Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims

by Toby Clements

  ‘Ordinaries,’ Walter states, gesturing at the soldiers as they crowd under the gates. ‘Posted to the garrison here. Can’t do a day’s work on the land and shoot an arrow afterwards like us.’

  ‘Walter,’ Geoffrey cautions.

  ‘I’m just saying,’ Walter replies, spreading his hands, all false innocence. ‘And anyway, even if they can do all that, they can’t be expected to remember on which side they’re meant to be fighting.’

  His voice rises as he speaks. A heavyset soldier’s hand goes to his sword. Two more shift their bills.

  The Watch Captain appears.

  ‘All right,’ he says. ‘All right. Calm down. Let’s move it along there.’

  Walter smirks.

  ‘Say anything like that again though,’ the officer says as he passes, ‘and I’ll prick you myself, you little shit.’

  Walter laughs. They follow the cart out along a narrow street towards the marketplace, its wheels grinding on the cobbles. All around them are wool-houses, great blank-sided stone buildings where the merchants store their sarplers.

  ‘What was all that about?’ Thomas asks Geoffrey. Geoffrey glances at him with a mixture of irritation and surprise.

  ‘Don’t you two know anything?’ he asks.

  Thomas shakes his head.

  ‘It was their mates who swapped sides at Ludford Bridge last year,’ Geoffrey says. ‘Went over to the Queen. The King, I should say. Their captain was the Master Porter of this place, bloke called Trollope. Andrew Trollope, a northerner. Meant to be a good friend to the Earl of Warwick, only when it came to it, he wasn’t.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Thomas asks. ‘Were you there?’

  ‘Me and Walter were. We were with Lord Cornford’s men, in the Duke of York’s battle. We had the men of Calais with us, and the Earl of Warwick in command, and though the King had three times the numbers, we were in a good spot, with a fortified wall and even some bombards and guns. And no one thought much of the King’s troops. They were northerners, see? Rather steal a candlestick from a nun than go toe to toe with a man.

  ‘So on the night before the battles were supposed to meet, we said our prayers and slept in the field where we were. Next morning, even before Mass, it was clear everyone’d left. Turned out that the Calais men had gone over to the King in the night. And so, seeing as he knew our disposition, and how the enemy now had four times as many men as us, the Duke of York and the Earl of Warwick gave up hope, and to spare the bloodshed of the commons, or so they said, they fought with their heels.’

  The traventers lead them into the marketplace, where the gabled houses seem to take a step back from the cobbled streets and there is glass in every window. Above them the towers of St Mary’s and St Nicholas’s rub shoulders with the Staple Inn, the stone-built hall where the Captain of Calais conducts his business. Even here Thomas can smell rotting meat.

  ‘God’s blood!’ Katherine mutters next to him. ‘Another one.’

  She has her hand over her mouth and turns her head from the sight, but Thomas cannot help himself. Four mottled quarters of meat hang on grimy ropes from a stone cross: a man’s arm and his legs, covered in fat black flies, and the rack of his ribs where the executioner’s axe has passed.

  ‘Wonder where his head is?’ Dafydd asks.

  They walk on, leaving the market square for a street full of taverns and cookshops, bath houses and a cock pit.

  ‘What I wouldn’t give for a drink,’ Walter mutters.

  A woman without a headdress watches them pass from the door of an inn. Then another, from a window above, who stares down at them in a manner Thomas knows to be brazen. Walter licks his lips.

  ‘A harlot,’ he says, addressing Katherine, who has been pretending not to see them. ‘Better not let Sir John find you with one of them though, Girly, or you’ll lose a month’s pay.’

  ‘And the wench’ll have her arm broken for her troubles,’ Geoffrey adds.

  Katherine moves closer to Thomas. He finds he likes it when she does that, but her proximity confuses him, muddles his mind, makes him uncertain what to do with his hands. He glances down at her. She is not looking his way. They walk on, she in his shadow.

  The alleyways between the houses are dark and noisome, little better than blocked sewers. Some are choked waist-high with every kind of refuse and worse, leaving only narrow slips at the centre for men and animals to pass. Here there are stables and sties, tanneries and pelterers’ workshops, each adding their signatures to the stink and noise of the streets.

