Nicholas himself might not have killed; but Wodman was not sentimental. They had to escape. And if they could do it still incognito, all the better.
The man slumped, and Nicholas seized his quiver and unclenched his hand from his longbow while Andro reclaimed his knife. Looking up through the fringe of rain from his hat, Nicholas tried, against the vibration and roar of the water, to listen for trampling feet on the bank, or any cries of pursuit from behind. High above him, there was a double flash, and the roof of the sky suddenly cracked in several places, producing a series of deafening reports. He was clinging to the slope of the bank, Andro behind him, when the river surged suddenly up to his waist and the archer’s body had gone, leaving him to scramble up the bank as the water clawed at the sodden hide of his tunic.
He and Andro arrived at the edge of the ravine together, rashly confident of a welcome from whoever was there. With any luck, it would be the party which had killed the four guards, on the way to rescuing them both. Even if it wasn’t, and some soldiers from Heaton appeared, they had no reason to harm two of Hector’s men, fleeing unknown attackers. And if, best of all, the rescue party was there, and they all got away before the Heaton men came, the Heaton men would assume that their two builders had died with the guards, and all four had been snatched by the river.
It was with reasonable confidence, therefore, that Nicholas clawed his way in the drumming rain to the edge of the bank of the Till and looked about him at a landscape that at first appeared to be empty.
Behind, from the direction of Heaton, nothing moved but the river.
In front, it seemed at first to be the same. Then, far ahead, there was a glint between trees, followed by a deadly whicker close to his face. Nicholas heard the arrow arrive, and the thud of its impact. At first, he did not know where he had been hit. Then he realised, from the gasp beside him, that it was Andro who had been struck, and who was lurching forward beside him in a welter of blood.
He thought at first that Wodman was dying. Catching him; rolling with him back over the edge of the bank, Nicholas determined that the wound was bad, but could wait for attention. It would have to. He took his bow and lifted himself along the lip of the bank, until he could see what was happening.
Four English guards had been killed. No one but Scots would do that. If they were now trying to kill fellow Scots, it was simply because they weren’t Adorne’s men, and didn’t know who Andro was.
It was an interesting dilemma. If he stood up, they’d kill him before he had a chance to explain. If he did nothing, the Heaton men would arrive, bent on revenge for the four men they had lost. The Scots would die, and he and Andro would lose their chance of escape.
Andro, who still had his wits, was slowly binding a kerchief round his thigh, where the arrow had struck. The cloth became instantly red. Nicholas said, ‘Could you swim?’
Wodman didn’t even look up. Beneath the broken nose was a sketch of a grin. ‘Not in that river,’ he said.
‘Nor any other,’ someone observed. An elegant man, it proved to be, standing just within earshot on the same side of the ravine, with a bow in his hand. He wore no armour, but a plated helm on his head, the glint of which had caught the light when he shot and injured Wodman. Even though the thick, fair hair was concealed, there was no mistaking the carriage, or the man.
Simon de St Pol.
Four of them, the archer had said. Of whom the archer himself and his friend had killed two.
Nicholas closed his eyes, and then opened them slowly. Wodman said, ‘He is there, Nicol. Henry is there.’
And so he was, stepping out to stand beside Simon, young and lissom and stern. You could see him draw breath; and it was as if he had made himself speak. ‘We can’t let you escape. You’re a traitor.’
Simon turned his head to look, with resignation, at the speaker. ‘You are proposing to talk to him, Henry?’
Nicholas said, ‘We are your prisoners. We are not traitors, but that can be proved later. Take us with you. Bind our hands. We can’t harm you.’
Simon laughed. ‘You have a bow in your hands.’
‘No,’ said Nicholas; and, lifting it, turned to the river. Then he stopped, looking at Andro.
Andro said, ‘Throw it.’ Above the flattened nose and drawn skin, his eyes were open and clear. So Nicholas did.
There were boulders leaping and wheeling now in the torrent, and parts of whole trees. The bow vanished at once. The roar was as loud as the sound of their voices. Nicholas raised his, calling to Simon, but kept it even and calm.
