Knight's Fee Read online

  He heard Gildon grumbling and roaring away as he always did, between cracks of the lash, until at last the feeding time uproar dwindled down into contented snufflings and the sound of bones being gnawed and Gildon hung up the lash and went tramping off.

  In a while Bran and Gerland came back and lay down again with contented grunts, stretching themselves out for sleep. Randal was hungrier than ever, but at least, now that they had come back, he did not feel quite so alone. Presently it was dusk in the kennels, and the sky turned water green beyond the little high window just above him, and there was one star in it, not bright as yet, because the sky had still so much left of light, but like an infinitely small white flower hovering there. Randal lay and looked at it, curled into Bran’s warm, brindled flank, and the soft, sleepy sounds of the hounds stirring and settling all about him. And little by little, despite his fear and hunger, the familiar sights and sounds that he had gone to sleep with almost ever since he could remember, wrapped themselves around him.

  It seemed that he had scarcely fallen into an uneasy sleep before he was awake again, to the golden gleam of a torch through the screening hurdle, casting a ring-streaked freckling of light across the piled straw and himself and the brindled hide of the hounds. The light wheeled across him, footsteps were coming along the central aisle, and Gildon’s voice called, ‘Randal – Randal! Rouse up now!’

  The next instant the full, fierce light of the torch was flaring raggedly into the narrow corner, making him blink with the dazzle of it, as he crouched back against the wall. Gildon stood in the opening, holding the torch high. ‘Come on now, up with you – you and the hounds.’

  He made a sudden movement as though to catch the boy and jerk him to his feet; Randal ducked, as he always did when anyone looked as though they were going to hit him, and Gerland whined deep in his throat, troubled by the torch, for even a dog that has been free to sit by the hearth all his life does not like fire that comes at him on the end of a stick.

  ‘Wha – what do you want? What is it then? Leave me to sleep,’ Randal began, and slid down again into the straw, playing desperately for time.

  ‘’Tisn’t me that wants you,’ said the man. ‘It’s Earl Hugh that’s finished his supper and taken a fancy to see his father’s wolfhounds again.’

  Randal gave a little choking gasp, and pressed back against the wall, his eyes darting from side to side as though in search of some way of escape.

  ‘Lovel,’ he protested stupidly, ‘it’s for Lovel to take them.’

  ‘Lovel is sick, as you know full well, and you know that you’re the only other living thing in Arundel Castle that those brutes will pay any heed to!’ The man stirred him roughly with a foot. ‘What’s amiss with you? Come on now, do you want to keep Hugh Goch waiting all night?’

  Randal stared up at him, wondering desperately if he could tell Gildon the truth and throw himself on his mercy, but he saw that it would be no good. Gildon was angry because he, a grown huntsman, was having to rout out a boy of nine to do what he could not do himself. It showed all over his broad, piggy face in the torchlight. He would have no mercy. Well then, if he set Bran and Gerland on to him, while he, Randal, ran away? But that would mean noise enough to rouse the whole Castle, and he could not escape while the gates were shut for the night, and so he would be hunted down and most likely dragged before Hugh Goch, which would make it all the more sure that Hugh Goch would know him again. The thoughts in his head ran round and round in circles like frightened mice, refusing to stay long enough for him to think them; and he found himself obeying, because he could not think of anything else to do, scrambling to his feet, catching up the hound leashes that the man tossed to him. One leash with the special knot on to Bran’s wide, bronze-studded collar, the other on to Gerland’s. Somehow, fumbling because he was blind and half-crying with fright and his sense of utter helplessness, while Gildon swore at him for being all thumbs, the thing got done.

  ‘Come then, Bran – Gerland boy – good hounds!’

  A few moments later he was scurrying across the still crowded bailey in the warm summer darkness, with the huge, feather-heeled wolfhounds loping on either side of him, and Gildon with the torch following hard behind. They climbed the Keep mound by the covered way, and were passed through the inner gatehouse into the courtyard in the midst of the huge shell Keep, and, with the hounds leaping ahead on the ends of their leashes, climbed the outside stair to the Great Hall.

