by Robert Low
The nobiles of Scotland had run after all.
To fight and win was now a dream. Hal saw it even as he saw Wallace and the pitiful knuckle of remaining knights slam into the great chest of English lances. The only sensible thing to do was run – the sudden rush of that made him jerk Griff’s head back – but, in the same moment, he saw the horse fall, saw the red and gold giant vanish into the mass; Hal raised his sword, kicked Griff hard enough to make the garron squeal and every man at his back surged out of the wood, screaming, ‘A Sientcler.’
They ploughed into the flanks of the struggling knights, just at the point they piled up like water at the dam. Hal cut and thrust and heard his sword bang like a hammer on a forge, felt the shock of it up his arm. A figure in stripes loomed; Hal cut and the man’s armoured head snapped back like a doll, his helmet dented on one side. A blow smacked Hal’s shield, reeled him so that he had to hang grimly on, while Griff spun in a half-circle.
He saw Nebless Clemmie hook his Jeddart staff in a knight’s fancy jupon, then spin his horse and ride off, dragging the knight to the ground with a clatter, where Ill Made Jock, elbow working like a mad fiddler, rained a flurry of furious stabs until the battle surged his plunging garron away.
The dam broke; the great mass of armoured horse rode over the remains of the Scots knights, who were either unhorsed and dying, or fleeing for the woods. Hal knew that his own attack had achieved only a moment of surprise and now the English were cursing and turning to fight. He saw Ill Made Jock’s garron, Wee Dan, smashed in the chest by the fearsome hooves of a warhorse, go down screaming – Hal lost sight of Jock in the whirl of hooves and legs and spuming blood.
Corbie Dand, on foot and with his face all bloody, was screaming and wielding the remains of his Jeddart, splintered down to a short-handled axe; the blow that crushed his head, kettle hat and all, came from a knight in blue and gold.
‘Wallace . . .’ yelled a voice and Hal turned into it, ducked a mad axe-cut at his head, took a mace on his shield and slashed back. He registered Sim as a flicker, on foot, open-mouthed and pointing; Hal spun Griff, felt the animal stumble, cursed and flogged it with cruel heels.
Wallace, off his mount, stood like a tree in a flood, the sword in both hands now and the added power hacking Hell into his enemies. Horsemen struggled and fought to get to him, for they saw the red lion rampant blazing on his chest and knew who it was, could taste the glory of it – but he stood there, a roaring giant, more ogre than man.
He turned briefly as Hal surged Griff up on one side, not even sure of what he was doing or why – then he saw the sheer joy of Wallace, the great beatific smile.
He is prepared to die, Hal thought, stabbed with sudden wonder. He is not afraid at all . . .
Sim staggered out of a ruck, slashing right and left, and stood on one side of Wallace, so that Hal found himself on the other, feeling Griff stagger and buckle.
‘Make for the ring,’ Wallace yelled and they did so, moving as swiftly as they could. Hal suddenly felt Griff sink and managed to kick free and drop; the snapped lance shaft was deep in the animal’s chest and, even as Hal cursed himself for not having seen it – when had it happened, in the name of Christ? – he heard the animal blow a last bloody froth and die.
‘The ring,’ yelled Sim, grabbing an elbow – a horse slammed into them, splitting them apart and sending Hal over in a dizzying whirl that left him dazed and looking at calloused, filth-clogged feet; when he rolled over, trying to get his eyes in focus, he saw the hedge of shafts over him.
Then a hand grabbed his surcoat, dragging him backwards; he heard the cloth tear and thought, mad as gibbering, that Bet the Bread would be furious at the ruin of her sewing.
A figure floated in front of him, a hand came forward and he felt the blow only faintly, then the second, sharp as a bee-sting. He flung up a hand to ward off a third and saw Wallace, his face streaked with blood, grinning at him.
‘Back with us? Good – there is work yet to do.’
Hal had lost his sword and his helmet and there was something wrong with the coif, which seemed to be flapping loose on one side. A mad-eyed figure with hair bursting out from under a leather helmet shoved a long knife at him, grinning insanely. Hal took it, looked up and round, feeling the shudder through the nearest shoulders and backs as English knights tried to force into the hedge-ring of grim men, standing like a single beast at bay.
