Kingmaker: Broken Faith

by Toby Clements

  And now, inevitably, the men in Somerset’s division are beginning to turn too, before they have even met Montagu’s line. Those at the left edge, the fringes of the centre nearest Hungerford and Roos’s scattered companies, have suddenly found themselves on the very extremities of Somerset’s left flank, and are already being outflanked by Montagu’s right. All Montagu needs to do now, if he could but see it, if he could but believe it, is send his men forward to wrap up the whole thing. And seeing this, and knowing this, the men in Somerset’s command have started to turn, and with the prickers dead or otherwise engaged, there is nothing to stop them.

  Thomas watches it happen.

  The centre begins to fray.

  Christ!

  And now men are really running at him. Trying to get past. It is dangerous to even stand facing them for any one of them will hack at him for fear he is there to stop them. But what can he do? He must find Jack. He steps forward. He punches a man out of the way with his buckler. Then has to use it to block a sliding blow from a bill. He fends men off. He is the only man moving forward.

  After a moment he is utterly isolated, alone, a single detached figure, and he watches the gap between him and the nearest of Somerset’s troops widen from ten, to fifteen, then twenty paces as each man realises he has been deserted by his neighbour, and he too must run.

  But Thomas must go forward, into the ground where the archers were, where the dead and dying are scattered among the feather fletches of arrow shafts. The smell is strong here. He is watched by Montagu’s men, he supposes, and he imagines them coming running up the slope toward him and if he is caught between them and Somerset’s he will be cut down in a moment, metal plates in his jack or not. But they do not seem to be moving fast, certainly not as quickly as Somerset’s scattering division. An arrow lands with a resinous puff nearby, a pretty good shot from Montagu’s line, he cannot help notice, and he ducks his head, but he still must move forward, coming back up to where he last saw Jack.

  ‘Jack! Jack!’

  He hardly expects an answer and every step reveals something he would rather not see. But then he finds where he thinks Jack was and he sees the heather is beaten down and there is Jack’s bow on the ground and then he finds him lying on his side, his foot scrabbling a circle in the dirt, kicking at the snarls of heather. His teeth are clenched and he is seething with pain and glaring in furious disbelief at the arrow shaft that sticks from his thigh, from the wool just above the left knee.

  ‘Thomas!’ he shouts when he sees him. ‘Look!’

  And he points as if Thomas would not have seen it. There is blood, a lot of it, but Thomas has no idea how much is too much and it doesn’t seem to be pumping in that way it can. Another arrow lands with a thump.

  ‘Where’s Kit?’ Jack shouts. ‘Where is he? By Christ! Look. I need him.’

  Thomas throws aside his buckler and the useless blade he’s been carrying and he kneels to slide an arm under Jack’s back. He glances over to see how long he has before Montagu’s men arrive. And now he frowns. Montagu’s men have not moved forward. Why not? They are not pressing their advantage, but rather they are regrouping, reorganising. They are turning to their left, turning towards Percy’s division, slightly up the slope. Why? Why have they not pressed their advantage? Thomas cannot guess, but it is a relief.

  He helps Jack to his feet. He wonders about trying to carry him but Jack can walk or hop.

  ‘Here,’ Thomas says, and he bends to break the arrow shaft, but it is thick and strong, and he cannot break it cleanly and it pulls in the wound and blood flows fast and Jack growls with the pain. Then it snaps and Thomas discards most of it.

  ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Put your arm around me.’

  And Jack does so and he half-drags him, hopping, back towards the rear. No more arrows land, but the ground is uneven, the heather catches Jack’s one foot, and they stagger, and they must negotiate the dead bodies and then the wounded man is there again and he shouts something at Thomas and Jack shouts something back at him.

  ‘Keep your strength,’ Thomas mutters.

  Jack growls again. His lower leg is glossy with blood, his boots red with it. He keeps his leg out straight and he gasps with each hop. A man collides with them, but they do not fall, and instead he blunders on. They are being left behind, Thomas thinks, and soon surely Montagu will bring his horsemen up.

  Nearly there, Thomas tells himself. Nearly there.

