Hoodsman: Hunting Kings

by Smith, Skye

  The Sussex horseman rode in silence, perhaps because he had ridden the same road twice today, at a gallop, and was too tired to do other than ride. Finally, after many miles, the messenger looked back over his shoulder at him to yell that the fork where the roads joined again was only another mile ahead. That was the moment that the messenger fell from his saddle.

  A dozen archers had stepped out onto the road and loosed a dozen arrows at them both. The messenger was in the lead so both he and his horse went down under that first volley. Raynar pushed and kicked his mare to a gallop and charged directly at the line of archers, who were all frantically nocking their next arrows. They tripped and stumbled backwards to get out of his way, and then he was by.

  "Run you bitch" Raynar complained to the mare "Run, else we'll both have arrows sticking out of our bung holes." As the mare ran her heart out, he searched the bushes for more archers, until he realized that he should be searching instead for a place to turn off this deadly highway.

  Now that he was around a corner and out of sight of the archers, he yanked hard on the reins to slow the mare, and then yanked again to turn her south onto a track that was nothing more than a game trail. The good thing about game trails is that they usually lead to water, and this horse would die beneath him if she didn't have some water soon. The branches were low over the trail so he leaped off the horse and led her.

  He had felt the force of some arrows hitting his back. Two arrows had struck him, but they had been slowed by the leather and then snagged by the felting of his brynja. The worst they had done was scratch him when he reached around to pull them out. "Toy bows, and light arrows" thought Raynar as he looked at the arrows. "A good thing for me."

  Hereward, the commander of Edwin's skirmishers, had just saved his life and he didn't even know it. This because at Hereward's insistence, Raynar was wearing a Norse brynja. A brynja was a seaman’s battle jerkin made from felted sheepskin and leather straps from which hung two inch rings of metal. Slashing blades would glance off the rings. Points would be slowed by the leather and trapped by the felting. The felted wool would keep a seaman warm in wet weather, but it would also float him for a good while if he fell overboard.

  A fortnight ago they had been ordered to leave Stamford's battlefield where the Norse army had been slaughtered. Hereward had his skirmishers search the battlefield for Byzantine bows, and their matching armour piercing arrows. Some of the mercenaries working for the Norse had come with the King of Norway from Constantinople, and the weapons those men carried were precious prizes. They had found only ten such compound bows with the Norse, and only two handfuls of undamaged arrows.

  Next Hereward had them unload a scavenger cart filled with gory and blooded Norse brynjas, and they had each selected one for themselves. They washed the gore out of them, and then wore them fleece side out so they would dry as they marched south. Raynar remembered Hereward's warning that cold winds are not long away, and that they would be glad of them soon. Raynar smiled and said aloud, "Bless you Hereward, I am glad of mine already" as he stuffed the enemy's spent arrows in with his own.

  The mare could barely keep up a walk through this thick bush on this narrow trail. Raynar could hear the sounds of battle from somewhere ahead. Damnation, he had ridden this horse to death to get the message from Earl Edwin to King Harold, but he was too late. The battle had already begun.

  "What am I doing here? I don't belong here," he mumbled to himself for the tenth time. Well he was stuck here now until the battle was finished. It would be wiser to hide than to risk being found by those archers.

  The horse was foaming and breathing with an ugly rasp and she pulled at him to stop him as she pawed the trail and sucked up some murky water. He tied her there and then walked stealthily towards the sound of battle. At the edge of the woods he heard voices so he dropped to the ground and rolled beneath some ivy, and then crawled. Moments later he was staring out between a dozen unarmoured legs.

  The battlefield was somewhere on the other side of the legs, but he could see nothing but tall grass. "Perhaps they are the king's men," he thought so he tuned his ear to listen to the voices, but it was a language unknown to him. "Normans" he thought "Now what?"

  Raynar snapped himself out of his thoughts. The unarmoured legs in front of him still had not moved. He backed away from them, half expecting a sword through the neck at any moment. Well at least he had found the king. The problem was that he was on the wrong side of the battle to reach him. Hopefully the other messengers got through.

  He moved cautiously back to the mare. She was in a bad way, and he feared her rasping cough would bring the Normans. He led her back the way they had come, to a low dip in the track. It was a small gully and to the east the bushes seemed to be greener than those all around them. He pulled her off the track and then east along the gully and eventually the mare stopped him by locking her front legs. There was water oozing out from under a fallen log.

  Raynar cleared the moss out of the way, and bent to the water, and drank from his hands. She kept pushing him with her nose as if to say "hurry up". Once he had tied the horse to a bush with enough slack that she could wet her lips in the trickle, then he unloaded his gear. They may find and take his horse, but he did not want to be without his gear.

  He shouldered his gear and walked further along the gulley. Eventually he found a spot that would be easy to find again, even if it were dark, and stashed everything he was carrying except for his Byzantine bow and his quiver of arrows and his short sword. "If he was caught by the Normans," his thinking went, "could he play act the part of a Norseman or some other ally? Would a Norman be able to distinguish between English and Norse?" He laughed silently at his own foolishness. If he did not even know their word for Norse, how could he even explain it to them.

