Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (12 page)

They walk along the quay a little way until they come to a quiet spot by a pile of conical wicker baskets leaking green water back to the sea.

‘Look to the mule,’ the pardoner instructs, ‘while I find the harbour master, and, Thomas, you’d better cut our sister’s hair so that she looks less like a Katherine and more like a Kit.’

So in one thoughtless stroke, Katherine becomes Kit, and Thomas borrows the pardoner’s knife and cuts her hair, dropping the hanks on the ground around her feet. She can feel his fingers on her scalp and her skin prickles with ill ease. She can feel her back arching, her shoulders rising, as if to escape his touch. Then he sits while she takes up the knife and attempts the same with him. She starts slowly, trying not to touch him, chopping at his thick hair until she sees she will have to hold it to cut it. She can feel his discomfort too. She stops to examine the wound above his ear. She flakes away some of the pardoner’s salve and sees the wound is livid under it.

When the pardoner comes back he shouts with laughter.

‘Saints above! He looks like a madman!’

She says nothing, but she too cannot help laughing at Thomas’s piebald head. He pulls on his cap.

‘Have you found a ship, sir?’

‘I have. The carrack
Mary
leaves for Calais on the next tide.’

‘Calais?’

‘Yes, but have no fear. Master Cobham is happy to put in at Sandwich before he crosses the Narrow Sea. Sandwich is in Kent, scarcely a day’s walk from Canterbury. So that has fallen well, thanks be to God. Not that the
Mary
is as comfortable as I should like, and Master Cobham is rather brusque, but there you are:
non licet omnibus adire Corinthum
. It is not given to everyone to visit Corinth, you see?’

The pardoner takes Thomas back to the market to buy bread and whatever else they might find. Katherine remains alone among the baskets.

Now is her chance. She begins going through the packs on the mule’s back, looking for the one where the pardoner keeps his money. Is this it? The one with the jar of salve. Where is it? She cannot find it. She stops, sick with shame, as a boy with half an ear leads past a train of mules, and then a man follows holding a dead badger, never quite happy with the way he is carrying it.

Dear God! Where is the pack? Her fingers are numb as she struggles with the knots. There. She finds it. It is inside a rough sack, a disguise. She is pulling it out when the pardoner and Thomas return in a hurry. They’ve bought cheese, bread, a sack of apples and three wineskins apiece, and they’ve even managed to sell the mule for a good price. Now they keep glancing over their shoulders and the old man misses her returning the pack.

‘We must be quick about it,’ he says. ‘The friars are astir over something and it is more than two apostates.’

The pardoner glances at Katherine, and she looks away. He shakes his head as if to clear some thought and she knows he knows. She wonders when he will tell Thomas.

‘Come on,’ he says, and they hurry to find this Master Cobham, who is standing with his hands on his hips watching a long-beaked hand crane swing a bale of something heavy on to the deck of a three-masted ship.

This is the carrack
Mary
, about twenty paces long, and low in the water. Cobham turns when he sees them and watches them approach without a change of expression. Up close he is solid, with sandy hair and the sort of face that mottles in the wind. He touches his hat in an ironic salute.

‘Day to you,’ he says.

His glance lingers on Katherine, and she feels herself warm under it, but after a moment he turns and shouts to the men on the crane to load the pardoner’s bags. The pardoner is especially careful about the pack with the salve in, and he will not trust it to anyone else. She sees Cobham’s pale eyebrow cock and her doubts about the man harden to mistrust.

‘Yours, my boy,’ the pardoner says, handing Thomas the pollaxe. ‘Best not let it stray.’

Then the horse-dealer’s boy arrives with a bag of coins and when everything is aboard, the pardoner turns and strokes the mule’s nose. There are tears in his eyes, though the animal stares back without emotion.

‘Goodbye, old friend,’ he says. ‘Perhaps we shall meet again when I come back through this way, a new man?’

As the boy leads the unprotesting mule away, Katherine follows the pardoner across to the carrack via a gangplank. She does not think to let Thomas take her hand even though it is offered and after a moment she steps down into a curious world that shifts beneath her feet.

Hardly an inch of the ship’s planking can be seen for sacks and barrels and bales and all manner of wooden spars. There are coils of rope, canvas sheets and two huge and badly rusted anchors. In one corner a dark-skinned man sits on an upturned bucket and warms his hands on a fire that smoulders in the middle of a broad slab of stone. Other men linger in the ropes, staring at the newcomers. There must be about seven or eight of them, each as wiry and wild-looking as the next.

