Kingmaker: Broken Faith (40 page)

‘Sacred Christ!’ a man shouts. ‘They’ve broken!’

And everyone who sees this knows what must happen next, and they too gather up what they can and they turn and run. The dead and the wounded are hurriedly robbed of anything valuable – coins, rosary beads, rings, anything instantly portable – or anything useful. Any decent bow, bill or blade is snatched from weakened hands; a pair of boots, a cloak, a good helmet, a costrel filled with ale. Farewells are said. Wounded men beg to be taken. Toward the rear of the camp men push women aside who trample boys who fight girls to get away. Everyone runs, round-eyed with panic.

Thomas thinks of Katherine. He starts running. He is shoulder to shoulder with fleeing archers and the naked men who’ve seen what is happening too, and they are scattering in their hundreds. He trips on the heather, staggers, rights himself, has to leap over a dead man, slip the grip of a wounded one, and then he is by the stream and where is she?

Where is she?

He finds her where he left her, wearing only her blood-smudged hose and pourpoint, with her jack cast aside and her linen sleeves rolled up and her legs sodden to her knees. She has a knife in one bloodied hand, and a broken arrow shaft in the other, and there is a man lying on his back on the stream’s bank, screaming while his friends hold him down and press some of that urine-soaked tow on to his wound. She and John Stump are ignoring the screaming, and are staring down the stream at the men who are running from the field, watching them rip off their livery coats, cast aside their helmets, cut the straps to the pieces of plate they spent so long tying on. They come running, splashing through the stream around them, sprinting for the woods. She steps aside before she is knocked over.

She starts when she sees Thomas, drops the bloodied arrow.

‘They’ve broken!’ he shouts. ‘Come!’

And John Stump does not need to be told twice what this means. He has seen a rout before. He throws the soot-blackened pot he is holding into the stream and turns and runs.

‘Come!’ Thomas shouts, and he means to run past her, to snatch her hand and drag her away from this, into the woods to begin their escape, but she stands, tears her hand from his grasp.

‘Where is Jack?’ she shouts. He stops.

Christ, he thinks. Jack. Where is he? Where is Jack?

John Stump is paused with one foot on the far bank. He turns to look back at the field where the din is increasing as Somerset’s remaining men, those who have stayed, those who are yet to break, shout their final challenges and roar at the enemy, and the enemy roar back, and at any moment the two lines will meet with that sliding crash of steel on steel.

Can Jack still be fighting back there? Oh, Christ!

Thomas looks at Katherine, and she at him, and John Stump at them both, and no one says anything, but Thomas feels the light fade, sadness seep in.

‘Go through the trees,’ he tells them. ‘Get as far as possible north. We will come and find you.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘We’ll wait.’

John Stump looks at her as if she is mad, and she is a fool, they all know that, but Thomas knows he must find Jack and he knows she will not leave, so he does not bother to argue. Besides, now here come the prickers, thundering down the slope from the right flank, on the far side of the stream, riding to try to stop those fleeing the disintegrating left flank. Thomas can feel their horses’ hoofbeats through the soles of his boots, and one of them has an ox whip. He is lashing at the fleeing archers and the camp followers from his saddle, but he is not stopping to send them back, because he must be there to cut off the fleeing soldiery, and the archers and the camp followers hang back to avoid the whip, to let him and the others pass, and then they press on, and Thomas watches them for a moment as they scramble up the bank and run on, their backs bobbing like rabbits in the heather, making for the stand of pale fluttering-leafed trees.

He wishes Jack were among them, but he is not. He turns and watches those coming past him. He does not try to stop any. They are too afeared and are likely to lash out at anyone in their way with whatever weapon they have to hand. None are Jack. Where is he? Can it be that he is still there? He tries to think. When he looked over, Jack was gone. He was not hit, Thomas is certain. But is he now?

And where does he even start looking? There. Where the wounded are dragging themselves through the heather, where they lie strewn behind the backs of the men-at-arms. He draws the short blade from its scabbard, and he has the buckler. He has never used one before; a small round shield hardly larger than his fist, but he can see its use. A man grabs him.

‘Help me!’

Thomas cannot but the man won’t let go. His fingers claw at Thomas’s face, his collar. He won’t be shaken off by anything other than a sideswipe of the buckler. He sobs as it hits him, and he rolls to his side and carries on mewling. Thomas leaves him to step among the others. There are a few in Grey’s livery. Most of them are recognisable, or identifiable; some sit, stunned by arrows on their helmets, others are bleeding all over themselves and some are already dead and abandoned by their friends. He peers into cooling faces. None of them is Jack. What about over there? A body splayed in the heather, face down, thrown as if tossed away. He turns him over. A splintered arrow shaft dug in the cheek, one eye open, broken teeth like pale chips in the dark blood. He is almost unrecognisable, but he is not Jack.

He stops and looks up. To his left the tide of fleeing men has proved too strong for the prickers. The man with the whip has been dispossessed and thrown from his horse, while the others have done no more than kill one or two of those fleeing as they pass, before they too have been pulled from their saddles and it is not difficult to guess what has happened to them.

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 flows 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.