Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (11 page)

‘What is it?’ she asks.

He is pleased by her interest.

‘A mixture of thirteen herbs,’ he says, ‘mixed with pig fat and elder buds.’

He holds the jar for her to see the dark paste within.

‘It cools wounds and cures almost everything,’ he says.

Then he tucks it away in a leather pack, and sets the leather pack inside another one, and this he places very carefully on the mule’s pack, as if it is valuable. Thomas stands with the giant’s pollaxe, looking uncertain what to do with it. Does he carry it? Or put it on the mule? Eventually they decide on the mule and they set out, following a path where the wood thins and out on to a broad expanse of fog-haunted marshes.

‘By the blood of Mary,’ the pardoner laughs as they walk. ‘Will you look at us? Two thieves ripe for the hanging and the third a victim of the plague. Thank the Lord for this mist or they’d have raised the cry and chased us away by now.’

To Katherine’s eye the pardoner’s clothes appear garish. He wears a long russet habit, not unlike Thomas’s, but over it a blue fur-trimmed cloak with a tightly fitting hood that has been dyed bright green. A low-crowned round hat of black-fringed felt holds the hood in place and she can see that between his hat, hood and beard, it is almost impossible to see the whorls on his neck.

Next to him Thomas looks like a crow, but she knows she is the worst: her patched cassock is crusted with mud; she has only one clog and no headgear, not even a cloth to cover her hair. She looks the sort of beggar the Prioress would turn away from the gate.

‘I will lend you my hat,’ the pardoner says, passing it to her. ‘And there’ll be a fripperer at the market from whom we might buy something more suitable. It should not be too far now.’

Ahead of them they hear the steady din of bells, and she can smell coal smoke. They join a road and as they walk, its surface improves. Stone replaces mud, and other travellers pass with loaded mules and curious looks.

‘Sir, by the grace of God, good day to you,’ the pardoner sings out each time he feels their glances settle too heavily on one or other of them, and each time the traveller nods and returns the greeting and moves on with a blessing, as if all were well.

Katherine stares back at them resentfully, and after a time the pardoner touches her elbow.

‘We’re strangers here, Sister,’ he says. ‘If someone takes against us, they will denounce us for some crime, and without our friends to vouch for our good name, we will end up like this poor fellow.’

He gestures towards a tree where a crowd of birds mob something hanging from the branches. It is a man’s body, hanging near naked, mottled and erupting with decay, his braided guts spilling out like fistfuls of grey string. A bird with glossy feathers clings to its face and with each peck the corpse twitches on its rope. The smell of rotting meat is thick and sweet.

‘Been there about ten days,’ the pardoner guesses.

‘But why doesn’t someone bury him?’ Katherine asks through her fingers.

‘He’s posted as a warning to others.’ The pardoner shrugs. ‘Were it a witch they would just strangle her at the roadside and leave her for the dogs. In the south when they catch a thief they nail his ear to a post and give him a knife to cut himself free.’

They walk on through mist that is shrinking towards the river, leaving a sodden, level landscape interrupted by meagre stands of trees, a low-beamed cottage and a herd of oily sheep. Ahead the town is a gathering of church spires and roofs under a pall of dark smoke.

‘The town of Boston,’ the pardoner says. ‘Home to a thousand or so souls. We must get through it to reach the harbour.’

She hesitates.

‘Come on,’ the pardoner encourages. ‘Walk on the far side of the mule, so the captain of the gate can’t see you. And hold its rope, so that if he does, he’ll think it belongs to you, and that you’re worth something after all.’

They join the other travellers queuing behind a carter trying to get his oxen on to the bridge.

‘
Hoc opus, hic labor est
,’ the pardoner mutters. He is looking anxious.

At the far end of the bridge a fat man in a stained leather jerkin and an iron helmet stands under a wooden awning, while another with a bill takes coins from those crossing the bridge.

‘Good day to you, sir!’ the pardoner calls when they reach the second man, and he presses a coin into the outstretched hand. The man says nothing but frowns and shows the coin to the first man. The first man holds up his arm to stop the flow.

‘Never seen you before, master?’ he says. His gaze travels over the mule, to Katherine, to Thomas, then back to the pardoner.

