Knight's Fee Read online

  ‘Truly, it has been a most noble storm,’ said Sir Everard, as they checked as by common consent, and stood looking down. ‘But from the speed that the floods are sinking. I think that it cannot have broken far inland. If not tomorrow, then surely at the next day’s low tide, I shall be able to get Valiant across the ford and go on my way.’

  Herluin said slowly, ‘Since the wind blew you into Arundel Great hall three nights since, I have been thinking – a little. D’Aguillon, will you do something for me, for your Richard, his sake?’

  ‘What would you have me do?’

  ‘Take the Imp with you when you ride from here.’

  The old man looked quickly at the younger one, but nothing was to be read in the cool, faintly bitter face, the pale eyes, in the windy, westering sunlight. ‘Why?’ he demanded, after a few moments.

  ‘Because I have known you – somewhat – since Richard and I learned our book together at Bec Abbey, and I would liefer give him into your hands than those of any other man I know.’

  ‘Surely you honour me,’ d’Aguillon said, deep in his throat. ‘That was not my meaning, however, as you know full well. Why give the boy into any man’s hands, out of your own?’

  ‘Hy my! For a number of reasons. Firstly, because the life of minstrel or jester is a chancy thing, as all men know – playing with fire was never yet a safe pastime, though amusing; and –’ his light tone hardened – ‘if ought should happen to me, I would not have him left in the hands of the Montgomery brood.’

  They had turned inland again, with the wind over their left shoulders, and Sir Everard nodded, his gaze on the wooded crest of the downs ahead. ‘Aye, bad men, both of them . . . It is sometimes in my mind to wonder –’

  ‘What?’ said Herluin gently.

  ‘No matter. I was going to say that I sometimes wonder you still hold to de Bellême yourself. But to each man the secrets of his own heart.’

  Herluin shrugged, the slow expressive shrug that showed him for no Norman but French to the bone, and rolled his eyes heavenward. ‘I am something of a fool as well as a minstrel . . . But we are talking of the Imp, not of me. I have given you one reason concerning him. For a second – I am fool enough to care that he should have a chance in life more suited to him than any I can give. It would be different if I saw the least likelihood of making a minstrel of him, but there is no music in the Imp. Mercy of God! There is no music in the Imp!’ Herluin shuddered as a shrill tuneless whistling reached them down the gusts. ‘If I keep him with me, he will find no place of his own, ever; he will strike no root, and he needs to strike root, greatly. You could give him that. Will you take him?’

  ‘What as?’ Sir Everard said, twenty paces farther along the dyke.

  ‘As a fellow for Bevis. You were saying only yesterday that the boy was growing up too solitary; that you feared you did wrong to train him up yourself, instead of sending him to one of the great houses.’

  ‘And that is true enough.’ Sir Everard gave a quickly suppressed sigh. ‘But Richard was my only son, and he is Richard’s, and when Richard was killed . . . I am a selfish old man; I delight in the boy’s company, but he – he needs company of his own age, and not merely that of the villeins’ children.’

  ‘Give him Randal to be varlet with him, and squire with him when that time comes,’ Herluin said. ‘He’ll make a good squire. He has lived so long with hounds that along with most of their faults he has learned the hound’s chief virtue of faithfulness.’

  The old man did not answer until they had turned seaward again, the wind snatching at his words. ‘And in ten years or so, Bevis will be made a knight however unworthy, because he is my grandson and gently born and it is the custom. What place for your Randal then?’

  ‘A squire’s place at all events, which is none so ill a thing. Give him his chance, d’Aguillon.’

  They paced on in silence a little farther, then Sir Everard said, ‘You have, I think, some fondness for the child.’

  ‘It is easy to grow fond of a stray dog,’ Herluin said lightly.

  ‘And the child has some fondness for you.’

  ‘Because mine was the first hand that ever touched him in kindness, no more. He is a small cub; he will soon forget.’

  Sir Everard looked round at the man strolling beside him, and the grim gash of his mouth that Randal liked so little had unexpectedly gentle corners. ‘And you? Will you also forget so soon?’

