Knight's Fee

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘Up, my Valiant, come up!’ said Sir Everard’s voice above him, and he saw the strong, dark hand on the reins, and felt the upward heave, the slipping scramble of the great horse under him, as Valiant lifted his hind quarters clear of the swirling flood. And they were across, with the old life left behind on the far side, the good and the bad of the old life, Bran and Gerland, Hugh Goch with his bird of prey face under the flaming hair, and the queer, evil, musk-scented dream – it really did seem like a dream now – that he had had last night on the water stair, and Herluin, standing among the alder trees.

  But Randal did not look back.

  He never afterwards remembered much about that long day’s ride. Indeed, it never seemed to be part of his life at all, but just a kind of bridge between one thing and the next. Usually it would have seemed, to the boy who had never been on a horse before, both splendid and terrifying to sit so high above the world, feeling the liveness and the willing strength of the great roan surging under him, and hear the drub of the strong round hooves on open turf or miry track spooling by so far beneath. But afterwards he could scarcely remember it at all.

  Late in the day there was a town of reed-thatched houses under the downs, that Sir Everard said was called Steyning, and a little later still there was suddenly a familiar thing; a grey, stone-built castle on the last low shoulder of the downs, with a river casting a bright loop through the marshy valley about its foot. ‘That is Bramber,’ Sir Everard said. ‘De Braose holds it from the King as Hugh Goch holds Arundel – as I hold Dean from de Braose.’ And almost as he spoke, the roan turned aside of his own accord through the dusty wayside tangle of bramble and seeding willow herb, heading southward, where the downs fell back to let the broadening river through. Sir Everard chuckled deep in his throat, a contented sound. ‘Valiant knows the way home, you see.’

  It was not yet dusk, but the ’tween-light was blurring the outline of all things, when they came at last, two or maybe three miles down-river, to the ford of a stream brawling down from the high chalk, and saw through the smoke-soft screen of willows and alders the gleam of a firelit doorway reflected in the glossy darkness of a mill leat. ‘Yonder is the Manor Mill,’ Sir Everard said, as he steadied Valiant down to the ford and they splashed up on the farther side. ‘And now – does the wind smell different? We are on Dean land;’ and a while later still, pointing, as the woods fell back, ‘See, up the valley yonder. There is Dean. That is your home, Randal.’

  Looking where the finger pointed, Randal saw a straggle of deep-thatched huts and bothies strung along the track where it wound upwards towards the downs, the faint, irregular pattern of field strips striping the valley, and at the upper end of the straggle, set about with hawthorn and old fruit trees, a long, low hall with its byres and barns around it. Beyond, only the steepening coomb winding upward, and the whale-backed ridge of the downs against a sunset that was like the echo of a brighter sunset somewhere else. Soft blue wafts of evening wood-smoke lay across the village, and the sunset looked as though there were trails of smoke across it, too. And as he looked, a queer thing happened; for it was as though something in Randal much deeper and older than his ten years, said softly and with certainty, ‘Yes, this is home.’

  A man crossing the track from the woodwright’s shop with a new ox-yoke on his shoulder, turned to greet his returning Lord with a welcoming growl; a couple of women, one with a squalling baby on her hip, heard the clop of hooves and came to cottage doorways, and a scattering of children appeared from nowhere and ran grinning at Valiant’s feathery heels, until their mothers called them in to supper. And all of them stared at the strange boy with the fair hair and dark skin, whom d’Aguillon carried before him. And tired as he was – it was a long ride from Arundel to Bramber, farther still from an old life to a new one – Randal felt their interest and curiosity, and stared back at them under his brows, wondering about them as only somebody whose chief experience of people is that they kick can wonder. But all the while, unwillingly, rebelling against it because he did not want to be happy in this new life that Herluin had betrayed him into, the queer sense of homecoming was with him.

  They were half-way up the village street when, with ears and tails streaming, three great hounds came bounding to meet them.

  ‘Ohé, Luath – Luffra! Ohé, Matilda lass.’ Sir Everard greeted them as they came yelping and weaving about him. ‘So, sa! Here’s a clamour! You will let them know through half Sussex that the Lord of Dean comes home!’

