Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (17 page)

Two of the Johns return with a pile of sticks and lumps of coal, which they light with some baked linen, a good black flint and a steel, and they soon produce a new source of discomfort as foul black smoke fills the tent.

Geoffrey then gives Thomas five silver coins, a sack and four jugs and sends him with Katherine to buy bread and ale.

‘Don’t spend it on pretty clothes, Girly,’ Walter calls as they leave.

When they are away Thomas asks her how long she thinks it will be before her sex is discovered.

‘I don’t know,’ she admits. ‘But what else can I do but keep up the pretence? Besides, if you are right that God has a special purpose in mind for us, well, we shall see.’

It is on Thomas’s tongue to remind her that Joan of Arc was burned not for being a witch, but for disguising her sex under a man’s clothes, against the strictures of Deuteronomy. Does she even know who Joan is? He doubts it suddenly. And whatever will they do to her when they do? He thinks of the man hanging in the tree outside Boston, or the wretch quartered in the marketplace in Calais, with his head sent elsewhere, or the pardoner’s story of the man with his ear nailed to a post, and the whore with her broken arm. There seem to be any number of ways to punish a man, or a woman.

‘Besides,’ she goes on, ‘Walter only calls me that to hurt me. It seems that is how he is.’

Thomas nods. He supposes she is right.

‘He is like a dog my father once had,’ he says. ‘He used to nip the sheep’s heels, and we lost more than one lamb because of it, so in the end my brother took him out and drowned him. After he’d done it, we regretted it.’

Katherine glances at him, but says nothing, and Thomas wonders why he has told her the story. He has never talked of home to anyone since he left. He does not often think of the place now. He had been happy to leave the farm. It was a harsh life, always cold, usually dark, and every day mutton. His brother too, and his brother’s wife, pregnant with their first child, always looking at him. He knew that being away, being in cloister, was the best thing that could have happened to him.

They walk on until they find some women willing to sell them ale and bread. By the time they return to the tent a cauldron of beans hangs over the fire.

Geoffrey has also spent money on new-made clothes. He hands Thomas and Katherine each a linen shirt, two hoods – one blue, one red – two pairs of blue hose that look as if they might fit Thomas but not Katherine, a travelling cloak such as the other men wear, and a thick quilted jacket each.

‘Won’t stop an arrow or a blade,’ he says as Thomas shrugs his on, ‘but then almost nothing does. Leastways, nothing we can afford.’

Thomas has never had new clothes before. The jack hangs stiffly from his body while Katherine’s reaches below her thighs and she pulls it tight about her, so that it becomes more like a long coat than a jacket. Geoffrey hands Thomas the giant’s pollaxe.

‘Keep it somewhere safe,’ he says.

Just then Richard Fakenham comes into the clearing by the fire.

‘Any news?’ Geoffrey asks.

‘The Earl of Warwick has sailed for Ireland,’ he says, throwing his helmet through the doorway of the tent and on to a pile of sheepskins. ‘Gone to see his grace the Duke of York. Means we’ll be stuck here awhile.’

Geoffrey groans. Walter spits a fob of white mucus into the fire.

‘Still, at least we’ll be able to prepare ourselves,’ Richard continues. He sits on the pile of sheepskins and unties the spurs from his boots. ‘The boys haven’t loosed an arrow in a week.’

Walter nods.

‘Where is Sir John?’ Geoffrey asks. ‘Is he lodged in town?’

‘He is. With old Lord Fauconberg. They were in France together, and you know how it is with them. He’ll take supper and sleep there, I suppose.’

‘Is that soup ready?’

After they have eaten dinner, Walter leads the company through the sprawl of tents to the butts. Thomas and Katherine follow along, a step or two behind, not yet accepted.

‘Right,’ he says. ‘Let’s get busy.’

The men begin unfastening their bows, shaking out their arrows on the mud. They nock their strings and begin stretching their arms and shoulders, limbering up ready to shoot.

‘You ever use a bow?’ Walter asks Thomas.

‘Not for a few years,’ Thomas says. ‘Not since—’

He stops. He has not used a bow since he joined the priory. Until then he had spent every Sunday after Mass with the other villagers on the butts behind the church, sending sheaf after sheaf of arrows into the sky. He had been thought a promising bowman, and when Walter passes him a spare bow, the weight and balance of it bring his childhood back.

