Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims

by Toby Clements

  And anyway, after a moment, it doesn’t matter. When they reach the bridge, the arrows thunder down on them and soon there are none alive to return to their estates and their manors. They are all dead, watched as they depart this earth in blank-faced silence by King Edward and the Earl of Warwick and a thousand weary archers hunched over their bows and empty bags. They’d made it farther than the first two attacks, almost to the end of the bridge. One of them had clambered on to a cross beam and even raised his axe, but he’d been pulled forward by one of the northern billmen and it isn’t hard to imagine what they would have done to him then.

  No one on the southern bank of the river moves. It is as if they are frozen. Arrows flit from north to south still, and after a moment a lightly armoured man struggles up from the river, water streaming from his creases, only to be sent bowling by an arrow from the opposite bank.

  As morning gives way to the afternoon they try two more attempts. Each fares worse than the last. There are too many bodies on the bridge now, blocking the way. Each attack Thomas watches from his vantage point in silence.

  Farther back Warwick keeps turning his horse around. His nerves are evident for all to see. Around him men are standing as if resigned to failure. There is no food being passed around, no drink, and men’s faces are dabs the colour of old linen. Starving, frozen, halted by a river crossing they cannot force, confronted by the sight of hundreds of their fellows lying dead in the snow, and with only the prospect of the long march home through an empty countryside, who could be blamed for wishing to be elsewhere?

  And now the wind is picking up, gathering weight. Pale clouds scud overhead. King Edward looks up and all of a sudden he is young again, too young for this sort of thing, and Warwick, well, he’s ridden from one battle, hasn’t he? And lost another. Who can put their faith in him now? And he is still on horseback, isn’t he? As if ready for the flight. Would he stay if the northerners came over the bridge now? Or would he fight with his heels again?

  A long moment follows. There is no plan for this and Thomas is conscious that in this moment, everything hangs in the balance. Men are stepping back from the fight; some have even turned to look for their horses. More will go soon, and if one goes, then they all will. This is the moment when something must happen.

  And it does. Warwick pushes his horse forward into the clearing at the head of the road so that all can see him. He stands in his stirrups for a moment, holding up his sword. Now he has the attention of every man who can see him, and the ears of those who cannot. He is looking about as if coming to some decision of his own.

  ‘My lords!’ he cries. ‘My lords! Let those who wish to fly, fly. But let those who wish to tarry, tarry here with me!’

  Saying this he swings his leg over his horse and drops lightly to the ground. Taking hold of the bridle, he holds his sword to the horse’s neck. Everyone is still. They watch. Warwick is looking at them all. The horse takes a step away, and another. Then Warwick pulls the sword towards him, slicing through the flesh, cutting the knotted veins that run alongside the horse’s throat, setting a torrent of blood seething across his fine plated sabatons. He steps back to let the horse fall in a loud struggling curl on the ground.

  Except for the dying horse there is silence.

  King Edward, who was Earl of March, stares at the Earl of Warwick. He does not seem to know what to do. He looks about, for Lord Fauconberg perhaps, but he is not there.

  Warwick’s own men know what to do. They start cheering and they push to the front of the crowd, and soon they are launching another attack down the road to the bridge.

  35

  WILLIAM HASTINGS HAS assigned Katherine and the barber surgeon’s assistant a rush-roofed barn among some elms, a league or so from the river crossing they call Ferrybridge. The barber surgeon’s assistant has found a moon-faced girl to show them where.

  ‘It’s a wonder she’s not been strangled as a witch,’ he mutters. ‘But she knows the way.’

  His name is Mayhew, and he is nervous around horses and anyone in command. When they get there they find the barn is occupied by men sheltering from the cold and it smells of cow shit and mice.

  ‘But it’s filthy,’ Katherine says.

  ‘What did you expect?’ the girl replies. ‘It’s a barn.’

  She is about twelve, Katherine supposes, with an accent she can hardly decipher.

  Grylle arrives to evict the soldiers, and despite herself Katherine is pleased to see him, though he is shocked to see her.

