed by the speed of it all, by the fact that he stood here in the free air, able to look down upon Zagelah which, from this height and distance, looked very much as it had looked on the Count’s map.

  The woman shrugged off her voluminous, dusty-black peasant-woman’s dress and stood clad in a bulky sheepskin coat. It reached to her knees and accounted for her heavy look. She threw it off. ‘It made running hard,’ she said, still from behind the ugly veil. She stood, half-revealed in what Sir Godfrey, though he had never been inside a harem, recognised as harem wear because amongst the slaves in the stable yards titillating little pictures had been furtively handed about. Then as he stared the woman, with a dramatic gesture, removed the tent-like veil with its little eye piece of coarse threadwork.

  ‘Now you know,’ she said, and looked at him with a smile which expected, demanded recognition.

  To the best of his knowledge he had never seen her before in his life. A mass of silky black hair, drawn back and held in a net of gold, studded with pearls; skin the colour of ivory, thin arched eyebrows over exceptionally steep eyelids and black eyes, a delicate, high-bridged nose, a sharply curved mouth, the colour of a dark red rose. And while his eyes observed, his nose breathed in the sweet odour, the product of a body which baths and unguents and perfumes had impregnated so thoroughly that even hard running inside a fleece-lined coat merely emphasised it.

  Such observations of eye and nose took o
nly seconds but, for her, too long. The expectant smile faded. She said, ‘You do not remember me?’

  He knew that people often took non-recognition as a kind of insult. Obviously she was from the harem, the owner of the voice which had spoken from the grille. Then a terrible thought struck him—somewhere a mistake had been made; he was not the man for whom escape had been planned.

  She said, ‘I have remembered you. For two years.’

  And even then he was not enlightened, having lost all sense of time. It was only from stray remarks in the stable yard about the length of Selim’s reign—more than six years—that he realised how long he had been in the quarry. In that lost, timeless time two years was meaningless.

  Utterly at a loss, he did the best thing he could have done in the circumstances. He offered he the singularly candid, blue-eyed smile which in the past had made so many people like him, even while admitting that he was stupid or stubborn.

  He said, ‘Madam, I am at a loss… My memory was never good and six years in a quarry, trying not to remember, has not improved it.’

  ‘But it was in the quarry. The man was beating me…’

  Confusion upon confusion. He remembered the day, the girl, so young, so new, his own impulsive action, the second flogging…

  The sun sank suddenly, as it did in mountainous places, cut off by the peaks to the west.

  ‘I remember now,’ he said. But he could not see the connection.

  ‘It took me so long,’ she said. ‘It was months before Selim even looked at me. He had another favourite then…’ Something, not a smile, though it moved her lips, changed her expression as she remembered the cunning, callous mechanisations which had led to the former favourite’s downfall. ‘It takes time to establish oneself in a position of favour—and power. I had you out of the quarry as soon as I had that power.’

  ‘I never even guessed…’

  ‘I think we should eat now,’ she said. ‘And then sleep, to be ready for the morning.’ She pulled the black, tent-like dress over the satin and silk, bent over the pannier she had carried and produce a large, double-handed, silver cup.

  ‘If you will fill this…’

  When he returned in the rapidly fading light, she had laid out, on a square of linen, what to him seemed a feast, a fresh roasted leg of mutton, a loaf of newly baked bread, some figs bursting with ripeness.

  ‘I had so little time,’ she said, apologetically. ‘I was ready… but never sure. Even after I had spoken to you, still not sure. At the last moment Selim could have demanded that I go with him…’

  ‘It amazes me,’ he said, ‘how you could arrange so much.’

  ‘Money will buy anything—even loyalty, of a kind. We are not yet safe. We shall not be safe until we are in Spain and that is to the north. I have studied maps. Selim thought I had interest in them because they were pretty.’ She laughed sardonically. ‘I brought a coat for you, too. In the mountains nights are cold.’

  ‘You know these mountains?’

  ‘No. My mountains are in Africa. But mountains are much the same. In my mind I know this country.’ She dipped a finger into the water cup and drew on the rock. ‘This is roughly the border between Zagelah and Escalona, this the border between Escalona and Spain and this between Zagelah and Spain.’ It was like a letter T with a sharply sloping cross bar. ‘We must somehow cross this ridge and go down to the west—when we are far north enough. Just here,’ she made a dot, ‘is a place called Santisteban. That is in Spain.’

  He sat and tried to think that it would be like to be amongst Christians again; of finding some travelled friar like Father Andreas who could understand English, of borrowing money to take him home.

  ‘I have food for a week—with care,’ the girl said. ‘Dried stuff when the fresh is eaten.’ She handed him a sheepskin coat and put her own on. ‘We should sleep now.’

  ‘I can never thank you properly.’

  ‘There is no need. I, too, am escaping. You could promise me something… If we should be taken, kill me. Women from that place who offend are sewn into weighted sacks and flung into the river.’ She knew because she had seen it done.

  ‘I promise. But we must not think about being taken.’

