Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (48 page)

Katherine asks about Sir John Fakenham and the others, about Richard and Geoffrey, and all the other Johns who had been waiting to join the Duke of York.

‘They might not’ve been there, you know?’ Thomas says. ‘They might have stayed in Marton Hall. D’you remember what Sir John said? That they’d go in the spring, when the fighting was supposed to start?’

She nods. It is a slim hope.

‘And what of – What of Walter?’

Thomas shakes his head.

‘Nothing,’ he says, ‘but nor have I heard anything of Riven’s boy or the giant either.’

‘You think Walter might have—?’ She cannot finish the sentence.

‘I hope so. He was the sort of man who might have liked the idea of selling his life dearly.’

Then Thomas lowers his voice and glances at the screen across the buttery where the innkeeper and his servants come and go.

‘Tudor’s scurriers have been through,’ he whispers. ‘The army is working its way around those hills we crossed, from the west. The innkeeper thinks they will be here within the next two days.’

‘Then we must be gone,’ Katherine says, trying to sit up.

Thomas nods.

‘The innkeeper says the road to England runs northeast from here,’ he says, ‘to a town called Leominster. He tells me to be careful to whom I speak when we get there, for the area is what he calls the Marches, and is supposed to be full of traitors.’

She struggles up on to her elbows and looks down at her clothes. Seeing them, something like relief runs through her, as if something has been decided for her.

‘Why am I dressed like this?’ she asks as she prises the blankets off.

‘D’you not remember? They are Margaret’s clothes. They were all that was dry. I sent your other clothes to the washerwomen but they would not touch them for fear of having them fall to pieces.’ He pauses, looks at her keenly. ‘Are you strong enough to travel?’ he asks.

They stare at one another. Both have heard the words before, when they were about to leave Kidwelly and someone asked the same question of Margaret Cornford.
Are you strong enough to travel?
Margaret had given them the answer they’d wished to hear, but it was not necessarily the right one.

‘So long as there are no more of those hills,’ she says.

Thomas frowns. ‘I cannot promise you that,’ he says.

She looks up through the bars of the hall’s window. Nor can he promise she will not be snowed on. The early-morning sky is white with it, and while the ostler’s boy saddles their horses they finish a mutton pie and get the fat girl to fill Margaret’s leather flask with ale. Katherine fastens Margaret’s beautiful blue cloak around her shoulders and presses the blue headdress over her coif, and she leaves the inn for the first time in more than a week.

Underfoot the snow in the yard is hard and a fat lip of ice hangs from a waterspout. Katherine feels the cold with every breath. She climbs into the side-saddle and settles herself just as she saw Margaret do, and then she waits while Thomas tips the boy for having put oil on the horses’ hooves.

After a moment she becomes aware that Thomas is gazing at her. When she turns on him he looks away, as if embarrassed to be caught staring.

‘What?” she says.

‘You look very different,’ he says.

‘I am wearing a dress,’ she points out.

‘I know,’ he says. ‘Only – only I had not realised how – I had not realised that you would look so good in it, is what I mean.’

He blurts these last words and she cannot help but smile.

They start out through the town gates and follow the road northwards, the country around them clamped in snow, silent except for the river that slides by alongside them like a rill of black silk. Immediately the road rises. The wind picks up, plucks at their hems, ruffles the horses’ manes. They ride in silence, Thomas’s shoulders hunched. Occasionally he turns to check on her.

She wonders what they will find when they return to Marton Hall.

‘What if it is already in Somerset’s hands?’ she calls. Thomas halts his horse and waits for her to draw abreast.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘But Sir John will have left word, and he will want to know what has happened to us. What happened to Walter. And Dafydd. And Owen.’

‘And Margaret,’ she adds.

Thomas nods.

‘Yes. And Margaret,’ he says, and they ride on, each wrapped in their own thoughts. Now all Katherine can think about is Margaret. Even her hands in these gloves remind her of Margaret. She is on Margaret’s horse, in Margaret’s clothes, and sometimes she thinks Margaret is talking to her, telling her something.

