Knight's Acre

by Norah Lofts

  ‘I must eat less,’ she said, on the fifth or sixth evening, snapping her slice of the brittle bread in two. ‘I think maps are liars, we should have been out of the mountains by now.’ She scowled fiercely.

  ‘I will eat less, too,’ he said, and put his whole piece back into the pannier and took the half she had returned.

  They were not only not out of the mountains but trapped in them, with peaks to east as well as west. Even had they been sure that they were far enough north to have Spain, not Escalona to the west of them, they could not have reached it; and never would unless they found a gap.

  They had retained both panniers because they were a convenient means of carrying the sheepskin coats during the heat of the day. What food remained, wrapped in the linen cloth, lay at the bottom of one pannier when they settled themselves for the night. The idea of guarding it had not occurred to them; they had climbed into heights where they were the only things living. Yet something came in the night and robbed them…

  ‘We might as well have eaten it all,’ Tana said, bitterly, but not without humour. ‘I heard something snuffling and gobbling. I hit it.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘How could I tell in the dark? It was hairy.’

  Wolf? Wild goat? Mountain hare? It had left no footprints on the bare rock.

  ‘You should have called me,’ he said. Women wakened in the night by a mouse’s activity behind the wainscot, or an owl hooting or a roll of thunder, ordinarily turned to the nearest person.

  ‘You could have done no more than I did. I hit it, and it was hairy and slipped away.’ She must have hit it hard, whatever it was. The side of her hand and the little finger were swollen and bruised. She had exceptionally narrow, fragile hands.

  She said, ‘So today or tomorrow we must find food. I once hungered for three days but my horse carried me.’

  ‘I once hungered for five days but then we were besieged and could not move.’

  Inaction lessened hunger.

  Their experience of going without food, different as they were, interlinked. Hold on and you survived. So they survived that day. And part of the next. By that time the shape of the country had changed, the corridor between two impenetrable ranges, a path littered with boulders, with scree, always descending. The last thing Sir Godfrey saw at the end of that hungry day was a glimpse of green. Pasture? Tree tops? but far away, deep down and, for their purpose, on the wrong side of the brutally rugged range.

  Abruptly, on the third day of hunger, although toward the north peaks still towered, shaped as one decided—a castle, a church steeple, a mushroom, a tree—underfoot the land sloped down and neither of them, fully in control of the mind, followed it. Everywhere lay bare rock, gorse and pine, beeches. And from somewhere came the plaintive cry of sheep.

  Tana said, ‘I think we should still be careful…’

  So they were careful and, hiding behind the grey boles of the beeches in a way of which Walter would have approved, they watched. A Moorish shepherd, leading his flock to lower pastures, stalking along as though sheep did not concern him; a woman, clad exactly as Tana was, and two children acted as sheepdogs did in countries were both women and dogs had more worth.

  This was still Moorish territory and they must be glad that the shepherd had a wife, not a dog. They must also be glad that amongst the surplus, or the diseased fruits of their branches, the beeches had shed a few early and edible nuts. Enough perhaps to keep a man alive, not enough to stay hunger or give strength.

  Cautiously they crossed the sheep trail, left the trees and grass behind and below and re-entered the hostile land of rock. And there, after a day in which they had eaten nothing at all, Tana broke down.

  He had heard the expressions, beating one’s breast, tearing one’s hair, but he had never seen anyone actually performing such actions. Now he did, for Tana’s self-recrimination was as thorough and wholehearted as everything else about her.

  ‘I have doomed you to death,’ she cried. ‘I over-estimated myself… In the garden you were not overworked and you always had food… Now you will die and I shall have killed you!’

  She beat her breast, she tore her hair, she banged her head against the rock.