  He does not think about what might be happening behind. He tries not to imagine how a horseman’s hammer will feel on the crown of his head, helmet or no helmet, or how an arrow will feel when it knocks him from his feet, and instead he concentrates on getting Jack to Katherine, and the belief that she will save him.

  He sees Katherine’s pale face peering up at him above the heather where she still stands by the stream. She has lost her cap, and her hair hangs free. Her forehead is smudged with blood and a bruise is developing under her right eye. John Stump is there. He has a sword in his hand and he is shielding her.

  When she sees them she scrambles up the bank to help.

  ‘No,’ Thomas tells her. ‘Let us get him to the trees first.’

  John Stump helps them down and together they carry Jack through the stream and across and under the leaf canopy to almost the precise spot they’d hoped to gather before their escape. They let him down and sit him against a pale trunk and Katherine is there very quickly, bent over him. Thomas removes first his helmet, then Jack’s, and he tosses them both into the heather. The boy is sweating and waxy now, but Katherine is swift. She puts her bowls and bags down on the leaves, then she takes the knife John Stump has been sharpening and she cuts Jack’s hose from his knee. She inspects the wound. Picks something out.

  ‘Can you move your foot?’ she asks, and he can, though not without a deal of pain. Still he looks up at them with wet eyes, like a dog who thinks this may be his time.

  ‘Good,’ she says. ‘Hold him, Thomas, will you?’

  And they exchange a look. This is going to hurt. She has a jug of urine. She pours a great splosh of it over the broken arrow shaft and the wound in the top of the knee, then when Jack is already pushing back with the pain of that, she makes the quickest incision under his knee, a little slit in the skin that makes him roar with pained surprise.

  But she ignores him.

  ‘It has gone good and deep,’ she says just as if he has done something clever. ‘It is nearly out the other side.’

  Jack frowns up at her through his tears. How can that be a good thing?

  ‘The barbs on the arrowhead,’ she says. ‘If I remove it this way …’

  He knows about the barbs. He has loosed many a barbed arrow himself. They are designed to stick into whatever they hit.

  There is still much blood, Thomas thinks. It is still dripping in spools, but Katherine does not seem worried. She trims the arrow’s splintered stump, breaking off the longest piece, levelling it as much as possible, and then she widens her eyes at him and he knows to take a good grip of Jack’s shoulders and John Stump comes very close to Katherine to be ready to take hold of Jack’s foot when the time comes and now Katherine takes the earthenware ewer she has of urine, empties it on the wound and then lifts it and bangs its base down on to the top peg of the arrow and Jack screams and writhes, but Thomas has him and John Stump has him, and now Katherine reaches under the leg and pulls out the arrow. There is a spray of blood. She drops the arrowhead in the leaves and grabs two handfuls of the piss-sodden tow and she presses one into the wound behind his knee and one into the wound above.

  ‘Hold them there,’ she says.

  And Thomas does so while she cuts up the linen of the jack she has already destroyed and she makes two or three strips that she quickly knots together to form one long one and this she wraps around the leg twice, covering Thomas’s blood-soaked hands, and then when she gives the word he pulls them out while she pulls the bandage tight over the tow and she keeps pulling until diluted blood flo
ws down his leg from both wounds. Then she wraps the bandage around twice more and then twice more again and she looks up.

  They are in a huddle in the gloom of the trees and while they have been looking to Jack, the two remaining lines have joined, a little further up the hill where Ralph Percy’s division has held, and Montagu’s men, instead of giving chase after Somerset’s, have canted around to address them. Now that Thomas has removed his helmet he can hear the rolling din of the engagement. From this distance there is no clue as to its real nature: the many blows and the screams are become as one, blending to make a noise no louder nor more threatening than waves washing on a shingle shore. Katherine looks up and there is a long moment of silence as they listen to the rattle of arms. After a moment she shakes her head and looks again at Jack.

  ‘Will he be all right?’ Thomas asks.

  ‘I think so,’ Katherine says. ‘He was lucky. Does it hurt?’

  Jack is surprised.

