‘You’ve never been in a fight before, have you?’ Brunt asks.
Flood has not.
‘Now is not the perfect time for it,’ Thomas tells him.
But still Flood will not budge, and before they can persuade him another party of prickers returns from the north and their escape is barred.
‘Come on,’ the commander says. ‘You are all the bowmen we have!’
They return muttering to Pembroke’s camp. The wounded prickers are telling those who will listen that they found trace of an army and followed it until they met a party of ten horsemen in blue, with a yellow badge across their chests – ‘like a smear’ – and they attacked them, even though they were outnumbered.
‘They are just over the river!’
Messengers are sent for Devon, to recall him, but by now it is dusk. Some men go down to the river, where there is a bridge, and Pembroke sends another party down to brace them. Two hundred in all. He sets his men to build big fires, and to tend them, to make Robin of Redesdale believe that Devon is with him, but he tells his commanders that they must be ready at first light.
‘We will catch them before they are ready,’ Pembroke says. ‘Before they learn we have no bowmen.’
Thomas and the others are to sit with the first party of prickers they met, all of them Welshmen, and they must keep the fire going all night. They sing incomprehensible songs and one of them recites endless poetry in their own queer language, and they toast their bread on the fires and then slice cheese over it, and in fact this is not so bad, Thomas thinks, if only they’d shut up.
Thomas keeps the last watch, over the cooling ashes of the fire, and the country is loud with birdsong. He sees the dawn come first as a pale smear, very ordinary, and below there is a mist rising up where the river meanders through its meadows, and he is on his knees in the wet grass, offering up prayers to God for his own safety that he may return to Katherine and Rufus, when the quietude of the morning is broken by distant shouting and the batter of weapons from down by the bridge.
That is how it starts.
The camp erupts around him. Men surge to their feet. They throw off their cloaks, and others call for servants, squires, ale, bread, their own boots. Pembroke is there among them, roaring his head off, bellowing for messengers to be sent to my lord of Devon, demanding that his lesser knights and gentlemen bring order to the camp and get their men together, and the camp resounds with Welshmen bellowing at one another, and over it all: the smell of cheese toasting. Very few women have come, because the men were mustered late and fast, and so it is just a lot of men with dark shaggy hair strapping on their armour and gathering their bills and spears and hammers and swords and struggling to find their friends among so many doing likewise and appearing so similar.
It is surprising how quickly they organise themselves, though, and before the sun is properly up they are lined across the field. There are perhaps three thousand of them formed up in three battles. Pembroke stalks the ground before them. He is in full harness, with a pollaxe. His squire carries his helmet and his bevor. Another tries to tie a strap at his calf but Pembroke will not stop his prowling.
The noise of the fighting below is a constant irregular rattle. Men are already limping away to collapse in the grass or trying to drag themselves up the hill. The trees hide what is happening on the bridge itself, but as the mist clears Thomas can see a horde of men surging through the furlongs the other side of the river, making for the bridge, and there is a great surge of sound as they come. Thomas wonders why Pembroke does not stop them on the bridge. Then he thinks that the Earl is not trying to stop them. He wants them to cross the bridge, and to form up, and then he will send his men down on them to kill them.
But what about bowmen? It is not much good having the advantage of height if you have no bowmen.
Pembroke stops and turns his back on the fighting and faces his men. He is a big man, made more so by his harness, and his face is broad, too, and now, weather-chapped and mottled, with his hair on end, he appeals to his men.
‘Men of Wales!’ he bellows. ‘Men of Wales, I thank God that you are with me today. Here in this shitty little part of shitty little England. I could have no finer company. None braver, none better beside me. And I thank God for that. D’you hear? I thank God that you sons of David are with me. Each and every one of you. You.’ He points. ‘You.’ He points elsewhere. ‘And you.’ At someone else.