The riders circled, frustrated and hurling curses, maces, axes, the remains of their lances and – now that the Selkirk bowmen had been scatteered and ridden down – their huge barrel helmets. The spearmen thrust and slashed, panting and snarling, and the great horses died, spilling the proud blazon of their riders into the crushed grass and bloody mud, where men in dirty wool came from the back ranks of the ring of spears, squirming between legs and feet to scuttle out and pounce on the trapped, or those too slow to struggle away on foot.
‘No’ chantin’ noo, ye sou’s arse,’ howled one, leaping like a spider on a black and silver figure, crawling wearily on hands and knees away from the kicking shriek of his dying horse. The thin-bladed knife went in the visor and blood flooded out the breathing holes – then the spider was back beneath the shelter of the spears, breathing hard and smiling at Hal like a fox fresh on a kill.
He wiped the dagger on his filthy, ripped braies and Hal saw it was Fergus the Beetle, black-carapaced in his boiled leather and grinning with blood on his teeth. He winked, as if he had just spotted Hal across a crowded alehouse.
‘Aye til the fore, my lord.’
Hal blinked. Still alive. Beyond the safety of the spear rings, the Scots archers were being ridden down and killed in a running slaughter and he wondered what had happened to Sim.
The Bishop’s horse limped and his surcoat was torn open under one arm, so that it flapped like the wounded wing of a red kite. Behind him stumbled a knight on foot, helmet and bascinet both gone and his maille coif shredded; there was blood on his face and a great spill of it down a once-cream surcoat, almost obliterating the two ravens blazoned on it.
Addaf did not need to hear Bek to know his anger, for it was plain in the wild, red-faced hand-waving he did at the knight in red and gold stripes, who sat sullenly on his expensive warhorse. It was draped in pristine white barding scattered with little red-and-gold-striped shields, each one ermined in the top left quarter; Basset of Drayton, Addaf had been told after the first angry encounter between the knight and the Bishop.
That was when Bek had tried to check the knights of his command and wait for the king before attacking, but this Basset of Drayton had arrogantly pointed his sword at Bek and told him to go and celebrate Mass if he wished, for the knights would do the fighting. Bek’s retinue heard it and took off in a mad gallop, a great metal flail that splintered itself to ruin on the nearest Scots ring of spears while the Bishop beat his saddle with futile anger.
Now the survivors of it, their horses dead, staggered away – and Addaf knew that Bek was scathing Basset because neither he nor any of his two bachelor knights nor nine sergeants had ridden anywhere near the Scots.
‘This horse is worth fifty marks,’ Basset argued, scowling as Addaf and the other archers came level with the arguing pair.
‘Then point it and spur – it should charge home,’ Bek snarled back, ‘even if the rider does not care to.’
‘By Christ’s Wounds,’ Basset bellowed, his beard bristling. ‘I will not take that from the likes of a tonsured byblow . . .’
‘Neither will you charge home,’ bellowed a new voice and everyone turned as Edward and his retinue came cantering up. Eyes went down; no-one wanted to look at the furious, droop-lidded lisping rage that stormed out of the king’s face.
Especially not Basset, who went as white as his horse barding and started to stammer.
‘Quiet,’ Edward ordered, then surveyed the wreckage of staggering, unhorsed knights, trailing back like drunks from an alehouse. A groaning knight in green, torn and spattered with mud and blo
od, was helped by two others; his left hand was hanging from a bloody mess by a few last fragments of tendon and flesh and someone had tied his baldric round the forearm to stop him bleeding to death.
‘My Lord of Otley,’ Edward said, nodding to the green knight as if they had met in cloistered court. The green knight moaned and another limped out behind him, bare-headed and leaking blood; he paused, looked up at his king and bowed.
Edward returned it.
‘My good lord,’ he said blandly. ‘You have lost your horse.’
Voiced as commiseration, it had a vicious twist to it – Eustace de Hacche had refused to sell his splendid charger to the king and now the beautiful bay with one white sock was lying, screaming in a tureen of its own entrails.
De Hacche turned away, nursing his ribs and more bitter about the horse than the spear which had burst him open; he did not want to have to remove his maille and gambeson for fear of what might tumble to the ground. I will look like my horse, he thought.
