Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (21 page)

‘Sir John is safe in his bed in Calais. We are here. We’ll do it Thomas’s way.’ Richard turns to the men. ‘Take off your boots and jacks,’ he says. ‘Drop everything but your bows and arrow bags, and bring a dagger each. Hurry now!’

The men begin to remove their equipment. A moment later they are in shirtsleeves and hose.

‘Fuck’s sake!’ Walter snaps, throwing his jack on the ground. ‘No way to fight a war.’

‘Walter,’ Geoffrey warns.

They can hear the drums change now, signalling the Newnham garrison advance. A trumpet blows.

‘Quick now! Kit! Help me.’

Katherine arrives breathing hard and begins helping Richard out of his armour.

‘Come on! Come on!’ Richard urges as her hands fumble with the leather points. ‘That’ll do! That’ll do. Stay here with it, Kit, and keep a good eye on it. With God’s blessing we’ll be back soon.’

One by one the archers slip into the mud of the marsh, freezing water up to their midriffs.

‘Christ on His cross!’ Walter is saying as if staying dry is his right. ‘We’ll drown!’

The water in the marsh is rich and brown, brackish with seawater, its margins stippled with sedge and reeds. Birds’ nests are secreted in the rush thickets and the mud draws and sucks at their legs. The smell is ripe. Thomas half gags.

They have about three hundred paces to go, each man carrying his bow and arrow bag above his head. To their left is the river, sluggish in the spring sunlight, ahead is Newnham. On their right, beyond the road, stands the copse of trees behind which the horsemen are hidden.

They go silently dipping through the stagnant waters. The sky ahead darkens briefly, as if a flock of starlings has come between them and the sun, and Thomas looks up to see a flight of arrows flit from the market square. Each shaft looks so delicate from that distance, like the most considered stroke of the best sharpened reed, but then comes the irregular flurry of thumps and cracks as the arrows hit stone, steel and flesh, followed by the cries of the wounded men.

‘Quick!’ Richard urges. ‘Quickly now.’

The water is thickening, fouler still.

There is a salvo of arrows from Somerset’s men in return.

‘Hold on to some of them fuckin’ arrows,’ Walter urges, but more shafts fly. The archery duel will last only minutes, until one side exhausts their arrows, and then they’ll retreat to let the billmen or the men-at-arms take up the mêlée. Once their arrows are spent, the lightly armed archers will fall easy prey to the horsemen with their lances, hammers, swords, axes and God knows what else. They’ll be driven into the river behind them.

‘My foot!’ Dafydd gasps. He’s spilled his bow and shafts into the water, and is stuck fast in the silt. Thomas grabs one arm, Owen the other, and they haul him out of the ooze. Swirling clouds of black mud roll under the surface as he comes free and the smell makes them retch.

Thomas surges forward. The thought that Riven might be waiting beyond the dyke makes him numb. He wishes he had the giant’s pollaxe with him now, but he’s left it at the fort. Then he stops. The giant. Of course. The giant will be there. He will be protecting Riven again. At the thought of the giant and his thumb on his eyeball, Thomas wavers. What is he doing? Why is he here? He is a canon of the Order of Gilbert. He stops. The others catch him.

‘All right, Northern Thomas?’ Red John asks. ‘Not thinking of turning tail on us now, are you?’

Thomas gathers himself. He thinks of the Dean. He hears that sound of steel in flesh. He thinks of Riven holding out Alice’s beads and something comes over him, like a glove over a hand, the same feeling that made him throw the staff at Riven in the first place. He surges forward and finds himself at the front of the men once more.

The marsh shelves into grainy mud, with patches of slick green waste to one side, its edges crusted with lichen-green, stinking slime. They slip as they scramble across the reach, two of them going down into the ooze, neither dropping his bow, both emerging with eyes white against the brown faces. They struggle to the water’s edge where it solidifies into land against the dyke.

‘Keep down,’ Richard calls.

The men are crawling out of the water and they lie gathering their breath on the side of the dyke. Thomas crawls to see what is happening, and is about to poke his head over the top when he feels them, through his knees and the palms of his hands. The horsemen have set off.

‘God’s teeth!’ Dafydd hisses. ‘They’re close!’ There is fear in his voice, echoed in the face of every other man.