  ‘We are not dead yet,’ he said, appalled by the sight of such distress. ‘And if we do die… at least we shall die free.’ It was all he could think of to say; fasting had not improved his mental processes or made him handy with words. He could, he thought, prevent her from hurting herself and with this in mind he took her hands and pulled her away from the rock. He said, ‘My dear… You are not to blame. I came of my own free will. I… I encouraged you… Perhaps I should curse myself…’

  Then the incredible thing happened and with incredible speed. At the touch of his hands she changed from a woman wild with misery and self-reproach to one wild with desire, something only a dead man could have resisted. He was idiotically surprised by the violence of his own response.

  He had always brought to the matter of sex the straightforward simplicity he brought to life. As a young, unmarried man he had made occasional visits to brothels because not to have done so would have seemed eccentric. But the traffic of flesh without genuine feeling had always repulsed him slightly. Until he met and fell in love with Sybilla, he had never experienced a genuine feeling towards any woman and, once married, had been contentedly faithful. Opportunities to be otherwise had not been lacking. There were many ladies, beautiful ladies of very high rank disposed to favour a handsome young knight who had distinguished himself in the lists. But intrigue had never appealed to him; at its best it involved furtiveness, at its worst, scandal. More than one angry lady had decided that he was too stupid to take a hint.

  He loved Sybilla, Sybilla loved him and their love-making had been placid and pleasant, entirely satisfactory to two people not passionate by nature but loving, considerate and kind. The six years of enforced celibacy had bothered him little—if he couldn’t bed with his loved one, he was content to bed with nobody.

  As for this girl, the thought had never once occurred to him though they had been alone together, living in close intimacy for so many days. She was sixteen, he was forty-three—and felt far older. Also, absurd, perhaps, but true, he was not merely a one-woman man, he was a one-type-of-woman man. Sybilla was his ideal and Tana was about as different from Sybilla as a female could be…

  However, there it was, it had happened and it was a stunning experience.

  Afterwards, depleted, completely drained, just before he fell into a sleep of exhaustion, he found himself hoping that what she had said—about loving him from the moment in the quarry and similar things—was the result of hunger-light-headednss. But what had he said? Light-headed from hunger, taken out of himself by joy he had not even imagined, he had said, ‘I would die now, content.’

  But death, which would have solved everything, was not to be theirs. Stumbling along next morning, now taking the easiest way, they heard sheep again; sheep first and then marketplace voices and, rounding a bluff in which a peak was rooted, they found themselves on the verge of what seemed a busy town.

  Santisteban?

  Hope cleared their eyes and they saw that this was not the place they were seeking; no streets, no house, no church.

  Centuries ago shepherds had realised that sheep from the uplands were hardier, long of leg, and thicker of fleeces. Those from the lowlands were fatter and more docile, less likely to go back to the wild. So they had met and made exchanges, a ram for three ewes. Then, people who owned no sheep realised that men were hungry and thirsty and came with food and drink; and other people who owned nothing had realised that people craved entertainment.

  Here, in a most unlikely place, a market had established itself, step by step, over the years. Boundaries, never very certain in such rugged country, and the rule of kings, of popes and prelates, had affected the gathering place hardly at all. It was an international, multilingual market where one could buy almost anything and the money-changers were
busy at their benches, one day to be called banks.

  Tana said, ‘I think we should not go down together. It is not Santisteban. Selim’s rule might even extend…’ She gave him one of the solid gold coins and said, ‘Buy what you can and ask the way. I will do the same.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘we should not be seen to leave together, either. Whichever of us first learns the way will go in that direction and wait.’ It was necessary to ask for, apart from the way by which they had made their entry which was not a real trail at all, better trodden ways led off in all directions.

  The place reeked of food cooking. Moorish women were grilling mutton and boiling rice and frying doughcakes and rolling them in powdered sugar. A woman who looked like a Spaniard was stirring a great pot of something he did not recognise; it looked like white worms; as she stirred she talked and he decided that her speech did not sound like Spanish. So he passed to a table where a man was slicing ham. Ham! Something he had not tasted for six years—the pig being regarded by the Arabs as an inedible beast. He indicated his wish for a slice and stood and devoured it. Nothing had ever tasted so good! He ate three slices while he listened. The man was undoubtedly Spanish. So he ventured to put his question. Santisteban?

