Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (62 page)

And the wind snatches the voice away again. Then returns it.

‘Into your hands, O Lord, we commend our souls in the certainty that what we do is right . . .’

But there is something else now. Thomas feels it at his back: a stirring, a restlessness that spreads through the archers, the questioning hum of conversation as men look up from their prayers, and turn their cheeks to feel the wind. They begin looking to the skies, peering up at the pale snow clouds, checking the flags on their poles.

‘Look at that,’ the Welshman says, pointing.

Thomas has seen it. Above the priest’s hat, the herald’s fishtailed battle banner has fallen slack. It hangs there on its beam, as if broken. Others join it, settling down. The ribbons on the Bishop’s hat settle. He removes his hand and it remains in place.

The wind has died.

Thomas can feel the archers holding their breath, not daring to move, not daring to speak, not daring to do anything lest it break the spell. No one moves. Even the priest has stopped his tongue and is looking up, waiting.

The snow still falls from the grey sky, each flake as large as a penny, exquisite and delicate, but they float, they drift. They no longer pitch in Thomas’s eyes.

The archer who has doubted the efficacy of the Bishop’s prayer stands up.

‘Fuck me,’ he says.

Then the rest of the line, all of them, stand as one, staring, mouths open as the real miracle occurs.

The banner above the priest flaps, once, twice, and then it twists on its lance and, unbelievably, it slowly swings on its hoops, turning from the south, to the west, and then all the way around to the north, where the wind picks it up again, and it becomes a finger, pointing northwards, pointing towards the enemy. Showing them which way to go.

And the flags all along the battle slowly turn on their lances to join it.

The wind has turned.

‘It’s a miracle!’ the Welshman shouts. He seizes Thomas and shakes him. ‘A bloody miracle!’

And now the priest is on his feet shouting and gesturing to the flags. No one can hear him for the din of men in armour and the roar of voices. Instantly Grylle is there, thundering up from the flank to take new orders. There is a surge of energy in the ranks. Men seem to forget their hunger, their thirst, the filthy snow. All they can think about now is how the wind will carry their arrows further than the enemies’.

‘This won’t be so bloody bad,’ the Welshman says. ‘We can fucking win this!’

But how long will the wind last?

‘Come on,’ Thomas finds himself muttering. ‘Come on! Advance, damn you! While the wind is with us.’

Drums ripple into life. Pipes pipe up. Trumpets signal. More messengers canter to and fro across the front. The archers are impatient, trying to press forward.

‘Come on,’ someone shouts. ‘Come on!’

But the wind only seems to freshen on their backs and the snow only seems to thicken, and Grylle is back, stopped in front of them and turning his horse so that all they can see is its powerful rump and dressed tail. He raises a hand and checks along the line where more officers in Fauconberg’s livery are stationed, about a hundred paces apart from one another.

They drop their hands as one, and as one the men start up the slope.

AS THEY BREACH
the ridge, they are able to see across the plateau for the first time, and the line comes to a rippling stop. A man pushes into Thomas’s back.

‘Piss and vinegar,’ someone murmurs.

There must be twenty thousand of them, standing in deep ranks, divided into three battles. They are standing on the higher ground, under their banners and flags, and they are shouting and crashing their weapons together.

Thomas feels his bowels liquefy.

‘Dear God!’ he breathes. Then he tries to imagine what Walter would say. ‘Steady,’ he whispers. Then more loudly: ‘Steady!’

One man turns to run. It is the boy Perers. Thomas flings an arm out, catches him, spins him around. Walter would have punched him. So Thomas does so too: across the face, a backhand to make his knuckles sting. Perers slumps in a twist of limbs.

‘Up.’ Thomas bends and hauls him to his feet. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘The wind is with us. God is with us. Didn’t you hear the priest? If we can just get our shots off, we’ll live to tell our grandchildren of this day.’

Perers stares at him. Blood and snot leak from his nostril. There is a long moment, before Perers nods and smears his lip. Thomas nods too, then picks up the lad’s new bow and passes it to him. His own hands have stopped trembling.

Grylle has turned his horse. Facing them, he has to shield his eyes from the snow.

