The man barked a laugh.
‘Course there’ll be more fighting,’ he said. ‘There’s always more fighting, isn’t there? It won’t stop until everybody gets what they want, and that isn’t going to happen before heaven opens her gates.’
John shook his head at the thought of it. The man took a loaf and filled his flask with ale and left them to follow the causeway that led up over Stanage Edge towards Sheffield and beyond.
When he’d gone, John turned to Thomas and stopped.
‘You all right, you daft bastard? You’ve gone all pale.’
More men came by in the next few weeks, bands of them in riding cloaks, bows and poles slung over their packs, moving furtively through the countryside on hungry horses. Things started to go missing from the farm – a couple of geese, one of the sheep – and Thomas helped bring the animals inside the hazel fence that surrounded the farmhouse and then every night the dogs woke and barked and John would grope for his bow.
That winter they did not go up into the hills to mine for lead as they usually did, and though at night they could see the fires on the hilltops all around where other men were smelting the grey metal, and they thought of the money they were missing out on, they stayed close to the farm, and waited.
Nothing happened all through Advent. Christmastide passed, then Epiphany, and then Candlemas and then Ash Wednesday came and went and still nothing happened. So now it is the season of Lent, when the statues in the church are masked, but the land without is opening up and life is returning to the valley, and it is now that eight men on horses turn off the road and come up the track to the farm, halting their horses before the stockade gates. John watches them come, shading his eyes from the low spring sun. The man who seems to be their leader gets off his horse well before the stockade’s gate and John tells Elizabeth to stay within the house with William and he asks Adam to find Thomas.
‘Quickly now.’
The man who has climbed off his horse is weary, and from his walk it is obvious he has been riding a good while. He relieves himself in the sheep-cropped grass, then turns to John. He has a bitter-set face and is wearing a buff jack with no sign of a badge to show his allegiance. He greets John cordially, but he does not smile.
‘Good country, this,’ he says. He has a thick, soft accent.
John nods.
‘Hard in winter, I’d imagine?’
Again, John agrees.
‘But all right in summer?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hunting?’
‘A little, in the valleys.’
‘Not on the hills?’
‘Not so much.’
‘Still though, eh?’
There is a long silence. It is as if the man doesn’t quite know how to start whatever it is he wants to start. His men are lined up behind him, still mounted. One of them is chewing something – a twig, or a piece of straw. He takes it and throws it down.
‘We are in need of a few things,’ the first man says, as if reminded to get on with it. ‘Something to eat. And ale, of course. But horses too, if you have them.’
‘I have a horse,’ John says. ‘But not for sale.’
‘I was not thinking of buying.’
‘Then?’
Adam comes back.
‘I cannot find him,’ he tells John.
‘Find who?’ the man asks.
‘No one,’ John says, then to the boy: ‘All right, Adam, go in now.’
Adam is uncertain. John gives him a push.
The man smiles, watching him go.
‘Fine boy,’ he says.
There is another moment of silence, then: ‘May I see the horse?’
‘Why?’ John asks.
‘See if I want it,’ the man says.
‘Makes no difference if you want it. You can’t have it.’
‘But I am willing to trade something for it.’
‘Such as what?’
The man smiles and gestures at the hall, the fields, the hills above them.
‘All this,’ he says. ‘You. Him. Her, probably.’
‘They are not yours to trade,’ John says.
The man frowns.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘No. Not for the moment, but there are more of us than you.’
The man pulls half his sword from his sheath. His eyes are unnaturally bright. He stares at John. John stares back. John does not know what to say now. He opens his mouth to say something, when an arrow flits past him and catches the man in the chest with a thump. The blow knocks the wind from him. He staggers back four or five paces, reaching out for John, then he falls on his heels and his backside.
John is as surprised as the man with the arrow in his chest. He stands stock-still for a moment, his mouth open, his arms by his sides. Then he looks up at the other men on their horses who are likewise paused in mid-gesture. Then at once they move, throwing themselves off their horses, and John turns and runs, back to the stockade.
