They walk all morning, moving at the speed of the slowest cart, and though no one except Somerset seems to have a very clear idea where they are bound, or how long it will take to get there, they all agree it had better not be too far, and it had better be well-provisioned, for they are not over-encumbered with baggage. There are a few carts carrying barrels of ale, a few laden with sacks of oats that do not look wholly dry and give off the taint of spoil, and each company has a cart piled with arrows and personal baggage and weapons, but that, more or less, is that. It is not enough to keep them in the field for very long, however few they may be.
‘Saints,’ Horner says, ‘it is good to be out, isn’t it?’
It is that. Castle walls begin to loom up over you after a while. Their shadows are long and cold and deep, even on a spring day such as this, but now they are out in open moorland, following a gritty track through rolling plains of heather, sedge, gorse and broom even, and men take sprigs of it and put them in their hats like the first Plantagenets, but as they walk on, the relief of being out of the castle fades, and Thomas’s anxieties begin to bloom.
He looks around him at the men he’s walking with, and all he really wants is to be away, to duck into the trees at the side of the road, to take Katherine with him and to return to a normal life, the one he imagines he is owed, with a house by a stream with some acres to call his own, with oxen, sheep, beehives, a pond. Christ! A spinning wheel and a few pigs.
A man begins playing a flute and another joins him, and then one takes up a song that suggests a plaintive desire to be elsewhere, and it speaks of home fields as the summer comes in, and of sweethearts, and of warmth and plenty, and pretty soon others have joined in, until the word comes down that it is to stop, and there are vintenars on horses threatening men to get them to hold their tongues, and the boys are told to get drumming, and so they do, and their tambours or whatever they are, are beaten in a driving rhythm and the home fields and sweethearts are all forgotten as men pick up their pace and forge ahead.
‘Is it always like this?’ Thomas asks Katherine and she shakes her head.
‘When we came to Towton, it was the grimmest thing you ever saw. Every man was set, and it was so cold you wouldn’t believe it was nearly Lady Day. And there were thousands of us. Thousands. How many are we now, do you suppose?’
‘Horner says nearly five thousand but they expect more to join them as we go.’
They move south, past Dunstanburgh from which a small contingent joins them.
‘Were you really eating toads?’ Jack asks one.
‘Not toads,’ he says. ‘They’re poisonous. Everything else, though. Seagulls are the worst, but we had a lot of them, so.’
They march all day, until it is coming on to night and they pitch camp on moorland that is reasonably flat. There are exactly eight tents, and they gather enough wood and bracken and heather for a large watch fire and the men sleep around it, as close to the tents as they can. The best place is under the carts, where they will be dry if it rains, nor will the dew soak them where they lie. Riven’s men are the other side of the camp, likewise gathered around their own cart, but Riven himself is to sleep in one of the tents, alongside Sir Ralph Grey and others. Horner goes to report and comes back impressed.
‘He is a cold fish,’ he says, ‘but he can silence Sir Ralph with a single look.’
Thomas sits awake, watching the tent in which he supposes Riven to be, and he watches Riven’s men on the far side of the camp. They keep themselves to themselves, he notices, and he is pleased, but he wonders if their doing so means anything. He wonders if he can walk over there and just look to see if the ledger is there.
Katherine seems to read his intention.
‘Do you think it’ll be to one side of the tent, by the door, nice and neat in its bag, ready to be collected?’ she scoffs.
And he admits it is unlikely. He’s becoming sure it is burned now, since why otherwise would they keep it?
In the morning it is cool again, and scouts are sent out while the King’s priests lead the remaining soldiery in prayer. They say the Ave, the Credo, the paternoster and the De Profundis before they eat their oatcakes and then dismantle the tents and get on their way, winding westwards now, the sea behind them, the breeze in their faces, stiffening their flags, tugging at their sleeves.
‘Always easier to come the other way,’ Horner tells Thomas, ‘but at least King Henry can ride without having to breathe us all in.’
He is right. Thomas thinks. They do leave a trail, like rats migrating from barn to barn in autumn, and it is better to be upwind of them and their frowsty clothes and unwashed bodies.
