The rider kicks his horse forward one or two paces. The firelight still doesn’t stretch to his face.
‘I am here to see Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick,’ he says. He has the firm voice of the well born, though in his cloak it is impossible to make out what sort of man he is: young or old, fat or thin, well made or sickly.
Walter steps forward a pace and peers into the stranger’s face.
‘Can I tell him who you are?’ he asks.
‘He does not know me by name,’ the man says, ‘but he will want to hear what I have to say. Give him this, as a token.’
The stranger leans forward to hand something to Walter. He is wearing gloves. They still cannot see his face.
Walter accepts it, frowning.
‘Are you armed, sir?’ he asks.
The stranger pauses for a moment, as if considering this an insult; then he pulls his cloak back to reveal an empty sword scabbard at his hip. He wears a white livery coat.
‘Thomas,’ Walter says. ‘Run and give this to Warwick Herald.’
‘No!’ the stranger snaps. ‘No. Give it only to my lord the Earl.’
Thomas steps across the pool of light to take the token. It is warm in the palm of his hand. He turns and begins to walk away.
‘You there. Wait.’
It is the stranger. Thomas stops.
The stranger leans forward in his saddle and stares down at Thomas. His face is hidden in the depths of the hood of his cloak. A long moment passes. Thomas can hear him breathing, hear his mouth click open, then close.
Finally the stranger sits back and flicks his wrist.
‘Go,’ he says.
Thomas turns and walks on into the camp. In the scant light of the fires, the design of the token is hard to make out, but it is a small silver badge such as a man might pin to his jacket to show his allegiance to a particular lord. Thomas holds it in front of the watch fire in the middle of the camp and can see the badge is of a ragged staff, Warwick’s own symbol. The Captain of the Watch meets him as he approaches, hurrying up the path with Henry trailing behind.
‘I have something for his lordship the Earl of Warwick,’ Thomas says.
‘Give it me,’ the captain says, holding out his hand. Thomas shakes his head.
‘It is for the Earl alone.’
The captain raises his eyebrows.
‘I hope you know what you are about,’ he says and he turns and gestures across the clearing to the largest tent, lit from within by numerous candles so that he can see the shadow of a man sitting in his bath. Another shadow pours a bucket of water that sends up swirling clouds of steam. A large awning extends from the front where two more men guard the entrance.
Thomas explains his mission and while one of the guards watches Thomas the other puts his head through the tent aperture and mutters in a low voice. Thomas hears the Earl barking.
‘Send him in,’ he shouts.
The guard emerges and jerks his thumb.
Thomas slips through the tent flap.
The Earl of Warwick sits in his bath while a servant pours water over his back, his knees like islands in the cloudy water. The smell of herbs is strong but that of the candles – tallow – is stronger still.
Warwick’s hair is plastered to his head.
‘You,’ he says, recognising Thomas despite the feeble light. ‘What in the name of all the saints do you want?’
Thomas is surprised Warwick recognises him. He has only glimpsed him that moment after the hunting accident.
‘There is a rider at the edge of the encampment who bid me give you this token, sir.’
Thomas steps across the rug on the ground to hand it over. Warwick takes it with a wet hand and turns it over a couple of times. A frown gathers on his brow.
‘Who is this man?’ he asks Thomas.
‘He will not say his name.’
Warwick grunts.
‘Wait for me.’
He stands up, letting the hot water cascade from his body, and holds his arms out. The servant hurries to rub him with a length of linen.
‘Hurry, man!’
Warwick dries and dresses quickly. He makes Thomas wait, and Thomas stands and has to watch him as he slides into his travelling cloak and riding boots. Thomas has never seen a man so full of energy, so certain in all that he does, and there is a sort of concentrated ferocity in the way he moves.
When he is ready he steps out into the night, clicking his fingers and gesturing to the guards to bring a lantern. Thomas says nothing as he leads Warwick back through the camp.
When he reaches the picket, the rider has dismounted but Thomas still can’t see his face. Warwick moves forward and speaks to him, and after a moment the two men shake hands.
