Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims

by Toby Clements

  He pushes his way through.

  In the valley below are the northerners: Somerset’s men, the Queen’s men, Henry of Lancaster’s men, thousands of men in colours Thomas does not know, and ranged along the crest of the valley around him are the King Edward’s men, and Warwick’s men, and Norfolk’s men, and they are beating down on the heads of those below, killing those they can reach, and driving those they cannot down the slope into a swift-running river that has burst its banks and laps the trunks of alders on the far side.

  It is a trap as tight as a barrel.

  There must be many thousands down there. Not one will live through the next hours unless King Edward returns to grant mercy for the commons.

  The press of Warwick’s men is impassable. They all want their moment at the front, they all want vengeance, and they push forward to get their chance to kill a man. They are wide-eyed, as at bear baiting, and Thomas knows he will never forget the sight or sound of this moment.

  He turns and pushes his way back through the throng.

  John Perers follows.

  ‘Bit bloody strong that, ain’t it?’

  If Riven is in the valley he will die, of that Thomas is sure. Someone will kill him or he will be drowned. But what if he is not?

  He leads Perers northwards. They pick their way through the corpses that clot the field. Looters are bent-backed everywhere, using hatchets to remove rings from men’s fingers, stuffing their bags with weapons, purses, the silver livery badges that men wear, jewelled collars. Cruelty is everywhere. Mercy has fled.

  Below to the left the ground gives way sharply, down to the river. It is too steep for men to climb up, and from their vantage point Thomas and Perers can look back and see the horror of the thing. While those higher up the slope are trying to escape the blades of King Edward’s men, those at the bottom are being forced chest-deep into the icy waters of the beck. They have cast off their armour where they can and are clinging to their companions. Some trust themselves to the flood and perhaps one or two make it. Most do not. Their linen-wadded jacks are blood- and water-soaked, heavier than armour, and they disappear under the waters with a final despairing wave to life.

  Thomas cannot see Riven among their number, but that does not mean he is not there.

  Still he walks on, something guides him, and farther downstream some of the northerners have managed to get across the river. Men are struggling to cross a ford, waist deep, shoulder deep, slipping on the treacherous stones under the surface. All order has broken down, and they are fighting one another to get across, turning their weapons on their friends, forcing one another down into the waters, and in the gloom it takes Thomas a moment to understand what he is looking at.

  It is not a ford, but a dam of bodies.

  So many of them have been drowned or killed and thrown into the waters that they are now piled the one on the other. They have risen above the river’s waters in a pile and now men are fighting to get across it, cutting and slashing at one other, trampling on the fallen, forcing them into the water the better to keep themselves dry.

  Even Perers is aghast.

  ‘Dear Christ,’ he breathes. ‘Dear Christ.’

  There is something about this concentration of cruelty that makes Thomas sure this is where Riven will be.

  And that is when he sees him.

  Not Riven. The giant.

  He is forcing his way on to the dam, knocking down those before him with that pollaxe and then treading on them, battering them down into the waters. Building up the bridge for himself. Thomas remembers the giant’s fear of the water. Behind him is another man. For a moment Thomas cannot be sure. In the gathering gloom it might be anyone, but then, after a moment, he is certain of it.

  Riven.

  He has removed his harness, and now wears only bloodstained linen and hose, and he is using a short-bladed sword to stab any who impede him.

  They are getting away.

  Thomas has to stop them, but between them stand a thousand desperate northerners, too tightly packed to move their arms, let alone let him pass.

  He turns to Perers.

  ‘Your bow,’ he says. ‘Let me have your bow.’

  Perers shakes his head.

  ‘Worth more than my own wife, it is,’ he says.

  ‘Give it to me, now!’

  It has come to this, this last moment. If Thomas does not do this now, he will never see Riven again.

  Thomas stares at Perers. Perers hands the bow over. He is very reluctant.

  ‘A string! Quick! A string.’

  Perers unwinds the string from his wrist.

  ‘You’ll be careful with it?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake! The arrows!’

  But Perers only has one.

