Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (41 page)

‘Are the horses all right?’ she asks.

‘Shhhh!’ Walter hisses.

She turns back and peers down the road. Her eyes begin conjuring shapes that cannot possibly be and after a while she has to pinch the bridge of her nose and shake her head. Around her the others are crouching behind the trees, pale faces tense, fingers clasping and unclasping their bows. Each has an arrow nocked. Time inches on.

There is nothing. And yet. So they wait. Still nothing. In the end they give up and gather themselves together and walk back to the horses.

Katherine’s pony lies on its side, its flanks unmoving. She cannot stop herself letting out a cry and running to him, but there is nothing to be done. Green-flecked drool coats his black lips and though his eyes are open they are sightless. She kneels and shakes her head. She cannot stop the tears.

‘These’re graveyard trees, aren’t they?’ Dafydd asks, looking up into the branches. ‘Supposed to be poisonous to cattle, like.’

They look at the remaining horses, out on the edge of the wood, pulling at the dead grasses under the hedge, then back at Katherine’s horse, lying under the yews.

She’d not even given it a name.

‘Only a horse, Kit,’ Walter says. ‘Here, come on.’ He helps her unload her pack, yanking the leather straps from under the dead weight of the horse. ‘You’ll go with Thomas then?’ he asks. She nods, and he begins loading her pack on to the back of his saddle to spread the weight. Then they lead the four remaining horses back through the yew trees and over the ditch on to the road.

‘What shall we do?’ Dafydd asks. ‘Can’t ride all that way with five on four horses, can we? Even with Kit so skinny.’

‘We’ll have to do as the wool merchant suggested,’ Thomas says. ‘Take a boat down the river.’

‘Which river?’

They look around.

‘We can ask at the priory.’

But the Prior won’t open the beggars’ gate, and one of the brothers shouts instead that they should ride on three more leagues, through a ford and then, a little way downstream on the far bank, they will find a port.

Why had no one told her about the poisonous trees?

They ride up and over a hill and as they are coming down the far slope she hears something again. Owen stops and turns in his saddle.

This time even Walter hears it.

They all look at one another and then press on. It is getting darker, and the temperature is dropping. Whorls of ice are forming on the puddles. Katherine sits with her arms around Thomas’s waist, and when no one is looking she rests her head against his back. She closes her eyes. She could sleep if every time she tried she didn’t see her dead pony.

At length they find the river, marked by willow trees, and hard by the ford a small hamlet gathered around a siding in the river. Tied at both ends to a mud-slicked platform of logs are three flat-bottomed boats, the same as those that ply the Trent behind the hall in Marton, carrying God knows what where.

A man comes out from one of the cots. He is holding a rusted kindling cleaver. Behind him is a sad-eyed boy with a long stick.

‘What d’you want?’ he asks. His voice is cracked with fear and his eyes are perfect dark circles.

Walter dismounts.

‘The Prior sent us,’ he lies. ‘We mean no harm. Just want to hire your boat, if she’ll float.’

The man lets out a gust of relief.

‘She’ll float all right,’ he says. ‘But she might not be for hire. Depends where you want to go.’

Walter looks around for some guidance. No one knows.

‘Kidwelly,’ Dafydd says. ‘Know where that is? Wales.’

‘Wales? She’s not going to get you there, is she?’

They look at one another in consternation.

‘Why not?’ Walter asks.

‘I’ll take you to Stratford,’ he says, putting the cleaver aside, but not so far aside that he cannot reach it. He has an accent like Geoffrey. ‘You can get a barge from there, downriver to Bristol. Or Gloucester. Last bridge on the Severn. Or first, depending on how you look it at.’

‘Can we stay the night?’ Katherine asks. ‘Or is there an inn nearby?’

The man looks them over. What choice does he have? He gives them what little ale he has and they share some pottage with him and his boy and then they sit crammed together on the ground by the fire in his cottage, watching the smoke rise from damp logs until there’s nothing left to burn. Behind them the boatman’s goat and dog stare at them, the dismal flame hardly reflected in their eyes.

‘You think someone’s really following us?’ Thomas asks in the darkness.

Walter shrugs.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Course not. Why would they?’

