Knights of the Hawk

despite the narrowness of the bridge.

‘Wait!’ I bellowed. ‘Hold position!’

‘Wait!’ Eudo repeated, and Wace behind him, and the next man, and the next, and I only hoped that our warnings were heeded. Of course those knights were impatient, as I was, to slake their thirst for enemy blood, but many would die if they didn’t keep to their ranks.

‘What do we do?’ Robert asked me, his brow furrowed, his eyes desperate. ‘Do we go on?’

‘We have to, lord,’ I said. ‘We can’t turn back now.’

‘But if the boat-bridge isn’t secure-’

‘If we delay any longer here, it won’t matter. We’ll be too late; the rebels will break our spearmen and then cut the pontoons loose, or burn them, and we’ll have no way of reaching the shore. We have to go now, and trust that the bridge will be ready in time. If we don’t, all our efforts will have been for nothing. It’s now or not at all, lord.’

Robert didn’t look sure. I glanced over my shoulder, back along the column, and my gaze settled upon the golden lion upon a scarlet field, the age-old symbol of the Norman dukes, flying proudly in the rising wind. King Guillaume himself had given us this responsibility. If we refused it at this late hour our names would be forever tarnished. We would have cost him his best chance of capturing Elyg and wreaking his revenge upon the rebels who defied him. He would strip us of our lands and the few riches we had to our names, cast us into the deepest, darkest dungeon he could find and leave us there to rot. We could not fail him. Not now.

My heartbeat resounded through my entire body, and I could hear the blood pounding in my skull. My fingers tightened around my shield-straps in one hand and my lance-haft in the other.

And I knew what I had to do. If Robert refused to make the decision, then I would make it for him.

‘With me,’ I cried, raising my weapon aloft so that the steel glimmered in the light of dawn. ‘For Normandy!’

I dug my spurs into Fyrheard’s flank and he reared up, teetering on his hind hooves for a moment, before falling back to earth.

‘Tancred-’ I heard Robert shout, and heard, too, the desperation in his voice, but then his words were drowned out by the cheer that rose up as one thousand voices together shouted out. A bolt of confidence surged through me, and as Fyrheard broke into a canter I found my limbs filled with fresh vigour, my mind with fresh purpose. I had no need to look behind to make sure that the rest of our host was behind me, for I could hear it in the thunder of hooves and the whooping as men revelled in the battle-joy.

A flock of wading birds heard our approach and rose all at once with a clatter of wings and a chorus of alarmed shrieks. I kept a firm hand on Fyrheard’s reins, trusting in his sure-footedness to keep us both alive. The mud swirled and sucked at the foot of the earthen banks, and the marsh-waters lapped at the posts and revetments. A short distance to our right ran the course of the original causeway, the one that had collapsed all those weeks ago. I recognised it not just from the ruined timbers that littered the mud all about, but also from the scores of corpses of horses and men that had been left there to rot without Christian burial, their mail and helmets brown with rust, their flesh blackened and swollen, with what remained of their innards spilling out. They stared unseeing from empty eye sockets, their jaws fixed open as if even in death they were still crying out. Yellowed bone protruded where carrion beasts had picked away the skin and sinew. The stench of their rotting flesh filled my nose, more powerful than anything I had known, and I fought the urge to retch.

I tore my eyes away, focusing on the way ahead and the rebels tumbling in their hundreds down towards the shore. A ragged mass of spears and scythes and hayforks and the long English knives they called seaxes, they charged upon the Norman battle-line, until at last there came a crash like thunder as limewood boards and steel bosses met, and then men on both sides were screaming, shouting, falling, dying. Thus the grim work of the shield-wall began. Behind the protection of their countrymen, the bridge-workers were still labouring to manoeuvre the final few pontoons into place, lashing them together with ropes and anchoring them to the marsh-bottom with stone weights attached to chains, but they did not have much time, for I saw even now that the enemy foot-warriors outnumbered our own, and already it seemed they were forcing them back towards the marsh.