‘Keep down and spread out!’ Richard calls. ‘Come on, get ready! We’ll have but one chance at this. Nock. Nock, damn you!’

Walter has his bow gripped sideways, an arrow nocked, three more tucked through the points of his muddy hose. The others fumble for their bows, nock their arrows and copy him, crouching in the reeds, giving themselves space to loose. Richard crawls up on the tussocky grass next to Thomas, peering over the dyke from behind a clutch of reeds.

‘Here they come,’ he says. ‘Wait for it. Wait for it!’

Thomas can feel the weight of the horses through the ground. A stalk trembles before his nose. Then he hears them: their hooves on stone, the jangle of harness and the shouting of men gearing themselves up for the slaughter.

‘Now!’ Richard cries.

The archers stand.

‘Draw!’ Walter snarls.

One of the horsemen sees them at this last minute and flinches, hauling at his reins, trying to bring his lance around. Thomas’s arm is fully cocked, the linen string to his ear. He cannot hold this pose for more than a long breath but he swings his bow along the line of the charging men, looking for anything that might identify Riven or the giant. There! A flash of that red coat. Or there! That white livery!

‘Loose!’

He looses. He cannot miss. None of them can. Their arrows slam into the charging horsemen from five paces. The din and the violence are terrible. Riders are hurled from their mounts. Horses slew, or rear. They fall and throw riders. Man and horse scream together. A horse is upended and lands with a crack. Another cartwheels, its shadow flicking over a man below, sparing him, before landing on another, killing him instantly. One is trampled before he hits the ground in a drum of skittering hooves.

Thomas watches his arrow crash through the breathing holes of a man’s helmet, so hard and so close that the steel visor opens in ragged flanges to admit the bodkin head. He is plucked from his saddle and vanishes from sight. His horse swerves, hits another, screams and crashes to the ground.

‘Nock!’

Thomas nocks and seeks the man in the white livery.

‘Draw!’

Where is he? Where is he? He is already down.

‘Loose!’

Thomas lets the shaft go at another, whose armour is swathed in sackcloth. He hits him in the stomach and he jumps in his saddle and another arrow hits his horse and knocks it aside. The man goes down under it.

They loose three more salvoes. From that distance an arrow will pass through a man, armour or no. It will pin him to the ground, or his horse, or whatever is behind him. It will pin two men together. As they nock for the fourth time Richard raises his arm.

It is over. It is done.

The archers lower their bows.

There is no one left standing. There is only a single white horse, galloping into the distance, stirrups flying. The road is filled with the dead bodies and the stink of shit and blood and ruptured guts.

A horse is still trying to get up, but has lost the use of its back legs, and is dragging them behind as it crawls on, screaming with the pain. Geoffrey raises his bow and looses an arrow that fizzes across and catches the horse behind the jaw. It collapses. Another lies wheezing, its chest rising and falling, its eye suddenly enormous. Blood spreads from an arrow that is buried up to the fletch in its shoulders. The horse’s black lips vibrate as it gasps for air. It seems this is the only thing left alive. Walter takes three paces from the top of the dyke, down into the road, steps over a dead man and smashes the animal’s skull with a lead maul.

No one says anything. Everyone is breathing heavily. Owen turns away from what he has done. Dafydd puts his arms about his brother and holds him as he sobs. He soothes him in a language only they can understand before breaking into English.

‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘It’s all right. It’s over now.’

One of the Johns vomits.

Another horse shudders and whinnies. It is trapped under the body of another horse. It raises its head, its neck arched, and stares at them. It is looking to man for help. Walter crosses to it, bends down, lets his hands drift over the heaving chest, down to where the animal’s foreleg is trapped under the dead horse. It is bent where it should have been straight. Walter shakes his head sorrowfully, then stands and crashes the maul down again. The animal subsides. Walter peers over to look at the rider the horse has pinned to the ground.

He laughs. ‘Like a bloody hedgehog.’

Richard is silent, pale-faced, unmoving on the bank.

Thomas feels weighed down with regret.

One by one they step down and into the road. Blood leaks from between armoured joints, clots in mail. Are any of the men alive? Does that one move? Does this one raise his gloved hand in a gesture? There is a gentle scrape, like a man breathing out, and a grate of steel on stone.

