Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (57 page)

Sir John raises his eyebrows but the captain is charmed.

‘Well, you’ll have your work cut out, mistress,’ he says. ‘Look.’

They have crested the hill and in the valley, following the old road north through the distant trees, is the long line of men and wagons. It stretches from one snow-filled horizon to the other.

They rein in their horses and watch for a long moment.

‘What is it?’

This is from Richard. The captain turns and stares at him, then turns away again and crosses himself.

‘It is the new King’s army,’ Katherine tells him. ‘They are riding north, so many of them as you would not believe. There are thousands. Thousands and thousands. With wagons and horses and God knows what else.’

‘Any cannons?’ Richard asks.

‘I can’t see any. Perhaps they will come towards the rear of the train?’

‘Like young Kit,’ Sir John goes on, turning in his saddle. ‘Remember him, Richard? He could see for miles and miles, couldn’t he? Saved us a scrape or two. That time we nearly attacked old Warwick’s ship in the Narrow Sea. And didn’t you say that time at Newnham . . .?’ He tails off. A wind is getting up, shaking the alder branches above them, hustling the sleet. ‘Anyway,’ he says, pulling his cloak around his chin. ‘A good lad, and much missed.’

Thomas watches Katherine as she tries to find the right expression to meet this remark. In other circumstances he might almost laugh at her discomfort, but not today, not here, sitting on his horse, watching the column of Fauconberg’s men winding through the bare crowns of the trees with the wind in his face. The captain of the picket leaves them with a salute and spurs his horse down the incline. His men follow.

‘Come on,’ Sir John says after they’ve watched them go. ‘Let’s find old Hastings then, shall we?’

They set their horses after the picket and join the column on the road. Companies are walking behind their carts, moving with all the speed the carters can manage, but the oxen are no longer fresh, and the road is bad. Progress is trudging slow. By the time they reach Doncaster, they are told that Hastings has already moved on to Pontefract.

‘In a hurry, isn’t he?’ Sir John asks himself. ‘Don’t suppose they can spare a day, feeding this lot.’

All around them men are pale-faced, pinched, hungry, anxious and cold. Winter is no time to fight a war.

‘We must catch him at Pomfret, then,’ Sir John says.

‘Can we make it by nightfall?’ Katherine asks. The sky above is uncertain, but Sir John is adamant and they set off riding alongside the column once more, leaving Doncaster behind, constantly having to step off the road where it is blocked, broken or flooded. Messengers pass them as best they can up and down the column’s length, carrying missives from the front to the back, a full day’s ride apart.

After two hours they raise Pontefract Castle. It towers over the surrounding countryside, the squared crenellated towers drawing the eye from distant miles, surrounded by outbuildings and pastures and paddocks, all crammed with tents, carts, flocks of sheep, lines of horses and oxen. The snow here has been churned to thick mud and there are so many men milling about looking for food, ale, anything to burn, that it is impossible to move within bowshot of the gatehouse. The gloom is banished and then made worse by a thousand smoking fires, and any peace made impossible by men talking, shouting, singing, hammering on armour, sharpening weapons, playing drums, flutes and tabors. Dogs bark incessantly.

They push their way through the throng, looking for badges they recognise, flags they know, asking for Hastings. Eventually they find men squatting by a fire under the sodden slough of Hastings’s flag. Thomas recognises their captain, another Thomas, a Welshman, who looks tired and hungry, and his men no better – worse in fact. They are sitting on their helmets in the mud around meagre fires of smoking green wood. At least the Welshman has a hunk of bread. He brightens when he sees Thomas.

‘Thomas! There you are! Haven’t got any food, have you? No? Any ale? No? Oof. Stupid question. Stupid time of year to be out in the field, this is. We should all be at home. Tucked up, like. And we aren’t allowed to take anything without paying for it, you know, are we? On pain of death. Drowning, it is. And then when you do manage to scrape together the money they’re asking for it, the bread’ – he holds up a piece of dark loaf as evidence – ‘the bread is bloody disgusting.’

He throws the lump in the fire where it sits for a moment until one of the archers hoicks it out with a broken arrow shaft and takes it for himself.

Sir John steps into the firelight.

‘It’s still Lent, man,’ he barks. ‘It’s good to be away from daily temptations. Good to be on your mettle. Now, where can we find Hastings?’

The captain stands. Sir John has that effect on some men.

