Winter Siege (17 page)

For a moment the people from the hut stood outside it, transfixed, before Alan began pushing them towards the southern forest. ‘
Run
.’

They ran, while wolves held the line behind them against men and dogs. It wouldn’t be long; the wolves were outnumbered; the men had spears.

They ran, dodging trees, falling over brambles, trying to keep to tracks made by animals whose prints might disguise their own. At their backs the tumult rose, then began to dwindle. They heard the whimper of dying animals and at least one human scream before there was silence.

Now the hunt was on. Alan, who was leading, jumped a stream and then came back to it. ‘Along here.’

He took the Empress’s hand and pulled her into the water, wading in the same direction as its flow so that their scent would be carried along with them, and not left behind for the hounds to sniff. Christopher, Gwil and Penda followed.

It wasn’t a deep stream but, by God, it was cold. At first they couldn’t feel it, but once their boots had absorbed the water, their feet threatened to become unbending stumps that made louder splashes than before so that they couldn’t hear what was behind them.

Then there were no more trees and the stream had gone down an incline, turning to ice in the process. All five slipped, bringing each other down like bowled ninepins so that they twirled ridiculously out into moonlight and space – to find themselves on a bank of a river so wide it could only be the Thames again. They’d made a wide arc that had brought them a bit further south, though probably not much.

Alan helped the Empress to her feet, looking upriver and down. They listened for sounds of pursuit and heard only the suggestion of a disturbance somewhere back in the forest that might have been hounds, or more wolves. Or both at once.

‘Now they know we’re going south, maybe they’ll have taken to the boats again,’ Alan said. ‘They know we’ll be following the river.’

But they were too tired to tackle the forest again, even if they could find their way in it.

The bank they were on was lined with pollarded willow and promised better going than the other, which, being bare, was just an escarpment of snow – not that they could have reached it; there was no bridge to be seen.

‘Are you all right, Lady?’ Alan asked.

They’d all fallen heavily, but while four of them rubbed their backsides, the Empress stood like a rock, as if royal arses didn’t bruise. She nodded, breathing hard.

To give her another minute, Christopher said: ‘Who was St Lupus?’

‘A bishop or something,’ Alan told him.

‘Well, if he’s the patron saint of wolves, I’m going to build him a chapel all to himself. Those animals did us proud, bless them.’

They set off downstream.

Gwil kept looking behind him. Alan had been right; if Stephen’s men had any sense, they’d have taken to the boats, watching the banks as they went.

No point in thinking how tired they were, no point in hating every drift that impeded them and had to be struggled through; no point in anything but lifting one foot and putting it in front of the other. One, two. Again. One, two.

A swan taunted their lumberings by flowing past them like a beautiful, white aquamanile gliding along a black and gleaming tabletop.

One, two. And again. One, two.

Penda’s head was drooping; she looked terribly pale too, as though she were sickening for something. ‘Don’t get poorly on me now, Pen,’ Gwil muttered under his breath as he took hold of her hand and started pulling her along. We been drawn in after all, he thought, and wondered how it had happened. One, two.

They disturbed an otter that slid down the bank and swam effortlessly away from them.

The Empress stopped. She said nothing, just stood still.

Gwil watched Alan pick her up, put her over his shoulder and stagger on, her head bobbing against his back.

Bloody woman. Her fault, all of it her fucking fault. What she want to be queen for? Must be – Jesus – nearly as old as me. Three sons by the Plantagenet. Or was it four? They said she nearly died having one of ’em. Guts, you had to give her that. Bloody woman.

Penda fell and didn’t get up. Gwil knelt, heaved her round his neck like a muffler, and limped on.

A coot emerged from the reeds, pattering noisily over the water before taking off.

Easy for furred and feathered things; fucking difficult for two legs.

‘Sanctuary.’ The cry from Alan made him look up.

Eternity
did
have an end. In the distance, on the opposite side of the river where it bent, was a great wall. With towers. A castle.

From behind them came a distant shout: ‘
There they are
.’

Wearily, Gwil turned and saw, being rowed downriver towards them, the boat he’d known to be inevitable.

It was coming too fast and the castle was too far away: she’d be captured; they’d
all
be captured.

No you fucking don’t, he thought. Not now we come this far.

