Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (64 page)

A cry goes up to suggest King Edward is coming.

‘Hold fast! The King! The King!’

‘Thanks be to sweet St John!’ a man yells. ‘The King!’

And now it is the northerners’ turn to waver.

For there is the King’s standard and under it perhaps twenty men, in best plate armour, almost impenetrable to sword thrust or hammer blow, swinging their pollaxes and driving the northerners back.

But where the King goes, so does the fiercest fight. Everyone wants to be the man to kill him, and soon ranged on the other side of the new wall of corpses are the enemies’ noblest lords. Men with plumes on their helmets, fighting with their own household men under their own banners. These are the proper soldiers. These are men who’ve trained to fight all their lives, and there is none of the clumsiness of the billmen.

Instead there is a rippling fluency of precisely delivered and shockingly powerful blows. Hammer flukes crash down and blades are thrown up. For every attack there is a defence and for every defence an attack, and the noise is one long percussive roll, like the beating of a drum, and to watch it, it is even elegant in its way, like a dance, save the men are so monstrous in their armour and the price of missing a step is a dagger point in the eye or the groin or the armpit.

And in the middle of it all, under his banner, King Edward is supreme. None can match him. His height and range are immense and he scatters all before him, throws them back, clears them out. He wades into the crowd and swings his axe, crushing hands, helmets, heads and faces, knocking weapons aside and driving on. He kills a horse with a single blow and despatches its rider with the return swing of his axe.

Beside him his men are a blur of calculated speed, defending his flanks, darting forward to finish off anyone on the ground so that he will not be stabbed from below. Thomas watches as a man in plate falls under the King’s hammer and lies stunned for a moment too long. His visor is ripped off and a dagger is punched into his face and that is that.

But no man can fight like that all day, and soon even King Edward is forced to retire, exhausted by his efforts and the heat trapped within his armour. His space is taken up first by his household men and then a succession of lesser knights until, suddenly, Thomas is back in the line again, fighting for his life once more, swinging and thrusting at the pale faces of other men. His arms are burning, his ears are ringing and his hip throbs. But on it goes, the endless furious flurry of steel, until his strength flees again.

Thomas turns and forces his way through the throng. Blood is running freely from a wound on his scalp as he limps back towards the ale wagon by the road. At the sight of the crowd of men gathered there waiting for ale he almost weeps.

But eventually he gets some, poured into his stained and dented helmet. He doesn’t care about the taste, only the fact of it. It is wonderfully strong. He sits in the snow by the side of the road and drinks it down and then rests his head in his arms and tears fill his eyes and he cannot suppress a sob though he does not know for what or whom.

He pulls off his gloves, holds out his hands, each palm stained with blood, some his own, some belonging to others, and the snowflakes melt on them, thinning the blood. His greaves are splashed royal purple where blood has hardened in a glaze and there are shreds of something else caught in the web of his sabatons. One boot is filled with warm liquid, and his toes swim in it, though whether this is blood or water, he cannot say.

At length he stands, picks up his gloves and finds a hammer lying bloodied in the snow.

‘You all right, mate?’ someone asks.

Thomas ignores him. He wonders what time of day it is, and how long they have been fighting. He wonders that there are still more men left to kill, and still more men willing to kill them. But here they are, more of them, and still more of them, moving up from the village, fresh men, yet to fight, though it seems that that is all he has been doing all day. That is all everybody has been doing all day.

But now the din of it seems to have faded, and as Thomas stumbles eastwards, he sees events as if through a pane of thick glass. Men are blurred and then sharp, their sounds are muffled and then loud, and even the sleet takes on a curious sort of beauty. He is warm, for the first time since he can remember, and as he walks gradually everything is suffused with a golden aura, as if leaking sunlight. He’s stopped shivering, he realises, and he walks on, no weapons to burden him, even his greaves and sabatons turned so light and easy to walk in. And his jack too, which has been stiff with damp and dirt for a month or more, now seems like a linen chemise floating lightly on his shoulders.

It occurs to him that perhaps he is dying.