  The giant is on the far bank now. He is stretching back to help Riven.

  Thomas notches the arrow. He holds the bow down. Looks at Riven. Looks at the giant. He draws the bow, feeling that top-heaviness. It is an ugly bow, he thinks, unloved, rough. Perhaps that is perfect for this last thing he has to do? He raises it, holds the string to his cheek, his arms fluttering with the effort, and just as Riven scrambles past the giant up the far bank, he looses.

  He misses.

  But the giant pauses. He takes two staggering steps to his right, arches his back and drops the pollaxe.

  ‘God in heaven!’ Perers murmurs. ‘That was some shot.’

  The giant tries to scrabble at something caught between his shoulder blades. He can’t reach it. He falls to his knees, then on to all fours. Riven turns back – perhaps the giant has shouted something?

  ‘Get an arrow!’ Thomas yells at Perers.

  His eyes are fixed on Riven, who hesitates by the fallen giant, and for a moment Thomas thinks he might help him. But then Riven snatches up the pollaxe, turns and runs. The giant collapses in the snow.

  ‘Find an arrow!’ Thomas screams. He looks about too, but keeps one eye on Riven who is moving northwards along the far bank, scrabbling through the bare-branched undergrowth, slipping in the snow, leaving a trail of bloody footprints.

  He is getting away. He is escaping.

  Thomas casts aside his helmet and runs along the valley top, shadowing Riven. The ground is too steep to descend.

  Perers follows.

  ‘My bow,’ he says.

  Thomas ignores him. There is a great pile of corpses blocking his way, and there are caltrops scattered on the ground. He scrambles over them, still watching the shrinking figure of Riven, still looking for another arrow. He finds one, but the head is bent and curled back on itself. It will never fly true. He throws it aside. Runs on.

  It is dusk now.

  He will soon lose Riven in the dark.

  He begins a prayer. ‘Pater Noster, qui es in caelis . . .’ Then he gives it up. Prayers are for later.

  On the far bank Riven’s run is clumsy with fatigue as he stumbles through the trees, scrambles along the banks and wades through the river’s broken water where the valley walls press too steeply.

  At last Thomas finds an arrow, sticking out of the ground in a rare patch of sodden earth. He pulls it out and runs to a spot between two low trees on the lip of the plateau.

  Riven will pass below on the opposite bank any moment.

  He notches the arrow and takes his stance.

  The wind here is fitful, uncertain, blustering around the valley, gusting up the rise. He will have to be careful. He has but one shot, and then it will all be over.

  For a moment he thinks he has lost Riven, but then he comes, a dark shape against the snow, moving like a spider. He climbs over a fallen bough among the trees on the edge of the copse. He seems exhausted, as if he will fall at any moment.

  Thomas draws the string with the last ounces of his strength, getting his back into the bow, and he holds the stance for a long moment, and he waits, waits for the perfect moment, concentrating on nothing but Riven, who moves into line.

  And then the bow explodes.

  The arr
ow flits into the gloom and a chunk of the bow’s belly lashes against Thomas’s temple.

  Darkness swallows him whole.

  39

  THEY MOVED UP to the village of Lead in the morning and took over the little church surrounded by fishponds, and they have had nothing to eat or drink all day, and so when two of Hastings’s men bring in Sir John at dusk, Katherine is exhausted and so hungry that she does not at first recognise him.

  His face and beard are crusted in blood. He cannot talk, and no one can tell what is wrong with him. Hastings’s men have removed his harness to lighten their load, they say, and they’d found it dented, but there seems to be no wound.

  ‘Face down he was,’ one of them goes on. ‘Almost drowning in the soup.’

  She recognises him when she peels off his linen cap. He does not appear wounded, yet he lies there with waxy skin and anyone looking at him would have given him up for dead.

  ‘Let us find him somewhere more comfortable to lie,’ she says.

  One of the friars looks up from the other side of the chapel.