Thomas is there. He has another arrow nocked and he draws and looses without seeming to aim. His arrow hits one of the men, bundles him with a cry from his saddle. Then Thomas nocks, draws and looses again and he hits another who is running with his back turned. A man shouts.
‘Kill him!’
Then there’s another arrow. Another cry. Adam has loosed and caught one of the men. He nocks and looses his practice bow just as he has been taught. The arrow carries less weight, but from this distance it may still turf a man from his horse, may still kill him.
John runs through the gateway and slams the hazel stock gate behind him. It is to keep animals in, or out, and not much good for anything else. Thomas sends another arrow through a gap in the fence but sees it wicker into the distance. Already there is another arrow nocked.
And now the remaining men beyond the fence have scattered. They are circling the farmhouse. Thomas has lost sight of them. Then there is a sudden thunder of hoof beats behind and a man looms over the fence and crashes his horse into it and through it. Thomas turns and looses. The arrow catches the horse below the jaw and the horse rears and the man is thrown back and falls from the saddle and the horse stamps forward into the yard and then thunders past, whinnying and screaming, and out through the other side. Geese scatter everywhere.
John emerges from the house with a billhook just in time to stop the fallen rider getting to his feet. He crashes the billhook down on his head, knocking his helmet off, and as his fear is replaced by anger, he crashes it down on him again and again. The man is dead long before John stops hitting him. There is blood everywhere, splashed on the walls, all over John’s legs, arms and chest, and all over the dead man.
But through the hole the horse made comes another man. He runs at John with a sword and a small round shield, but Adam stands up behind a beehive, scarcely able to see over the wicker mound, and follows the man with his bow, just as if he were out hunting. He looses and the arrow jumps across the yard. It catches the man’s thigh, whipping his leg away from under him. He spins, trips and lands heavily with a bellow of rage. He spills the sword. John takes a step and drops the billhook down on this second man’s head and with three or four more clumsy blows he manages to kill him too.
Thomas doubles back around the hall, stepping through the gap in the goose-pen fence and then out past the wood stack. He thinks there are still two more. Where are they? They will have had time to string their bows by now. He is past the wood stack, into the mess where the privy drains. The smell is foul, but familiar. Where are they? He edges forward. He glimpses something in the orchard, from the tail of his eye. He turns too late to see one of the soldiers among the trees. He has his bow raised and an arrow nocked. Thomas sees him loose the arrow.
Just then his heelless boots slip. His feet go from under him and he falls on his back into the mire with a winding crash. The arrow slaps straight into the wattle and daub of the wall above his head, leaving a neat hole. Thomas recovers his bow, scrambles to his feet and runs ducking around the corner. The last sold
ier is there, hiding from Adam and his bow. He turns to look at Thomas. He has only a rondel knife, gripped in his right hand, but he is a boy, shaking, and only holding the dagger because he knows he ought.
Thomas stands a moment, looks the boy in the eye, then takes two swift steps and smacks the knife from his hand with the tip of his bow. The boy sucks his breath and clutches his hand. His hat drops over his eyes. Thomas takes another step and punches him in the chest. The boy collapses. Thomas takes the arrow from his belt, nocks it and turns back to the soldier in the orchard.
He is bobbing in and out from behind an apple-tree trunk. He is trying to see who is alive and where his friends are. He calls out. There is no answer. He calls again. It is very quiet when he is not shouting and in the weak sunlight his face is very pale between the trees’ trunks and Thomas thinks it would be easy to catch him.
He lifts the bow, then lowers it. He turns around and steps over the boy on the ground who is still gasping for air, kicking his legs in the dirt, and he comes out into the yard where Adam is still by the beehives, with his bow and an arrow shaft gripped in shaking, white-knuckled hands. His eyes are fixed on his father who is standing over two dead men, staring at the blade of the billhook that is chipped and ruby with blood. John is breathing hard with the effort of having killed the two men. He looks up at Thomas. They are listening to the one in the orchard shouting out. Thomas turns on his heel, rests his bow against the wall of the house and goes to fetch the other boy who is crawling in the dirt, still hardly able to breathe. Thomas picks him up under the arm and walks him back around the corner and out into the yard where he drops him next to the two dead men in the thin sunlight.
