Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (8 page)

But Katherine is not looking at Alice. She is staring at the long scratch on the side of Sister Joan’s neck.

‘Your neck,’ she says.

Joan touches the scratch and then looks at the bloodied tips of her fingers. She smiles nervously, sharp teeth on her thin lips, a furtive expression.

Katherine cannot endure it. She lunges and before Joan can raise her hands she is on her. She knocks her back over on to the mattress and her hands seek out the neck, her thumbs in the doughy throat. But Joan bucks. She arches her back and screams and after a moment the Prioress grabs Katherine’s shoulders and hauls her off and throws her across the room. Katherine lands badly, but Joan still screams. She is thrashing and scrabbling as if trying to get something off her back. And then there is blood frothing from her mouth and nose. It is staining her teeth, pouring down her chin.

The Prioress is frozen where she stands, hands clapped to her cheeks. Joan is choking on something. She rolls face down on the mattress and all three women see the shards of green glass driven into her back just as the stench of the medicine rises up and washes over them. It catches in their throats and burns their eyes and sends them coughing back up the infirmary.

This time there is no one to stop her. Katherine is through the door, down the stairs and across the yard, staggering past the very spot where she’d seen the canon, and out of the beggars’ gate. She has no plan in mind, only flight, and she no longer cares what happens to her next.

Snow remains in patches across the fens, but there is more grass and mud, and there are black fire circles on the fields, and the sweet smell of cold wood smoke and human shit hangs in the air. She limps out across the furlong, making for the hamlet at the river ford. Two lay brothers are there at the river’s edge with shovels. She turns from them to the ferryman’s lighter, on the riverbank below the mill. If she can right it and somehow get it into the water, then she might follow the river’s current wherever it will take her.

She crosses the furlong and tries to lift the boat, but it is too heavy. Vestiges of ice cement it in place. She finds the ferryman’s pole, a long staff of ash. She is about to try to use it to lever the boat upright when she sees a movement by the canons’ beggars’ gate. Someone running. A man. At first she thinks he is coming for her. She panics and looks for a place to hide in the shelter of the watermill, behind a pile of millstones. It is a canon, she sees, running desperately. Then she sees another man emerge.

‘Dear God!’ she says aloud.

It is the giant from the day before. He is still barefooted, still with that axe. She looks again at the canon. It is him. He runs towards her. He is also making for the boat. He tries to roll it over but gives up just as easily as she had. He goes looking for something and then starts with panic as the giant approaches.

‘Why?’ he shouts. ‘Why me?’

The giant ignores him.

The canon tries to punch him, but the giant catches his fist and twists his arm. He falls to the ground.

‘Why?’ the canon cries out once more. ‘What did I do to you?’

The giant plucks him up without effort. The canon kicks out but the giant has him by the throat. He is carrying him at arm’s length. The canon struggles, still kicking, tearing at his hands, but he is forced backwards and pinned against the upturned boat. Still he kicks but it is no use. The giant leans forward and switches hands, so that he is holding the canon down with his left hand while his right moves up to the canon’s face. The canon tries to pull away but the giant is too strong. He seems to stroke his cheek and look into his eyes and then he places his thumb over the canon’s eyeball. The canon screams.

Without thinking Katherine leaves the stones and rushes the last few paces to the boat and, with all her remaining strength, she brings the ferryman’s pole down on the back of the giant’s head. It makes a crack she feels in her knees.

The giant lets the canon go and stands, as if he has just thought of something he ought to do. He turns and looks down at her. He is confused.

She takes a step back, lifts the pole again. The giant takes a step towards her. He stretches his hands out. She is about to bring it down on him when his face seems to go blank, his eyes roll up into his head, he cants to one side, staggers, then slips, and finally falls to the ground.

After a moment he is still.

The canon is gasping, muttering some prayer, his hands clapped over his eyes. After a moment he stops, removes his hands and now he too looks at her. Then he lifts himself to peer down at the giant’s body.

‘Is he dead?’ she asks.

The canon gets up and looks at the giant more closely.

‘I don’t think so,’ he says.

