At length he stands, picks up his gloves and finds a hammer lying bloodied in the snow.
‘You all right, mate?’ someone asks.
Thomas ignores him. He wonders what time of day it is, and how long they have been fighting. He wonders that there are still more men left to kill, and still more men willing to kill them. But here they are, more of them, and still more of them, moving up from the village, fresh men, yet to fight, though it seems that that is all he has been doing all day. That is all everybody has been doing all day.
But now the din of it seems to have faded, and as Thomas stumbles eastwards, he sees events as if through a pane of thick glass. Men are blurred and then sharp, their sounds are muffled and then loud, and even the sleet takes on a curious sort of beauty. He is warm, for the first time since he can remember, and as he walks gradually everything is suffused with a golden aura, as if leaking sunlight. He’s stopped shivering, he realises, and he walks on, no weapons to burden him, even his greaves and sabatons turned so light and easy to walk in. And his jack too, which has been stiff with damp and dirt for a month or more, now seems like a linen chemise floating lightly on his shoulders.
It occurs to him that perhaps he is dying.
A priest passes him and starts murmuring something but Thomas laughs and makes the sign of the cross in the air as if he were blessing a congregation and he feels light enough to dance away from the priest, and a little farther on he notices blood is dripping from his fingers and that he cannot really move them, and then he thinks that this does not matter anyway.
All he can recall is that he has to move to the King’s right flank, for that is where he is wanted, or that is where something awaits him. He knows he must get there and that when he does everything will reveal itself. He is moving up across the back of the King’s army, through the mess of wounded men. People step aside for him, stare at him as he passes. A pile of corpses is laid to one side and there are dead horses and there are women with more ale and water and a man is stumbling from the fighting, groaning like a bullock until he falls on his knees, and then to his face, and lies twitching in the snow until he is dead and no one even watches.
Thomas walks on until he finds himself stopped by a roadside and ditch brimming with a slurry of faeces, and beyond is a snow-filled marsh where black boggy lakes are skimmed with grey ice. There are stands of sedge grass and crouching alder trees misshapen by the wind and he realises he has walked the width of the field, and that he is now on the King’s right flank, behind Fauconberg’s men. A memory stirs in him again. He turns and looks down the field, watching the thousands of men fighting and dying under the broad snow-filled expanse of the sky, and then – he sees it.
The flag.
Six ravens.
Riven’s standard.
38
THE SENSE OF wellbeing is gone in a snap but Thomas feels a surge of power within him, and suddenly he knows what to do.
He is running. He is jamming his helmet over his blood-soaked cap. Then he is forcing on the steel-knuckled gloves. He finds a rondel dagger lying on the ground, a foot-long tapering point of rust-flecked steel, and he snatches up a bill, a nicely made thing, with good weight and balance, and he is pushing forward, shunting men aside, and his eyes are fixed on Riven’s flag.
He is not afraid of being killed. He is too fast, too strong. He has a good weapon. He has a helmet. He has gloves. His blood is thrumming in his ears and he can hear himself roaring again.
He is shoving between the gaps in Fauconberg’s lines until he is before Riven’s flag. Alongside him are three or four of Fauconberg’s junior knights in modest harness. They are fighting with pollaxes and bastard swords. The give and take of blows is swift and practised. This is no place for a poorly armoured archer, yet Thomas forces himself forward.
Riven is unmistakable now. In fine plate, he is fighting with a long-handled hammer. He turns to trap a bill under his arm and slash its poorly protected owner across the face. Then he spins to take a blow on the languet of his hammer and he switches hands and drives the helve into a man’s face. In the single moment, he has killed two men. It has cost him almost no effort, no thought, and he is preparing to do it again. But now Thomas is before him and for a brief moment Thomas imagines Riven recognises him and hesitates.
But if he does, he does not hesitate for long.
He launches himself at Thomas and Thomas moves to parry the blow, but of course it is a feint, and Riven is on him from below. Thomas throws himself inside the blow, flinching as the hammer fluke slides across his chest, and he crashes his bill into Riven’s steel elbow.