  ‘I?’ Herluin flickered up his eyebrows and laughed, lazy, light, mocking laughter into the wind, that seemed echoed by the sea-birds’ crying. ‘I shall have forgotten him in three days! I am Herluin, de Bellême’s minstrel; any man will tell you that I have no heart to remember with!’

  And Randal, pulling a tick from behind Bran’s left ear, though, ‘It cannot be anything that matters, after all. It must be something funny, or Herluin would not laugh like that.’

  The men had come to the seaward end of their walk again, and halted as before, looking down to where the Hault Rey swirled the colour of heather ale over its paved ford.

  ‘I’ll take him,’ Sir Everard said abruptly. ‘And this I promise you, that save for knighthood, which is beyond my hands, he shall have what Bevis has, both of the kicks and the honeycomb.’

  Not that night, but the next, when it came to sleeping time, and he had propped his harp in its usual corner of the narrow wall chamber, Herluin lounged down on the roughly carved stool, and crooked a finger for Randal. ‘Come here, Imp.’

  Randal, who was spreading his own rug just within the doorway, where he had slept ever since Herluin had objected to his sleeping across his feet, came and stood against the minstrel’s black-sheathed knees looking up at him inquiringly.

  ‘Tomorrow, when the river ford is passable at low tide, Sir Everard goes home to his own place, across the downs,’ Harluin said.

  Randal was glad, and showed it as clearly as a pup wagging its tail; but his gladness lasted for only a heartbeat of time.

  ‘And you,’ said Herluin, ‘you go with him.’

  Randal stared at him, startled, and beginning to be afraid; and then burst into a flurry of words. ‘Why? I do not understand – for how long? I must be back before we sail for Normandy.’

  ‘You are not coming with me to Normandy, Imp.’

  ‘But you said – you promised –’ Randal was sick and breathless now, staring at Herluin with dilated eyes.

  ‘Did I so? Then it must be that I am breaking my promise.’ Herluin’s voice sounded faintly bored. ‘Never trust a minstrel. Hy my! Anyone will tell you that de Bellême’s minstrel changes his mind as often as a swallow changes course.’

  ‘But I don’t understand!’ Randal protested frantically. ‘Have I made you angry? Tell me, and I’ll never do it again – only don’t send me away.’

  There was a little silence and a queer smile rather like a shadow flickered across Herluin’s face without ever touching his eyes. ‘Na na, there is naught amiss. Never think it, Imp.’ For the moment he had dropped something of his usual drawl. ‘It is in my mind that here is a better way for you, that is all. It may even be that when you have as fine a beard as Sir Gilbert the Steward, you will think so too. Or it may be that you will not. A fine thing it would be if a man might foretell how the moves in life will turn out, as clearly as the moves in a game of chess.’ Then, with a deliberate return to the cool, affected drawl that his world knew, he yawned hugely, stretching with his fantastic winged shadow stretching on the wall behind him. ‘So – I change my mind; the thing is settled. Sleep now, Imp. They tell me that low tide is at some barbarically early hour in the morning.’

  Randal stood back a little, still staring at him, breathing short and quick. ‘Yes, I will go and sleep,’ he said thickly, through the sob in his throat. ‘But not here! I will sleep with the hounds as I used to do. They do not change their minds!’ And he turned and stalked out with his nose in the air and his mouth tight shut on the grief within him.

  He went down the spiral stair,
past the entrance to the guardroom where the men-at-arms were settling in for the night, and down again, slowly, his hand on the great stone central core of the stairway. Half-way down, he checked altogether, not quite able to believe, even now, that Herluin would not call him back or come after him. But the moments dragged out long and thin, and no lazy voice called, no step sounded on the stair behind him, and he went on down, into the darkness. The man-at-arms on duty at their stair foot passed him through without trouble, thinking that he was on some errand for Herluin, and he came through the archway into the courtyard in the midst of the great shell Keep. He knew that the gate to the outer bailey would be shut now, and certainly no one would open it again for the likes of Randal. That was no matter; in the flying autumn moonlight another archway opened like a black mouth; that was the entrance to the water stair that led down to the Castle well, outside the Keep, and in normal times it was not kept guarded.