She is only partly relieved. There is a pause. A breeze has picked up. The rainclouds have retreated, and the sky is a scrim of white clouds again. They look to the walls of the priory, then at each other.

‘Are you expelled?’ he asks.

Katherine nods.

‘I was seen talking to you,’ she says.

She looks back at the priory. Three figures have appeared in the canons’ beggars’ gateway, one limping, coming down towards them. All are carrying swords. The men from the day before.

‘Brother?’ she points.

‘They will kill us this time,’ he says. He stoops for the giant’s axe. It is a fearsome thing: four feet of chamfered oak pole with long steel points at both ends, its axe blade balanced by a vicious pick. It is crusted with dried blood, as if dipped in brown lace, and it looks oddly light in his hands.

‘You cannot fight them,’ she says. ‘Not three of them, not even with that thing.’

‘God is by my side,’ he says. ‘He will provide.’

‘Where was God when he was about to put out your eyes?’ she asks, pointing at the giant.

The canon flinches. He stares at her open-mouthed.

‘Besides,’ she says, hurrying him on past her blasphemy, ‘God has provided. Look. We must take this boat. Come. Help me.’

She slides the boat pole under the lighter’s edge and tries again to right it. Still it will not move.

Seeing her struggle, he joins her, pushing the axe under the boat’s side and helping her lever it over, revealing grey grass and a family of dead rats. He puts the axe aside and helps shove the lighter across the mud and down into the water where the river is running high, thronging with brown meltwater, the ice long gone.

The men from the priory are running now, down across the furlong. They are shouting.

He stands with his feet in the water and holds the boat steady while she throws in the pole and then clambers in after it.

‘Come!’ she says, holding out a hand. ‘Come!’

Still he hesitates. Is he mad?

‘You cannot fight three,’ she shouts. ‘They will kill you! Then me! They’ll kill us both. Come!’

This decides him. He collects the axe and slides it into the boat. Then he launches himself in after it, sending the boat out into the rolling current. The boat staggers, dips as if it will sink, then rises and spins in the water.

The men are near now. She can see their expressions. One has blood on his face. They are shouting. They run past the giant and the one in a white shirt comes down the bank and wades into the water up to his thighs. They are too late and they know it. The man in the water smacks its surface in frustration.

The canon plunges the boat pole into the water and heaves, sending the boat off into the current as the two men on the bank start following them. After a few moments the one in the water wades back on to dry land and shouts after the canon. She cannot make out his words and in a little while the boat crosses the ford and the man in the river is lost to sight.

Katherine stares back over her shoulder long after, though, watching as first the roofs and then, finally, the priory’s church tower slip away until at last, for the first time in her memory, she is beyond its sight, floating in a land unknown.

THE SISTER SITS
ahead and keeps watch with the giant’s axe across her knees. She is rubbing her blistered feet and Thomas can think of nothing to say to her.

Finally she speaks.

‘Where shall we go?’

It is a good question.

‘We must make our way to Canterbury,’ he tells her with more certainty than he feels. ‘We must seek redress from the Prior of All. He will hear our case and see that justice is done.’

The sister turns to him and studies him as he talks. Her eyes are blue, her face paler than vellum.

‘Where is this Canterbury?’ she asks.

Thomas does not know.

‘It is where the Prior of All is,’ he says.

There is a pause.

‘So you do not know?’ she says.

‘No,’ he admits.

She nods and turns her back on him again. He feels only confusion. To think that the day before he had been looking forward to rubbing gold leaf over a letter T he’d built up from the page with gesso. She says nothing more and after a while the mist begins to clear and a flock of gulls wheels above them, wings black against the pale clouds.

‘More snow,’ he says, and thinks of the night to come.

Then there is a crash in the rushes, and a shout from the bank.

‘Oh Great God above.’

It is the giant. He comes pushing through a stand of reeds and is almost on them before Thomas heaves on the boat pole and sends the boat lurching across the river.

‘Leave us be!’ the sister cries. ‘For the love of the Trinity, leave us be!’

