Kingmaker: Broken Faith (27 page)

‘Dear God,’ he says. ‘Nevertheless, it is as fine as anything King Henry will have seen in Scotland these past months, of that you may be sure. So. Get him up, dressed and ready to ride before midday.’

‘Today?’ Katherine says.

‘Yes,’ Grey answers. ‘Today. This morning. King Henry commands it. And you are to come too. And you, whatever your name is. And you too. Help make up the numbers.’

‘He is not yet strong enough to walk much further than the privy. How will he cope with a ride in the rain?’

But Grey has turned and he waves his arm airily as he stalks away, just as the chapel bell is ringing again.

It is only a few hours later, just after noon, that they ride out on borrowed horses, under a scudding slate-grey sky. Devon John is slumped on a sag-backed pony between Thomas and Jack, his face the colour of goose fat, and Katherine watches him anxiously. He is well topped up with Sir Ralph’s distillation, but even so, a trip like this could be the end of him.

‘Is he all right?’ Thomas asks.

‘Doesn’t matter anyway,’ Jack calls. ‘It’s past All Saints. You’ve won your bet.’

They ride out through the barbican’s mossy walls and over the bridge and below them the moat is stippled with raindrops and a boy is trying to fish for something in the pungent waters. Before they have ridden a bowshot, Grey stops the party while he uncorks his costrel and takes a nip of the spirit. Is it Thomas’s imagination, but does the air waver over the bottle when it is uncorked? It seems so. They ride on, three abreast. Despite himself Thomas finds there is something special about riding in a party like this. He feels watched, feared, and very serious. He finds that his jaw is set and his gaze fixed in the distance. He supposes he would soon get used to it though, and come to find it boring.

The sea appears again at their right hand, restless and grey and scored with heavy foam-frilled waves, and that’s where they first see Dunstanburgh Castle, sited above the sea on a skirt of black cliffs around which gulls wheel.

‘D’you ever see such a spot?’ Horner mutters. ‘Wouldn’t want to be there when the wind blows, mind.’

Thomas has never seen anything quite like it before. On one side is the sea, beating against vertical black stone cliffs, while on the other is a long slope down to three or four broad lakes through which a narrow road must twist to arrive at the turreted barbican. It must be impregnable.

They ride past and then come down through scattered black boulders on to a beech of fine sand where the waves thunder and throw up clouds of spray. They follow that, curving around, blown by sea spray, and then up again through broken dunes, and in the distance is another great pile of turrets and a square tower behind curtain walls.

‘Bamburgh,’ Horner tells them. He is just as proud of it as if he had built it himself, and it is possible to see why. Hard by the seashore it is a perfect succession of stone battlements topped by the massive tower of the keep. It seems huge when they first see it, and it takes the rest of the afternoon to reach it.

By the time they are there, it is late evening, time for Vespers, and Devon John is practically dead. Whether it is the cold or the lingering shocks of the amputation, Katherine does not know. Grey is quite drunk, too, chattering incessantly, and he sends a rider ahead to announce his arrival. As they come under the castle’s lower barbican, the gates open and they process as usual into its court, and the gate is dropped with a boom behind them, and they are kept trapped in the dank yard while many eyes assess them. Thomas always hates this bit: sitting there, scrutinised, waiting not to be killed.

‘Get on with it,’ one of Horner’s men calls, and after a pause the chains start their slow grind as the inner portcullis is raised and after a moment the huge gates beyond are drawn open. Thomas kicks his horse on, past some steps up to the keep, and into the inner bailey, sunk in gloom now, but crowded with men about the business of getting bread and ale, and finding themselves somewhere warm and dry for the night.

No one pays them much attention. They ride up to the great door of the keep where lanterns illuminate a knot of guards gathered on the steps, and Grey dismounts successfully, clings to his saddle a moment longer than he ought, then rights himself and sets off up the steps very deliberately. After a moment he stops and waits for Horner, who has removed his cloak to show his colours, to catch up. Thomas can hear the challenge, the reply, the muttered conversation that follows. He hears a note of peevishness from Grey, then a deep authoritative murmur. A message is sent. There is a moment of waiting. More men come from the doorway. A slim figure appears in better clothes than the others, and they step back respectfully. Explanations are offered, a misunderstanding cleared up.

