The Wolves of Savernake d-1

by Edward Marston

  The Wolves of Savernake

  ( Domesday - 1 )

  Edward Marston

  Edward Marston

  The Wolves of Savernake

  Prologue

  Savernake Forest trembled in the fading light. A cool breeze came out of nowhere to whistle through its undergrowth, to rustle its leaves, and to make its boughs genuflect fearfully towards the heavens. The sun was falling slowly into the seductive embrace of the horizon and only a few last rays were left to probe through the fretwork of branches and to conjure shapes out of the gathering gloom. When the breeze stiffened, the whole forest shivered with a pale fear. On a warm summer evening with its trees in full leaf, its grass thrusting forth in unchecked profusion, and its shrubs at their most riotous, it stood silhouetted against the watchful quietness of the sky and felt the icy touch of premonition.

  The crouching figure who moved quickly and furtively along the riverbank paid no heed when birch and oak and ash came to life to bend and whisper all around him. He was a creature of the forest and knew its whims and wilfulness of old. When a weeping willow dived angrily downwards to sweep the ground then thresh it with violent malice, the man did not even lift his eyes. Alric Longdon was a miller, one of eight in the area, a low, squat, round-shouldered man of forty or more with a compact strength in his hunched frame and a face as big, white, and plain as a sack of his own flour. He was carrying something in his hand and scurried along with a stealth born of long acquaintance with Savernake. Tied to the river for his livelihood, married indissolubly to the swift current of this tributary of the Kennet, he listened to the restless surge and followed water to his destination.

  A noise made him halt in his tracks. It was the resounding hiss of bracken being trampled by heavy feet. Longdon froze. Savernake was a royal forest and subject to forest law. King William protected his hunting grounds with a savagery such as the miller had never known under Saxon rule. Longdon was already trespassing. If he was caught by a keeper or a verderer, he would be beaten or fined or both. If the court decided he was poaching, Longdon could be blinded or cas-trated. His free hand went to his eyes to guard them against the unthinkable, then it travelled down to his groin to cover it against the unbearable. The miller had a young and beautiful wife who satisfied his lust without complaint and who lay beneath his sweating nakedness with gentle obedience. He would not surrender his manhood for a walk in the forest. Better to kill than to be cut down to such humiliation. His hand tightened on the dagger in his belt.

  But his alarm was unnecessary. There was a wild flurry of movement in the bracken, then hooves pummelled the earth. Whatever had been approaching him, it was no forest official with a warrant to enforce the law. The animal was even more frightened than he and took flight as soon as it caught his scent. Alric Longdon continued on his way. He then turned off the river, following to its source a rippling stream that fed into it. As he climbed steadily upwards, he saw the water cut deep into the chalk. It vanished briefly below ground and became a gurgling echo. It surfaced once more and twisted back down towards him through its narrowing banks with playful urgency.

  Savernake was not continuous forest. It was a vast acreage to the north of the county, a series of straggling woods and coppices, linked by areas of heath and gorse and downland which might themselves be dappled with timber or criss-crossed with hedgerow. Red and fallow deer were the favoured prey of the king and the herds needed trees in which to hide and open spaces in which to forage. Hunters required paths along which they could gallop, glades where they could rest, and fields where they could run down their quarry. Savernake was a great, rich, rambling, and largely uncultivated wilderness that was teeming with animal life to provide royal sport for the royal personage.

  Alric Longdon was now in light woodland, tracing the serpentine writhing of the stream and blending happily with the foliage in the half-darkness. He was safe. No keeper would find him here in his secret territory. He knew his way by instinct. The water swirled capriciously in a semicircle, then it took him farther up the hill before it disappeared below ground again. Longdon stopped, felt the leather pouch he was holding, then knelt beside a withered yew. Blasted with age and split by lightning, it stooped over the stream at the point where it issued forth from its subterranean cavern. The tree was skirted by moss and swathed in so much bindweed that it looked as if its huge, gaping wound had been bandaged to stop the crevice from widening. The miller stroked the yew as if welcoming an old friend.