  They did not jump up, having been trained like all good hounds not to leap upon a mounted man and startle the horse; but Luath, who was the tallest of them all, reached up and nosed Sir Everard’s foot in the long Norman stirrup, while Valiant dropped his head to touch muzzles with the bitch Matilda, and Luffra, who was little more than a puppy, skirmished about them with tail and ears flying.

  A big, half-wild pear tree, gnarled and twisted with age, hung over the gateless gap that led from the village street into the Hall garth, the little brown pears showing among the rusted leaves, and as they drew near, something that was not the wind made a sudden frowing and flurrying in the branches, and Randal, looking up, saw a long, thin leg in loose, russet-coloured hose appear from among the leaves. It was followed by another, and next instant a tall boy dropped lightly into their path almost under Valiant’s nose, making the horse snort and sidle, and came to Sir Everard’s stirrup as the knight reined in to a trampling halt.

  ‘Bevis! That was a fool trick!’ Sir Everard growled, patting Valiant’s neck. ‘Softly, softly my Valiant, have you never seen the boy before? Have you no more sense, Bevis, than to come dropping out of nowhere under a horse’s nose to startle him half out of his wits?’

  ‘He’s not really startled, only a bit surprised,’ the boy said, with a breathless laugh in his voice. ‘And I didn’t drop out of nowhere. I was up in the pear tree, watching for you.’

  ‘So? And how did you know that I should come home this evening?’

  ‘Ancret said you would. She said she heard Valiant’s hoofbeats this morning in the wind, and you would be home by dark.’

  He was a tall boy, maybe a year or so older than Randal, with a thin, eager face that looked white in the twilight, under a feathery tangle of dark hair; and as he spoke, his gaze flicked from his grandfather to the boy riding before him, lingered, frowning a little, and flicked back again.

  ‘Who is that?’

  ‘A boy called Randal. Herluin, de Bellême’s minstrel, who was your father’s friend, sends him to you for a fellow varlet. For the rest – doubtless he will tell you himself, whatever he wants to tell you, by and by.’

  Bevis turned his gaze again to meet Randal’s, which had been fixed upon him since the moment that he dropped out of the pear tree. And they looked at each other, both frowning, a little wary, like two young dogs who walk round each other on stiff legs, uncertain whether they are going to be friends or fly at each other’s throats.

  ‘How long is he to be here?’ Bevis said at last.

  ‘That is as God wills. He will be varlet with you, and squire with you when the time comes.’ Sir Everard sounded a little stern.

  ‘I don’t mind that’ – Bevis spoke with a faint challenge, after a moment’s silence – ‘so long as he remembers that it is I who have the right to be your body squire when that time comes, grandfather.’

  Sir Everard laughed, deep in his throat, his sternness forgotten, and set Valiant in motion again. ‘Since you have already been my varlet for two years, and so he must be two years behind you all the way, you must surely sleep secure on that score, unless of course I decide that your manners are too ill to fit you to be any decent knight’s body squire – in which case I shall send you up to de Braose to herd the Bramber swine.’

  The boy Bevis gave a crow of laughter, apparently completely reassured by this dire threat, and padded along at his grandfather’s stirrup, with the hounds flowing all about him, as they headed for the long, low Hall that was already sheddin
g dim, saffron firelight through high windows and open doorway to greet them.

  A sharper note of light, ragged and jaunty like a dandelion, came round the end of the Hall, and a little man, knotted like a tree root, came with a stable lantern swinging in his hand, to take Valiant as they clattered to a halt.

  ‘Not washed away by the floods, you see, old Wulf,’ said Sir Everard, and dropped stiffly from the saddle, lifting Randal down after him.

  Randal was so tired and stiff from the long journey that his legs buckled under him, and he stumbled and all but fell before he got his balance. The lantern light swam round him for a moment, or he round it, like the autumn moth that had come fluttering out of the dusk to circle about and about the candle flame, beating soft, spread wings against the horn panes. Ever after, when he thought of that first coming to Dean, he remembered old Wulf’s brown, toothless face lit from below by the lantern, and the powdery white moth turned to silver in its airy circling.