Riven is beaten back but comes again. He goes high but hits low, catching Thomas on the knee, sending a barely manageable jolt of pain up his spine. He cracks a short-armed blow in Thomas’s face, but Thomas ducks, and then the hammer glances off his helmet. It rattles his teeth and he tastes blood but he is not dead. Riven seems surprised. Thomas goes at him. He feints, lunges, draws him left then right, and thrusts for his armpit. But he trips. Staggers. Is down. The bill is gone. Riven rears over him, raises his hammer in both hands. Thomas is down among the dead, nearly one of them. He rolls. The bodies around him trap him, hold him fast, but before Riven can bring down the hammer one of Fauconberg’s men intervenes with a jab. He catches Riven and turns him, distracting him long enough for Thomas to hurl himself forward with the rondel dagger in his fist. He can drive it up under Riven’s steel skirt. But Riven grips him and hauls him upright. They are face to face. Thomas presses his cheek to Riven’s visor to stop him butting him. He forces his right arm free and slides the dagger up his ribs. He will stab him in the armpit.
Then the giant arrives.
He has the pollaxe. The pollaxe he reclaimed from Walter. He swings it at Thomas’s spine and connects with a force that rips Thomas from Riven’s embrace and casts him across the heaving layer of steel-clad bodies that cover the ground. He twists with the pain and falls on his back. He lies there, unable to move for the agony. He stares up at the crisscross of weapons above him, watching the giant batter away at two of Fauconberg’s men, watching Riven kill the billman who’d earlier saved his life. He feels the man sprawl across his legs and then he feels nothing. It is as if he is floating in warm water, his head swaddled, his hearing muffled.
He wonders again if he is dying.
He thinks of Katherine. He wants thoughts of her to be his last. He wants to tell her that he is sorry. Sorry for dying here, sorry for leaving her.
Above him the fight continues. Men fall by his side. There is blood in the air, scraps of metal and shards of splintered wood, a tooth, something gory.
Thomas watches the swings and blows, back and forth. He watches the snowflakes fall, and he wonders if this is what death is. No triumphant entry through heaven’s gate, or agonised descent into hell, only this: detachment, an eternity spent on the field where you died, an eternity spent ruing all your sins of commission, and all your sins of omission.
But now he finds he can move. His fingers are coming to life.
Can it be that he is not dead?
He moves his head.
He lurches, rolls over. There is a brief lull in the fight. Men are pulling back, taking stock. Exhausted men are retiring. New men are coming up.
Thomas is on his hands and knees; he has only one thought in his mind: to get away. He begins crawling, one hand after the other, slithering through the blood, back across the armoured corpses that are covered in gore and shit. Dead men stare up at him with noses smashed and mouths and chins slashed open. Some are still alive, spitting blood, bleeding through their ears. He gasps for breath and the pain is a burning band around his chest.
He can hear himself moaning like a beast in agony as he crawls through the line of Fauconberg’s men and slumps against a corpse. He rests his cheek against the dead man’s breastplate and closes his eyes.
He saw the giant. He knows that pollaxe. He should have a broken spine. He should have a fluke buried a ha
ndspan in his back. And yet. Here he is. Alive.
He raises himself and crawls on. The blood is pooled between the bodies, deep enough to drown a man. Everything is sodden with it. Everything is red. He finds a bill in the crook of a dead man’s elbow and hauls it out. He stabs it in the bloody slush and levers himself up on to one knee.
The pain is terrible, yet not as bad as it should be. He inches his arm around behind his back to press against the wound. Then he wheezes a laugh. So that is it. The ledger. The giant hit the ledger. Thomas swings the bag around to see where the fluke has punched a hole through the leather, and he puts his finger in the wound up to his bloody knuckle.
It is the pardoner’s final lifesaving gift.
