Perers waves his arm to suggest that he will.

‘Bloody hell fire,’ he says, rubbing his throat after Richard has let go. He is too terrified to look at him.

‘Give me the book,’ Katherine says.

He hands it over.

‘It’s a long way,’ he says. ‘Can’t we wait until morning?’

‘He is still alive,’ Katherine says. ‘I am sure of it.’

She cannot stand to think of him out there, just one more man dead or lost. She does not want to number him among men like Dafydd, or Walter, or any of the Johns, whom she has known and now – are gone.

‘Look,’ the archer goes on, ‘I’m sure he’s dead. One night isn’t going to hurt him any more than he already is, is it?’

‘I will cure you if we go now. Tomorrow may be too late, for both of you.’

Mayhew will come with her, carrying a torch, and Richard too.

‘What difference will the dark make to me?’

They follow the hobbling archer up the road and on to the dale. The wind has died and the snow has settled and the stars are out, and it is cold enough so that touching metal strips the skin from fingertips. All across the field men have lit fires, burning old arrows and bows and anything else they can find to give them the light with which to see, and everywhere shadows flit as they go about their business. Even now there is still the noise of men hitting other men.

‘It was over there,’ the archer says. ‘Mind out for the bloody caltrops.’

The field stinks like a shambles, and underfoot it is soggy and still warm with the spilled blood. Katherine walks with her hand over her mouth and nose. When she becomes aware the banks she thought were earthworks are jumbles of corpses, ready to be interred in pits, she is glad Richard cannot see. After a moment, Mayhew lowers the burning torch so that none of them can.

‘Dear God,’ she says. ‘How will we ever forgive ourselves for this?’

‘Are there many?’ Richard asks.

‘I can’t tell you. Thousands. Many thousands.’

They carry on up towards the fires on the plateau.

‘I never did fight in battle,’ Richard says quietly. ‘All that training. All those hours in the tilting yard and at the butts. It was all I ever dreamed of.’

‘Why?’ Katherine asks. She wonders why she has not asked before.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘It is what you do.’

‘Here we are,’ the archer says. ‘About here.’

They stop by the side of the road, near a broad barrow of corpses. Blank faces stare at them from the pile, and men are twisted among one another, like the frayed edges of a carpet.

‘He was sitting here,’ the archer says, gesturing in the dark. ‘His head was bleeding.’

‘You are lying.’ She just knows.

‘No, as God is my witness.’