‘I am Robert Daud,’ the pardoner says. ‘A merchant, of Lincoln.’

The man tips his chin and stares down his broad nose.

‘Take your hood off.’

There is a moment of silence. The pardoner looks very old. He begins fiddling at the ties below his chin. His fingers are trembling. But then the mule lifts its tail and shits. A man with a sack of beets on his shoulder cheerfully sets them aside to gather the steaming lumps.

‘Hands haven’t been this warm since Martinmas,’ he calls, and gets his laugh. Someone behind shouts and all around them people urge the Captain of the Watch to get on with it, and just then the pardoner discovers the knot is tighter than he thought, and at last the captain shrugs as if in the end he could hardly care less. He gestures at the mule and rolls his finger in a circle for another coin.

‘Pontage,’ he says. ‘Another penny to cross the bridge with a mule.’

The pardoner cheerfully digs in the pouch on his belt and produces the coin. The crowd surge forward. When they’ve turned a corner, the old man slumps against a wall and runs his fingers under the band of his hood.

‘Thanks to the blessed St James for that,’ he breathes.

When he is recovered he leads them along the narrow street to the marketplace, where the ground underfoot is cobbled and houses of every shape and size tower above them, each with glazed windows, and at one end is an edifice of ash poles and scaffolding indicating that something grand is being built.

But it is the business of the people that startles Katherine most. She has never seen so many men and women or children gathered together at once, and they are all shouting. Traders proclaim the value and virtue of their wares while rivals bellow disparagement, and money is changing hands, and everyone seems to be arguing with good-natured passion. In the middle of it all is a bear, a creature at once both human and alien, sitting glumly while a man nearby eats a pie.

‘We must eat something before we go about our business,’ the pardoner is saying, tying up the mule to a rail and handing a boy a coin to tend it. He leads them down a covered street to a cookshop where he buys them each a bowl of pottage, dark stuff, much tastier than Katherine can believe, reinforced with bacon and strips of yellowing kale. Then comes a loaf of dense brown bread still warm from the oven as well as an earthenware plate on which three pasties are actually greasy with butter. The cook’s wife hands them mugs of ale and they eat and drink sitting on the step with their backs against the shop’s wall. After they’ve finished the pardoner buys each of them a baked apple with wrinkled skin, too hot to hold.

‘You were hungry,’ the cookshop owner says. He is foursquare with short legs and sly eyes. His woman stares at them from the darkness of the kitchen.

Fabas indulcet fames
,’ the pardoner replies, half turning. ‘We have had a long voyage, goodman, from foreign shores, much delayed by wild weather. Now that we are replete, we are bound for the fripperer and then the shoe-maker.’

‘And the barber too, I hope,’ the man says, nodding at Thomas’s tonsure. ‘There are plenty in town’d turn you in for the way you look.’

‘Quite so,’ the pardoner allows, swallowing the rest of his ale. He pays the man and hurries them on their way.

Katherine feels sick.

‘We must find our vessel,’ the pardoner announces, though this is news to her. ‘It won’t be long before the friars get about and they’ll know you’ve left your priory. First though: some clothes.’

They find the fripperer beyond the tailors’ stalls on the far side of the market, next to a man dealing in horsehides and urine. He is seated on the ground with his legs crossed, surrounded by a shin-high pile of rags of every kind of colour and cloth. He is working on some stitching, but when he sees the pardoner looming into view, he throws aside the work and is on his feet.

‘Master,’ he says, ‘may God make you prosper.’

With quick eyes he grades the value of their clothes, deducting from the total the price of every tear and abrasion, and though he is pleased at the thought of the money a man like the pardoner might possess, he grimaces when he sees Thomas and Katherine’s cassocks. The pardoner explains what he wants and the clothes-mender begins casting uncertainly through his stock, looking for something that might do.

‘I cannot furnish this chit with anything at the present,’ he says, indicating Katherine. ‘Women tend to their own clothes, see, or if they do leave me a garment, they come by to collect it. They don’t seem to get caught up in other things, as men do, or get themselves killed so often.’

‘I am not interested in anything for the girl,’ the pardoner tells him airily. ‘She can take her chances. I need clothing for him, and for my other servant. A lad smaller than this one.’