  The skin curtains over the Hall entrance were drawn back because of the warmth of the night, and the archway was full of smoky, amber light. The flaring brightness of the torches, the colour and noise and press of life within, stopped Randal on the threshold like a blow between the eyes, but Gildon thrust him forward, and all chance of escape was cut off.

  2

  A Game of Chess

  THE RICH SMELL of food lingered in the air from the meal that was just over, mingling with the sour smell of the rushes on the floor, and the smoke of the torches held by a score of squires stationed round the walls hung in a drifting haze under the rafters, so that the light was thick, and the whole scene swam in it as in murky, golden water.

  The new Lord of Arundel sat in his great chair, leaning an elbow on one carved front-post and his chin in his hand, to watch a man who was dancing on his hands before him while another played a bagpipe; but as Randal stood just within the arched doorway, his mouth dry and his heart hammering, Hugh Goch looked up and saw him with the hounds in leash, and impatiently gesturing the strolling tumblers out of the way, crooked a finger to him in summons.

  Somehow Randal found himself walking forward up the crowded Hall, the two great wolfhounds stalking on either side of him. He kept his shoulders hunched and his chin tucked down, staring at the rushes as he walked, with a crazy hope that if he did not look at Hugh Goch, Hugh Goch might not recognise him. He had reached the step of the dais now, and halted, still staring at the rushes.

  ‘Ohé – a sight from old times, eh, Robert?’ He heard the Lord of Arundel’s voice above him. ‘I scarce ever remember our father in Hall that he had not these brutes or others of their kind lying at his feet.’ And then, ‘Bring them here to me, boy.’

  Randal had just enough sense to know that the order was for him and that he must obey. He climbed the step, and stood again staring down – at a pair of feet shod in rose-scarlet cloth with fantastically long toes. Ever after he remembered the chevron pattern of gold that ran down the instep, and the withered yellow head of ragwort among the rushes beside the left one, that made him think of the salt-smelling marshes where they took the hounds for exercise when they were not hunting. Hugh Goch was snapping his fingers to the two great hounds, laughing as he failed to get any response from them. ‘Hai! My Bran – my Gerland, don’t you know the bad black smell of the Montgomery blood?’

  ‘Since you so clearly remember our father with his hounds, Little Brother, have you forgotten ’twas his pride that they answered to no one else – even of the Montgomery blood?’ De Bellême’s voice was like Hugh Goch’s, but with a note of mockery, darker in tone as the flame of his hair was darker in colour.

  ‘It seems that they answer to the boy,’ Hugh Goch said. ‘Look up, boy. You should be proud that you can handle my father’s hounds, not hanging your head. Look – up – I say.

  It was smoothly spoken, with almost a sheen of laughter, but the smoothness was terrible. Slowly, Randal raised his head, feeling as though his eyes were being dragged upward, over the great iron-hilted sword lying across the man’s knees and the beautiful, ruthless hand that held it there, over the violet-coloured breast-folds of a cloak, until they came to Hugh Goch’s face, white under the flaming hair, with the red, rough marks that his mail coif had worn at cheek and chin and forehead giving it somehow the look of a mask. He was leaning forward, his gaze waiting for Randal’s face as it turned slowly up to his, waiting, as it were, to swoop. And the boy knew as he met the golden eyes that Hugh Goch had known him from the first moment he
entered the Hall.

  ‘Do they always do what you tell them, my father’s hounds?’

  Randal, his eyes caught and held so that he could not look away, whispered through dry lips, ‘Mostly, my Lord.’

  ‘Show me.’

  ‘What – would my Lord have them do?’

  ‘Bid them go back to their kennels,’ said Hugh Goch, softly.

  Randal, terrified as he was, suddenly found himself able to think again and think quickly. But all his thinking told him was that if he did not send the hounds away, they would fly to his aid when he needed it – as he would need it – and that then no matter whose throat they tore out first they would be cut down, here in this dreadful place full of men with swords; and Hugh Goch knew all that, and was enjoying the situation.

  ‘Bran,’ he whispered, ‘Gerland,’ and as they looked round questioningly into his face, he slipped the leashes from first one collar and then the other. ‘Go back! Off to kennels. Off now!’

  He stood watching them as they bounded away down the Hall and disappeared through the archway into the darkness; and the panic whimpered higher into his throat as he saw them go.