  ‘Gah,’ Geoffrey exclaims as they pass a dyer’s yard where a great vat of urine and dog shit simmers. ‘Right strong, isn’t it?’

  Worst are the shambles, where butchers bleed their animals and leave offal to rot in the streets. Here is a pile of rotting cows’ hooves.

  Another Watch guards the fortified Boulogne Gate, but this afternoon they are more interested in throwing stones at a man hanging in a basket suspended from the castle walls.

  ‘Get on with it!’ one of them shouts as he launches a half-brick over the moat.

  ‘Cut the rope, you dozy bastard,’ another bellows. ‘Then we can all go home.’

  ‘What’s he doing up there?’ Dafydd asks.

  ‘Don’t you worry about him,’ the soldier laughs.

  The moat’s waters are turbid with all kinds of rubbish, and rats compete with seabirds for scraps. Two soldiers are stationed in a boat below the man in the basket though whether they are there to drown him when he falls or pull him out it is impossible to tell.

  Beyond the gate sprawls a vast village of rain-damp canvas shelters in a broad sea of pale mud that stretches as far as the eye can see. The roads are raised on dykes over drainage ditches and the water in the canals reflects the dull skies above. It reminds Thomas of the marshes around the priory, and he feels a leaden depression settle on him.

  ‘Welcome to the parish of St Anne’s,’ Walter spits. ‘What we call the Scunnage.’

  Wordlessly they follow the cart up an avenue between the tents. Some are grander than others, with standards hung from long lances thrust into the mud, and within them it is possible to see chunky sheepskin beds where the better class of captain sleep. From other tents bored men stare at them. They are not precisely friendly, not precisely hostile, and there is nowhere for anyone to sit.

  Everywhere is crowded with rough-looking women and boys acting as porters, carrying jugs of ale and water, armfuls of pimps and faggots for the cooking fires. The boys are filthy and malnourished, and more than one is missing an ear. Beyond are more women, eyeing them with weary speculation. Walter waves to them, all false jocularity.

  ‘Whores,’ he mutters.

  They move on.

  ‘I always hate this bit,’ Geoffrey mutters. ‘Looking for the best place to set up and everyone looking at you like you’ve got the pox.’

  ‘And you always end up exactly where everybody’s been shitting since a month back,’ Walter adds.

  They move on through the camp until they come to its edges. Sure enough a shallow scoop has been gouged in the earth and the stench of human waste is almost unbearable. Chickens and geese and pigs are everywhere.

  Then there is a priest on a grey donkey.

  When he sees him, something in Thomas lurches. He has been so long at sea that he has almost forgotten his state as an apostate. Now it comes back to him. He ducks his head and hurries to the other side of the cart. Katherine is already there, her eyes wide with anxiety. Her hands still shake long after the priest has gone.

  The sooner they see the Prior of All, he thinks, the happier she will be.

  ‘I think we’ll head around there,’ Geoffrey says and urges the carters off the road and across a sodden compression towards where the armourers and arrow-makers have set up their stalls. The acrid smoke from their fires does something to mask the smell of the camp, but the din of their hammers is insistent.

  ‘You’ll soon get used to that right enough,’ Walter says, ‘and, an
yway, they can’t work after sunset.’

  There are long hovels where the horses, oxen and asses are kept and there are more boys in cast-off clothes bringing hay from the barns. There are pens for geese and sheep and sties for pigs and efforts have been made to make a road using willow hurdles laid across the mud. Some boys are piling up slender logs for the fires and thick-armed women are trying to wash clothes in water that has never been clean. Every now and then a Watch rides past, back from one of the other castles in the Pale, their horses’ hocks yellow with mud.

  ‘Not much of a place,’ the other Thomas points out, shaking his head so that the line of water drips scatters from the fringe of his cap. He is a quietly spoken boy, about Thomas’s age.

  ‘It’ll be better when we’ve had something to eat,’ Geoffrey asserts. The rest of the men begin unloading the wagon while the carters look on and Geoffrey shows them how to set the battens and canvas and tie the loops off to keep the tents upright. They use broken arrows as tent pegs, hammering them into the mud with mauls that might properly have been used to stave in a man’s skull.

