Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (51 page)

‘You seem underdressed, Thomas,’ Hastings says.

All around them are ranged men in full harness, some of it field armour perhaps – the mismatched bits and pieces they’ve scrounged, looted or had adapted for their own purposes – but armour nonetheless. Every man has steel gloves, a helmet, a staff weapon, a hammer of some sort, a sword. Thomas has nothing save a scruffy travelling coat and a blunt sword.

‘It is all I have,’ Thomas explains.

Hastings nods.

‘Take my horse,’ he says, gesturing to the squire, a skinny boy whose livery tabard hangs to his knees.

‘Won’t you need it?’ Thomas asks.

‘Not if we triumph,’ Hastings replied. ‘And if we don’t . . . well, I am in no mood for flight. If we lose today, I’d have nothing to fly to, in any case.’

‘But what will I do with it?’

‘I want you to act as my eyes on the field. Indulge me, Thomas. March and I have come to think of you as our good-luck talisman. Since that time at Newnham – do you remember? – he will not go happily into battle without you.’

Thomas nods. Is this normal? He has no idea. He is pleased to lift himself up into the saddle of the horse though, to separate himself from the fighting men. To feel the warmth between his knees. Over their steaming heads he can see the water meadows, still in shadows, all the way down to the marshy acres and the two willows.

‘Ride forward and tell His Grace we are in position now, will you?’

There are trumpeters to do that, Thomas knows, and heralds already riding to and fro, and it would hardly take a moment of Edward’s time to turn his head and look to see where Hastings’s flag is held aloft by a bearded man-at-arms. But Thomas sees this task is extended as a favour, and he thanks Hastings for his unexpected solicitousness.

‘Not a bit of it. Not a bit of it. As I say, my lord of March will want to know you are with us.’

Thomas leaves him and rides forward. Men glance up at him as he goes. Are they envious? He supposes so. He knows he would be. But then these are grim-faced men, shuffling forward as if keen not to miss the chance to swing an axe at another man. He turns the horse southwards just as the sun comes up over the eastern hills, setting the mist that billows among the trees aglow as if on fire.

He rides on towards Edward’s banner and soon through the mist he sees Tudor’s army. It is spread across the meadows five or six hundred paces away, bulking out, moving slowly up, accompanied by the usual din of drums and pipes. Flags are hoisted above their heads, and there are men in green and white livery but most are in brown and russet. Thomas shields his eyes from the low sun and he searches for Riven’s flag, or men of his livery.

He has no idea what he’ll do if he sees them. He knows he cannot fight the giant or even Edmund Riven, not now, not this day, but still, when he can see no one in Riven’s white livery, he feels the loss.

But then, he wonders, where are they? Where would they have gone? Would Tudor – or whoever claimed their free-floating loyalty – have been able to force the giant to fight? Forced Edmund Riven to mount up and ride into battle? Or having lost those men yesterday, would they have absented themselves? Gone back to Cornford Castle.

He thinks of Cornford. Thinks of Marton Hall.

He is before the first battle now, and turns and rides across its front. Men stare at up at him, and he cannot help but look back at them, their pale faces, some so young. At the centre is Edward, Earl of March, the new Duke of York, standing under his banner, moving his arms, jumping on the spot to keep warm. Around him are his best men, hard-faced veterans with axes, pikes, billhooks and hammers, all well harnessed. They stand waiting for Tudor to make a move, their hands changing grip on the shafts of their weapons, tongues running across lips, all heads turned slightly to March, waiting to take their lead from him.

Edward turns to him.

‘Everingham,’ he says.

‘My lord,’ Thomas says, but the sun is shining in his eyes. He raises his hand to block it, but finds he cannot. He needs his forearm. He is confused. Something is wrong. Instead of one sun, there are three. Each casts a halo of golden light.

‘Well?’ March asks. ‘You have a message?’

Thomas says nothing, He is too confused. He points.

‘Look,’ he says. March turns to look. He turns and he too raises his arm against the suns. Thomas notices he is casting three shadows on the frosted ground, just as if he were standing before three altar candles. Around him the soldiers start to turn, and do likewise, all with their arms up, peering into the light in the east.