‘You’ve just missed him, sir. He’s gone up to the river with Lord Fitzwalter—’

‘Fitzwalter?’ Sir John demands. ‘By God! I’ve not seen him since Rouen. What’s he doing here? Is he with Warwick?’

‘Yes, sir. He’s taken the bridge – after a bit of a scrap, I hear – and now he’s got all our carpenters and coopers trying to repair it.’

‘How far is this river?’ Sir John asks.

The Welshman shrugs.

‘Half a league? That way.’

He gestures northwards. Sir John wonders if they ought not to go up and find this Fitzwalter, but the Welshman is unsure.

‘No place for a lady,’ he says, nodding at Katherine, ‘nor a blind man, if you’ll pardon me. You can stop here by the fire, such as it is, until William Hastings returns? If it is him you want to see, my lady?’

Just then the first wounded men limp back from the mêlée at the bridge, and behind them there is a cart carrying those who cannot walk. Men get up and clear them a space, but they stare, stock-still when they have done so, and there is silence now. Arrow wounds mostly, Thomas sees, but also some men clutching their faces with blood on their hands. He can smell it, and he feels that familiar fear again. He does not want to be here.

‘Had to clear a few of Somerset’s men from the bridge,’ a blue-liveried vintenar tells them. ‘And they didn’t want to go.’

The wounded men are unloaded from the cart and placed in the mud by the fire. Some need to be carried in their cloaks.

‘What d’you want me to do with them?’ the Welsh captain asks the vintenar.

‘Haven’t you got a surgeon?’ he replied. ‘Heard you had.’

The Welshman scratches his new-grown beard.

‘We had a surgeon, all right,’ he says. ‘Lovely fellow he was, but we buried him outside Leicester.’

There is a pause. Both men look down at the wounded and Thomas can see them thinking that the sooner they die, the better.

But now Katherine is among them.

‘Are there many more to come?’ she asks.

‘That’s the lot. For the moment,’ the vintenar supposes. He stares at her with his mouth open and Thomas sees the effect she has on men. She bends over each of the wounded and makes a quick decision on each.

‘Fetch the priest,’ she says, and, ‘This one is already dead,’ but there are also some who she thinks will live. She turns to the Welshman. ‘Where are the barber surgeon’s tools? His bags?’

‘I don’t know,’ the Welshman admits. ‘He has a servant, though.’

‘Find him then, and get him to bring the bag.’

‘Right,’ Sir John says, rubbing his hands and turning to Thomas. ‘Let’s go and find Fitzwalter, shall we? He’s usually got a pot going.’

Thomas turns to Katherine. She has heard what Sir John has said and is now standing still among the wounded men, staring back at Thomas. Her face is ashen. They stare at one another and Thomas can feel prickles all over his skin and tears in his eyes and he wants to run to her and take hold of her and tell her that – dear God! – he loves her.

But. But Sir John is there and the Welshman and so instead he stands with his hands by his sides and he says nothing, but watches as her eyes mist and she wipes away a tear with a grubby hand. She sniffs and she says, finally, very quietly:

‘Go with God, Thomas.’

And he cannot stop the tears leaking from his own eyes and nor can he speak for the lump in his throat but he whispers:

‘You too, my lady. You too.’

And then they have to go, and he turns and buries his head in some little task to do with his leg armour before helping Sir John into his saddle and climbing into his own. He looks at her from the saddle and raises his hand; then he lets it drop and he covers the noise of a sob by jabbing his horse to take a few steps.

‘We shall see you in the morning,’ Sir John says, and, ‘Look after her, Richard.’

Thomas turns the horse and follows Sir John into the smoke and darkness. As he goes he feels he is leaving something behind, something from within him, winding it out through a wound in his chest. His legs do not feel strong enough to control the horse, and he wonders if he will fall.

By the time they reach the river’s bank, the fighting is over and the enemy dead have been looted and left in the snow. Thomas does not know their livery: a badge like a pilgrim’s shell on rough russet hessian. Warwick’s dead are laid on their backs next to one another by the roadside, as if for inspection, and down by the bridge the air is thick with the smells of chipped stone, fresh-cut wood and hot iron where the carpenters, masons and coopers are working bent-backed, steaming in the cold.

Fitzwalter’s men in their blue livery jackets are across the bridge, on the river’s far bank, burning a broken cart for warmth. The flames are beautiful in the gloom, flaring and leaping, and the column of smoke rises crow-black and silent against the late-afternoon sky.