  Randal oozed his way along the wall to it, taking advantage of every blot of shadow. There was no reason why he should not have walked boldly across to it, no law against his sleeping in the kennels again as he had used to do, though it might have meant answering questions that he did not want to answer, if he were seen. But before Herluin came, his night-time comings and goings about the Castle had mostly been furtive affairs, and now that Herluin was gone from him again, he returned without thought to his old, secret ways. He reached the dark mouth of the stairway unseen, and slipped into the pit of blackness that it made, as an otter slips into the water without a splash. The hollow feel of the tunnel was all about him, and the cold, green smell of water coming up from below.

  There was another smell too, that brought him up on the third step, sniffling delicately and cautiously like a hound. A very faint scent, it was wafted up on the stronger water smell, seemed to whisper in his nostrils, and then before he could lay hold of it, was gone. He stole down two more steps, and now he had it again, more strongly this time, more surely. Once, a great lady had walked close by him, and her mantle had given out a strange scent that was heavy and warm and sweet, but animal. He had asked someone what made the lady smell like that, and been told that it was musk; and now he knew the scent again, infinitely thinner and fainter, but the same. But why was the scent of musk creeping up the water stair? One of the Lady Adeliza’s women meeting in secret with someone among the knights or men-at-arms? He thought he caught the murmur of voices in the darkness far down the stairway; but it seemed to him that both voices were men’s, and even in the midst of his misery, a little stir of excitement shimmered through him. He crept nearer, slipping his feet silently from step to step. Near the foot of the steps was a recess where a narrow doorway led to some chamber deep in the foundations of the Keep, and just below that, the stairway turned a corner before it ran out into the vaulted well-house. It was from below this corner that the murmur of voices came. Randal gained the recess safely, and flattened himself against the slimy stonework, listening with all his ears.

  The low voices were close below him now. One of them spoke in low-toned, fierce impatience, and he knew it for the voice of Hugh Goch.

  His carefully held breath caught in his throat in a cold moment of terror. He knew that he was in deadly danger. Whatever it was that Hugh Goch did here, whoever he met in dead-of-night secrecy, he would not welcome eavesdroppers. He knew that if Hugh Goch caught him, he would kill him here in the dark; and he longed to turn and run, leaping upward to the silver moonlight at the head of the stair. But as before, when the Lord of Arundel had looked up at him as he leaned over the parapet of the gatehouse roof, he seemed turned to stone and built into the wall.

  The other man was speaking in his turn, answering Hugh Goch’s impatient words.

  ‘It is too late in the year to start anything now, more especially with Brother Henry playing watch-dog.’ It was a curiously smooth voice, a hairless voice, with a faint suggestion of a lisp. ‘De Lacy sends you word to go to Shrewsbury, as many of your knights with you as maybe, and hunt your Welsh forests towards winter’s end, that you may be ready in the Marches before spring. The King will summon Mowbray to appear before his Easter Court on the matter of the Northman’s trading vessels; Mowbray will refuse, and then –’

  ‘The revolt will flare up as at a signal.’ Randal heard Hugh Goch’s soft, snarling laugh in the darkness. ‘A fine signal for our purpose, and one that can be relied on to bring in the whole of the Marches. We Marcher lords, we’re all pirates and reivers to a man – but at least we do our reiving openly and not under cover of self-made laws as the King does!’

  ‘Be ready when the time comes, and before high summer we’ll have done with Red William and his self-made laws, and mount Stephen of Aumale in his place.’

  ‘Bid De Lacy to have his own weapons sharp,’ Hugh Goch said scornfully, ‘and never doubt that I’ll have mine!’

  Randal heard the formless sound of movement, and a soft footfall on the water stair. The two voices sank to a mumble, mingling with the brush and pad of stealthily retreating footsteps, dwindling away. The sounds had quite died now, nothing left of what Randal had overheard but his own wildly drubbing heart, and the faint, lingering echo of the scent of musk. The boy drew a great gasp of air, the first full breath that he had drawn in all that while, and gathered himself together to run. But even as he did so he heard one of the men coming back. He had just time to flatten himself again into the embrasure of the door behind him, before the man, whichever it was, swept by.