And now sound returns and Thomas can hear the crash of steel and the shouting of men as the fighting continues. Fauconberg’s line is giving once more, bowing towards him. Riven and his men are forcing their way through and if Fauconberg’s line is thinned any further, then the northerners will break it. They will have won and the battle will be over. Once this flank is turned, then the whole army will be wrapped up, pushed down the hill and murdered at will. Some of them may try to run, he supposes, but then he remembers the bridge. That is as far anyone’ll get. That’s where the remainder will die. Perhaps that is why the northerners broke the bridge in the first place: not to stop them coming, but to stop them leaving.
There are no trumpets calling for men to bolster the line, for the trumpeters have fled, or they’ve been forced to throw down their instruments and join the line, and anyway even if they were there to blow the signal, there are no men to obey it. There is no reserve left.
This is it.
He whom they call Edward Plantagenet, formerly the Earl of March, then the Duke of York, had wanted God’s judgement on his right to be king, and God has delivered it: he has no right, and so now all his men must pay the price of that gamble.
Riven’s flag is carried high as he comes between the ranks: Thomas can see him, hacking through; and there is the giant, just behind him, crashing men aside with that pollaxe. Thomas wonders whether his one-eyed son is there too, his wound hidden under his visor.
He thinks back to the moment he first saw Riven, when he first saw Katherine. He thinks of their time in Calais, and then the summer at Marton Hall. He thinks of the hills in Wales, and that week in the inn in Brecon. He thinks of Walter, and of Dafydd and Geoffrey, and all the Johns. He thinks of the Dean. Of Margaret. And now it is over. He will never avenge any of them now.
He swings the ledger back over his shoulder and unplugs the bill from the sloppy earth.
He stands.
He will at least die on his feet.
And then from behind him comes the sound of trumpets, faint, distant, thin. He turns. Along the road is a mass of men coming through the snow, grey and indistinguishable at this distance. There is a lull, infinitesimal, a let-up in the constant clash of steel as men turn to face the new arrivals.
‘It’s the White Lion!’ a man shouts. ‘It’s the Duke of bloody Norfolk! Blessed be God!’
It is the men that boy had been waiting for, his father among them. There is a surging cheer along the ranks of King Edward’s men as the news spreads, and Fauconberg’s men are heartened and they rejoin the line with renewed vigour. Men in blue and white run past him, hurrying to wade back into the fight, hurrying to hold the line.
‘On! On! A Fauconberg! A Norfolk!’
The new contingent in red livery is fast. They join King Edward’s line at its eastern end, up by the marshes, and they crash into the northerners’ line, and for the first time that day, the northerners are forced to take a step back. They step back over the bodies of the men they’ve killed and over those who’ve died to buy them their advance. Their left flank, previously grounded on the boggy marshland beyond the road, is now overwhelmed by Norfolk’s men, fresh to the fight, and soon the battle lines are canted around, so that they run from north to south, and it is the northerners’ turn to call on their reserves to shore up their wavering wing.
Thomas is breathing more easily, and he gathers himself. He feels redeemed. Released. He must return to find Riven. But now he cannot get to the front for the press of these new men; he can no longer see Riven’s flag above their helmeted heads and the forest of their bills and spears, and the fighting is slowly moving away. He follows it, stumbling in its wake where between the corpses the ground is an ankle-deep soup of blood and snow, and every man is coated in it, so that liveries are not easily distinguishable.
The line is slowly advancing.
Those who fight for Henry of Lancaster are being beaten back by those who fight for Edward of York. Thomas follows, through tumuli of bodies creaking where wounded struggle to escape.
And then through the swirling snow he glimpses Riven’s flag again, he is sure of it. It is farther back, and he pushes forward. He tries to get between the broad backs of Norfolk’s men, but their number is too great, and the resistance of the northerners too fierce.
They fight on, and the quality of light in the sky changes, and it is now nearer the eve than the morning; for the first time in the day it seems the King’s men might have the numbers, and the balance of battle is weighing in their favour.
And now there is a great cry. A roar that surges around Thomas.
‘A Warwick! A Warwick!’
