Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims

by Toby Clements

  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.

  2

  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.

  ‘Let me,’ Katherine says.

  ‘But I want to help.’

  Again Katherine wonders why Alice is there. Not standing by the river and holding a bucket of the Prioress’s slops, but in the priory at all. She is too young and too pretty to have come here to wait to die like the other sisters. She is too thin, that is true, but so is everybody these days, except perhaps the Prioress and Sister Joan. Nevertheless, even standing there holding that bucket of shit, even with that dew drop on the tip of her pink nose, Alice seems other-worldly, more than merely one of the sisters. Her clothes have no patches or stains and her rosary beads are finely wrought from ivory – a gift from a loving relative perhaps – and there is a lightness about her, as if she barely touches the ground at all.

  ‘Why are you here, Sister Alice?’ Katherine asks.

  ‘I told you,’ Alice says. ‘I want to help.’

  ‘No, no,’ Katherine goes on. ‘I mean here. Here at the priory.’

  Alice smiles.

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I am a bride of Christ.’

  She even holds up her hand to show the gold ring on her finger.

  ‘What about you? Are you not a bride of Christ too?’

  Katherine cannot tell if Alice is making a joke, but she thinks of herself: left at the almonry as an infant, with only a purse and some letters, and now the one to empty the Prioress’s slop bucket every morning.

  ‘Me?’ she says at length. ‘I am like this.’

  And she pours the slops into the barrel, careful to keep back the solids for the dung heap. After she has done it, she empties the heavy bucket on to the heap, three or four very brown turds on the snow. The two nuns step back and Alice shivers.

  Then they turn and begin their walk back across the fields towards the priory.

  ‘Why is it always you who empties the Prioress’s night bucket?’ Alice asks.

  ‘It just is,’ Katherine says.

  Alice opens her mouth to ask something more but then closes it. Perhaps she has too many questions and cannot choose the right one. They walk on in silence, listening to their footsteps, and the click of Alice’s rosary, and their ragged breathing; Katherine is lost in thought, and so it is that she doesn’t hear the horses on the road above them until it is too late.

  When she does, she stops mid-stride. Her heart lurches.

  Men on horseback. More than one. More than two.

  ‘Quick,’ she whispers.

  She gestures to Alice, and they lift their skirts and run. She hears a man shout. Dear God. They’ve been seen. She keeps running. The men are urging their horses off the road, cutting down across the frozen river, aiming to meet them before they reach the beggars’ gate.

  There are only a hundred steps to cover, but Katherine and Alice are floundering in their clogs and skirts, and the bucket is heavy and she dare not drop it for fear of what the Prioress will say. Then Alice falls with a cry. Katherine drags her to her feet. The men are in the field now, hollering as if at sport, ploughing their horses through the snow, one pulling ahead of the others.

  Katherine turns and starts running again, but in a moment the first horse is on them. She cowers even as she runs, ducking the expected blow, but the rider overtakes them, thundering past. Then he stands tall in his stirrups and hauls back on the reins. He sets the horse on its hind legs and blocks their way.

  The horse is huge, brown, with flailing hooves, a beard of filthy icicles and eyeballs as big as fists. The rider is young, but strong, and his face is bright with delight at what he’s caught. He is laughing. Without thinking Katherine takes a step to one side and then, using every muscle in her body, each one honed by punishing years of labour, she swings the heavy bucket. Lets it fly.

  It hits the horseman with the crack of a falling trap door.

  He flies back over the croup of the horse, hands clapped to his face. Alice screams. The horse launches itself forward again. They throw themselves aside as it barrels past them.

  The man is screaming. He rolls on his back, knees drawn up, hands pressed to his face, blood pouring between his leather-gloved fingers. It is everywhere, staining the snow and his white tabard.

  But now the other horse is on them, a grey, ridden by a man in a long red coat. He has a sword.

  Katherine
steps in front of Alice and faces him. She is beyond fear now.

  The rider comes at her, arm raised. She stands to face him. But then something happens. Something comes through the air, a dark blur. It catches the horseman, hits his head with a slap. He falters, drops the sword, then collapses, as if filleted. He rolls from the saddle and crashes to the snow. The horse turns, canters away.

  And suddenly there is someone else there with them. A man on foot, in a black cloak, clogs on his feet. It is one of the canons, running from the direction of the river. He is waving his arms and shouting, and his skirts are riding high around his bare knees.

