The sound of the army breaking camp brings Nicholas and Bianca awake. Looking out of their tent, they see the forest has disappeared, swallowed by the fog that has settled overnight like a shroud. In the twilight before dawn, it coalesces into half-human shapes that flit and writhe before vanishing again, to be replaced by new creatures that seem to spring out of the ground, live for a moment or two in strange animation before sinking back into the soil. It is as though all the ghosts of this conflict have gathered together in one spot to dance a pavane to the living. Voices seem flattened. The snorting and whinnying of the horses sound like the fading echoes left behind after a parade has passed by.
The baggage train is to remain where it is camped. It will move once the main force has cleared the track along the forest’s edge and secured the land around Conna Castle. Go back to sleep, Nicholas tells Bianca. Sleep is almost as important as food or water. Like them, it must be seized when the opportunity presents.
He wakes again and thinks the rain has returned – a scattering of hail, perhaps, striking the canvas of the tent. Then he hears a shout from close by.
‘Physician! Where is the physician? He is needed forward.’
Another scattering of hail, longer but more ragged.
Not hail, Nicholas realizes with a start that brings him fully to his senses, but the flat crack… crack… of caliver, petronel and matchlock being discharged.
Nicholas is all but dressed; no one has had the luxury of a nightshirt for days. He throws on his doublet, laces his boots and steps out of the tent into the chill morning air.
‘I am Dr Shelby – over here. Who calls?’
A drummer boy, barely into his teens and clad in a muddy tunic too big for him, emerges from the fog, breathless and frightened. ‘The rebels have launched an ambuscade, sir. They’ve caught our vanguard in the trees. You’re to come at once.’
‘How many hurt?’
‘I know not, sir – only that you must come.’
Bianca appears at Nicholas’s shoulder. He tells her to muster her women and have her balms and washes ready. Then he gathers three barber-surgeons from their sleeping place beneath a wagon loaded with cooking cauldrons and follows the lad back into the fog.
Within moments Nicholas is sure they are lost. A tree looms out of the fog, like the mast of a sinking ship. Then another. He fears they are wandering into the forest. And if the rebels have launched an ambush, they are as likely to be there as anywhere. He tries not to dwell on the thought that – to some amongst the enemy – a severed head is as much a trophy as a living one still attached to a neck worth ransoming.
It is all he can do to keep the diminutive drummer boy in sight. The lad has a habit of fading alarmingly, forcing Nicholas to quicken his pace over the uneven ground. He hears the crash of bodies and horses moving through undergrowth off to his left, where he thinks the trees thicken. Are they rebels about to attack? Or are they our own men breaking in panic? Disjointed cries carry on the flat air. English or Irish? Victor or vanquished? From far off comes a chorus of unearthly high-pitched screams, suddenly cut off. Men? Women? Animals? Ghosts? He cannot tell.
And then figures emerge out of the smoky fog, like escapees from a house on fire. They are clad in dirty padded jerkins, their faces streaked with mud and sweat; large men, fiercely bearded, murder in their eyes – English pikemen. One of them, larger than the others, carries something slung across his back. He could be a poacher bringing home a deer, Nicholas thinks. Then he notices the dangling legs and knows the man is carrying a wounded comrade. His companions walk beside him, carrying the fallen man’s armour: the greaves to protect the legs, the unlaced pauldrons from the shoulders, the plumed burgonet helmet, all muddied, bloodied and battered, trophies of someone else’s victory.
The man carrying him stoops as he moves, weighed down by his burden. His face is impassive, the jaw set tight. In his eyes Nicholas can see a grim determination: to carry his charge for as long as it takes to find him aid – to the farthest reaches of hell, if necessary.
‘Over here!’ shouts the drummer boy. ‘Here is the physician!’
One of the figures calls in reply, ‘Thank Jesu! We have a good man here, most grievously hurt.’
The words seem to give the soldier carrying the body a final burst of strength. His legs look on the point of buckling, yet he breaks into the semblance of a run, an ungainly, desperate gait, as though he were the one with the wound. Reaching Nicholas, he sags to his knees and releases his burden. His companions drop the armour they are carrying into the mud. One of them throws down a bloodstained cloak. Then, with surprising gentleness for such fierce-looking fellows, they lift their charge from the kneeling man’s shoulders and lay him on it. Nicholas looks down into the deathly-white face of Sir Henry Norris.
Despite the sickly alabaster light, Nicholas can see at once that Norris has lost a lot of blood. Beneath the streaks of dirt, his face is the same colour as the fog. He hangs on to consciousness by a thread, his eyes half-shut, his slack expression like that of a man robbed of his senses by a sudden terrible palsy.
Cutting away the cloth around Norris’s shattered left leg, Nicholas tries to assess the extent of his injuries. It doesn’t take him long to see that they are grievous. The whole knee joint has been destroyed, the ball of the tibia smashed to pieces, the patella staved in and the tendons and muscles shredded like a coney torn to pieces by a hound. Norris does little as Nicholas probes, other than groan softly as though troubled by heavy dreams.
‘I must amputate at once, tie off the main blood vessel, or he’ll die before we get him back to the shelter of the baggage train,’ Nicholas says to the man who carried Norris out of the forest.
The man gives him a murderous look. ‘I’ll have no quack dishonour Sir Henry,’ he says, placing one hand on the hilt of his sword. ‘You butcher him, you die.’
‘It’s alright, he’s the earl’s physician,’ says a voice. ‘If Dr Shelby says the leg must go, then it must go. He’s the best surgeon we have.’
Glancing up, Nicholas sees Oliver Henshawe emerge from the fog.
‘Thank you, Sir Oliver,’ he says. ‘I’ll do the very best I can, I promise. Is it safe to work here? I don’t want to move Sir Henry any further than necessary.’
‘Aye, it’s as safe as anywhere on this damnable island,’ says Henshawe. ‘We chased the papist rogues off eventually.’
‘Do you know if it was shot or pike?’ Nicholas asks Norris’s men. ‘I need to know what might be in the wound.’
‘Pike, sir,’ one of them says. ‘When he came out of the saddle, his horse stamped on him for good measure.’
Nicholas orders Norris held down lest he struggle. Two of his men kneel on either side, like pall-bearers. Norris does not resist. Indeed, he seems almost insensible. Nicholas pushes the knight’s helmet under the ruined knee, to support the limb while he works. One of the barber-surgeons places Nicholas’s physic chest close by.
‘No point in wasting time,’ Nicholas says, taking a determined breath.