A little while later they pass a tower on a hill a short distance off the road to the south. Beyond the next rise is a mean little cottage where there is no one to be seen, not in the cottage, nor in the furlongs beyond. They get off their horses. Inside embers smoulder under pale ashes.

Thomas shouts for the owners but there is no answer.

‘Can you feel someone watching us?’ he asks.

She senses it too, and looks around, but she finds nothing. The wind soughs in the trees. They eat some of the bread they’ve brought and pour away the ale for tasting of horses’ urine, and then they mount up and carry on over a wooden bridge. Here Thomas stops and gets off his horse. He bends and traces his finger in the frost-stiffened mud.

‘Horses,’ he says. ‘About ten of them, well shod. I have been seeing their prints on the road since Brecon.’

She says nothing. Of course there are hoof prints, she thinks. It is a bridge. Then she sees what he means. There are a lot of hoof prints, all left at the same time, and all going in one direction, northeast.

‘Can they be Tudor’s scurriers?’ she asks.

‘Could be,’ Thomas says, but there is doubt in his voice.

‘Or?’ she asks.

He gets back in the saddle and turns to her without a word.

‘It cannot be Riven and his giant,’ she says, but she knows it can.

‘They must know we crossed the hills,’ he says at length. ‘They must suppose we are trying to get back to Marton Hall.’

‘Perhaps we should avoid the road?’ Katherine suggests half-heartedly. She looks up at the hills ranged around in a ring, grey with snow, wreathed in cloud. She is not well enough for any more nights in the open; they both know it.

‘No,’ Thomas says. ‘The innkeeper says there is an inn the drovers use. We must make for that tonight.’

They continue on, following the tracks of the riding party until evening starts to fall, and then, after another league, they come to the inn, a yellow light in the gloom, holding out all sorts of promises. It is a thatched hall built on the squint and set back off the road among fields thick with bleating sheep. Even before they’ve dismounted they can smell meat cooking, and Katherine can think of nothing else, but as they approach they hear the sound of men and ale-fuelled conversation.

‘We cannot stay here,’ Thomas whispers.

Disappointment settles on her like wet clothing. No, worse than that. It actually hurts. What little strength she has ebbs away, and soon she is shivering and sweating. She is not yet well. They ride on.

‘Is it warmer as a man or woman?’ he asks.

‘Neither,’ she says.

He laughs.

Mist is boiling up from the river beside them, overflowing on to the flood plain, dank and penetrative, and they are pleased when the road turns away and heads up a gentle hill. Over its crest they find what they are looking for: a single cottage with smoke seeping through the eaves. A man appears from the gloom carrying a froe and a dead fish. He drops the fish when he sees Thomas, and swings the froe in both hands. He puts the tool aside when he sees Katherine, reassured by the presence of a woman.

He agrees to let them share his fire, but he has no news, not of Tudor or Riven, or any of the battle of which the Brecon innkeeper told them. He has not even heard that there are any wars, and is only able to tell them that they are still on the right road to Leominster, and that they are in for cold weather. He guts the fish on the floor without much care, throwing the entrails to seethe in the flames. Then he boils the fish in water in a blackened pot that hangs from a bar above the fire. He has no interest in whence they’ve come or whither they are going and once he’s eaten his share of the fish, he falls asleep where he sits by his fire, keeling over on to the hard-packed ground and snoring glutinously through the night.

Thomas spreads his blanket awkwardly over them both, and offers her the ledger on which to rest her head, but she refuses, and in the morning, when they rise the carpenter is outside among low mounds of chipped wood, splitting a log with his froe. Overhead the sky is like milk and the cold fiercer than ever and the carpenter’s body is steaming. Within a moment Katherine is shivering in her cloak and her face is burning in the wind. The horses stumble on the iron-hard mud as they cross a low plateau and descend to find another hamlet, also deserted.

‘They must have heard Tudor is coming,’ Thomas says.

The same is true of the next village. And the next.

‘We shall starve if we don’t eat soon,’ Thomas tells her.

‘Is it just us?’ she asks. ‘Or does everybody travel so uncertainly?’

‘Perhaps we ought to return to the man with the fish? We can buy some from him.’

She turns in her saddle just as they crest the next low rise.

‘Thomas!’