  Another sound disturbed him and caused him to look up. But it was only a bird, startled by his presence and taking to the air through the branches with a vigorous flapping of its wings. Alric Longdon laughed silently. He thought of his mill, his wife, his welcoming bed. He thought of his cunning scheme and his hopes of good fortune. He thought of Savernake and its eternal mysteries. He thought of his most favourite place in the whole forest. His lips were still curled in a smile when the bushes nearby parted abruptly.

  Black eyes glared at him, teeth glinted, and a low growl set his hair on end. Longdon tried to scramble up, but he was far too slow.

  Before the first scream of horror could reach his mouth, he was knocked over backwards and his throat was eaten away in one vicious, all-consuming bite. His head, his shoulders, and his leather bag were submerged in the stream that had led him to his death. Blood gushed out of him and darkened the water, forming a long red slick that was carried along with increasing force through the woodland. As it joined the river and met the main current, it was borne along on the surface like a stain on nature itself. Alric Longdon lay dead beside a yew tree in Savernake Forest while a part of his being raced towards the biggest mill in the valley.

  His soft-eyed young wife was sitting patiently in her kitchen, awaiting the return of her husband. There was food on the table for him and submission in her heart. The mill was a clamorous homestead.

  As the massive wooden wheel went on its ear-splitting round over and over again, dipping and rising endlessly through the foaming water, it never occurred to her that the man she had married was helping to turn it with his life-blood.

  Chapter One

  They had travelled well over ten miles before the madness seized him.

  One minute, he was riding at the head of the little cavalcade, talking amiably with his companions and enjoying the unhurried progress across Salisbury Plain; the next, he went completely ber-serk. Letting out a blood-curdling cry, he dug his heels into the flank of his mount and rode hell-for-leather up the grassy incline ahead.

  Mantle streaming behind him and one hand aloft with a sword in its grasp, he charged at an invisible enemy and terrified them into immobility with the fury of his attack. Ralph Delchard was half a mile away before he reined in his horse on the crest of the rise. He gazed at something in the distance and waved his sword in salute. A Norman lord with position and age that should bring dignity was behaving like an impetuous young soldier in his first battle. As the others trotted slowly in his wake, they could hear his ripe laughter echoing across the plain. Was this drunkenness or sheer lunacy?

  Gervase Bret was the first to catch him up. His honest face was crumpled with apprehension. Ralph was a friend, a mentor, almost a father to him. A son does not expect such wild abandon in a revered parent. Perhaps it was the fault of the animal. It had taken its master unawares and bolted. One glance at the grinning Ralph Delchard disposed of this theory. He was one of the supreme horsemen in the service of the Conqueror. Not for him the small, sturdy, compliant English mounts that most of them rode. Certainly not the braying donkey that Canon Hubert sat astride. Ralph was in the saddle of his destrier, a Norman steed with a high Norman temper, a big, fiery war-horse which had been trained for action
in the field and which would gallop on command through the mouth of hell itself without losing its stride.

  “What ails you, Ralph?” asked Gervase.

  “I wanted to feel the blood race in my veins.”

  “You frightened us.”

  “We needed some exercise,” said Ralph, slapping the neck of his stallion with an affectionate palm. “And we wanted to see it first.”

  “See what?”

  “Wait for the others, Gervase.”

  “But what did you see?”

  “Wait, wait …”

  Canon Hubert coaxed a final spurt out of the donkey with his chubby legs and joined the two men. Like Gervase, he was some yards short of the summit and his view ahead was blocked by the ample frame of Ralph Delchard. Righteous indignation turned the prelate’s fat cheeks to the colour of plums. He waved an admonitory finger and put severe reproach into his voice.

  “Have you run mad?” he demanded.

  “Only with joy,” said Ralph.

  “You are here to guide and protect me, not to desert me in open country where thieves might lurk.”

  “No man would dare to lift a hand against you, Canon Hubert,” said Ralph with amusement. “Seated upon that fine beast, you look like Christ Himself riding into Jerusalem.”