He heard his own whisper: ‘Get on,’ and managed to raise it to a yell: ‘Get
on
, leave it … me.’

He didn’t see if he was obeyed; his eyes were on the boat. He lowered Penda to the ground, still sleeping. Somehow he raised an arm to unhook the crossbow from his shoulder; somehow found a bolt for it – his last. Somehow put his foot in the stirrup and by a miracle had the strength to cock the thing. Went down on one knee in the striped shadows of a willow.

From a quarter of a mile away, in the bright moonlight, the boat with its men and spears had looked like a massive hedgehog speeding over the water towards him. Now he could see the glint of Stephen’s striped silver and gold blazon on shields.

The man-at-arms standing in the prow didn’t spot him; he was too busy pointing at the two burdened figures staggering along the towpath.

Gwil waited, watching the approach of the boat’s prow as its rowers fought against the current to change direction and reach the bank ahead of Alan and Christopher to cut them off. Near him now. Unconsciously he worked out distance, angle, water resistance.

Forgive my sins and be with me now, Lord.

He shot.

There was a spurt of spray at the side of the boat, disregarded by the excited men in it, and sounding to Gwil as weak as the ‘plop’ of a rising fish. Oh Jesus, he’d miscalculated. The bolt had hit the boat below the waterline, but bounced off. It had hit but hadn’t pierced, plugging the side, not holing it. Too tired, too old, he’d missed altogether.

He was wrong. One of the rowers shouted, let go of his oars and took off his helmet to start bailing. The boat skewed and slowly, very slowly, tipped to port as water rushed in through the hole by its keel.

Men were crying out. Some were clinging to the boat’s hull. The river was claiming others who splashed desperately to keep afloat in its weakening cold.

God help them, he prayed, and began the trudge towards the castle. Shields and spears floated past him as he went and the cries behind him grew weaker. Help the poor buggers, Lord, but what else could I do?

There was no bridge to the castle. At least, there
was
, but it was drawn up over the portcullis of a gatehouse some sixty feet tall and seventy-five feet away across the river.

Alan, with the Empress pressed against his side to keep her warm, and Christopher with Penda pressed against his, were standing on a quayside that had on it what looked like a toll booth. Their voices were engaged in shouts with two others across the river, the argument making echoes skip back and forth across the swift-flowing water between them.

‘Tha’s all very well,’ a man’s voice from the gatehouse was saying as Gwil limped up the quayside, ‘but iffen you don’t know the password—’

There was an interjection from somewhere along the ramparts. ‘Don’t think we got one, Ben.’

The gatehouse was put out. ‘Ain’t we? Still and all, we ain’t letting just anybody in. I got my orders.’

Gwil sat down and rested his head on his knees. This was sanctuary?

‘Your orders come from Maud of Kenniford,’ Alan yelled, ‘who has sworn herself and this castle to the service of the Empress Matilda. This
is
the Empress. Let her in.’

‘Don’t look like no empress to me,’ said the gatehouse. ‘Where’s her crown?’

Christopher tried diplomacy. ‘If you would be good enough to fetch Lady Kenniford …’

‘This time o’ morning? She won’t take kindly. Be a braver man than me …’

The Empress detached herself from Alan’s arm and stood tall. She took two steps forward, and spoke. ‘I am the Empress Matilda, Lady of England and your sovereign. Open to me.
Now
.’

A thousand years of dominion went ringing across the Thames like a trumpet blast. Anglo-Saxon and Viking–Norman ancestry combined in a chord that had deafened and conquered nations. It expected the moon to bend its knee. If not, so much the worse for the moon.

The gatehouse made an arbitrary decision. There was a roar of clanking chains as the bridge was lowered and thumped into place at the Lady of England’s feet.

Head up, she crossed over it, followed by the others, to be received into Kenniford Castle.

Maud was spitting mad to hear that five more strangers had been admitted into the castle and was wondering whether she should add the blasted gatekeeper Ben to the list of people she’d quite happily hang at the moment, the herald Payn being top of it.

She’d discovered his latest slip after one of her rare visits to Sir John yesterday.

Sir John of Tewing was still alive; paralysed but alive. The left side of his face, from eye to chin, was lopsided as if its flesh had melted and run downwards. He had no use of his right arm or leg and had to be helped in and out of his bed. Yet, in many ways, he was as big a presence in the castle as he had been before.