‘Right,’ Walter says. ‘Another tour of the camp. Come on.’
They set off again and by the time they are back, the stranger has left and there is no one to say what has happened. By dawn the rain has stopped. Thomas sits next to Red John on the earthwork and they drink their ale in silence. The bushes are thick with birds and their song is loud in the air. A wagon comes into the clearing, one wheel wobbling, loaded with barrels of ale. It is pulled by four oxen. Another follows, then another.
So Walter is right, Thomas thinks. For all the ambassadors and overtures that Warwick and March are sending to King Henry and the Duke of Buckingham, they know it will come to a fight, and now here it is, the ale the men will need to insulate themselves against the horrors of the day to come.
He slips off the earthworks. If there is any ale going, he wants to be in there early. He takes a full mug from the woman and retires to the bank again. Richard Fakenham appears, the first time he’s seen him walking without help since his accident. He steps gingerly, like his father, as if he does not quite trust his feet to hold him up, and behind his new black beard, his face is pinched with pain. He wants to speak to Thomas.
‘What was that token the messenger gave you last night, Thomas?’ he asks.
‘It was a ragged staff, I thought.’
‘Did Warwick recognise it when you gave it to him?’
‘I don’t think so. I think he was confused, to begin with.’
‘And what about when he saw this messenger?’
They’d shaken hands warmly, hadn’t they? As if Warwick had recognised him, and yet the stranger had said that he wouldn’t know him by name. So here is a mystery, but it is not one that will be solved just now, because a trumpet sounds, and the men look up. This is it.
Thomas downs the last of his ale and returns the cup to his pack. He helps Richard back to the tent. Katherine is there, helping load the cart. She is to stay with Richard and Sir John and to keep an eye on the baggage train.
‘Good luck,’ she says.
‘You too. I’m glad you’re not coming with us,’ he adds. ‘Walter says it is suicide.’
There is a long moment.
‘He will be there this time, Thomas,’ she says. ‘I know it. I don’t know why. I just do.’
Thomas swings the pollaxe behind him.
‘I thought it would be different,’ he says. ‘I thought I’d meet him alone somewhere and it would be fair. But this?’ He gestures to the army around him: the men sharpening swords, packing arrows, testing strings, honing blades. Men of all sizes, shapes, ages, experience. Thousands upon thousands of them. How will he ever find Riven among such a crowd? How will he ever find the time and space to fight him?
‘It may not be as either of us imagines it,’ she supposes. ‘But surely it is God’s will that it should happen?’
Thomas nods again. He knows she is testing him, half in jest, half serious. He knows she no longer believes in God’s will. But Thomas does, and if God wills it, he will find Riven and that giant of his.
‘And then it will all be over,’ he says.
She looks at him steadily and he cannot help smiling. She is so slight, yet so fierce. She breaks into a smile too.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘All over.’
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He turns as once again the shouting begins and the army starts to form up, each body of men trying to find the right banner under which to gather.
‘I must go,’ he says.
She nods.
‘God go with you,’ she says and she clutches his hand.
‘You too, Kit,’ he says.
And he watches her as she steps back out of the way and her place is taken by a column of archers in fire-scale steel helmets.
19
‘ARCHERS, TO THE front! Archers to the front! Get over there, God damn you, man!’
‘A Fauconberg! Where is Fauconberg?’
‘Stafford! John Stafford to me!’
‘Where are William Hastings’s men?’
By mid-morning Thomas and the rest of Sir John’s company are in their battle, ready to move out, two bags of arrows apiece, spare strings, mauls, bucklers, sallet helmets. Lord Fauconberg leads the way with his household men and his knights in their plate, still mounted. Their banners and standards are heavy with all the rain and hang from their battens as if broken. Fauconberg is to take the vanguard of archers and the men of Kent, while the Earls of Warwick and March are to take the other two battles.