Esward watched him stumble off, his face a dog’s dinner of anger, then turned his droop-eyed fury on Bek and Basset.
‘Neither of ye have the sense of an egg,’ he growled and watched them bristle, mildly curious to see if they would spill it over to argument. They winked on the brim of it – then puffed it away and Edward sat deeper in his saddle, slightly disappointed but not surprised.
Christ blind me, he thought, good men have died because this Basset fool has a head fit only for carrying a metal helmet and as empty. Not that he is alone in it, he added bitterly, else I would not have to be here, completing the task I set for the Earl of Surrey and others.
‘If you have finished squandering the chivalry of England,’ Edward growled at the pair, ‘perhaps we can return to completing this affray?’
He gave a signal; a horn blew and Addaf heard the Lord of Bedale shouting at Heydin Captain, who, in turn, roared out orders in his sonorous Welsh for the war-winners to step on this bloody stage.
Addaf rolled his shoulders expectantly, then looked right and left, dismayed. Around him, the Welsh archers, watching the expensively hired Gascon crossbowmen trot forward and start rattling shafts, twisted smiles of braided scorn on their faces. The Welsh spearman butted their weapons and leaned on them insolently.
Addaf’s heart sank – the sullen hatred for the English was more to the Welsh than honour and, though they would not change sides, they did not want to participate further, a defiant response to the slaughter perpetrated on them earlier.
The archers stood, stolid faces blank, one horned nock of their unstrung bows on the instep of a shoed foot to keep it out of the mud, the other clamped between two fists as they leaned gently, pointedly going nowhere.
Like all the other millinars, Bedale yelled and galloped back and forth, but it was Heydin Captain and all the other captains of a hundred who persuaded the reluctant Welsh of his command into the business, with a combination of scathing curses on their bravery and wheedling promises of being first at the plunder.
That lashed them to action and they moved forward, knowing that each step took them closer to the part that mattered – the plundering of the bodies when the field was won. Yet Addaf was aware of the low mumured growl of all the other Welsh, conscious of the burn of their eyes on his back.
It was not Bedale or even Heydin Captain – for all their shouting and waving – who did the serious work for Addaf and his fellows: that task belonged to Rhys, the Master. Mydr ap Mydfydd, they called him – Aim the Aimer – and with good reason.
He brought them to within a hundred paces, while the remaining knights circled aimlessly round the thicket of spears, waving weapons and trying to dart in now and then and stab with their lances – though most of them had thrown them down. They saw the Welsh archers come up and frantically spurred or staggered away from the schiltrons as if the men in them had plague; they did not want to be anywhere near the arrow storm when it fell, for they knew the Welsh would take as great a delight in killing English horse as the enemy.
There were no more enemy bowmen left, Addaf saw, peering through the two ranks ahead of him – all scattered and cut down. Yet someone snugged in the ring of spears had a crossbow and was shooting it at that portion of the line where Addaf stood; he did not like the angry whip of the bolts.
Aim the Aimer ignored them as if they were spots of light rain, strolling down the front ranks, his own bow raised, judging wind and distance from the red and green ribbon fluttering from the end. The Gascon crossbowmen, sweating and sullen at being left to do the work on their own, belly-hooked their bows to the latch, firing in slow, uncontrolled flurries and the Welsh curled a lip at them.
‘Nock.’
There was a rustle as the long arrows snugged into braided string.
‘Draw.’
The great creak of tensioned wood was like the opening of a heavy door.
‘Shoot.’
God ripped the sky as if it were cheap linen and the spear-ring began to shriek. The real killing had begun.
It was like a giant wasp byke someone had kicked, a mad, black, humming mass that fell on them. The cry went up when the arrows were loosed and Hal saw the man nearest him, a whey-faced boy, turn his face to the sky to try to find them.
‘Get yer head down, Tam ye arse,’ his neighbour hissed and the boy saw that everyone else was hunched up and staring at the ground, as if their eyes could dig holes in the mud and blood. Those with steel helmets hunched up as if to climb inside them, those with leather or none instinctively covering up with their arms; spears rattled and clacked like a forest of reeds in a high wind. Hal braced, feeling his flesh crawl, ruching up tight as if hardening against the impact.