  ‘A space here,’ he calls, and he stoops to close the eyes of a dead boy. Mayhew summons the other friars to take the body away, and they carry Sir John across the blood-smutted straw. In the light of a rush they stare while Mayhew runs his fingers over the body. What is wrong with him? She cannot say. There is no obvious wound, yet his breath is quick and shallow, and when they remove his arming jacket they find his chest is sunk.

  ‘I have seen something like this once before,’ Mayhew says, though he does not look happy with the thought. He rinses water through Sir John’s white hair, washing the blood away, and then runs his fingers over the skull.

  ‘Here,’ he says. ‘Feel.’

  He stands beside her and guides her fingers. She can feel nothing at first; then there is a slight depression. She wonders if she can feel the slightest sensation of grating bone when she applies pressure.

  ‘A blow,’ Mayhew says. ‘He came in without his helmet, but he must have been wearing it when he was hit.’

  ‘It saved his life,’ she says.

  Mayhew looks doubtful.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he says.

  ‘So what can we do?’

  ‘There will be a sanguineous swelling within the orb of the skull, I have no doubt,’ he says. ‘It is usually – always – fatal. It is something to do with the brain. It cannot work with the swelling.’

  She cannot bear it.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Not Sir John.’ Then she thinks, and asks: ‘How do you treat sanguineous swellings elsewhere on the body?’

  ‘A leech, sometimes,’ Mayhew says. ‘Or we cut it open and dispose of the blood.’

  ‘Why?’ she asks.

  ‘Why? Because. Because we do.’

  ‘If we cut open the swelling now?’

  ‘It is – behind the skull,’ Mayhew says. ‘We cannot get to it to cut it.’

  ‘The bones are broken, I am sure of it.’

  Mayhew frowns. He looks down at Sir John.

  ‘You would have to cut open the scalp,’ he says, ‘which is easy enough, of course, but then you would have to crack the skull if it is not cracked already.’

  ‘I think it is.’

  ‘But the swelling might not be where the break is. It might be on the other side of the brain and – no. You do not want to touch a man’s brains.’

  ‘It is worth a try, surely?’

  Sir John looks closer to death than life.

  ‘It cannot hurt,’ Mayhew says. ‘But let us call a priest first.’

  While Mayhew fetches more wine Katherine finds Richard. He is sitting on a step talking to a wounded captain and tearing linen into strips. She touches his shoulder.

  ‘Richard,’ she says. ‘Your father is here. He will die unless we cut him. But it is not easy and of course the cutting may kill him.’

  Richard stands up.

  ‘Take me to him,’ he says.

  Katherine does so and leaves the two together while another man is brought in with a wound in his chest that makes a noise and within a few minutes he is dead. She glances over at Richard and Sir John when she is holding the dying man’s hand and Richard is gently feeling his father’s face, cupping his bearded chin, letting his fingertips play over the nose and eyes and forehead.

  ‘Will you do it, my lady?’ he asks when the priest is called and she is standing next to him. He is offering her a courtesy, since she knows Sir John.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says. Mayhew nods and takes a step back.

  Richard holds Sir John’s hand and the old man mews in his sleep. She has a blade, taken from the barber surgeon’s bag, which is sharper than anything she has ever seen. She holds it up to the candle that the murmuring friar is holding.

  ‘Should I shave his head?’ she asks. ‘It will help with the stitching afterwards.’

  Mayhew raises his eyebrows.

  ‘Good idea,’ he says. She turns the knife and slices through the white locks. Underneath there is a silver furze, nicked here and there by tiny scars. She had imagined that people have round heads, but of course they don’t. Sir John’s is long and fluted with angles, slightly asymmetric, with a ridge here and a point there. She clears away the sodden hair and wipes the bristle with some linen soaked in wine. Now that the hair has gone it is easy to see the indentation and there is even a greenish tinge to the skin. Again she presses her fingers to the skin and she can feel the grating of the bones.

  ‘There is nothing for it,’ Mayhew says.

  She nods and cuts, holding her nerve even while blood pours from the wound.

  ‘Scalps always bleed mightily,’ Mayhew says.

  The skin wrinkles around the cut, pulling back. There is a thin veil of pale pink flesh that she needs to slice through. Then there is the bone, the colour of old teeth.