‘You’ll be stopping in there, if you’ve a mind,’ Cobham says, nodding to a plank door below the raised deck at the stern of the ship.

‘Very good,’ the pardoner says and he picks his way across the deck to prise open the door. An insistent stink billows out, stronger even than that of the sea: an unholy combination of vomit and the privy.

‘Gets mighty cold out here at night,’ Cobham continues with a smirk.

It begins to snow again, fat wet flakes that settle on the pardoner’s hat. Katherine looks along the wharves to where the mule is disappearing in the gathering gloom. Two black-robed friars have stopped the boy. Benedictines.

‘Let us try the cabin,’ she says.

The pardoner catches her glance.

‘Indeed,’ he agrees. ‘
Ignis aurum probat, miseria fortes viros
.’

There is no light, only slatted apertures, and the floor is sodden and the walls are crusted with something that has long set hard. The pardoner pulls the door shut after them.

‘We need only stay until we set off and are out of reach of the friars,’ the pardoner tells them as they hold their breath. He peers through the gap in the window.

‘Or until that man hands us over,’ Katherine says.

‘Yes,’ the pardoner agrees, ‘he looks like the worst sort but I have only paid him half what we owe, with the promise of the other half on safe delivery in Calais, where I have said I am to be met by associates with the balance. He will not let us go to the friars without collecting that, but knowing we are wanted might make the journey more awkward – and more expensive – than need be.’

They sit in the sulphurous dark, listening to the voices outside. At length there is silence. It seems the friars are gone.

‘Thanks be to God for that,’ sighs the pardoner. They can only see his eyeballs in the dark. Footsteps fall on the ladder beside the door and someone shouts and then more feet fall and there are more shouts and suddenly the ship shudders and lurches and seems to come alive. Katherine impulsively grabs Thomas’s arm. She feels him stiffen.

‘We’re casting off,’ the pardoner says. Above them on the rear deck they can hear Cobham bellowing rhythmically, as if encouraging some physical effort.

She lets go of Thomas’s arm, just as the pardoner claps his hands to his cheeks.

‘Dear Christ on His cross!’ he exclaims.

‘What? What is wrong?’

‘We have made no offering to St Nicholas,’ he says. ‘We have made no offering for a safe journey.’

THE WIND COMES
from the east, bringing with it ranks of lace-topped swells that roll under the carrack, lifting her and dropping her nearer the lee shore. Master Cobham, standing on the aft deck, legs spread and his leather hat pulled low over his brow, swears.

‘God’s wounds!’ he bellows. ‘God’s holy wounds!’

On the deck the pardoner and Thomas crouch together, heads between their knees, clinging to the ship’s listing side with raw hands.

‘We shall be wrecked,’ the pardoner shouts over the wind. ‘We should have said a Mass. Should have said a hundred of them.’

He retches again and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. In the night he has pulled a muscle from all the vomiting and now his face is yellow, his eyeballs bloodshot, and his beard slimed with something not even the rain can wash away.

By the evening he is too weak to sit and, with the help of Katherine and the ship’s boy, Thomas carries him back into the cabin and hoists him into a stained canvas hammock.

‘By all the saints,’ the old man murmurs when he is settled, ‘have I not suffered enough? They said take a medicinal bath. They said that would suffice. So I sent a servant, a good girl, to drown a litter of puppies for me: fox terriers. Then I had her gut the little things,
Jesu Christe
, and boil them up to make a soup. Yes. A soup. Dog soup. Enough to fill a bath. In which I sat for four hours with two—’

He retches again, a long fruitless spasm.

‘Two newly cut goat-kid skins – one on my head and the other on my chest – so that I shouldn’t catch a chill. They told me that would be enough, that that would cure me, but no. No. God wants to kill me this way. With seasickness.’

The ship’s boy is lingering in the cabin door, glad to be out of the rain for a moment.

‘Master Cobham says no one ever died of seasickness,’ he pipes.

‘The thought of dying is the only thing that keeps me alive,’ the pardoner groans.

The boy laughs and hurries off, balancing against the slant of the deck, letting the door bang behind him.

‘A good lad,’ the pardoner says. ‘Reminds me of my own boy.’

