Palmer shook his head in reply. He stepped past the injured man over to the ladder, hand firm over his mouth.
“Can’t hold your drink? Thought so, with a wench face like yours.” De Tracy laughed hard. “And a sap with no sea legs too.”
Palmer scrambled up the ladder to the deck, willing his stomach to hold on. He made it out on deck and ran to the edge. He leaned out over the thunderous waves and retched himself empty, same as the day he’d been sent away to become a page. Seven years old, his landless cottar father dead from a terrible growth that filled his stomach and ate the rest of him away. His four small sisters clustered in a mute group, as his weeping mother pushed him from her to the rough clutch of the earl’s steward. The bewildering journey by cart, which ended at a busy port, where a ship waited to wrench him from his family, his home, his childhood. The green and gray curves of land had shrunk fast as the vessel tossed up, then down. His insides had coiled in loss so hard he thought his heart would stop. But he wouldn’t cry, not in front of the hard-eyed men who sailed the ship and mocked him for a fearful whelp. Yet he couldn’t keep his grief and loss in: he’d gone to the side of the ship and vomited and vomited.
As Palmer straightened up, he used his tongue to clean off his coated teeth. Fitzurse stood by the mast, deep in conversation with the hulk le Bret. Neither seemed to notice that, though quieter than before, the world tossed and bounced beneath them. The ocean raced past, the set sail making quick work of the many miles’ journey to England.
Palmer would prove his worth as a professional soldier once they were on dry land, once they got to Canterbury and its mighty cathedral. Within its walls, they would find Thomas Becket, its archbishop and leader of all the souls in the kingdom. A leader locked in bitter conflict with King Henry himself.
The King had ordered action, action that Palmer could scarce believe he’d been hired to execute. Oh, he’d rise to the challenge, serve his king, demonstrate his loyalty, his fealty. ’Course he would. He’d be paid handsomely for it. His jaw had dropped of its own accord when Fitzurse had named the price.
His stomach and throat drew together in a fresh sour spasm, and he leaned over the side yet again with a stifled oath. He’d do anything at all. Long as he could do it on dry land.
CHAPTER 2
“How much longer till we get there?” Palmer asked le Bret, the driver of their small tarpaulin-covered cart.
Ahead, down a long, straight, featureless highway, with winter-empty ploughed fields on either side, lay the town of Canterbury. The storms of two days ago had been replaced by clear skies and ice on the air, making for easier progress along the mud-churned road. Plumes of grayish-white smoke rose from hundreds of hearths and hung above the distant roofs, shrouding the cathedral’s huge towers.
Le Bret shrugged. “Hour. Two, maybe.”
“Good,” said Palmer. “My backside’s sick of this seat.” He shifted to stretch his deadened legs and nodded to where the other three knights led the way on horseback. “I’d rather ride any day. Keeps you moving. And warm.” He pulled his thick woolen neckerchief tighter to keep the afternoon’s deepening chill at bay.
Le Bret shrugged again. “Need the cart. Fitzurse says so.”
“What for?”
“Don’t know.”
Palmer shook his head to himself. Le Bret didn’t know much.
“You there!” De Tracy’s shout carried across the frozen fields. “Make haste and stand aside.”
Palmer leaned to one side to see past his mounted companions. Shortly ahead on the roadway on the left side were two men, ragged laborers mending a wide gap in the hedge by laying new pleachers. Piles of dead branches and shorn evergreens spilled partly onto the road. Both men looked up at the order and dropped their billhooks at once. They bent to scoop the trimmings back into the ditch, scrabbling low in their haste.
As the knights on horseback went past, the men snatched their coarse dark woolen caps off and bowed their heads.
Palmer’s rumbling cart drew level. One of the ragged men risked a glance up, then dropped his gaze abruptly again.
“Sorry, sirs,” he muttered, eyes fixed low on the muddy wheels.
Neither Palmer nor le Bret acknowledged him.
“Stupid peasant,” said le Bret as they carried on.
Palmer glanced back around the canvas cover. The men had replaced their hats and were reordering their work, gesturing angrily to each other. He faced forward again. “He should have better manners. But they’ve a job to do with that hedge.”
Le Bret smirked. “You a clod-grubber, Palmer?”
“Better that than the son of a gargoyle and a whore. Go grab yourself, le Bret.” But Palmer was born a clod-grubber, with no land, no money. He’d hedged, ditched, picked stones from behind a plough, pitching them into a basket on his back until his five-year-old knees would near give way. Unblocked privies, carried hay on his shoulders. Always following behind his weak, meek father, trying to earn enough to feed them as well as his mother and his sisters. And never succeeding. Like the men on the side of the road, he’d lived in rags, feet numb and frostbitten in split, useless tatters of boots. He too had snatched off his cap a thousand times to his betters.