One of the troopers – Hawkwood assumed it was the one who’d given the order – jerked a thumb towards the wagon.

“Where to now?” Hawkwood asked.

There was no reply.

A lantern hung from a strut behind the driver’s seat. It provided little illumination, though in its vapid glow Hawkwood saw that the back of the wagon held two upright, bucket-sized wooden casks.

The first pair of troopers boarded the vehicle. Only when Hawkwood and Lawrence were seated did the second pair climb up after them. At which point, the first pair split up, one into the driver’s seat, the other to the front of the wagon, where he angled himself so that he faced backwards. As the second pair settled themselves down in the rear, the driver clicked his tongue and with a flick of the reins the wagon moved off.

Hawkwood looked out over the encampment. There was a moon but it wasn’t shedding much light and it was hard to make out details. Shrouded figures moved among the tents and bivouacs. Other blanketed forms lay huddled around the edges of the cooking fires. No laughter here. Instead, the night was broken by harsher sounds: the whimpering of the sick and the suffering. Hawkwood shivered as a chorus of coughs and groans, carried upon the breeze, broke out across the hillside, contaminating the night.

“Dear God,” Lawrence whispered, his expression mirroring his horror.

Their path, Hawkwood saw, was heading downhill, away from the main encampment, towards the woods.

“You know when I said the last time that I didn’t like the look of where they were taking us?” Lawrence murmured, following Hawkwood’s gaze. “Well, now, I really don’t like where we’re going.”

The trees drew them in. Noises from the camp began to fade. There were no animal sounds, no night screeches, no rustling in the undergrowth. There was just the creaking of the wagon boards and the splintering of pine cones beneath the wheels as they trundled across the forest floor. Their escorts had yet to utter a single word.

Hawkwood’s eyes flickered towards the casks. One of them appeared to be leaking. The liquid seeping from the crack in the staves looked like watery gruel. There was no smell coming off them, or at least none that he could detect. Surreptitiously, he allowed his gaze to linger on the leaking cask’s lid. It looked secure enough, though what might have been a trickle of the same soupy liquid had formed a thin rime around the lip. It was hard to see clearly in the darkness.

As if from a great distance, he heard Stagg’s voice in his ear.

I’ve got more’n forty tubs of prime potash takin’ up space in the hold …

As the words came back to him, he realized what he was most probably looking at and a knot formed in his stomach.