‘We’ll carry on to within a bowshot,’ he shouts. ‘Then loose a ranging shot.’

The archers understand. They are touching their weapons, their helmets, what armour they have. They tighten the points on their jacks, buckle belts, finger rosaries. They begin settling themselves, taking deep breaths. Those with the sense or experience to have kept something back to drink do so now, tipping their heads quickly. Thomas settles the ledger in the small of his back. It is a comforting weight, but still an unwanted burden.

Then they begin forward again. They start stretching their shoulders, rolling their arms over. Thomas nocks an arrow and keeps walking: twenty paces, thirty, forty. All the while he hunches and relaxes his shoulders, gently easing the string back, flexing the big-bellied bow, trying to get some life into the frozen wood. He makes a hundred unconscious calculations as to the wind’s strength, its direction, the way it gusts. He thinks about the snow, the flurries. He thinks about the field. He looks for advantage, for disadvantage, for anything that might influence the course of the day to come.

The plateau is not flat, but tilted slightly, from the east down to the west, and from the north down to the south. He can see what looks like a stand of trees away across to his left, and there seems to be nothing beyond, as if the ground drops away, down into a river valley, perhaps.

Thomas sees how well the northerners have chosen their spot. The valley protects their flank, and there will be no chance of Fauconberg’s riders turning them as they had done at the bridge the day before. He wonders if there are any bridges over the river, or if the northerners have broken them down as a precaution.

And there ahead, arranged in deep ranks across the high ground, is the mass of the enemy archers, scarcely visible in the snow.

What must they be thinking? This morning they’d been in the perfect position, almost unassailable, with the wind at their backs and a falling slope at their feet. They’d have been wondering how they could lose. But now?

‘Here!’ Grylle calls.

They are now within a long bowshot of the enemy.

Each man finds himself the space he needs. They shout to one another to spread that way and this way, forwards and back. They loosen the strings on their arrow bags and shake out the shafts. Thomas nocks his own bow. Puts a few shafts in his belt.

He can hardly see the enemy. The wind is not strong, but the sky is full of snow.

Each man stoops to take a piece of the frozen earth in his mouth, just as his grandfather might have done at Agincourt, and to make his sign of the cross on the sod where he’ll stand and possibly die, and for a moment there is silence. Thomas fiddles a nugget of frozen black soil and places it in his mouth. It is tannic and gritty as it melts on his tongue. He holds it aside in his cheek.

Grylle signals and all along the line the captains and the vintenars call out:

‘Nock!’

There is a swathe of movement. Thomas nocks a shaft.

‘Draw!’

‘Loose!’

There. It is done.

The first arrows shoot away with a drumming of strings and grunts of six thousand men. The sky flickers and darkens. He stops and watches, peering through the snow. Will they land on the enemy? There is a distant drum roll. Misty figures twitch in the enemy lines. They are within bowshot.

‘Nock!’ he cries. ‘Draw!’ The fletch of his second shaft tickles his cheek. ‘Loose!’

Walter once said you could tell who was going to win a fight after the first three or four salvoes. Whoever got the most in first would win. They nock, draw and loose three times. More than fifteen thousand arrows.

And in return there is a ripple of something thickening in the snow ahead. The northerners’ arrows land with a sudden spitting patter. They are like bristles in the ground, like a strange crop that no one’ll ever want to eat. They are fifty paces short.

The men laugh. They are delighted.

‘Move up!’ the vintenars bellow. ‘Move up!’

And already the men are charging forward. They stop shy of the ground where the enemy’s arrows are burying themselves with low puffs of soil and ice.

‘Nock! Draw! Loose!’

They repeat the process until they are out of arrows. Thomas’s back is burning. His fingers are skinless and raw. All around him men are grunting with the effort. The rate of firing is fast, ten a minute, but slowing. Men become clumsy as they tire. After two minutes they are done and are left scarlet-faced, heaving for breath, hands on knees, one vomiting with the effort. Sweat stings his eyes and the fog from their bodies blurs his vision.

‘Arrows! Arrows! More shafts! Quickly now!’

And how is it with the enemy? Over the field he can see and hear the impact of the arrows. He can see their line buckle, thin and bunch, but it seems the poorly armoured enemy archers are paying dearly.