  He walked from his hide directly towards the sounds of battle, dropped to his knees when he saw the woods thinning, and crept up to a marshy clearing. There were no legs at this spot. He stilled his breath and listened for any sounds of men around him.

  There was too much battle noise to hear soft sounds, so he kneeled up, slowly, and peered between the leaves. He was on the western edge of the battlefield. The battlefield was a damp meadow between two hills and the English army was defending the larger of the hills to the north. The highway ran down the hill through their lines and then curved towards the south. That must be the highway from London to Hastings.

  He was less than four hundred paces from the closest English shieldwall, their west wing. The line of trees he was in would take him a little closer, so he crawled away from the clearing and then north along the tree line. When he was as close as he could get to the west end of the English shield wall, he sat and looked and wondered what to do.

  * * * * *

  * * * * *

  THE HOODSMAN - Hunting Kings by Skye Smith

  Chapter 3 - The Battle of Hastings Road, E.Sussex in October 1066

  Damn, there was still three hundred paces of open land between him and the safety of the English army. Well, not really open, as he was facing the backs of a row of mounted knights, who were facing the backs of a row of light infantry, who were facing the backs of a row of archers who were facing a row of dead and dying horses.

  Young Raynar had to move some more leaves and stare hard to make sure of that last row, but that was what it was. A mound of dead horses ran all along the front of the English shieldwall. He focused his eyes again at the shieldwall. The men behind the shieldwall were at ease awaiting the next attack. The spear heads were all pointed up, at rest.

  And yet there seemed to be pikes still pointed forward at an angle from the ground. The answer came to him when two shieldmen swapped places in the wall. The pike between them remained. The end of it must be buried in the ground. He looked again. There was no metal spearhead on it. It was a sapling sharpened into a stake. The men's shieldwall was so straight because it ran along a straight row of sharpened stakes. No wonder there was a wall of horsemeat.

/>   He looked along the Norman lines to the southeast. There were two other battalions facing the English shieldwall. The center battalion was the largest, because behind it were the reserves, and above the reserves flew a host of banners that marked the leaders. They had the same four rows, cavalry, infantry, archers, dead horses; with the archers very close to the horsewall.

  Of course, the Norman bows. They were not powerful bows. His Welsh friends in the Peaks would carve better bows for their children. The arrows had no range. The archers had to be close. He thought he heard a sound and pulled back into the bush. By the time he was brave enough to look again, the Normans were regrouping for another attack, but it was obvious from the amount of horsemeat that they were losing this battle.

  Why were the Norman archers standing in the open with no shieldmen to protect them? They were sitting ducks for English archers. There was only one logical answer. The English had no archers, and the Normans had no shieldmen.

  The archers that Raynar had been with at the battle at Stamford would have decimated the Norman archers at that range. He had watched English archers and shieldmen work together at Stamford. The archers stood behind and protected by the shield wall, and would either shoot between the shields or over them. He had even seen the men in the wall duck down all at once, which gave all the archers a clear shot forward.

  Fool, of course there were no English archers. King Harold had been in York with his elite warriors when the message reached him that the Normans had landed. He gave the order for every warrior of note to mount any horse they could find and race south back to London. They took almost every horse. There were no horses left for the likes of mere archers.

  Over there, facing the Normans, were the best of the warriors from the entire kingdom, as well as every southern noble fit to fight, and the local Sussex fyrdmen, but with them was not a single one of the seasoned archers that had faced the Norse in Yorkshire. Not yet. Not until Edwin got here.

  Once the king and the warriors had left York with all the horses, Edwin was in charge of the Norse prisoners, and the light infantry and archers from both English armies. Whereas the king's force raced here on horseback, Edwin's forces had to walk. He felt especially foolish taking so long to figure this all out, because he had just spent two weeks walking south with them.

  He watched while hundreds of Norman archers with 'toy bows' stood in the open at short range and volley by volley, wasted thousands of 'toy' arrows. All they were hitting were the shields of the shieldwall. The English simply hid from each volley. Even shooting over the shieldwall at the mass of fyrdmen behind the shieldmen was a waste of arrows, because those arrows flew too far up the hill and fell on empty hillside.

  He could see the effects of the frustration of the Sussex fyrdmen at not being able to attack the archers. A few of them were slinging stones and lead shot at the archers. Whenever the archers came too close they were pelted by the fyrdmen using rocks and short spears and rock hammers and anything else they could chuck at them over the shieldwall.

  Eventually there was a lull, and Raynar watched the fyrdmen dive out between shields to collect back their missiles and some even ran forward and again threw them at the archers. It was a dangerous game to play out in the open without wearing armour and with so much cavalry about, but they were so frustrated they were doing it anyway.

  * * * * *

  He waited about an hour and then watched while the shieldmen repelled yet another cavalry attack. Each cavalry man was aiming a long lance at the center of a shield in hopes of pushing that shieldman backwards to create a hole in the wall. If his giant horse could make a hole then it could turn and trample and widen the new hole in the wall. It was a good plan but it wasn't working against the English shieldmen near Raynar, and it didn't seem to be working anywhere else along the wall either.