‘Today you are my brothers. Today we are all brothers. All of us here. All of us in this line. We are brothers. We are a family. A nation. A race. A race of men. A race of men the world has come to fear. A race of men the world has reason to fear. And on this day we will write another legend in the annals of our proud nation’s history. Another chapter.’
Thomas wonders where men such as Pembroke learn all this sort of stuff. Is rhetoric thrown into their upbringing along with drills in the use of the long sword and the battle axe?
Pembroke continues. He acknowledges that Devon is not yet there, but tells his troops that now is the hour they must acquit themselves as men, and that when the battle is done, Devon and his men will come to regret their petulance, and that they, being perfidious Englishmen, will come to lie about this day, and say they were here on this field, and that they saw what the sons of Wales can do.
There is much shouting and waving of weapons.
Thomas and the few others who make up Pembroke’s bowmen are standing a little off, on the right hand of the right-hand battle. They nock their bows, fluff out the fletches, and begin rolling their shoulders to warm them.
‘We are to hold the flank,’ Thomas mutters. He might laugh if it were not so desperate.
Flood is in full harness now, and of course, someone has spent money with an armourer to make his plate just the finest you could possibly imagine. In it, he looks awe-inspiring. He moves with such facility that even though Thomas knows there must be the usual weak spots – the groin and armpit – it is impossible to imagine him being still for long enough for anyone to threaten them. He has a pollaxe as fine as Thomas’s and a horseman’s hammer in his belt. His servant has taken the sheaths from sword and dagger and they hang from rings.
‘You are not to go down there,’ Thomas tells him.
Flood looks at him with those widespread blue eyes and for a moment Thomas feels he is falling into them. Flood tries to appeal to him.
‘Thomas,’ he says. ‘Thomas, sir?’
‘No,’ Thomas tells him. ‘Lord Hastings charged me with bringing you back whole and alive. I don’t care how good at this you are, and how much you want to get your harness bloody. You are not risking your neck here and now. There will be plenty of chance for that later.’
Flood blinks.
Thomas sees he has a piece of gauzy cloth tied to his pollaxe. Can it be from Maude? It is. Oh dear God. Does he know what that weapon will do to a man? Does he want to get something so pure all splattered with gore? With brains? With the stuff that spills from torn entrails? Really?
‘Give me your axe,’ Thomas says.
‘No.’
Pembroke is still shouting, but in Welsh, and the Welshmen are shouting something in return. The men at the bridge are still putting up a fight, but soon Robin of Redesdale’s men will force a crossing. It is only a question of time.
Thomas holds out his hand for Flood’s axe.
‘This is not your fight,’ Thomas tells him. These are words that would persuade him, but Flood is young. He has not yet fought anywhere other than the tilt yard.
‘Come on,’ Thomas says, and he puts his hand on the axe, closing his fingers around the shaft. Flood does not let go. It is a strange position. If Flood wanted to kill him now, he could. Thomas watches him consider it. But Brunt and Caldwell move slightly behind Flood’s shoulder and Flood sees the movement and turns to them, one on one side, the other on the other, and they smile innocently at him, but all four know what’s just happened, and Flood looks back at Thomas and smiles.
‘Very well,’ he says, letting him take the pollaxe. ‘But keep it close.’
Pembroke has finished rousing his rabble and the men at the bridge have finally been overwhelmed and are now scattering across the lower reaches of the hill pursued by Robin of Redesdale’s men, who have taken the bridge by weight of numbers and are spreading into the field below.
‘Come on,’ Caldwell mutters. He has a long arrow nocked in his enormous bow, and if only Pembroke would give the signal, he could send it into those who are even now killing the wounded men.
Pembroke gives the signal. He steps back and levels his hammer at Thomas and his little band, and then lowers it, and so now Thomas drops Flood’s axe in the grass next to his own and snatches up his bow and nocks an arrow. Already Caldwell has sent that first shaft down the hill, carefully aimed, into the chest of a man with a hammer about to despatch another crawling through the long grass. Brunt laughs. O’Driscoll cheers. That is the way to do it, Thomas supposes. They are only four bowmen and they each have fewer than fifty arrows apiece, so laying down salvoes will do no good. They must pick their targets and shoot accurately.
