Sir Thiebaut sat his bay palfrey and looked at him, his brows rising a little over those brilliant, colourless eyes. How assured he seemed, in his dark gown turned back with fox fur, the peregrine on his fist unhooded and made ready for flight: how coldly formidable. Randal was aware to the depth of his being that he was a boy of fifteen, and had been less than two weeks a squire; he felt very small and naked to be challenging such as de Coucy.
‘Surely your new squirehood has gone to your head like too much cider,’ de Coucy said contemptuously. ‘But I am not used to that tone from an equal, let alone from a mere squire. Thank your patron saint that I am a patient man, and go away, my good lad, and cool that hot head of yours in the river.’
‘I will go when I have said what I came to say,’ Randal told him. ‘If you like I will speak it before these others.’ He glanced about him. ‘There’s more than one within shouting distance. But I think that maybe what I have to say, you would as lief not hear cried aloud to the world.’
He watched something flicker far back in the man’s eyes, and wondered whether he was remembering the water stair at Arundel, or whether there were other matters.
Then the knight shrugged, still with a show of contemptuous good humour. ‘What man that is flesh and blood and no cold saint has not something that he does not particularly wish his world to know? Nay then, I’ll hear you, since you seem so set on it,’ and he wheeled his horse as he spoke, and began, Randal beside him close as a shadow, to separate from the rest of the hawking party. The falcons had returned to their lords’ fists by now, the heron had been recovered and the hounds leashed again, and the whole company were drifting off up-river towards the next patch of cover.
Randal and Sir Thiebaut dropped farther and farther behind, until the hawking scene grew small and bright with distance as it had been when Randal first saw it through the screening alders. Finally, in the lee of a tump of still bare blackthorn, they reined in and turned to look at each other.
‘Well?’ Sir Thiebaut said. ‘Now, before I lose all patience, what is the thing that you would say to me?’
Randal’s heart was suddenly banging against his ribs.
‘Firstly, Sir Thiebaut, by way of sweetening what comes after, to pass on to you some words I once heard from that Ancret who dared to look at you in a way you did not like, when you came to Dean a year and a half since. “There’s never aught but sorrow come yet to mortal man from the gold of the Hollow Hills.” Remember that, if you think, by gaining Dean, to gain also king’s fortune from the crest of the Bramble Hill.’
‘So you have heard tales,’ de Coucy said after a moment, dropping pretence.
‘Yes, I have heard tales. Maybe you can tell me that they are not true?’
Sir Thiebaut smiled. ‘Come to think of it, why should I?’
He was hatefully sure of himself. Randal longed to smash his fist into the plump face and take some of the sureness out of it. He steadied his voice with an effort, terrified that even now it might betray him with an unbroken squeak.
‘You have some influence with His Grace of Durham –’ How pompous that sounded! He felt that his enemy was mocking him for it.
‘A little, I hope. And His Grace of Durham has – have you heard it? – some influence with the King.’
‘Then, if you have not already spoken of this matter of Dean, let you leave it unspoken. If you have spoken, then let you use this influence that you have with His Grace, that he give the words back to you as though they had never been.’
‘And why?’ said de Coucy again, pleasantly.
‘Because five years ago last October, I, who was then a dog-boy at Arundel, overheard what passed between you and the Lord of Arundel on the water stair of his castle.’
Sir Thiebaut made no sign, save that his eyes narrowed a little, but the peregrine on his fist suddenly bated wildly, filling the silence between them with her scream and furiously clapping wings. When the bird was quietened, the knight said gently, ‘Yes, and how do you know me again?’
Something clicked in Randal’s brain, and he saw the danger. Many men might wear musk, and a voice was such a small thing to swear to – to those who had not heard it as he had done.
‘It was dark in the stair-way,’ he said, taking a risk, ‘but once outside, the moon was very bright.’
The knight inclined his head as though giving him best on that point, but smiling, because he could afford to. ‘You were then, perhaps, ten years old? Whatever you heard, whatever you dreamed you heard, who, think you, is going to take your word against mine? The word of a boy scarce yet a squire, and at the time only a child, and it appears a mere dog-boy at that, against the word of a knight?’