All day they potter westwards under racing clouds and the drummers are not so enthusiastic when the showers come, and they remove their skins, and the men trudge through the gathering mud with their heads down and raindrops ringing on their hats and shoulders. The thing is, they do not seem to have a destination. They seem to be wandering around, moving from west to east, east to west, waiting for something to happen that might not happen.
Then King Henry leaves them, riding for better quarters, and he is to be escorted by a company of Sir Giles Riven’s men, and so Thomas and Katherine stand in the rain and watch them go.
‘Christ,’ Thomas says. He almost wishes he were riding with them.
For two days in a row they stay in the same camp, stripping and despoiling the countryside around, until the morning of the third day, when they break camp and retrace their steps. Scouts come and go, bringing conflicting reports. Sometimes Montagu is still in Newcastle, and the Scots have returned to Edinburgh. Sometimes Montagu is riding westwards, via Carlisle, and the Scots are moving that way too, on their way to meet him in Kelso. Sometimes Montagu has many men with him, a great power with bombards, and a force of archers many thousands strong; sometimes he is moving quickly in a party of no more than forty horsemen. No one can be sure of anything. Morale is sapped. Fights break out. The rain comes down.
More days pass, and they are now west of Bamburgh, north of Alnwick, in rough stream-fissured moorland offering little shelter under stunted, wind-sculpted hawthorns. Birds shoot overhead, bundled by the gusts from the west, and the steely grey sky suggests more rain. Sir Ralph Grey comes stalking through the heather, seeking out Thomas and Horner.
‘Can’t bloody well stand this much more,’ he says. ‘Shouldn’t have left Bamburgh. Christ! Shouldn’t have left Alnwick. And that goddamned traitor Riven has slipped off with King Henry so he doesn’t have to be out in this. So Riven is gone and with him goes Thomas’s best hope for a chance to kill him. Christ, he thinks, if this task is a God-given, God is not making it easy.
‘Still,’ Grey continues ‘There we are. Cowardly bloody bastard. But never mind that. I want you to ride to Hulne for me. The Prior will have had time to distil some more of his – his – his whatever the stuff is called. Actually, while you are there, ask him what it is called, will you? Find out if it has a name.’
‘Can I take Kit and Jack?’ Thomas asks.
‘No,’ Grey says. ‘They must stay.’
So not only has Riven slipped away, they are still not trusted.
He and Horner and two other men ride out the next morning. It is the first time he has been away from Katherine since that day on the river’s bank in the summer, and he feels his departure like a physical pain, and thinks of himself as a stone being pried from the flesh of its plum. They find a few moments alone while Thomas pretends to piss, and they stand side by side by the river, and he tells her it will not be for long.
‘What if you run into Montagu?’ she asks.
‘We won’t,’ he says. ‘Horner says Montagu has looped well to the west, to Carlisle.’
So Thomas and Horner and the four others mount up and are southbound on one of the old roads, paved with large flat stones, centuries old already, that leads south to Morpeth, Horner says, when ahead of them they see a great party of horsemen clustered together, possibly all in black
and red.
‘Christ!’ Horner shouts. ‘It is them! It is them! Get back! Let’s go.’
And they turn their horses and dig their heels in and they gallop back up the track. Montagu’s men do not give chase.
‘Did you get it?’ Grey asks when they ride into the camp and throw themselves from their horses. When they tell him what they know, Grey is disappointed, but Horner is taken before Somerset.
‘Just told him what we saw,’ he tells Thomas when he returns.
Trumpets are sounded. Drums pick up. Vintenars are among them again with their sticks and cuffs, shouting, harrying. There is some trouble among Lord Roos’s men: a fight, some sort of mutiny, quickly overcome. More patrols are sent out. Thomas finishes his ale, and the remnants of his oatcakes. He wishes they had made it as far as Hulne, where he might have found some food, even if it was only fish soup and bread. The scouts come back. They estimate that Montagu has four thousand men, a number only slightly smaller than their own. As many as a thousand archers are among them.
Preparations are made.
‘Dear God,’ Thomas says. ‘We are going to have to fight them!’