‘Water,’ he says, gesturing to the bucket.
Adam puts his bow down and throws the contents of the bucket over the boy, who gasps and sits upright.
‘Go and fetch your friend,’ Thomas tells the boy. ‘Tell him to put his bow down and come and there will be no more of this.’
The boy gets up from the mud. His face is mottled and his breath reedy, and he is sopping wet, and he cannot take his gaze off the dead men as he goes back around the corner and tries to shout to his companion in the orchard. Both John and Adam are staring at Thomas with their mouths slack.
‘It is – safe,’ Thomas says.
John starts to laugh. So does Adam. Thomas feels himself smiling.
‘He speaks!’ John laughs. ‘He actually speaks!’
Then he throws his arms around Thomas and pounds his back and Thomas can feel the bristles on his brother’s chin and the breeze of his breath on his ear. John is laughing so hard.
‘By the saints,’ he gasps, addressing Adam over Thomas’s shoulder, ‘by all the saints, we did for them, eh, Adam my boy?’
Now Adam is laughing too, and all the more so when John lets go of Thomas and pushes him away and looks at his hands.
‘Jesus, man!’ he snorts. ‘You’re covered in shit!’
They laugh again. Tears are rolling down Adam’s face. Thomas’s face aches. John can hardly breathe with laughter. But then they hear it. A terrible sound. Someone is crying. It is Elizabeth, in the house, with William. John goes. Thomas waits outside, washing his hands. Then John shouts from within.
‘Adam! Thomas!’
Adam goes in first, then Thomas. For a moment Thomas cannot see for the gloom of the house, but John and Elizabeth are gathered on the far side of the dead fire, kneeling around the boy William who is lying on her lap, one leg outstretched, the other bent with the foot tucked up under the knee of the first.
When he can see more of him, Thomas sees there is an arrow dug deep by his sternum, and across the room dust motes and smoke particles swirl in a thin stream of light that emerges unexpectedly from a hole in the wattle and daub. It is the arrow that missed Thomas. It has come through the wall to hit William, who is breathing very fast and has a glossy circle of blood spreading on his shirt while his mother clutches him to her, pressing his body to hers, rocking him as she might have done when he was an infant, only she is moaning a high-pitched constant cry. Next to her the boy’s father is on his knees, helpless. He looks up at Thomas and there are tears in his eyes and blood on his cheeks. Adam stands mute.
It doesn’t take long and when it’s over Thomas turns and goes back out to the boy and the archer in the orchard. They are standing side by side, their caps off. One – the younger of the two, the one Thomas punched – is knock-kneed, the blonde down on his chin catching the sunlight, his pale eyes clear and very frightened. The other is darker, with a faint and ugly moustache above his lips which are curled in a sneer of defiance to mask his fear. They look up at Thomas when he comes out, and then back at the dead man at their feet, at his wounds where bubbles of blood rise and pop gently.
‘Come,’ Thomas tells them. Something warns him that these two must not be the very first thing John sees when he emerges from the house. He takes them with him to check the other bodies beyond the fence.
‘Stand over there,’ he says.
The leader of the band is still alive, but Thomas doubts it will be long before that changes. He is holding Thomas’s arrow in his chest, and his horse is cropping the grass next to him. Beyond is another body, with an arrow in the throat.
Thomas crouches next to the first man. He is breathing quickly, his teeth are red and blood is foamy in his mouth. The man snarls and manages to spit blood at him. It is surprisingly warm and Thomas stands and wipes it from his chin and throat and he’s wondering what to do next when his brother comes out of the house and through the gateway. He has the billhook clenched in both hands and he is striding toward the dying man. Thomas steps aside. There is nothing he can do to stop this even if he wanted to.
