The houses began to thin out. A narrow bridge appeared, signalling another river crossing. Still the Saranac, though they were obviously further upstream. Across the bridge, open country beckoned; scattered farmhouses, meadows, empty ploughed fields, bordered by a thick band of trees into which the road disappeared.

“Where the devil are they taking us?” Lawrence muttered. “Can’t say as I like the look of this.”

You realize they could just take us out and shoot us.

A statement spoken partly in jest. Now, though, as they entered the woods, the words didn’t seem quite so amusing. Hawkwood studied the guards’ faces for a clue. There was nothing in the troopers’ expressions to suggest that their charges were under any immediate threat, but that didn’t render the situation less worrying. Hawkwood thought about the knife in his boot. Hard to draw it and fight with manacled hands. Not impossible, though, if push came to shove.

By Hawkwood’s reckoning they had travelled about three miles from the town when Lawrence sniffed suddenly and frowned.

“You smell that?”

“Hard not to,” Hawkwood agreed.

Twisting in their seats, they looked over the wagon driver’s shoulder.

A gap appeared in the trees ahead. As the wagon emerged from the woods, Lawrence let out a gasp.

Hawkwood had lost count of the number of bivouacs he’d had to endure during his two decades of soldiering. Irrespective of the country or the terrain, they all had one thing in common: the stench, of unwashed bodies, cooking-fire smoke and shit. Mostly shit, because there were never enough latrines. The rag-bag collection of tents and crude shelters that was spread out before them was no exception.

Just as well it was winter, Hawkwood thought. Had it been the height of summer, God knows what the stench would have been like.

“Dear God,” Lawrence muttered in awe. “What an utter bloody shambles.”

It was an acute observation. With drifts of woodsmoke rising from the sea of tents and makeshift accommodations, the scene looked more like a squalid gypsy encampment than a military one. This was no Greenbush.

The camp must have covered tens of acres, most of them hacked out of the forest to judge from the huge number of tree stumps that had been left to poke up between the tents and the campfires and the various roosts that the troops had built for themselves from whatever materials there had been to hand, from cut-down spruce branches to uprooted bushes and strips of birch bark.