  He had never seen the word written, had only heard it said, by Tana, in Arabic, and now pronounced it as she had done but in his English voice. The ham-seller looked blank, shrugged his shoulders, spread his hands, answered in Spanish that he had never heard of such a place. Sir Godfrey pointed towards what seemed to him the westerly of the trails and the man understood. ‘Escalona,’ he said.

  But this was a friendly place. Wars might be waged on either side of the mountains but in this old upland marketplace there were only buyers and sellers, so the man was disposed to be helpful and, turning away from his table, enquired of his neighbour who sold knives, saying the word as Sir Godfrey had said it. He also looked puzzled for a moment and then said, ‘Ah! Santisteban?’ He gave the word the correct stress. Sir Godfrey nodded and then pointed vaguely, regretting very much that he had learned no Spanish at all; he could not even say ‘Thank you’, or ‘How far?’ He simply had not bothered. He had a sharp, self-reproachful memory of Sir Ralph who had practised so assiduously, acquiring as many as ten words or phrases in a day. He had no means of knowing that Sir Ralph, with all that he knew, his taste for gossip, his keen sense of self-preservation, lay at the bottom of a gully, not far from the city of Escalona, a mass of greening bones.

  But, the right trail—it seemed to lead to the north-west—indicated to him he smiled and held up his fingers. One, two, up to ten miles. The gesture was not understood. No matter, he thought, we shall find out.

  The he had a bad moment. He had bought three slices of ham and now bought more; a whole heap of pink and white succulent meat slapped into a fig leaf. He was uncertain about how Tana felt towards ham. In their talks she had always emphasised her tribe’s difference from their Arab neighbours. Some pretence at being converted had been necessary but her tribe still worshipped the sun, giver of all. He thought—Well if she will not eat ham, she can eat what she has chosen; and he placed the big, folded leaf in his pannier and proffered the big gold coin. The ham-seller looked at it, not entirely with suspicion but with curiosity, turning it this way and that. The three slices of ham, eaten too hastily and gulped down into an empty stomach, threatened for a moment to rebound. For a moment he thought he was going to be sick and in the same moment he contemplated the wisdom of turning away, vanishing into the crowd without waiting for change. Common sense alone kept him still. Such extravagance would be remarkable—and he had already indicated his destination. So he stood, with the stolidity that had so often been mistaken for stupidity, and waited while the ham-seller placed the coin between his teeth and bit it and then dropped it on the table. It was gold! And here gold in any form was acceptable, just as any harmless man was acceptable. Sir Godfrey took his change and, sauntering deliberately, bought bread, apples, figs and then, ignoring the invitations to enter enclosures inside which bears danced and dogs fought and all the booths that sold trivialities, even amber from the far north, made his way towards the trail, slightly north of west. He looked about as he went but Tana, covered from the crown of her head to her ankles, was not to be distinguished from any of the other Moorish women in the milling market place. So he went along, sat down on a boulder and waited. Now that he had time to think he realised the folly of his behaviour on the previous evening. It had been, in a way, an act of despair, death seeming so likely as to make what one did or did not do of small importance. It had been a failure of self-control, a violation of his marriage vows, a contradiction of his principles. And would colour the whole of his relationship with the girl in future. Armoured in innocence he had been able to visualise himself presenting Tana to Sybilla, to James, to William as his deliverer, expecting nobody to think evil because none had existed. It would be different now; he felt that guilt was written all over him.

  It must never happen again.

  Having decided that he began to be uneasy because she had not yet joined him. Had she not seen him leave? Had she misunderstood the direction or been misdirected? Or—his heart gave a lurch—had the worst happened? He remembered the curiosity which his gold coin had evoked, suppose hers… and suppose Selim’s spy system operated even in this distant, Tower-of-Babel place.

