Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims

by Toby Clements

  ‘Sir John knows Giles Riven,’ she says.

  Thomas starts.

  ‘How?’

  After she’s told him he throws off the sailcloth and stalks away across the deck. She watches him for a moment. He is so drawn and thin next to the other men. She can see every bone. The sooner he returns to the cloister, she supposes the happier he will be. But she feels a breeze of panic when she thinks of parting from him. What will she do then?

  When he comes back he looks even more disturbed. There is something in his eye that reminds her of Alice, or perhaps one of the other sisters after they have been at prayer too long.

  ‘It is the will of God,’ he says. ‘There is no other way to explain it.’

  She says nothing, but she feels something sinking within her.

  ‘Why would He send those winds?’ Thomas is asking. ‘If not to hold us back, so that we would meet these men? Why would He preserve us through the fight with – with Cobham? Surely it is as Sir John says? He has some special purpose for us.’

  Katherine does not believe God has in mind a special purpose for anyone, for if that were so, then why not for everyone? She cannot believe His special purpose for her was to endure the Prioress’s torments for so long. She cannot believe that His purpose for Alice was to die like that. Were she to believe that, then she could only conclude that this God was a vengeful God.

  ‘It is God’s will that we go to Calais,’ Thomas is saying.

  She shakes her head to distract herself.

  ‘Why?’ she asks. ‘Why Calais?’

  Thomas is momentarily flummoxed. He glares at her. Then softens.

  ‘We can go from there to Canterbury,’ he says. ‘Where we will seek out the Prior of All and plead our case.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says. She does not want to think about Canterbury.

  ‘What is wrong?’ he asks.

  Now it is her turn to be flummoxed. It is the question, and the way he looks at her when he asks it, because it seems he wants to know what is wrong with her so that he can put it right. The experience is new.

  ‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘Nothing.’

  And now she looks away over the ship’s rail, across the dipping waters at the banks of sea mist and fog that have congealed around them. She has been putting off the moment but now she knows she must tell him that she can expect nothing but a noose from the Prior of All. She knows she must do it now. Tell him that she cannot come with him to Canterbury, she cannot return to the priory. She looks up, ready to confess, but a sailor in the ship’s bow gives a shout, Thomas turns away, and the time for confession is gone.

  Hearing the cry the men in the ship’s waist roll to their feet and Richard Fakenham appears to seek out Lysson, the ship’s new captain.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asks.

  ‘Ship,’ Lysson says, nodding towards the French shore.

  The men begin to crowd the ship’s side, staring across at the waters to this new vessel’s hazy outline. She looks to be a carrack like their own, but she is moving faster, with her sails filled and her bow throwing up white water.

  When Richard Fakenham is anxious he clenches his jaw and even under the ten days’ of bristle it is possible to see his muscles at work.

  ‘Where did she come from?’ he asks.

  ‘Dunkirk, prob’ly,’ Lysson says.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Came from inshore, so.’

  ‘But it could be anyone?’

  ‘Can’t make out the standard yet, but they ain’t merchants.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Look at them castles,’ he says. ‘’S a fighting ship, all right. Pirates, most like.’

  The new ship is built up at both ends to give her crew the advantage of height when it comes to loosing arrows and throwing stones.

  ‘Could be French. Spanish. Breton. Could have come from Sandwich. Stuck there with the wind and that. Could be from the English fleet.’

  ‘Best be ready then,’ Richard says, and turns to the men gathered on the deck. ‘Walter?’ he calls.

  Walter is already ushering the archers into the cabin to collect their bows and put on their quilted jacks. They emerge cumbersome, strapping leather bracers on their wrists, pulling leather tabs over their draw fingers. Each man straps a short sword around his waist and hangs a small circular shield over the pommel. The bows are taken out of their bags last and the hemp strings nocked.

  ‘Lids on, lads,’ Walter says.

  They slip their helmets on, close-fitting steel shells each fastened with a leather strap under the chin.

  Richard stands at the ship’s prow while Geoffrey straps a piece of plate armour across his back. Despite being so large, Geoffrey has agile fingers, and he fastens the hidden straps before Richard’s father appears on deck.

