Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (24 page)

‘Sandwich,’ Walter says. He points out a distant huddle of pale roofs gathered around a dark stone church among a green swathe of marshland. ‘Doubt we’d be trying this if the French hadn’t already busted down the walls and burned the place to the ground.’ He is gloomy, sour-tempered still, unenthused by the thought of what is to come.

‘Good to see England again, though,’ Geoffrey tries.

‘Never had to come ashore somewhere I’m not wanted,’ Walter continues. ‘And I’ll wager they’ve got guns this time. Guns and water. Guns and water. Worse combination there is, that one. If you don’t get a stone in the face, you’ll most likely drown. This is going to be fun, this is. Where’s Simon?’

‘Here.’

‘About to see what’s so bloody good about guns, you are, you ignorant bastard.’

They hear the first one go off as they breast the channel. Ahead of them are the docks and then the flint walls of the town. The gates are shut. Smoke rises from fires and all along the wall men are clustered at embrasures.

The first boulder thrums through the air and then falters and falls slushing into the turbid waters of the channel. There is a faint cheer from the first boat. The next gun fires. This time there are two separate noises that run into one: the report of the gun, then the longer sound of its boulder hitting the first tub amidships. The stone smashes through the wooden planks and tears into the men behind.

The boat staggers, loses way. Thomas hears bellows of rage and pain. Blood comes running down the boat’s side. Bodies soon follow, dead and wounded men pushed overboard as those left alive struggle to find space to loose their arrows. Then a third gun goes off.

‘See?’ Walter shouts above the noise. ‘See?’

Again the stone crashes into the tub, sending her shivering. There are more screams. Thomas hears men shouting at the defenders, men begging for mercy. Begging not to be fired on.

A fourth gun goes off. The archers in the first tub begin loosing their arrows at the men on the shore, aiming for the gunners, but they are too tightly packed and the gunners ashore are behind palisades and under tile roofs. Arrowheads spark on the cobbles. The defenders loose fire arrows, sooty trails arching in the sky, and soon the first sail is on fire, dropping in flaming black rags on to the heads of the men below.

Then a stone hits the carrack. It is a small one, about the size of a man’s head. It comes with a thrumming sound and an explosion of splinters from the top of the ship’s rail in the waist. It passes through the first man’s chest, throws the second man into the air and then shatters the third’s hips. Splinters of wood and man fly in every direction and others clap hands to their faces and suddenly blood is everywhere, a steady pink drizzle. It turns faces red. Gums eyes, lingers on lips, tastes distinct and coppery.

The
Mary
butts the first ship, now ablaze and listing against the quayside. Her deck is scattered with the corpses of the dead, and the wounded are scrabbling to get off before they are burned or drowned.

Thomas follows Walter across the gap, scrambling over the bloodied ship’s rails; he slips on the gore, picks himself up before he is trampled by those behind. Men around him are roaring, and he realises that he is too. A steady thunder of arrows keeps coming at them. Arrows pick men off, spin them around, hammer them to the deck.

The man next to Thomas goes down, skewered by an arrow between the buttons of his jack. It is the other Thomas. Johnson takes an arrow through the thigh, too, a typical archer’s injury. He doesn’t scream, but throws down his bow and turns, limping away, where he is swatted aside by one of Fauconberg’s men trying to make firm ground.

Another one of Fauconberg’s men falls just as he’s scrambling over the ship’s side on to the harbour wall. He screams and Thomas feels his body give under the press of the boat against the dockside. He doesn’t look down.

‘A Fauconberg!’

Thomas makes it stumbling on to the dockside, getting the pole of his axe caught between his legs and tripping just as an arrow whispers over him to crash into the burning ship. Black smoke chokes them all. He finds his feet, swings the axe on his back and begins loosing his arrows without any thought, nock, draw, loose, nock, draw, loose, all those hours in the butts rewarding him now. He lets his shafts go wherever he sees the pale disc of a face.

The defenders are wearing the same livery as the men in Calais: murky linen jacks with the cross of St George. They are good archers, too. They keep the sky overcast with volleys and they are withering Fauconberg’s men. Shafts boom down, men are killed and the wounded cry out. Friends drag friends away before they are hit again, and blood turns the cobbles black.

