Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims

by Toby Clements

  ‘Warwick Castle,’ the boatman’s boy tells them. They stop punting to stare up at the castle as they come under its walls, from the top of which men in helmets look down on them.

  Thomas stares open-mouthed and even Walter seems impressed. But Owen is still studying the riverbanks in their wake.

  ‘Seen anything?’ Katherine asks.

  He shakes his head. At Stratford the boatman will go no farther, so they pay him off and the next morning they find a larger barge, crewed by three men who will only leave their places by the fire in the hall of a riverside inn for such wages as make Walter hate them and admire them in equal parts.

  ‘What’s your hurry?’ one of them asks.

  ‘Just get on with it,’ Walter tells him. They load the horses and push themselves off through the river traffic. From here the water becomes busier, with all manner of boats coming and going, sails set, men on the oars, rowing barrels and sacks and more horses up and down the river. Again Owen sits in the back with his bow across his knees. He’d have been easy to ignore if Dafydd hadn’t kept glancing across at him.

  ‘What’s he got? Some kind of magic sense or something?’ Walter asks.

  ‘Never been wrong yet,’ Dafydd tells them.

  ‘But there are loads of boats following us!’ Walter cries. ‘Look. That one, with the patched sail. Cows on board. They can’t be following us, can they? Cows. Ever think of that?’

  They stop in Tewkesbury that night where they find an inn named after the bells that sound compline from the square tower of the nearby abbey. While the others settle the horses, Katherine and Thomas linger by the dock, waiting in the shadow of some willow trees. There is nothing unusual to be seen, or at least that they notice.

  ‘I’ll go upstream,’ Thomas says, and is gone for so long that Katherine thinks something has happened to him. He returns in the dark, having got lost in the woods.

  ‘I like this place,’ he says.

  The next morning they are up at cockcrow, loading the boat to the faint sound of plainchant from the abbey. Owen is back at the aft rail again, looking anxious.

  ‘For all that’s holy!’ Walter cries. ‘No one can’ve followed us here.’

  ‘Why not?’ Katherine asks.

  Walter opens his mouth to say something harsh, but then closes it, looks aside.

  ‘It’s that Welsh bastard,’ he mutters. ‘He should go and sit at the front of the bloody boat; least that way we’d be able to have a kip.’

  But all through the morning Walter keeps glancing back along the length of the river. At one point he frowns.

  ‘That sail there,’ he says, pointing to a green square in the distance. ‘Seen it before?’

  ‘Owen says it’s been with us since Stratford,’ Katherine says, but no one replies.

  They are in the city of Gloucester by midday.

  ‘Straight on down to Bris’el now,’ the captain tells them.

  The green-sailed ship is still with them, five or six bowshots’ distance, never farther, never nearer.

  Katherine is still not sure.

  ‘Master,’ she asks at last. ‘Do you know most of the ships on the river? What do you make of that one?’

  He stares back the boat, the winter sun catching on the bristles of his chin, as on snow.

  ‘Seen her before,’ he mutters. ‘From Stratford way. Can’t think what’m be doing down this way, though, ’less she’s taking some men somewhere in a rush?’ He looks straight at her and she turns away.

  At Bristol they hug the eastern shore of the river as her two banks part, and they sail towards the setting sun until they swing into the mouth of another river and use the tide to take them up between some towering red stone cliffs. A while later they enter the reach under another battlemented castle where the dockside is filled with boats, more than they’ve ever seen in Boston or even Calais perhaps; some seem large enough to carry a church. The houses around them smack of the sort of wealth that only comes through the buying and selling of wool.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ the boatman calls as they unload the horses, ‘don’t want to be here when the tide runs out.’

  Walter pays the pilot while the others stare downstream to where the green-sailed boat stands off in mid-channel before dropping her sail and diverting, as if after some discussion, to the river’s far bank. Without the sail she is quickly lost in the forest of masts.

  ‘Did you make it out?’ Walter asks.

  Katherine shakes her head.

  ‘We’ve come too far down the river to cross now,’ Walter carries on. ‘We’ll have to find a ship to take us to this bloody place. Christ, I hope to hell all this is worth it.’

