Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (42 page)

Between them another boat is just putting out, a green sail hoisted.

IT IS THEIR
second day at sea and the Easterlings know the storm is coming because the birds disappear.

‘Bad one, I think,’ the cog master says.

Then there is an argument. The mate wants to put into port, Thomas guesses, but the cog master wants to ride it out at sea. Eventually the cog master carries it, and the little boat veers out into the emptiness of the western sea, where blue-black clouds boil on the horizon.

The day darkens and the rain starts some time after noon, sharp and cold, stinging like pinpricks. The wind baffles the sail, starts humming through the ratlines, and only gets stronger until it is enough to lift ropes from the deck to stream aside horizontally. The ship ducks and rears and the crew furl the sail and cram it below the deck. The mate ties himself to the mast and shouts at the others to do the same.

Then the sky turns black and sea rises up around them. Thomas is suddenly aware how small the ship really is. It is tossed about, lifted on great scarps of green water, then let go to plummet into frothing troughs. Great slides of water thunder across her deck. Thomas clings to the mast. He prays to God for deliverance. The cog master battles to stay upright. The wine tuns float free. Something falls from the masthead and hits the mate, knocking him either dead or cold, none can tell. He remains tied to the mast, hanging with his hands by his feet, head by his knees, and is thrown back and forth until he surely must be dead.

The cog master bellows all the while: they must bail out; and so they stagger from their perches and set to with anything they can find: buckets, jugs, dishes, an old hat. One of the crew uses a mallet and lever to get the tuns back into place.

The wind rises further, shrieking in the stays, and the sea is battering the cog, breaking her to kindling. Water booms over the gunwales, shoving them aside, its level rising to froth around their knees. The cog feels heavy, unbalanced.

Thomas begins to think that this is how it will end: they will be drowned in a cog with some Easterlings off the Welsh shore, the roar of the wind in their ears and the taste of brine stopping their mouths. It would be easier to cease now, he thinks, to put aside his bucket, to say his prayers, face the truth. It is only the sight of Katherine that pushes him on. Her hair is plastered over her narrow head and her brittle little shoulders are pumping away as she scoops out the water with a wooden bowl.

On it goes, through most of the afternoon and into the evening, until at last the pitch of the wind eases. The rain hesitates, falters. Thomas looks up. Is it his imagination, but is the next wave shallower, the climb less arduous, the subsequent dive less deep, the rush of water across the deck less powerful? He seizes on the difference. Takes new heart. Digs his bucket into the churning broth and begins again. Soon they are managing to scoop more out than is coming in.

The crew give a muted cheer. They too guess the little cog has made it. They carry on bailing through the night, dipping, lifting, pouring, and by the time they stop Thomas is dizzy and his fingers are bleeding, but the cog is still afloat, and they are still alive.

They sleep all that night and the next morning breaks clear, just a bar of purple cloud across a sky the colour of a dove’s breast, and a steady breeze from the southwest. There is nothing to mark the passing of the storm except a quantity of driftwood in the sea. Then there is a body, floating face down, a man in a pale coat and blue hose.

‘Someone not so lucky,’ is the cog master’s opinion. ‘Keep eye out for survivors.’

But there are none, only more wreckage, a terrified rat on a barrel bobbing in the water, and then a shred of sail. Is it green? Katherine watches it pass, frowning hard, saying nothing.

The land is a shadow on the horizon. The mate, a purple bruise the size of a duck’s egg on his forehead, gets the crew to unfurl and set the sail and the cog master shouts a tired order and gives a heave on the tiller. The canvas slaps for a moment, then tautens and the cog collects herself, and turns in the dimpled green water, and they head northwards, back towards the coast.

‘How far d’you think we’ve drifted?’ Thomas asks the cog master.

The man shrugs.

‘Day, maybe,’ he says. ‘Maybe two. We see.’

The sailors are still bailing out, but above them the seagulls are back.

‘Is good sign,’ the cog master says.

Thomas joins Katherine in the bows where she is letting the wind dry the woollen coat she’s refused to take off. She is scanning the sea.

‘Any sign of it?’ he asks. He means the other ship. She pauses, and then shakes her head. She is pale in the early-morning sunlight, her skin almost transparent, her clothes stained, her hair salt-stiffened. Her cut ear is reddened by chafing against the damp wool of her hat. He wants to touch it, but doesn’t. He almost laughs as he tries to imagine what she’d say if he did.