They move up the road at the head of a loose crowd, hemmed in on both sides by dense woods of hawthorn and alder, everything vivid green with all the rain. Behind them come the rest of Fauconberg’s battle, in blocks of about two hundred men: archers, tramping along with their bows over their shoulders and their arrow bags bumping against their backs; followed by the men-at-arms with their hammers and swords; and then the Kentish billmen, with their bills and glaives. Then come more archers and so on, the pattern repeating itself down the line. Behind them come the naked men in shirtsleeves and hose wielding farm tools, and then the prickers, those old soldiers on fleet-footed horses posted to stop any stragglers turning and running.
Once or twice they are forced off the road as messengers from the front thunder past, hurrying orders from one commander to another, and all the while the drums and trumpets continue.
‘Make way! Make way there! Make way for the Archbishop!’
‘So Warwick is still trying to make terms?’ Thomas asks aloud.
‘It’s all bollocks,’ Walter says again. He is huddled in his cloak, wearing it like a winding sheet, and he is pale and worse-tempered than ever.
Thomas takes up his usual position between Dafydd and Red John, and ahead of them, across a sloping meadow framed by the trees, he can see the spires and watchtowers of Northampton behind its walls.
Above the town there is a thick column of smoke, dark against the rainclouds.
‘Is that normal?’ Thomas asks.
Walter snarls.
‘Course it’s not normal,’ he says. ‘They’re burning the town. It’s like bloody France.’
When they emerge from the trees and on to the meadow, the rain starts in earnest. They huddle in their damp jacks, and some men tuck their strings under their helmets for the sake of superstition. There is an abbey in the grounds nearby and an ornate stone monument to some long-forgotten event surrounded by camp followers and a local audience, there to watch what happens.
‘All right. All right. Move along now.’
More drums and horns and they turn off the road, dropping down into a broad ditch with water up to their knees, then scrambling up and out on to the slope where cows have stripped the lower branches of the few trees. The grass under their feet is soft and tussocky and as they file across the fields that dip gently down towards the town on their right, men begin cursing.
Then Thomas sees why.
Across the meadows, no more than a thousand paces away, down in the crook of a bend in the river, the King’s men have excavated a broad ditch that is now filled with river water. The earth they’ve removed has been piled up and compacted behind the ditch to make a long wall as high as a man’s head. It is bristling with sharpened stakes and at regular intervals along its length it is punctured by embrasures from which stick the unmistakable snouts of guns.
‘Suicide,’ someone mutters. ‘That’s what this is. Suicide.’
‘Bloody Burgundians,’ Walter murmurs. ‘Just like Castillon. Worse, even.’
‘How many have they got?’ Geoffrey asks. He too has lost some of his colour.
Walter counts.
‘Twenty bombards,’ he says. ‘Lots more small ones. A whole bloody armoury. And look at all them.’
Behind the bombards stand thousands of men in rank: men-at-arms at the front, so that they may defend the dyke, archers behind, so that they may shoot over their fellows’ heads into any onrushing army.
‘Haven’t got many archers,’ Geoffrey says.
‘Don’t need archers if you’ve got all those guns, do you?’ Walter mutters. ‘We’ll be dead before we ever come in range.’
Behind the thin line of archers is the camp, a hundred tents, like a village, including a huge two-poled tent above which flies the royal standard. It is the King’s tent. Above the troops there must be fifty banners of all sorts, including those long fishtailed battle standards carried by the lords’ retainers. After all the rain, even those droop so as to be unrecognisable from any distance, but Thomas is only looking for one: Riven’s white flag with its checked edge and rising triangle of crows.
He wishes Katherine was there. She has better eyes than anyone. She might even have been able to see the giant.
‘Can you make out any of the banners?’ he asks, turning to Geoffrey. Something has caught his eye in the rain. A pale square, towards the back on the left flank, marked with black symbols.
‘The King’s, I suppose,’ Geoffrey says. ‘And Buckingham’s. And there’s Ruthyn’s on the left there. Beaumont is there, and Egremont, too, and that one is the Earl of Shrewsbury. Christ, there are a lot of them. Must be scarcely a man left to fight for all those holding flags.’