  ‘Not really,’ he says.

  ‘It will,’ she tells him.

  ‘That was – incredible,’ Thomas says.

  ‘I have done it before,’ she says. ‘To the Earl of Warwick.’

  ‘No,’ they all say.

  And she cannot help smile.

  ‘What now?’ John Stump asks.

  They look around. The fighting continues sporadically in the open, but in the woods, there are many shadows moving in its depths. Men are returning shamefaced, and now Thomas sees they have an audience. Some of Grey’s men have crept back, as well as Tailboys’s. There is even one who has thrown away his livery, but is wearing Hungerford’s badge. None of Riven’s.

  ‘Why hasn’t Montagu come after us?’ one of them asks. ‘Don’t make no sense.’

  ‘They come chasing after us,’ another, older, man answers, ‘and they’ll be all over Northumberland then, won’t they? Never get to Scotland like that. It is good discipline, that is.’

  They are impressed now, and they watch in silence as Montagu’s men round on Percy’s division and they pity him and his men then, and each man there feels he has cause to look shamed.

  ‘It was those bastards in white who started it,’ one of them mutters. ‘With the crows. Who are they? They ran as soon as the arrows came. As if they’d bloody planned it.’

  ‘Riven,’ another spits. ‘Never bloody trust them. Never. I was at Northampton. He turned his coat then. Probably did the same thing now.’

  It does not last long. Montagu’s army swamps Percy’s little force – all that is left of Somerset’s larger army – and though a few men can be seen running from its rear, and there are horses being brought up to help the escape, there can be only one outcome.

  ‘Christ,’ one of them breathes and then there is a restless silence in the woods that will only end when the last man offering any resistance is killed in the field, or the last man has run. No one among the trees can see who it is. Katherine, who has good eyes, does not want to watch. She has seen this before. And she is with Jack, who is very pale now, as if he has faded, and he wants to sleep. She is keeping him warm with all their cloaks and she has given him the last of their ale and she is trying to keep him awake. Still he shivers.

  ‘Are you sure he will live?’ Thomas asks.

  ‘I think so,’ she says, ‘but he cannot ride. He is not strong enough.’

  And Thomas nods. He feels sick. He extends a hand and squeezes Katherine’s shoulder and she shrugs and turns back to Jack and so after a moment Thomas returns to the end of the wood where men are still gathered, watching, and the rattle of the fighting diminishes, then becomes inconstant, and oddly all the more terrible for that, for it is possible to pick out a single particular noise – of a hammer falling, say – and imagine the ferocity behind the blow, its intent, and what it does to the man below. A father, a son, a brother, a husband. Eventually it stops.

  ‘We’d best be off,’ an archer says. ‘Look.’

  He points to where Montagu’s squires and boys are bringing up their masters’ horses.

  ‘Once they get on them, they’ll be after us.’

  But they stay to watch a moment or two longer as Montagu’s camp followers arrive on the field from the road south and begin scavenging among the dead, and Thomas supposes there must be scant pickings today, since so few of Hungerford and Roos’s men stayed to be killed, nor did Somerset’s command acquit themselves as they might have wished, and he imagines that apart from Percy’s dead, most of the few bodies left on the field must be those of unlucky archers, with little on them of much value beyond their bows.

  ‘Where are the nobles?’ Thomas asks. ‘Where is Grey? Where is Somerset? Did anyone see them go?’

  ‘They ran just as quickly as us,’ one of the men mutters says, ‘and further too.’

  ‘They’d’ve only stopped to collect their gear and to give King Henry the glad tidings.’

  ‘He will be sore depressed,’ another says.

  ‘If there was ever a man used to being told that kind of thing,’ John Stump says, ‘then that man is King Henry.’

  And they gather what they can in the falling gloom, and they help Jack to his feet, and they creep away, darting across the track and into the trees on the other side as best they can. They carry him almost a mile, following the tracks they made that morning, unmolested by any of Montagu’s prickers, until they are met in a dip by a picket of Roos’s men, and there is some ill feeling and some muttered accusations, but there is nothing anyone can do, and a fight, they all know, will just be a fight.