  “That is blasphemy!”

  “It is a compliment.”

  “Beware of a wicked tongue.”

  “I speak but as I find. Besides,” added Ralph, “you had no need to fear. With one man gone, you still had six left to throw a ring of steel around you.” He indicated the other riders, who had now reached them. “Seven of you in all, Canon Hubert. That is a good, round, comforting biblical number.”

  The prelate blustered, the donkey brayed, Ralph chuckled. Gervase Bret found smooth words once more to calm the upset. It was not the first time that Ralph Delchard had teased the short, plump, pompous canon, and it fell to the youngest member of the group to reconcile them. A sense of duty was finally restored to the expedition. An uneasy companionship was resumed.

  They were eight in number. Ralph Delchard was leader of the commission, a proud, sometimes arrogant, and always strong-willed character with the rough handsomeness of a man of action. The adipose Canon Hubert of Winchester, a solemn soul with an acute mind, gave the company its spiritual weight, and his emaciated assistant, Brother Simon, a white wraith in a black cowl, lent his own spectral religiosity.

  Gervase Bret was the real force in the party, a shrewd and brilliant lawyer of little more than five and twenty who had risen to a high position as a Chancery clerk and who had been selected for this assignment by the king himself. Slight of build and of medium height, Gervase had a studious air that belied his capacity to defend himself against physical attack. His short dark hair framed a face that had a boyish appeal behind its keen intelligence. Four men-at-arms accompanied the commissioners, picked by Ralph from his own retinue to provide good humour on the journey as well as to enforce its purpose.

  Two pack-horses were towed in the rear. Ralph Delchard wore mantle, tunic, and cap of a cut and quality which marked his status, but his soldiers were in matching helm and hauberk. All of them were skilled with a sword and two of them proficient with the bows that were slung across their backs. Safety had been ensured on the journey.

  Any robbers would be deterred by the sight of so much expertise.

  Canon Hubert had recovered his composure.

  “Have you taken leave of your senses?” he enquired.

  Ralph shook his head. “My senses bid me ride off.”

  “But why?”

  “He wanted to see something,” explained Gervase.

  “See what? See where?”

  Ralph Delchard tugged on his reins to pull his horse out of their line of vision. He flung out an arm to gesture at the landscape ahead and drank in its marvel anew.

  “Come forward,” he beckoned. “And behold!”

  They nudged their animals the last few yards up the incline so that they were able to survey the prospect below. Then they gaped. Gervase Bret was frankly astonished. Canon Hubert was just as frankly horrified. Brother Simon blanched with apprehension and began to mumble a prayer. The soldiers had seen it before, but they were still impressed and bemused afresh. Even the donkey was cowed into silence.

  What they saw was so stirring and remarkable that it shook them to the core. They were in the presence of sheer magic. Salisbury Plain stretched away before them in its crushing enormity, but it was no flat and featureless expanse of land. It rose and fell like the waves of the sea, surging and retreating, billowing and dying, forever chang-ing shape and colour as the clouds scudded across the sky to obscure the sun before allowing it to filter through again and paint its vivid hues upon the earth once more. As a gust of wind set the grass and the scrub in motion, it seemed as if the waves were dancing with crazed delight.

  But there in the middle, unmoved and majestic, awesome in its scope and unnerving in its certainty, was an island of defiance. Con-centric circles of gigantic stones were enclosed within a much wider circle of chalk rubble which was banked up to a height of six feet or more and fronted by a deep ditch. The earthwork was broken by a broad gap on the north-east side and there were smaller gashes elsewhere. A hundred feet inside this rampart was the first circle of stones, some thirty in total, massive uprights which were topped by an almost continuous line of lintels. A few had been displaced and had crashed to the ground, gouging out a new home for their troublesome bulk. The huge blocks were carved from natural sandstone and all dressed to shape.