The wasps buzzed and zipped. Tam thought it sounded like the gravel he had thrown against the wattle wall of Agnes’s place when he had been trying to entice her out into the night. Instead, he remembered, her da had stormed out and told him to bugger off . . .
He straightened, turned to Erchie to thank him for the good advice – Christ, yin of those in the eye would have ruined my good looks, he started to say. Then he saw the feathers perched incongruously in the side of Erchie’s neck, like some wee bird. When he realised it was all that could be seen of the yard of metal-tipped wood that had gone in the top of Erchie’s shoulder and was slanted down into his kneeling, still upright body, he gave a wail.
Hal saw the whey-faced boy weep and start to pat his neighbour as if he was an injured dog. He wanted to tell the boy that his friend wasn’t injured, was certainly dead for no man could survive what that arrow had done to his insides. But he thought the boy probably already knew all that.
There was no time to tell him much, for the second sleet was lancing on them and Hal saw three shafts spit the turf at his feet. In front, a man reeled with the deep spanging bell of a hit on a steel plackard and the arrow splintered sideways in ruin. Yet the man fell like a mauled ox, gasping like a fish from lungs collapsed by the shock of the impact. Even without penetrating, Hal saw, fighting the rising panic in him, their arrows are killing us; he was not alone in the thought.
‘They will shoot us to ruin,’ Wallace bellowed. ‘If we are here to allow it. Time we were away, lads. Step now, in time. Towards the woods. Now – step. Step. Step.’
Towards the woods. A short walk across a litter of dead horses, groaning men and the bloody dead. You could pick your way into the trees in five minutes, Hal thought, unless you were in an ungainly ring of men all trying to move in the same direction and keep some semblance of a shape. Thirty minutes if we are lucky, he thought mournfully – any longer and it will not matter much.
The wasps arrived again, a fierce, angry sting. Men shrieked and screamed and fell, clattering into their neighbour, to be pitched away with a curse. Slowly, like a huge dying slug, the schiltron lurched towards the trees, spitting out a slime-trail of bloody dead and wounded.
***
‘One wants Wallace, my lords,’ Edward rasped, listening to the thrum and ras
p of his archers at work. Like music, he thought. The song of battle, as the monks’ chant is the song of the church.
‘One wants the Ogre,’ he repeated and the Earl of Lincoln, spattered with mud and blood, grinned, saluted him with his sword and clapped down his fancy new pig-snout visor.
‘The cruel Herod,’ he bellowed, metallic and muffled, ‘the madman more debauched than Nero. He will be brought to Your Grace’s footstool.’
Hal knew the knights were circling like wolves on a stag, waiting for the moment of supreme weakness to pounce – it would not be long, he thought. He did not know how the other rings fared, but the one he was in was a nightmare of sweat and fear and bloody dying.
It stretched slowly, became egg-shaped and halted on one side for the ranks to re-form. It thinned – the space in the middle was larger, so that Hal could walk now, helping those shuffling backwards to negotiate the dead horses, the still groaning men, some of them pleading to be taken – all of them disgorged with no mercy.
They stumbled over things that cracked out marrow, skidded in fluids and slithered entrails, heard the last, farting gasp of the dead they stepped on and had breath themselves only for a muttered ‘Ave Maria, Gracia plena . . .’
Hal saw a sword, bent to pick it up and looked into the unseeing bloody remains of MacDuff of Fife, a great blue-black hole in the side of his head like a blown egg. He blinked once or twice, thoughts whirling in him – so MacDuff had not run after all and paid the price for it. Then Wallace knelt suddenly and, for a shocking moment, Hal thought he had been hit. The arrows were coming in flocks like startled starlings out of a covey, steady and fast from practised hands.
‘Ach, Christ’s Mercy on him,’ Wallace said, rising up, and Hal saw the bloodied face and battered, muddy ruin that had been a cousin – Simon, Hal remembered, the sweet-voiced singer.
‘Keep moving,’ bellowed a file commander. ‘Not far now.’
Far enough, Hal thought. It had taken an eternity – but the trees were closer, tantalisingly within touching.