The giant comes down at them, but stops at the water’s edge. He looks about wildly and shouts something unintelligible. He seems stuck.

‘Merciful Mary,’ Thomas breathes. ‘He’s scared of the water.’

The giant stares at them, deciding what to do. Then scrambles along the river’s edge, ripping his way through the thickets. Ahead of him a bittern takes flight with a slow clap of wings.

If Thomas can just keep up this rhythm with the boat pole, and if he can stay on the right-hand side of the river, then he need think of nothing else, need think of nothing that has happened and of nothing that might yet happen. His feet throb with the cold and his head rings from Riven’s blow, but he goes on, letting the water run down his arm as he pushes and lifts, pushes and lifts, and all the while the giant crashes along the riverbank beside them.

Then, suddenly, the giant stops. He stands in the bulrushes and the sedge where the wind makes a tuneless song among the sodden seed spikes. But now Thomas can hear something else. The giant points ahead and shouts. There is something almost sorrowful in his expression. He shouts again and waves his arms.

‘Brother?’ the sister says. She is turning and pointing ahead. ‘Have you seen?’

Ahead of them the banks of reeds part, and the river on which they have been travelling meets another, and this new water is broad, swollen with rainwater and snowmelt, heading south in spate. The lighter joins it and they are sucked into its turbid current. Water laps over the lighter’s sides, pooling under their feet. The sister begins trying to scoop it out with her hands.

‘We’re sinking,’ she says. ‘We must reach the other side.’

But the river pulls them on and the farther they go, the wider apart the riverbanks become. They pass fishponds and eel farms and all along the banks the rushes have been clubbed and harvested. Two men in russet hoods stop digging in a field with a mattock and watch them as they go, as does a third on horseback, who turns and stares, a hunting bird perched on his wrist.

Thomas uses the pole as a rudder, guiding them towards a small hamlet dominated by a church tower, but as they approach a handful of boys leave off throwing stones at a cockerel and start trying to hit them in their sinking boat. By now they are standing up to their ankles in water and the boat is slipping away under them. There is nothing for it though: Thomas leans on the pole and the boat slews towards the river’s western bank. Just as its bows dip under the water for the last time, it noses into a broad stand of reeds and Thomas jumps out to drop up to his thighs in the icy water. He holds the boat still for the sister, but by now she can hardly move. She inches across the prow and half falls into the brown water. Thomas hurries around, his clogs lost in the mud. He takes her arm, hesitating at first to touch her, but when she shows no sign of resistance, he helps her out of the boat and up the bank. He goes back for the pollaxe, just as the boat is tugged backwards by the current.

At the top of the bank he twists the water from the skirts of his cassock and looks around. There is nothing: only a broad stretch of reeds and mudflats. In the distance, a wood. Is there smoke in the air beyond? A village perhaps.

‘We’ll have to walk,’ he says, gesturing downriver. ‘We will surely come to something that way. We can ask the way to Canterbury from there.’

The sister looks doubtful. He sees she has wounds on her wrists and ankles. She has lost a clog too, and they both know they will never be able to walk far.

‘We could say we are travelling on monastic business.’

‘Together?’

Thomas frowns. She is right. They ought to part. He looks away upriver. A single swan comes towards them. He watches it for a moment. Then another appears from the rushes and joins the first and together they sail past and on out of sight. Thomas recalls words that he has written on parchment.

‘“Two are better than one,”’ he says, ‘“because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow.”’

‘“But woe to him that is alone when he falls,”’ the sister continues, ‘“for he has not another to help him up.”’

He looks at the sister properly for the first time. She is sharp and fierce-looking, all angles.

‘Ecclesiastes,’ she says. ‘I don’t know the verse.’

He manages a smile.

‘Nor me,’ he says. ‘But we should walk together, at least for a little while.’

She nods. He picks up the pollaxe and swings it over his shoulder. It is a good thing to have. It feels curiously natural in his hands, and now that the blood has been washed from it, he can see it is finely worked, with the tracings of an ornate pattern etched in its blades. No wonder the giant wanted it back. It must be worth something.