  ‘Take him with you to help Wulf stable Valiant.’ Vaguely he heard Sir Everard’s voice above him. ‘If he is to be varlet with you, he cannot begin too soon.’

  And then, a little behind the boy Bevis, he was stumbling after the swinging lantern and Valiant’s feathery heels, into the new life that was waiting for him to learn its ways.

  5

  Red Amber

  THE HALL WAS the heart and centre of the Manor, a long, low timber-framed building deep-thatched with reed that was bee-brown save where the new reed of a mended place shone pale as honey, with its fire burning on a long hearth down the centre of the floor, and the smoke-blackened beams showing still where firelight or torchlight touched them, the red and blue and saffron paint that had made them gay for a Saxon master before the Normans came. D’Aguillon had made little change in the place, save that for comfort he had built on a small solar at the far end, raised up a few steps over an undercroft where they stored farm implements and spare bee skeps at one end and the Manor’s quota of war bows, and leather jacks in great iron-bound kists at the other.

  The byres and barns huddled about the Hall, all within the tangled hedge of hawthorn and the little half-wild fruit trees. Below the Hall garth, the reed and turf and bracken-thatched bothies of the villeins straggled downhill, each with its kale and herb blot, its tethered cock among his clucking hens, its woodpile beside the door, its bee skep at the back; and beyond the village stretched the three great arable fields, each divided into long narrow strips, lord’s land and villeins’ land all mixed up together, with the long, communal pasture lying between it and the high, wind-haunted stride of the downs above, where Lewin Longshanks kept the Manor sheep. It was all Dean land, from the river in the east where the trading ships passed up to Bramber or down to the open sea, away up to the whale-backed ridge of Long Down, a mile and more to the westward; from the ford by the mill where the manor corn was ground, down-river until the Bramble Hill thrust half across the valley, and, so they said, the King of a forgotten people slept with his golden treasure about him, in the heart of the green grave-mound against the sky.

  This was the share that Sir Everard’s sword had earned him thirty years ago, when he was young and followed de Braose who followed Duke William from Normandy. A knight’s share of English land, held for the usual knight’s fee, five mounted or ten foot soldiers to follow his Baron in time of war, and in war or peace alike, for the Lord of the Manor himself, a month in every year spent on Castle guard duty at Bramber.

  A small, self-contained world that, as the years went by, had woven itself very closely into the fibres of d’Aguillon’s being. And it was the new world to which Randal woke, on his first morning, lying in the deep fern beside the fire, with Bevis and the hounds and the rest of the household, stiff and sore, bewildered, bruised and aching in heart as well as body, and yet still with that unwilling feeling on him of having come to the place where he belonged.

  But in the next few days he lost something of that feeling. The new life that he had to lead now was so very strange to him, and it irked him like a too-tight garment. In the mornings, until ten o’clock dinner, he must go across to the small, thatched church just outside the garth, and sit with Bevis at the feet of Adam the Clerk who looked after the souls of Dean and kept the Manor Rolls, sniffing the smell of mice that always clung to the little man’s rusty gown, and struggling to make sense of the marks that he scored on wax tablets and then smoothed out and scored again. He must learn to handle light weapons, and to tend old Valiant and Hector, Sir Everard’s second horse, and to handle hawk and hound; and all that part he liked. (He knew already, of course, more about hounds than Bevis was ever like to do.) But at meal times in the smoky Hall he must bring water for Sir Everard to wash his greasy hands, and help to serve him as Bevis did, for Bevis might speak with his grandfather as man to man, but that let him off none of his duties, and he served the old knight on bended knee as the varlets and squires served Hugh Goch in his Great Hall at Arundel. He was quick to learn all these new things – his old life had at least taught him to be quick-witted – but they still irked him because he could see so little sense in them. And these were only the surface things, for underneath there were others even more bewildering. Different ways of living inside oneself and treating other people from any that he had known before, things that he could only guess at, feeling in a confused and half-painful way that they might be good to know about, but not even beginning to understand.