  ‘Just wait till you see Kidwelly,’ Dafydd assures them. ‘You’ll never want to leave it again.’

  After some enquiries with the revenue men and one of the harbour master’s assistants they find a cog, a single-masted vessel, captained by a man whose accent they can hardly understand.

  ‘He’s an Easterling, or something,’ Walter says. ‘Or he’s from somewhere, anyhow.’

  The Easterling is intending to sail to Wexford, in Ireland, with a cargo of Gascony wine in barrels, and he is prepared to carry them, though he cannot manage their horses.

  ‘Where you want go?’

  Once again they explain.

  ‘Kid Velly?’

  ‘It’s on the sea,’ Dafydd keeps repeating.

  ‘When you look at sea, does sun shine on face or on side of face, or on back?’

  ‘Hardly ever shines,’ Dafydd admits.

  ‘Face!’ Owen shouts. ‘On face.’

  The cog master blinks, and begins to move away as if idiocy might be contagious.

  ‘Is good,’ he admits. ‘Is south coast you want.’

  ‘You’ll recognise it when you see it, won’t you, Dafydd?’

  Dafydd looks none too sure. They pay the Easterling a share of the fee he demands. Walter shakes his head as he counts out the coins from the purse Sir John has given him.

  ‘We have missed tide,’ the cog master announces, gesturing at the mud behind him. ‘We sail tomorrow. First light.’

  They sell their horses at a stable that smells of river mud. The dealer can hardly believe Thomas’s horse, and has to send a boy to borrow more money so that he can cover even half of its real value. Then instead of buying provisions for the journey they pay a boatman to take them across the river where they spend until nightfall looking for the green-sailed boat, but with no luck.

  The next morning the cog master and his crew meet them on the foreshore with a large supply of foodstuffs and supplies for the journey, some of which they are prepared to sell to Walter – at a price.

  ‘A man has to make living,’ the master says with a shrug. He sells them a clay pot of cooked beans, ale in a wooden barrel and a loaf of bread the size of a man’s torso and twice as hard. When they’ve climbed aboard, each finding a nook around the wine tuns, the crew cast off and two small rowing boats tug them out into the fast-flowing channel that has swelled overnight to refill the muddy reach. Soon they are back in the Bristol Channel. Walter and Thomas join Katherine at the stern and peer back towards the harbour mouth, where the spires of the churches and the towers of the castle are hidden behind the converging cliffs of red limestone.

  Between them another boat is just putting out, a green sail hoisted.

  25

  IT IS THEIR second day at sea and the Easterlings know the storm is coming because the birds disappear.

  ‘Bad one, I think,’ the cog master says.

  Then there is an argument. The mate wants to put into port, Thomas guesses, but the cog master wants to ride it out at sea. Eventually the cog master carries it, and the little boat veers out into the emptiness of the western sea, where blue-black clouds boil on the horizon.

  The day darkens and the rain starts some time after noon, sharp and cold, stinging like pinpricks. The wind baffles the sail, starts humming through the ratlines, and only gets stronger unt
il it is enough to lift ropes from the deck to stream aside horizontally. The ship ducks and rears and the crew furl the sail and cram it below the deck. The mate ties himself to the mast and shouts at the others to do the same.

  Then the sky turns black and sea rises up around them. Thomas is suddenly aware how small the ship really is. It is tossed about, lifted on great scarps of green water, then let go to plummet into frothing troughs. Great slides of water thunder across her deck. Thomas clings to the mast. He prays to God for deliverance. The cog master battles to stay upright. The wine tuns float free. Something falls from the masthead and hits the mate, knocking him either dead or cold, none can tell. He remains tied to the mast, hanging with his hands by his feet, head by his knees, and is thrown back and forth until he surely must be dead.

  The cog master bellows all the while: they must bail out; and so they stagger from their perches and set to with anything they can find: buckets, jugs, dishes, an old hat. One of the crew uses a mallet and lever to get the tuns back into place.

  The wind rises further, shrieking in the stays, and the sea is battering the cog, breaking her to kindling. Water booms over the gunwales, shoving them aside, its level rising to froth around their knees. The cog feels heavy, unbalanced.