‘Take a cord,’ Walter says. ‘Nock it.’

Thomas loops the string around one of the horn nocks and then places it against the side of his foot to help bend the bow and loop the other end over. It is a big bow, fat and long, witch hazel, but old and tired, and probably never a really good one.

‘Seen better days.’ Walter nods at it.

There are dark pricks in the wood and signs of cracking from long use. Yet with the string nocked it comes alive in his hands and he itches to find an arrow to put it to use.

Walter has turned back to the men and Thomas watches as they strap on their bracers and slip their fingers into the leather tabs that protect their drawing fingers. There is something timeworn and easy about this routine, the manner in which they joke together and mock one another, and he can easily imagine them back at the village butts. But then instead of taking turns to loose their arrows down the range, as they did at home, the men form a loose harrow formation, standing in three ranks, so that each has just enough room to shoot. They have arrows stuck in the ground and in their belts and some wear their bags on their belts. They stand waiting for Walter’s command.

‘Nock,’ Walter says, and they nock their arrows on to the bowstrings.

‘Draw.’

They haul the strings back as they lift their great bows into the pale sky.

‘And loose!’

They send their arrows off with a roll of thrums, each shaft oddly elegant as it whips sighing out of sight. As he lets fly, each archer grunts, as if in satisfaction, and staggers a pace or two forward.

Then they pick up another arrow each. Walter repeats the command.

‘Nock, draw, loose!’ he snaps, quicker this time. ‘Nock, draw, loose.’

After they’ve shot about a dozen shafts each Walter stops them.

‘All right,’ he says. ‘Time for a laugh. Thomas here is going to have a go.’

The men let Thomas through.

‘I have not shot for some time,’ he says, preparing them for the worst.

‘Just get on with it,’ Walter grumbles. There is a low murmur of well-meant mockery. Thomas cannot help but smile.

He picks an arrow, nocks it on the cord and places it on the shelf the knuckles of his left hand make where he grips the bow. It is a bodkin head: a war arrow. He begins the draw, but the bow now seems horribly stiff. He knows he has to get his body into the bow, so that his back muscles take the weight, not his arms, but still, after so many years in the priory attending to not much more than his psalter, his muscles have withered, and though he has the technique, he has lost the strength. He can hardly get the string to his left shoulder. Sweat breaks out on his brow, his arms begin shaking and the string cuts into the soft fingers of his right hand. He cannot hold the string any longer. He looses it with a twang and the arrow shoots forward about a hundred paces to land in the mud.

Walter cackles.

‘I reckon young Girly can do better than that,’ he says.

Richard is watching and gestures that Katherine is not to be put to the test.

‘All right,’ Richard says. ‘You’ve had your fun. Now let’s stop messing about. Collect your arrows and then we’ll have a sheaf each. Fast as you can.’

The men grumble as they fetch their arrows, but are silenced on their return to find the men of the Gate Watch that Walter abused earlier that morning standing fanned out along the back of the butts, each man at ease with his bow, waiting, watching. No one says a thing. The atmosphere thickens.

‘All right, boys,’ Walter mutters, pretending to ignore the newcomers. ‘Let’s see if we can’t put on a show to remind this lot not to switch sides in the future, shall we? Remember this is for the pride of Sir John Fakenham’s company, so go fast, but make each one count. I don’t want to be able to see the butts for the fletches. Understand?’

The men gather their arrows together, and get back into position.

‘Not you, Northern Thomas,’ Walter says. ‘Right. Let’s go. Nock! Draw! Loose!’

For the next three minutes the men work fast, each one drawing and loosing his bow twenty-four times. Dafydd is the last to finish. The arrow storm has been brief but nearly four hundred arrows have been loosed, and it is possible to imagine just what that might do to an enemy.

When they’ve finished, they are all flushed and breathing heavily and they are steaming in the chill air. They look satisfied enough, but Walter’s eyes are shut. The Watch officer begins a slow hand clap and his men begin murmuring, then laughing.

Walter turns on the captain.

‘Think your boys can do any better?’ he asks.

‘I know they can,’ the captain says. ‘But let’s have a bet, shall we?’ The captain has tired eyes, creases either side of his mouth, and wears a scarf to warm his throat. ‘A barrel of ale?’ he suggests.