  The heavy folds of a cloak actually brushed Randal, but no scent of musk came from them. The dark figure swept on and up, taking the water stair two steps at a time. He saw it silhouetted for an instant in the stairhead arch; even the bleaching moonlight could not quite drain the red from Hugh Goch’s hair. Then it was gone.

  4

  River of No Return

  RANDAL WAITED AWHILE in the darkness, his heart hammering. But he could not stop there for ever. He must go forward, or back, and he was not going back. The man with the hairless voice must be well out of the way by now. . . . He crept on down, round the corner of the stairway, the last faint traces of the womanish scent dying into the cold smell of the water strong in the enclosed spaces. He saw the well-house empty in the back-wash of reflected moonlight, and the whiteness of the night hanging beyond the arched doorway, and flung himself at the steps up to it as though at this last instant hands that smelled of musk were closing on the back of his neck, and shot out into the thick moonshadows at the foot of the Keep mound.

  There were still people about in the outer bailey, which always kept later and more uncertain hours than the Keep, and Lovel, long since well of his fever, his battered old lantern in his hand (it was only Gildon who took a naked torch among the hounds, and then not if Lovel were there to see him) was just snibbing the door of the kennels, after his nightly prowl round, as Randal came darting across the bailey.

  Randal flung himself against the door, tearing at the latch under the huntsman’s surprised hands. ‘Let me in! You let me in!’

  ‘So, so? I thought that you were Herluin’s man these days’, the other grumbled, peering at him in the light of the lantern.

  ‘Na!’ Randal spat the words between his teeth. ‘Tomorrow I go with the old knight he is for ever talking to – him with a mouth like a trap – but tonight I sleep with my own again!’

  Lovel grunted, not interested enough to ask questions, and let him through, rattling the door to again behind him.

  Randal stumbled forward into the familiar rustling and snuffling, dog-smelling darkness. He knew the place so well that it was as though his feet could see the way for themselves. But there was light at the far end of the place; a silver sword of moonlight slanting down from the high window; and at the foot of it, Bran and Gerland lay outstretched, their brindled hides bleached to cobweb grey in the shadows, frosted silver where the moonlight fell.

  They greeted Randal with softly thumping tails, and he crawled in between them as he had done on so
many nights, and lay down with his back against Gerland’s flank and his head on Bran’s shoulder, and his face hidden under his arm from the white, fierce sword of moonlight. He was shaking from head to foot, and it seemed to him that he could smell musk everywhere, and hear the nightmare smoothness of a voice that lisped a little, in the darkness. But already he was not quite certain what he had overheard; the whole incident seemed to be dissolving as an evil dream dissolves when the dreamer wakes from it, leaving only a sickly taste of the evil behind. Gradually his heart quietened from its pounding and his breath that had been coming in little, whistling gasps grew steady again. But as his terror ebbed away, the furious misery that it had almost driven out for a time came back and engulfed him.

  ‘Tomorrow I go away,’ he told Bran and Gerland in a small, cracked whisper. ‘I will never forget you – do not forget me, old Bran – Old Gerland . . . I told him hounds did not change their minds, I told him – I told him . . .’

  Bran licked his face sleepily.

  Next morning at low tide, so early that it was not yet full daylight, and the white mist lay across the marshes, Randal left the great Castle of Arundel that had been the only home he knew in all his first ten years, mounted before Sir Everard on his tall roan stallion. Herluin strolled down with them to the paved ford, but Randal would not look at Herluin again, at which the minstrel grew mocking-merry under the alder trees.

  Randal had crossed the Hault Rey often, when they took the hounds to run on the marshes, but this time, as Sir Everard gentled the horse down into the swift, brown water, and he saw it swirling and boiling mealy with foam about the great brute’s legs, it seemed to him that this was more than just the Hault Rey; this was something strange and terrifying, wild water sweeping between the unknown world that he went to, and the old familiar one that, with all its badness, was the only world he knew.