  The thought brought him to his feet and set him running back towards the noise and the stench when a moment’s cool consideration would have sent him galloping towards Santisteban, for if she had been taken there was nothing he could do; he could only doom himself as well. But he ran marketwards and at a turn in the trail met her, hurrying too, and heavily laden. For a second the breathlessness of haste and agitation prevented speech; they could only lean against each other in a way which any Arab onlooker would have found highly suspicious. Finally he said, ‘I was afraid something had happened…’

  ‘It almost did…’ Behind the veil she laughed , but shakily. ‘I almost died of fright… The woman selling doughcakes did not like the look of my money… She took it to the money-changer and Godfrey, I could not move. I knew I should… melt into the crowd… but I was paralysed. I did not know that one could be so frightened…’

  However, the money-changer had declared the coin good and fear unlocked its hold. She had bought bread, fruit, cheese, smoked mutton and two portions of the fresh meat which he had seen an Arab woman grilling; cubes of mutton not much bigger than a dice, threaded onto a piece of wire, the meat cubes interspersed with onion and some other vegetable, green.

  ‘One for you,’ she said, ‘and one for me, I am so hungry.’

  ‘Have you not eaten?’

  ‘Oh no! I thought we should break our long fast together.’

  His hastily-gobbled slices of ham were uneasy again, spurred this time not by fear but by self-reproach. But he took the proffered handy meal and learned, as they walked and munched, that Tana had been more successful than he had in extracting information.

  Santisteban was four days’ easy walking away. ‘And that delayed me, too,’ she said. ‘First I said the name wrongly and must be corrected. Then I was warned that it was in Spain and Moors were not welcome there. I said that it was a place I wished to avoid and that was why I asked. And I took a roundabout way to this path. Just in case… but I do not think we are being followed.’

  She ate her portion of meat on the skewer, two slices of ham, half a loaf, three of the doughcakes. She seemed to be insatiable—but she had waited to take the first mouthful with him.

  And whoever had told her that only four days of easy walking would lead into Santisteban had never followed this trail which led upwards to the last summer pasture and a little hut in which some shepherd had sheltered. After that the land fell away in a series of steep declines, more difficult to descend than to ascend since in climbing upwards handholds offered some momentum. The journey took a full five days but they knew on the fourth that they were in Spain
because, on that day, they reached sheep country again and this time the flock was led by a bell-wether, an experienced old ewe who knew which way to go.

  ‘All Arabs are afraid of bells,’ Tana said. ‘We are in Spain. Beloved, we are free!’ She lifted the ugly veil from her head and threw it down and then turned and embraced him.

  It was the moment for which he had passionately longed and hopelessly hoped for; but it was marred for him by what had taken place immediately before. The thing he had vowed should never happen again had happened; and the statements which he had hoped were the product of hunger light-headedness had been repeated many times. It still seemed incredible to him that one so brief encounter with a man old enough to be her father should have kindled such intense and lasting devotion, but there it was!

  She had hidden nothing from him; the scheming and plotting—a horrifying harem intrigue—by which she had attained the position of favourite and the title—Light of The King’s Eyes; her dangerous contacts with Soraya in order to find out his name, his nationality. ‘She is a relative of Selim’s and could have betrayed me. To think about another man is a crime…’ He had simply saved her from a few strokes of a cane and she, in return, had risked her life many times. ‘I made up the story that being English you would know about gardens; had you been German or Italian I should have said the same. It was necessary to have you in the garden. Heart of my heart, I used to watch you, wondering when the moment would come when I could act…’

  He did not love her—he assured himself of that whenever he thought about the situation in which he found himself. He was deeply and everlastingly in her debt, he admired her wholeheartedly but he did not love her, or at least only with his body, formerly so disciplined and now out of control. Sometimes he wondered whether it were possible for a man to be in love with two women at once, in two very differing ways. It was a question with which his simple, single-minded nature was not equipped to deal. And now, as sheep country became cultivated country and their longed-for destination, a huddle of red roofed tiles and white walls, became visible, became near, his happiness was diluted with guilt and foreboding.