Knight's Fee

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  And so, checking in the opening of the tent, after twelve years Randal saw Herluin the Minstrel again.

  ‘We must see that you are well bestowed. Robert de Bellême’s own minstrel should fetch a good ransom,’ de Braose was saying bluntly.

  Herluin shook his head a little. ‘I doubt it, do you know. They tell me that de Bellême has come in to make his submission, and will of a surety be stripped even of his Norman possessions, now that Henry is Lord of Normandy. Not, I fear me, the moment to be indulging in luxuries such as the ransom of a mere minstrel.’

  ‘A pity,’ de Braose said, meaningly.

  ‘Yes, is it not? It seems that you will have to trade me cheap – hy my! Almost for nothing! – or have me on your hands for life.’

  ‘Not on my hands,’ de Braose returned with a glimmer of a smile, stripping his great war-mittens between his fingers. ‘I dare say Henry may well find it amusing to possess a minstrel captured from one of his brother’s barons – especially since Rahere shows signs of exchanging his motley for a monk’s habit and his harp for a rosary.’

  ‘It was once said of me by de Bellême, my Lord,’ Herluin said in a tone of gentle reverie, ‘that so far as he knew there was no way of – persuading me to wake the harp against my will.’

  ‘I wonder. Henry has ways of – persuasion . . .’ de Braose’s hard eyes flicked towards the tent opening, and he saw Randal standing there with the fires of the windy sunset behind him. But Randal was not looking at him, he was still gazing at Herluin; and in the same moment, as though feeling the intensity of the gaze upon him, the minstrel turned and saw the haggard young man in the opening.

  ‘Herluin!’ Randal said, as their eyes met.

  Herluin looked in silence for a moment, and the wicked, winged lines of his eyebrows drifted upward. ‘Well, Imp! Not maybe the happiest of ways to meet again.’

  ‘Ah, of course.’ De Braose’s hard voice came between them. ‘I had forgotten that you two were of old acquaintance.’ He gestured with his war-mittens to Herluin to stand aside, and turned his full attention to Randal. ‘Come here!’

  Randal came, walking heavily like an old man, and stood before his overlord.

  ‘You know why I sent for you?’ How intently the man was looking at him, the hard, grey eyes raking into him as though seeking to uncover what lay behind his outward-seeming and form some judgement.

  ‘Yes,’ Randal said. ‘Bevis told me – before he died,’ and was aware of a sudden movement from Herluin, who never made sudden movements.

  ‘I will give you Dean to hold for a year,’ de Braose said abruptly. ‘At the end of that time – we shall see. Meanwhile, the end of a campaign, when the shield squires have proved their mettle, is as good a time to be making new knights as the beginnings of a campaign, when one makes them for the sake of fresh fighting blood. Kneel down.’

  Randal remained standing. No longer like an old man, but very young, very straight, very proud for all the haggard misery in his face.

  ‘I have my knighthood already, de Braose.’

  He saw de Braose’s brows snap together, and added, his hand in the engraved pommel of the great sword at his side, ‘At Bevis’s hand. Sir Gervase de Merchault stood sponsor for me.’

  De Braose’s iron-gaze flickered a little in the silence that followed. ‘So-o. I seems that I am late for all things today – Sir Randal.’

  Sir Randal. How strange it sounded. Sir Dog-boy, Randal thought, with a harsh mockery of it tearing at his chest. All that way he had come, and he would have been so proud to be a fellow knight of Bevis’s – and it was only by Bevis’s death that he could furnish his helm. Life was very bitter, very cruel, and he wished rather desperately in that moment that he too was dead. He was saved from his moment of black despair by the sudden ripple of reflected firelight as a log fell, on the blade of Herluin’s captured sword where it leaned against the bench behind de Braose. Herluin’s sword – Herluin a captive, and in need of help . . . Herluin had said once that Randal had lived with hounds so long that, together with most of their faults, he had learned their chief virtue of faithfulness. Randal could not know that, but it was true.