  Thomas begins to think that this is how it will end: they will be drowned in a cog with some Easterlings off the Welsh shore, the roar of the wind in their ears and the taste of brine stopping their mouths. It would be easier to cease now, he thinks, to put aside his bucket, to say his prayers, face the truth. It is only the sight of Katherine that pushes him on. Her hair is plastered over her narrow head and her brittle little shoulders are pumping away as she scoops out the water with a wooden bowl.

  On it goes, through most of the afternoon and into the evening, until at last the pitch of the wind eases. The rain hesitates, falters. Thomas looks up. Is it his imagination, but is the next wave shallower, the climb less arduous, the subsequent dive less deep, the rush of water across the deck less powerful? He seizes on the difference. Takes new heart. Digs his bucket into the churning broth and begins again. Soon they are managing to scoop more out than is coming in.

  The crew give a muted cheer. They too guess the little cog has made it. They carry on bailing through the night, dipping, lifting, pouring, and by the time they stop Thomas is dizzy and his fingers are bleeding, but the cog is still afloat, and they are still alive.

  They sleep all that night and the next morning breaks clear, just a bar of purple cloud across a sky the colour of a dove’s breast, and a steady breeze from the southwest. There is nothing to mark the passing of the storm except a quantity of driftwood in the sea. Then there is a body, floating face down, a man in a pale coat and blue hose.

  ‘Someone not so lucky,’ is the cog master’s opinion. ‘Keep eye out for survivors.’

  But there are none, only more wreckage, a terrified rat on a barrel bobbing in the water, and then a shred of sail. Is it green? Katherine watches it pass, frowning hard, saying nothing.

  The land is a shadow on the horizon. The mate, a purple bruise the size of a duck’s egg on his forehead, gets the crew to unfurl and set the sail and the cog master shouts a tired order and gives a heave on the tiller. The canvas slaps for a moment, then tautens and the cog collects herself, and turns in the dimpled green water, and they head northwards, back towards the coast.

  ‘How far d’you think we’ve drifted?’ Thomas asks the cog master.

  The man shrugs.

  ‘Day, maybe,’ he says. ‘Maybe two. We see.’

  The sailors are still bailing out, but above them the seagulls are back.

  ‘Is good sign,’ the cog master says.

  Thomas joins Katherine in the bows where she is letting the wind dry the woollen coat she’s refused to take off. She is scanning the sea.

  ‘Any sign of it?’ he asks. He means the other ship. She pauses, and then shakes her head. She is pale in the early-morning sunlight, her skin almost transparent, her clothes stained, her hair salt-stiffened. Her cut ear is reddened by chafing against the damp wool of her hat. He wants to touch it, but doesn’t. He almost laughs as he tries to imagine what she’d say if he did.

  The next day the coast reveals itself as jagged green hills skirted by grey stone cliffs and stretches of ochre sand. Clouds are gathered over it and soon it starts to rain again.

  ‘This way, I think,’ the cog master says, and the cog heels to the west. They sail on, past a spit, and then turn northwards again, across a bay towards another headland.

  ‘They call Worm’s Head,’ the cog master tells them, nodding at a low point as they sailed past. ‘Is haunted.’

  ‘Haunted?’

  ‘By souls of drowned sailors.’

  Dafydd and Owen are together at the gunwale, clutching each other and pointing at a bay that opens before them.

  ‘Is?’ the cog master asks.

  ‘Home!’ Dafydd shouts. ‘Look! There’s the house.’

  He points. There is not much to be seen: a broad sweep of mud, a sandy bank, then low hills and a river emptying from the northwest. Thomas can’t see any cottage. Katherine stares hard, frowning, looking at something else in the sand, but still she says nothing.

  ‘The next bay is Kidwelly!’ Dafydd says. ‘Just around there.’

  The cog master orders the sail reduced and they steer past the headland. Beyond is another river’s mouth.

  ‘Never seen so much bloody mud,’ Walter mutters. ‘It’s like there are two seas: the watery one we’ve just been on, and now this. Look at it.’

  Walter’s sea of mud stretches to the horizon either side of them and all the way ahead to where the land rises in soft-topped green hillocks. Seagulls wheel overhead, calling to one another, playing in the wind, their feathers the only bright accent against the grey clouds above.