  ‘There was nothing we could do,’ one of them says. ‘It was those bastards in white, with the bloody crows. As soon as the first arrow landed they just – they just packed up and ran. All that bloody training they did, d’you remember? This and that. Ooof. But when it came to it, they just fucked off, left us dangling on the flank, and we just – well.’

  He ends with a shrug.

  They enter King Henry’s camp from the west, and must make their way past Riven’s men, who it seems have had the time to hunt a deer, and they are roasting it on a spit over a bed of flames, and the smell is heavenly, and there are ale mugs in their hands and though they are silent, the men seem not as abashed as Thomas supposed those who have broken and fled from a battlefield might. They look like men who have completed something together: the shearing of a flock, say, or the building of a wall.

  ‘Bastards,’ one of Roos’s men mutters, but very quietly.

  They find Horner, sitting on their cart, looking very sad in the light of a low fire. He has discarded his harness and is more familiar in riding boots and travelling coat. He is pleased to see them.

  ‘Is there any news?’ Thomas asks.

  Horner shrugs.

  ‘It was not a complete disaster,’ he lies. ‘We still hope to have enough men to catch Montagu and his Scots on their way south back to Newcastle.’

  ‘What about Percy?’ someone asks.

  Horner tilts his head.

  ‘There was nothing we could do,’ he says, repeating what he has obviously been told. ‘And besides, if anything, his death will stir up the North.’

  21

  THERE ARE SOME wounded to tend the next day: men who have limped into King Henry’s camp, or been carried in by their friends, and if they have lived this long, then there is a chance they will live longer. And so Katherine is busy during the morning with the needle she has learned to sharpen, and the tow from another jack she has had to cut up, but there is not very much she can do for their wounds other than clean them and get the men to keep them clean and get them to pray they do not start giving off that foul smell or weeping the watery pus. She finds tears in her eyes when one boy dies of a stab in the stomach, some time before noon, though the end is a mercy really, and a friar has come and he is able to offer some spiritual consolation, for what that is worth.

  By the end of it, she thinks Grey has lost five men dead and if the black pestilence does not strike those she has stitched up, then that will be
all.

  ‘Not too bad,’ Horner says.

  ‘Will we go back to Alnwick?’ she asks him, ‘or Bamburgh?’

  ‘Neither,’ Horner admits. ‘We are to keep moving.’

  She is disappointed. She has become bone weary of sleeping on the ground, of waking with aches and pains beyond the usual stiffness, to begin again the daily competition to find enough to eat before nightfall. And though every day they send out patrols of scurriers to find fresh supplies of bread and ale and oatcakes, they have scoured the land of more or less anything edible, and it is only the sea that provides sustenance now: endless fish soup which they must reinforce with handfuls of alexanders and nettles, and it tastes so bad she can hardly hold it down, though the others manage, and laugh at her, telling her she is as fussy as a merchant with a choice of meats on his board, but really: the stuff makes her gag. One advantage of this poor diet is that her monthly flowering has stopped again, and she is grateful. A rough camp such as this is no place for the subterfuge needed to hide that.

  The scurriers must also keep a lookout for Montagu and his army, which will soon be coming back from Scotland with the Scottish negotiators, though she cannot imagine what they will do if they manage to find them, since King Henry’s army is now much dwindled after that day in the field at Hedgeley Moor, with some men being, as John Stump puts it, ‘too dead to fight’, while others have managed what they could not, and have melted away in the course of the nights that followed the day. King Henry has left the camp, of course, though is said to be close by, and Somerset has taken the precaution of sending the rest of Riven’s men away to join him wherever he is, so they do not fight with the rest of the men who think they are cowards for running at Hedgeley Moor and blame them for its loss.

  The Duke of Somerset has stayed in camp though, and the others who were gathered around the board at Bamburgh, whom she supposes now have nothing left to lose, including Lords Roos and Hungerford and their men who spend so much of their time blaming Giles Riven for their having run at Hedgeley Moor. Tailboys is there, too, though he has a tent of his own, and he keeps his own company close by.