‘Let us walk towards you. There isn’t much time. The Castle Heaton soldiers are coming.’
‘Really?’ said Simon. He sounded entertained. ‘You must be terrified. If you are spying for Scotland, they’ll kill you. Or will they? We saw you chatting. We saw you pretending to work. I don’t think anyone from the castle is coming. Four men have been killed: who will notice, downriver like this, in this weather? Who will trouble when two more disappear? I think we can take all the time in the world.’
Nicholas said, ‘No. They are coming.’ His eyes were holding Henry’s.
Simon said, in the same mirthful voice, ‘Then there isn’t time to come and tie you up, is there? You must, alas, be dealt with forthwith. Don’t you wish, Claes, Claikine, young bastard, that you had stayed in your dyeyard? You would be safe now, if you had.’
Nicholas, motionless, answered; speaking to Henry with his eyes and his voice. He said, ‘I am where I have chosen to be. I only wish we had longer.’
After a moment, he said, ‘You are right. There isn’t time; kill me. But let Andro go; your father would want it. And save yourselves.’
‘We have your permission?’ said Simon. ‘How kind.’ The bow in his hands was ready strung. He lifted and pointed it, fussily. ‘And really, I don’t think we wish to preserve witnesses. You have both died. We need not tell everyone how.’
Nicholas heard him, but let the words pass. He made himself look at Simon: at the comely, petulant face, no longer young, bearing even now, in his instant of triumph, the blight of dissatisfaction, the shallow vehemence founded on bitterness. He wished he could convey, in these closing moments, something of what he himself felt. My father, my father …
If you had taken me in, I would have come: I would have stayed bound to the furrow, and you might have found something in me that you were not ashamed of. We could have lived side by side … neither for favour or reward, hate or love, but for the truth. We could have found happiness.
But if that had transpired, what of Henry? If there had been no apprentice, Henry would not have been born.
He was thinking of his two sons, and did not watch as Simon’s hand drew back, and steadied. So dissimilar, Henry and Jordan, and yet, in a shadowy way, there was something innate that they shared. He had imagined once or twice recently that a tolerance, even a friendship, was forming between them. If that happened, it might make this worth while.
Then he thought of Jodi, and the others he loved.
He had closed his eyes. He didn’t hear, above the roar of the river, the Heaton bowmen streaming down from the bridge. He didn’t see them slacken, drawing their bows, as they saw what was happening. He didn’t see the arrows spurt, or the one that struck home. He only heard Henry’s cry, and, opening his eyes, perceived the white face of his son, printed with amazement, at first looking at nothing. Then the blue gaze turned, passing over Nicholas de Fleury and coming to rest, bewildered and sick, upon Simon, as a child’s eyes would dwell on its father. For a moment, nothing moved. Then Henry, shuddering, descended first to his knees and then, quicker and quicker, tumbled down the ravine and into the river.
Nicholas saw it, and leaped. The arm that held him back was inhuman: hard across his stomach; so unyielding that its force made him retch. And a voice—Wodman’s—said, ‘No. Simon must do it.’
Even Wodman’s arm couldn’t hold him for ever. Nicholas tore free, and jumped. But during that second’s delay Simon de S
t Pol, with furious courage, had plunged to follow his boy down the slope at his feet, leaping and sliding until he, too, was seized by the torrent and spewed into the landslide of water that was the murderous flood of the Till.
Neither of them had the skills Nicholas had. No one had taught Henry to dart and swerve between rocks like a salmon; to duck and dive below floating obstacles; to ride the spume of a weir. No one had taught Simon either.
It would never enter Simon’s head that what he was doing was useless. His son had made a blunder. He, Simon, would correct it. Had he been able to look, far behind, at the place where Nicholas plunged in to follow them, he would have been filled with cruel amusement. Wodman had been right, in his wisdom. The success … or the failure … had to be Simon’s. To Simon, anything else would be intolerable. Anything else, good or bad, would leave Nicholas facing a murderous and illogical venom worse than death.