‘You have a son?’

The pardoner shakes his head.

‘Buried him three years ago,’ he says. ‘Plague.’

The weather lasts for two more days. They are not wrecked and when it is over, life on deck begins again. Gulls resume station, their wings snowy against the blue sky, and the sun shines, warming the skin if not the bones. The cook lights a fire on his stone and makes soup from fish the boy catches with a hook. Though the ship still dips and surges, the crew set about repairing the sails and everything wet is hung out to dry, including the pardoner.

The next day the land recedes to their right, and there are boats on the horizon. The water under the ship’s prow changes colour, becomes a choppy brew littered with broken barrels, scrubby feathers, filthy rushes, a dead dog.

‘Crossing the estuary,’ the boy explains, gesturing westwards. ‘Up there to London.’

Master Cobham is more watchful and the boy is sent to climb the ratlines and sit on a spar lashed to the mainmast’s crown.

‘Worried about pirates,’ the pardoner murmurs. ‘Something else we have to be watchful of these days.’

Thomas hears himself grunt absently. It seems to him that he has not slept since leaving the priory, for every time he closes his eyes, he sees Riven, or the giant in that moment before he felt his thumb press on his eyelid; or he sees the Dean being killed in the cloister, and all these images come afresh, just as if they are still happening, not things that have happened, and every time he lurches into wide wakefulness, his heart racing and his fists clenched.

He has tried to pray for release, and he asks God to take vengeance on his behalf, but as he prays, he cannot help but imagine himself as God’s chosen instrument. He imagines that it is he seeking Riven out, just as the pardoner suggested, and he imagines it is he landing the blows on the man, cutting him, pounding him, breaking bones, gouging flesh. Each time he must catch himself, calm himself, and return to prayer.

He hears the pardoner sighing on the bale beside him.

‘It must be hard,’ the old man is saying, gesturing to Katherine in the boat’s bow, her back turned on them. ‘Thrust from her cloister to be among us rough-skinned men.’

Thomas looks at her again: her straight back, stiff shoulders. He says nothing.

‘And what about you, Brother Thomas? Will you return to the cloister?’

‘One day,’ he says. ‘It is a good life.’

‘It’s a good life,’ the pardoner agrees, ‘though I cannot see that it will last too much longer.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The monasteries are too rich,’ the pardoner starts carefully, gesturing towards the shore. ‘Think of the ends to which our dukes and earls go to find their children advantageous marriages, and yet the finest match in all England would be that between the Abbot of Westminster and the Abbess of Sion. With wealth like that, such men as your man Giles Riven, well, they will find a way to get hold of it, by hook or by crook, and when they do, all the monasteries and convents and priories and friaries will be snaffled into someone’s hunting bag before a single summer is out.’

The pardoner is interrupted by a shout from the mast. The boy has seen something. All the sailors stop what they are doing.

‘What is it?’ Cobham shouts up.

‘Balinger,’ the boy calls down. ‘Moving fast, maybe ten oars, maybe more. Mainsail up, making for the foreland.’

Thomas rolls to his feet and joins Katherine at the bow. Across the water one of the boats is moving fast, with a bank of oars that dip rhythmically and propel the craft forward in definite steps. Cobham shouts orders and the sailors run to new tasks, easing the sails to let them slip the wind. The ship relaxes under their feet. They wait.

‘Changed course,’ the boy shouts down. ‘Coming towards us.’

Cobham swears again and shouts more orders. The crew reset the sails and the carrack lurches. Cobham jams the tiller over so that she slews eastwards, out to sea.

There is another long silence. The sailors are tense.

‘Well?’ Cobham shouts.

‘Coming on after us,’ the boy cries.

There is a groan.

‘Bloody pirates,’ Cobham says. ‘No good, this. Th’Earl of Warwick’s supposed to be keeping the seas clear and look at this. Unless . . .?’ An idea strikes him. ‘Who are they?’ he calls up to the boy. ‘You make ’em out?’

‘Sun’s shining on a quantity of metal.’

‘Harness?’

‘Could be. Helmets, anyway.’

‘Might even be Warwick’s men,’ Cobham supposes.

They look up at the patched sails, and the next minute they watch them sag as the wind dies. The carrack loses way. Cobham swears once more and begins pumping the tiller as if this might speed them on their course.