An arrow strikes his helmet. It seems to grab his head and throw it at the ground. His feet fly up above him. He sees a flash of green light and then finds himself lying staring up at the grey sky where smoke clouds billow and arrows flit from left to right and back again. Men step over him, trip on his lifeless legs. They are shouting. He can’t get up. Darkness crimps his vision. Sound comes at a remove. Where is he? What is happening? He feels warmth stealing over him. He can feel a foolish smile covering his face. Then his view is blocked. Owen towers over him, a great paddle of a hand catches him under the arm and hauls him to his feet.

‘Back,’ Owen says. He is using his huge body to protect Thomas, and he pushes him. ‘Go back.’

Thomas comes to. Power returns to his legs. He bends to recover his bow. Owen is still with him, back turned to the enemy. Dafydd arrives.

‘All right?’ he shouts.

Thomas nods. He still has arrows to loose and the guns by the town gate keep firing. One of the bombard barrels is sighted across the hard and Thomas can see men crouched over it, blowing on the wick to set the fire going. Then they all step back and clap their hands over their ears as the gun goes off with a jump. It belches a great spike of smoke and the noise itself is enough to drive a man mad.

The stone passes through a rank of men at the front; four of them are instantly cored. Bodies drop and sprawl. A mist of blood drifts in the air. Men wail. They try to turn and run but the vintenars are there with their pollaxes, driving them on with jabs and thrusts.

Then the second gun fires. But it explodes. Chunks of iron and oak hurtle into the gathered defenders, scattering them in a cloud of smoke and blood, ripping them to pieces. The invaders cheer. They take new courage and storm forward across the blood-slicked hard. More ships’ companies debouch and join the assault; fresh numbers begin to tell and soon it looks as if they’ll do what they came to do.

They move up into the town, one pace at a time, seeking the shelter of walls, barrels and coils of rope and carts, but the arrows still find them out, heavy bodkin heads landing with a distinct chunk, thumping into wood and daub, stone and flesh.

Thomas’s muscles go on working without him thinking, until he is out of arrows. With his bag hanging limp at his belt and sweat in his eyes, he turns and pushes his way back through the press of men, twisting to let other archers take his place.

Walter is there, paused by a foul-smelling alleyway between two new-built cottages.

‘We need to get around behind the guns,’ he shouts. ‘Bring that bloody pollaxe and come with me.’

Thomas sets off after him, but they are too late. The defenders have run out of arrows too, and now they throw aside their bows and draw their side weapons – the mauls, the daggers, the falchions, the pimp cleavers – and they swarm forward over their wall to engage with their attackers. Fauconberg’s billmen move forward to meet them and so begins the mêlée, the cutting and hacking hand-to-hand fighting that will be decided not by skill but by the fear of being driven back into the sea.

For a moment it looks to be in doubt. The press of the defenders seems heavier than that of the attackers, but the drums are beating and trumpets are sounding and men are shouting for Fauconberg. The left flank gives under the pressure, and the axis of the fight pivots. But a knot of armoured men-at-arms under Fauconberg’s banner surge forward and already the left flank is rallying, and then the right is turning the enemy.

It is over soon enough after that. It reaches that point when unannounced everybody knows what will happen next. The attackers take the first easy step forward; the defenders break and run. And now the rout can begin.

When it is over Thomas sits on a broken barrel with his head in his hands. His temples throb and his fingers are bleeding from the bowstring. He unties the leather strap of his helmet and studies its previously smooth surface. There is a star-shaped depression and a long gouge on the back where the arrow has hit and glanced away. He feels the puffy welt on the side of his head, his fingertips coming away damp. He puts the helmet back on again and ties the straps under his chin.

Smoke drifts across from a burning cottage roof, and the smell of it is mixed with blood and shit and saltpetre. The men-at-arms have pressed on into the town, after their slice of glory, but all around him, the archers and the billmen have broken off and most have fallen to looting. Corpses are scattered across the quayside as if they’d been flung away, piled the one on the other, some pinned by arrows, others bearing the marks of war hammers, glaives, daggers, axes. Some have been blown clean apart by the guns. Already there are noisy flies in the air and blood glistens between the cobbles, an oily slickness, viscid as phlegm. It is splashed on the cob walls of the houses and there are scraps of cloth ripped from banners and clothes; peelings of broken armour; discarded weapons; broken arrows; a dead horse. There is an arm lying alone on the cobbles, neatly dismembered through the elbow.