‘In these days even a knight cannot afford to have suspicion fall upon him,’ Randal said, thinking out his words as he went along. ‘The King is half mad with suspicion – all men know it – and loves not those who are even whispered to have plotted against him. And’ – his voice did shake a little then, but he steadied it instantly – ‘I am ready to take my story before the Bishop of Chichester and offer myself for trial by ordeal to prove that I speak the truth!’ (What would they do? Make him plunge his hand – his sword hand – into boiling water? That was the most usual ordeal. He must cling to the faith that, whatever it was, the God that Adam Clerk had taught him about would strengthen him and bring him through unscathed to prove that his accusation was a true one.)
‘So, a fighting cock indeed!’ Sir Thiebaut said softly, and then, ‘Have you not thought that it might be no very hard matter to have such a troublesome boy – cleared from the path?’
Randal had thought of that, but not the answer. His quick wit furnished him with that now, in the moment of his need. ‘Yes; and therefore I have set a written and sealed report in the hands of – someone, to be opened and acted on, if any harm comes to me.’
He watched the odd little flicker behind de Coucy’s eyes again. He did not think the man believed him, but saw that he could not be sure; and he knew that while he could not be sure, de Coucy would not dare to risk it.
Something from the long-ago night when Herluin had won him with a game of chess came into his mind.
‘Checkmate, Sir Thiebaut,’ he said.
Sir Thiebaut seemed to be watching the distant hawking party, but after a moment he looked round once more at the young squire. And Randal, meeting the narrowed gaze of the pale, bright eyes, found himself looking into sheer hate. A personal hate that went far deeper than the question of Dean.
‘No, only stalemate,’ he said, very, very gently. ‘And I think that one day you shall weep blood for this day’s work, my kennel-bred squire.’
10
The Flowering Flint
RANDAL RODE BACK to Bramber, stabled Swallow, and went in search of Sir Everard. At the head of the Keep steps he met Bevis, looking very white and taking his position as senior squire heavily – the more so, perhaps, because of last night – who caught him by the shoulder, demanding, ‘Randal! What in Satan’s name do you mean by skulking off without leave like this? Where have you been?’
‘I went after the hawking party,’ Randal said. ‘Where is Sir Everard?’
‘Well, next time you think to run off to play –’ Bevis began furiously; and then something that he saw in the other boy’s face halted him. ‘Randal, what is amiss now?’
‘Nothing,’ Randal said. ‘No, I think – everything is going to be well enough. But I must speak to Sir Everard.’
Bevis dropped his hand. ‘Go along and make your peace with him then. He is in the armoury with de Braose, and I warn you, he’s angry.’
The armoury was on the ground floor of the Keep, with the dungeons and storerooms, beneath the guardroom; a kind of undercroft with its low, barrel-vaulted ceiling supported on short, immensely strong piers, so that the place was like a church that had gradually sunk down squat and bow-legged under the immense weight of the great Keep above it. There among the pike stands and stacked shields and iron-bound arm
our-kists, with a couple of torch-bearing squires to light them – for though the armoury was above ground it had no windows nor outer door – Sir Everard and the old Lord of Bramber were looking at several sword blades laid on a kist top between them.
Sir Everard glanced up as Randal came clattering down the steep, curling, guardroom stair, and looked at him a moment, deliberately, his black brows drawn together.
‘Ah, Randal, wait there,’ he said, as though there had been no question of his squire being absent without leave, and turned his attention back to the sword that de Braose was holding to the light. His mouth was at its grimmest, and the frown lingered between his eyes, but clearly he did not intend to take his squire to task before onlookers.