  Two of the Johns return with a pile of sticks and lumps of coal, which they light with some baked linen, a good black flint and a steel, and they soon produce a new source of discomfort as foul black smoke fills the tent.

  Geoffrey then gives Thomas five silver coins, a sack and four jugs and sends him with Katherine to buy bread and ale.

  ‘Don’t spend it on pretty clothes, Girly,’ Walter calls as they leave.

  When they are away Thomas asks her how long she thinks it will be before her sex is discovered.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she admits. ‘But what else can I do but keep up the pretence? Besides, if you are right that God has a special purpose in mind for us, well, we shall see.’

  It is on Thomas’s tongue to remind her that Joan of Arc was burned not for being a witch, but for disguising her sex under a man’s clothes, against the strictures of Deuteronomy. Does she even know who Joan is? He doubts it suddenly. And whatever will they do to her when they do? He thinks of the man hanging in the tree outside Boston, or the wretch quartered in the marketplace in Calais, with his head sent elsewhere, or the pardoner’s story of the man with his ear nailed to a post, and the whore with her broken arm. There seem to be any number of ways to punish a man, or a woman.

  ‘Besides,’ she goes on, ‘Walter only calls me that to hurt me. It seems that is how he is.’

  Thomas nods. He supposes she is right.

  ‘He is like a dog my father once had,’ he says. ‘He used to nip the sheep’s heels, and we lost more than one lamb because of it, so in the end my brother took him out and drowned him. After he’d done it, we regretted it.’

  Katherine glances at him, but says nothing, and Thomas wonders why he has told her the story. He has never talked of home to anyone since he left. He does not often think of the place now. He had been happy to leave the farm. It was a harsh life, always cold, usually dark, and every day mutton. His brother too, and his brother’s wife, pregnant with their first child, always looking at him. He knew that being away, being in cloister, was the best thing that could have happened to him.

  They walk on until they find some women willing to sell them ale and bread. By the time they return to the tent a cauldron of beans hangs over the fire.

  Geoffrey has also spent money on new-made clothes. He hands Thomas and Katherine each a linen shirt, two hoods – one blue, one red – two pairs of blue hose that look as if they might fit Thomas but not Katherine, a travelling cloak such as the other men wear, and a thick quilted jacket each.

  ‘Won’t stop an arrow or a blade,’ he says as Thomas shrugs his on, ‘but then almost nothing does. Leastways, nothing we can afford.’

  Thomas has never had new clothes before. The jack hangs stiffly from his body while Katherine’s reaches below her thighs and she pulls it tight about her, so that it becomes more like a long coat than a jacket. Geoffrey hands Thomas the giant’s pollaxe.

  ‘Keep it somewhere safe,’ he says.

  Just then Richard Fakenham comes into the clearing by the fire.

  ‘Any news?’ Geoffrey asks.

  ‘The Earl of Warwick has sailed for Ireland,’ he says, throwing his helmet through the doorway of the tent and on to a pile of sheepskins. ‘Gone to see his grace the Duke of York. Means we’ll be stuck here awhile.’

  Geoffrey groans. Walter spits a fob of white mucus into the fire.

  ‘Still, at least we’ll be able to prepare ourselves,’ Richard continues. He sits on the pile of sheepskins and unties the spurs from his boots. ‘The boys haven’t loosed an arrow in a week.’

  Walter nods.

  ‘Where is Sir John?’ Geoffrey asks. ‘Is he lodged in town?’

  ‘He is. With old Lord Fauconberg. They were in France together, and you know how it is with them. He’ll take supper and sleep there, I suppose.’

  ‘Is that soup ready?’

  After they have eaten dinner, Walter leads the company through the sprawl of tents to the butts. Thomas and Katherine follow along, a step or two behind, not yet accepted.

  ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Let’s get busy.’

  The men begin unfastening their bows, shaking out their arrows on the mud. They nock their strings and begin stretching their arms and shoulders, limbering up ready to shoot.

  ‘You ever use a bow?’ Walter asks Thomas.

  ‘Not for a few years,’ Thomas says. ‘Not since—’

  He stops. He has not used a bow since he joined the priory. Until then he had spent every Sunday after Mass with the other villagers on the butts behind the church, sending sheaf after sheaf of arrows into the sky. He had been thought a promising bowman, and when Walter passes him a spare bow, the weight and balance of it bring his childhood back.

