Kingmaker: Broken Faith (7 page)

‘It is – safe,’ Thomas says.

John starts to laugh. So does Adam. Thomas feels himself smiling.

‘He speaks!’ John laughs. ‘He actually speaks!’

Then he throws his arms around Thomas and pounds his back and Thomas can feel the bristles on his brother’s chin and the breeze of his breath on his ear. John is laughing so hard.

‘By the saints,’ he gasps, addressing Adam over Thomas’s shoulder, ‘by all the saints, we did for them, eh, Adam my boy?’

Now Adam is laughing too, and all the more so when John lets go of Thomas and pushes him away and looks at his hands.

‘Jesus, man!’ he snorts. ‘You’re covered in shit!’

They laugh again. Tears are rolling down Adam’s face. Thomas’s face aches. John can hardly breathe with laughter. But then they hear it. A terrible sound. Someone is crying. It is Elizabeth, in the house, with William. John goes. Thomas waits outside, washing his hands. Then John shouts from within.

‘Adam! Thomas!’

Adam goes in first, then Thomas. For a moment Thomas cannot see for the gloom of the house, but John and Elizabeth are gathered on the far side of the dead fire, kneeling around the boy William who is lying on her lap, one leg outstretched, the other bent with the foot tucked up under the knee of the first.

When he can see more of him, Thomas sees there is an arrow dug deep by his sternum, and across the room dust motes and smoke particles swirl in a thin stream of light that emerges unexpectedly from a hole in the wattle and daub. It is the arrow that missed Thomas. It has come through the wall to hit William, who is breathing very fast and has a glossy circle of blood spreading on his shirt while his mother clutches him to her, pressing his body to hers, rocking him as she might have done when he was an infant, only she is moaning a high-pitched constant cry. Next to her the boy’s father is on his knees, helpless. He looks up at Thomas and there are tears in his eyes and blood on his cheeks. Adam stands mute.

It doesn’t take long and when it’s over Thomas turns and goes back out to the boy and the archer in the orchard. They are standing side by side, their caps off. One – the younger of the two, the one Thomas punched – is knock-kneed, the blonde down on his chin catching the sunlight, his pale eyes clear and very frightened. The other is darker, with a faint and ugly moustache above his lips which are curled in a sneer of defiance to mask his fear. They look up at Thomas when he comes out, and then back at the dead man at their feet, at his wounds where bubbles of blood rise and pop gently.

‘Come,’ Thomas tells them. Something warns him that these two must not be the very first thing John sees when he emerges from the house. He takes them with him to check the other bodies beyond the fence.

‘Stand over there,’ he says.

The leader of the band is still alive, but Thomas doubts it will be long before that changes. He is holding Thomas’s arrow in his chest, and his horse is cropping the grass next to him. Beyond is another body, with an arrow in the throat.

Thomas crouches next to the first man. He is breathing quickly, his teeth are red and blood is foamy in his mouth. The man snarls and manages to spit blood at him. It is surprisingly warm and Thomas stands and wipes it from his chin and throat and he’s wondering what to do next when his brother comes out of the house and through the gateway. He has the billhook clenched in both hands and he is striding toward the dying man. Thomas steps aside. There is nothing he can do to stop this even if he wanted to.

‘Look at me,’ John tells the dying man.

The man turns away his face. John kicks his cheek.

‘I said look at me.’

The man slowly turns. He shows his red teeth.

‘God damn you,’ he snarls. ‘God damn you both.’

‘No!’ John shouts. ‘God damn you!’

John lifts the billhook and he chops it down into the man’s throat. It goes straight through the bones at the back of his neck and into the grit below. The horse bolts at the noise. John wrenches the billhook from the ground and the man’s head rolls slack and more blood gurgles in the grass. Then he turns on the two boys. He is going to kill them, too.

‘No,’ Thomas says. ‘Leave them.’

John pauses. He looks at Thomas. He frowns.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ John breathes. His face is smutted with ash and blood, and tears have made lines in his cheeks. ‘For Christ’s sake.’

