Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (46 page)

‘All right,’ he says. ‘Go. Get on your horses and go.’

‘No,’ Thomas insists. ‘It isn’t your fight.’

Walter shakes his head.

‘Course it’s my fight,’ he says. ‘You seen what they did to Dafydd? I’ll stay here, hold them as long as I can while you get ahead with the girl. The girls. And the boy. I’ll have surprise and the hillside on my side and, with a bit of luck, I’ll kill them all. Five arrows. Five men. Then we’ll see.’

‘And what if you don’t kill them all?’ Katherine asks.

‘You ever known me not to kill them all?’ he asks. It is an act. She knows this. He is being Walter the old soldier.

Now she can feel the tears brim in her eyes.

‘Walter,’ she says, stepping towards him.

‘Stop there!’ Walter says, backing off. ‘Go on. Get away. A monk and a nun. Creeping bloody Christ.’

The boy shouts again.

‘They’ve found the tracks,’ Margaret intones.

‘Right,’ Walter says. ‘Go as fast as you can. Find somewhere to shelter tonight and I’ll catch you up. Make some kind of signal. An owl. What about that? A couple of hoots, you know it’s me.’

They all know he’ll never make those hoots.

Thomas nods. There are tears in his eyes too.

‘Go on now. Go on. Fuck off,’ Walter says.

‘Wait,’ Thomas says. ‘Take this.’

He hands Walter his pollaxe.

Walter looks at it.

‘You sure?’

‘It’s a lend, isn’t it?’ Thomas says.

Walter barks a laugh.

‘Might come in handy. Now, go! And good luck!’

When they look back, Walter is kneeling, applying the sign of the cross and bending to kiss the ground.

LITTLE DAFYDD LEADS
them straight up the track, one long scour through the forest, wider than the drovers’ path but cramped on both sides with blackthorn bushes and straying field maples. Thomas rides as fast as he dares – he owes that to Walter – but the sure-footed cob is nervy, sensing the atmosphere, and nearly goes down just as Thomas is turning to look over his shoulder. He hears the scrape and clash of weapons below. A scream perhaps. Or maybe just a crow.

He puts his head down and they ride on.

Later, he pulls his horse aside where the track bulges and he lets Katherine and Margaret pass. Margaret’s face is clenched and she is racked with another coughing fit. Her breathing makes the sound of a saw in oak. Katherine does not look at him. They ride up on up the hill for a league. They ride in silence and all the while he knows he should have stayed and fought the giant.

Later Margaret stops them and has to take a draught of the medicament. She shudders. Thomas looks at Katherine.

‘What is it?’ he asks. ‘What is wrong with her?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says, ‘but whatever it is, the horse urine does no good.’

They ride on. The path flattens, dips into a hollow where there are traces of some workings, a mine perhaps, and a stand of fir trees. They ought to stop, he thinks. They might even risk a fire. Get the girl warm. Beyond the hollow, the track rises steadily. Katherine pauses in the copse, perhaps thinking the same thing. But it is too soon. They have not ridden far enough yet.

‘We go on?’ Thomas asks the boy, pointing up the hill.

Little Dafydd looks anxious. His gaze strays to Margaret, whose cough has not caught, but goes round and round, a constant churn. Katherine looks at her too, then back down the hill.

‘What do you think?’ he asks.

‘We should go on,’ she says. ‘We have not gone far enough.’

Thomas nods, and turns his horse and uses his heels to set it trudging up the hill. The others begin to follow. The wind strengthens, and the snow stings their eyes. It gathers and hardens in the folds of their cloaks. They lean into the wind and the slope and press on until night is about to overtake them and they can stand it no more.

‘We can’t go on!’ Katherine shouts over the wind. ‘It is too dark.’

‘But we can’t stay here! There’s nowhere to shelter. If we get over the top, there’ll be somewhere on the other side.’

They carry on, heads buried against the wind. The road continues on up.

‘Thomas,’ Katherine is shouting again. ‘Thomas! What’s that?’

She is pointing ahead, on the left where a dark shape looms out of the snow. Thomas reaches for his pollaxe but remembers it’s gone. Little Dafydd starts saying something and pointing. The shape doesn’t move and they ride on towards it, watching it grow larger through the snow.

‘A stone,’ Thomas says at last.