He turns and stands in his stirrups and peers back over her head. The road behind them, not three leagues distant, is now a line of horsemen.

‘Dear God!’ he says. ‘They have moved up fast. It can only be the vanguard.’

They kick their horses and crest the hill, but the animals are too tired and cold and hungry and they can manage no more than a trot.

‘We must not stop until we reach Leominster,’ Thomas says. ‘The town will shut their gates on Tudor, and the army will pass them by. That’s what the innkeeper said.’

‘Then let us pray for that,’ Katherine says. ‘But how far is it?’

‘He said no more than two days. We have already ridden one, so . . .’

‘Can we outrun them?’

‘I don’t know.’

They ride on through the morning, the road passing through water meadows skimmed with grey ice, and stands of naked trees. Katherine’s muscles ache from unfamiliar exertions of the saddle and she is feverish, half frozen, half broiled. But they must not stop. They ride a league, then another, and all the while Tudor’s army seems to gain on them, his scurriers stretching forward along the road towards them, then sliding back, only to come up again.

A mile later she looks around and a riding party is setting out more purposefully along the road towards them. They have been seen, she thinks, two lone dots on the horizon, and someone has given the order that they be hunted down. Ten men she guesses, pale in their livery coats, long spears in their stirrups. There is something about them that draws her up short. A big man, riding what looks like a carthorse.

‘Thomas!’ she shouts again.

Thomas flinches at her shout and turns to squint into the distance where she is pointing.

‘It can’t be,’ he says. ‘It’s just another big man.’

‘We must get off the road now,’ she says. ‘There is a turning. Look.’

Half a league ahead is a clutch of cottages at a crossroads, smokeless and deserted like everywhere else in this county. If they can reach them they may be able to leave this road and cut away up into the hills and let the army pass. She hopes that she is wrong about Riven and the giant being among them.

They use their heels hard and though they are done in, the horses are tough, and manage an extra turn of speed. They reach the crossroads between the cottages and strike off to the left, northwards. The path is barely that, but it serves, and takes them through an orchard of crouched apple trees and past a watermill where the wheel creaks and thumps, creaks and thumps above the flare of water in the rill below.

Katherine is numb with cold now, sick with hunger and fatigue, her pony near halt, near dead perhaps. She feels likely to fall from the saddle again, but still they don’t stop. Their path runs along the river’s bank and then through its water meadows. Hills rise up either side. Ahead is a wood.

‘What should we do if they come this way?’ she calls.

‘I’m trying to think what Walter would do,’ Thomas says.

She supposes he will stop and volunteer to hold the road while she rides on. It is the sort of thing he might suggest, just as he had on the other side of the hills in Wales, and suddenly the thought terrifies her. Without Thomas, there is nothing.

She ducks as the path takes them through a small wood of low-hanging trees where dark pools reflect the sky above; then the road dog-legs around a couple of willow trees where Thomas groans and she follows his pointing arm.

This time there is no mistaking them.

The giant, on a huge horse, is following a path down through the tangled woods in the hills above. They must have seen them turn and have ridden to cut them off. More riders follow him, about ten in a file, long spears held upright.

‘Dear God,’ she breathes. ‘How did they know?’

‘We might still outrun them,’ Thomas says. ‘Or find somewhere better to fight.’ He looks around. There seems nowhere better than here. He sighs. ‘No. Let us have done with it here. I am tired of running.’

She nods. Together they draw their swords, his longer than her short little blade. She throws her cloak over her shoulder and wipes her nose with the back of her hand. Her short hair is loose, the coif hanging like a hood; her ear aches in the cold. Together they watch the riders emerge on to clearing: a man with a bandaged eye and the giant.

‘Look,’ Thomas says. ‘It is the son. Not the father. Perhaps you will unhorse him again?’

The giant sees them under their tree and gestures. Next to him Edmund Riven laughs. Then the giant kicks his horse and begins plodding through the reeds towards them. She hears Edmund Riven draw his sword.

The giant meanwhile is holding something up for them to see. He is laughing.

It is the pollaxe.

Katherine closes her eyes. So Walter is dead. It feels like physical pain, like a punch to the kidneys, a fall from a tree.