‘What river is this, anyone?’ Sir John asks.

No one has any idea. It is about fifty paces wide, strong-flowing, fringed by snow-laden poplars and willows. The bridge across is stone-built, wide enough for a man and a cart, with low parapets supported by a succession of broad arches and at the far end a chantry chapel. Halfway across, though, the enemy have levered the stones apart and broken two of the spans.

‘But why did they not hold the crossing?’ Sir John asks again, nodding at the far bank. ‘Makes no sense, unless they’re drawing us further into a trap, but, Lord, aren’t we already in one?’

‘And if they wanted to do that, why break the bridge in the first place?’ Thomas asks.

Sir John grunts and rests a foot on the low stone wall. A breeze is picking up. It is hard to tell if it will snow again tonight or in the morning. Possibly both. The land beyond the river fades into the sombre distance and just to look at it is to feel cold.

‘He’s there,’ Sir John mutters. ‘I can feel it in my bones, you know? Him and his bastard stinking son. That goddamned giant. This time we’ll find them, Thomas. This time we’ll make them pay for what they’ve done.’

Thomas can only feel the cold and the bruise of having said goodbye to Katherine so badly. He shivers and stamps his boots. He is thinking he must find Hastings first, to tell him he is there, and to take up his responsibilities, but Sir John is adamant.

‘Hastings can wait until tomorrow. Come on. Let’s go and find young Fitzwalter, shall we? See if he’s got anything to warm us.’

Thomas Fitzwalter is one of those big men, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, with an unfashionable black beard, and in the umber light of the flames he looks like a piece of seasoned hardwood.

‘Fitzwalter!’ Sir John booms when he sees him.

Fitzwalter steps back.

‘By all the saints, Fakenham! Sir! What’re you doing here?’

The two men clasp one another and kiss. Fitzwalter is half Sir John’s age, but he was born old, with all the certainty and the knowledge of the right thing to say and when to say it, and the two of them square up as old friends.

‘And look at you,’ Fitzwalter goes on. ‘God damn it! You’re walking properly. What’s happened to the old fistula?’

‘Had it cut!’ Sir John announces, as proudly as if he’d done it himself. ‘By my surgeon. Completely cured.’

He walks one way and then the other. He holds his hand up to take that of an imaginary dance partner. In Fitzwalter’s company Sir John is a changed man, as if relieved of the weight of recent sorrows.

‘Dear God!’ Fitzwalter laughs. ‘Who is this miracle? Give me his name.’

‘I would,’ Sir John says, the mood changing for a moment, ‘but he is gone the way of all flesh.’

They call for drink and Lord Fitzwalter clears a place for Sir John by the fire under the shelter of a flap of canvas stretched from a tent behind. Thomas stands listening as the two swap meaningless gossip about their time together in France. They mention Rouen and Thomas thinks of the ledger hanging from his saddle. Would Sir John’s name be in it? Probably.

They are joined by another veteran, whom Sir John calls ‘Jenny’, and to whom he offers commiserations on the death of his father. Who is his father? Thomas has no idea. Here is just another man who’s lost a father, and who is coming north to settle a score.

Once they’ve exhausted the subjects of their mutual friends, Sir John brings up the bridge.

‘It was a stroke of fortune to find the crossing so poorly defended,’ he ventures.

‘It was,’ Fitzwalter agrees. ‘A good old-fashioned military blunder, I expect. They only left a picket, and when they saw us, half of them ran for the hills. The other half stayed on and, I have to say, inflicted more wounded on us than I’d hoped. A score of men killed, too. We couldn’t cross to get at them in any great numbers, see? The bridge being so narrow. We had to thin them out one by one with arrows. Took most of the afternoon.’

Sir John nods. While they have been talking a light dusting of snow has fallen to refresh the earlier fall, and all around the camp men are asleep by the fires, snow gathering in swags in the folds of their cloaks, in peaks on their hats.

‘And you’ve left men on the other side now?’ Sir John goes on.

‘Twenty archers and the same again of bills.’

‘Is that enough, d’you think?’

Fitzwalter shrugs.

‘To tell you the truth, I can’t send any more,’ he says, ‘or they’ll start to fight among themselves. It’s the old puzzle about the boatman trying to cross the river with a hen, you know? With a fox and a sack of grain.’