What animated him was fury. The eyes in that ruin of a face, one of them pulled down to show a glaring red rim, bulged out at the world like an enraged bull’s. The only intelligible sound he could make was ‘uck-oo’, and he shouted it over and over – ‘Uck-oo’, ‘Uck-oo’ – with the regularity and force of a deranged
Cuculus canorus
, pounding his good hand against his useless one as if to hammer life back into it.

Despite the inconvenience to herself and everybody else who attended on her patient, Kigva had insisted on moving Sir John to the topmost room of the keep, with views to the north, east, west and south.

It had been built by Maud’s father, a man so distrusting of his own people that he wanted to keep an eye on them from all points of the compass as they went about their business 120 feet below. Kigva had said that was where Sir John wanted to be, perhaps for the same reason, perhaps to give him an interest. Maud, wanting to do her best for the man, had seen no reason to deny it to him – and only regretted it when, with Kigva’s delighted help, he managed to prop himself up against the window mullion and burst into uck-oo, uck-oo, uck-oo, uck-oos that could be heard throughout the castle baileys and beyond.

Nobody doubted that he was swearing, and that the word lacked an ‘f’ in front of it, with a ‘y’ after the ‘k’, nor that it was addressed at his wife, though, after a while, it seemed directed at anyone he saw passing. ‘Uck-oo, uck-oo, uck-oo, uck-oo, uck-oo.’ Like blow after regular blow from a blacksmith’s hammer, as if he accused all Kenniford, from Maud down to the kennel boy, of betrayal, blaming them for flying the Empress’s colours, for not being as helpless as he was.

They became used to this winter cuckoo, showed it respect by nodding or bowing as it called to them from above in much the same way that they acknowledged a magpie – ‘Hello, Mr Magpie’ – to ward off bad luck, but it engendered a guilty discomfort that made it a relief when, at night, it fell silent.

Everything that could be done for him was done. Maud had called in two doctors from Oxford who consulted over his urine and recommended frequent bleeding as well as cold baths to abate what hot blood they left him with, suggesting potions made from seethed toad, mandrake root and ground ivy. The infirmarian from Abingdon Abbey was summoned and diagnosed demonic possession, attempting to cast out the evil spirit with prayer and holy water.

These administrations were met with a battery of uck-oos from their patient. He threw his piss-pot over the doctors and nearly strangled the infirmarian with the monk’s own rosary. All three refused to return.

Before he left, still clutching his bruised throat, the infirmarian told Maud: ‘This evil is of the Devil, be sure of it, else how could a sick man exert such energy? I believe it to be witchcraft by that hag who attends him. Turn her away.’

Maud didn’t like Sir John’s mistress either; on the other hand, Kigva showed a devotion to her patient that she, who was only prepared to expend monies on him as a wifely duty, shuddered at. It was Kigva who cleaned him when he fouled himself; Kigva who massaged the wasted limbs with linseed oil and honey to bring back their strength, who chewed meat into a pap so that he could swallow it, dripped strengthening drinks of her own concoction into the distorted mouth and kissed it. Murmuring like a lover, she could calm him out of the worst of his tempers – not that he exempted her from them. She interpreted the grunts he made. ‘My lord wants extra blankets,’ she’d say. ‘Get them.’ Or: ‘He says they bloody cooks put too much salt in his broth.’

Maud had climbed the winding turret staircase to Sir John’s room and paused outside the door to gather herself to encounter its stink: not the smell of farmyard with its tinge of sewage that pervaded the bailey – she hadn’t noticed that; it was too familiar, too friendly – but that of a pustule. Kigva’s idea of cleanliness was that of a sow’s. Maud and Milburga had done their best to purify the room but Sir John had kicked over their bowls of scented water, and thrown their herbal garlands in their faces.

Still, at least young William would be there; like the dutiful son he was, he spent much of his time these days sitting by his father’s bed helping Kigva minister to him.

She squared her shoulders and went in. Three pairs of eyes were rounded on her, as if she had intruded into a secret meeting. Even William’s, though his held … what was it? Guilt? Well, that she could forgive; she knew he was fond of her but his fidelity, like that of all males, was to the man who had fathered him and as a result she would never make her own claim on him, not wanting divided loyalties to tear him in half.