  ‘Richard,’ he calls to his son. ‘Better stand elsewhere, eh? No sense making yourself a target.’

  Richard is pale and keeps swapping his drawn sword from hand to hand. He ignores Sir John and peers at the ship ahead. The plates of his armour tap and scrape as Geoffrey secures them.

  ‘Walter,’ Sir John calls. ‘Get the flag up.’

  Walter leaves the rail and fetches a large square of fabric from Sir John’s trunk. One of the sailors takes it and climbs a few yards up the ratlines.

  ‘Go on. Farther. Up there. Look.’

  Walter points. The sailor climbs up and ties the top corner to a stay, then pulls it taut. The flag – a large black star on a white background – catches in the breeze. There is a tentative cheer from the men.

  ‘Can you make out her standard?’ Sir John asks the sailor. The man pauses with his bare feet on the ship’s rail and peers across the waters at the other ship, shields his eyes, then, after a moment, shakes his head.

  ‘Never mind the standard,’ Walter mutters. ‘Has she got any cannons? Any bombards?’

  At the mention of artillery the sailor quickly climbs down. The rest of the archers are quiet.

  ‘I can’t see anything,’ Richard is saying. ‘This mist. God’s blood! Is that smoke? Look! Yes! They have a fire going. They mean to use fire arrows.’

  He turns on Thomas and Katherine who are standing spare before the cabin door.

  ‘You two! Find a bucket each. Get some water on board.’

  Since Cobham and his men have thrown everything overboard there is only one bucket from the balinger.

  ‘I said we should have brought a friar,’ Geoffrey says, his voice slightly higher than usual. ‘We need someone to lead us in prayer.’

  Thomas opens his mouth but closes it again and instead they drop a bucket on a rope down into the green seawater and let it fill, hauling it up as the archers kneel and begin a muffled chant of the paternoster. Each archer makes a sign of the cross on the deck where he kneels and then bends to kiss it.

  ‘All right, on your feet,’ Walter says when they’re finished. They keep glancing at one another and fiddling with their equipment and one of them yawns with nerves.

  ‘Put your arrows in your belts,’ Walter says. ‘Make every one count ’cause we ain’t got no more. Pick your aim and look for faces. Look for faces, understand? Faces. Anything pale. This ain’t the butts. This is the real thing.’

  They are still well beyond bowshot, but the other ship is approaching fast. Geoffrey stands next to Katherine. He is carrying a long-handled hammer with a pick on the reverse, like Thomas’s pollaxe, only shorter, designed to be used with one hand.

  ‘Can you make out her standard?’ he asks.

  Thomas shakes his head. Katherine cranes forward just as the wind gusts and backs a notch, and the ship’s banner spreads itself red across the grey sky.

  ‘It is a picture of something,’ she says.

  Sir John hobbles over and grips the ship’s side.

  ‘Of course it is a picture,’ he barks. ‘Of what though?’

  Katherine cannot be sure. The boats plough towards one another, dipping in the green waters so that the flags flap and buckle. Then
the banner stretches and looks to be some sort of creature, and she remembers the bear she saw in Boston.

  ‘Could it be a bear?’ she asks. ‘Gripping something?’

  ‘A stump?’

  ‘A tree stump? Perhaps.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ Sir John asks.

  She nods.

  ‘Ha!’ Sir John claps her on the shoulder, nearly driving her to her knees. Then he cups his hands and tries to shout across to the other ship. ‘A Warwick!’ he cries. ‘A Warwick!’

  The archers groan with relief but then hurry to the ship’s side to join the shouting, and soon across the dipping waters they hear the same cry returned. There is the sound of men sighing with relief. Soon the other vessel is alongside. The men across the water are almost identically dressed, in red coats and jackets, and they watch as their captain climbs the ship’s rail, one hand raised in salute.

  ‘Where are you bound?’ he shouts.

  ‘Calais!’ Richard shouts back. ‘We are the company of Sir John Fakenham!’

  Even at such a distance Katherine can see this means nothing to the other man.

  ‘Godspeed!’ he calls. ‘And keep you safe!’

