weather and the exhortations of his granddaughter and her new husband that he remain with them at least until Candlemas. He went slowly towards the wain where Gervase’s squire was saddling up the brown remount.
‘You could always sit within, my lord,’ the young knight said, indicating the cart with its load of travelling chests and supplies pressed on him by Adam and Heulwen.
‘The day I cannot straddle a horse and take to one of those contraptions will be the day of my funeral,’ Miles said grumpily. Yes, he was feeling his years, but was not yet prepared to admit defeat.
He set his foot in the long stirrup and allowed the squire to boost him into the saddle; suppressing a grimace of pain, he gathered up the reins. Expression blank, Gervase signalled to the wain driver and turned to remount his own destrier, but paused half-way into the saddle, his eyes widening in shock.
‘Ware arms, the Welsh!’ he cried, his voice whiplashing the cold air.
Miles’s escort closed around him. He fumbled with his shield strap, swearing at the clumsiness of his gnarled, frozen fingers.
The Welsh wasted no time on the niceties of battle. Arrows were the means of destruction, arrows aimed at the Norman destriers to bring them down. A shaft struck one of the geldings harnessed to the wain, but obliquely in the rump, causing pain but little serious damage. The horse threw up its head and, with a shrill whinny, tried to bolt. The driver cursed and strove to control its panic, but the horse was insensible to all save the instinct to escape from danger and the pain. Another arrow hit the driver, pinning his arm to the structure of the wain. He shrieked, and the reins were torn from his grip by the jerking of the injured horse. It shied into its companion, which, terrified by the lack of a guiding hand and the stench of fear and blood, skittered sideways and tried to bolt.
Miles saw it coming, but could do nothing about it. He was aware from the corner of his eye of Gervase’s squire leaping to try and grab the reins, a warning shout tearing hoarsely from his throat, his eyes wide and appalled. As if in slow motion the baggage wain swayed and rocked like a drunkard caught out after curfew, and as the horses plunged and strained and kicked, it lurched and tipped over on its side, smashing its wooden-base frame into jagged spars, wantonly hurling its contents forth like tossed rags.
The horses threshed free and with harnesses trailing bolted into the midst of the panic. A flying sliver of wood shot into the eye of Miles’s stallion, and with a scream of agony it reared, forehooves pawing the sky. Miles tried to cling on to the reins and pommel, but a lifetime separated his reflexes from Renard’s and he was flung from the saddle, landing hard against the shattered carcass of the wain.
Outnumbered and outmanoeuvred, it was quickly and bloodily over for the Normans. The Welsh leader, big and broad, with the legacy of the Irish Norse revealed in his sturdy bones and bright blue eyes, nudged his horse around a mailed corpse and drew rein before the smashed ruins of the wain where a dead youth, his neck broken, sprawled close to the stallion’s hooves. He pressed his knees and let the horse pick its way delicately around the body to the other side of the wain. For a moment he was filled with a sickening disappointment, thinking that his scheme had come to nothing, but then the man on the ground moved feebly and groaned.
Davydd ap Tewdr dismounted and bent beside the old man to examine him with the swift thoroughness of one accustomed to doing battle on the run and dealing with its casualties. ‘Naught save cracked ribs and bruising,’ he announced with relief in which excitement trembled, ‘but he’s bruised and badly shaken. Twm, bring a blanket. We’ve got to coddle him as tenderly as one of our own until we can exchange him for Rhodri.’
Adam couched the lance beneath his arm, held the shield well in to his left side leaving no gap, clapped his heels into the stallion’s belly and shouted, ‘Hah!’
Vaillantif leaped from his hocks like an arrow from an arbalester’s wound bow and sped down the tilt yard. Adam’s lance struck the quintain a solid blow. He ducked as the sandbag flung round and parted the air over his crouched frame. He turned Vaillantif in a compact swirl of hooves and repeated the move with an effortless liquidity that had the spectators envying him his accomplished grace, and the young Welsh hostage viewing his own imminent attempt at the quintain with trepidation.