The next day the coast reveals itself as jagged green hills skirted by grey stone cliffs and stretches of ochre sand. Clouds are gathered over it and soon it starts to rain again.

‘This way, I think,’ the cog master says, and the cog heels to the west. They sail on, past a spit, and then turn northwards again, across a bay towards another headland.

‘They call Worm’s Head,’ the cog master tells them, nodding at a low point as they sailed past. ‘Is haunted.’

‘Haunted?’

‘By souls of drowned sailors.’

Dafydd and Owen are together at the gunwale, clutching each other and pointing at a bay that opens before them.

‘Is?’ the cog master asks.

‘Home!’ Dafydd shouts. ‘Look! There’s the house.’

He points. There is not much to be seen: a broad sweep of mud, a sandy bank, then low hills and a river emptying from the northwest. Thomas can’t see any cottage. Katherine stares hard, frowning, looking at something else in the sand, but still she says nothing.

‘The next bay is Kidwelly!’ Dafydd says. ‘Just around there.’

The cog master orders the sail reduced and they steer past the headland. Beyond is another river’s mouth.

‘Never seen so much bloody mud,’ Walter mutters. ‘It’s like there are two seas: the watery one we’ve just been on, and now this. Look at it.’

Walter’s sea of mud stretches to the horizon either side of them and all the way ahead to where the land rises in soft-topped green hillocks. Seagulls wheel overhead, calling to one another, playing in the wind, their feathers the only bright accent against the grey clouds above.

‘Not much of a place?’ Thomas suggests.

‘A shithole,’ Walter agrees.

‘Wait till you see the town,’ Dafydd says, but his words have taken on an ambiguous tone. They carry on through the channel in the mud. A man in the bow shouts instructions to the cog master at the tiller and Dafydd points out a low-roofed grey stone house, set among some scrub on the hills.

‘Penallt,’ he says. ‘Where the Dwnns live.’

‘Bloody Dwnns.’ Walter tuts. Thomas can’t help smiling at this, and seeing him, so does Walter.

The cog master puts them down on the deserted quay, a rotting wooden platform half backfilled with rubbish.

‘Happy hunting,’ he says, collecting the balance in coins and giving his crew the order to cast off.

After nearly four days at sea they stand on the uncertain ground and watch the cog slip back along the channel.

‘Never again,’ Walter says. ‘I’ll walk from now on. Don’t care where I’m going, you’ll not see me in a bloody boat ever again.’

Nevertheless they’d agreed with the cog master that he will come past on his way back from Wexford to see if they need carriage back to Bristol, but Thomas does not imagine they will see him again.

‘Return journey price double,’ the cog master said once he’d seen where he was dropping them. ‘A man has to make living.’

It carries on raining, soft and constant, but warm – or at least not so cold.

‘See?’ Dafydd says. ‘Told you it was hot.’

‘It’s odd,’ Thomas agrees.

‘Come on then, Dafydd,’ Walter says. ‘Let’s see this fabled castle of yours.’

They carry what they can of their salt-stained baggage, and follow a worn path along the river’s bank, around a low bluff to the church, above which they see the castle rising up on a headland. It is small, but there is something perfect about it, the way its pale walls cap the rise and lean over the valley.

‘See?’ Dafydd asks.

‘Why’s it boarded?’ Walter asks. He is pointing to the castle walls, which are clapped in planks.

Dafydd looks anxious.

‘I don’t know, do I?’

Dafydd leads them splashing through a ford and up into the village that hunkers under the castle’s walls. The houses are very low, stone built, with rough thatches, mossy and rotting in parts. Water throngs everywhere. A straw-flecked road takes them past the church up towards the castle and they meet a boy with three goats and no shoes. Dafydd greets him in a language Thomas doesn’t understand and the boy returns the greeting just as if he has seen Dafydd the day before.

‘That’s Dafydd, that is,’ Dafydd explains when he’s passed on down the road. ‘Dafydd the swineherd’s boy. Grown a bit, hasn’t he?’

Owen moos in agreement.

But there is something strange about the village. They all feel it. There is no smoke in the air, nor any of the workaday clatter they’d expect. There aren’t even any chickens or pigs about. Dafydd stops and ducks under the low lintel of a cottage. Inside it is dark, no fire in its place, no swirl of smoke to sting the eye. The straw mattress is gone, too, and when he feels above the door, where the bow and its arrows might be kept on pegs, there is nothing; nor are there pots either, only a broken-handled bucket half full of something viscid.