‘Is there shelter?’ Katherine calls.

Margaret is really bad now, her breathing a constant haul. Its noise mixes with the wind.

‘We’ll have to,’ Thomas says.

He dismounts and pulls his horse off the track and up towards the stone. It is a thick slab of grey rock, twice the size of a man and almost as wide as it is tall, placed on its end by who knew what forces? Instinctively the horses huddle behind it, sheltering from the wind, nose to tail.

‘We’ll have to get Margaret up against it,’ Katherine shouts. ‘Where there is most shelter.’

Thomas helps Margaret from her saddle. She is rigid and light in his arms, like a strung bow, he thinks, but too hot to the touch and her breathing is a jerking scrape that makes him want to cough himself. He carries her to the side of the rock where Little Dafydd is scraping away the snow with his bare feet. Thomas sits her down, her back to the gritty surface. Her head rocks back and she gasps for breath.

‘Dafydd,’ he says and points Little Dafydd to the spot next to her. Little Dafydd cautiously sits down next to her, but she is too far gone to care for station or manners and she slumps against him. For a moment the coughing stops and it seems she will be comfortable. Then it starts again.

‘We need a fire,’ Katherine says.

He is doubtful.

‘Can we risk it? What if . . .?’

Neither wants to think about what might have happened down in the woods. It is better to concentrate on getting away.

Thomas rummages in his bag for his flint and steel and the little bag of baked linen for kindling. He looks around for anything he might get burning. There is nothing. Even in the shelter of the great stone the wind tugs at his clothes. Katherine pulls out her extra clothes from her own bag and lays them over Margaret and Little Dafydd. Dafydd looks over her shoulder at Thomas. His eyes are large, and Thomas suddenly wonders if any of them will live through this.

They must have a fire.

He has the ledger. He opens the bag and is about to rip out the pages, all those names, all those dates and moneys paid out, all up in smoke. Would it matter? But Katherine leans forward and takes his wrist. She shakes her head.

‘Not that,’ she says. ‘What about the book in Margaret’s bag?’

He is relieved. He packs the ledger away and picks out Margaret’s Book of Hours instead. He knows that it is good by its binding and the quality of the paper, and he fears to burn what might be a work of some beauty. But what choice is there? He closes his eyes as he rips out the pages, one, two, three at a time, tearing them from their stitches and pressing them into balls. He strikes the steel and the flint and after a moment the linen catches. He lets the flame grow, and then builds it a shelter from the balls of paper.

‘Keep it going,’ he tells Katherine, passing her the book. The others huddle forward, spread their shaking hands over the tremulous heat. Thomas brings Margaret’s pattens, then his bow, useless without arrows, then he tears up some thick-rooted snarls of heather, beating them on the ground to knock the snow off. There is a small twisted tree he hacks at with his sword and brings back to feed into the flames. It will not last the night but it will have to do.

They huddle together under a tent of their clothes until one by one they fall asleep, last of all Thomas, his back against the stone, his legs stretched to the fire in front of him, Katherine’s back against his chest, her head against his shoulder. He presses his nose into the top of her cap, breathing in the mix of smoke, wool, dirt and that other distinguishable trace that is uniquely hers.

He shifts, so that she rests more fully against him, and he places an arm around her that, after a moment, she grips across her chest. He can feel her breathing and is conscious that his fingertips rest on her inner thigh. He cannot resist and he slowly strokes the worn wool of her hose, not intending anything other than intimacy, or perhaps, from somewhere deep within himself, to test how far he may presume on her. It is what he needs, he tells himself, after leaving Walter to die.

It is a moment before he realises that her breathing has changed and that she is holding her breath. Then she says something, perhaps in her sleep, and she shifts her legs so that his hand falls away, but she rests her head against his chest, and after a moment his own heartbeat slows and soon he too is asleep.

He wakes in the night to silence and registers that the fire is dead and that the wind has dropped and there are stars scattered thick above them. He can’t hear the stream any more and it takes a moment before he realises it has frozen.

It is only later, near dawn, that he misses Margaret coughing.

For a moment he is glad, imagines she must be over it, but then in the pale light of dawn, when they come to wake her, she will not move and she is stiff and her face is blue. Snowflakes have melted on her eyelids and then frozen again.