‘God’s blood!’ March mutters, turning to a man next to him. ‘What in the name of Jesus is that?’

The man has no reply.

‘Anyone? Will no one tell me why in God’s name are there three suns!’

There is a note of panic in his voice. The men behind have noticed and everywhere they are asking the same thing. The movement is subtle, a shrinking, a withering, as the army takes a step back, cringing from the freakish light. Suddenly all thought of the fighting is suspended. There is a ripple of movement as men make the sign of the cross. More than one casts aside his weapon and falls to his knees.

‘It’s an omen!’ a man says.

‘Of course it’s an omen,’ March says. ‘But an omen of what?’

March looks around at his troops and Thomas sees that for once he does not know what to do, what to say. Then the two outer suns move closer together, nearer the centre sun, the larger of the three, and an even brighter ring of light springs from that central sun, to extend around each sun. The colours are of a rainbow.

‘A trinity of suns,’ Thomas thinks aloud. ‘God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.’

March stops and stares at Thomas. Then back at the suns, then at his men as they cower before the strange light.

He starts.

‘Off your horse,’ he says, half pulling Thomas from Hastings’s horse. He gives him his pollaxe and swings himself up into the saddle.

Is he going to run? No. His hands are hard on the reins as he yanks the horse around to face his men. Then he takes his hammer from his belt and uses his spurs to get the horse to rise on to its legs and thrash its head and bellow in rage.

‘Men of the Marches!’ he cries, his hammer in the air. ‘Men of the Marches! Sirs! Be not afraid! Do not dread this thing! It is a sign from God. Those three suns represent the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost! They are the Holy Trinity, sent as a sign to give us courage, to show us that the Lord God above is on our side, to show us that right will prevail! So let us be of good cheer and let us this day think to acquit ourselves as men, as we go against these His enemies right hard, to drive them from the field, for this is God’s will!’

There is a momentary pause, almost infinitesimally brief, before the man standing next to March roars, and as he roars, others join him, and still others, and then all through the army men begin raising and shaking their weapons and bellowing, and March throws himself from the horse’s saddle and stalks forward and behind him the army surges forward across the marshes towards Tudor’s battle.

IN THE DAYS
that follow the victory below Wigmore Castle, named by the heralds after the nearby village of Mortimer’s Cross, Thomas and Katherine lodge at the White Hart Inn by the river in the city of Hereford. There are the dead to be buried, wounds to be healed and scores to be settled. All that first week crowds gather in the market square beneath the guildhall to watch as whey-faced wretches are held over a broad green log, already gummed with blood and cross-hatched with axe marks, to have their heads struck off into the bloody straw below. The crowds jeer and whistle and laugh to see it done, but it turns Katherine’s stomach.

‘They like to see bears baited and women strangled,’ Thomas tells her. ‘Someone having his head chopped off is nothing to them.’

It is Grylle who insists she comes. He is intent on her and whenever Thomas is absent, which happens whenever William Hastings wants him for some errand or other, Grylle is there. She says no at first, but then is caught by the thought that perhaps this is what ladies do? Watch executions? Suddenly she fears that if she says no, he will see through her disguise, and so it is that she finds herself standing with him watching as the old man Owen Tudor is dragged to the block.

Grylle talks to her as if she is a simpleton, but she is pleased when he explains that Owen Tudor is the man who married King Henry V’s widow – which makes him the current King’s stepfather – and, worst luck for him, also the father of the Jasper Tudor, the Earl of Pembroke, the man who’d raised his banner in Wales and paid for all those Irish mercenaries now lying slaughtered in the fields above Mortimer’s Cross.

When he is standing there by the log, the old man doesn’t believe they’ll do it.

‘Thinks he’s English,’ Grylle laughs.

But when the guards remove his fur collar to keep it clean for selling on, he realises they will, and he looks wistful, his silver locks and wrinkled skin giving him an almost exotic appearance in a world where few live to celebrate their fiftieth birthday. He mutters something about being used to rest his head in more comfortable places than on the log, and just before he kneels he takes the chance to stand a moment and study the crowd.