He tries to laugh. Walter sneers. They can hear the King’s men shouting now, a rolling roar, both defiant and taunting, and Thomas looks along the line of men about him, silent in response. Not a face about him shows anything but fear. There is none of the resolution he’d seen in Sandwich, none of the determination they’d shown at Newnham Bridge.
Walter looks as if he’s given up his ghost already and a tremor has appeared in Red John’s cheek. He keeps clenching and unclenching his hands on his bow. After a moment he turns to Thomas.
‘Thomas,’ he says. ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this one. If it goes wrong, will you find me? Make sure I get a decent hole? I don’t want the heralds to throw me in the river with the rest of them.’
He holds his hand out and Thomas takes it.
‘It’s going to go fine,’ Thomas says. ‘Fauconberg knows what he’s about.’
The words sound hollow, and he wonders he has the nerve to say them, when Fauconberg rides along the line out in front of his troops. Raindrops bounce off his armour and the raised peak of his helmet. He undoes the bevor at his throat and turns to address the men.
‘Men of England!’ he calls out. ‘This is an infamous day. Today, through no fault of our own, we are called upon to make war on fellow Englishmen. Those of you who fought with me in France will know my preference for killing Frenchmen, and so today finds me heavy-hearted. Heavy-hearted that we must take the field against the King’s army.
‘But I say to you that our cause is just. I say to you that God has given it His blessing and though we go against the banner of the King, we do not go against the person of the King himself. So therefore, in the name of God, I command you to spare those whom you may spare.’
‘Lord spare us,’ Walter mutters.
‘Spare first the King. No man among you is to touch the person of the King on pain of death. Where it can be helped, spare too the common soldier where you find him, for he being duped is more to be pitied than despised. Spare him his life so that he may use it more profitably in future.’
As he speaks the rain becomes a drenching downpour. Fauc
onberg huddles into his armour.
‘Kill only those of a noble stamp,’ he shouts above the noise of the rain. ‘Kill only those in harness under their own banner. You may kill as many dukes and earls and lords as your hearts desire, and for each death, you will find yourself handsomely rewarded. Kill them all, kill them all, save those persons who fight under the banner of Sir Edmund Grey of Ruthyn. Do not harm him or his. The men of Ruthyn fight in red coats and are distincted by their ragged-staff badge, which is similar to my lord of Warwick’s save that while his device is white, the men of Ruthyn carry a grey-coloured staff. Spare these men where it can be helped.’
‘As if we’ll get the chance to spare a soul,’ Walter says.
So that is what last night’s rider was about. His token was not Warwick’s but Ruthyn’s. What does it mean though? He turns to Walter to ask, but Walter is just then sick, throwing up his ale in a welter of bile. A vintenar along the way tosses a handful of grass in the air, watching where it falls. The wind is negligible, the rain heavy, and the grass falls swiftly to the ground.
‘Just let’s get on with it,’ Walter says, wiping his mouth. His eyes are bloodshot. ‘Let’s get it over with.’
But there are further delays. Fauconberg turns his horse and holds his hand out to check on the rain. Behind him, on the plain below them in front of the King’s position, Warwick Herald and a party that includes the Archbishop of Canterbury are riding back from the enemy lines across the meadow.
‘We have time for a prayer,’ Fauconberg continues and he dismounts and passes his horse’s reins to a page. He kneels in the mud and a priest appears alongside and the rest of the men fall to their knees too and together they begin the paternoster. When they’ve finished a trumpet blows in the middle of Warwick’s battle. Fauconberg turns and faces the rain and the enemy, then raises his arm and holds his battle hammer high. Men make their last signs of the cross and lower visors.
Another trumpet.
And Fauconberg drops his arm.
The men surge forward, armour and weaponry clinking and scraping as they go. A first man slips in the grass; another follows. The line sags and wavers and they’ve only gone ten paces before another slips, his feet taken from under him, and yet another. Now the line buckles. Weapons are dropped. Picked up. Carried on. Thomas digs his heels into the soft earth and Black John behind has to use his shoulder to stop himself sliding down the hill.
Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims Page 24
