A strong injunction for that loyal soul, but I intended that there be not the smallest disobedience. She was undone by my words and clutched my cloak, begging me not to go.
“You forget yourself, Gwladys! Of course I will see the battle! Did you think we came all this way so that I might cower in the woods like a hind? My place is by the King! When the battle ends I must be the first to reach him; I have things to tell him that can wait no longer. He dreamed of unifying all England, and I would have him know that I understand that dream at last. And love him for dreaming it, even as I deplore the slaughter to come! Think you that he will understand that, Gwladys?”
The woman looked at me wild-eyed. “I do not understand it myself, Your Grace!”
To my own surprise I laughed. “Perhaps I do not either. But no matter now, it will sort itself in time.”
Osbert awaited me outside. With one hand always on his knife, he led me by some trackless path at the very edge of the forest until we reached a point almost even with Senlac Ridge. Our view was better than that of Gytha and that other woman on their hill, and so long as we stayed within the cover of the trees we were unlikely to be seen. The whole west side of the ridge was clear to our view, and we could now see its steep face and the Hastings Road beyond it.
The fyrd was drawn up in its battle position. Along the whole front of the ridge stood the loyal housecarles, the most skilled of English warriors, holding their shields pressed edge to edge to form a shield wall. Behind them, shoulder to shoulder and ten deep, were the rest of the housecarles and armed ceorls. Theirs was the most terrible of weapons, the mighty battle-ax brought to England by the Danes. No man could live in its deadly path, as I well knew. A skilled axman could cut his enemy in twain so quickly and cleanly that the man would continue to stand upright for a bird’s breath before falling dead into separate islands of cooling meat.
Soldiers not carrying axes awaited the Normans with spears and longclubs, to the heads of which round stones had been bound with thongs. “Skullbreakers” Osbert called them.
“Do you wish you stood with them, Osbert?”
“I am doing the task the King assigned me, my lady,” he answered simply. “Caring for you.”
The thegns were easy to recognize, being horsed and helmeted. My eye was drawn to one who wore plainest garb yet towered above the others as he sat on his chestnut destrier. The horse was footsore, picking its way over the broken ground gingerly, but Harold of England looked almost as fresh as if he had not driven an army twice the length of England in three weeks.
He was riding toward the summit of the ridge from the direction of Gytha’s hill, whence he had no doubt gone to seek his mother’s blessing before the battle. (And another blessing, too? From a raddle-necked woman with patient eyes?) He had to kick his tired horse to make it canter up the rise to the summit, where the Fighting Man waved in front of the headquarters tent. He made as if to dismount, but just then someone grabbed his horse’s bridle and gestured wildly toward the south. Harold rose in his stirrups for a better look; and I steadied myself with a hand on Osbert’s shoulder as I mounted a fallen tree to improve my own view.
Up the rutted road from the Channel, a sea of a different kind poured toward us. Wave upon wave of metal armor gleamed in the sun. Hundreds and hundreds of huge horses bore knights protected from head to hip and preceded by a mass of bowmen and infantry.
One group of knights detached itself from the main body and took up a position on a knoll some three hundred yards from the foot of Senlac Ridge. “The Bastard and his barons have picked themselves a good vantage point,” commented Osbert.
It was now well into the morning; the sun was up and the mist had all burned off. The two armies came together, not with a clash of weapons, but with a raucous burst of hoots and jeers. Each side taunted the other with the wildest insults as they strove to work themselves into a killing rage. From where we stood I was spared the words, but the meaning was clear enough.
Just when it seemed that the Normans would charge at last, a wondrous thing happened. A path fell open through the heart of their ranks, and a fellow clothed as a minstrel came galloping out of the mass of Norman soldiers onto the open ground between the two armies. His horse was most gaily caparisoned; bells jingled on its gilded reins. When the rider reached the foot of the ridge directly beneath Harold’s standard at the summit, he reined his charger back on its haunches and hurled his lance high in the air.
English and Norman alike, the men stopped their shouting and stared agape. The amazing minstrel caught his lance by the blade with his ungloved hand and immediately tossed it high again.
“The man is mad!” Osbert exclaimed. Mayhap he was, but it was a glorious madness. For that my Griffith would have applauded him, and written a triad about it later.
