And then, with the sounding of two horn calls, the line swept forward again, like a great boar hunt.
A mile behind them, the rest of the army lurched into motion.
The van pressed forward into the woods. Led by the king, in person.
Bill Redmede – Jack of the Jacks – saw the armoured figures coming on foot, armoured cap a pied, and the bitterness in his heart was enough to melt steel.
So much for Thorn and his contempt for men.
Jack turned to his lieutenant – Nat Tyler, the Jack of the Albin Plain. ‘Bastard aristos have a spy, brother.’
Tyler watched the inexorable approach of the armoured men. ‘And we’re in deep brush.’
‘Thorn said they’d be mounted on the road,’ Jack said. ‘Fuck!’
‘Let’s loose and get gone,’ Tyler said.
‘This is our day!’ Jack argued. ‘Today we kill the king!’
Seventy yards away, the king stood virtually alone. He stood in a shaft of light in the deep forest, and he raised his arms – he had a four-foot sword in one hand and a sparkling buckler in the other.
Redmede drew his great bow and, suiting thought to deed, loosed.
Beside him, Nat Tyler’s bow twanged deep, the harp of death.
All along the line, Jacks rose from ambush and loosed at the king.
The king’s figure twinkled as he pivoted on his back heel and spun, his buckler sweeping over his head, his sword scything through the first fall of arrows.
All around him, men-at-arms broke into a dead run, charging the line of archers.
The king stood his ground – stepped and swung, stepped, cut, and then ran forward.
‘Good Christ,’ Jack muttered. Not a single arrow had gone home. ‘Too far – too damned far!’
But the Jacks were robbers and partisans, not battlefield men, and they turned and ran.
A hundred paces to the rear, the line of Jacks steadied. Nat Tyler got them into a line at the edge of a meadow of flowers a third of a mile long and two hundred yards deep – an ancient beaver meadow, crisscrossed by a stream. Bill led them over the stream, emerging wet to the waist, and they formed a new line on the far side.
‘Better,’ Nat Tyler said with a grim smile.
The men-at-arms must have paused to drink water and rest. The sun was much higher when they came – and they came all together. Forward in a line. This time the captain yelled at them to pick their targets and leave the king to the master archers, and the shafts flew thick and heavy over open ground.
He could no longer cut every arrow in the air, and heavy shafts rang off his buckler, his helmet – he was leaning forward like a man walking into a storm, but his heart was singing, because this was a great deed of arms. He laughed, and ran faster.
The stream opened under his feet and he fell – straight down the banks and into a thigh deep pool.
Two peasants stepped to the edge of the pool and loosed arrows at him from a few feet away.
Gaston saw the charge falter and blew his horn. Men were falling into something – a line of pits, a hidden trench-
An arrow rang from his breastplate, denting it deeply, and then he had an armoured fist on the king, and he pulled him straight out of the muddy pool in one long pull. By his side his squire, angered, threw his short spear across the stream and it struck – more by luck than skill – in the torso of a peasant, who folded over it and screamed. And the king got his feet under him and ran straight at the beaver dam – the only clear bridge over the stream.
Gaston followed him, and every man-at-arms nearby followed, too. The dam was half in and half out the water – far from solid, just an animal’s hasty assemblage of downed branches and rotten wood. But the king seemed to skim across it, even as Gaston’s right leg went into water as cold as ice – and he lost his balance, flailed, almost lost his sword and an arrow slammed into his helmet.
The king ran on, across the uneven top of the dam. The first half ran to a rocky island, and then the dam was even worse, the centre of its span under water, and yet the king ran across it, his feet kicking up spray in a brilliant display of balance – straight across the dam into the archers pouring shafts at him, and one got past his buckler to bury itself in his shoulder by the pauldron, and another rang off his helmet, and then he was among them, and his sword moved faster than a dragonfly on a summer’s evening. Gaston was struggling to catch him, breathing like a horse at the end of a long run, soaked, his left leg trapped in mud for a moment and then Gaston was with the king, through the line of archers, and the horns were playing the
He followed the king up the rise to the ridge that dominated the meadow, and more and more men-at-arms crossed behind them – and far off to the left, more men-at-arms had crossed the narrow footbridge on the road, and now the whole line of peasant archers was compromised, and they ran again.
But even as they turned to run, the wyverns struck.
Gaston saw the first one – saw the flicker of its shadow, and looked up in stunned unbelief, even as the wave of its terror struck him and the Alban knights with him. The Albans flowed through the palpable fear – and he refused to let himself pause, although for a moment it was so intense he couldn’t breathe – they surged forward even as the carthorse-sized monster killed a dozen of their number in a single flurry of talons and beak.
There were three of the things.
That was all Gaston could comprehend – that, and that the king was like a fiend, leaping forward at the first wyvern, and his sword sliced a wing through at the root and his back cut flayed a sword’s length of scales from the thing’s neck, and it whirled to face him but he was gone, under the flailing neck and his blade went up into its belly – ripped the thing open from anus to breastbone, and was gone again as its intestines fell free.
Gaston followed him to the second one, where it crushed the Bishop of Lorica to the ground with one blow and ripped his squire’s head from his trunk with its beaked head. Gaston got his spear up, and spiked the head – lost his balance on the uneven ground, broken with the spiked branches the beavers had left – stumbled, and lost his spear, whirled and drew his sword as the head, trailing his spear, went for him.
He cut into its snout with every muscle in his body.
Its head knocked him flat.
The head reared above him, with his spear
The surviving knights roared their approval and Gaston got slowly to his feet, drenched by the hot blood of the thing, and dug in its jaw for his sword – he had to kick it off his blade.
The third wyvern was already airborne, leaving a trail of broken knights behind it, but after leaping into the air, he pivoted and collapsed on the king, bearing him to the ground.
Every knight still alive in the meadow fell on the wyvern, and blows rained on it like a steel hail – pieces of meat flew free like dust rises from the first fall of rain.
The wyvern hunched and tried to rise again into the air, but Gaston slammed his spearhead into its neck, and a few feet away, Ser Alcaeus hit the thing with a maul and staggered it. The king struggled from beneath it, staggered to his feet, and rammed his sword to the hilt in its guts before falling to his knees.
The wyvern screamed.
The king fell to the ground, his golden armour all besmirched with the blood of three mighty foes.
Ser Alcaeus swung his maul up over his head, screamed his defiance, and slammed the lead head into the wyvern’s skull, and the beast crumpled atop the king.
A dozen gauntleted hands scrambled to pull the dead thing off the king, even as trumpets sounded behind them and the mounted chivalry emerged from the tree line.
Gaston ran to the king. He got the king’s head on his knee and opened his faceplate.
His mad cousin’s eyes met his.
‘Am I not the greatest knight in the world!’ he roared. ‘And no craven, to basely let my liege be slain!’
His eyes flickered. ‘Get the arrow out of my chest and bandage me tight,’ he said. ‘This is my battle!’ And then the light went out of his eyes.
Gaston held his cousin tight while a pair of squires tried to staunch the flow of blood, stripping his breastplate and his haubergeon. The remnants of the vanguard pressed on.
‘He demanded it, this morning,’ said a voice behind Gaston, and suddenly the squires were bowing.
The King of Alba stood there, in Jean de Vrailly’s cote armour.
