Toby Clements - Kingmaker - Winter Pilgrims

With the dusk the steady stream of wounded that has lasted all day begins to dwindle, but later a man comes in on his own, limping badly. Though he has lost his bow, she can tell he is an archer, and he wears the blue and white livery of Fauconberg.

‘Trod on a caltrop,’ he tells her, ‘just as I was coming off the field. Went through all that, fighting all day, and I slip at the last moment. It hurts, oh Christ it hurts.’

He holds up the sole of his boot for inspection. It is filthy with the manure of every animal she can name, dyed up to the ankle in human blood.

‘There is nothing I can do for you,’ she tells him.

‘I can pay,’ he says.

‘It is not that-’ she begins but he has a leather bag slung behind him and when he tugs it around and opens it up, she feels a flutter in her chest as sharp as a stab.

‘Look,’ he says, pulling out the pardoner’s ledger. ‘Got a hole in it and that, but still. Must be worth a penny or two.’

Her ears are roaring and her hands come up to snatch it from him, but she collects herself. He holds it upside down and back to front so that she can see that the hole does not go all the way through.

‘Reckon it must have saved his life,’ the archer says, exploring the hole with his finger.

Katherine can say nothing for a moment.

‘Come on,’ the archer says. ‘You can have it if you fix me up. Stop it hurting. Make sure it doesn’t go bad.’

‘Sit by the fire,’ she says.

She hurries to get Richard, who is sitting over his father.

‘There is an archer by the fire’, she whispers, ‘who has Thomas’s ledger.’

‘Have you asked him where he got it?’

‘No. He can only have stolen it.’

Richard nods.

‘Take me to him,’ he says, ‘and get Mayhew.’

Katherine waves Mayhew over and together they lead Richard to the archer’s side.

The archer glances up as Richard sits next to him.

‘What’s this?’ he asks.

‘I’m blind,’ Richard says. ‘But I have a good sense of smell.’

‘Really.’

The archer goes back to staring at the fire. He is clutching his foot.

‘Yes,’ Richard goes on. ‘And I can smell a thief.’

Now the archer looks up. He has been in situations like this before, that much is clear.

‘A thief is it, blind man?’

Suddenly there is a knife in his hand, but Mayhew kicks his wrist and the knife flies across the stone floor of the nave. And now Mayhew has his own knife out, and he threatens the archer with it, though he looks confused. Then Katherine steps on the archer’s wounded foot.

He cries out.

‘What is this? What’re you doing?’

‘What’s your name?’

‘John. John Perers. County of Kent.’

‘Where did you get that book?’ Katherine asks.

Perers looks mutinous. Katherine applies some pressure.

‘On the field,’ he says. ‘All right? I took it from a bloke.’

‘Which bloke?’

‘Just some bloke.’

‘Is he dead or alive?’

‘I don’t know. Dead, for God’s sake. Probably. Everybody is up there.’

‘Take me to him.’

‘What? No. Don’t be so stupid. I’m not going back up there.’

‘If you do not get treatment for that wound you’ll die. Death will take you bit by bit, starting with the foot, which a surgeon will have to cut off, with a saw, but that will not stop the putrefaction. The surgeon will have to take more off your leg, piece by piece, and each time the saw bites, it will feel as if you are being roasted by the fires of hell.’

Perers is pale with all he’s been through, and now the pain is great, and here is this woman, a blind man and physician’s assistant trying to force him back up to the field.

He moves to leave. He’ll find another surgeon, easy, with all the money he’s picked up.

Richard moves like a ferret and his hands are suddenly on the archer’s neck. The archer tries to scream and lash out, but Richard’s thumbs dig into his throat.

‘Take us, now,’ he says.

Perers waves his arm to suggest that he will.

‘Bloody hell fire,’ he says, rubbing his throat after Richard has let go. He is too terrified to look at him.

‘Give me the book,’ Katherine says.

He hands it over.

‘It’s a long way,’ he says. ‘Can’t we wait until morning?’

‘He is still alive,’ Katherine says. ‘I am sure of it.’

She cannot stand to think of him out there, just one more man dead or lost. She does not want to number him among men like Dafydd, or Walter, or any of the Johns, whom she has known and now — are gone.

‘Look,’ the archer goes on, ‘I’m sure he’s dead. One night isn’t going to hurt him any more than he already is, is it?’

‘I will cure you if we go now. Tomorrow may be too late, for both of you.’

Mayhew will come with her, carrying a torch, and Richard too.

‘What difference will the dark make to me?’

They follow the hobbling archer up the road and on to the dale. The wind has died and the snow has settled and the stars are out, and it is cold enough so that touching metal strips the skin from fingertips. All across the field men have lit fires, burning old arrows and bows and anything else they can find to give them the light with which to see, and everywhere shadows flit as they go about their business. Even now there is still the noise of men hitting other men.

‘It was over there,’ the archer says. ‘Mind out for the bloody caltrops.’

The field stinks like a shambles, and underfoot it is soggy and still warm with the spilled blood. Katherine walks with her hand over her mouth and nose. When she becomes aware the banks she thought were earthworks are jumbles of corpses, ready to be interred in pits, she is glad Richard cannot see. After a moment, Mayhew lowers the burning torch so that none of them can.

‘Dear God,’ she says. ‘How will we ever forgive ourselves for this?’

‘Are there many?’ Richard asks.

‘I can’t tell you. Thousands. Many thousands.’

They carry on up towards the fires on the plateau.

‘I never did fight in battle,’ Richard says quietly. ‘All that training. All those hours in the tilting yard and at the butts. It was all I ever dreamed of.’

‘Why?’ Katherine asks. She wonders why she has not asked before.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘It is what you do.’

‘Here we are,’ the archer says. ‘About here.’

They stop by the side of the road, near a broad barrow of corpses. Blank faces stare at them from the pile, and men are twisted among one another, like the frayed edges of a carpet.

‘He was sitting here,’ the archer says, gesturing in the dark. ‘His head was bleeding.’

‘You are lying.’ She just knows.

‘No, as God is my witness.’

‘Remember your foot.’

There is a long moment. The dead seem to be letting slip some kind of miasma, thick, like breath, but cold.

‘All right,’ he says. ‘A little bit along.’

She gathers her cloak around her and they make their way along a pathway that has been made between the corpses. Mayhew is reduced to silence. Her shoes are letting in liquid. She does not want to think what. Richard stumbles and someone cries out in the darkness.

‘Hurry,’ she says.

‘All right, all right. My foot. It’s hurting.’

‘It will only get worse.’

‘Christ.’

They go on. At one point Katherine trips and steadies herself by clutching a man’s face. It is cold and gelid. She wipes her hand on a man’s tunic, but it comes away even darker with gritty blood.

‘Where is he?’

They have moved beyond some trees where the land slopes sharply and, over the lip of the dale, dead bodies are piled in acres, three or four deep, and in among them, walking above them, are parties of looters, crouching over the corpses, each one lit by a boy holding a flaming torch as they burrow among the dead. She watches a man twisting at something and chopping at it with a hatchet and she feels a great sorrow.