Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (61 page)

After he has said his prayers, he lies awake, crouched with cold, listening to the soft sound of the men around him: the occasional snore, the whispers, the prayers, the little movements in the dark. This is when they are at their most honest, he supposes, when they are skinless, and when you learn what sorts of men they are, and they learn what sort of man you are.

He must have fallen asleep for he wakes shuddering before first light, his hair stiff with ice. Outside the horizon is growing pale, the first birds are starting to sing, and the land is beginning to emerge indistinctly from the milk-grey morning light. Still there is nothing to eat, and one of the sentries tells him that Fauconberg is supposed to be in a little village called Lead, away to the west. His lances and mounted archers caught the Flower of Craven in the dark, in a little valley farther north, a dint in the dale, the messenger says, and killed every last one of them.

‘They weren’t looking for that,’ the messenger laughs. He’d been there, he says, and taken part in the ambush, and shows Thomas a little gold ring; its design is that dragon with the curled tail. His face is grey with fatigue, and there is a ring of blood around his nostril where he’s picked his nose with a bloody finger.

‘Give it to you for a loaf of bread?’ he asks.

‘You’ll be lucky.’

‘What about a coat?’

Thomas laughs. The bells of the church ring and they both instinctively look up. Behind the church’s tower pale snow clouds move south.

‘Palm Sunday,’ the messenger mutters, tucking the ring away. ‘Easter next week. Probably never live to see it.’

‘Now don’t talk like that,’ the Welshman says, appearing at Thomas’s side. ‘Bad for morale, that is.’

‘You seen how many men old Henry of Lancaster’s got?’ the messenger says. ‘No? Well, I have. Went up to the ridge last night. Must be thousands and thousands of ’em. Northern bastards. And I’ll tell you what: they’ve got all the quality. All the lords, the nobles, all the men who can fight. Not like us. Who’ve we got?’

‘The King. We’ve got him.’

The messenger looks at the Welshman for a long moment.

‘Do we?’ he asks. ‘Do we really?’

‘And God.’

Now the messenger spits.

‘We’ve got Warwick,’ Thomas says.

‘Warwick,’ the archer allows. ‘Though I hear he’s wounded.’

They hear the slow squeal of cartwheels on the road to the south and everyone gets to their feet and they move to meet the carts.

Arrows. Eight wagonloads of them.

‘No bloody food? No bloody ale? How’re we supposed to fight like this? Can’t draw a bloody bowstring with no food in your belly.’

‘Kill the oxen,’ someone recommends. ‘Cook them on their own carts.’

The first carter tries to protest, but his whip is quickly wrestled from his hands and the other seven are glad to leave him to it, and while they unload their carts on the road, one of the men swings his axe and kills the animal and the noise reminds Thomas of the Dean’s murder. Before they can butcher the ox or break up the carts to set them alight, there are more trumpets, the sound curiously thin in the cold grey air, as if it might break at any moment.

It is one of Fauconberg’s captains and a group of his household men, about twenty of them. There is no sign of Sir John. Thomas wonders where he can have got to. He hopes he is warm, in any event. They pull up in front of the dead ox, their horses shying from the brassy smell of the blood, and begin shouting orders.

Every eye is on the ox, its fat tongue lolling, but the men are driven away, shuffling, stiff and grey-faced and it only gets worse as they leave the shelter of the village and begin the slog up through the furlongs where the wind scours the land in urgent flurries. Every man walks with one eye on the flags that are stiff in the breeze, like pointers, stretched southwards, telling each one to return whence they’d come.

Thomas picks his way among the men William Hastings has assigned to his command, checking each has his bow, at least one spare string and a bag of shafts apiece. Most wear tight-fitting helmets, pitted with rust now, and each man has some other weapon hanging from his belt: a maul, a dagger, something like that. They smell damp and fungal.

They stop again, huddled in the road. The snow starts, tiny balls of it, like hail.

‘Will there be many?’ one of his men asks. He is younger than Thomas, with a bow of yellow yew. He reminds Thomas of the boy Hugh, who ran away before Canterbury. He has not thought about him since.

‘A few,’ Thomas says. ‘Enough, anyway.’