‘We mustn’t,’ Katherine whispers. ‘You mustn’t. You must get away. Today. This moment.’
But the prickers are already there, mounted, in pickets, waiting for any to try just this. He feels he has been asleep and has now woken up to find himself joining the line, bow clutched in hand, getting ready to fight for men he hardly knows against men he hardly knows. And she looks at him with tear-filled eyes and he cannot pretend that everything will be all right and that nothing will happen to him, because anything could happen to him, and it might not be all right. Katherine touches him on the sleeve.
‘Kit,’ he says and she looks at him and realises what he means – that she is Kit not Katherine, even now – and she withdraws her hand.
And Katherine stands. She is very pale. He looks at her and vows to himself that he will remember her like this, whatever else happens. She is in a long jack that reaches mid-thigh, baggy hose, good boots still, and she wears her linen cap under a simply made fulled wool tube that she has curled over. She has a belt on which is her purse, where she keeps her rosary and her knife. Over her shoulder she carries a pale linen bag that is, just now, half-filled with oatcakes.
‘So,’ she says, and she extends her hand and he takes it. They hold one another’s gaze longer than they ought, and he feels, Christ, we have said these sorts of farewell before. His hand lingers. He is breathing quickly. He wants of all things to pull her to him.
She seems to know, but there is nothing to be done, and then there are the usual parting wishes, of going with God, and of God guiding hands, and of God delivering to safety and finally Thomas has to let go of her hand and look away and Horner is still there, turned, staring up to where men are gathering on the slight crest above. The King’s banner is there, though Thomas supposes King Henry himself is not; as is Percy’s, on the right, though the others – Somerset who came in just his nightshirt – do not have theirs, and so linen has been painted with the Beaufort colours, and it flutters in the breeze. Above, a skein of geese passes, flying spread out in the shape of an arrowhead, northwards for the summer.
20
THE BEARDED PRIEST calls them together and from the bed of a cart he leads them in a cycle of prayers that few can hear, during which there is an appeal for intercession from the Virgin Mary and from St Edward in particular, to uphold the divine right of King Henry to rule his people as his own, and then another cycle of prayers begins, before they are permitted to disperse to their own carts and their own little encampments, to follow their own routines, to find their own consolations and seek their own encouragements, and now those that have harness put it on, and servants and women start to bustle about the place while men grow still and silent.
Grey has provided his own men with his livery coat and a helmet each, all in the same style made by the same armourer, as well as a padded jack apiece, though Thomas does not need one, and he pulls his livery cloth over his brigandine, and his helmet is close-fitting, good for loosing a bow, but it makes hearing hard, and for some reason it is difficult to judge space and distance around the camp, and then he ties on his bracer, finds the short sword he has acquired and ties that to his belt, and then the buckler that Grey has also given out, and last he picks up his bow and two sheaves of arrows.
And now there is nothing more they can say. On Hedgeley Moor the drums are beating constantly and everyone is shouting for one another and there are bugles and horns being blown and horses are being led to their riders to take them up towards the line. The prickers are riding in packs of four or five, long spears resting on bootcaps, looking for men in the shadows, under carts, down by the river, in among the heather, anyone who might be tempted to drift away.
Then Horner arrives, breathless, pink with pleasure at his attire. He has plate on his arms and legs, good steel gloves, a fine helmet with a face-piece he can raise and a bevor. He has plate under his livery coat, and, with his pollaxe, to Thomas’s mind he looks like a boy dressed up to fight, and he remembers thinking that of someone before, but whom? He does not know. He wonders for the first time how old Horner is.
‘We are to be in the centre,’ Horner tells him. ‘On the road itself. Somerset is to lead from there, with Percy’s men in the vanguard and Hungerford and Roos on the left.’
‘What about the King?’ John Stump asks and there is a moment of embarrassed silence.
‘Archers will be to the front,’ Horner continues. ‘Facing south, wind from the west as usual. Whatever happens if Montagu is to survive the day, he knows he has to get past us, and we will stop him here, and then the day will be ours.’