  ‘Linen,’ she says, and she retracts the blade. Mayhew wipes the wound with wine and for a moment they see thin cracks in the depression, such as on an egg. He nods. With the tip of the knife she touches one of the pieces of bone. Sir John gurgles and moves his tongue.

  ‘Hold him,’ Mayhew calls and he grabs Sir John’s head to keep it still. Katherine touches the bone again, this time letting the tip of the knife slip to the edge of the fragment. She probes further. Her hands are steady though her heart is fluttering. Then she attempts to lift the fragment away, to prise it from the skull. It comes, but with it comes a splurge of blood, thick and dark, that wells from the wound and pours down into Sir John’s ears.

  ‘Good,’ Mayhew says. ‘That might be the sanguineous swelling.’

  Sir John makes another noise, deep in his throat, more like a dog than a man, and she fears the worst, but Mayhew has placed the clay pot of wine on the old man’s chest, and concentric rings appear in its surface to let them know he lives and breathes. After that there seems nothing else to do but stitch Sir John’s scalp back together. She uses her own hair and makes the smallest stitches she can, taking her time while Mayhew sees to the rest of the wounded as they come limping in. When she has finished she wipes Sir John’s wound with more wine and egg whites and then his face with the last of the rose water.

  His eyes flutter and he opens them and for a moment he is terrified.

  ‘All is well, Sir John,’ she says. ‘All is well, only don’t move.’

  She takes his hand and they are like that for a moment, still and silent, and then his eyes focus on her and he smiles.

  ‘Kit,’ he whispers through dry lips. ‘Kit. Praised be, you are here.’

  She feels a jolt, and the blood runs to her face. She cannot help herself glancing at Richard, who is sitting there, his face expressionless. Has he heard? She supposes not.

  She bends over the old man.

  ‘I am Margaret, Sir John,’ she whispers. ‘Margaret Cornford. Do you not remember?’

  Sir John opens his mouth in close little gasps.

  ‘I know what I know,’ he whispers. ‘By my truth, I know what I know.
And where is Thomas? Where is he? You should be with him.’

  ‘Hush now, Sir John, hush now and all will be well.’

  He shuts his eyes and drifts away again.

  She stands abruptly and walks away.

  Her plan! Dear God, in all this she has forgotten her resolve, and now there is no time for it, but Sir John’s words have stirred her again, thickened the brew, decided her. She looks down at her bloody dress and knows she cannot be Margaret Cornford. She cannot be like this. All at once it has become a stupid pretence, as crude as it is dishonest.

  But has she left it too late?

  And what of Thomas?

  She has seen so many dead men this day, how can she believe there are any still living? Yet, somehow, she is certain that he is.

  With the dusk the steady stream of wounded that has lasted all day begins to dwindle, but later a man comes in on his own, limping badly. Though he has lost his bow, she can tell he is an archer, and he wears the blue and white livery of Fauconberg.

  ‘Trod on a caltrop,’ he tells her, ‘just as I was coming off the field. Went through all that, fighting all day, and I slip at the last moment. It hurts, oh Christ it hurts.’

  He holds up the sole of his boot for inspection. It is filthy with the manure of every animal she can name, dyed up to the ankle in human blood.

  ‘There is nothing I can do for you,’ she tells him.

  ‘I can pay,’ he says.

  ‘It is not that—’ she begins but he has a leather bag slung behind him and when he tugs it around and opens it up, she feels a flutter in her chest as sharp as a stab.

  ‘Look,’ he says, pulling out the pardoner’s ledger. ‘Got a hole in it and that, but still. Must be worth a penny or two.’

  Her ears are roaring and her hands come up to snatch it from him, but she collects herself. He holds it upside down and back to front so that she can see that the hole does not go all the way through.

  ‘Reckon it must have saved his life,’ the archer says, exploring the hole with his finger.

  Katherine can say nothing for a moment.

  ‘Come on,’ the archer says. ‘You can have it if you fix me up. Stop it hurting. Make sure it doesn’t go bad.’