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Romford tried to recall what he had felt and seen, but his thoughts came only in scraps. He knew there had been a time when he was scrambling on the ground among feet and hooves. Another when he had been deafened by some weapon that gave out a great roar and belched billows of smoke that stank like rotting eggs. He remembered shooting an arrow through that rank smoke. He remembered the smell of piss and horse dung. The scratch of dust and grit in his throat and nose. His lip split by a stray boot. His smarting eyes meeting those of the dying and dead.
We’re up to our tits in debt to virtually every fucker who lends money between here and Tartary.’ ‘Where’s Tartary?’ asked Scotsman. ‘It’s where tarts come from,’ snapped Northampton. ‘Any more questions?’ The Dogs said nothing.
After Romford landed his arrows and they inspected their targets, the other two archers pounded him on the back while the crowd whooped. ‘Show him which way Paris is and the little bastard could put one clean through King Philippe’s eye,’ said Thorp, shaking his head. ‘War’d be over in one shot.’
Romford pulled out his flask and sipped more tincture. White and brown piglets in a makeshift wooden pen swapped faces with the men guarding them. The men grew snouts and squealed.
The stale odour of rotting rubbish and human waste already hung in the air. ‘Mary Magdalene feeding the fucking donkey, this place stinks,’ muttered the Scot.
the two men squelched on through the marsh together, dodging tent ropes and wooden stakes, and trying to close their noses to the smell of countless thousands of men, all too long in the field, inured to living among piss and shit and vegetable skins and the bones of the animals they devoured. All caught between their hope of an end and acceptance of their fate, which was simply to wait and try not to die until the ships came to take them home.
‘Aye, well. Knights all look the same to me. Talk a lot of shit, suck their horses’ cocks and won’t have a fight unless they’re wearing a hundredweight of tin.’
Romford could see the Scot growing very confused. ‘I need a fucking drink.’ ‘Then you had better apologise to The Hat. He detests spitting. He has a peculiar theory that it spreads plagues.’
So he walked on, along the seafront, seeing up close the city walls he had stared at for so long that spring from the Risbank. Nothing now seemed special about them. The stone knew nothing. Or told nothing. Which amounts to the same thing.