He is become judge and executioner.
He sees a man, decides he does not like him, draws his bow and sends an arrow skimming down the hill to kill him. On what basis? He has never liked those helmets with cheek pieces. Barbutes, they call them. He picks a man wearing one, draws and looses. The man is snatched away from what he is doing – trying to organise his men – and sent staggering. He sees another urging men forward, but not moving himself. Him he catches on the helmet. He may not be dead, but he will not be getting up any time soon. He imagines he sees Taplow, or someone very like him – but there are so many who are like him down there! – and he looses a shaft at him, aiming for his chest and sending him scuttling backwards. Then there is another Taplow, and so he looses at him too. And then he remembers Horner, down there, just trying to make a living, and he wavers, remembering his promise not to fight the man, but he thinks: Well, there is nothing for it. He must do what he must, and take the repercussions as they come.
And he draws and looses. He does not know these men. It is better not to speculate. It is better to loose as if he were a fulling stock: rising and falling, pulling and loosing. He just ceases to think and concentrates only on sending arrows as well as he is able and as fast as he is able: shaft after shaft down into the faces of those trying to come up the hill to kill him.
But they have nowhere near enough arrows. And soon arrows are being loosed back at them in return. A dark cloud. A dirty blur in the morning sky. A man is dropped on Pembroke’s front rank, an armstretch from Pembroke himself, and all along the battles there is a slight retreat, a flinching, a wincing, as the front rank withdraw from the arrow shafts that come slicing down and bury themselves where they will. A man screams. There is a bellow, a bleat, and another runs for a moment before he falls thrashing. Pembroke remains, standing with his arm raised and showing no fear, and God gives him luck, but they all know if they stand for long, without Devon’s bowmen, they will all be hit and the Earl knows without Devon’s bowmen he cannot hold this height, so he shouts above the noise:
‘For God! For King Edward! And St David!’
And his Welshmen surge forward with a bellowed roar. They storm down the hill towards where Robin of Redesdale is drawing up his men, and Thomas looses his last arrow and sees with admiration how well Pembroke has timed his charge, for Robin of Redesdale’s bowmen have not had time to do their worst, and nor are his men-at-arms ready to receive this onslaught. Pembroke’s men arrive in a hard, broad front with momentum behind them, and they break the loose formation below. The noise is terrible, a rolling batter of steel on steel. The screams will come later. Robin of Redesdale’s men are pushed back into the trees, into the river, the lucky ones back across the bridge.
Thomas and Brunt and the others are bent with their hands on their knees, faces flushed as apple skins, breathing hard, steaming in the early morning like oxen, watching the events below.
It is only then that Thomas sees Flood is not there.
14
The priory is no more.
It is gone, burned through, a collection of blackened stumps, a cancerous growth on a low islet in the encroaching fen. The church tower is shorn at an angle, the roofs elsewhere are collapsed and the outer wall is crumbled to stone and mortar. The damp air smells of soot and ash and disturbed gulls wheel above, shrieking.
‘Was it always like that?’ Liz asks, letting the horse come to a stop on the road below. Katherine does not reply. She just shivers. Now that she has finally seen it again, she cannot take her eyes from it. This is the place in which she grew up, the place that has sent a black shadow like a pike shaft through her life since, the place that has filled her nightmares and sometimes her waking hells. It is gone. Just like that. She cannot grasp it.
‘What is that place?’ Rufus asks.
Isabella and Liz look at Katherine for an answer and when it comes it surprises them all, even her.
‘It was once my world,’ she says.
‘Not a very nice one,’ Rufus says.
Liz smiles.
‘Was there a fire?’ he asks.
‘Big one, by the look of it,’ Liz says.
Everywhere is black. The whole place, from gate to grate, from footing to spire, all of it, tumbled down and thick with layered soot.
