The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [121]
The boar, it seems, had a lair somewhere up on Burley Beacon, overlooking the valley, and had been known to raid the farms there. Some time around Martinmass, when most of the livestock were slaughtered, it had come down to Bisterne, following the streams that led down from Castle Hill, until, near the manor house, it had come to Bunny Brook. By the manor farm it had found milk pails cooling in the stream, taken the milk, and then killed one of the farm’s remaining cows.
Its appearance at this time would have been terrifying indeed. It was not only the black beast’s blazing eyes, frothing mouth and tusks. If thwarted, the wild boar has a hideous scream; its breath in the cold November air would have steamed; boars also move across the ground with the strangest silence. As it ran across the Bisterne fields by the pale light of dawn it would have seemed an unearthly creature.
And no wonder, one cold November night, the brave Sir Maurice Berkeley went out to fight the monster. The encounter took place in the valley and it was bloody. The knight’s two favourite hounds died in the mêlée and Sir Maurice, having killed the beast himself, received wounds that became infected. By Christmas he was dead.
Some legends are invented later, from half-forgotten events; others spring to life at once. Within a year, the whole county knew of Sir Maurice Berkeley’s battle with the Bisterne dragon. They knew the dragon flew over the fields from Burley Beacon. They knew the knight had killed him single-handed and died of the dragon’s poison. And if the wider world was soon distracted by the knightly dramas of the Wars of the Roses, in the New Forest and the Avon valley, as the years passed, men remembered: ‘We had a dragon not so long ago.’
It was another two miles from the crest of Shirley Common to Bisterne manor, and the boys took their time descending. Sometimes they could see the spur of Burley Beacon, at others it was hidden; but they kept an eye out in that direction in case the dragon should take wing from its hill and come flying towards them.
‘What’ll we do if we see it coming?’ asked Willie.
‘Hide,’ said Jonathan.
On the lower part of the slope the track led through woodland. The slanting morning sunshine made a pale-green light in the undergrowth. Mosses gathered by the bases of the trees, ivy on the trunks. They heard a pigeon cooing. The path veered left out of the trees and led down the side of the wood. A grey hen scuttled across in front of them from the long grass. And they had only descended another hundred yards when suddenly on their right there was a flapping sound and, in a flash of dark metallic blue, a blackcock with his lyre tail, disturbed by something, burst over their heads out of the trees.
‘That made you jump, Willie,’ said Jonathan.
‘So did you.’
Soon after this they came down on to the open valley floor and saw at once that they had entered a world where a dragon might appear at any time.
The world of Bisterne was very flat. Its large fields stretched over two miles westwards to the Avon’s silver waters which, as they often did in spring, had spread out over the lush water-meadows in a magical, liquid sheen. The manor house – it was more of a hunting lodge for the Berkeley knights, really – was a single timber-and-plaster hall with a stable yard attached, standing by itself in the middle of open parkland where cattle grazed and rabbits in an enclosed warren bobbed on the close-cropped grass. Away in the distance were the slopes behind which Burley Beacon lay; and dotting the landscape from hedgerow and field, single oaks or elms were holding out their bare arms as though expecting the winged monster to fly down from the Beacon and perch upon them.
It was quiet. Occasionally, they heard the lowing of cattle; once, the sawing sound of swans’ wings, beating over the distant water. And now and then a hoarse cawing and sudden flapping