Walter cannot get out of it. They shake hands and the men of John Fakenham’s company shuffle to one side to let the Watch take their places. Thomas cannot help thinking that even without their livery and quilted jacks, these men look more like soldiers than Fakenham’s. They are older, grizzled, and their equipment more accustomed to use. They move with a muscular ease, too, certain of themselves.

Others have turned up to watch now: other archers, billmen, some women and boys and a dark-skinned man in a wool-lined travelling cloak, sitting on a rouncey with a baggage train behind him.

‘Right,’ the Watch Captain says in a nasal drawl. ‘Butt on the left-hand side. A sheaf apiece. Nock. Draw. Loose!’

The soldiers erupt into action. It is measurably smoother and faster than Fakenham’s men and it seems each one has sent his third arrow off before the first has hit its target. In less than two minutes it is over. They all level their bows as one.

‘Fuck me,’ one of the Johns mutters.

Everybody else is silent for a moment. The two companies walk down to the butts, one on either side of the range. The Watch’s arrows are without exception buried up to their shoulders in the earth of the left-hand target. Those of Fakenham’s company – distinctive because of the green-tinged twine that has been used to secure the fletches – are scattered over the ground: some have fallen short, some have overshot, some are wayward to the left, others to the right.

‘Tcha!’ the officer says, clapping his hands together with a bang. ‘We’ll have that barrel delivered to the garrison, if you please.’

They collect the shafts and walk back to their tents in silence, shame trailing them like a pall.

‘I’m glad they’re on our side,’ one of them mutters.

‘They are for now,’ Walter snarls.

When they get back to their tent, they put away their bows and sit in silence. None can look another in the eye.

‘So what are we going to do?’ Richard asks.

‘Can’t go back there again,’ Walter says.

‘Chuck away our bows? Become billmen?’ This is from Simon the Londoner.

‘God’s nails!’ Dafydd says. ‘I’m not becoming a bloody billman. Don’t get paid as much, for one thing.’

‘We’d best be selling our bows anyway,’ one of the others says, ‘to pay for that bloody barrel of ale.’

‘Walter should pay for it. He made the wager.’

This is from Simon again. The others look at him.

‘Walter backed us,’ Red John says. ‘We let him down. Least we can do now is help him out.’

Walter nods his thanks. One or two of the men dig in their purses for small coins and pass them to Walter.

‘Simple fact of the matter is that we aren’t good enough,’ Richard says.

‘We are,’ Simon says. ‘We’re as good as any of those northerners, and much better than any Scot, or any bloody Frenchman.’

‘But when we go back, we won’t be fighting Frenchmen, will we?’ Red John says. ‘We’ll be fighting . . . You know. Fighting . . .’

He cannot bring himself to say that they will be fighting Englishmen.

In the silence that follows, Richard stands up.

‘By God,’ he says. ‘You might as well be a billman if that’s the way you look at it. I don’t want to stand and fight with men who aren’t as good as someone else. I only want to stand and fight with the best.’

All eyes are on him. What is he going to do? Desert them and join the Calais garrison?

‘The thing is,’ he starts again, quieter this time, piecing his thoughts together, ‘they are fast and they are accurate. That comes not from fighting, but from practice.’

‘And any fool can practise,’ Geoffrey chips in.

‘Even you lot,’ Walter adds.

Each man is silent for a moment, trying to imagine the comments they’ll have to endure when next they appear at the butts.

‘We need to get away,’ Richard goes on. ‘Somewhere we can put in the hours without the garrison troops turning up every few minutes to show us how it’s done.’

‘Not back in the boat again?’ This is from Hugh.

‘No,’ Richard says. ‘I’ll see if we can’t volunteer to garrison the fort at Sangatte. On the higher ground over there.’ He gestures westwards, back towards the sea. ‘Nothing’s going to happen here, anyway. Not until the Earl gets back. No one will miss us.’

THE NEXT MORNING
the same men who’d watched them erect their camp the day before watch them break it again. While Walter goes in search of the carters and their ox to first take a barrel of ale to the ordinaries at the Seaward Gate, then to carry their gear up to Sangatte, Geoffrey takes Thomas and Katherine to buy more supplies, including arrows from the fletcher.

‘So what are we going to do?’ Katherine asks him as he loads her arms with three sheaves in their linen bags.