‘Much easier, that,’ the fripperer says and he begins pulling garments from different piles again, holding them up and then discarding them. Eventually he hands Thomas two piles.

‘Should sort you out,’ he says.

The pardoner pays the man and they retreat to an alley behind the marketplace.

‘You can change here,’ he says, dividing up the piles of clothing. ‘And mind where you step.’

The smell in the alley is powerful, and at its end they each turn a different corner and begin to try to make sense of their new clothes. For Katherine it is a strange experience. She needs to hold them up first, to see what they are. Then she pulls on the linen braies, followed by the woven hose. She rolls them over at the top and ties them off around her waist. Then she quickly takes off her cassock, and plunges her naked arms into the undershirt. It is rose-coloured, faded in parts, mossy at the pits and slick with wear. Then comes the tunic, russet-coloured as most men wear, then the coat, green and quilted, but worn and smelling of horses. Down its front on one side is a row of rough horn discs with which she is not familiar, and down the other stitched slits that mystify her. The garment gapes over her bosom and feels wrong. She’s spent her life in a cassock that hangs from her shoulders and these new clothes grip her body in unfamiliar places. Still, she is able to move more freely unhampered by the heavy skirts, and so long as she does not get her feet wet, she imagines she will be warm.

She meets Thomas in the alleyway and they stare at one another for a moment. His jacket is blue and his hose green on one leg, red on the other. His tunic strains where he had done up the buttons on the front. When Katherine sees this, she understands what the bone discs on her own jacket are for and she clumsily presses them home.

‘These are men’s clothes,’ she says.

Thomas nods.

‘It is safer,’ he says. ‘They will be looking for a canon and a sister.’

She nods. Unsure. He too looks askance.

‘Why is he doing this?’ she asks, pulling on the felt cap she’s been given. ‘He has no need to show us such kindness.’

‘It is a penance, I think,’ Thomas says. ‘If he helps us, things will go well for him in France. And if he hopes to benefit from it, then we may take these favours in good conscience, surely?’

She sees he too is in need of persuasion.

‘We would have had to take them from someone, at any rate,’ Katherine says, ‘or we would be dead.’

It is a hard point, and Thomas is silenced.

‘Look,’ he says. ‘I took these from Riven. You should have them.’

He proffers her Alice’s rosary beads. She does not take them for a moment.

‘I did not even know her,’ he says, pressing them on her.

Katherine does not want to gain from Alice’s death, but she takes them, puts them over her head and tucks them into her shirt. For a moment they are cold against her skin.

When the pardoner sees them he laughs.

‘Not perfect,’ he says, ‘but what is perfect?’

He is holding two pairs of brown leather boots. They slide them on and stand in them. She stares down at herself. She can hardly believe what she sees.

‘Good God!’ Thomas says. He is wriggling his toes and smiling broadly. She smiles too. The pleasure is almost too much to bear. Warmth begins to thaw her feet and though the boots are too long, so that they smack the cobbles as she walks, they are not half so bad as the clogs she is used to, not half so bad as going with one foot bare.

‘Thank you, master,’ she says. ‘Thank you for all your kindness.’

‘It is nothing more than my duty as a Christian soul,’ the pardoner replies, ‘but perhaps we had better not linger.’

Two friars are hurrying across the marketplace, and there are many more behind, spilling from one of the churches.

‘Your hat,’ the pardoner murmurs to Thomas. Thomas pulls it on, quickly covering the patch of shaved skin. Katherine can feel herself stiffening as they pass. She realises she is holding her breath. One of them is ruddy-faced, a drinker, with eyes that linger on Katherine’s crotch, and she feels horribly naked, and steps behind Thomas.

When the friars have passed, the pardoner takes them to find the mule, and when he has paid the boy off, they pass down a narrow road to a grey sweep of sea-slimed stone staithes. Ahead is the sea, under a huge stretch of pale sky, and boats and ships of every imaginable size bob in the puckered waters.

It takes her breath away.

‘Dear God,’ she murmurs.

All along the quay men are busy among the stacks of sarplers and bales, the casks of wine, piles of logs, coils of thick ships’ rope and canvas-covered heaps of only the Lord knew what. The smell is a mixture of salt and fish guts and something else.