‘Neither will you charge home,’ bellowed a new voice and everyone turned as Edward and his retinue came cantering up. Eyes went down; no-one wanted to look at the furious, droop-lidded lisping rage that stormed out of the king’s face.
Especially not Basset, who went as white as his horse barding and started to stammer.
‘Quiet,’ Edward ordered, then surveyed the wreckage of staggering, unhorsed knights, trailing back like drunks from an alehouse. A groaning knight in green, torn and spattered with mud and blood, was helped by two others; his left hand was hanging from a bloody mess by a few last fragments of tendon and flesh and someone had tied his baldric round the forearm to stop him bleeding to death.
‘My Lord of Otley,’ Edward said, nodding to the green knight as if they had met in cloistered court. The green knight moaned and another limped out behind him, bare-headed and leaking blood; he paused, looked up at his king and bowed.
Edward returned it.
‘My good lord,’ he said blandly. ‘You have lost your horse.’
Voiced as commiseration, it had a vicious twist to it – Eustace de Hacche had refused to sell his splendid charger to the king and now the beautiful bay with one white sock was lying, screaming in a tureen of its own entrails.
De Hacche turned away, nursing his ribs and more bitter about the horse than the spear which had burst him open; he did not want to have to remove his maille and gambeson for fear of what might tumble to the ground. I will look like my horse, he thought.
Esward watched him stumble off, his face a dog’s dinner of anger, then turned his droop-eyed fury on Bek and Basset.
‘Neither of ye have the sense of an egg,’ he growled and watched them bristle, mildly curious to see if they would spill it over to argument. They winked on the brim of it – then puffed it away and Edward sat deeper in his saddle, slightly disappointed but not surprised.
Christ blind me, he thought, good men have died because this Basset fool has a head fit only for carrying a metal helmet and as empty. Not that he is alone in it, he added bitterly, else I would not have to be here, completing the task I set for the Earl of Surrey and others.
‘If you have finished squandering the chivalry of England,’ Edward growled at the pair, ‘perhaps we can return to completing this affray?’
He gave a signal; a horn blew and Addaf heard the Lord of Bedale shouting at Heydin Captain, who, in turn, roared out orders in his sonorous Welsh for the war-winners to step on this bloody stage.
Addaf rolled his shoulders expectantly, then looked right and left, dismayed. Around him, the Welsh archers, watching the expensively hired Gascon crossbowmen trot forward and start rattling shafts, twisted smiles of braided scorn on their faces. The Welsh spearman butted their weapons and leaned on them insolently.
Addaf’s heart sank – the sullen hatred for the English was more to the Welsh than honour and, though they would not change sides, they did not want to participate further, a defiant response to the slaughter perpetrated on them earlier.
The archers stood, stolid faces blank, one horned nock of their unstrung bows on the instep of a shoed foot to keep it out of the mud, the other clamped between two fists as they leaned gently, pointedly going nowhere.
Like all the other millinars, Bedale yelled and galloped back and forth, but it was Heydin Captain and all the other captains of a hundred who persuaded the reluctant Welsh of his command into the business, with a combination of scathing curses on their bravery and wheedling promises of being first at the plunder.
That lashed them to action and they moved forward, knowing that each step took them closer to the part that mattered – the plundering of the bodies when the field was won. Yet Addaf was aware of the low mumured growl of all the other Welsh, conscious of the burn of their eyes on his back.
It was not Bedale or even Heydin Captain – for all their shouting and waving – who did the serious work for Addaf and his fellows: that task belonged to Rhys, the Master. Mydr ap Mydfydd, they called him – Aim the Aimer – and with good reason.
He brought them to within a hundred paces, while the remaining knights circled aimlessly round the thicket of spears, waving weapons and trying to dart in now and then and stab with their lances – though most of them had thrown them down. They saw the Welsh archers come up and frantically spurred or staggered away from the schiltrons as if the men in them had plague; they did not want to be anywhere near the arrow storm when it fell, for they knew the Welsh would take as great a delight in killing English horse as the enemy.
There were no more enemy bowmen left, Addaf saw, peering through the two ranks ahead of him – all scattered and cut down. Yet someone snugged in the ring of spears had a crossbow and was shooting it at that portion of the line where Addaf stood; he did not like the angry whip of the bolts.
Aim the Aimer ignored them as if they were spots of light rain, strolling down the front ranks, his own bow raised, judging wind and distance from the red and green ribbon fluttering from the end. The Gascon crossbowmen, sweating and sullen at being left to do the work on their own, belly-hooked their bows to the latch, firing in slow, uncontrolled flurries and the Welsh curled a lip at them.
‘Nock.’
There was a rustle as the long arrows snugged into braided string.
‘Draw.’
The great creak of tensioned wood was like the opening of a heavy door.
‘Shoot.’
God ripped the sky as if it were cheap linen and the spear-ring began to shriek. The real killing had begun.
It was like a giant wasp byke someone had kicked, a mad, black, humming mass that fell on them. The cry went up when the arrows were loosed and Hal saw the man nearest him, a whey-faced boy, turn his face to the sky to try to find them.
‘Get yer head down, Tam ye arse,’ his neighbour hissed and the boy saw that everyone else was hunched up and staring at the ground, as if their eyes could dig holes in the mud and blood. Those with steel helmets hunched up as if to climb inside them, those with leather or none instinctively covering up with their arms; spears rattled and clacked like a forest of reeds in a high wind. Hal braced, feeling his flesh crawl, ruching up tight as if hardening against the impact.
The wasps buzzed and zipped. Tam thought it sounded like the gravel he had thrown against the wattle wall of Agnes’s place when he had been trying to entice her out into the night. Instead, he remembered, her da had stormed out and told him to bugger off…
He straightened, turned to Erchie to thank him for the good advice – Christ, yin of those in the eye would have ruined my good looks, he started to say. Then he saw the feathers perched incongruously in the side of Erchie’s neck, like some wee bird. When he realised it was all that could be seen of the yard of metal-tipped wood that had gone in the top of Erchie’s shoulder and was slanted down into his kneeling, still upright body, he gave a wail.
Hal saw the whey-faced boy weep and start to pat his neighbour as if he was an injured dog. He wanted to tell the boy that his friend wasn’t injured, was certainly dead for no man could survive what that arrow had done to his insides. But he thought the boy probably already knew all that.
There was no time to tell him much, for the second sleet was lancing on them and Hal saw three shafts spit the turf at his feet. In front, a man reeled with the deep spanging bell of a hit on a steel plackard and the arrow splintered sideways in ruin. Yet the man fell like a mauled ox, gasping like a fish from lungs collapsed by the shock of the impact. Even without penetrating, Hal saw, fighting the rising panic in him, their arrows are killing us; he was not alone in the thought.
‘They will shoot us to ruin,’ Wallace bellowed. ‘If we are here to allow it. Time we were away, lads. Step now, in time. Towards the woods. Now – step. Step. Step.’
Towards the woods. A short walk across a litter of dead horses, groaning men and the bloody dead. You could pick your way into the trees in five minutes, Hal thought, unless you were in an ungainly ring of men all trying to move in the same direction and keep some semblance of a shape. Thirty minutes if we are lucky, he thought mournfully – any longer and it will not matter much.
The wasps arrived again, a fierce, angry sting. Men shrieked and screamed and fell, clattering into their neighbour, to be pitched away with a curse. Slowly, like a huge dying slug, the schiltron lurched towards the trees,
