The sailor lobs the pack back in the cabin, but everything else goes over. The cook’s pots and pans, a wooden chair, every scrap of rope, every lump of tar, all the food, all the ale. All that remains are the men, the sails, the pardoner’s bag and the weapons: four rusted swords, a long-handled bill, a hammer used for breaking chains and the giant’s axe. Each member of the crew has a knife on his belt and one hidden in his clothes. Thomas has the pollaxe and one of the sailors passes Katherine a length of rope with its end tied off in a knot that looks like a large fist. Within is a weight and together they make a lethal club.

‘I am expected to fight,’ she whispers to Thomas. She swings the weight and flinches as it flies past her nose.

‘Foof!’ Thomas says. ‘Be careful.’

She stares at the knot. He moves to stand in front of her, to protect her from whatever will happen next.

‘Still gaining, but slower now,’ the boy calls down.

He need not have bothered. Every sailor is ranged along the ship’s side watching the balinger come battering across the water. Cobham watches from the stern deck.

‘Fuck,’ he says. ‘Should’ve kept the firestone. Drop it on ’em from up here, it’d take the whole stinking lot of ’em with it.’

Thomas sees something flicker in the sky. Then there are two sharp thuds in the carrack that make every man jump.

‘Christ Jesus!’

Two fat arrows quiver in the deck. Both a yard long and as thick as his forefinger. One instant they aren’t there, the next they are, buried in the deck in a corolla of grey splinters. Dust rises from each like smoke from a candle wick.

‘Christ!’ Cobham shouts. Then he calls up to the boy. ‘Oi! Boy! Warn us when they’re about to loose those bloody arrows, will you, you little—’

He breaks off and shields his eyes from the glare. He stares up into the rigging.

‘—bastard,’ he concludes quietly. An arrow pins the boy through his chest to the mast. He looks around. Then: ‘Saxby! Saxby there!’ he shouts. ‘Stop your fuckin’ gawkin’ and get rid of the dead wood.’

He nods his head and Saxby leaves off his post at the ship’s rail with something like a leer and on quick feet he crosses to where the pardoner stands, pale and old and frightened. Before Thomas can move, Saxby grasps the old man around his arms and rushes him backwards, toppling him over the ship’s rail and into the sea. The old man has no time to cry out.

Saxby steps back.

Thomas runs to the ship’s side. There is nothing there, just the green sea, peaking, troughing, frilled with foam, unreadable to the horizon. There is no sign of the old man. The pardoner is gone. Thomas cannot believe it.