  Bevis might have helped, but Bevis and he were still watching each other from a long way off. They did their work together but when they were free, each went his separate way, and Randal was left to his bewilderments.

  It was more than a sennight after his first coming to Dean, that the change came about. It was the day they started cider-making – perry-making would follow after when the later ripening little brown pears had had time to go part rotten – and half the folk of the Manor were gathered at the top end of the Hall garth, where the cider press stood among d’Aguillon’s apple trees. The cider press, like the mill and dovecot, belonged to the Lord of the Manor, and everybody brought his own pears and apples to it for crushing. Randal and Bevis had been pressed into service with everybody else, fetching up the willow baskets of apples that the two villeins in charge tipped into the press, and though this also was new to Randal it was something that he liked wholeheartedly. The whole cheerful crowded scene under the apple trees, centred about the great stone press with the plough-ox treading his patient circle harnessed to the pole, the sweet, heady scent of the half-fermented apples, the clear, amber stream of juice trickling down the narrow trough into vat after vat, had all the feeling of holiday that he loved.

  So much so that presently he had forgotten that he was supposed to be working at all, and was standing on the outskirts of the throng with a basket of apples dumped at his feet, watching a flock of small birds busy among the seeding thistles in the corner of the garth. He had seen their like before, on the downs above Arundel when he was helping to run the hounds, but had never wondered about them. They were very beautiful little birds, and as they flittered from thistle head to thistle head, he saw the golden bars on their wings, and the patch of chestnut crimson on their foreheads. And then a gleam of sunlight woke under the apple trees – it was a grey drifting day of broken lights and shadows – and suddenly they were feathered jewels.

  Delight sprang up in Randal, and he said to Bevis, who happened by at that moment with an empty basket, ‘What are they? Oh, they look as though they had rubies in their foreheads!’

  ‘Goldfinches,’ Bevis said checking in his tracks. That was all; they didn’t even look at each other, they were both watching the gold-touched and jewelled finches among the pale silky thistle heads. But for the moment their delight leapt between them, making a bridge from one to the other.

  Next instant, as though at some signal, the goldfinches burst upward in a puff, a flurry of little birds. They swept right overhead, the brief sunlight striking through their pulsing and qui
vering wings to touch them with fire, before they wheeled in a cloud and flittered out over the hawthorn hedge. Randal took a quick step back to follow their flight, caught his heel in something and sat full in a vat of apple juice that had been set aside under the hedge.

  Amber juice sluiced over the edge of the vat, deluging Bevis who stood nearest, as with a breaking wave. And Randal, kicking and spluttering, saw the other boy’s usually grave face above him, splintering into helpless laughter even as he grabbed his hands to pull him out. A splurge of voices had broken out all round them, half grumbling, half richly satisfied, according as grief for the loss of so much good cider or joy at seeing someone sit heavily and unexpectedly in a vat of apple juice was uppermost in this man or that. And in the midst of it all, Randal and Bevis stood dripping with sticky, golden juice, snatching at their breath and crowing with laughter and trying not to, because with Reynfrey the Steward, who had been one of d’Aguillon’s men-at-arms, bearing down on them, they had a feeling that it might be no laughing matter.

  ‘You young devils!’ said Reynfrey, towering on them, his thumbs in his belt that held up his big stomach. ‘I’ll teach you to go playing the fool with the year’s cider, that better folk than you have had the work of pressing!’

  ‘But we weren’t – we didn’t – I stepped back into Randal without seeing he was there, and Randal stepped back into the cider vat,’ Bevis spluttered helplessly. ‘Oh, Randal, look out for that bee, you’ll have it down your throat. It thinks you’re a foxglove full of nectar or something!’

  Reynfrey caught them each by an ear and banged their heads together, just to sober them a little, then turned them round in the direction of the Hall.

  ‘Pull up your roots and march, my fine young foxgloves, and don’t let me see either of you again today.’

  By the time they reached the Hall they were more or less in their right minds again, and Bevis said, ‘If we can slip in quietly without Sybilla catching us, we can snatch a clean tunic each, and go and wash off in the stream, and no fuss.’