Puck of Pook's Hill

YOUNG MEN AT THE MANOR

YOUNG MEN AT THE MANOR

They were fishing, a few days later, in the bed of the brook that for centuries had cut deep into the soft valley soil. The trees closing overhead made long tunnels through which the sunshine worked in blobs and patches. Down in the tunnels were bars of sand and gravel, old roots and trunks covered with moss or painted red by the irony water; foxgloves growing lean and pale towards the light; clumps of fern and thirsty shy flowers who could not live away from moisture and shade. In the pools you could see the wave thrown up by the trouts as they charged hither and yon, and the pools were joined to each other – except in flood time, when all was one brown rush – by sheets of thin broken water that poured themselves chuckling round the darkness of the next bend.

This was one of the children’s most secret hunting-grounds, and their particular friend, old Hobden the hedger, had shown them how to use it. Except for the click of a rod hitting a low willow, or a switch and tussle among the young ash-leaves as a line hung up for the minute, nobody in the hot pasture could have guessed what game was going on among the trouts below the banks.

‘We’s got half-a-dozen,’ said Dan, after a warm, wet hour. ‘I vote we go up to Stone Bay and try Long Pool.’

Una nodded – most of her talk was by nods – and they crept from the gloom of the tunnels towards the tiny weir that turns the brook into the mill-stream. Here the banks are low and bare, and the glare of the afternoon sun on the Long Pool below the weir makes your eyes ache.

When they were in the open they nearly fell down with astonishment. A huge grey horse, whose tail-hairs crinkled the glassy water, was drinking in the pool, and the ripples about his muzzle flashed like melted gold. On his back sat an old, white-haired man dressed in a loose glimmery gown of chain-mail. He was bareheaded, and a nut-shaped iron helmet hung at his saddle-bow. His reins were of red leather five or six inches deep, scalloped at the edges, and his high padded saddle with its red girths was held fore and aft by a red leather breastband and crupper.

‘Look!’ said Una, as though Dan were not staring his very eyes out. ‘It’s like the picture in your room – “Sir Isumbras at the Ford.”’

The rider turned towards them, and his thin, long face was just as sweet and gentle as that of the knight who carries the children in that picture.

‘They should be here now, Sir Richard,’ said Puck’s deep voice among the willow-herb.

‘They are here,’ the knight said, and he smiled at Dan with the string of trouts in his hand. ‘There seems no great change in boys since mine fished this water.’

‘If your horse has drunk, we shall be more at ease in the Ring,’ said Puck; and he nodded to the children as though he had never magicked away their memories the week before.

The great horse turned and hoisted himself into the pasture with a kick and a scramble that tore the clods down rattling.

‘Your pardon!’ said Sir Richard to Dan. ‘When these lands were mine, I never loved that mounted men should cross the brook except by the paved ford. But my Swallow here was thirsty, and I wished to meet you.’

‘We’re very glad you’ve come, sir,’ said Dan. ‘It doesn’t matter in the least about the banks.’

He trotted across the pasture on the sword-side of the mighty horse, and it was a mighty iron-handled sword that swung from Sir Richard’s belt. Una walked behind with Puck. She remembered everything now.

‘I’m sorry about the Leaves,’ he said, ‘but it would never have done if you had gone home and told, would it?’

‘I s’pose not,’ Una answered. ‘But you said that all the fair – People of the Hills had left England.’

‘So they have; but I told you that you should come and go and look and know, didn’t I? The knight isn’t a fairy. He’s Sir Richard Dalyngridge, a very old friend of mine. He came over with William the Conqueror, and he wants to see you particularly.’

‘What for?’ said Una.

‘On account of your great wisdom and learning,’ Puck replied, without a twinkle.

‘Us?’ said Una. ‘Why, I don’t know my Nine Times – not to say it dodging; and Dan makes the most awful mess of fractions. He can’t mean us!’

‘Una!’ Dan called back. ‘Sir Richard says he is going to tell what happened to Weland’s sword. He’s got it. Isn’t it splendid?’

‘Nay – nay,’ said Sir Richard, dismounting as they reached the Ring, in the bend of the mill-stream bank. ‘It is you that must tell me, for I hear the youngest child in our England to-day is as wise as our wisest clerk.’ He slipped the bit out of Swallow’s mouth, dropped the ruby-red reins over his head, and the wise horse moved off to graze.

Sir Richard (they noticed he limped a little) unslung his great sword.

‘That’s it,’ Dan whispered to Una.

‘This is the sword that Brother Hugh had from Wayland-Smith,’ Sir Richard said. ‘Once he gave it to me, but I would not take it; but at the last it became mine after such a fight as never christened man fought. See!’ He half drew it from its sheath and turned it before them. On either side just below the handle, where the Runic letters shivered as though they were alive, were two deep gouges in the dull, deadly steel. ‘Now, what Thing made those?’ said he. ‘I know not, but you, perhaps, can say.’

‘Tell them all the tale, Sir Richard,’ said Puck. ‘It concerns their land somewhat.’

‘Yes, from the very beginning,’ Una pleaded, for the knight’s good face and the smile on it more than ever reminded her of ‘Sir Isumbras at the Ford.’