  ‘De Braose, it is the custom, I know, to make some gift to the Church or to the poor, for the first act of one’s knighthood. May I, instead, pay the ransom for a friend?’

  ‘Meaning de Bellême’s minstrel,’ de Braose snapped.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Randal caught at the tail of his eye another movement from Herluin, startled and quickly suppressed. His eyes were on his overlord’s square, uncompromising face, begging him to understand and show mercy. He knew that he was taking on a crushing burden for Dean. ‘Oh, I know that I could only pay it off a little at a time; Dean is not a rich Manor, but if you will set Herluin free now, I will clear the debt though it takes me twenty years.’

  ‘And I have promised you Dean for only one,’ de Braose said. ‘If at the end of that time I do not choose to renew the fief – what then?’

  Randal went silent. He simply did not know what then. He felt how ridiculous his offer had been; there must be something he could do – some other way – but he could not think of it.

  ‘I am not a man given to easy kindness, as you will know by now,’ said the Lord of Bramber. ‘I give nothing for nothing. For your good service these two summers past, and for the old friendship between d’Aguillon and de Braose, I have given you Dean to hold by knight’s fee. I take that back now, and make another offer. I will give you the minstrel to do with as you choose, or I will give you Dean. The choice is yours.’

  There was a long dragging silence. Randal’s fists clenched slowly at his sides, and he no longer looked into de Braose’s face, but into the red heart of the fire brightening as the windy daylight faded. Le Savage, on the edge of the firelight, protested explosively down his nose. ‘That’s too cruel a choice to set the boy! You can’t do it, de Braose!’

  ‘I can, and I will,’ de Braose said, simply; and something of the cold iron that showed in his eyes sounded also in his voice.

  Every face in the dim, fire-reddened pavilion was turned to the two standing beside the field-hearth. Herluin’s expression, as he looked on, was a strange one under the circumstances; a look of interest that seemed to be quite detached from himself, and something that was almost amusement in his pale, bright eyes. A dog began to scratch in the silence, and scratched on, and on . . . Randal was still staring into the fire, while slowly but without any kind of wavering, his mind made itself up. A few moments ago, he had thought that he had nothing more to lose; now he knew that he had, and he must give it. He knew that it had been Bevis’s last with that he should hold Dean, but Bevis would understand. There was certain things that a man could not do, certain debts that he could not leave unpaid. In an odd way that he could not have put into words, he felt that Bevis, whose body would sleep in Normandy, was part of Dean, part of the marshes and the downs and the river woods in springtime, woven into them by his love. Nothing could ever take Dean from Bevis now; the Wealden blackbird would always sing for him . . . For himself, it meant that he must go all his life in exile, but there was no other way. He raised his head slowly, and looked at de Braose through the faint waft of woodsmoke fronding across his face, and ran the tip of his tongue over his lower lip because it was uncomfortably dry.

  ‘I beg you give the Manor to someone like Gervase, who will be good to it – to the land and the villeins,’ he said.

  There was a soft rustle of movement among the watching knights. Herluin made a small gesture of applause that was only half fantastic. The dog finished scratching and wandered out. De Braose stood for a long moment more, looking at the young knight, and still stripping his great war-mittens between his hands. Then he turned and tossed them on to the bench behind him with an air of finish, and swung back to Randal.

  ‘So.’ He nodded. ‘The colt is worthy of his breakers. I was none so sure, before, though you should have had the Manor at least for the year to prove your worth; but it
is in my mind that he who keeps faith in one thing, even to the breaking of his heart, is like to keep it in all. You’re a fool, Randal, but such a fool as I would have among my fief knights. Take Dean, and this minstrel of yours also. Pay me for the one with a stirrup cup each year over and above your knight’s fee, and for the other – do with him as you will.’