Thomas watches as two archers in murrey and blue begin picking through a pile of bodies thrown against the church wall, three or four deep. They haul them off as if they are grain sacks until they find a man alive. One archer shouts a warning to his mate. The man on the ground bellows something and throws up his hands in supplication. The second archer falls on him and stabs him in the face. The screaming is horrible. Men look up from what they are doing, and then look away again. The dead man stops thrashing, but the archer keeps on stabbing him, too terrified to stop. He has a short black dagger, and his arm goes up and down, up and down, as if he is pounding walnuts in a pestle. Thomas puts his hands over his ears.

Walter comes back down the road with five or six of the others. He has blood on the sleeves of his jack, a dent in his buckler and a small leather purse he is throwing up in the air and catching. He looks pleased with himself. Thomas is glad to see Dafydd and Owen and Red John with him. Dafydd’s hose is ripped at the knee and there is blood all over the stocking. Owen has a black eye. But they are alive.

‘Wait here, you lot,’ Walter says. ‘Take what you like off the dead, but don’t touch anything else. Don’t for fuck’s sake go in any houses or I’ll kill you myself.’

He turns and makes his way back through the town gate to the harbour. The rest of them gather around and find places to sit. They pass around a jug of ale.

‘It’s all right,’ Red John says. ‘I paid for it.’

‘Ale,’ Simon says. ‘Saints, it’s good to be back.’

But it feels wrong.

‘Feels as if we’re invading though, doesn’t it?’ Dafydd says. He gestures at the dead bodies. ‘As if we’re not wanted in our own country.’

‘You mustn’t mind all these bastards, Dafydd,’ Simon says, taking a draught. ‘They may be wearing the King’s livery, but they aren’t proper Englishmen. Bet you half of them are, you know, what-have-yous: Frenchies.’

‘Still,’ Thomas says.

‘The people want us back. You wait and see. Soon as we get on the road to Canterbury, they’ll be flocking to join us. And girls too. That’s why they don’t want us smashing the place up, nicking stuff. In case it scares them off. And to show we’re better than those bloody northern bastards. Begging your pardon, Thomas.’

Men and women and children are beginning to appear now, round-eyed, stepping between the grisly piles, stopping to stare at the bodies. Mothers hide their children’s gaze. A merchant and his wife stand in front of their house and survey its broken windows, arrow-studded thatch, and a dead body slumped across their doorstep. There are bloody fingerprints on the plaster. Then the child gets blood on her shoe and starts to cry when her mother can’t get it off.

‘I saw Thomas killed,’ Thomas says.

There are mumbles of regret and the others stare at the ground.

‘What happened to his bow?’ Dafydd asks.

Thomas’s bow had been a beauty. Thomas shakes his head. Someone must have picked it up.

‘And look what I found,’ Little John Willingham says. He shows them a finely worked dagger with a badge on its pommel. A cockerel with its tail feathers raised.

‘Wouldn’t hang on to it, if I were you,’ Dafydd cautions. ‘Imagine his son finding you with it?’

‘Well, I can’t sell it back to him, can I? Cunt’s dead.’

‘Break the chicken off then.’

John flips the knife and bangs the decoration on a stone. After a while it breaks off, but now he finds he doesn’t like it any more, so he throws it in the water.

They sit for a bit and watch the other archers going about their business, lifting visors, cutting the leather arming points, stealing rings, weapons, purses, anything. One laughs when another treads in a coil of blue guts that have spilled from a man who’s come off worst against something sharp.

Hugh is sitting a little apart from the rest of them, looking out to sea. His face is the colour of goose fat.

Thomas calls over to him.

‘You all right, Hugh?’

Hugh shakes his head but says nothing, just gestures to the nearest dead body. There are tears in his eyes, vomit on his livery and he is trembling. His arrow bag is full.

‘Once we get to London, it’ll be all over,’ Dafydd says. ‘The King’ll get rid of whoever it is we’re trying to get him to get rid of, and then we’ll all be home for the harvest.’

‘Got to be home for the harvest, anyway,’ Brampton John says. ‘Can’t let my old ma get it in. I hate them fields, though.’