That day no swimmer, hurled from rock to rock of the Till, could be sure of surviving. Luck came into it, as well as skill, and concentration, and the kind of blank stoicism that disregards shock and pain and fatigue, and thinks of nothing but what must be done. Sometimes, far ahead, Nicholas would glimpse the bared, darkened hair of the man who had never wanted him. Beyond that, and much less often, he witnessed the brighter head of his son. It lurched and soared with the billowing water, and Nicholas never saw a raised arm, or even the profile of a cheek with one dimple. That was when, deep within him, his heart started to fail.
But he swam, for as long as he could, and for as long, as it turned out, as was needed.
ANDRO WODMAN, ONE-TIME member of the King of France’s bodyguard of Scots Archers, one-time Conservator of Scots Privileges in Bruges, did not resist when he was found in the mud where he had dragged himself, under the overhang of the embankment of the Till. He had lain there for a long time, drained of blood and immobile, and even now was only half conscious. Then someone was holding him and calling his name. He thought it must be one of the English.
Then he realised that he was now on top of the gorge, not within it, and that the rain had stopped, and that there were no English masons or soldiers in sight. And that the man holding him was Anselm Adorne, in dark riding clothes. Within a close leather helm, his face was harshly indented and stern. He said, ‘You’re safe. The soldiers found no survivors, and left.’
Wodman lay, looking up. Other men of Cortachy’s had arrived and were kneeling about him. So they had stayed at Upsettlington. Mildly indignant, Wodman reviewed the recent past, which he remembered quite clearly up to the point where they were repairing the bridge. He said, ‘You took your time. Have you seen Nicholas?’ He thought, with satisfaction, of the language Nicholas had probably used.
Adorne said, ‘No.’ He hesitated, and then said, ‘Where is he? Do you know, Andro?’
Andro lay, looking surprised. He cast his mind back. Clearly, something had happened that he should have remembered.
Then he stopped breathing, for he had remembered.
Adorne said, ‘I think I can guess. But tell me.’
Almost before he had got to the end they had scattered, running down the bankside, slinging rope, seizing branches for scouring-poles. The river was still brawling, and laden with rubbish, but the level had sunk.
Adorne said, ‘We’ve searched the near water already, but not so far as the mouth. You say the boy was injured, and St Pol was not a strong swimmer? But Nicholas, following, was still alive when you saw him?’
‘He couldn’t have caught them,’ Wodman said. He forced himself to sit up. It made him feel dizzy. ‘Unless one of them was thrown out, or smashed and held by a rock. Nicholas had started from a few yards behind them, and they were all being swept along at the same rate. You couldn’t swim. You could only ride the spate like a—like a—’
‘Like a demon, perhaps,’ Adorne said. ‘Nicol can be one, at times. Don’t give up hope. I haven’t.’ It was the first time he had ever shortened the name.
Then someone shouted, circumspectly, from far down the river.
IN A FLOOD such as that, swimmers of indifferent strength and ability would be carried at the same speed. Only the strong could diverge from the race, winning themselves the respite of calmer waters, or even forcing an exit to shore, if they were ingenious.
Several times, in his headlong career downriver that day, Nicholas could have abandoned his battle, and snatched at a chance to batter his way from the grasp of the water. He stayed, not because he could travel faster than the two men before him, but because luck sometimes took a hand in the game. A funnelling log could create its own unexpected diversion; a careering boulder could kill, but could also break the force of the flow. Henry might find some such haven, and Simon might join him there. He might come across both, idling and hapless, but requiring only his strength to draw them over to safety. He tried not to think of the cost: the broken bones, the crushed limbs, the dismembering gashes that they might have suffered by then, impaled upon the spears of snapped trees underwater. It was taking all that he knew to keep his own battered body intact, and fit for its purpose. But he persisted in hope.
He found no friendly backwaters, and they did not wait for him. Instead, through the leaden gloom and the rain, there rose behind him a pillar of water higher than any before, which arched its glossy neck and crashed down in foam at his back, together with all it contained. It hurled him forward, and he hit rock after rock and went under. Rising, retching and coughing, once more, he saw the whitened water travelling onwards with its own grinding roar. The boom of it was like the boom of taut sails in a gale. But this ship was without crew and without rudder.