  ‘You are indeed a hound boy,’ said the soft, amused, terrible voice behind him. ‘They say that the Saxon blood always makes the best hound boys and huntsmen. Now turn again to me, you Saxon brat.’

  Randal turned.

  ‘So,’ Hugh Goch said conversationally, ‘we meet again, boy who throws rotten figs at his Lord.’

  ‘I didn’t–’ Randal protested wildly, staring like a trapped hare into the white face with the gold-rimmed eyes of a bird of prey. ‘I did not – it was not me – it–’

  ‘No? In this Castle of Arundel, there are no doubt many boys with skin as dark and hair as pale as yours?’

  ‘I didn’t – I didn’t–’ Randal babbled. ‘Oh, my Lord, I meant no harm.’

  ‘Oh no, you meant no harm.’ Hugh Goch’s laughter became suddenly a snarl. ‘The gadfly that stings my wrist means no harm, I break it under my thumbnail, none the less.’ His hand flashed out and gripped Randal’s shoulder, the long fingers biting as though they were tipped with iron, and began to drag him to and fro, shaking him with short, snapping movements like a dog with a rat, until he was sick and crowing for breath, his neck all but broken and his eyes set in his head.

  When at last the Lord of Arundel flung him down, he fell all asprawl, gasping and crowing and clutching at his shoulder that felt as though it had been torn out by the roots, then somehow struggled to his knees.

  ‘Take this thing away and thrash it,’ Hugh Goch was saying, ‘but stop short of killing it. It is too good a hound boy to waste, and we can always thrash it again another day.’

  Randal heard the words, and with the certainty of a ruthless hand already swooping to catch the scruff of his neck, gazed wildly and imploringly among the faces on the dais. He saw de Bellême looking on as at a jest, the Lady Adeliza with her mouth buttoned and her eyes cast down; faces that laughed, or were uneasy, or simply did not care; and out of them all, one face that was not shut to his agonized appeal, looked back at him. At the last instant, with the hand of one of Hugh Goch’s squires in the act of closing on the neck-band of his ragged tunic, he rolled clear, scrambled across the dais on all fours and flung himself at the long black legs of de Bellême’s minstrel, clinging to them with small, desperate hands.

  He felt a quick movement above him, and an arm was laid across his shoulder – but so casually that it seemed as though it had happened by chance – and a light and lazy voice said, but not to him, ‘Hands off, my friend.’

  Out of the startled hush in the Great Hall sounded Hugh Goch’s voice.

  ‘You have something there – an ill behaved puppy – that belongs to me. Pray you hand it over to my squire, for training.’

  And the lazy voice replied, faintly drawling, ‘Let the Lord of Arundel forgive me, I fear I am something too busy.’

  A gasp riffled round the Hall, a laugh bitten off before it was begun; and then complete silence save for a dog scratching under one of the benches. Randal, whose face had been hidden against the minstrel’s knees, looked up, and saw the two men watching each other above him. Hugh Goch’s eyes were all golden, the pupils contracted to mere pin-points of black. ‘Too busy? And what then is this busyness that has no outward showing?’

  ‘I make a song,’ Herluin the Minstrel said blandly, his own eyes wide and very bright under the lock of mouse-coloured hair that fell across his high, sallow forehead. ‘I make songs as well as sing them, did you know? And the songs I make, folk sing and whistle afterwards – and laugh at when they are meant for laughter. This song that I make now is meant for laughter; it is a song of how a great Lord spent as much rage as would set all Wales in flames on one small boy who dropped a half-eaten fig on his horse’s nose. It will be a good song – very funny.’

  By now the whole Hall, breath in cheek, was watching the two men who faced each other in the dais. Years after, when he was a man and had some knowledge of courage, Randal knew that for sheer, cold courage he had seldom seen the equal of Herluin the Minstrel, that night in the Great Hall of Arundel.

  It seemed that Hugh Goch thought so too for he said after a few moments with his lips smiling over the teeth, ‘You are a very brave man, Herluin, my brother’s minstrel.’

  Herluin shrugged thin, expressive shoulders, his brows drifting upward under the hanging lock of hair. ‘I leave the martial virtues to my Lord and his kind. My toy is the harp, not the sword.’