They settled down to listen, Sir Richard bare-headed to the sunshine, dandling the sword in both hands, while the grey horse cropped outside the Ring, and the helmet on the saddle-bow clinged softly each time he jerked his head.

‘From the beginning, then,’ Sir Richard said, ‘since it concerns your land, I will tell the tale. When our Duke came out of Normandy to take his England, great knights (have ye heard?) came and strove hard to serve the Duke, because he promised them lands here, and small knights followed the great ones. My folk in Normandy were poor; but a great knight, Engerrard of the Eagle – Engenulf De Aquila – who was kin to my father, followed the Earl of Mortain, who followed William the Duke, and I followed De Aquila. Yes, with thirty men-at-arms out of my father’s house and a new sword, I set out to conquer England three days after I was made knight. I did not then know that England would conquer me. We went up to Santlache with the rest – a very great host of us.’

‘Does that mean the Battle of Hastings – Ten Sixty-Six?’ Una whispered, and Puck nodded, so as not to interrupt.

‘At Santlache, over the hill yonder’ – he pointed south-eastward towards Fairlight – ‘we found Harold’s men. We fought. At the day’s end they ran. My men went with De Aquila’s to chase and plunder, and in that chase Engerrard of the Eagle was slain, and his son Gilbert took his banner and his men forward. This I did not know till after, for Swallow here was cut in the flank, so I stayed to wash the wound at a brook by a thorn. There a single Saxon cried out to me in French, and we fought together. I should have known his voice, but we fought together. For a long time neither had any advantage, till by pure ill-fortune his foot slipped and his sword flew from his hand. Now I had but newly been made knight, and wished, above all, to be courteous and fameworthy, so I forebore to strike and bade him get his sword again. “A plague on my sword,” said he. “It has lost me my first fight. You have spared my life. Take my sword.” He held it out to me, but as I stretched my hand the sword groaned like a stricken man, and I leaped back crying, “Sorcery!”

[The children looked at the sword as though it might speak again.]

‘Suddenly a clump of Saxons ran out upon me and, seeing a Norman alone, would have killed me, but my Saxon cried out that I was his prisoner, and beat them off. Thus, see you, he saved my life. He put me on my horse and led me through the woods ten long miles to this valley.’

‘To here, d’you mean?’ said Una.

‘To this very valley. We came in by the Lower Ford under the King’s Hill yonder’ – he pointed eastward where the valley widens.

‘And was that Saxon Hugh the novice?’ Dan asked.

‘Yes, and more than that. He had been for three years at the monastery at Bec by Rouen, where’ – Sir Richard chuckled – ‘the Abbot Herluin would not suffer me to remain.’

‘Why wouldn’t he?’ said Dan.

‘Because I rode my horse into the refectory, when the scholars were at meat, to show the Saxon boys we Normans were not afraid of an abbot. It was that very Saxon Hugh tempted me to do it, and we had not met since that day. I thought I knew his voice even inside my helmet, and, for all that our Lords fought, we each rejoiced we had not slain the other. He walked by my side, and he told me how a Heathen God, as he believed, had given him his sword, but he said he had never heard it sing before. I remember I warned him to beware of sorcery and quick enchantments.’ Sir Richard smiled to himself. ‘I was very young – very young!

‘When we came to his house here we had almost forgotten that we had been at blows. It was near midnight, and the Great Hall was full of men and women waiting news. There I first saw his sister, the Lady Ælueva, of whom he had spoken to us in France. She cried out fiercely at me, and would have had me hanged in that hour, but her brother said that I had spared his life – he said not how he saved mine from his Saxons – and that our Duke had won the day; and even while they wrangled over my poor body, of a sudden he fell down in a swoon from his wounds.

‘“This is thy fault,” said the Lady Ælueva to me, and she kneeled above him and called for wine and cloths.

‘“If I had known,” I answered, “he should have ridden and I walked. But he set me on my horse; he made no complaint; he walked beside me and spoke merrily throughout. I pray I have done him no harm.”

‘“Thou hast need to pray,” she said, catching up her underlip. “If he dies, thou shalt hang!”

‘They bore off Hugh to his chamber; but three tall men of the house bound me and set me under the beam of the Great Hall with a rope round my neck. The end of the rope they flung over the beam, and they sat them down by the fire to wait word whether Hugh lived or died. They cracked nuts with their knife-hilts the while.’

‘And how did you feel?’ said Dan.

‘Very weary; but I did heartily pray for my schoolmate Hugh his health. About noon I heard horses in the valley, and the three men loosed my ropes and fled out, and De Aquila’s men rode up. Gilbert de Aquila came with them, for it was his boast that, like his father, he forgot no man that served him. He was little, like his father, but terrible, with a nose like an eagle’s nose and yellow eyes like an eagle. He rode tall war-horses – roans, which he bred himself – and he could never abide to be helped into the saddle. He saw the rope hanging from the beam and laughed, and his men laughed, for I was too stiff to rise.

‘“This is poor entertainment for a Norman knight,” he said, “but, such as it is, let us be grateful. Show me, boy, to whom thou owest most, and we will pay them out of hand.”’

‘What did he mean? To kill ’em?’ said Dan.