  ‘Not much of a place?’ Thomas suggests.

  ‘A shithole,’ Walter agrees.

  ‘Wait till you see the town,’ Dafydd says, but his words have taken on an ambiguous tone. They carry on through the channel in the mud. A man in the bow shouts instructions to the cog master at the tiller and Dafydd points out a low-roofed grey stone house, set among some scrub on the hills.

  ‘Penallt,’ he says. ‘Where the Dwnns live.’

  ‘Bloody Dwnns.’ Walter tuts. Thomas can’t help smiling at this, and seeing him, so does Walter.

  The cog master puts them down on the deserted quay, a rotting wooden platform half backfilled with rubbish.

  ‘Happy hunting,’ he says, collecting the balance in coins and giving his crew the order to cast off.

  After nearly four days at sea they stand on the uncertain ground and watch the cog slip back along the channel.

  ‘Never again,’ Walter says. ‘I’ll walk from now on. Don’t care where I’m going, you’ll not see me in a bloody boat ever again.’

  Nevertheless they’d agreed with the cog master that he will come past on his way back from Wexford to see if they need carriage back to Bristol, but Thomas does not imagine they will see him again.

  ‘Return journey price double,’ the cog master said once he’d seen where he was dropping them. ‘A man has to make living.’

  It carries on raining, soft and constant, but warm – or at least not so cold.

  ‘See?’ Dafydd says. ‘Told you it was hot.’

  ‘It’s odd,’ Thomas agrees.

  ‘Come on then, Dafydd,’ Walter says. ‘Let’s see this fabled castle of yours.’

  They carry what they can of their salt-stained baggage, and follow a worn path along the river’s bank, around a low bluff to the church, above which they see the castle rising up on a headland. It is small, but there is something perfect about it, the way its pale walls cap the rise and lean over the valley.

  ‘See?’ Dafydd asks.

  ‘Why’s it boarded?’ Walter asks. He is pointing to the castle walls, which are clapped in planks.

  Dafydd looks anxious.

  ‘I don’t kn
ow, do I?’

  Dafydd leads them splashing through a ford and up into the village that hunkers under the castle’s walls. The houses are very low, stone built, with rough thatches, mossy and rotting in parts. Water throngs everywhere. A straw-flecked road takes them past the church up towards the castle and they meet a boy with three goats and no shoes. Dafydd greets him in a language Thomas doesn’t understand and the boy returns the greeting just as if he has seen Dafydd the day before.

  ‘That’s Dafydd, that is,’ Dafydd explains when he’s passed on down the road. ‘Dafydd the swineherd’s boy. Grown a bit, hasn’t he?’

  Owen moos in agreement.

  But there is something strange about the village. They all feel it. There is no smoke in the air, nor any of the workaday clatter they’d expect. There aren’t even any chickens or pigs about. Dafydd stops and ducks under the low lintel of a cottage. Inside it is dark, no fire in its place, no swirl of smoke to sting the eye. The straw mattress is gone, too, and when he feels above the door, where the bow and its arrows might be kept on pegs, there is nothing; nor are there pots either, only a broken-handled bucket half full of something viscid.

  ‘Where is everybody, Dafydd?’

  Dafydd shrugs. Thomas unconsciously swings his pollaxe so it is nearer to hand. Walter nocks his bow and fishes out an arrow. Farther up the road a bare-legged brewster’s girl is washing out a barrel in the rain. She stops when she sees them and waits with her mouth open. She’s very ugly. She recognises Dafydd and Owen and they talk a moment.

  Whatever she tells him, it makes Dafydd gasp.

  ‘What is it?’ Thomas asks.

  ‘I don’t believe it! Myvanwy says Jasper Tudor has raised his banner in Pembroke.’

  ‘Jasper who?’

  ‘Jasper Tudor,’ Dafydd says. ‘The Earl of bloody Pembroke. He’s raised his banner and is recruiting men to march on London. She says he’s waiting for an army of Irish and Frenchies to come from over the water, from Ireland. Gallowglass and Kerns, and those bastards with guns.’

  ‘What’s he want with them?’ Walter barks.

  ‘They’re going to fight for King Henry.’