  The third rider turns to face the new threat, and the fourth rider, a giant of a man on a carthorse, dithers too.

  Katherine snatches Alice’s hand and they turn and bolt for the gate. The canon hesitates in mid-stride, swerves, nearly slips, and then follows them. The third rider pulls a long-handled hammer from his pack and jams his heels into his horse’s flanks. The fourth rider – the giant – jumps from his horse and comes running at them on foot. He has no shoes, but is as fast as a wolf, and he has a monstrous axe, and he is roaring as he comes.

  Katherine finds the beggars’ gate and pulls Alice through. Then the canon comes hurtling through. She heaves the oak door shut in the giant’s face and drops the locking bar. The planks rock and the bar bulges under the impact of the man’s shoulder, but the door holds, just.

  Katherine stands back. She can hardly breathe. She can feel her pulse in her teeth. She makes the sign of the cross, but she cannot help steal a glance at the canon. He is bent with his hands on his knees, gasping with the effort, a long funnel of breath rolling from his gaping mouth. At that moment he stands and he looks at her and for an instant they stare at one another. He has blue eyes, reddish hair.

  Then Alice speaks. She is on straw-flecked ice of the yard, pointing at the canon’s clogs, shrinking back, shielding her eyes so that she cannot see the rest of him.

  ‘He must go!’ she says.

  It is true. If he is seen, Katherine can scarcely imagine the penance the three of them will face. But then a voice drifts over the wall.

  ‘Brother Monk?’

  It is a refined voice, nasal and strong. The voice of a man used to ordering others about.

  ‘Brother Monk? Sister Nun? I know you can hear me. You’ve grievously mishandled my boy, Sister Nun, and you have knocked me from my horse, Brother Monk. By my honour, I cannot let that pass. Come out now and we shall do our business and then I shall ride on my way as if none of this ever happened. Do you hear me, Sister Nun? Brother Monk?’

  His voice is close, just the other side of the door, a mere hand’s span away. There is a pause of two or three beats of the heart and then the voice comes again.

  ‘Well, Sister Nun and Brother Monk, since you’re not going to come out then I shall have to come in. And when I do, I promise you this: I shall find you. I shall find you first, Brother Monk, and when I do, I’ll let my man Morrant here do you to death. Then I’ll come for you, Sister Nun, you and your snivelling girl. After Morrant’s done with you, I’ll nail your bodies to this very door here, see, the one you’re hiding behind, and then I’ll set a fire under you. I’ll see you beg the Almighty to take you. Do you hear me?’

  Then there is a quick turn of hooves on the other side of the gate and the horsemen are gone. Katherine stares at her wet wooden clogs under the snow-thickened hem of her cassock. Alice is whimpering.

  ‘I must be gone,’ the canon mumbles. ‘Must go.’

  She looks at him one last time. He is a big man, a half-head taller than she, with broad shoulders, the reddish hair cropped short, a disc of skin shaved bald. Apart from the horsemen beyond, he is the first man she can ever recall having seen. She almost reaches out to touch his face.

  He turns and hurries across the courtyard to the wall that divides the priory and scrambles up on to the roof of the wood store. His clogs send the snow sliding, but he catches the top of the wall and hauls himself up and over. He pauses, looks back, and then is gone, back into his own world. Only then does she wish she’d thanked him.

  ‘We must tell the Prioress,’ Alice wails, still on the ground. ‘We must warn all the sisters.’

  ‘No!’ Katherine says, helping her up. ‘No. We cannot. We cannot. We must tell no one. No good can come of this.’

  She is looking around them at the windows and the apertures. Has the canon been seen? She thinks not. There is no one about.

  ‘But what of those threats?’ Alice counters. ‘Those things said?’

  ‘They can do nothing,’ Katherine says, ‘so long as we remain within the priory walls. Let us thank God for that canon, whoever he was, and let us pray that he was not seen here in our quarters.

  ‘We will do our own penance, Sister,’ she adds. ‘A thousand Aves and two thousand Credos before the Shrine of the Virgin, and we will forgo bread until the feast of St Gilbert.’

  Alice nods uncertainly. Only Katherine knows that the feast of St Gilbert is but a few days away.