He hurls the billhook across the grass and then walks back into the farmhouse where they can hear Elizabeth howling. The two boys are staring at Thomas. Then they hear the tone of Elizabeth’s cry change and they hear her shouting and then she is in the yard and they turn to see her coming at them. She is screaming, her bare feet flying, and now John is pulling at her, trying to hold her back, but she twists out of his grip and Thomas sees she has a knife in her hand. When the boys see it they react like sheep before a dog. They each dip one shoulder and then turn and run, parting so that Elizabeth does not know whom to chase.

She comes instead at Thomas, perhaps because there is no one else there. Thomas stands until she is almost on him, and she pulls back her arm to slash at him, and he can see she is mad. He steps inside her swinging arm and catches her wrist and the knife shoots from her grasp to the ground behind his feet. He tries to hold her. She pushes at him. She scratches his face. He catches her hands and he holds her at arm’s length. She is strong but he is stronger still. She has lost her headdress and her face is scarlet, smudged with ashes and snot and tears and blood and her mouth is a rectangle of rage. He can feel how hot she is. She is almost feverish.

‘Beth,’ John says. ‘Beth.’

He wants to say that it is all right, that everything will be all right, but it is not. Her son is dead. Nothing can change that. Her husband stands behind her.

‘Beth,’ John soothes. ‘Beth. Come now.’

Finding how helpless she is, she slumps. Her arms go slack and Thomas releases her. She turns and lets John wrap his arms around her and she sobs against his chest. After a moment Thomas cannot bear to witness the misery and he turns. The two boys are standing a little way off watched by Adam who has his bow nocked again.

‘What are we going to do with them?’ Adam asks.

‘They can start by burying their friends,’ Thomas says.

Elizabeth stops, turns her head. Strands of wet hair cover her face. Her eyes are already red from weeping. She points at Thomas.

‘He speaks,’ she says. ‘Dear God.’

They are all staring at him, even the two boys who know nothing of his silence. Thomas does not know what to think. He did not realise that he had not been speaking, or that he now has. But he does feel odd. He can hear the river on the rocks of the ford and some birds in the tree crowns. And there is more: it is as if a veil has been lifted. Colours are brighter. Movement is faster.

Elizabeth is still staring at him.

‘You,’ she says, pointing one long shaking bony finger at him. ‘You did this. If you had not loosed that first arrow …’

John looks down at her. He loosens his arms as she pushes him away.

‘No, Beth,’ John says. ‘It was not like that.’

‘It was,’ she says. ‘They would have only taken the horse and maybe some bread. My boy would still be alive. If you had not killed that man.’

She gestures to the body on the ground. Blood winks in the wounds and they can smell it. Thomas wonders if she is right. Doubt clouds his mind. When he saw the way the men had been when they’d first arrived at the house, he assumed they were threatening John, and he thought, Dear God. Perhaps Elizabeth is right? John glances quickly at him.

‘No, Mother,’ Adam says. ‘They meant to take everything. You saw them.’

‘But they would not have killed my William!’ she wails.

‘They would have killed us all!’

She turns on Adam with those mad eyes.

‘You are on his side,’ she says, gesturing at Thomas.

‘Beth,’ John mutters. ‘Not now. It is not about that.’

‘Don’t talk to me,’ she says, stepping away from John. ‘Don’t speak to me. You know nothing. You stand there while them that murdered my boy still live! And while the man who caused it all stops me from exacting justice. An eye for an eye, the priest says, and he – the simpleton! – he stops you!’

‘By the Mass, woman, you have gone too far now.’

‘Yes?’ she says, turning her livid gaze on him. ‘What will you do? What you always do. Drink ale by the fire.’

Now John strikes her. A backhanded blow to the face that sends her staggering. Neither Thomas nor Adam moves. The crack of the blow fades.

‘Get back in the house,’ John tells her. He rubs his knuckles and she her face. Seeing her expression, Thomas steps on the knife, pressing it flat into the grass. But she goes, and when she has gone, John is chastened.

‘I am sorry,’ he says. Thomas shakes his head. He is not sure what John is sorry for: his wife’s remarks, or for hitting her, or both.

‘We’d best get on,’ Thomas says.

‘Aye,’ John says. They summon the two boys to move the dead men, but while Thomas is washing himself he begins to feel dizzy. Pain shoots through his head, bad enough to make him clap his hands to his temples. He has to sit at the river’s bank for a long moment. He watches the boys carrying out the bodies and laying them next to one another on the grass. The boys are both snivelling, and he wonders absently about their relationships with the dead men. Sons? Brothers?