But although no one knows the answer to this, they do not believe him and they sleep only fitfully that night, and in the morning there is a sour gruel flavoured by a badger’s bone. The boats’ ochre sails are gathered in sagging rolls on their booms and there is an ankle-deep soup of leaves and river water in the bottom of each.

‘Not getting in there,’ Dafydd says. ‘Sink soon as you look at it, that one.’

But they force the horses up the gangplank and in with a barrage of hooves on the hull’s thin boards. Ice slicks everything and the boatman gives them each a long pole with which to push against the bank or the riverbed and then he sets the sail just as the boy unhitches the aft rope and loops it in.

Katherine catches Thomas’s eye, knowing what he is thinking.

‘I half expect to see the giant appear,’ she says.

‘This time we’re ready.’ Thomas smiles, and he nods to where Owen sits with his bowstring nocked and a bag of arrows at his waist. The current takes them westwards. After a while Katherine sits in the bows of the boat and her thoughts turn to that evening with Fournier again.

Once Thomas had calmed her down and taken the knife from her, she had left the hall and gone to sit in the yard with Liz Popham, who was having trouble trying to decide whom she should take as a husband: Little John Willingham or John Brampton. Katherine had said nothing. She did not – still doesn’t – suppose it mattered which one Liz chose, since both were so similar, but afterwards she spent an anxious night unable to sleep for fear of what Fournier might do next.

The next morning, Fournier had been up before first light. He’d collected his horse and his tools and had ridden south, pausing only by the gate to look back at her, and she had thought he was about to say something when Walter chased him away.

‘Good riddance,’ Walter had said.

But what had he been about to say, and where was he going? As he’d hauled himself up into his saddle and turned his horse south, he’d sent her a particular knowing look.

The only sound around them now is the dipping of the boy’s paddle and the gurgle of the waters.

‘Still thinks someone’s there, Owen does,’ Dafydd calls. ‘A boat.’

‘What?’ Walter bellows. ‘For the love of Christ!’

They gather in the stern and stare back along the river. Nothing.

‘Kit?’

She can’t see anything, but she trusts Owen and as one they find their boat poles to send the boat surging forward, a shunt that makes the horses stagger.

In a little while the horizon becomes dominated by the looming bulk of a bluff-walled castle, flags at every buttress, chimneys leaking coal smoke.

‘Warwick Castle,’ the boatman’s boy tells them. They stop punting to stare up at the castle as they come under its walls, from the top of which men in helmets look down on them.

Thomas stares open-mouthed and even Walter seems impressed. But Owen is still studying the riverbanks in their wake.

‘Seen anything?’ Katherine asks.

He shakes his head. At Stratford the boatman will go no farther, so they pay him off and the next morning they find a larger barge, crewed by three men who will only leave their places by the fire in the hall of a riverside inn for such wages as make Walter hate them and admire them in equal parts.

‘What’s your hurry?’ one of them asks.

‘Just get on with it,’ Walter tells him. They load the horses and push themselves off through the river traffic. From here the water becomes busier, with all manner of boats coming and going, sails set, men on the oars, rowing barrels and sacks and more horses up and down the river. Again Owen sits in the back with his bow across his knees. He’d have been easy to ignore if Dafydd hadn’t kept glancing across at him.

‘What’s he got? Some kind of magic sense or something?’ Walter asks.

‘Never been wrong yet,’ Dafydd tells them.

‘But there are loads of boats following us!’ Walter cries. ‘Look. That one, with the patched sail. Cows on board. They can’t be following us, can they? Cows. Ever think of that?’

They stop in Tewkesbury that night where they find an inn named after the bells that sound compline from the square tower of the nearby abbey. While the others settle the horses, Katherine and Thomas linger by the dock, waiting in the shadow of some willow trees. There is nothing unusual to be seen, or at least that they notice.

‘I’ll go upstream,’ Thomas says, and is gone for so long that Katherine thinks something has happened to him. He returns in the dark, having got lost in the woods.

‘I like this place,’ he says.

The next morning they are up at cockcrow, loading the boat to the faint sound of plainchant from the abbey. Owen is back at the aft rail again, looking anxious.

‘For all that’s holy!’ Walter cries. ‘No one can’ve followed us here.’

‘Why not?’ Katherine asks.

Walter opens his mouth to say something harsh, but then closes it, looks aside.