  Their sail shudders as the carrack passes and takes their wind, and then it is gone, away into the mist, southwestwards on a soft air.

  ‘All right,’ Walter begins, ‘excitement’s over, let’s get everything put away.’

  ‘God gave you good eyes, Kit,’ Sir John says. Katherine flushes and hides herself in fiddling with the handle of the bucket. The old man hobbles back to his cabin.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ she asks Geoffrey.

  ‘Fistula,’ Geoffrey says. ‘Spent too long sitting on his horse in the rain, see, wearing heavy armour and looking for a Frenchman who’d give him a fight.’

  The archers begin unstringing their bows and putting their swords and bucklers back into their packs. Only Richard looks anything but relieved.

  ‘He’s yet to be blooded,’ Geoffrey says quietly. ‘And it weighs on him more heavily than on the rest of them.’ He nods towards the others, who are teasing one another, elated now that the danger has passed. ‘You nearly shat your pants, Dafydd, when you thought they’d fire a gun at you.’

  ‘No, I never,’ the Welshman replies in his impossible accent. ‘Been in tighter spots than that, haven’t we, Owen? Being shot at by a couple of drunken sailors from England, I don’t know.’

  Dafydd and his brother Owen are from somewhere in Wales, though perhaps by different fathers, for Dafydd is compact, with dark brows and a lick of black hair as coarse as a horse’s tail, while Owen is big-boned and blank-faced under sandy hair. Dafydd has an argumentative streak, but Owen says almost nothing, except to repeat that of which he approves. He smiles most of the time, and sits in silence staring at his brother, his massive hands curled in his lap. Geoffrey says he is simple, but there is something reassuring about his company.

  ‘Sir John was doubtful about taking him on after Ludford,’ Geoffrey tells her, ‘but Dafydd says he can spit a mouse at two hundred paces. Yet to see him try, of course, but he’s been no trouble so far.’

  Dafydd and Owen often play dice with Black John. Black John is one of the six Johns in the company, called black for the colour of his hair. There is also Red John, who has wild red hair and freckles; and Little John Willingham who had been the smallest in the company until Katherine arrived. Then there is Brampton John, who comes from a village called Brampton, near Sir John’s manor; and Johnson, son of John, from Lincoln, whom they call Johnson in honour of his father, and finally Other John, also from Lincoln, whose father is also called John, and who looks so like Brampton John and Johnson they can think of no way of distinguishing him from the other five Johns except to mark that he isn’t one of them.

  Along with another archer called Thomas – who remains just Thomas, while Thomas has become Northern Thomas because of the vestiges of a northern accent – there are two Roberts and a Hugh, also from Lincoln. Most have spent every Sunday and feast day learning to shoot arrows in the butts behind the churches in their various villages, and they’ve worked together in the fields since they were boys too, and there is an easy familiarity among them.

  Of the others, sometimes Simon Skettle of London joins Dafydd and Owen and Black John in their dice game, but no one seems to like Simon, and though he talks a great deal, he tends to silence any conversation he joins.

  Walter’s disgust is reserved in the most part for Hugh. Hugh is a long-limbed youth with fleshy lips and eyes like a girl’s, and he is always on the brink of tears.

  ‘More like a friar than an archer,’ Walter tells him. ‘You sure you’ve spent your time in the butts? Show me your fingers again.’

  Hugh manages to look misused and is made to feel it, like some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. As they sail on towards France he stands alone, staring mournfully as the mist begins to dissipate and they sight the coast.

  As they near the shore Katherine smells the tang of coal smoke and human excrement. The archers are crowded at the ship’s rail peering over the waters towards the coast where a wavering smoke stack rises above a town.

  ‘Calais,’ Walter spits. ‘The last piece of France we have to call ours.’

  ‘Looks like a bit of a shithole,’ Dafydd says.

  ‘You could say that,’ Walter agrees, ‘but it’s our shithole. Or at least, it’s the Earl of Warwick’s.’

  This gets a laugh. The remaining sailors start to reduce sail. They can hear the waves on the shore and the ship begins to slow.