He tries to see himself through their eyes, as someone who’s been in battle, who fought at Sandwich, and at Northampton, the man who’d killed the Earl of Shrewsbury, then fought through the rout at Mortimer’s Cross. They look at him as if he knows what he is about, as if he is supposed to lead them, when all he’s done so far is ignore them and leave them to their own devices while he wallows in his own misery.

‘What’s your name?’ he asks.

‘John,’ the boy answers. ‘John Perers, of Kent.’

Thomas nods. Another John.

‘Well, John,’ he says. ‘You got good eyes?’

‘All right. I can pick out a target all right.’

‘No, I’m looking for a flag. Six ravens, like this.’

He marks out Riven’s badge in the thin snow on the mud by his feet.

‘Black on white.’

Perers nods.

‘On our side?’

‘Theirs.’

A knot of men on horseback is gathered on the hillside directing the companies to their positions. The wind whips the horses’ manes and tails. It plucks at the hems of their clothing, dashes the snow in their faces.

‘You lot, over there,’ one shouts. He gestures and they step off the road, following other companies across furlongs where the earth has been left in frozen furrows by the passing of autumn ploughs. Below them, down the slope, filtering in vast numbers through the village, come the men-at-arms, the billmen, the naked men. They make up the mass of the army, roughly organised in companies, gathering in the fields around the village, each one following three or four horsemen under their lord’s flag.

There must be ten thousand, fifteen thousand. It is impossible to guess. They are uncountable. Boys are leading strings of horses away, back to the rear, and all around them men are manoeuvring up the slope into position.

They stop when they reach a company already in place.

They are in the middle of the field. They turn and face up the slope to where a solitary tree crowns the ridge. Thomas spreads his men out, the usual harrow formation, as more companies filter into the line around them, and they stand seven men deep across a broad front.

‘I can smell them,’ one of the men says. He is a bitter, bitten old man with grey whiskers. He fiddles with his strings, licking his lips, his gnarled hands shaking.

No one says anything.

‘I can smell them,’ he goes on. ‘I can smell men who’ve slept under roofs by fires. Men who’ve had their bellyful of meat and ale.’

Still no one says anything.

‘I can smell men with the wind at their backs,’ he adds.

‘Oh shut up,’ the Welshman snaps. ‘For the love of the virgin Mary, for the sake of her seven bloody sorrows, will you just shut your bloody mouth.’

There is silence for a long moment. The wind hums and buzzes and the snow softens and starts to fall as fat flakes. The tree on the ridge top is lost to view. Behind them in the village there is a commotion of drums and trumpets. A party of horsemen come slowly through the throng and up the road, heralds clearing their way, three or four of the long-tailed banners above their heads.

‘Must be King Edward,’ the Welshman mutters.

Behind the King’s party come the Earl of Warwick and his men in red, and then Fauconberg, with his own retinue in blue and white. Thomas wonders again where Sir John might be and whether Katherine is safe.

‘Heard old Warwick was wounded?’ the Welshman asks. He is sauntering around the ranks of his archers, checking his men are sorted, his nerves seemingly made of ice.

‘In the thigh,’ Thomas confirms. ‘An arrow. It must have been a glancing thing, though I saw it, and it seemed well stuck.’

‘Probably got the world’s finest physician, hasn’t he, the Earl of Warwick? An Italian gent, I bet, who’s cured the Pope of dropsy.’

‘Does the Pope have dropsy?’ another man interrupts.

‘Not any more,’ the Welshman says, barks a laugh, and goes on his way.

Thomas wishes he could be like that.

There is more shouting from the vintenars and the officers, tough men on good horses, and the men-at-arms begin spreading across the fields to find their places behind the rows of archers.

‘Where’re you from?’ a captain of the men behind them shouts. He touches his visor with the plated knuckles of his hand. He is a boy, sixteen perhaps, gangling in his antique plate. He carries a slim and useless-looking sword, but his men are armed with halberds, glaives and hammers and they wear the same red and white livery.

‘All sorts,’ Thomas replied. ‘Yourselves?’

‘Huntingdon.’

Thomas has never heard of it.

‘North of London,’ the boy says. ‘We could have come up with the Duke of Norfolk, but we came this way instead. Thank God we did. Wouldn’t have wanted to miss this.’

The boy gives him a smile that is closer to a grimace, and then peers back over his shoulder as if he is expecting someone.