  Each charging horse slowed when it came to the wall of dead horses, and refused to jump, or was too heavy to jump, and would slowly lurch through the mass of meat with much coaxing and lashing by the rider. By the time a cavalryman reached the wall he was no longer at charging speed, so the lance and the enormous horse were missing much of their awesome power. The wall was bristling with pikes and spears. The shieldmen were using their weight to brace the shields, while the fyrdmen were using pikes and spears and even pitchforks to jab out between the shields at the faces of the horses.

  Many of the shieldmen were using shorter jabbing spears rather than their normal long handled battle axes. The pikemen were working hard at skewering the horses while others were dragging the riders from their mounts with pole axes, while shieldmen hacked at the necks of the horses with swords or battle axes. As soon as the riders hit the ground they seemed to surrender. That made sense for they would be winded or wounded from the fall, and would not be allowed to stand, and were surrounded by English blades.

  The effect of this defense was that the next cavalry man couldn't make use of any hole made by the horse in front of him, because that horse was still in his way and in trouble. A horn blared, and the cavalry stopped charging, and retreated. Those horses that were not able to retreat were quickly finished off by the English.

  Gangs of fyrdmen then dragged the heavy bodies of the dead horses forward away from the shieldwall. That explained the wall of horsemeat in front of the English line. Meanwhile the riders who had surrendered were pushed further behind the lines of warriors and led up the hill to where there seemed to be a crowd of other prisoners, sitting without their armour or weapons. The armour and weapons must have been stripped from them and left with the English warriors behind the shield wall in case they were of use to anyone.

  He thought back on what he had just seen. Even the few cavalry horses that had not shied from mound of steaming horse flesh, and had actually arrived at the shield wall at speed, had little effect. The English shieldmen were ready for them, and simply stepped sideways to form a funnel that led to one of the planted stakes, and the horse had two choices, stop quickly, or skewer himself. This left the rider trapped between four to six armed men.

  Unable to turn the horse in the narrow space, the rider had to back it out. A slow process that was causing the death of many riders. The only riders who surrendered and lived, were the ones that fell out of their saddles. It was as if it were a matter of honor that a rider would not surrender so long as he was mounted.

  "Bugger the message" Raynar thought to himself. "It is too late. Besides, the others must have gotten through." He lay down on the cool earth, and tried not to fall into the heavy sleep of exhaustion. There was nothing he could do but wait. Hour after hour. Each time there was a charge the sounds around him changed. The steady hum of so many men together on one field was dimmed by the thunder of hooves. Each time he would crawl forward to watch the battle.

  William was losing. His cavalry was useless against the combination of shieldwall and planted stakes and fyrdmen with pikes. They should have left the giant horses in Normandy to pull the carts. This was not all good news however, for although William was losing, Harold was not winning. The cavalry moved so quickly that Harold's heavily armoured warriors could not attack them. The only way that the English could win, was for the Normans to lose by keeping up these costly cavalry charges.

  How could any sane man keep ordering these charges. How could anyone be so callous to the suffering of his men and their animals. He supposed that a general must be that callous during a battle, and only gave it any thought afterwards, after the battle was won or lost. How could a general live with the guilt when it was all over, when they saw the carnage that they had caused, and later, when they saw the widows and the orphans that it had created. It depressed him just thinking about it.

  This battle was complete madness and it seemed like it would continue to be madness without end unless Duke William stopped ordering the charges, and instead ordered his army to withdraw.

  * * * * *

  The very next charge went very badly for the Normans and Raynar was elated. Maybe this wou
ld be enough to force Duke William to withdraw. The wing of the Norman army closest to him was in full retreat. Archers, infantry, cavalry all running away from English fyrdmen who had broken from the west wing of the English wall in hot pursuit, armed with spears and pikes.

  The Norman archers were running to the cover of the very trees where Raynar was hiding. A group of them slid under the bushes beside him, and then another group on the other side. The Norman archers did not look that different from himself. If they didn't look closely at Raynar's powerful bow or his Norse brynja, he would not be taken for the enemy. If he kept his mouth shut, he should be safe enough hiding with them.

  Most of them must have been farm boys, because that was how they were dressed and how they looked. All had a bow, a quiver, and a dagger, but few had helmets, and fewer still had mail, and none had swords or pikes.

  He stayed right where he was and pretended that he had been part of their retreat. Another wave of retreating archers moved into the trees behind him, so now there was no chance of him creeping backwards and getting away. Like the rest of the archers, he stayed behind the bushes and watched the battle.

  The infantry were still running away, but the cavalry retreat had now slowed and then stopped and turned. They were regrouping to face the English fyrdmen, who were still foolishly running towards them. There were more cavalry now. The reserves from the center of the field had galloped quickly across the field and were riding between Raynar’s trees and the fleeing Norman infantry, ordering them to turn and face the English.

  He was close enough to the English to hear them calling to each other, warning each other of the approach of fresh cavalry. They were now in danger because they were in open land with cavalry turning to meet them. The English shieldmen were banging their shields with their axes to get the pikemen to pay attention and get back to the safety of the shieldwall.