  ‘That’s Fort Risban.’ Walter points, nodding across the water at a castle looming on the end of a long low spit that curves around the port. It is a squalid building, salt-stained where it is not caked in gull shit, and from its lower walls protrude three squat black barrels. There are soldiers on the castle battlements and behind them a fire is sending up smoke, as if the wood they are burning is green.

  Lysson gives an order the sailors have been waiting on. A rope is thrown out to a smaller boat with oars, and the carrack is towed along a green-watered reach between Fort Risban on one side and Calais Castle on the other.

  Beyond the castles the town sits behind its limestone walls, a jumble of church steeples and the gabled roofs. Along the quay is a broad skirt of lean-to shacks and fish-hangers where women and children are gutting fish and mending nets while men hurry past pushing carts laden with bales, bundles, caskets and barrels.

  The Mary is brought into the murky waters of the crowded harbour beyond, finishing her voyage by grating against the weed-slimed timbers of the quay. While the sailors tie her up, the gangplank is run out and dropped with a bang. Sir John Fakenham emerges from the cabin. He looks grey, more ill now than he had when he boarded the ship, and he hangs from Geoffrey’s thick arm.

  ‘Let us thank St Nicholas for a safe voyage,’ he says, and then he catches sight of Thomas and Katherine and stops. ‘Though I know that not all would see it in that way,’ he admits.

  Simon and Red John are lugging Sir John’s chest out on deck and Richard emerges from the cabin behind his father. He turns to Thomas and Katherine.

  ‘What about this?’ he asks. He holds up the pardoner’s pack, the one he had valued so highly. It is stained now, but it has been carefully tied so that its contents look to have survived the journey. She sees Thomas about to speak.

  ‘It is his,’ she interrupts, nodding at Thomas. Thomas glances at her, then nods and stretches his hand to take it. Richard hardly cares one way or the other, and tosses Thomas the pack. Thomas slings it over his back, and together they step up on to the gangplank. She follows him across, trying to imagine what the pack might hold that the pardoner valued above all his other possessions.

  9

  THOMAS SITS NEXT to Katherine on a millstone on the quayside. She is staring at the grit beneath her boot soles.

  ‘Did you ever think you’d come to France?’ he asks.

  He stamps on the ground, as if to
make sure it is real. This is the land where his father died, but it is also the land apart, where Englishmen come to make their names and their fortunes. Despite himself, he feels a slight thrill, as if the earth is communicating something to him. Katherine is less excited.

  ‘I did not ever think I’d leave the priory,’ she says.

  He is quiet after that and together they watch Geoffrey haggling with a traventer over the cost of hiring an ox and cart to take the company to find lodgings in the Pale.

  ‘You’ll find no room in the town,’ the traventer says. ‘Every man in England who owes his living to the Earl of Warwick is here. More attainted traitors than you’d dare shake a fist at.’

  He is an old soldier with a worm of pink scar tissue crawling across his nose. His mate, who holds the ox’s ring, is drunk and grins distantly while the archers pile their equipment into the cart. It takes five minutes. Thomas carries an iron cauldron that leaves his hands covered in black grease while Katherine has a leather bucket crammed with wooden spoons, plates and mugs, and a set of leather bellows. There is a grindstone and a massive roll of canvas that the Welsh brothers carry between them as if it is a dead body. There are tent poles, a lance, another bucket of broken arrows, a pile of grubby sheepskins imperfectly cured and there are more boxes and bales and lengths of canvas and some spare bows and some bags of arrows, a number of bills with rusted heads, three dented breastplates, a kettle helmet, a roll of rondel daggers and a falchion, as well as a collection of lead mauls kept in a broken barrel. Lastly the archers throw their own bags up.

  ‘Right, boys,’ Geoffrey calls, ‘that’s the lot.’

  The carter lashes the ox and they pull off across the wharves towards Calais’s Seaward Gate. Thomas and Katherine walk shoulder to shoulder behind it, hanging back from the other men; the pardoner’s pack is heavy on his back. They cross the drawbridge and go through the fortified towers in a crush with the porters hurrying under the spikes of the portcullis. The Stand Watch are there in quilted, buff-coloured jacks, each man with a cross of St George on his chest, a polished sallet on his head and a bill in his hand.