A priest passes him and starts murmuring something but Thomas laughs and makes the sign of the cross in the air as if he were blessing a congregation and he feels light enough to dance away from the priest, and a little farther on he notices blood is dripping from his fingers and that he cannot really move them, and then he thinks that this does not matter anyway.

All he can recall is that he has to move to the King’s right flank, for that is where he is wanted, or that is where something awaits him. He knows he must get there and that when he does everything will reveal itself. He is moving up across the back of the King’s army, through the mess of wounded men. People step aside for him, stare at him as he passes. A pile of corpses is laid to one side and there are dead horses and there are women with more ale and water and a man is stumbling from the fighting, groaning like a bullock until he falls on his knees, and then to his face, and lies twitching in the snow until he is dead and no one even watches.

Thomas walks on until he finds himself stopped by a roadside and ditch brimming with a slurry of faeces, and beyond is a snow-filled marsh where black boggy lakes are skimmed with grey ice. There are stands of sedge grass and crouching alder trees misshapen by the wind and he realises he has walked the width of the field, and that he is now on the King’s right flank, behind Fauconberg’s men. A memory stirs in him again. He turns and looks down the field, watching the thousands of men fighting and dying under the broad snow-filled expanse of the sky, and then – he sees it.

The flag.

Six ravens.

Riven’s standard.

THE SENSE OF
wellbeing is gone in a snap but Thomas feels a surge of power within him, and suddenly he knows what to do.

He is running. He is jamming his helmet over his blood-soaked cap. Then he is forcing on the steel-knuckled gloves. He finds a rondel dagger lying on the ground, a foot-long tapering point of rust-flecked steel, and he snatches up a bill, a nicely made thing, with good weight and balance, and he is pushing forward, shunting men aside, and his eyes are fixed on Riven’s flag.

He is not afraid of being killed. He is too fast, too strong. He has a good weapon. He has a helmet. He has gloves. His blood is thrumming in his ears and he can hear himself roaring again.

He is shoving between the gaps in Fauconberg’s lines until he is before Riven’s flag. Alongside him are three or four of Fauconberg’s junior knights in modest harness. They are fighting with pollaxes and bastard swords. The give and take of blows is swift and practised. This is no place for a poorly armoured archer, yet Thomas forces himself forward.

Riven is unmistakable now. In fine plate, he is fighting with a long-handled hammer. He turns to trap a bill under his arm and slash its poorly protected owner across the face. Then he spins to take a blow on the languet of his hammer and he switches hands and drives the helve into a man’s face. In the single moment, he has killed two men. It has cost him almost no effort, no thought, and he is preparing to do it again. But now Thomas is before him and for a brief moment Thomas imagines Riven recognises him and hesitates.

But if he does, he does not hesitate for long.

He launches himself at Thomas and Thomas moves to parry the blow, but of course it is a feint, and Riven is on him from below. Thomas throws himself inside the blow, flinching as the hammer fluke slides across his chest, and he crashes his bill into Riven’s steel elbow.

Riven is beaten back but comes again. He goes high but hits low, catching Thomas on the knee, sending a barely manageable jolt of pain up his spine. He cracks a short-armed blow in Thomas’s face, but Thomas ducks, and then the hammer glances off his helmet. It rattles his teeth and he tastes blood but he is not dead. Riven seems surprised. Thomas goes at him. He feints, lunges, draws him left then right, and thrusts for his armpit. But he trips. Staggers. Is down. The bill is gone. Riven rears over him, raises his hammer in both hands. Thomas is down among the dead, nearly one of them. He rolls. The bodies around him trap him, hold him fast, but before Riven can bring down the hammer one of Fauconberg’s men intervenes with a jab. He catches Riven and turns him, distracting him long enough for Thomas to hurl himself forward with the rondel dagger in his fist. He can drive it up under Riven’s steel skirt. But Riven grips him and hauls him upright. They are face to face. Thomas presses his cheek to Riven’s visor to stop him butting him. He forces his right arm free and slides the dagger up his ribs. He will stab him in the armpit.

Then the giant arrives.

