‘Up,’ said a voice, as mild as if lifting a bairn from a puddle. Hal leaned in the iron grasp, looked up into the blood and mud of Wallace’s face and had back a grin.
‘Aye til the fore,’ the Guardian said, then glanced back over his shoulder, to where the milling riders were slaughtering the slow. ‘Into the woods.’
No sensible knight risked a good warhorse by forcing it into a tangle of undergrowth and trees, where his vision, already no more than a narrow slit, was arrowed down to nothing by leaves and branches, so that it was impossible to resist the temptation to rip off the heavy constriction of helm. Vulnerable, slow, unable to use weight and power, a man in his right mind knows woods are not for heavy horse.
Hal knew, as soon as he heard the great crashing, that sanity had run from this part of the world, with a frightened look over one shoulder at the madness of God which rode in to replace it.
Hal, following the stained gold surcoat with the red lion snarling defiantly, turned to see a white camilis billowed, ripping apart on the snatching talons of tree and bush as Brian De Jay, Master of the Templars and righteous with the power of the Lord in him, closed with a triumphant roar on the running fox of Wallace, that offence to God.
Hal did not think. He turned, stepped to one side as the warhorse plunged, De Jay reeling in the saddle, half pulled out by the snag of the treacherous white robes. The German Method, Hal heard himself say aloud, though the voice did not seem to be his at all – then he half crouched and spun, putting all the weight in a backhand cut, the sword grasped in both hands.
It broke the warhorse’s hind leg with a crack like a snapping branch and the shriek of it falling was high and thin, piercing as any blade. Brian De Jay went out between the ears of it, smashing into the mulch and the briars, rolling over and over until he slammed into a tree with a sound like an acre of tin kettles falling off a cart.
Pulled off balance by his blow and the weariness of a hard day, Hal tipped sideways and fell his length, then started to scramble up. De Jay, struggling weakly, also started to rise, bellowing rage and pain out in bloody froth; then a shadow fell on him and he looked up.
‘Ye were seeking a wee word with me?’ Wallace asked mildly and De Jay tried a cut, so weak that Wallace only had to put his sword out for the Templar blade to ring a soft chime, then fall limply to the ground.
‘Aye, weel,’ Wallace said softly, ‘here I am, my wee lord. May God forgive ye for what ye have done to Templar honour this day – argue your case when ye see Him.’
The hand-and-a-half, clotted to the hilt already, came round in a vicious two-handed swipe that took De Jay badly.
It was meant to be a neck kill, a single-stroke beheading that men would later marvel at, but rage and fear and the black howl of defeat made Wallace poor with it; the blade slammed into the Templar Master’s expensive, new-fangled plate gorget and skittered upwards, taking the man in the jaw and carving through into the tree beyond, where it stuck.
With a pungent curse and a frown, Wallace put his foot up – he had taken off his boots, Hal noted dazedly – on De Jay’s chest and began to work the blade out, his toes flexing in the vomited mess flooding from the Master of Templars’ ruined face.
The forest crashed and a new rider, like the ghost of De Jay himself, came bounding out like a stag on the run. Hal, halfway to his feet, saw that Wallace was trapped, saw the Guardian let go of the wedged sword and whirl, fumbling for a dagger.
Brother John De Sawtrey, his white robes shredded and stained, his helmet and bascinet, maille coif and all flung away, whirled a little fluted mace in a circle and his purpled face under a thorn-crown of sweat-spiked tonsure was a vicious snarl.
He saw the fallen De Jay and howled at the outrage of it until his throat corded. His head was a storm of vengeance and he dug in his spurs; the warhorse’s great rump bunched and it squealed – Hal levered himself to his feet, knowing he was between Wallace and this charging knight.
He tried to brace, but his legs trembled and his arms felt as if they had two anvils on the end; De Sawtrey rocked as the great warhorse shot forward – four strides and it would plough Hal into the forest floor.
One stride. Hal saw small twigs and acorns bounce up off the ground with the powered weight of each hoof.
Two strides. Something flicked at the corner of Hal’s eye, but he could not turn his head from the sight of the warhorse’s snarl of yellow teeth, the angry pink flare of nostrils and the great, slow-motion rise of massive feet.
Three strides – something went between Hal and the great loom of beast and rider, whirring like startled bird. John De Sawtrey flung up one hand as if arrogantly dismissing the world and then vanished over the back of his cantled saddle.
The warhorse, veering, slammed a shoulder into Hal and there was a moment of flying, a great tempest of leaves and earth that left him breathless and sprawled. Gasping and desperate, he struggled to rise, to find his sword -MacDuff’s sword, he remembered wildly. He staggered and weaved, then a shape lurched into trembling view, the crossbow across one shoulder. Beyond, John De Sawtrey lay with the black leather fletches of a bolt perched like a crow in his eye.
‘Aye til the fore,’ said a familiar voice. Hal’s head wobbled on his neck as he looked up into Sim’s badger- beard grin and, beyond, other faces he knew, twisting and sliding like heat haze in the dappled, dying light of the forest – Ill Made Jock, Dirleton Will, Sore Davey, Mouse…
‘Aye til the fore,’ echoed Bangtail Hob from the filth of his face and stuck out a hand to haul Hal back to his feet. ‘Time we were not here.’
The fires were piled high, as if to ward off all the bewildered ghosts who wandered that field and, in the dark, the moans and cries of those still alive crawled on everyone’s skin.
Edward sat in his curule chair, sullen and droop-lidded, looking at the stained, bloody rag they had brought to lay at his feet. Red jupon with a white lion, someone had pointed out; you could see it if you squinted, Edward thought, but even this man’s own mother would not know him now.
‘The Wallace arms, I am told, your Grace,’ De Warenne declared proudly, his Saracen beard a quivering silver curve as he smiled.
‘The Ogre,’ Edward declared sarcastically, ‘seems to have shed the arms of Scotland which I was reliably informed he wore at the start of this affair – yellow-gold, my lord of Surrey, with a red lion rampant.’ De Warenne’s eye flickered a little.
‘Also,’ Edward went on savagely, ‘even allowing for the exaggerations of the fearful, this giant ogre Wallace seems to have diminished. I have a court caperer whose little bauble is taller than this.’
With a sudden, sullen twist, De Warenne signalled for the body to be removed and followed it, stiff with indignation. De Lacy leaned forward, his face bloody with torchlight.
‘Possibly a cousin, your grace,’ he said softly. ‘I heard there were three such in the field here. The search goes on…’
‘He is gone,’ Edward muttered and gnawed a nail. Gone. Wallace was gone, into the damned forests where had had come from, where he fought best.
There was a slew of bloody grass studded with Scots dead like winnowed stooks – and only two English deaths of note, Sir Brian De Jay and John de Sawtrey. The Master of England’s Templars and the Master of the Scottish Templars – there is a harsh justice in that, Edward thought, chilled by the presence of the Hand of God.
He did not bother with the tally of lesser lights, dead Welsh, Gascons and foot, for they were mainly men of little or no account – but the victory he’d had here was no more than possession of a blood-slimed field near Callendar.
Wallace was gone. Nothing had been resolved.
Chapter Thirteen
Herdmanston
Feast of St Merinus, September 1297