He sank again, and hit his last rock. He didn’t know, lurching backwards, that the afterwave was about to pick him up and throw him, half conscious, into just such a shallow lade as he had imagined. He lay there, half on silt, half in water. When he stirred, not long after, it was to find the rain had stopped; the water had loosened its grip; and the level was lower. Only the boughs of trees, high on the bank, showed where the last block of water had passed.
He did not think he could move, but he did; fanning into the water until the stream received him again, and he swam. He was close to the confluence when his gorged eyes perceived the cradle of boughs that had been cast up on the slope of one bank, and settled there, half out of the water.
Someone was sleeping there, lifted into it perhaps by a wave. Then he saw that there was not one person, but two.
It took a long time to reach them. He would think he had progressed; and then a surge would buffet his shoulders and snatch at his limbs and the nest would recede, so that he had to try all over again. When he touched the embankment, he could hardly climb to the ledge, and grasped at bushes as he made his way over and knelt. But by then, he knew what he would see.
Both men were fair, but he thought that nothing in life could ever approach the matchless purity of the young face, its fine bones upturned to the sky, the heavy lids closed, the soft lips parted a little, as if desiring to speak.
Simon lay on his breast, as he must have arrived, lifting himself with the last of his strength to gather the boy safe from harm; and then sinking down, his eyes open, to weep.
His eyes were still open, blue in the face which, at the last, had lost all its petulance. And Henry’s gilt hair, loosed and fallen over his shoulder, was interwoven and mixed with the fair hair of Simon de St Pol. Both were dead.
ANSELM ADORNE CLIMBED down before anyone else, and knelt in silence, his hand on Nicholas’s shoulder. Then, having permission, he signed for his men. He and his captain drew Simon from the place of his finest passage of arms: the act of chivalry completed not for his own glory, but for the sake of another. But only Nicholas laid tender hands on the boy, and lifted him, and carried him uphill himself, aided by steadying arms. At the top, there were litters.
Andro lay in one, his eyes closed, but breathing still. Two more, drawn well aside, received those who were not. Men brought cloaks to cover the c
rushed and torn bodies. You could tell how beautiful they had been. Fair; so fair.
Nicholas’s own clothing, too, was in shreds. As he knelt back from the pallet, he felt Adorne’s hands on his shoulders, moving lightly to explore the bloody hacks and gouges and misshapen contusions that he could see but not, as yet, feel. Then someone, coming with cloths, began swiftly to tend them, and Adorne, who had gone to give orders, reappeared with a man at his side. ‘Nicol, this is my courier. Tell us everything you know.’
Pain returned while he was speaking, and he began to shiver, and they brought him something to drink, and a rough shirt, and a cloak. He went through what he had to say twice, and then everyone vanished, and he was alone. The courier would leave now. The rest of them had gone to uncover the boats and prepare to cross while the Tweed was still running high, and the Till’s flooding upstream held the soldiers’ attention. Once across, Nicholas would be given means to take him to Kelso where, with fitting reverence, the crypt of the Abbey would receive Simon and Henry de St Pol for the interim, and where he could stay, if he wished. It was only an hour’s ride away.
Adorne would not be with him. Adorne was to follow his courier north, taking Andro, for there were twenty thousand enemies at the door, and the King’s brother leading them. Nicholas, said Adorne, had done enough.
Adorne would not greatly mourn Simon, who had been cavalier with his own son, and whose weaknesses he despised. Equally, he had had small time for Henry’s undisciplined wielding of steel, although he had observed, perhaps, Nicholas’s forbearance. Adorne’s compassion was for Nicholas, and was rooted in those first days in Bruges when—to general derision—Nicholas had not only claimed the name of St Pol, but appeared to believe in the claim. Adorne had always been a humane judge. However baseless the contention, he was honouring it. For—he would argue—if Nicholas held it to be true, he was suffering today the loss of a father in Simon, and a half-brother and nephew in Henry.
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