‘It’s that Welsh bastard,’ he mutters. ‘He should go and sit at the front of the bloody boat; least that way we’d be able to have a kip.’

But all through the morning Walter keeps glancing back along the length of the river. At one point he frowns.

‘That sail there,’ he says, pointing to a green square in the distance. ‘Seen it before?’

‘Owen says it’s been with us since Stratford,’ Katherine says, but no one replies.

They are in the city of Gloucester by midday.

‘Straight on down to Bris’el now,’ the captain tells them.

The green-sailed ship is still with them, five or six bowshots’ distance, never farther, never nearer.

Katherine is still not sure.

‘Master,’ she asks at last. ‘Do you know most of the ships on the river? What do you make of that one?’

He stares back the boat, the winter sun catching on the bristles of his chin, as on snow.

‘Seen her before,’ he mutters. ‘From Stratford way. Can’t think what’m be doing down this way, though, ’less she’s taking some men somewhere in a rush?’ He looks straight at her and she turns away.

At Bristol they hug the eastern shore of the river as her two banks part, and they sail towards the setting sun until they swing into the mouth of another river and use the tide to take them up between some towering red stone cliffs. A while later they enter the reach under another battlemented castle where the dockside is filled with boats, more than they’ve ever seen in Boston or even Calais perhaps; some seem large enough to carry a church. The houses around them smack of the sort of wealth that only comes through the buying and selling of wool.

‘Come on, come on,’ the boatman calls as they unload the horses, ‘don’t want to be here when the tide runs out.’

Walter pays the pilot while the others stare downstream to where the green-sailed boat stands off in mid-channel before dropping her sail and diverting, as if after some discussion, to the river’s far bank. Without the sail she is quickly lost in the forest of masts.

‘Did you make it out?’ Walter asks.

Katherine shakes her head.

‘We’ve come too far down the river to cross now,’ Walter carries on. ‘We’ll have to find a ship to take us to this bloody place. Christ, I hope to hell all this is worth it.’

‘Just wait till you see Kidwelly,’ Dafydd assures them. ‘You’ll never want to leave it again.’

After some enquiries with the revenue men and one of the harbour master’s assistants they find a cog, a single-masted vessel, captained by a man whose accent they can hardly understand.

‘He’s an Easterling, or something,’ Walter says. ‘Or he’s from somewhere, anyhow.’

The Easterling is intending to sail to Wexford, in Ireland, with a cargo of Gascony wine in barrels, and he is prepared to carry them, though he cannot manage their horses.

‘Where you want go?’

Once again they explain.

‘Kid Velly?’

‘It’s on the sea,’ Dafydd keeps repeating.

‘When you look at sea, does sun shine on face or on side of face, or on back?’

‘Hardly ever shines,’ Dafydd admits.

‘Face!’ Owen shouts. ‘On face.’

The cog master blinks, and begins to move away as if idiocy might be contagious.

‘Is good,’ he admits. ‘Is south coast you want.’

‘You’ll recognise it when you see it, won’t you, Dafydd?’

Dafydd looks none too sure. They pay the Easterling a share of the fee he demands. Walter shakes his head as he counts out the coins from the purse Sir John has given him.

‘We have missed tide,’ the cog master announces, gesturing at the mud behind him. ‘We sail tomorrow. First light.’

They sell their horses at a stable that smells of river mud. The dealer can hardly believe Thomas’s horse, and has to send a boy to borrow more money so that he can cover even half of its real value. Then instead of buying provisions for the journey they pay a boatman to take them across the river where they spend until nightfall looking for the green-sailed boat, but with no luck.

The next morning the cog master and his crew meet them on the foreshore with a large supply of foodstuffs and supplies for the journey, some of which they are prepared to sell to Walter – at a price.

‘A man has to make living,’ the master says with a shrug. He sells them a clay pot of cooked beans, ale in a wooden barrel and a loaf of bread the size of a man’s torso and twice as hard. When they’ve climbed aboard, each finding a nook around the wine tuns, the crew cast off and two small rowing boats tug them out into the fast-flowing channel that has swelled overnight to refill the muddy reach. Soon they are back in the Bristol Channel. Walter and Thomas join Katherine at the stern and peer back towards the harbour mouth, where the spires of the churches and the towers of the castle are hidden behind the converging cliffs of red limestone.