‘They’ll not take much more of this,’ Thomas shouts. ‘They must come at us!’

No commander can stand to watch his men take such punishment. Already there is a low wall of the dead at the northerners’ feet and everywhere wounded men disrupt the living. The northerners will have to break one way or other, he thinks, forwards or backwards, and it would be better for them if they broke forwards.

Around him men are still crying out for more arrows. They begin reusing the northerners’ shafts, plucking them from the ground and sending them back the way they’ve come. The damaged arrows thrum and throb in the air. The broken fletches buzz like wasps, each one with a dying fall as it speeds out of earshot.

But now the boys are running forward, each weighed down with five or six damp linen bags full of arrows. They duck through the ranks and drop them at the archers’ feet. The archers rip them open and get to work.

‘Nock! Draw! Loose!’

They do not need to be told.

And yet the northerners still hold their line. They continue loosing their arrows, and all the while their arrows fall short.

‘They cannot see,’ Thomas guesses. ‘They cannot see their arrows are not reaching us.’

Every man is loosing just as he can now, scrabbling for arrows from the ground and from the boys as they pass. Thomas has no breath to order the salvoes, only enough to nock, draw and loose.

On it goes, full five minutes. How can they stand it?

Then the boys slip away, some sixth sense warning them to go, and across the fields the trumpets blare and the flags move forwards and the colours of the enemy line change. The line solidifies. Gone are the muted buffs and russets of the archers’ jacks, and now men in heavy armour and bright livery coats begin moving through.

They come forward in companies under their flags but first they must negotiate the corpses of their archers strewn thick as autumn leaves on the blood-slicked ground. The snow is in their eyes as they tramp forward, down from their hill, away from their advantage, and Thomas shouts at his men to use every last arrow they have.

‘Back!’ he shouts, gesturing. The enemy front is a hundred paces away. ‘Come on! Leave them be.’

They turn and run, Thomas with them, bunching up and streaming back across the field towards the gaps left between the battles of Edward’s men-at-arms. He is spent, weak as a kitten, his arms and back afire. For a moment he can hear nothing above Edward’s men roaring and bellowing and banging their weapons as they advance against the oncoming northerners. Trumpets shriek and drums thunder and everywhere men are shouting their cries for Warwick or Fauconberg, but the mass of them are shouting out for King Edward, and above all other flags and banners, it is the King’s standard that draws the eye. Under it is the huge figure of Edward himself, wielding a pollaxe as if it is a toy, a mere stick, and all around him his men are hurrying forward to meet the enemy.

Soon Thomas is in among the men-at-arms and then he is through the lines, where the archers are wild, savage with the glee of having survived. They are roaring with laughter, suddenly very physical, hugging one another, kissing one another, thumping one another, congratulating themselves on a thing done well. Every man is steaming, as if on fire, but they’ve suffered not one casualty. Not one.

The archery duel is over, and there is no question which side has carried it.

But the laughter stops and each man is silent as back up the slope the two lines meet. The din is a savage rippling crash, the shriek of steel sliding against steel and the drumming thunder of a thousand hammers falling on their fellows.

Now the ale has arrived, dragged up the slope from the village on the beds of three wagons pulled by teams of six long-horned oxen, and there are fires being lit. Ale and bread and soup, chilled and viscous, better than anything Thomas has ever tasted, drunk from his helmet. Men are letting ale pour down their chins and into their clothes, laughing again. One ale woman has fists bigger than Thomas’s, and in one of them she carries a stout club with which to keep order. She opens the spigots on the barrels but keeps her gaze fixed on the hillside behind them, ever alive to the sway of the fighting, knowing that she’ll never see another dawn if it goes badly.

Thomas gulps his ale and tears at his hard black bread. Christ, it is good. John Perers appears at his side, looking crafty, pleased with himself. He has to raise his voice above the noise of the fighting and the shouting men, the constant wall of noise that rolls back from the front like a physical force.

‘Saw that flag o’ yours,’ he shouts.

Thomas lurches, pours away his ale, puts aside the bread. Takes Perers’s elbow.