vote we take Cully and see if we can get some rabbits in the chase,” cried the Wart.
“The rabbits won’t be out in this wet,” said Kay sarcastically, delighted to have caught him out over natural history.
“Oh, come on,” said the Wart. “It’ll soon dry.”
“I must carry Cully, then.”
Kay insisted on carrying the goshawk and flying her, when they went out together. This he had a right to do, not only because he was older than the Wart but also because he was Sir Ector’s proper son. The Wart was not a proper son. He did not understand about this, but it made him feel unhappy, because Kay seemed to regard it as making him inferior in some way. Also it was different not having a father and mother, and Kay had taught him that being different was necessarily wrong. Nobody talked to him about it, but he thought about it when he was alone, and was distressed. He did not like people to bring it up, and since the other boy always did bring it up when a question of precedence arose, he had got into the habit of giving in at once before it could be mentioned. Besides, he admired Kay and was a born follower. He was a hero-worshipper.
“Come on, then,” cried the Wart, and they scampered off towards the mews, turning a few cartwheels on the way.
The mews was one of the most important parts of the castle, next to the stables and the kennels. It was opposite to the solar and faced south. The outside windows had to be small, for reasons of fortification, but the windows which looked inwards to the courtyard were big and sunny. All the windows had close vertical slats nailed down them, but no horizontal ones. There was no glass, but to keep the hawks from draughts there was horn in the small windows. At one end of the mews there was a little fireplace and a kind of snuggery, like the place in a saddle-room where the grooms sit to clean their tack on wet winter nights after hunting. Here there were a couple of stools, a cauldron, a bench with all sorts of small knives and surgical instruments, and some shelves with pots on them. The pots were labelled Cardamum, Ginger, Barley Sugar, Wrangle, For a Snurt, For the Craye, Vertigo, etc. There were leather skins hanging up, which had been snipped about as pieces were cut out of them for jesses, hoods or leashes. On the neat row of nails there were Indian bells and swivels and silver varvels each with Ector cut on. A special shelf, and the most beautiful of all, held the hoods: very old cracked rufter hoods which had been made for birds before Kay was born, tiny hoods for the merlins, small hoods for tiercels, splendid new hoods which had been knocked up to pass away the long winter evenings. All the hoods, except the rufters, were made in Sir Ector’s colours: white leather with red baize at the sides and a bunch of blue grey plumes on top, made out of the hackle feathers of herons. On the bench there was a jumble of oddments such as are to be found in every workshop, bits of cord, wire, metal, tools, some bread, and cheese which the mice had been at, a leather bottle, some frayed gauntlets for the left hand, nails, bits of sacking, a couple of lures and some rough tallies scratched on the wood. These read: Conays IIIIIIII, Harn III, etc. They were not spelt very well.
Right down the length of the room, with the afternoon sun shining full on them, there ran the screen perches to which the birds were tied. There were two little merlins which had only just been taken up from hacking, an old peregrine who was not much use in this wooded country but who was kept for appearances, a kestrel on which the boys had learnt the rudiments of falconry, a spar-hawk which Sir Ector was kind enough to keep for the parson, and caged off in a special apartment of his own at the far end, there was the tiercel goshawk Cully.
The Mews was neatly kept, with sawdust on the floor to absorb the mutes, and the castings taken up every day. Sir Ector visited the mews each morning at seven o’clock and the two austringers stood at attention outside the door. If they had forgotten to brush their hair he confined them to barracks. They took no notice.
Kay put on one of the left-handed gauntlets and called Cully from the perch; but Cully, with all his feathers close-set and malevolent, glared at him with a mad marigold eye and refused to come. So Kay took him up.
“Do you think we ought to fly him?” asked the Wart doubtfully. “Deep in the moult like this?”
“Of course we can fly him, yon ninny,” said Kay. “He only wants to be carried a bit, that’s all.”
So they went out across the hay-field, noting how the carefully-raked hay was now sodden again and losing its goodness, into the chase where the trees began to grow, far apart as yet and parklike, but gradually crowding into the forest shade. The conies had hundreds of buries under these trees, so close together that the problem was not to find a rabbit, but find a rabbit far enough away from its hole.
“Hob says that we mustn’t fly Cully till he has roused at least twice,” said the Wart.
“Hob doesn’t know anything about it,” said the other boy. “Nobody can tell whether a hawk is fit to fly except the man who is carrying it.
“Hob is only a villein anyway,” added Kay, and began to undo the leash and swivel from the jesses.
When he felt the trappings being taken off him, so that he was in hunting order, Cully did make some movements as if to rouse. He raised his crest, his shoulders coverts and the soft feathers of his thighs, but at the last moment he thought better or worse of it and subsided without the rattle. This movement of the hawk’s made the Wart itch to carry him, so that he yearned to take him away from Kay and set him to rights himself. He felt certain that he could get Cully into a good temper by scratching his feet and softly teasing his breast feathers upwards, if only he were allowed to do it himself, instead of having to plod along behind with the stupid lure; but he knew how annoying it must be for Kay to be continually subjected to advice, and so he held his peace. Just as in modern shooting you must never offer criticism to the man in command, so in hawking it was important that no outside advice should be allowed to disturb the judgement of the actual austringer.
“So-ho!” cried Kay, throwing his arms upwards to give the hawk a better take-off, and a rabbit was scooting across the close-nibbled turf in front of them, and Cully was in the air. The movement had surprised the Wart, the rabbit and the hawk, all three, and all three hung a moment in surprise. Then the great wings of the aerial assassin began to row the air, but reluctantly and undecided, the rabbit vanished in a hidden hole, and up went the hawk, swooping like a child flung high in a swing, until the wings folded and he was sitting in a tree. Cully looked down at his masters, opened his beak in an angry pant of failure, and remained motionless. The two hearts stood still.
A good while after that, when they had been whistling and luring and following the disturbed and sulky hawk from tree to tree, Kay lost his temper.
“Let him go, then,” said Kay. “He’s no use anyway.”
“Oh, we couldn’t leave him,” cried the Wart. “What would Hob say?”
“It’s my hawk, not Hob’s,” exclaimed Kay furiously. “What does it matter what Hob says? He is my servant.”
“But Hob made Cully. It’s all right for us to lose him, for we didn’t have to sit up with him three nights and carry him all day and all that. We can’t lose Hob’s hawk. It would be beastly.”
“Serve him right, then. He’s a fool and it’s a rotten hawk. Who wants a rotten, stupid hawk? You’d better stay yourself,
