Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (49 page)

‘If I can land just one blow, that is all I ask,’ Thomas says.

The riders across the meadow fan out shoulder to shoulder behind the giant and Edmund Riven. One or two seem to be carrying wounds. Even the giant seems to have his left hand lying loose in his lap, as if to favour it. Walter’s work, she hopes.

The shadows of the hills behind Riven’s men stretch out across the water meadow as night fills the broad-bottomed valley, and above them all colour bleeds from the sky. Steam billows from their horses.

‘So,’ Thomas says. ‘This is it. This is what God wills.’

‘So it seems,’ Katherine agrees. Her voice wavers in her throat, cracks. Her heart is beating very fast. She must try to be courageous about this. Not to fall screaming. Not let herself down at the end.

Thomas turns to her.

‘Kit,’ he says. ‘Katherine.’

There are tears in his lashes; his lips tremble.

She holds out her hand to him. He takes it.

‘Thomas,’ she says, before he can speak. ‘You know that I do not believe in the will of God, but if He wills our deaths now, as it seems, then I give him thanks that at least we will be together at our end. I am glad of that, at least.’

He is silent for a moment. It is as if she’s taken his words away.

He rests his sword on his lap and sighs lengthily, a long plume of breath.

‘I wish . . .’ he begins. ‘I wish – we had more time. More time to just be. Like other people. With none of this.’ He gestures at her drawn sword and the approaching horsemen. ‘I wish we had more time for . . . for everything,’ he says.

‘I know,’ she says. ‘I know.’

She spurs her horse to him and stretches up. He leans down and their lips touch. She closes her eyes at the sensation, wishing it could last.

Then they pull away.

‘Go with God, Thomas,’ she says.

‘You too, Katherine. You too.’

EVEN WHILE HE
can still taste her on his lips, he knows he must kill her.

It is what Walter would have done.

He will do it quickly, so quickly she’ll never know what is happening. He will draw the blade across her throat and she will be dead before she slumps from her saddle. It will be so easy and, once done, the giant will never be able to touch her.

He feels the nerves in his fingers prickle and the blood in his sword arm froth. He changes his grip on his sword hilt, draws back his arm. He lifts his arm.

But across the marshy ground Edmund Riven seems to sense what is afoot.

He yells and charges.

As he does so, Thomas sees a movement from the periphery of his eye, down by the woods at the end of the marsh, where nothing should be moving. It is a tiny blur, a blur that a man might register only after it is gone, but an archer would know it for what it was. An arrow shaft.

It slits through the air and catches Riven’s horse with a short thud. The horse staggers, cants four or five steps to the left, then dips. The horse’s head drops and its forelegs tangle as it runs. There is a crack like burning pinewood and the horse goes down. Edmund Riven is hurled from the saddle. He flies for a moment and then is gone. Behind him the horse rolls through the reeds and the waters.

The giant pulls up. The men behind too. A second shaft hums across the marsh and twists one out of his saddle, bundling him to the ground. A third follows. Thomas slips from his saddle and drags Katherine from hers. He drops to the ground and spreads his body over her, pressing her into the black mud.

‘Who are they?’ she cries out.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’

Riven’s men are just as confused. They are shouting the same question. The horse is screaming. The others are trying to turn their horses, trying to get back to the trees. Thomas raises his head above the grasses. At the far end of the meadow he can see the pale spikes of bows among the thickets of sedge. Another arrow skims through the reed tips. It hits something and there is a cry.

Riven’s men are pulling back. There is a drum of unsteady hooves as they reach the trees and start up the hill, back to Tudor’s army.

But where is the giant? Where is Riven?

Thomas raises his head again. An arrow sighs overhead, missing the horses. He ducks.

‘Come on,’ he says. He takes Katherine’s hand and leads her scrambling back behind the willows. Under the branches it smells sharply of cows. He looks around the rough bark, sees the archers moving up. Three or four empty-saddled horses stand cropping the grass and nearby a man sobs in agony. Reed tops twitch, and an arrow with a broken fletch buzzes noisily overhead in the gloom.

Who are these new men? Where have they come from?

There is a long moment of silence. Then a man shouts in the distance, calling to his own men. Horsemen have arrived from the far end of the marsh and are now cautiously investing the long grasses. They are scurriers perhaps, but whose? Thomas can almost make out their livery, but cannot believe it. Blue and murrey? Isn’t that March’s livery? Or Hastings’s?