Randal waited, standing stiffly in the archway at the stair foot, while the two knights bent their heads over this weapon and that. They were old friends, old comrades in arms; but it was hard, Randal thought, seeing the Lord of Bramber, fat and gout-ridden, with his pouchy, used-up face in which only the eyes still seemed really alive, to think of him, young and strong and maybe much as Sir Philip was now, leading his squadrons to the charge, at Senlac, over the downs: he was so long past his fighting days, though he could be no older than d’Aguillon. But, past the use of them though he might be, he had kept the same passion for fine weapons that another man might feel for horses and a third for jewels. Now, smiling a little, he passed to his old companion a damascened blade on whose dark surface the torchlight played changeably as on a stormy sea.
‘Feel. Is not the balance sweet? I had to have a new hilt made for it: the Saracens have narrower hands than ours, seemingly, and the grip was too small.’
‘From Laef Thorkelson?’ Sir Everard said, making the blade sing as it cut the air.
‘Ah, I forgot that you were a friend of Laef Thorkelson’s. He has brought me more than one of my best weapons; fine Arab blades that have no equal in the North.’
‘It is a lovely weapon’ – Sir Everard felt the balance again and squinted one-eyed along the blade – ‘though a little light, to my mind, maybe because I have carried a heavy sword all my life . . .’ He gave it back, and took up another from the kist top. ‘This has more the weight of my own sword that I carried at Senlac, and that Bevis will carry after me.’
Clearly, since it seemed that there was nothing to be done about Dean, they had set the matter behind them for the time being, in cleanly and civilised fashion, to take pleasure in their old companionship and the keenness of damascene sword iron.
And still, at the stair-foot, Randal waited.
At last the time drew near to noon – dinner had been set back two hours to suit the hawking party – and de Braose bade his squires to wrap the blades again in their oiled linen swathings and lay them away in the open sword kists, before they all climbed back into the dim daylight of the guardroom above. When the Lord of Bramber had ambled away leaning on the shoulder of one of his squires, Sir Everard gestured Randal to follow him up on to the rampart that cut the inner from the outer bailey.
Randal followed the tall old man as he descended the Keep stair, crossed the inner bailey and went tramping up the rampart steps with the chape of his sword ringing on the stones beside him. The rampart walks, not greatly used except in time of war, for the look-out was kept from the roof of the Keep itself, were good places to be safe from interruption or unwanted listeners.
‘Randal,’ Sir Everard said, strolling a little ahead, his shoulders hunched in his old, rust-stained leather gambeson, ‘you know the duties of a squire. If you have any excuse to give me for going off this morning without first asking my leave, give it to me now.’
‘I went after the hawking party,’ Randal said to his stooping, leather-clad shoulder. ‘De Coucy rode with them, and I had to get word with him alone.’
Sir Everard stopped in his tracks so abruptly that Randal all but bumped into him; then he turned round quite slowly, and stood looking at his squire.
‘If I had come to you for leave first, you might have asked me why I wanted word with him,’ Randal urged, to the stern uncompromising face.
‘Randal,’ said Sir Everard in a voice that grated a little. ‘What have you been doing?’
Randal leaned against the side of a crenelle, surprised to find that he was shaking. But he had been shaking without knowing it, ever since he left de Coucy and the hawking party.
‘Sir – I knew something about de Coucy that I thought I could maybe use as a weapon against him.’ He checked, stumbling for the right words. He could not tell d’Aguillon the whole story. For himself, his only loyalty was to Dean, but d’Aguillon’s loyalties were wider and he might feel it needful to go to de Braose . . . But something he must tell him. ‘When I was in Arundel, I overheard de Coucy once, in a place where he had no right to be, with a man he should not have been with, and they made a plot that – would not have pleased the King. I think that he will leave Dean alone.’
There was a long silence. The little February wind hummed through the crenelles of the rampart, and below in the courtyard the hawking party was returning, and folk beginning to make their way towards the Great Hall for dinner. Sir Everard brought up both hands and set them on Randal’s shoulders, and looked at him very straight out of those dark eyes that would be so hard to lie to. ‘Tell me the truth, Randal; this plot you speak of, is it finished, a thing altogether of the past, or does anything of it reach out to the future?’
‘It is altogether of the past,’ Randal said, ‘but the King loves not those who plot against him, even in past years.’