  ‘Are you quite well, my lady? You look . . .?’

  He tails off with a shrug. She has been crying, and imagines her face smutted with smoke mixed with tears.

  ‘I am fine,’ she says and Grylle leaves it at that.

  ‘I am sorry it is so basic,’ he apologises. ‘The hospital in the friary’s already full.’

  She imagines this to be false, and that it is being kept as a billet for the better class of commanders.

  ‘But the friars are on their way,’ he goes on, brightening, ‘and the surgeons from the other companies will be here by the by. They’ll bring more supplies and so on, I suppose?’

  He has no idea. She has no idea. No one has any idea. They are so keen on fighting one another they have forgotten to think what to do with the wounded.

  ‘Is it always like this?’ she asks Mayhew when Grylle has ridden off.

  ‘Usually,’ Mayhew agrees, staring up at icicles hanging from the roof. ‘Any lord of quality wants a physician, doesn’t he? But only really to fix him up. They’re expensive, you see? No one wants to waste his balms on a dying billman, does he? Be like ministering to a cow, or a dog. Mind you, William Hastings is a good man. Sees to his men, where he can. Hence, me.’

  He points at his chest. He has jug ears and a red face, fully freckled like Red John, and his arms hang from narrow shoulders almost to his knees. Katherine cannot help smiling at him.

  ‘Come on then,’ she says and together they help Richard from the wagon and into the barn.

  ‘Is there anything to eat?’ he asks.

  There is a hunk of hard rye bread and a half-full leather bottle of thin ale, but that is all and when that is gone, they’ll have to think again. Together they help the walking wounded into the barn and then three grey friars from the friary join them, bringing with them long strips of linen, a glass jar of leeches, a selection of balms in clay pots, some rose oil, a tubby barrel of wine, six dozen eggs and a crucifix.

  ‘You deal with them,’ Katherine tells Mayhew.

  At first they regard her with suspicion that only deepens when they see Richard sitting blank-eyed against the low stone course of the barn wall.

  But then the wounded are brought in and laid in a line along the barn’s northern wall. Mayhew knocks out some of the crumbling infill in the southern wall to let in the day’s dying light, but it also lets in the cold, with flurries of snow, so they start a fire in the middle of the barn, burning what they can find, and soon the smoke is thick in the air and they are all red-eyed and coughing. They warm the wine and crack the eggs and Mayhew collects as much urine as he can. Then they unpack the surgeon’s instruments and start on the wounded, cutting away the clothing and washing the wounds with the urine and the hot wine.

  Katherine’s first patient is a boy with an arrow in the meat of his thigh. He is pale with the fear of pain, and looks up at her with large eyes, soot-black and oily in the orange firelight. She studies the leg and considers him both lucky and unlucky. The arrow has not hit the bone. That is lucky. Nor has it hit the artery that carries all the blood, the one that when it is cut means a man will bleed to death.

  But the arrow is buried deep in the muscle and the lips of the wound, now cleaned with a sponge, are pursed around the shaft of the arrow.

  A shadow appears at her shoulder and she looks up.

  ‘May I?’

  It is Mayhew. He has put on a blacksmith’s apron and he crouches over the boy and feels along his leg, rolling the slic
ed hose down to his knee.

  ‘Hmmm,’ he says. ‘Hmmm.’

  ‘Will you pull it?’ she asks. She remembers cutting out Richard’s arrow in France.

  ‘More likely to pull the shaft from the head,’ he says. ‘Seen that happen a thousand times.’

  He measures the arrow, or the amount of it that protrudes from the leg. Then he sits back on his heels and looks at the boy’s thigh from another angle. He nods to himself.

  ‘Only one thing for it,’ he says. He stands up.

  ‘Ready?’ he asks the boy with a smile. The boy looks up at him with complete fear. His mouth opens and closes but before he says anything, Mayhew crouches again, grasps the arrow with both hands and leans his shoulder on the notch, forcing it through the leg and out the other side with a rush of blood and splitting flesh. The boy screams. He bucks and levers himself up to punch Mayhew.