‘What badges are they wearing?’

Katherine peers through the willows.

An arrow cracks into the trunk above their heads. She screams and he drags her down again.

There is a sudden drum of hooves and a bellow of pain, then another scream that ends in a crunch of something. Whimpering; more silence. Overhead three ducks pass, their wings wheezing as they beat. A man roars. A scrape of steel and iron, a splash, and then more shouts. An archer appears along the road, keeping to shadows, his head bobbing. He starts when he sees them, raises his bow and draws.

Thomas throws aside the sword and holds his palms up. The archer half relaxes his string.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ he asks. He sounds like Walter.

Thomas stares at him. He can hardly speak. The archer has the badge of a bull’s head on his tabard. The bull’s head. William Hastings’s badge. He is one of Hastings’s men. Hastings’s archers.

Thomas takes a step towards him and the man tightens his string, but then is distracted by Katherine wearing a lady’s fine cloak, but her hair is short and uncovered, and she is like no lady he can ever have seen.

‘My name is Thomas Everingham,’ Thomas begins. ‘A good friend to William Hastings.’

There is another scream in the marsh behind them. All three flinch. They hear a man running clumsily, breaking through the reeds on to the path ahead. He stops and stares at them. Then he turns away and runs and there is a thump as he is upended in a tangle of legs by an arrow. Someone laughs.

‘Well, Thomas Everingham,’ the archer says, ‘if you want to stay a good friend of William Hastings, then you’d best be keeping your bloody head down. You too – ah – mistress.’

He touches his sallet and passes them, moving out into the reeds, stretching his bowstring. The archers have started calling to one another now. They are moving through the marsh like huntsmen clearing a covey from a copse.

‘Can they be dead?’ Katherine asks. ‘Oh, I pray to God they are.’

One of the horsemen comes up the path from the far end of the clearing. He looks young, moving with exaggerated swagger, playing the part of the soldier.

‘The devil are you?’ he asks when he sees them. He has a long sword in his hand and the bull’s head is on his chest too. His long nose and wide mouth lend him a familiar look.

‘You are William Hastings’s man?’ Thomas asks.

‘I am. I am John Grylle, of Kirby Muxloe, in Leicester. And who are you?’

‘I am Thomas Everingham, of Marton Hall in Lincoln, of the affinity of Sir John Fakenham, and a good friend to William Hastings.’

‘Is that so?’ Grylle nodded. ‘And my lady?’

Thomas turns. Dear God, who is she? They have not thought to decide.

He opens his mouth to say something but Katherine speaks first.

‘I am Lady Margaret Cornford,’ she says in a clear voice. ‘Of Cornford, also in Lincolnshire.’

Thomas opens his mouth, closes it. Why has she said that?

‘My lady.’ Grylle touches his helmet. ‘But why are you here and—?’ His gaze travels up and down her muddy dress. ‘And who are those men on the road? We assumed they were Tudor’s scurriers, but—?’

‘They followed us here from Wales,’ Katherine tells him. ‘We have come from there. From Wales. They are Giles Riven’s men.’

Grylle starts.

‘Giles Riven the turn-and-turn-again-coat? Ha. But how came you here from Wales? Do you have any news of Tudor and his army?’

‘His vanguard is on the road south of here,’ Thomas says, pointing. ‘Making for the town of Leominster.’

‘Ha!’ Grylle barks again. ‘He will need to negotiate with the men of the Marches before he can have the liberty of that choice.’

‘Who are they?’ Thomas asks. ‘Who are the men of the Marches?’

Grylle looks at him as if he is stupid. ‘You are in the Marches,’ he says, gesturing to the hills around him. ‘All this land belongs to the Earl of March and those who live on it do not take kindly to just anyone coming through, especially not a rabble of Irishmen and Frenchmen led by a treacherous Welshman who ought to be hanged like the common criminal he is.’

‘But you are Hastings’s man? Is he here?’

‘Why, yes,’ Grylle says, again as if this is the most obvious thing in the world. ‘We are camped by Wigmore, not two leagues up the road. We marched back from Gloucester when we got news of Tudor’s landing.’