  In the first instant Randal was not quite sure that he had really heard it. Then, very slowly, the words sank in and became part of himself. His eyes were on de Braose’s face all the while. If the Lord of Bramber knew that in that instant he had gained for life a liege man who would follow him into Hell fire to bring him a cup of water if he were damned and thirsting, he showed no sign of doing so; but every other man there saw it plainly enough.

  Randal did not attempt to thank him; he had no words – no words of his own, only the words of the vassal’s oath, that Bevis had spoken at his own knighthood in the Great Hall of Dean, a year and a half ago.

  In the smoke-filled and fire-flushed pavilion, with a few battle-weary knights and a captive minstrel looking on, while outside the triumphal cloud banners faded over the battlefield of Tinchebrai, he knelt in a passion of gratitude, and set his hands between de Braose’s.

  ‘Here, my Lord, I become liege man of yours for life and limb and earthly regard, and I will keep faith and loyalty to you for life and death, God helping me.’

  Two day later, Randal took his leave of Herluin the Minstrel, in the lea of an apple orchard on the edge of the English camp. The camp was smaller than it had been, for the King and his Bishops and certain of his English Barons had by now made their quarters within the walls of Tinchebrai. De Bellême had been dismissed, humiliated and raging, with his freedom but little else, to almost the last of his Norman estates left to him. The dead were buried, and the swallows, gathering for their flight south, swooped and darted once more about the Castle walls.

  It was raining, soft swathes of rain that were scarcely more than mist, and the moisture spattered cold from the branches of the apple trees. Somewhere in the rain a trumpet sounded thinly for watch-setting, and a horse whinnied, and someone went by whistling a snatch of a Breton tune. The blue waft of woodsmoke from the cooking fires drifted to them, mingling with the chill, grey freshness of the dawn. Beside one of those fires they had sat together late into the night before, silent for the most part, talking by fits and starts, of all that had happened in twelve years; of Dean and Arundel, of Sir Everard and de Coucy – of Bevis . . . But it seemed to Randal now that he had left unsaid so many of the things that really mattered. At the last moment, he said one of them.

  ‘Herluin, come back with me to Dean.’

  Herluin’s brows drifted upward under the lank forelock, and his winged mouth curved in mockery. ‘Hy my! Are you, then, one of the Barons of the land, to keep a minstrel in your Hall?’

  ‘I did not mean as a minstrel,’ Randal said. ‘I just meant – come.’

  ‘Nay then, what should I do, save grow moss, on a downland Manor?’

  Randal was silent a moment, rebelling against the implication, yet knowing the truth of it. Herluin and Dean were of two different worlds.

  ‘You’ll go to de Bellême, then?’

  ‘At least life will never be dull, where de Bellême is.’

  ‘And you think it would be, with me?’

  Herluin’s face cracked into its slow, twisted smile. ‘I think it more than likely.’

  And then he set both hands on Randal’s scale-clad shoulders, and stood looking at him, almost as searchingly as de Braose had done, two evenings ago. ‘You are not yet bearded to compare with Sir Steward Gilbert at Arundel; but tell me now, was it a good thing that I did, when I gave you to Sir Everard, twelve long years ago?’ He was not asking in a spirit of ‘did I not tell you so?’ He was asking the question because he wanted, wanted badly, to know the answer.

  Randal gave him back his look – even in that moment it seemed to him odd that Herluin’s eyes were on a level with his own instead of glinting and glancing down at him from somewhere tree-tall above him.

  ‘Two days since, when I was yet Bevis’s squire, I would have told you yes, a thousand times,’ he said at last. ‘Now, I am a knight, and Lord of my own Manor, and Bevis is dead; and I should maybe have a less sore heart if you had never even played the game of chess that won me from Hugh Goch.’ His voice, which had been hoarse and steady, cracked desperately in the middle. ‘I don’t know, Herluin, I don’t know.’