  ‘Hold him!’ Mayhew cries. Katherine throws herself on the boy, trying to pin him down. One of the friars hurries over. Mayhew girds himself and breaks the arrow shaft just above the wound while the boy gasps and thrashes on the ground. There is blood all over the place, mixing with the straw and the mud and whatever else. Mayhew runs his fingers over the break in the arrow to remove any splinters, pours a little of the urine he has in the clay pot on to the wound and then asks the friar to lift the boy’s leg.

  The black bodkin arrowhead protrudes just below the boy’s buttock, where the blood flows in a thick line. Mayhew takes it between his fingers, rolls it, and then eases it through the wound and out. A sudden rush of blood makes him frown. He nods at a wad of linen soaked with still warm urine.

  ‘Press it hard,’ he says.

  Katherine holds the pad to the wound. The archer has fainted. After a moment the bleeding slows, and Mayhew nods with satisfaction.

  ‘Hah!’ the friar exclaims. ‘Nicely done.’

  Mayhew stands and inspects the tip of the arrow. There is a small cluster of woollen threads, viscous with blood. Again he nods with satisfaction and tosses the arrow on the fire.

  ‘More fun than couching for cataracts, hey?’ he says. ‘And if we bind him now, I think he’ll live to fight another day.’

  The boy is very pale and sweat beads his forehead. Katherine washes the two wounds and binds them with linen strips. Every day: a lesson.

  More wounded are brought to the doors: a boy in blue with an arrowhead in his stomach, the broken shaft emerging from a rip in his jack. He is carried on a web of cloaks by his mates, five of them, and his face is also very pale, like alabaster, or ivory, and his lips very red. Once again Mayhew appears. He looks at the boy and shakes his head almost imperceptibly. Together they guide the men to a space on the ground near the fire where they lay him with unexpected gentleness.

  ‘You’ll be all right, son,’ one says, and Katherine sees from their likeness that he is indeed the father talking to the son. ‘Surgeon’ll soon have you fixed up and we can go back to Mam, hey? Good as new, with a fat purse apiece.’

  Tears break from his eyelids though, and he turns away with a final shake of the boy’s hand. His mates take their cloaks, sliding them from under the boy’s body, and they cluster around the older man, guiding him away, back to the field.

  There is a lull as the evening comes on. The friars have more bread and ale and they sleep by the fire. She shares a blanket with Richard and in the middle of the night he sits up, but does not move. It is as if he is staring at the moon. She says nothing.

  In the morning they come again. It is all arrow wounds. Not a single blade injury. Katherine washes them, and occasionally cuts an arrowhead free when she knows where she is cutting, usually deferring to Mayhew, who’s only ever been an assistant but seems to have a rare gift for his craft.

  ‘Where are those other bloody surgeons?’ he asks. He has a spray of blood over his freckles now, and his leather apron resembles that of a butcher. ‘Taking their leave until the nobs get involved, I dare say,’ he answers his own question.

  A priest has come from Pontefract and is moving quietly among the wounded, guided by one of the friars, and now more friars have come and they begin taking the bodies of men out of the barn as well as bringing them in. The men are mostly archers, brought in by their friends, but now and again a few men-at-arms appear, brought on horses by their squires and servants, who linger to help remove the plate armour, and who try to get them preferential treatment – ‘My master is a personal friend of Sir Humphrey Stafford,’ one will say – and always Katherine ignores them in favour of the most needy, thinking of Thomas and who might bring him in if he were wounded.

  A little after noon a surgeon does appear and within moments he has reorganised everything and everybody, so that a large area is set aside for the quality, while those without the appearance of means are set outside in the bitter cold. He is not a surgeon, he says, but a physician. He wears a long coat and a pointed oily fur hat that he never removes. He stands in the centre of the room next to the fire and sets Mayhew the task of bleeding those from whom they have spent all morning removing arrows.

  ‘It is a mercy the commons can’t afford it,’ Mayhew mutters, nodding at the poor archers and footmen who are banished to the cold.

  The physician turns to Katherine, confused by her presence.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asks.