He has the pollaxe. The pollaxe he reclaimed from Walter. He swings it at Thomas’s spine and connects with a force that rips Thomas from Riven’s embrace and casts him across the heaving layer of steel-clad bodies that cover the ground. He twists with the pain and falls on his back. He lies there, unable to move for the agony. He stares up at the crisscross of weapons above him, watching the giant batter away at two of Fauconberg’s men, watching Riven kill the billman who’d earlier saved his life. He feels the man sprawl across his legs and then he feels nothing. It is as if he is floating in warm water, his head swaddled, his hearing muffled.

He wonders again if he is dying.

He thinks of Katherine. He wants thoughts of her to be his last. He wants to tell her that he is sorry. Sorry for dying here, sorry for leaving her.

Above him the fight continues. Men fall by his side. There is blood in the air, scraps of metal and shards of splintered wood, a tooth, something gory.

Thomas watches the swings and blows, back and forth. He watches the snowflakes fall, and he wonders if this is what death is. No triumphant entry through heaven’s gate, or agonised descent into hell, only this: detachment, an eternity spent on the field where you died, an eternity spent ruing all your sins of commission, and all your sins of omission.

But now he finds he can move. His fingers are coming to life.

Can it be that he is not dead?

He moves his head.

He lurches, rolls over. There is a brief lull in the fight. Men are pulling back, taking stock. Exhausted men are retiring. New men are coming up.

Thomas is on his hands and knees; he has only one thought in his mind: to get away. He begins crawling, one hand after the other, slithering through the blood, back across the armoured corpses that are covered in gore and shit. Dead men stare up at him with noses smashed and mouths and chins slashed open. Some are still alive, spitting blood, bleeding through their ears. He gasps for breath and the pain is a burning band around his chest.

He can hear himself moaning like a beast in agony as he crawls through the line of Fauconberg’s men and slumps against a corpse. He rests his cheek against the dead man’s breastplate and closes his eyes.

He saw the giant. He knows that pollaxe. He should have a broken spine. He should have a fluke buried a handspan in his back. And yet. Here he is. Alive.

He raises himself and crawls on. The blood is pooled between the bodies, deep enough to drown a man. Everything is sodden with it. Everything is red. He finds a bill in the crook of a dead man’s elbow and hauls it out. He stabs it in the bloody slush and levers himself up on to one knee.

The pain is terrible, yet not as bad as it should be. He inches his arm around behind his back to press against the wound. Then he wheezes a laugh. So that is it. The ledger. The giant hit the ledger. Thomas swings the bag around to see where the fluke has punched a hole through the leather, and he puts his finger in the wound up to his bloody knuckle.

It is the pardoner’s final lifesaving gift.

And now sound returns and Thomas can hear the crash of steel and the shouting of men as the fighting continues. Fauconberg’s line is giving once more, bowing towards him. Riven and his men are forcing their way through and if Fauconberg’s line is thinned any further, then the northerners will break it. They will have won and the battle will be over. Once this flank is turned, then the whole army will be wrapped up, pushed down the hill and murdered at will. Some of them may try to run, he supposes, but then he remembers the bridge. That is as far anyone’ll get. That’s where the remainder will die. Perhaps that is why the northerners broke the bridge in the first place: not to stop them coming, but to stop them leaving.

There are no trumpets calling for men to bolster the line, for the trumpeters have fled, or they’ve been forced to throw down their instruments and join the line, and anyway even if they were there to blow the signal, there are no men to obey it. There is no reserve left.

This is it.

He whom they call Edward Plantagenet, formerly the Earl of March, then the Duke of York, had wanted God’s judgement on his right to be king, and God has delivered it: he has no right, and so now all his men must pay the price of that gamble.

Riven’s flag is carried high as he comes between the ranks: Thomas can see him, hacking through; and there is the giant, just behind him, crashing men aside with that pollaxe. Thomas wonders whether his one-eyed son is there too, his wound hidden under his visor.

He thinks back to the moment he first saw Riven, when he first saw Katherine. He thinks of their time in Calais, and then the summer at Marton Hall. He thinks of the hills in Wales, and that week in the inn in Brecon. He thinks of Walter, and of Dafydd and Geoffrey, and all the Johns. He thinks of the Dean. Of Margaret. And now it is over. He will never avenge any of them now.