  Within this imposing circle was a smaller, tighter bluestone circle, incomplete and largely in ruin. Uprights lay at curious angles. Dis-carded lintels burrowed into the ground. Some of the rock looked as if it had just been hewn from its source and not yet cut to shape. There was also a horseshoe of even bigger sandstone blocks, inside which a bluestone horseshoe had been erected with uprights that increased in height towards the centre. It was a sight so unexpected in such a setting, a sign of life in a seeming void, a mysterious order in a place of chaos. Time had attacked it viciously, but its primitive power remained. What hit the onlookers most was this sense of hideous permanence.

  Canon Hubert could bear to view it no longer.

  “Let us ride on,” he insisted.

  “But I had to show you Stonehenge,” said Ralph.

  “It is the work of the Devil.”

  “So is our king,” reminded the other mischievously. “His father, the duke, was of that name: Robert the Devil. If we serve William, we serve the Devil through him.”

  “Take us away from here,” said Hubert querulously. “It is a place of damnation.”

  “No,” said Gervase, still excited, still absorbed, still running an eye to count the stones and trace their patterns. “Truly, it is a place of worship.”

  “Worship!”

  “Yes, Canon Hubert. Worship of what and by whom I may not tell.

  But there is purpose down there on the plain. There is homage.

  There is sacrifice.”

  “To Satan himself!”

  The prelate now took refuge in prayer and the donkey shifted restlessly beneath his holy burden. Brother Simon was torn between fear and fascination, joining his master in appealing to heaven while sneaking an occasional glance back at this miracle in stone. The soldiers were intrigued but warily so, as if sensing a hostility in the weird formations below them. When Ralph and Gervase elected to take a closer look at the phenomenon, none of the men was keen to go with them. Ignoring the loud protests of Canon Hubert and the feeble bleating of Brother Simon, the two friends set off at a canter across almost a mile of undulating plain.

  Stonehenge was even more daunting at close quarters, but the couple rode right into the heart of it. They noted the pits in the ground at regular intervals and the small white circles on its surface where the chalk had been exposed. But it was the stones themselves which intrigued them. Ralph Delchard and Gervase Bret felt like insects
walking through a range of mountains. Solid rock dwarfed them to insignificance. When they had set out from Winchester, they had seen masons swarming over the half-built cathedral and hoisting up their stone with strong ropes. At Salisbury, too, they had witnessed much activity on the castle walls as they were extended and strengthened with Norman thoroughness. Nothing seen then could compare with this. The largest blocks used in cathedral or castle were only a fraction of the size and weight of the colossal uprights.

  Gervase Bret still felt it was consecrated ground.

  “We are in a temple,” he said simply. “An ancient temple. But who built it, Ralph? And why?”

  “That is not my question, Gervase. I ask only- how?”

  “How?”

  “These sarsens are sandstone,” said Ralph, pointing to the uprights. “They come from the Marlborough Downs some twenty miles north at least. What hands could lift such boulders? What beasts could drag them all the way here?”

  “And that bluestone,” observed Gervase. “It varies in colour. I have seen nothing like it before.”

  “They say there are mountains of that hue in Wales. And how far distant is that? It would take a week to bring back a bag of pebbles from that wilderness. To drag just one of these bluestones would take a lifetime.” He turned to look up at the six figures on the distant ridge and picked out the one on the donkey. “Canon Hubert may be right.

  The Devil may have been the stonemason here.”

  “No,” said his friend. “I feel a power here, but it is not unfriendly.

  It carries a blessing.”

  “Then let it wish us God-speed!” Ralph’s mood changed abruptly.

  “There is no more time to linger. We must collect the others and ride north towards Bedwyn. They expect us.”

  Expectation did not put a smile on the face of the town. Rather did it spread doubt, suspicion, and quiet panic. The commissioners had already visited Bedwyn once and subjected it to such a rigorous examination that its citizens felt they were facing the Last Judgement itself. Here, as throughout the whole realm, the investigation which had been decreed by King William probed so remorselessly into what everyone owned, for how long they had owned it, and from whom they had first acquired it, that it took on the character of the final reckoning. The Conqueror himself might call it a description of all England, but the name which was muttered with cold irony in the shires was the Domesday Book.