‘Where is everybody, Dafydd?’

Dafydd shrugs. Thomas unconsciously swings his pollaxe so it is nearer to hand. Walter nocks his bow and fishes out an arrow. Farther up the road a bare-legged brewster’s girl is washing out a barrel in the rain. She stops when she sees them and waits with her mouth open. She’s very ugly. She recognises Dafydd and Owen and they talk a moment.

Whatever she tells him, it makes Dafydd gasp.

‘What is it?’ Thomas asks.

‘I don’t believe it! Myvanwy says Jasper Tudor has raised his banner in Pembroke.’

‘Jasper who?’

‘Jasper Tudor,’ Dafydd says. ‘The Earl of bloody Pembroke. He’s raised his banner and is recruiting men to march on London. She says he’s waiting for an army of Irish and Frenchies to come from over the water, from Ireland. Gallowglass and Kerns, and those bastards with guns.’

‘What’s he want with them?’ Walter barks.

‘They’re going to fight for King Henry.’

Walter curses.

‘What about the castle?’ Katherine asks.

Dafydd turns to the girl and speaks urgently.

‘She says the Dwnns are holding it for the Duke of York. That’s why it is boarded.’

They hurry on up through the deserted village until they stand before the castle gatehouse. The drawbridge is raised, presenting them its blank underside, and heads move in the tower and along the boarded battlements above. A moment later and one of the shutters slides open with a bang and a man’s face appears.

‘Name yourselves,’ he shouts.

‘Bloody hell,’ Dafydd mutters. ‘It’s old Gruffydd Dwnn.’

He sidesteps behind Thomas, as if afraid to be seen, and Walter calls back:

‘We’ve come from Lincoln,’ he says. ‘We are of Sir John Fakenham’s household and he has sent us with letters for John Dwnn in the hope of his assistance in a matter of property.’

When Walter is trying to sound formal, he speaks as if he has only recently been taught the language. The man in the window cocks his head. Then he starts speaking Welsh and ends with what sounds like a question. After a moment Dafydd calls back. He is blushing as if he’d been caught out at something. The man in the window barks with laughter and the shutter is drawn up again. More heads appear at the battlements, curious, but they are small, and none wear helmets. Boys, girls, women, peering over. Dafydd waves up at them and shouts something.

The drawbridge comes down with a percussive rattle of heavy chains running through stone eyelets, and the planks boom against the stone bridgehead. Suddenly the air is rich with the smell of horses, damp, mud and rot.

They step on to the mossy bridge and wait while another iron-hooped gate is opened by unseen hands. Beyond is a dark tunnel, barred by an iron portcullis, which rises to admit them with another rattle of chains. Through that a further gate stands open, its daylight portioned by the bars of yet another portcullis. While this is inching its way up into the ceiling Thomas looks up to see faces peering down at them from the murder holes above.

‘Pretty tidy,’ Walter admits. ‘Take a hundred bombards to knock a hole in this.’

A man appears beyond the gate.

‘We’ve no news Tudor has bombards,’ he says in an up-and-down accent. ‘Only an army of Irishmen. They’re devils for rapine, they are, and best killed on sight, like wolves, and as for the Frenchies, well, I expect them to be more busy than bold, as usual.’

He names himself as Gruffydd Dwnn, the constable of the castle, of the affinity of Richard, Duke of York. He is wearing an old-fashioned hood, such as Thomas remembers the pardoner wearing, though this man is an old soldier, flint-hard, his nose a mess, as if he’s been hit by a hammer.

He leads them out from under the gatehouse and into the castle’s outer ward. Here is a clutch of rough tents and lean-tos and the air between the walls is hazy with the smoke of cooking fires. To one side the entire village’s livestock compete for space behind a woven withy fence and the smell is powerful.

‘So that’s where everybody is,’ Walter says.

As news of their arrival spreads, a hundred faces, smoke-smutted and filthy, some of them flame-red-haired, emerge to stare at them through the murk of the smoke. A brindled dog on a rope barks at them.

‘Crowded,’ the old man agrees with Walter’s unspoken observation, ‘but these walls make us too tough a nut for all but the largest army to crack. Tudor’s men will pass us by in the hope of easier meat in England.’