  ‘I am sure that will please the Lord,’ Alice says at length, and seems to be about to say something else, but just then the bell begins ringing for prime. They look at one another before they brush the snow from their cassocks, adjust their veils, fold their hands into their sleeves and walk towards the cloister and the safety of church.

  Neither hears the soft tap of a shutter being pulled closed above their heads.

  3

  ‘ALARM!’ HE SHOUTS. ‘Alarm!’

  It is just after first light and the canons are gathering for prime in the western arm of the cloister. They react as a herd of cows might to a barking dog. Only the Dean steps forward.

  ‘What is this, Brother Thomas?’ He stands with his hands on his hips and a scowl on his face.

  ‘There are horsemen without.’ Thomas points. He can hardly breathe for running. ‘They are armed. They are coming for us.’

  The Dean snaps into movement, as if this is something for which he had planned.

  ‘Brother John!’ he barks. ‘Brother Geoffrey! Secure the main gate. Brother Barnaby, sound the bell to summon the lay brethren! Let it ring sharply now. Brother Athelstan, have the Prioress secure the postern gate in the sisters’ cloister and shutter every window. She must gather the sisters in the chapel. Brother Anselm, bring reed and ink and some paper to the Prior in the secretarium. Brother Wilfred, have the ostler saddle a horse. And tell Brother Robert to come.’

  Three canons are sent to take the books from the library to the secretarium, and two more to take axes to the buttery, ready to open the barrel and let the wine run to waste if the priory walls are breached. The bell in the belfry begins an urgent peal.

  ‘How many, Brother?’ the Dean asks.

  ‘Four, I believe, although one has been sorely treated.’

  ‘You harmed him?’

  Thomas hesitates. He does not wish to mention the two sisters.

  ‘I did, Brother, may God forgive me.’

  ‘Good man,’ the old soldier says. ‘I am sure He will find it in His heart to do so.’

  The Prior stands before the iron-bound door of the secretarium, frowning at the sound of the bell. He is dressed only in an alb, and the white circle of hair around his head is in disarray, and he blinks.

  ‘Why is the bell ringing so, Brother Stephen?’

  ‘We are under attack, Father. Brother Thomas here was waylaid while without by four armed men.’

  The Prior’s gaze switches to Thomas.

  ‘What was their purpose?’

  ‘Their captain threatened to invest the priory and to have me killed.’

  The Prior turns to the Dean.

  ‘You have alerted our sister the Prioress? Good. And secured every gate and window?’

  ‘All is done, Holy Father, although I have not yet sent for aid from Cornford.’

  The Prior looks thoughtful.

  ‘It is difficult to know what to do in that regard,’ he says, mor
e to himself than the Dean or Thomas. ‘I am not yet sure of where Sir Giles stands in respect to his obligations to our house.’

  Brother Anselm arrives with the reed and ink and this decides the Prior.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ he says, taking the nib and paper. ‘Let us do so, and see what results.’

  ‘Brother Robert can deliver it.’

  The Prior nods and the Dean turns to Thomas.

  ‘Climb the belfry, Tom, and see if your men are still there.’

  Thomas hurries through the secretarium into the nave, where Brother Barnaby is tugging the bell rope in sharp jerks. Thomas has never been up the ladder. His clogs are clumsy on the rungs and he clings to the risers so tightly that sections of bark come loose and spin down on Barnaby below.

  ‘Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus . . .’

  After almost a hundred rungs the ladder emerges through a trap door on to a bird-shit-splattered, roughly adzed wooden floor. The bell swings close above him, deafening. He crawls across to the snow-capped sill of the window set in the northern wall and looks out.

  Nothing.

  Beyond the priory walls a milk-white dawn mist has risen above the fens, a membrane that floats over everything so he can hardly tell where the earth below meets the sky above. Only the stark branches of the hawthorn trees are prominent, though here and there the mist eddies and thins under the tutelage of the freshening wind, so that vague shapes appear for a moment, then are gone.

  He watches from the other windows of the tower, each facing a different point on the compass, and through each the view is similar. There is no sign of the horsemen. Down below he can see the beggars’ gate open and quickly close again to admit numerous lay brethren, summoned from their granges by the din of the bell.

  At length it stops ringing, though his ears continue long after.

  ‘Brother Thomas!’

  The Dean is standing in the middle of the garth, framed by the cloister.