Adam lit down from the saddle with only the slightest hint of stiffness to mar his movement and suggest a recently healed wound. Walking Vaillantif over to the youth, he handed the lance up to him. ‘Remember to keep your head down, your shield in tight, and don’t sit up too soon afterwards or you’ll get your skull well and truly rattled.’
‘And I aim for that red triangle in the centre?’ Rhodri sighted down the tilt, voice matter-of-fact, mouth nonchalant, eyes dubious in the extreme.
‘That’s right.’ The corners of Adam’s eyes crinkled for a moment before he schooled his expression to a teacher’s benign neutrality. ‘Not just the red triangle, but the dead centre of it, your enemy’s heart. Good fortune.’ He slapped the borrowed black destrier’s glossy shoulder and stepped back.
Beside Adam, Heulwen paused on her way back from the somewhat neglected plesaunce where she had been planning some new herb beds. Linking her arm through his, she felt the small, unseen ripple of laughter make his body tremble.
‘What’s amusing you?’ she demanded.
The fact that she had spoken to him gave him the excuse he needed to break into an open grin. ‘I know what’s coming next.’
‘What?’ She watched the young man’s throat move as he brought up the lance.
‘It takes months and months of practice at the quintain to avoid that sandbag. The beginners can’t divide their attention between aiming and ducking. They can’t co-ordinate it all. He’s in for a bruised back at the very least. Most likely he’ll end up on the ground.’
‘But I was watching you. It looked so easy!’
He chuckled. ‘It is when you know how, but you learn the hard way, believe me.’
‘As in all things,’ she said with a small, almost sad sigh, and fell silent to watch Rhodri ap Tewdr gallop down the tilt to a rendezvous with his inevitable fate.
More by luck than judgement, he almost succeeded in being one of the elite few to cheat the sandbag on their first occasion — nearly, but not near enough. The spear tipped the target just slightly off centre, its impact unbalancing him, so he was a fraction too slow when he ducked and the sandbag fetched him a buffet across the back of the neck that swiped him out of the saddle and jarred him to the ground.
The black destrier jogged to a halt, and after one curious look over its shoulder, bent to nose at a tuft of grass. A grinning Austin ran out to catch the bridle.
‘Not bad,’ Adam admitted judiciously as he bent over the groaning, bruised young man. ‘We’ll have you jousting in Paris yet.’ He took the reins from Austin and enquired with the faintest hint of challenge, ‘Want to try again?’
The Welsh youth threw him a burning glance, then turned aside to spit out a mouthful of bloody saliva. ‘Go to hell!’ he snarled, but struggled unsteadily to his feet. He caught his horse and pulled himself into the saddle, and prepared to attack the quintain once more.
‘Bravo, lad,’ Adam murmured, watching with calculating eyes the strike, the mistimed duck and the way he strove to stay aboard his mount before finally conceding defeat and sprawling on the tilt yard floor, the last of the wind driven from his lungs.
Adam collected horse and spear and brought them back to him. Rhodri braced himself on his elbows, retching and fighting for air, wasted some of it on cursing Adam, but nevertheless got doggedly back on the horse as soon as his body was capable of obeying his will.
Rhodri turned the stallion in a quarter-circle and galloped not at the quintain, but straight at Adam, the lance levelled and deadly. Heulwen screamed. Adam’s whole body tensed to move faster than he had ever done in his life if he had misjudged his man. At the last moment, the spear tip changed direction and the horse swerved. A string of foam globbed Adam’s gambeson. He smelt the strong odour of stallion sweat and was swept by hot breath as the destrier passed within a fraction of trampling him down.
‘Jesu God!’ Heulwen cried furiously. ‘He might have killed you!’
‘I don’t think so.’ Adam turned to where two of the watching knights had seized Rhodri’s horse and were dragging him out of the saddle, pinning his arms and ramming them behind his back.
‘All right, Alun, leave him be.’ Adam gestured.
They let him go, but almost as roughly as they had seized him. The young man shook himself like a dog and rubbed one of his bruised arms. Blood smeared and stained his chin. His lower lip was swollen and dark. ‘How did