His head swims. He wonders if he will vomit. He gets up, reaches his arms deep into the river, deeper than his elbows, then he splashes water on his face, down his neck. After a moment he feels better and he sits again on the bank and watches the river slide past over the rocks. He looks around him. He sees things afresh, as if for the first time, and he wonders why he is here. He stares at his hands. They are broad and calloused, square-palmed and ingrained with dirt. Questions occur to him. What is he doing here? How long has he been here? Why is he not in Holy Orders?

‘Good question,’ his brother agrees when Thomas asks him. ‘Why aren’t you?’

Thomas just cannot remember. He feels leaden, weighed down. He can hardly open his mouth to speak such thoughts that come sluggishly to mind.

‘Last I knew of it,’ John tells him, ‘that is where you were bound. Made yourself unwelcome hereabouts, if you remember, like Adam here, always starting fights, and old Father Dominic thought you might be good for a friar, if I paid him.’

Thomas asks him where that was.

‘Lincoln way,’ John says. ‘Some priory run by canons. He said it’d keep you out of mischief.’

The boys have laid the dead bodies next to one another, still warm, and now Adam is stripping them, taking anything of value. The dead men have come like windfalls, and Thomas’s brother is suddenly rich, with horses to sell, clothes and boots to wear, coin to spend. There are bows and arrow shafts, swords, knives, steel helmets and pieces of plate, too.

They set the two boys to digging the grave under the aspens on the edge of the pasture, well below the farm. The ground here is rocky and full of roots and the boys make heavy work of it.

Beth comes out again. She is still pinched with anger.

‘We should make them dig room for two more,’ she says. ‘Three, even.’

John pretends he does not hear. He turns to Thomas.

‘What I want to know,’ he starts, ‘is how you learned to do all that.’

He mimics the action of drawing a bow.

‘You were always good with a bow, I’ll grant you that, but to kill men, like that?’

He blows out.

‘And it looked like you’ve done it before,’ he goes on, ‘and all those cuts and scrapes and what-have-yous, all over your body when you turned up. And that dint.’

He taps his temple.

‘You don’t get those writing up the gospels.’

Thomas can tell John nothing. They are silent for a long while, watching the boys dig. Adam climbs into the pit with them to help. The day wears on. When the boys have dug so deep into the earth they are up to their thighs, John stops them. He gets them to roll the dead men – naked now save for their braies – into their grave and then to shovel the black earth in on top. No one is sure about leaving any cross to mark it.

‘Plenty of people’d have just swung them in the river,’ John says. ‘Or dragged them into the next Hundred. Let those bastards over there take care of the coroner. Least we buried them. Will you say a few words, brother? Save us paying the priest.’

Thomas is lost for a moment. He stands over the raised mole of earth and is struck by the sense of having done this before. He asks the Lord to look down favourably on the men they are burying and to forgive them for what they have done, and for any other sins they may have committed in this life and then he asks for their time in purgatory to be appropriate and that when they are cleansed of sin, that the saints and martyrs will be on hand to receive them in heaven and guide them to the new Jerusalem. He crosses himself, and the others except for Elizabeth do likewise, and the crows in the trees above caw loudly as sunset comes.

‘Now what are we going to do with these two?’ John asks.

The two boys stand in their shirts and hose and linen caps and again Thomas is tugged at from within. Of what do they remind him? Of whom do they remind him? He cannot say, only that while Elizabeth wants them dead and John wants them gone, he feels some sort of responsibility for them.

‘If you put them out, then you put me out too,’ Thomas says.

There is a silence. Thomas sees John glance at Elizabeth.

‘Good riddance,’ she says.

John looks at her.

‘Let them stay tonight, if they wish,’ he says. ‘Then tomorrow, we’ll see.’

That night Thomas does not have nightmares, but the pain in his head wakes him before dawn, before the others are awake. One of the two boys is whimpering in his sleep, having a bad dream, and Thomas nudges him with his boot. The boy shifts, seems to wake, then slips back into sleep.

Thomas goes outside to wash his face in the stream. He comes to a decision, and returns to the farmhouse and shakes the first boy awake.

‘Come,’ he says, ‘gather your stuff.’