Meanwhile Katherine swings off her horse, and Jack too, and they help Devon John down from his saddle. He is mute and limp, his face very white in the gloom, his eyes fast shut.

‘We need a fire,’ she says. ‘Somewhere to warm him.’

Horner comes down the steps alone. King Henry will not see Grey today, but he is to be found space on a mattress in the keep, and is invited to dine in the same room as the King, if not at the same board. His men meanwhile are to be billeted in somewhere called the great outward postern gate, just about as far from the keep as they can be while remaining in the confines of the castle, and they will have to find food for themselves. There is a long moment while Grey’s baggage is extracted from the mules, and then they remount, and ride down through the bailey again, following a slow-walking steward in pale livery who guides them to the inner postern gate, and then through it and into the outer bailey where now there are sheep – guarded especially at night by men with bills and bowmen – as well as the ruins of hovels and stables, pulled down for hearth wood. It is a bad sign.

‘And we are to be given duties,’ Horner admits. He is depressed. He had hoped for a flourishing garrison, ready to sally out to retake England for Henry of Lancaster. Not this.

The outward postern gate is shut and barred and there is no one in the lower guardrooms, where there are puddles and rotting straw on the flagstones and the walls are glossy and green with running water. Horner wrinkles his nose. It is like a cave, Thomas thinks. Up the circling steps there is the mechanism of the portcullis winch, two great piles of rusting chain links and a long iron bar with hand spikes. The wind whistles constantly in the murder holes. Up the next set of steps and the reason for the abandonment of the lower storeys is clear: there is a broad circular bread oven that dominates the room, of the sort in which a man might easily fit, three men even, and there are that number sitting on a ledge around it, with their backs against it now, legs outstretched, ankles crossed, one of them asleep, the others playing a form of dice. Their weapons – a billhook, three unnocked bows, a sheaf of arrows, and a short tapering sword – are a long hand-stretch away.

‘Thanks be to God,’ one of the dice men says when they tell him he is relieved of his post, and he wakes his companion. ‘Come on, John,’ he says. ‘We’re set free.’

While one goes up the steps to break the news to their colleague in the tower’s top, the others pack up their few belongings, taking their weapons, their mugs and bowls, a sheet of waxed linen, and slinging the rough rolls of their mattresses over their shoulders.

‘God’s blessing on you,’ the returning sentinel says. He is sodden through, his face as pale as parchment, and he stops to press his palms against the declining warmth of the oven’s stones. ‘You’ll need it, here,’ he adds.

When he is gone, Thomas and Jack help Katherine bring Devon John up the awkward steps and lean him against the oven, just where the other men were slumped. Thomas unblocks the door of the oven. Inside it is deep with grey ash, winking embers and the bones of yesterday’s fire. There’s no bread, that’s for sure.

‘Well,’ Horner says, and he holds out his hands over the non-existent fire. Thomas already misses the guerite at Alnwick.

At dawn the next morning it is Thomas’s watch, so he wakes and rises and climbs the steps up and pushes open the iron-bound door against the wind, and emerges on to the long rectangular space, with the wind fresh in his face, and he claps his hat to his head and looks about. Horner is there, looking tired. He turns and studies Thomas over his shoulder for a second, grunts something and then turns back. The stones of the wall are green with moss and lichen and caked in seagull shit. Underfoot, men have also relieved themselves in a gutter and despite the wind, the smell is clammy and strong. Beyond the wall, where the wind is coming from, is the broad ribbon of dunes and then the beach of white sand, leading to the sea, grey-green now, mist-shrouded and rising and falling as if it is breathing. There are seagulls everywhere, shrieking, floating in the air, their din louder than any clapped bell. To the north is the dwindling stretch of unworkable moorland, and to the west, more or less the same thing, save for a small village hard by the castle walls among the blackened ruins of a larger one in which at least the church tower has been spared. Funny to look down on it, he thinks.

Horner joins him, his fingertips green with lichen from the stones.

‘Scots did that last year,’ he says, indicating the burned walls of the old village. ‘Or maybe it was the Earl of March and his men the year before?’