  She woke him in the first dim light, offered him water from the refilled cup, gave him a piece of bread. ‘We can eat as we go.’ Again she led the way, upwards and northwards over ground that became rougher and more broken all the time. The sun came up and the red sandstones took on colour, muted pinks and purples. She halted for a second, bowed herself, touched the ground and then her veiled forehead with her right hand—not a Moslem gesture—and hurried on. He looked back and Zagelah was now hidden from view. Ahead, due north was a peak which reared itself above its neighbours and which had weathered into a rough resemblance of a helmeted head. He took it for a landmark.

  It grew hot again as the sun rose higher; they divested themselves of the coats, stuffing them into the panniers. Whenever they reached a waterfall, or a little stream, they drank. At one such halt they heard sheep and the girl said, ‘We must avoid people. In a place like this we should be more remarked than in a crowded street.’ She led they way up, up again.

  A foot soldier reckoned twenty miles in an ordinary day’s march, though he could do more under pressure. Sir Godfrey calculated that they must have covered more than that distance by the time they halted for the night but they had ascended, descended, veered to avoid too-steep slopes or wide stretches of scree, and the landmark peak seemed as far away as ever. It took them four strenuous days to reach its base. Each of these days was much like another, except that they now ate dried food, slices of bread rebaked until it was too dry to go mouldy, a little smoked meat, flat dry figs.

  Over the food they talked, desultorily, learning each other’s history; Tana—that was her name—was more voluble and painted for Sir Godfrey a picture of a strange way of life, half-nomadic, half-pastoral. Aspects of it were sometimes reminiscent of life on the borders which he knew, raids, feuds, banditry, though her clan or tribe appeared to operate either in the mountains or in desert country which he found difficult to imagine. They were not Moslems, she said; they had come from somewhere far away to the east and were settled long before the Arabs arrived. They had once had their own language—‘My grandmother still remembered it and spoke it when she was angry, which was often.’ Their women were not secluded or veiled and seemed to enjoy unusual power; girls chose their own husbands and if a man wished to take a second wife, his first had a voice in the choosing. That, he thought, sounded civilised but when she spoke of fighting alongside her father and brothers and showed him, as proof, the scar on her head, his sense of chivalry was outraged. Ladies should be protected! Yet there was little about her to appeal to the protective instinct; she out-ran, out-walked, out-climbed him every day and that despite the fact that she, for two years, had led a most cushioned life while he had worked. She was at home in the empty, hostile terrain as he could never be; her instinct for direction was instinctive—he was always searching for landmarks, observing the position of the sun. She never failed to find water. Sometimes making a diversion in order to do so. When he offered to carry both panniers she said, ‘Why should you? It would make you slower.’

  They talked about horses—it had been agony, she said, never to see a horse except through a window; her father had owned the best horses in the world. Hounds too. She had had two of her own. ‘Trained to fight. They were both killed.’

  In exchange her told her about Arcol, also trained to fight—but he cut that story short, it evoked painful memories, and told her instead of Arcol’s wilfulness and how it took an old donkey to get him aboard. That amused her and she laughed like a boy. It was, on the whole, rather like travelling with a tough, ingenious young squire, incongruously disguised as a Moorish woman.

  She told him that Selim, because he had taken the crown of Zagelah by a trick, was deeply suspicious of treachery and had built up not only the best spy system but the most ef
ficient courier service in the world. ‘That is why,’ she said, ‘we must avoid even a shepherd. By now Selim knows that he has lost a concubine and slave. Everybody in Zagelah and Escalona will know too. When we come down it must be in Spain.’

  He asked, idly, stupidly, ‘If we manage it, will you go home?’

  ‘Home? I have none. We were wiped out. Do you imagine that if one of my tribe had been alive and could crawl and had strength to cut my throat, I should have been left alive to become a slave? No, in future your home will be mine.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘of course.’ Honesty compelled him to add, ‘I may have no house of my own. But I have family and friends.’

  More and more, as day followed day and they made, though slow, steady progress, he had considered what a man might find after an absence so long that death may be presumed.

  Tana said, ‘We could buy a house; many houses I think. Do you think I came away empty-handed? From the stronghold of an enemy? Look!’

  She loosened the ugly black dress. And the rose-coloured, heavily embroidered satin jacket which she wore under it. Between the base of her long neck and the jut of breasts, small but firm, there were three strings of pearls; around her slim waist was a band from which two pouches were suspended. She pulled them out with an apparently unself-conscious gesture and tipped out their contents. Gold coins, a tangled mass of jewelled ornaments, sapphires, rubies, diamonds which even in the dimming light, glittered. He had never seen, he thought few men had ever seen such a collection of wealth.

  Tana said, ‘Spoil! I took everything I could lay my hand upon. I thought if I ended in a sack, in the river, it should be for some act of which my tribe would have approved.’

  Innocent then, he was able to contemplate her future in England. Young—he knew her age, sixteen, so two years ago, in the quarry, he had been right in thinking her very young—rich. But in England she would, for a time, be a stranger. He determined that whatever he found—Knight’s Acre sold, Sybilla remarried—he would take care of Tana, see that nobody took advantage of her, find her a decent husband; in short behave to her as though she were his sister.