Katherine bends over the girl’s bent body and after a moment she looks up at him. He sees tears in her eyes and down her grubby cheeks. Thomas feels sick with guilt. In the night he had been thinking only of himself and Katherine, of himself with Katherine, and he had let the fire die. He had not checked on her. He had heard her silence and was himself comfortable and warm and had done nothing and all the while . . .

‘I am so sorry,’ he says. ‘It is my fault. I should have . . . I don’t know.’

‘No,’ Katherine tells him. ‘I did it. You said we should stay in the valley down there. I said let us ride. Oh God, forgive me.’

She begins gathering all their clothes, shaking the snow off them, and he hears her sob. Little Dafydd looks on with no expression.

‘There is a pit down there,’ Thomas says, nodding towards the river. ‘We can bury her there.’

He leaves Katherine to strip Margaret’s body. She leaves her in her linen shift and they carry her, sublimely beautiful now she is released from the coughing, down to some workings which Little Dafydd has cleared of snow. They lay her down and after a moment the stiffness seems to leave her body, and she subsides, and even looks at peace. While Katherine and Little Dafydd fetch bracken, more heather, grasses, anything they can pull up, Thomas takes the first page of the pardoner’s ledger, and his ink, and he cuts a frozen reed from the frozen river’s bed, and he fashions a pen. Then he writes:
Here lie the mortal remains of Lady Margaret Cornford, only issue of the late Lord Cornford, who died on this day, right beloved of God and of all those who knew her. May she rest in peace
.

Then he places the piece of paper on a stone and then places another stone on top to make a simple marker. They cover her body as best they can and they kneel by her graveside and Thomas says a prayer, asking the Lord to look down favourably upon his handmaid Margaret, to forgive her any sins she may have committed, and for the saints and martyrs to receive her in heaven and guide her to Jerusalem. Tears shimmer on Katherine’s cheeks, and she wipes her nose with her sleeve. She is shaking and Thomas has to help her stand and come away from the graveside.

Afterwards Katherine offers Margaret’s cloak to Little Dafydd, but he will not take it. They load the horses in silence and then turn their backs on the stone and walk back to the track. There is almost no wind now, and the sky above is very pale. The snow has obscured all trace of their arrival, and ahead the road rises to the two peaks.

When they reach the track Little Dafydd says something.

‘I think he wants to leave us here,’ Katherine says.

‘You can hardly blame him,’ Thomas agrees.

They try to give him Margaret’s horse but he will not take it, not with the side-saddle, so they give him Katherine’s horse, which is the one he wants anyway. Then they say goodbye as best they can and they watch him retrace their steps down the track, hurrying away from the great slab of stone and down over the snowfields, back towards the town he’d called Castel Nedd.

‘Whatever will he tell Dwnn?’ Thomas wonders.

They are left just the two of them, with two hungry horses, but no bow, no companions and no idea what to do next except follow the road over the hills towards England.

They turn and walk north, up the slope to the crest, where the wind picks up. On the other side the land drops steeply into a valley. The path follows it down, bent like scissor handles, until it straightens out to run alongside a dark line in the snow that must be a river.

‘Come on,’ Thomas says and they set off down through the snow, still walking as the horses pick their way down behind them. They reach the river, frozen over in parts, rushing in others, and they follow it eastwards, travelling all that day. Katherine rides side-saddle on Margaret’s horse, and finds she likes it.

‘You look proper, up there,’ Thomas observes. ‘Well, you would if you were in a dress.’

Katherine does not say anything. She has not said a word since the morning. All around, the land is deserted. They do not even see a sheep until towards late afternoon when it is getting dark and they make out a smudge of smoke above a pair of cottages in the distance. Then there are more houses, and next a small town. They stop at the first cottage and an old man agrees to sell them bread and when Thomas makes the mistake of letting him see the weight of Margaret’s purse, his old eyes deepen in his head. He invites them to sit by his fire and they tear at the bread with filthy hands while the man’s wife fetches ale.

While they sit, another man joins them, and then another. Neither speaks. They just stare. The atmosphere deepens. Thomas can imagine how this will end.

‘Ought to see to the horses, Kit,’ he says, standing suddenly, hauling her to her feet before the three men can gather themselves. They hurry outside and haul themselves up into their saddles just as two more men come running.