The men in the marshes behind them are more relaxed now and they are beginning to brag and joke with one another as their nerves unwind.

‘Let’s see where we are then, shall we?’ Grylle says, and he kicks his horse to push past them through the reeds. Thomas and Katherine follow. Thomas still has his sword. They find Edmund Riven’s horse first, straining to breathe, eyes rolling and ears flattened with pain. A broken arrow is buried in its shoulder and a ribbon of plum-coloured blood snakes from the wound. One of Hastings’s men is silently contemplating it. After a moment he cuts through the animal’s throat with an almost tender stroke of his knife, and holds its head while blood seethes from the frilled lips of the wound in rhythmic spurts. Steam drifts in the air, the smell rich, and after a moment the horse is still.

‘Sorry about that, old son,’ the archer says, laying the head down softly.

Thomas looks away. To think he has come so close to doing the same to Katherine.

Riven has been thrown a little way off, among the rushes, so Thomas pushes aside the reeds with his sword, expecting to see him lying dead or unconscious.

But there is nothing.

He searches again.

Still nothing. There are broken reeds and a scrape of mud to show where he’s fallen, but no sign of blood or his body.

He is gone.

The giant too, but of him there is even less sign, since his horse is also missing. As is the pollaxe.

‘Must have got out of the bag,’ is Grylle’s estimation, and he gestures down towards the trees in the south. ‘My orders are to picket this approach, though, and not to go chasing their scouts back into camp.’

The archers are disappointed. There are four of Riven’s men dead and two wounded, both so badly they will not live through the night, and Thomas and Katherine and the squeamish horse-lover look away as one of the sergeants blesses them with a sign of the cross and then brains each of them with two blows of a lead maul.

‘It’s a mercy,’ one of the archers says. ‘I’d hope someone’d do the same for me in that case.’

‘Christ,’ Thomas cannot stop himself breathing.

‘I would have tried to do something for them,’ Katherine whispers, ‘if they had not spent the last days trying to kill me.’

Grylle sends a man on horseback to the camp with them to report what has happened and they take to their saddles again and follow the path through the valley. They are almost too tired to talk. They pass a hamlet and then a soldiers’ camp of tents. Men stare them as they pass. They are Hastings’s men, and March’s men, and Thomas feels dizzy with relief, but he cannot help but wonder why Katherine said she was Margaret Cornford.

She looks at him helplessly and gestures to her dress.

‘It was all I could think of,’ she says. She closes her eyes and shakes her head.

Thomas says nothing. What could she have done? Said she was someone else? Who, though? He opens his mouth to tell her that, but then stops. It wouldn’t help. Besides, what is done is done. They ride on.

Beyond the camp is a castle: a clutch of grey-stone battlemented towers bosomed with bare-branched trees, on a steep bailey a little off the road to the west. Behind it rises a line of hills.

‘Wigmore Castle,’ their guide says. When they arrive at the gatehouse he names them to the Captain of the Watch as Thomas Iverington and Lady Margaret Cornford though no one appears to care very much for anything they have to say that does not concern the whereabouts, numbers and disposition of Tudor’s army.

‘Can we see William Hastings?’ Thomas asks after he’s told the captain all he knows.

The captain grumbles something about Hastings being too busy to see anyone and takes them to the crowded inner ward where they can hear a flute being played in one of the solars above. Someone is plucking strings too, and a man is singing in a high voice. Thomas asks for news of the engagement outside Sandal Castle.

‘It was what it was,’ the captain says, scuffing his boots. ‘A disaster. Duke of York: killed in the field. Earl of Salisbury: captured then executed by that bastard the Bastard of Exeter. Earl of Rutland: murdered by that black-faced butcher Clifford. And how many men like you and me killed where we stood? Who knows? Thousands.’

‘But what about Sir John Fakenham? Do you know if he was there?’

The captain shakes his head.

‘Never heard of him,’ he says, and he leaves them in a dark corner by a doorway that leads to the castle latrine. Thomas puts the bags down and Katherine leans against him for a moment. Thomas stands stock-still; he places an arm around her, and they stand for a while, neither moving, neither needing to say a thing.

Then a messenger with a candle in a lantern comes for them, and they step apart.

‘You the bloke who’s just come from Wales? Get your things and follow me,’ he says. ‘Earl of March wants to see you.’