‘Speech!’ someone in the crowd calls. ‘Come on, tell us a joke, you old Welsh goat!’

Just then Tudor catches Katherine’s gaze and he stops short. It is as if he recognises her. Katherine can feel her face flush, and next to her Grylle is puzzled and watches her reaction. Tudor shakes his head as if he cannot believe what he is seeing, and he takes a step towards her and gestures.

‘Do you know him?’ Grylle asks.

Katherine shakes her head.

‘He seems to know you.’

Before the old man can say anything more, the men behind him seize him and force him to his knees and the executioner – a butcher by trade – hacks off his head just as if he is killing a turtle.

Katherine turns away and Grylle laughs and tries to put an arm around her.

Afterwards someone sets the old man’s head on the steps of the butter cross to general laughter. It is done in revenge, someone says, for the execution of the Earl of Salisbury, and the head is canted around so that it faces the city of York to the northeast, ‘so that they can look one another in the eye’. Later someone tampers with it, a madwoman who washes his face and brushes his hair and lights more than a hundred candles around the base of the cross. No one knows where she’s come by the candles, and since they are expensive, they are quickly stolen, and soon the birds are squabbling over what remains unburied of the late Queen’s husband.

Over the following days Katherine cannot stop thinking about him, but nor, it seems, can Grylle stop thinking about her. He is around the inn all the time, usually bringing messages summoning Thomas to the castle where William Hastings and the new Duke of York are plotting their next move.

To escape Grylle’s company Katherine has resorted to assisting with the wounded, who lie in the guildhall and in the hall of the inn. The surgeons are doing what they can for the wounded men of rank whom they think may live, but for the others less fortunate, it is the women who’ve traipsed around the country after them who are called into service, and Katherine assists an elderly, broad-waisted woman who’s followed the army to France, she says, and had to repair her man after a fight more than once. She has a wen on her chin, and she says she knows how to concoct all the cures and salves she needs from hedgerow plants, and those such as yarrow, camomile or lavender. It is February, though, and none of these are available, and in their absence she pours hot wine on smaller wounds and then seals them with dry bindings and prayers.

‘Sometimes seems to work,’ she says.

But other wounds are too serious.

‘I have seen surgeons stitch flesh together as a wife might mend her man’s hose,’ the old woman tells Katherine, ‘but I lack the art and these fingers are not so dainty as once they were.’

She holds them up: they are lumpen and gnarled like tree roots.

‘You have a go,’ she tells Katherine and so Katherine tries her hand, stitching together the lips of a wound an archer has made in his own thigh with his knife while drunk.

‘Lucky,’ the old woman says, pointing to his inner thigh. ‘Been there and there’d be no stopping the blood.’

They wash the wound with the archer’s urine and a cup of wine warmed in a pot over the fire. It starts the bleeding again, but it cleanses the wound and then, while the old woman pinches the flesh together, Katherine uses a silver needle and a length of hemp and she stitches the separate parts of him together again. She is surprised at the feel of his flesh. It is firmer than she’d anticipated, and tougher, too, so that when she pulls on the needle the hemp does not cut through it, but rather brings it together in a neat seam.

‘Very tidy,’ the old woman says afterwards and Katherine thinks of the hours spent at needlework in the priory. She tries to imagine what she would have done had the Prioress paid her such a compliment.

But men keep on dying, long after the battle is over. It is those who seem to be drowning in their own blood who go first, those with wounds in their chests. Then the men with wounds in their stomachs follow, usually in great pain, vomiting endlessly or with their bellies horribly bloated. None survive. Then it is the men with no memory of the fight, men who’ve lost their helmets and who are dazed. For a while it seems as if they will recover, but they die anyway, later. And all the while the men with flesh wounds are succumbing, their limbs swelling, turning first purple then black, and emitting such a stink that men gag and prefer the smell of tallow; and there are others who convulse and twitch and cry out to the Lord in rigid terror of what awaits them.

It is better to be killed on the field, she thinks, and the old woman agrees.

And again, she wonders about the old man, Owen Tudor. Had he meant anything by the look he had given her? She still cannot decide, and yet she cannot forget it. Why would the old man single her out?