‘Look at me,’ John tells the dying man.
The man turns away his face. John kicks his cheek.
‘I said look at me.’
The man slowly turns. He shows his red teeth.
‘God damn you,’ he snarls. ‘God damn you both.’
‘No!’ John shouts. ‘God damn you!’
John lifts the billhook and he chops it down into the man’s throat. It goes straight through the bones at the back of his neck and into the grit below. The horse bolts at the noise. John wrenches the billhook from the ground and the man’s head rolls slack and more blood gurgles in the grass. Then he turns on the two boys. He is going to kill them, too.
‘No,’ Thomas says. ‘Leave them.’
John pauses. He looks at Thomas. He frowns.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ John breathes. His face is smutted with ash and blood, and tears have made lines in his cheeks. ‘For Christ’s sake.’
He hurls the billhook across the grass and then walks back into the farmhouse where they can hear Elizabeth howling. The two boys are staring at Thomas. Then they hear the tone of Elizabeth’s cry change and they hear her shouting and then she is in the yard and they turn to see her coming at them. She is screaming, her bare feet flying, and now John is pulling at her, trying to hold her back, but she twists out of his grip and Thomas sees she has a knife in her hand. When the boys see it they react like sheep before a dog. They each dip one shoulder and then turn and run, parting so that Elizabeth does not know whom to chase.
She comes instead at Thomas, perhaps because there is no one else there. Thomas stands until she is almost on him, and she pulls back her arm to slash at him, and he can see she is mad. He steps inside her swinging arm and catches her wrist and the knife shoots from her grasp to the ground behind his feet. He tries to hold her. She pushes at him. She scratches his face. He catches her hands and he holds her at arm’s length. She is strong but he is stronger still. She has lost her headdress and her face is scarlet, smudged with ashes and snot and tears and blood and her mouth is a rectangle of rage. He can feel how hot she is. She is almost feverish.
‘Beth,’ John says. ‘Beth.’
He wants to say that it is all right, that everything will be all right, but it is not. Her son is dead. N
othing can change that. Her husband stands behind her.
‘Beth,’ John soothes. ‘Beth. Come now.’
Finding how helpless she is, she slumps. Her arms go slack and Thomas releases her. She turns and lets John wrap his arms around her and she sobs against his chest. After a moment Thomas cannot bear to witness the misery and he turns. The two boys are standing a little way off watched by Adam who has his bow nocked again.
‘What are we going to do with them?’ Adam asks.
‘They can start by burying their friends,’ Thomas says.
Elizabeth stops, turns her head. Strands of wet hair cover her face. Her eyes are already red from weeping. She points at Thomas.
‘He speaks,’ she says. ‘Dear God.’
They are all staring at him, even the two boys who know nothing of his silence. Thomas does not know what to think. He did not realise that he had not been speaking, or that he now has. But he does feel odd. He can hear the river on the rocks of the ford and some birds in the tree crowns. And there is more: it is as if a veil has been lifted. Colours are brighter. Movement is faster.
Elizabeth is still staring at him.
‘You,’ she says, pointing one long shaking bony finger at him. ‘You did this. If you had not loosed that first arrow …’
John looks down at her. He loosens his arms as she pushes him away.
‘No, Beth,’ John says. ‘It was not like that.’
‘It was,’ she says. ‘They would have only taken the horse and maybe some bread. My boy would still be alive. If you had not killed that man.’
She gestures to the body on the ground. Blood winks in the wounds and they can smell it. Thomas wonders if she is right. Doubt clouds his mind. When he saw the way the men had been when they’d first arrived at the house, he assumed they were threatening John, and he thought, Dear God. Perhaps Elizabeth is right? John glances quickly at him.
‘No, Mother,’ Adam says. ‘They meant to take everything. You saw them.’
‘But they would not have killed my William!’ she wails.
‘They would have killed us all!’
She turns on Adam with those mad eyes.
Kingmaker: Broken Faith Page 5
