Even then three tries failed to get the char to light his tow, which was apparently damp despite being carried in a well-made tin, right against his skin. He cursed.
Bess shrugged. ‘Stop your whining,’ she said. ‘I know a trick.’ She rubbed some birch bark between her hands, crumpling it finer and finer as three other women held their cotes over her head to keep the rain off – and the birch dust caught the spark from the char cloth, flared to light, and lit a twist of birch bark that glared like a magic spell in the darkness. All the men and women in the dark, wet camp, cheered spontaneously – not just a gasp, but a shout. In a minute, the pile of dry birch bark caught and in ten minutes, the whole vast pile of wood was roaring, flames leaping twenty feet in the air, so high that the rain was diverted over their heads.
With fire a palpable reality, the Jacks found the spirit to get more wood, even though it had to be scrounged by feel in total darkness – armloads of sodden, half-rotten wood appeared, but by then the fire was so hot that it had ceased to discriminate. It was so hot it could dry a man’s shirt in a few beats of his heart, even as that heat threatened to boil his blood. The sick and the most weary were encouraged to lie down, feet to the fire, in a ring close around it where the air was breathable, and they were as close to comfortable as a man could manage in the Wild.
Nat Tyler came in near to midnight. The fire was still burning like a beacon, and men were working in shifts to feed it, crashing a hundred feet or more into the surrounding darkness.
‘It’s like you’ve hung out a sign,’ Tyler said. He crouched down by Redmede, and he was obviously exhausted.
‘Get anything?’ Redmede asked.
‘Doe and two fawns,’ Tyler said with half a grin. ‘Wasn’t pretty, but we got ’em. Funny – when we took the deer we could see your fire plain as the fingers on my hand, but when we came down the hill, we lost you – even lost the stream for a time.’ He shook his head. ‘Plague take it, lost in the dark is like hell come to earth, comrade.’
‘They still out there?’ Redmede said slowly. He didn’t want the answer. He was warm and as dry as he’d been in two days and didn’t want to move.
‘I told the boys to sit tight and I’d come for them,’ Tyler said. ‘I’ll go fetch ’em in.’
‘I’d better come with you,’ Redmede said. He hoped it didn’t sound as grudging as it was.
Tyler sighed. ‘I wish I could tell you to sit and rest,’ he said. There was a long pause. ‘But I don’t think I can go out again by m’self. Fell asleep under a tree for – don’t know how long. Minute? Three? Twenty?’ He got to his feet. ‘There’s something out there, too.’
‘Something Wild?’ Redmede asked. ‘We’re allies, now.’
Tyler frowned. ‘Don’t you believe it, Bill Redmede. This is the fucking Wild. I know it like my own nose. They aren’t even allies to each other, plague take them all. It’s a world of blood and talon, and right now we’re easy meat.’
Redmede shivered. He half drew his falchion in its scabbard and it caught – there was rust on the blade, rust right down into the scabbard. As it was his prized possession he felt a flare of anger and even sadness. He checked his dagger and shook his head over his bow and quiver. He hung the quiver on a spruce tree, leaned the great bow against the trunk between the dense dead branches, and made a tent for them with his cloak.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
His confidence lasted for ten paces, and then the sheer cold of the ever-present rain and the futility of moving in the pitch blackness hit him as if someone had thrown a pail of water over his head.
Tyler was muttering to himself, and Redmede worried he was still fevered. They crashed through the brush, making as much noise as a hundred mounted knights, and taking damage from the alder and the spruce saplings. Redmede misstepped badly and fell down the bank, putting one whole wool-hosed leg into the icy Cohocton, and when he glanced back he could see the fire burning like a mountain of light just a bowshot behind them. The heart went out of him.
‘I’d never ha’ gone back into the dark wi’out you, Bill,’ Tyler said. ‘Christ on the cross, I hope I can find the lads. They’re scare’t shitless and they was more a hindrance than a help. I should hae left them wi’ you.’
‘They’ve got to learn sometime,’ Redmede said without thinking. One foot in front of the other – it always got him through these moments. Besides, it was Tyler doing the work, breaking trail and guessing where he’d left the runaway serfs. All Redmede had to do was follow him and keep his spirits up.
They walked and walked until Redmede’s head was numb and he felt as if he was asleep and yet walking in an endless sea of rain. The downpour drowned out all other sound, the darkness was nigh total, and he tracked the shine of his friend’s rain-soaked cote, the dull gleam of the leather belt that held his leather bottle, and the shape of his head against the rain. They moved from tree to tree because it was too dark to walk well, and they were far from any trail, and still low branches tripped them – it was exhausting work, and no end in sight.
And then something struck him.
He had an ill-defined warning – never fully sensed, but something made him duck and turn, and the spear haft meant to punch through his neck slapped the side of his head and came down on his shoulder instead – a flare of pain, but not a blow to stop a warrior, and Redmede had the haft in his hand. Before his head was in the fight, he’d rotated the shaft between his hands, tearing it away from his assailant, and he slammed the haft solidly into the creature and it fell away with a wet scream – the ferns under his feet were full of them-
‘Boggles!’ he screamed.
Tyler had a heartbeat more warning, and he used it to drag his blade clear of its scabbard. Redmede saw Tyler’s blade pass so close to his cheek that he might have seen himself in the blade, with more light, and then there was a wet thump and he was sprayed with warm ichor.
He began to use the spear with ferocity. The darkness was against him, but Redmede had never quit in his life, and he put the stone spearhead into two or three of the beasts before he felt the stinging pain at his ankle that told him-
– and then Tyler was there, cutting hard. He cleared the boggles off Redmede, and then the two of them got their backs against the bole of a great tree.
The boggles were gone.
‘I’m hit, Nat.’ Bill Redmede was as terrified as he’d ever been in his life. He could feel the blood flowing out his ankle, and he could see the ferns moving.
Tyler spat. ‘Some allies,’ he said.
Chapter Four
Lutece – The King of Galle
‘Jean de Vrailly?’ asked the King, and his voice was high and sharp. ‘He’s in the Nova Terra? How lovely. For all of us.’
Courtiers laughed. A few frowned.
The Seneschal d’Abblemont laughed. ‘He sent a letter, Your Grace.’
The King rolled his eyes. ‘I had no idea he could read or write,’ the King said. Women tittered. ‘Very well, read it.’
From the Noble Knight, Jean de Vrailly, to his royal liege and master, the most puissant and powerful, Lord of the Pensey Mountains, Defender of the-
‘Spare me, Abblemont.’ The King’s thin voice cut like a sharp eating knife.
‘Your Grace. Ahem. Greetings. In the spirit of errantry, and to prove myself worthy of the title, granted me by many, of best knight in the world – Your Grace that’s what it says.’ Abblemont looked a little more like a large monkey stuffed into satin than was quite right, with too much facial hair and a curling beard, protuberant teeth, and a wrinkled forehead balancing an almost perfectly flat nose with two enormous nostrils. Wits at court debated whether he was more like a pig or a dog, but the name that stuck was ‘The Horse’.