But those flags. They are pointing to Roos and Hungerford’s men, in their red-and-green and blue-and-yellow, and Thomas cannot help thinking he would not like to be where they are, on that wing of the front. He sees Riven’s men among them, though, and he is pleased. He imagines the men who’d wanted to kill him will be under the drifting arrow cloud when it comes. He remembers Little John’s tale of being under one of them, and he is suddenly dry-mouthed with fear. How did it come to this? he wonders. He looks for a way out, an escape, but there is none. He wonders exactly when it became too late. The moment he encountered Horner, he supposes, six months earlier.
Thomas takes his leave of Horner with a quick clasp of his metal hands, and then he edges through the crowd of men-at-arms and their attendant billmen to the front, to find Jack and the others, the archers, his archers, who stand well spaced for the loosing of their bows, some with their arrow shafts in the ground, others with them in their belts. They are confident, it is obvious, and ready for this, and for a moment Thomas is reassured to be among them, since he knows they are good and well trained, and that they will do their best. He takes his place among them behind the man who always came last in the arrow-shooting competitions, having chosen this because he’d rather be behind him than in front of him. His name is John, a cutler from Sheffield. A good man, well-meaning, but as simple as a cow.
Jack is further along the line, craning to see the enemy, still so boyish despite it all. Thomas leans forward to catch his eye, and when he does, Jack nods back, but he is distracted. Thomas hopes he will be all right today. He thinks of him the first time he saw him, bobbing in and out of the trees in his brother’s orchard, and he realises how fond of the boy he has become. He watches him tell another man a joke, or something that makes him laugh anyway, and he feels curiously proud. He is like a what? Not a son. Jack is only a few years younger than Thomas, but he is definitely like a nephew perhaps. Like his brother’s son; the one who lived.
Thomas turns to the front, and peers over John the Cutler’s padded form, and he sees for the first time the distant line of Montagu’s troops. At moments like these a man sees his enemy and thinks that if he is to survive he will have to kill every single one of them, that it is him against them. And right now, this does
not, at first, look possible. Montagu’s men move in a solid block, with what look like archers to the front, as is usual, and then a great mass of men-at-arms behind. At the centre are the polished figures of Montagu’s captains, moving up quite quickly, Thomas thinks. Then they stop. There is a short moment while they reorganise themselves. A trumpet brays. They carry on.
‘This is it, boys,’ someone says. ‘Say your prayers.’
There is a susurrus and a murmuring among the men, and Thomas joins them in a mumbled paternoster, and then there is a flurry of arms crossing chests. One or two of the older men bend a knee and mark their place with a cross in the dirt under the heather roots, and some of them take a small piece of this earth and place it in their mouths, but the younger archers don’t bother. It must be something from France, Thomas thinks, when the English fought the French, rather than one another.
Another trumpet. Distant shouts in the cold grey afternoon.
Now Somerset propels his horse through the ranks and he rides out a little way, before turning to face them. He has his helmet raised and his bevor undone, and he is carrying a horseman’s hammer, but it is for show, since they all know he must dismount and send his horse back, and fight on foot like a proper Englishman. But for now, it is a good thing, something to wave, something to emphasise his rhetoric.
‘Men of Lancaster!’ he begins, raising the hammer. ‘Men of England. On this day, in this hour, now, the fate of the kingdom – our kingdom – hangs in the balance. If we let past this mob of false traitors sent by the treacherous Duke of York to seek the succour of the enemies of our dread liege King Henry, we will lose. Not just the day, but everything. We will lose our names, our lands, our lives. And all the hardships we have shared over the years, all the privations, all the sacrifices, all the time we have been denied our lands, our hearths, our dogs, our wives – they will count as nothing. All the blood we have shed. All the blood our fathers have shed, all the blood our sons and brothers have shed – it will count as nothing. But if we stop them here today, if we send them back whence they have come, then news of this day’s work will resound throughout Christendom. We will turn the tide, and we will show the world that we, we men of the north, we are equal and greater to anything they might throw at us, and that we remain loyal. We remain steadfast where others falter, and that we are the true beating hearts of this our land.’
Kingmaker: Broken Faith Page 30