The banners and the eagles spread out, bright in the sunlight, as the column cantered across the heath.
Sir John Faulkner, seneschal of Corfe Gate, woke early from a restless sleep. Sunlight from the fenestella six feet above his head slanted across the little bedchamber, fighting the chill that tended to gather in the room even in the height of summer. The great keep was always cool; for the sun at its hottest could scarcely reach through a dozen feet of Dorset stone. A week before the Lady Eleanor, mistress of the place, had moved her people from the lower baileys to make room for the soldiers flocking in and the refugees begging shelter; the household was still unused to the primitive conditions of the donjon. The seneschal rubbed his face, filled a bowl and washed, swilling the water down the sluice beneath the window. He dressed, grateful for the touch of fresh linen on his body, and left the chamber.
Outside, a circular stairway wound up through the thickness of the wall. He climbed it, placing his feet at the sides of the treads; generations of wear had scooped the steps into hollows that were traps for the unwary. At the top of the spiralling way a door, loosely closed by a lanyard, gave access to the roof. He unfastened the becket and stepped through, leaned on the parapet and looked down between the massive crenellations at the surrounding country. Five miles to the south the Channel stretched away in a pearly haze; out there on a clear day keen sight might make out the shape of the Needles, guarding the western tip of the Isle of Wight. The Devil sat there once in the long-ago, heaved a rock at Corfe towers, and dropped it short on Studland beach. The seneschal smiled slightly at the fancy and turned away.
Northward were the heights of the Great Plain, pale in the dawn light, grey and vague like the uplands of a kingdom of ghosts. Close to the castle rose the huge swellings of Challow and Knowle, its flanking hills; and all round was the heath, blackened in places by summer fires, flat and sullen and immense, a sour expanse that would grow nothing, supported nothing except roving bands of croppers. He could see the smoke from one of their camps threading up in the distance. Nearer at hand he looked down on the ribbed grey roofs of the village, the farm that stood just beyond the wet ditch. As he watched a lorry coasted to it, off-loaded two churns, and puffed away round the shoulder of the motte towards the Wareham Road.
Almost unwillingly, he lifted his eyes to the semaphore tower on the crest of Challow Hill. As if it had been waiting for a cue, the thing began to move; the jerky ‘Arms up, arms down’ of the Attention signal. He knew it would be answering another far across the heath; so far that only the Guildsmen, with their wonderful Zeiss binoculars, could translate accurately the letters and symbols of the message. Way across the land the chain of towers would be moving, lifting their jointed arms, banging them back. Attention, Attention…
Reading the semaphores was not officially the province of the seneschal; down in the third bailey a scurry of movement told him the guards had already alerted the household’s Signaller-Page. The boy would be hurrying from his room, rubbing his eyes maybe, message pad in hand. The seneschal watched the movements of the arms, lips shaping the numbers as they formed, mind translating the cryptograms to which generations of Signallers had reduced the king’s English. ‘Eagle Rye one five,’ he read. ‘North-west ten, closing.’ That would be My Lord of the Cinque Ports, with his hundred and fifty men; he was nearer than the seneschal had thought. Nine dead,’ said the thing on the hill. ‘Nine.’ That was bad; the Pope’s lieutenant was evidently determined to enhance his reputation for ruthlessness. There followed a call sign; Sir John heard cables rattle as Eleanor’s Signaller worked the arms of his tower. ‘Yield your guns,’ said the grid’ repeater briefly. ‘Give yourselves into captivity. Messengers en route.’ Then that was all. The arms dropped with a final clash; the tower fell austerely silent.
The watching man sighed and instinctively his hand went to the amulet round his neck. He turned the little disc in his fingers, tracing the outline of the symbol carved on it. Down below the kitchen chimneys smoked, pails clanked as the cows were milked in their stalls. Those of the household who had been in sight of the tower had paused momentarily when its arms started to move, and all would have heard the clatter of their own answer; but no commoners could read the language of the Guild, and they had soon bent to their tasks again. Eleanor would have to be told. He ducked back down the stairway, hunching his shoulders automatically to prevent banging his head on the low ceiling. His mouth was set grimly. This was the thing that had been ordained a thousand years; an era was about to come to an end.
The Lady Eleanor was already up and dressed. A board had been set out for her in one of the chambers opening off the Great Hall; she was taking breakfast in an alcove beneath a window set with quarrel-panes of coloured glass. She rose when she saw her seneschal, and watched his face. He nodded briefly in answer to the unvoiced question. ‘Yes, my Lady,’ he said quietly. ‘He will come today.’
She sat back, no longer conscious of the food in front of her. Her face and worried
eyes looked very young. ‘How many men?’ she asked finally.
‘A hundred and fifty.’
She waved a hand, conscious suddenly of her incivility. ‘Please sit down, Sir John. Will you take wine?’
He leaned back in the window seat, resting his head against the glass. ‘Not at present, thank you, my Lady…’
He watched her, and no one could have told the expression in his eyes. She stared back seeing how the lights stained his hair and cheek with colour, gold and rose and blue. She pulled at her lip, and twined her fingers in her lap. ‘Sir John,’ she said, ‘what am I to do?’
He didn’t answer for a time; and when he did speak there was no help in the words. ‘What your blood dictates, my Lady,’ he said. ‘You will follow your breeding, and your heart.’
She got up again quickly and walked away from him to where she could see the Great Hall shadowed and forbidding, the gloomy power of the vast crosswall, the dais where in ancient times the family sat at meat, the gallery where minstrels used to play. She touched a switch beside the chamber door; a solitary electric lamp flicked on in the roof, throwing a wan pool of light on the coarse flags of the floor, and suddenly the place seemed fitter for the dead than the living. Somewhere a chain-hoist rumbled; the Signaller-Page ran into the hall, stopped short when he saw his mistress. She took the message he carried, smiling at him, turned back with the flimsy in her hand. She said broodingly, ‘A hundred and fifty men…"
She walked back to her chair, sat with her hands folded in her lap, and stared at the table in front of her. ‘If I open to him,’ she said indistinctly, ‘I shall run behind his pack train like a soldiers’ drab. I shall lose my living and my home, most certainly my decency and probably my life. But I can’t fight Pope John. To war with him is to take on all the world… Yet this is his man come to try me.’
The seneschal said nothing; she hadn’t expected him to answer. She sat still a long time and when she looked up there were tears in her eyes. ‘Close the gates, Sir John,’ she said, ‘and get our people in. Advise me when these messengers arrive, but do not grant them entry.’ He rose quietly. ‘And the guns, Lady?’
‘The guns?’ she said sombrely. ‘Take them to the gate by all means, and shot and powder for them. So far we will do as he desires…"
Through all the passages and high walks of the place the drums throbbed, beating to quarters.