  ‘Take a cord,’ Walter says. ‘Nock it.’

  Thomas loops the string around one of the horn nocks and then places it against the side of his foot to help bend the bow and loop the other end over. It is a big bow, fat and long, witch hazel, but old and tired, and probably never a really good one.

  ‘Seen better days.’ Walter nods at it.

  There are dark pricks in the wood and signs of cracking from long use. Yet with the string nocked it comes alive in his hands and he itches to find an arrow to put it to use.

  Walter has turned back to the men and Thomas watches as they strap on their bracers and slip their fingers into the leather tabs that protect their drawing fingers. There is something timeworn and easy about this routine, the manner in which they joke together and mock one another, and he can easily imagine them back at the village butts. But then instead of taking turns to loose their arrows down the range, as they did at home, the men form a loose harrow formation, standing in three ranks, so that each has just enough room to shoot. They have arrows stuck in the ground and in their belts and some wear their bags on their belts. They stand waiting for Walter’s command.

  ‘Nock,’ Walter says, and they nock their arrows on to the bowstrings.

  ‘Draw.’

  They haul the strings back as they lift their great bows into the pale sky.

  ‘And loose!’

  They send their arrows off with a roll of thrums, each shaft oddly elegant as it whips sighing out of sight. As he lets fly, each archer grunts, as if in satisfaction, and staggers a pace or two forward.

  Then they pick up another arrow each. Walter repeats the command.

  ‘Nock, draw, loose!’ he snaps, quicker this time. ‘Nock, draw, loose.’

  After they’ve shot about a dozen shafts each Walter stops them.

  ‘All right,’ he says. ‘Time for a laugh. Thomas here is going to have a go.’

  The men let Thomas through.

  ‘I have not shot for some time,’ he says, preparing them for the worst.

  ‘Just get on with it,’ Walter grumbles. There is a low murmur of well-meant mockery. Thomas cannot help but smile.

  He picks an arrow, nocks it
on the cord and places it on the shelf the knuckles of his left hand make where he grips the bow. It is a bodkin head: a war arrow. He begins the draw, but the bow now seems horribly stiff. He knows he has to get his body into the bow, so that his back muscles take the weight, not his arms, but still, after so many years in the priory attending to not much more than his psalter, his muscles have withered, and though he has the technique, he has lost the strength. He can hardly get the string to his left shoulder. Sweat breaks out on his brow, his arms begin shaking and the string cuts into the soft fingers of his right hand. He cannot hold the string any longer. He looses it with a twang and the arrow shoots forward about a hundred paces to land in the mud.

  Walter cackles.

  ‘I reckon young Girly can do better than that,’ he says.

  Richard is watching and gestures that Katherine is not to be put to the test.

  ‘All right,’ Richard says. ‘You’ve had your fun. Now let’s stop messing about. Collect your arrows and then we’ll have a sheaf each. Fast as you can.’

  The men grumble as they fetch their arrows, but are silenced on their return to find the men of the Gate Watch that Walter abused earlier that morning standing fanned out along the back of the butts, each man at ease with his bow, waiting, watching. No one says a thing. The atmosphere thickens.

  ‘All right, boys,’ Walter mutters, pretending to ignore the newcomers. ‘Let’s see if we can’t put on a show to remind this lot not to switch sides in the future, shall we? Remember this is for the pride of Sir John Fakenham’s company, so go fast, but make each one count. I don’t want to be able to see the butts for the fletches. Understand?’

  The men gather their arrows together, and get back into position.

  ‘Not you, Northern Thomas,’ Walter says. ‘Right. Let’s go. Nock! Draw! Loose!’

  For the next three minutes the men work fast, each one drawing and loosing his bow twenty-four times. Dafydd is the last to finish. The arrow storm has been brief but nearly four hundred arrows have been loosed, and it is possible to imagine just what that might do to an enemy.

  When they’ve finished, they are all flushed and breathing heavily and they are steaming in the chill air. They look satisfied enough, but Walter’s eyes are shut. The Watch officer begins a slow hand clap and his men begin murmuring, then laughing.