  ‘I am Lady Margaret Cornford, daughter of the late Lord Cornford, personal friend of William Hastings,’ she says, looking him in the eye. ‘I am here at the request of William Hastings, and I will not be party to the bleeding of any man, nor the cauterisation of wounds, nor to the application of any of your sow-gelder’s creams.’

  Hunger makes her hands tremble, but she means it.

  ‘I will however wash wounds,’ she continues, ‘where I can, with warm wine and fresh urine, and I will suture them afterwards with hemp or silk, and then I will dress the wound with clean dry linen. No more. No less.’

  He is taller than she by a head, with a long rough-skinned nose from which hair erupts in two damp explosions. He stares down at her, calculating her worth and so her power. After a moment he licks his thin lips. ‘Very well, my lady,’ he says. ‘But you keep your ministrations to the commons. I shall deal with the gentles.’

  ‘They’ll not thank you, you know, for killing them.’

  The physician looks bitter and turns and walks away, his long coat a soft half-turn behind. Mayhew chuckles, watching the physician leave the barn, but he carries on with his knife and bowl, cutting into a man’s hand between his fingers and holding him while he bleeds into a clay bowl.

  The boy with the arrow in his stomach dies in the early afternoon and by then Katherine is bloodied up to her elbows and across her skirts and she is nearly faint with hunger. She supposes she might have treated a hundred wounds, and she is hopeful for them all, for when he is not bleeding the gentry, and when the physician is not there, Mayhew is everywhere, making instant judgements on whether a man will live or die, and assigning them accordingly, so she finds herself treating the lightly wounded, while the friars deal with those whose grasp on life looks unsustainable.

  At about four o’clock, as the daylight begins to leach away, there is a let-up in those thought likely to survive, and for the first time since waking she thinks of Richard. She finds him sitting where she left him that morning. The moon-faced simpleton is staring at him from a distance of only a few inches, and Katherine chases her away.

  ‘Did you know she was there?’ she asks.

  He shakes his head.

  ‘I thought I sensed something,’ he says, ‘and I shouted out, but there has been so much coming and going, so many different sounds, that I could not be sure. Your man Mayhew has just asked me to piss in a cup for him, which I do gladly, but is there any other way I can help? I am frozen to the marrow out here.’

  Before she can think of some soothing answer there is a thunder of hooves. A great party of men is coming towards the barn. They ride under a saltire flag.

  ‘
Dear God,’ she breathes. ‘The Earl of Warwick.’

  ‘He is here?’ Richard asks, struggling to his feet.

  ‘He comes now.’

  ‘Is he wounded?’

  ‘It may be.’

  ‘Don’t let that bastard of a physician see him. Save him yourself. It will be the making of you.’

  She glances at him. Whatever does he mean?

  Warwick’s household men tear across the fields to the barn and the first arrival leaps from his horse before it has stopped moving.

  ‘A surgeon!’ he cries. ‘My lord of Warwick is wounded.’

  The physician is still absent. Mayhew appears.

  ‘Is it bad?’ he asks.

  ‘An arrow. In his thigh.’

  ‘Is he bleeding?’ he asks.

  The man looks at him. He has lost his helmet and has blood on his livery coat.

  ‘Of course he’s fucking bleeding, begging your pardon, my lady.’

  ‘Is he bleeding a lot?’ Mayhew emphasises.

  The man-at-arms gestures with exasperation.

  ‘Here he comes. Look for yourself.’

  Warwick is on another man’s horse, leaning back in the saddle, the broken stub of an arrow sticking from the inside of his right thigh. His proud face is screwed up in pain and with every jounce of the horse he winces and mutters something ungodly.

  Mayhew is struck dumb by the sight. It is as if he is looking at a saint or a martyr and not only does his touch desert him, but his voice too.

  Katherine intervenes.

  ‘Get him down,’ she says.

  The men-at-arms help their lord down off the horse and he puts his arms around two of them and hobbles into the barn.

  ‘Where’s my physician!’ he shouts, his voice rising into a scream on the last syllable. ‘Get him!’