Men are fighting with desperate intensity, knowing that to yield an inch now will be to yield the whole day. For a few brief moments Thomas is forced to the front again and is hacking and chopping at men in bloodied livery. They are exhausted, and Thomas is aware – also for the first time – he is attacking them and they are defending. The balance has swung.
One turns, and runs. The next likewise, and the man Thomas is trying to kill is struck down by a fat-bladed bill and goes down and behind him there is no one, only the backs of men, fleeing the fight.
Just like that the northerners have broken, and their line is disintegrating along its entire length.
It is as sudden as that.
The battle is won.
And now the trumpets sound behind King Edward’s lines again. They are blowing a shrill call, and boys hurry forward with strings of horses from the park and the King’s spears and lances are suddenly there, mounted men coming up from the rear, and they are joined by the prickers who’ve reclaimed their mounts, and every man with access to a horse is forcing his way through the press to get at the fleeing northerners, and to cut them down.
Thomas stands numb and watches the northerners throw aside that which might slow them – their weapons, their armour, everything – as they begin a pell-mell rush northwards, pushing one another aside, stamping on their fellows to get away. But it is no good. King Edward’s horsemen are everywhere, riding them down, running men through with spears, breaking skulls with hammers, slashing at them with swords.
And so now the killing really begins. What was a contest becomes a slaughter, butchery, closer to commerce than to sport or battle. Archers are there with mauls and daggers, hacking at the backs of the fleeing men. Those with arrows loose them at men as they run, knocking them over, hobbling them so they can be killed and robbed at leisure.
Some northerners don’t run, but try to sell their lives dearly, and they huddle together in groups and turn their weapons outwards, but they do not last long. Surrounded, they go down in a hail of blows and they are set upon as soon as they’ve bowed their heads; knives jammed into eye-slits, visors ripped open and the contents gouged out, swords stabbed into groins and armour stripped off. Even the dead are mutilated.
Some try to flee back across the field towards the woods, but Warwick’s lances cut them off and herd them towards the valley beyond where the rest of the King’s men crowd forward to kill them.
Where is King Edward to demand mercy for the commons?
There is no sign of him. He has ridden northwards after the fleeing men.
Where is Riven?
Thomas is running now, tripp
ing on dying men, stumbling clumsily through the corpses heaped like islands in a sea of blood. Here and there some of the King’s men have already broken off to loot the dead and Thomas starts searching the bodies himself, seeking that livery badge, but everywhere they are the Duke of Somerset’s men with their portcullis, or the Duke of Exeter’s, entangled with those of Warwick, or Fauconberg, or the King’s men with their white rose. The points of bloodied weapons make it a dangerous exercise.
‘You don’t look too clever,’ a voice says.
It is Perers, alive, looking well even, carrying his bow unnocked and a single arrow in his belt. He is studying Thomas as if trying to work out why he lives when he should be dead.
‘So, did you find that bloke with the flag?’ he asks.
Thomas shakes his head.
Perers sniffs.
‘He’ll be down there then,’ he says. ‘If he’s still alive.’
He gestures across the field to where King Edward’s men are gathered on the lip of the plateau to the west. There are thousands of them and the noise of fighting persists, a constant grinding.
‘Take a look, if you like?’ Perers offers.
Thomas nods and Perers shows him how he’s been using the bodies as stepping stones.
‘Don’t tread on them in armour,’ he says. ‘Too slippery. Just tread on them in jacks. And for fuck’s sake mind out for those caltrops. You stand on one of them, you’ll know about it all right.’
The caltrops are scattered where the northerners’ right flank had started and Thomas follows Perers across the field, stepping from body to body, wary of the spiked iron balls that lie under the snow.
At the lip of the plateau the King’s men are ranged in a crowd, three or four deep. Beyond them Thomas can hear bellowing and screaming and there is the dense rattle of hammers and blades beating on well-fixed armour. When he reaches the fringe, men turn to look at him, and he sees they are furtive and guilty, as if they have been caught out at something.
Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims Page 51
