Toby Clements - Kingmaker - Winter Pilgrims

By the time he reaches the sisters’ cloister Thomas’s shins are scorched, his chilblains throb and his fingers are already so thick and clumsy with the cold he knows he will not be able to hold a quill all day, knows he’ll make no progress with his psalter. Even his teeth ache.

He stops at the sisters’ gate, pauses a moment, glances at it though he knows he must not, then he leaves the shadow of the priory’s wall and cuts away, down across a field where the lay brothers will plant rye in the distant spring. There is an old path on the snow, a line of footprints he follows through the furlong and down towards the dung heap by the river. Here the path ends in a confusion of dimples in the snow and broken ice, as if someone has been fetching water.

Thomas climbs down the low bank on to the ice where a mist unfurls around his ankles. He steps on to it, testing it though he knows it to be strong enough to bear a cart and ox, and he hurries across in a few quick strides to thread his way through the ice-rimed reeds on the far side. Just as he is scrambling up the bank, the fox shrieks once more, rough-edged, filled with pain. Thomas pauses, frozen. The scream stops abruptly, as if cut off.

Thomas wavers again, looks back to the priory, at the low clutch of stone buildings that huddle around the stump of the church’s tower. He sees the frater house roof leaking smoke into the pale sky and he wishes he were safe behind those walls again, readying himself for prime, perhaps, or even still asleep and dreaming again of the summer to come.

Curse the Prior. Curse him for waking him. Curse him for sending him on this errand.

And why? Why him? Why not this John who set the snare in the first place? Thomas is a scribe, an illuminator, not a lay brother, no longer some farm boy. He’d meant to pass that day applying leaf to one of the capitals, burnishing it with Brother Athelstan’s dog’s tooth tool. But now his fingers are like sausages.

This is the Prior’s design, of course. Thomas understands that. The Prior means to knock the pride from him. He said as much the night before, when he’d preached against the sin during supper. Thomas had felt the old man’s eye settle on him more than once during the meal, but had thought little of it. He hadn’t looked contrite enough; that was it. A lesson there.

He carries on to where the snow is deeper, undisturbed since it started falling the day after Martinmas this last year. He breaks through the snow crust up to his knees, stumbles, flounders. Soon he is sodden. On he goes, up the gentle slope until he is only a few footsteps from the tangled borders of the copse. It hurts to breathe. He peers through the lattice of unruly branches. He sees nothing, only darkness, but something is in there. Again the hair on his nape bristles. He raises his stick to hook aside a bough.

There is an explosion. A rattling boom. There is a cry, a tearing sound, the beating of wings. It comes at him, soot-black, straight at his face, at his eyes.

He bellows. He ducks, swings the staff, throws himself to the snow.

But the crow is gone before it is really there.

It flies off with a dismal caw.

Thomas’s heart is pounding. He hears himself blubbing, making no sense. When he gets to his knees, his hands are blue, his cassock quilted with snow.

The crow has settled on a snow-capped post by the dung heap.

‘Bastard bird!’ Thomas calls, shaking the staff. ‘Bastard bloody bird!’

The crow ignores him. The bell begins tolling in the priory, and from the river a mist rises, thick as fleece. Thomas turns back to the copse, resolute now, but he can find no way in through the tangle of brambles. He hacks at them with his staff, circles the copse until he finds a track; the lay brother John’s prints, he supposes. He ducks under the first low branches and fights his way in. The brambles pull at his cassock, snow tips down on him from above. He steps over a fallen trunk and finds himself on the edge of a tight clearing and something makes him stop. He eases aside a branch, and there it is: the fox, a slur of matted red fur in the gloom.

He steps forward.

Its neck and foreleg are caught together in a loop of wire, and the wire itself is hooked over a spur of hornbeam. The fox is on its hind legs, half-hanged, half-frozen, its narrow snout sunk on its blood-wet chest. The snow below is scraped to the frozen black earth and bloodstains and clumps of russet hair are everywhere.

Thomas makes the sign of the cross, and stands stock-still, listening. He can hear something. Then he realises it is the fox, still alive, still breathing, each breath a high bubbling drag followed by a racking exhalation that subsides in a hoarse whimper.

After a moment it seems to sense him and lifts its head.

Thomas gasps and takes a step back.

The fox is blinded, its eyes gone, each glistening socket weeping a tag of thick blood.

The crow caws from beyond the thicket.

‘Bastard bloody bird,’ Thomas breathes. Again he makes the sign of the cross.

After a moment, the fox’s head sinks wearily back on its chest.

Thomas steels himself. He steps forward, raises the staff just as the Dean suggested, then brings it down. Crack. The fox jerks in its noose. There is a delicate patter of blood on the snow. The fox shudders. It gives a long rattling sigh; then it is dead.

Thomas pulls the staff from the cup of broken bones. It is smeared with a dark-veined soup of grey brains that he wipes in the snow bank below the hornbeam. Once he has done this he stands for a moment, then makes a final sign of the cross over the fox, blessing it as one of God’s creatures, and is about to turn and go when he remembers the Prior’s instruction.

With a sigh he sets aside the staff and begins following the line of the snare back from the branch on which it is caught, pinching it between thumb and forefinger, down through the wet spray of traveller’s joy to the base of the tree. It is awkward. His fingers are so numb, and the knot is set in the ice, pulled taut by the fox’s struggle.

He gropes forward, on his knees now, his ear pressed against the rough bark of the tree. He cannot pick apart the strands of the knot. He needs his knife, he realises, and is cursing his forgetfulness when he hears the shouts of men and the sudden drum of horses’ hooves on the road beyond.

Daylight is almost come by the time Sister Katherine brings the pail down from the Prioress’s cell. She comes out into the yard where the cold clamps her chest.

‘God keep you, Sister Katherine.’

It is Sister Alice, the youngest of the nuns, newly come, wrapped in her thick cloak, her breath a rolling plume before her face.

‘And God keep you, Sister Alice. I see you are not in chapel?’

‘A walk, first,’ Sister Alice says this as if this is the most natural thing. Katherine frowns. She has made the same journey every day for seven years now, and not once has anyone come with her. In truth she is grateful. An animal has been screaming in the night, and she feels the residue of anxiety.

‘I’d welcome the company, Sister Alice,’ she says. She holds the bucket away from her thigh as Alice helps her with the drawbar of the gate. Something slops within, and a tongue of warm steam rises to lick her wrist. Her skin crawls.

Beyond the gate their feet break the new crust of snow hard frozen in the night and a thick mist is rising from the river. A crow leaves its perch on a pole.

Alice stops.

‘I have always hated birds,’ she says. ‘It is the feathers.’

Katherine wonders what it would be like to have time for such luxuries.

She carries on, her steps loud in the frozen stillness. When they come to the tangle of the previous day’s footprints by the dung heap she sees someone — one of the lay brothers probably — has been out since yesterday, and has crossed the river. She sets aside the bucket and opens the barrel lid with a snap of ice. It is the one advantage of winter, she thinks, when the cold seems to keep at bay the lazy flies that usually hum around the barrel’s open mouth and the stink of the process makes you gasp. Sister Alice tries to pass her the bucket. She slips and nearly drops it.