‘Pity,’ Thomas says.

‘Yes,’ Horner mutters. ‘Christ. What a place. I’d imagined, you know – more, more men. Less, less shit.’

‘Yes,’ Thomas says.

It starts raining. Both adjust their cloaks.

‘We could find some wood?’ Thomas suggests.

‘I’ll send some of the men out,’ Horner moans, ‘but the place has been gone over a thousand times already.’

‘Why don’t I take Jack and see if we can’t find anything in the way of bread and ale?’ he suggests.

‘You can try,’ Horner agrees, ‘and get bread if you can. Not oatcakes. D’you hear? If we’re on oatcakes already then you know things are worse than we thought.’

Thomas finds Jack by the oven and leads him down the steps and out, trudging back up through the muddied paths of the outer bailey, watched by the sheep and their armed herders. There are a few tents to one side, from which oily smoke billows, and at their openings, their inhabitants, dirty-faced men and women, a few children, are hostile. Beyond are a few stalls such as you might find in a market, where there are feathers and linens for sale, shoes, old clothes, bundles of rushes and mattresses already made up, and candles. Thomas can smell vinegar, rotting meat, wet stone, the cesspit.

And now he can hear the rhythmic tonk of men practising their fighting, something Jack enjoys, both participating in and watching, and next to him the boy picks up his pace, walking on his toes, since someone told him this is how fighting men walk. They pass through the inner postern gate, and then up into the inner bailey, where sure enough they find men in various livery jackets going at one another with various weapons, and the noise and the smell reminds Thomas of some days before – before when? Something comes back to him, another fragment of time: in a small castle on a hill above the sea, and loosing arrows endlessly, all day, every day, falling asleep over supper with his back knotted and aflame. He remembers being shouted at, forced to run, forced to loose his bow. But he remembers laughter too. And something else. Something that leavened it all. A lightness like sunlight, something like that first moment when you realise from one day to the next that spring is really here.

‘You all right, Thomas?’ Jack asks and Thomas returns to the here and now.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Sorry.’

Jack pats him on the shoulder. Thomas is grateful the boy is there, is grateful that he did not kill him in his brother’s orchard all those months ago, grateful that he saved him from Elizabeth’s vengeance.

Around them billmen are being drilled in companies, small groups of men-at-arms in harness are making elaborate and simultaneous moves across the worn grass of the bailey, past others fighting with weapons swabbed in cloth. Others crowd around, shouting the combatants on, and there is a pack of archers gathered at the far end, taking it in turns to send their blunts into targets pinned to butts set against the curtain wall. Horner would be happy to see this lot, Thomas thinks, but who are they all, in their various liveries?

‘Them is Lord Hungerford’s men there,’ Jack tells him, ‘and them belongs to Lord Roos. That one is Lord Tailboys. Them I don’t know. But look. There are the King’s men.’

And Thomas looks over. They do not look that different from the other men there, but in their buff coats with their St George’s Cross badges, they hold themselves slightly apart, as if they may be special, and again, they feel slightly familiar and he has to shake his head to invite further revelations, or clear it entirely.

They walk on, hard-packed earth under their feet, into the shadow of the keep, its lower facade pierced with arrow loops and narrow windows, a spitting guard peering down through the merlons at the top. They pass the keep and enter a service yard where the kitchens are and there is a hubbub of raised voices, and a crowd of men is gathered, all in their various livery coats and badges, many more of them than before, many of whom Jack has never seen, all of them waiting with their backs turned, waiting impatiently for something to eat. And as Thomas walks towards them, he sees something and his heart starts thumping, and his ears roar. He stumbles.

‘By Christ,’ he mutters.

‘What’s wrong, Thomas?’ Jack asks.

Thomas is breathing as if he has run a hundred paces. What is it? What is it? His eyes are fixed on the backs of the men in the crowd, and then there it is. He recognises it: a flash of something pale, white, with a pattern of dark shapes. He knows what the shape is: it is the rough approximation of a bird, a crow. But no, now that he knows more of these things, he knows that is more properly the rough approximation not of a crow, for who would have that? No. Instead it is a joke, a heraldic witticism, a play on words, for the bird is not a crow, but a raven.