  ‘A toy that you use for a weapon, and to good account for your own ends, however,’ said Hugh Goch, dryly.

  ‘Nay, I am a peaceable man, and a lazy one. But – I am such a creature of whim – I have a mind to this boy.’

  ‘So-o?’ Hugh Goch said softly. ‘And do you then suggest that I give him to you?’

  Herluin smiled. ‘Ah, la no. There must be so many who come craving boons of my Lord, and I was never one to run with the pack; while my Lord, generous though he is, must grow weary of so much giving. No, since – I think – my Lord finds poor entertainment in the juggling turns that we have endured through supper, I would suggest that we change the order of the evening to something that may prove more amusing, and play a game of chess for the boy.’

  For a long, silent moment Hugh Goch looked at his brother’s minstrel, red brows knit above the fierce golden stare, while Herluin, his arm still lying across Randal’s shoulders, smiled sweetly back, and the whole Hall waited. Everyone knew – even Randal, still clinging desperately to the minstrel’s long black legs, knew, for in his kind of life one learned many things – that the new Lord of Arundel was a gambler to the bone. He saw little flecks of light begin to hover far back in the golden eyes.

  ‘Truly there was never a minstrel like you, Herluin,’ said Hugh Goch, ‘but how if we say that tonight we are all of us suddenly in the mood for minstrelsy, and cannot spare you from your harp?’

  ‘As to that, Little Brother’ – de Bellême spoke in that dark, mocking voice, with a flash of pointed teeth in the fashionable red, forked beard – ‘I never yet found any means to persuade this Herluin of mine to wake his harp when he was not minded to.’

  Herluin cocked one eyebrow at him. ‘Na, I do not think you ever have,’ he said in a tone of cordial agreement; and a moment later, detaching Randal from his legs with a ‘Hy my! What is all this clinging for, Small One?’ lounged to his feet with the slow, somewhat fantastic grace that was very much a part of him, and made a deep bow to the Lord of Arundel that expressed without words how completely he was at my Lord’s service and ready to play chess.

  Hugh Goch stared at him a moment longer, then flung up his head with a snarl of laughter. ‘I have done many things in my time, but never played chess for a human stake before. So be it; I am in the mood for something new.’ Then, with a long, contemptuous stare at the thronging faces all turned in his direction, stamped to his feet. ‘But not here, to be a rare-show in my own Hall . . . O
hé, Reynald my Squire, set out the chess-board in the Great Chamber, and bring wine there, and a torch that we may have light to play by. No, since the outcome of the game concerns the brat somewhat nearly, let him come and hold the torch for us himself.’

  And so, a short while later, everything seeming unreal about him, Randal was standing with a long resin torch flaring in his hands, in the Great Chamber above the Hall. The Great Chamber was by right the private quarters of the Lord and his Lady, and since the Old Lion had been away making his peace with God in Shrewsbury Abbey, it had of course been used by the Lady Adeliza and her women. But now there was a new Lord of Arundel. Sir Gilbert the Steward had ventured one trembling protest, earlier that day, when he found that Hugh Goch intended instantly to dispossess the Lady. ‘It is but a short while before your Lady Mother goes to the nunnery where she has chosen to spend her widowhood; might it not be kind to leave her the Great Chamber until she goes?’ But Hugh Goch had made the situation quite clear. ‘If she were indeed my Lady Mother, who knows, I might scrape up enough of filial piety to leave her in possession. She is my father’s second wife and her long sheep’s face raises the devil in me by the mere sight of it. Splendour of God! Cannot you find her another corner of this place to patter her prayers in? You had best try, for I warn you that I lie in the Great Chamber tonight if she lies in the brew house!’ So now he sprawled in the carved chair beside the empty hearth, his sword still across his knees, while Herluin the Minstrel had settled himself, long legs outstretched, on the cushioned bench opposite; and on the table between them, at which the dispossessed Lady of Arundel had taken her supper, for she seldom supped in Hall, lay the chess-board with its white and crimson morse-ivory pieces marshalled like opposing armies.

  Hugh Goch had drawn red, when they tossed a silver penny for sides, and said laughing, ‘It is fitting that I should command the Red Queen and her train. I warn you, I always play better with my own colour.’