‘True,’ Sir Everard said slowly. ‘So be it, then, I will ask no other question. A bargain is a bargain, even with such as de Coucy.’ And then, as Randal heaved a sigh of relief. ‘No. One more question. How did you contrive to make such a bargain – your word against his, and you were a child at the time?’
‘I – reminded him of how half-mad with suspicion the Red King is; I said I would take the thing before the Bishop of Chichester and submit to being proved by ordeal. I – oh, I know it was a weak enough weapon, but it was all I had, and – and it worked!’ Suddenly there was a great swelling in his throat and he could say no more. He was aware of the warm trickle of tears on his face, and he stuck out his tongue like a puppy to lick them up.
D’Aguillon was shaking him very gently, very kindly. ‘You young fool! You very valiant young fool! Fifteen is too young to be making yourself a deadly enemy!’
Next day Sir Thiebaut de Coucy was gone, seemingly forgetful that he had ever looked in the direction of Dean. A week later, Sir Philip de Braose took his wife away to his own Manor at the northern end of the Honour; and the great Castle guarding the pass through the Downs settled to its usual way of life again. The month of Sir Everard’s guard service drew to a close once more, and on a day of soft rain sweeping in from the sea, the old knight and his squires rode home.
The alders were dropping their little dark catkins in the water of the ford, and the elm trees below the Mill wore their brief purple mist of blossom, and as they drew towards home the babble of the young lambs came down to them from the lambing pens. Bevis let the reins drop on Durandal’s neck, and stretched his arms wide above his head.
‘Oh, it is good to be back. We have been away too long!’
Randal, with his head up into the soft rain that tasted a little of the sea on his lips, heard the babble of the lambing pens, and the deep content welled up in him because Dean and the Dean sheep would not suffer a change of master this year.
‘There’ll be a-many lambs come already by the sound of it,’ he said, and he and Bevis looked at each other as they rode, sharing the contentment. He had told Bevis the whole story. That was a different matter from telling Sir Everard, though he would have been hard put to it to find words for the difference.
Sir Everard glanced back over his shoulder. ‘You have run in strict leash all these past thirty days, and it is time that you were slipped. Bide for supper, then away with you up to Lewin and his
lambing pens. It is in my mind that you would liefer spend the night there than lying decently by the Hall fire, at this time of year.’
And so, when Sybilla had done fussing over them, and supper was finished, they left Sir Everard to talk over the Manor affairs with Reynfrey and Adam Clerk, and took Joyeuse who had been bringing Bevis all that the house had to offer, including the best kitchen ladle and a hen’s egg warm from the nest, and set out for the lambing pens on the sheltered skirts of the downs. It was still raining, the fine, soft rain that seems at any moment ready to turn into mist. The branches of the old pear tree dripped and splattered on them as they went out through the gate gap and turned uphill for the open downs, and away to their right they could hear the voice of the little winter bourn that began to run when the springs broke in November and would dry up again by May. It was not very dark for there was a moon behind the clouds, and in a little they saw the dark mass of the lambing pens on the sheltered southern slope of the little coomb, silent now, save for the occasional bleat of a lamb waking to find itself separated from its mother. A dim flicker of firelight shone from the opening of the bothy through the mizzle rain, and as they drew nearer, there sprang up a gleam of paler and stronger yellow that spoke of a lantern, and a great baying broke out, at which Joyeuse pricked her ears and whined, pulling against the leash.
Then Lewin’s voice sounded, quieting the dogs. He was standing, big and peaceful, beside the opening of the bothy, his old battered lantern half shielded under his sheepskin mantle, when they came up.
‘The thirty days are finished, and ’twas in my mind to wonder whether you would be up tonight,’ he greeted them.
‘It seems more than thirty days,’ Bevis said. ‘Oh, Lewin, it is so good to be back! How goes the lambing?’
‘Well enough. Aye, well enough this year. I was just going to take my look around the pens now. Coming with me?’ It was a question that he had asked often before, and he knew the answer so well that he did not even wait for it. ‘Tie up the bitch then, and come.’