Each archer is drawn to the rider he killed first. Thomas stands frozen. Then: Christ! A man has caught his ankle. He can hardly see him for he is pinned by the weight of a horse.

Thomas pulls free.

The man’s fingers go slack.

Walter steps past, over the bulk of the horse, peers down at the man. He bends and lifts the man’s visor. He smiles. It is almost tender. Then he raises the maul and brings it down with a gristly crunch.

Walter tucks the maul under his arm and begins undoing the man’s chinstrap.

‘I’ll have this,’ he says.

Thomas turns away. He can still feel the man’s fingers on his ankle. He finds the man in red, lying face down, crumpled against the far bank. Thomas thinks he recognises the coat. It is the same madder red. As he turns the body, it slips to the road. Thomas’s arrow is broken, jammed in the visor. He inserts his knife into the hinge on the other side and levers it open.

It is not Riven.

It is a man with a thick moustache and a spider’s web of blood spreading across his face. His eyes are open, curiously blue, looking into the far distance. Thomas waves away a blowfly.

‘May God have mercy on your immortal soul,’ he murmurs. ‘And grant you eternal rest.’

He makes the sign of the cross over the man and then Richard appears at his shoulder.

‘Let me see,’ he says, and he stares into the dead man’s face.

‘It is not him,’ he says. ‘He was never here. Never here.’

He gestures across at the man in white, lying between his horse’s legs.

There are black marks on the man’s tabard but they are not birds. They are ornate, curlicued crosses, arranged in the same three, two, one pattern that distinguishes Riven’s livery.

‘Look,’ he says. ‘Kit mistook the banner.’

The dead man is fat, with leathery skin, quite elderly; he does not even look like an Englishman.

Richard is in despair. Geoffrey and the other men pass among the dead men, lifting their visors where they have not already been shaken loose.

‘We will find him,’ Thomas says. ‘I know it.’

Richard nods.

They stand like that for a moment, shoulder to shoulder. They become aware of a presence. A man stands behind them. It is the captain of the Newnham garrison, the one who lent Richard the practice bow. He stares at them speculatively. Behind him stand his sergeant and three of the garrison ordinaries, bills in hand. They are the men who’d jeered at them as they had passed over Newnham Bridge. Now they are silent, staring at the carnage, counting the bodies. The bells in both churches in the village begin ringing again.

‘It is you, isn’t it?’ the captain asks. ‘You’re the archers who can’t shoot to save yourselves a barrel of ale.’

Richard stands up and wipes the blood from his palm on the front of his shirt. He is about to say something when his attention is taken by something else, over the man’s shoulder. A party of men in costly burnished plate is walking towards them. One of them carries a blue and murrey battle standard emblazoned with a white lion, the others their pollaxes.

The captain turns to see what Richard is looking at. As soon as he sees who it is, he steps off the road with a slight bow. A huge knight with his visor raised to form a peak on his helmet leads the party. His armour is scratched and dented, and there is another man’s blood over his plated lower legs. He stops in front of Richard and stares down at him.

‘Who in the name of the great God above are you?’ he asks.

Richard takes a breath.

‘I am Richard Fakenham, my lord,’ he says. ‘Of Marton Hall in Lincolnshire. My father is Sir John Fakenham. He is my lord Fauconberg’s man and we are his company.’

He gestures at the archers, who stand perfectly still. The man stares at him, then at them. He is very big, almost a giant, and very young, with wide blue eyes and fair hair.

‘Then, Richard Fakenham,’ the man says slowly, ‘I owe you a debt of thanks. For you have saved many lives here today. I do not know how you came to be stationed here along this road, but without your famous action there would be many more widows and orphans and childless fathers alive today.’

He bends to pick up one of the spears the horsemen had been carrying. It is more than twice his height. He peers up at the tip to make his point.

‘I shall not forget you,’ he says, turning back to Richard. ‘I shall not forget you, Richard Fakenham. You or your men, d’you hear? England needs men like you, Richard Fakenham. I need men like you. If ever you need a favour of me, I hope you will ask. I hope I shall be able to help you in return.’

Richard bows.

The man shakes his hand. Thomas whispers in Geoffrey’s ear.

‘Who is that?’

Geoffrey looks at him as if he has gone too far this time.

‘Give me strength. Who is that? Who is that? D’you really know nothing?’