‘Still, he should be here soon,’ he goes on, gabbling with nerves now, his touch flitting from his cheek to his neck to the pommel of his sword and back again. Even in the cold he is sweating. He offers Thomas a drink from his flask.

Thomas takes it gratefully. Wine.

‘Yes, he should be here soon,’ the boy repeats. ‘My father is with him. With the Duke of Norfolk. Coming up from the east. With five thousand men. If not more.’

Thomas hands him back his flask. So they are five thousand men fewer than was thought.

‘Well, God go with you, sir,’ he says, ‘and thanks for my drink.’

‘You too. Perhaps we’ll share another after the battle?’

‘I’d like that.’

They stop and listen to something. It is a low roar, coming and going like the suck of waves on the beach below Sangatte.

‘What’s that?’ the boy asks.

‘I think it must be them,’ Thomas says.

The boy swallows and nods.

Trumpets blow along the lines.

Thomas returns to the front. He looks at his own hands. They are shaking again and he clenches them around his bow. Christ, how he yearns for more wine. Or ale. They all do. Thomas catches the Welshman’s glance. The Welshman nods. Here we go, he thinks. Fauconberg’s officers are riding up and down the line, shouting instructions to the sergeants and the vintenars. Above them their flags flap briskly. One of them stops before Thomas’s company. It is Grylle, in his distinctive helmet, his armour still too big. Grylle pretends not to recognise Thomas.

‘The top of the hill flattens out,’ he shouts, gesturing behind him. ‘Then there is plateau, a stretch of flat land rising slightly. Lancaster’s men are there, at the far end.’

Thomas cannot imagine missing them, even in this snow.

‘They will be two bowshots away,’ Grylle goes on, ‘and they will be above us, on the rise.’

No one says a word but Grylle knows. They all know.

‘We cannot choose everything,’ he says. ‘We must fight the enemy where we find them.’

One of the archers behind Thomas spits noisily.

‘Are there many?’ someone shouts.

Grylle is silent for a telling moment and the sound of shouting comes again, washing over them from the north. If he had not been wearing a gorget Thomas imagines he would have seen Grylle swallow.

‘God is with us!’ Grylle reminds them. ‘God is with us, not those usurping northern bastards.’

He nods, and then rides on to deliver his message down the line. Thomas lets his eye run along the ranks. The front stretches four hundred, five hundred paces away from the road, the same again the other side. There must be thousands of archers alone, and twice that number of men-at-arms. And yet the enemy has more? It does not seem possible.

The snow lightens and a priest on a horse appears ahead, away near the road in the centre of the army. He is backed by three or four heralds and a handful of men in plate. Is it Coppini? Has the Legate ridden all this way with them? He is too far away for Thomas to be certain.

The Bishop – if it is him – dismounts, holding his headgear in place, and hands his horse to a squire. The heralds’ banners, unreadable at this distance, flap heavily in the wind, and the Bishop holds up his hands and begins saying something.

‘Speak up, for the love of St Ives,’ someone shouts, and, ‘What’s he saying?’

‘A prayer,’ Thomas tells them.

‘A prayer? What sort of prayer?’

‘One that’ll help us win.’

‘What? He’s praying for the wind to back around and those northern bastards to come off their bloody hill?’

‘Something like that.’

The men laugh. Thomas warms to them: to joke about their own deaths. Now the priest has his arms out and those around him kneel. The movement ripples along the army, spreading from the centre and the front ranks, all the way to the flanks and the rear. Men get off their horses and go down with one knee in the snow. Still they can hear little or nothing, but they bend their heads and each man makes his own prayers.

Thomas prays again that he will not be killed, that he will not be wounded, that he will not be left to lie out there and bleed to death, stiffening in the cold, but that if he is, if it is God’s will he should die, then that it will not be painful. He prays that he will find Riven and that when he does, that he will be able to punish Riven for all the evil he has let loose in the world. He prays that Katherine will make her way safely in life, and that Sir John will survive to return to Marton Hall. He prays for Richard. He prays that he will come into whatever is best for him.

In a moment of stillness he hears the priest’s voice.

‘And so we beseech your help, Lord, in ridding this your land of these vile traitors who would destroy our dread liege Edward and those whom he loves. We—’