Grylle looks at him as if he is stupid. ‘You are in the Marches,’ he says, gesturing to the hills around him. ‘All this land belongs to the Earl of March and those who live on it do not take kindly to just anyone coming through, especially not a rabble of Irishmen and Frenchmen led by a treacherous Welshman who ought to be hanged like the common criminal he is.’

‘But you are Hastings’s man? Is he here?’

‘Why, yes,’ Grylle says, again as if this is the most obvious thing in the world. ‘We are camped by Wigmore, not two leagues up the road. We marched back from Gloucester when we got news of Tudor’s landing.’

The men in the marshes behind them are more relaxed now and they are beginning to brag and joke with one another as their nerves unwind.

‘Let’s see where we are then, shall we?’ Grylle says, and he kicks his horse to push past them through the reeds. Thomas and Katherine follow. Thomas still has his sword. They find Edmund Riven’s horse first, straining to breathe, eyes rolling and ears flattened with pain. A broken arrow is buried in its shoulder and a ribbon of plum-coloured blood snakes from the wound. One of Hastings’s men is silently contemplating it. After a moment he cuts through the animal’s throat with an almost tender stroke of his knife, and holds its head while blood seethes from the frilled lips of the wound in rhythmic spurts. Steam drifts in the air, the smell rich, and after a moment the horse is still.

‘Sorry about that, old son,’ the archer says, laying the head down softly.

Thomas looks away. To think he has come so close to doing the same to Katherine.

Riven has been thrown a little way off, among the rushes, so Thomas pushes aside the reeds with his sword, expecting to see him lying dead or unconscious.

But there is nothing.

He searches again.

Still nothing. There are broken reeds and a scrape of mud to show where he’s fallen, but no sign of blood or his body.

He is gone.

The giant too, but of him there is even less sign, since his horse is also missing. As is the pollaxe.

‘Must have got out of the bag,’ is Grylle’s estimation, and he gestures down towards the trees in the south. ‘My orders are to picket this approach, though, and not to go chasing their scouts back into camp.’

The archers are disappointed. There are four of Riven’s men dead and two wounded, both so badly they will not live through the night, and Thomas and Katherine and the squeamish horse-lover look away as one of the sergeants blesses them with a sign of the cross and then brains each of them with two blows of a lead maul.