  But even as he said it, he knew that it had been good; for the sake of all that Dean had given him and made of him, for the sake of the friendship he had shared with Bevis, that could not be lost, even though Bevis was dead. He brought up his own hands and set them over the minstrel’s and bowed his head for an instant on to the other’s neck.

  ‘It was a good thing, Herluin,’ he said, ‘a good thing that you did, all those years ago,’ and dropped his hands and stood back.

  Herluin kept his hands on the young knight’s shoulders a moment longer. ‘So; and truly I think that for Dean also, for the folk and the fields of the Manor, which must otherwise have passed to a stranger’s hand, the matter will prove to be none so ill. God keep you, Imp.’

  He slipped his long musician’s hands from Randal’s shoulders so lightly that Randal never felt them go, and turned away, leaving the boy standing there under the apple trees in the rain, with the waking sounds of the English camp behind him.

  18

  The Lord of Dean Comes Home

  TOWARDS EVENING OF a wild day in late October, Randal dropped from Swallow’s saddle in the courtyard of Bramber Castle. He was quite alone; the Dean men and Bevis’s horses which were his now, left behind in Normandy with le Savage, for the King and the main part of his army were not yet coming home. Henry had held a Council at Lisieux and soon there would be another at Falaise, for the reforming and future handling of the Duchy that was once again one with England. But there was so much to do, and already the year grew late for embarking an army; so it could not be before spring, now, that the King would be home. Meanwhile de Braose had sent Randal back with letters for his Seneschal at Bramber, and for the Lady Aanor, before the winter storms shut the seaways.

  The rain that had come with him all the two days’ ride from Pevensey had fled away for the moment, and the streaming cobbles washed clear of their accustomed filth shone silver-gilt, the puddles reflecting the ragged lake of clear sky over the battlements, and in the old days Randal’s heart would have lifted to the sudden blue and silver flashing out of the grey like a sword from its sheath; but not now: all that seemed dead in him now, and left behind him with Bevis at Tinchebrai.

  An ancient stable-hand had come hobbling out to take Swallow from him, and a small, impudent varlet not much older than he had been when Herluin won him from Hugh Goch came darting down the Keep stair, grinning as he recognised the mired and weary knight who had just ridden into the courtyard, and shrilling like a curlew to know whether de Braose and the rest were near at hand. Already a little crowd was gathering, of women and boys and old men. There were few of fighting age in Bramber now.

  ‘Na na. De Braose and the rest will not be home before spring,’ Randal told him, standing with his hand on Swallow’s wet and drooping neck. ‘I am come back with letters from my Lord to the Lady Aanor. Where may I find her?’

  ‘In the great Chamber. Have you seen much fighting?’

  ‘Enough . . . Run then, and tell her that I come, and that all is well with the Lord of Bramber.’

  The boy darted off again, and behind him, slowly, wet and saddle-stiff and desperately weary, Randal was climbing the familiar Keep stair. He was passing from the wind and the scudding silver-gilt light that was beginning to fade, into the smoky dimness of the guardroom; climbing still, from the guardroom to the Great Hall and then to the Great Chamber above it: the Great Chamber that he had come to know so well since he spoke there with the old Lord of Bramber on the night of the witch hunt. Now a fire leapt on the
hearth, and the fluttering light of it warmed the grey stone walls and the hangings of the huge box bed against the chill and the changing lights and glooms of the wild autumn day. The Lady Aanor sat in the carved chair by the hearth, where the old Lord had sat that long-past summer night with his sword across his knees, her year-old son sprawling with the wolfhounds among the strewn rushes at her feet, while scattered about the room two or three of her women were busy at their spinning.

  She had been busy, too, on the embroidery of a wall-hanging to keep out the draughts, but she had let the work fall in a drift of soft, dark storm-colours across her lap, and sat looking towards the stairhead arch as Randal appeared in it.

  ‘Why, Randal. God’s greeting to you. Garin says that you bring me a letter from my Lord.’