‘What a shame,’ Isabella murmurs. She cannot abide waste.
Katherine says nothing.
‘Shall we go up and see?’ Liz asks.
‘See what?’ Katherine asks. ‘What is there to see?’
But they do. They leave her with the horse down on the track and she watches them go.
Rufus tells her not to be sad and she tells him she isn’t.
‘Then why are you crying?’
And she realises she is. She stands watching for a long while. It is cold today. No sign of the sun, and the wind stirs the water around about and the rushes sigh as they move. She shivers as if her dress is wet.
After a while the two women come out through the gates again. Their blue and green dresses and white linen headdresses are dabs of colour against the drab black world. They come down the track. Liz has soot on her elbow and shoulder, and their boots are black with it.
‘By the Mass, what a place,’ Liz says.
‘It was worse before the fire,’ Katherine tells them.
Liz laughs, but Katherine can tell they hoped to find something. What? A coffer full of papers relating to her family?
‘Are you sure you don’t want to go up?’ Isabella asks. ‘It might be better for you. It is – There is nothing still standing. Even the floor of the church is broken up.’
Katherine shakes her head. They climb back into the cart; Liz settles and flicks the horse into a slow plod.
‘No one’s been in since it burned down,’ she says. ‘Odd, you know? Because there’s wood to be had, and stones there for building.’
‘Who’s building around here?’
They look about. The mill is there, but it is abandoned too, and its wheel has folded over and the roof tiles slithered off.
‘Like it were made of cheese,’ Liz says.
Other than that, there is nothing.
‘Cornford Castle is that way,’ Katherine tells them. She is thinking aloud, really; reminding herself of her past life. Isabella lets out a long sigh.
‘Let’s leave that for another day, shall we?’
Katherine cranes her head around to watch the priory slip out of view. She can see the sisters’ half of the priory now. The field where she first met the Rivens, and Thomas of course. Ten years ago, or thereabouts. Dear God. And as they roll on, she begins to feel that something is now missing from the middle of her life, and she starts to feel as if she is floating – or falling; she cannot decide which. She cannot believe the priory is gone.
‘Wonder what happened to all them monks?’ Liz asks.
‘The
y must have escaped the blaze,’ Isabella imagines.
‘It had a bad atmosphere,’ Liz counters.
‘It always had a bad atmosphere,’ Katherine tells her.
‘Perhaps Baron Willoughby will know?’ Isabella says.
But when they finally make it to Tattershall, Baron Willoughby is absent, and with him every able-bodied man, and most of the women, too, so all that remains of his household are the elderly, the infirm, a few women, and an old priest with pink-rimmed eyes like a dog. When Isabella asks about the priory, he crosses himself and turns around three times and spits on the ground.
‘The devil himself came unto that place,’ he tells her through loose lips, but that is all he will tell them – because they are women, Katherine supposes – and he does not want to shock them. Liz, who goes first to the kitchens, tells them afterwards, though only once she has clapped her hands around Rufus’s ears.
‘The Prioress was sent out of her wits for the love of another sister!’ she tells them later. ‘And that sister was so scandalised, she were driven to drown herself in the river where they washed their linens. The Prior of All came and investigated but nothing could be proved, but still he sent the Prioress back to where she’d come from.’
‘That was all?’
Liz shrugs.
‘They say this Prior of All were terrified of her. And he were right to be so, because they said that before she left she cursed the place – that she damned the canons and sisters all to hell and what have you.’
Rufus wriggles free.
‘Within a month they were visited by a one-eyed beggar who came for alms,’ Liz goes on, ‘only he brought with him the pestilence.’
‘Dear God.’ Isabella crosses herself at its mention.
‘And by the end of the month, every monk was dead save one. Can you imagine what that must have been like? Trapped in there? Alone and just waiting for them black spots to come up on your skin? Burying a body every day? Anyway. He went mad, of course, too, this monk, after a month or so.’
Divided Souls Page 20