‘On!’ I shouted above the din, trusting that Robert and Pons and Serlo and all the others were with me as I set out across the first of the pontoons, leaving the earthen dykes behind me. Iron clattered upon oak and I felt the planking bob beneath Fyrheard’s hooves, not by much, but enough to send a shiver of doubt through me. ‘On,’ I cried, trying to put those fears from my mind. ‘On, on!’

That was when I heard Robert shouting.

‘It’s too short,’ he cried. ‘The bridge is too short!’

For a moment I didn’t understand what he was trying to tell me, but as I stared at the shore and those Englishmen charging towards us, suddenly sickness gripped my stomach.

He was right.

The line of pontoons did not quite stretch all the way to the Isle’s shore, but came to an end around thirty or forty paces short, in the shallows rather than on dry land. Perhaps the recent rains had swelled the marsh-waters more than the king’s engineers had expected, or else the current had taken one or more of those floating platforms and carried them downstream. I didn’t know, and it hardly mattered. To reach the shore we would now have to fight our way through water that I reckoned would reach up to our mounts’ knees, if not even higher.

‘Keep going,’ I yelled. ‘We can make it!’

I sounded more confident than in truth I felt, but only because I knew we had no choice. Everything depended on us. We couldn’t give up now.

Barely three hundred paces ahead, the Norman shield-wall was beginning to break as the English ran amongst them, driving a wedge into their ranks, surging forward with shining blade-edges raised.

‘Faster!’ I yelled, knowing that if the enemy managed to rout our spearmen, they could hold the shore against us and drive us back into the marsh. With that in mind I spurred Fyrheard from a trot into a canter, which was as fast as I dared ride along those narrow platforms. ‘For Normandy!’

Indeed one flank of the Norman shield-wall had already collapsed, and a group of rebels perhaps two score strong was now racing through the shallows towards the pontoons with axes in hand, having spotted our approach and recognised the danger.

‘Faster!’ I repeated. ‘Ride harder!’

The bridge shook beneath the weight of the charge, and the timbers creaked. At any moment, I thought, they would give way, splinters would fly, and we would all, knights and banner-bearers, destriers and palfreys, be plunged into the fen. Surely it could not fail now, not when we were so close. Fewer than one hundred paces stood between us and the Isle. No Frenchman had managed to come so close in three months on this campaign.

Let the bridge hold, I prayed. Let it hold.

I clenched my teeth. Reed-banks and gold-glistening meres flew past on both sides. The thunder of iron upon timber filled my ears as Fyrheard’s hooves thudded in rapid rhythm upon the oak planking, so loud that I could hear nothing else. Not the shouts of the enemy or my companions. Not the screams of the dying or the clash and scrape of steel on steel up ahead, or the jangle of my mail, or the blood pounding in my skull, or the clatter of the chains anchoring the pontoons, or the creaking of timbers, or the whistle of arrows being loosed by the bowmen in the punts out on the marsh. Only the unrelenting thunder reverberating through my skull.

I was dimly aware of those two score rebels rushing to meet us, crashing thigh-deep through the marsh- waters with steel in hand and the promise of death in their eyes. My attention was fixed upon the bridge’s end, which was growing nearer with every stride. Like any good destrier, Fyrheard was trained to water, so I didn’t expect him to falter or to panic, but nevertheless I felt my stomach lurch and my breath catch in my chest as we galloped along the last pontoon, the final dozen strides, and I saw the marshes looming. My fingers tightened around the haft of my lance and the straps of my shield-

As Fyrheard leapt.

All fell silent. For the briefest moment I had the sensation that we were flying. Beneath us was only air, but not for long, before Fyrheard’s hooves came down, and then suddenly there was water and mud all around. Showers of spray drenched my shoes and my braies and soaked through my mail to plaster my tunic against my arms and chest. Fyrheard was crashing on through the shallows, the marsh reaching as high as his forearm, but he didn’t seem to mind. On my flanks now were Serlo and Robert, and I wondered what had happened to the