He has the pollaxe. The pollaxe he reclaimed from Walter. He swings it at Thomas’s spine and connects with a force that rips Thomas from Riven’s embrace and casts him across the heaving layer of steel-clad bodies that cover the ground. He twists with the pain and falls on his back. He lies there, unable to move for the agony. He stares up at the crisscross of weapons above him, watching the giant batter away at two of Fauconberg’s men, watching Riven kill the billman who’d earlier saved his life. He feels the man sprawl across his legs and then he feels nothing. It is as if he is floating in warm water, his head swaddled, his hearing muffled.

He wonders again if he is dying.

He thinks of Katherine. He wants thoughts of her to be his last. He wants to tell her that he is sorry. Sorry for dying here, sorry for leaving her.

Above him the fight continues. Men fall by his side. There is blood in the air, scraps of metal and shards of splintered wood, a tooth, something gory.

Thomas watches the swings and blows, back and forth. He watches the snowflakes fall, and he wonders if this is what death is. No triumphant entry through heaven’s gate, or agonised descent into hell, only this: detachment, an eternity spent on the field where you died, an eternity spent ruing all your sins of commission, and all your sins of omission.

But now he finds he can move. His fingers are coming to life.

Can it be that he is not dead?

He moves his head.

He lurches, rolls over. There is a brief lull in the fight. Men are pulling back, taking stock. Exhausted men are retiring. New men are coming up.

Thomas is on his hands and knees; he has only one thought in his mind: to get away. He begins crawling, one hand after the other, slithering through the blood, back across the armoured corpses that are covered in gore and shit. Dead men stare up at him with noses smashed and mouths and chins slashed open. Some are still alive, spitting blood, bleeding through their ears. He gasps for breath and the pain is a burning band around his chest.

He can hear himself moaning like a beast in agony as he crawls through the line of Fauconberg’s men and slumps against a corpse. He rests his cheek against the dead man’s breastplate and closes his eyes.

He saw the giant. He knows that pollaxe. He should have a broken spine. He should have a fluke buried a handspan in his back. And yet. Here he is. Alive.