A third time he threw the lance, and we watched it spin silver, end over end, in the sun.
But whatever finale he had planned for his amazing performance was not to be, for the horse chose to play a part of its own. With a lunge it tore the reins from the rider’s hand and bolted straight for the ridge, leaping up the slope with prodigious bounds. In a few heartbeats it had carried its hapless rider to the center of the Saxon line. The poor fool swung his lance about him desperately but vanished almost at once beneath a press of men and axes.
As if that were a signal, the battle was joined at last. The morning came alive with a hellish roar. Screams, yells, curses, the clash of metal and the thud of wood, the neighing of horse and the long singing hiss of arrows in flight.
Behind the shield wall the Saxons stood firm as the Norman arrows came up at them. Most of the arrows glanced harmlessly off their shields and fell back onto the slope. A few men were wounded in their knees or feet, but when one fell another immediately stepped into his place.
The Norman archers reached into their quivers and fired a second volley, then a third, with little more result. When our men did not return their fire, the Normans eventually found themselves reaching into empty quivers while their needed arrows lay beyond their reach on the sloped face of the ridge. So did the King’s first strategy succeed.
The Norman infantry moved up to take the place of the bowmen. Above them the housecarles raised their battle-axes, and the fighting became savage.
The axes cut through helm and hauberk as a knife cuts through rotten meat. The Bastard’s men fell back with their heads split open, showering blood and brains around them. Our thegns hurled their spears with skilled accuracy, and many tore through the Norman chain mail. One mounted knight raised his helm for a moment, as I watched him, and made to wipe the sweat from his eyes. Instantly a Saxon javelin spitted through his neck and he tumbled off his horse.
Trumpets and horns sounded continually; orders were being shouted from all sides. I doubt if the fighting men really heard any of it. The general noise was so great no individual sound stood out clearly.
This was muchly different from the limited warfare I had seen between Godwine’s men and Griffith’s, in Wales. The war horses, the heavy armor, the great masses of men—but above all that ceaseless racket. Every man at Senlac Ridge must have been yelling constantly, save only the dying, who shrieked and moaned.
The Normans fought well, but the English fought better. At last we could see a faltering in the Norman charge. “Men become reluctant to press forward when they must climb over the piled-up bodies of their comrades,” Osbert explained.
Never had I seen so much blood. The axes created a crimson world, a nightmare place where everything was blurred by the constant red spray. The coppery sweet smell of it came drifting to us as the breeze played fitfully across the battleground.
Harold sat calmly on his horse, directly beneath the Fighting Man. He sat as if relaxed, his huge ax resting across his shoulder. It was still too early in the fight for him; his bloodlust was not yet sufficiently roused. He merely watched the battle closely and called out orders or encouragement to his men.
Then it happened that a f
ew soldiers on both sides began to lose their nerve, throw down their weapons, and run away. Some Saxons fled toward our wood and fell with Norman arrows in their backs. We saw Normans making for the marsh, but then our view was cut off and we did not know what happened to them.
Osbert’s experienced eyes saw something mine had not. Harold’s brothers, the earls Gyrth and Leofwine, had been in the thick of the fighting at the shield wall. Just as the first charge of Norman cavalry succeeded in reaching the foot of the ridge, Osbert gave a cry.
“Lord Leofwine has fallen!”
“Where? Oh, Osbert, are you sure?”
“Yes, Your Grace. I could pick him out in any throng. He pushed forward to meet the Norman horsemen with his ax, and a foot soldier got to him unnoticed and cut him through the body with a sword!”
Poor Leofwine! Good and kindly, brought down by a faceless stranger.
The Norman charge gave ground, but I saw gaps appear in the shield wall that were slow to fill.
“There is Duke William, my lady … there, on the black horse, beneath the banner of the cross. He flaunts the papal blessing for this enterprise!”
As a new charge galloped up Senlac Ridge the axes met them. The helmeted knight Osbert identified as William of Normandy had a horse cut to pieces under him, and a cheer went up from the fyrd. But he scrambled straightway to his feet, caught the bridle of the nearest riderless horse, and was back in the battle. The Bastard was no coward. Armed with that spiked iron ball they call the mace, he fought as savagely as any, and soon I lost sight of him in the press of men and horses.
Having seen William in the forefront of his knights, King Harold gathered his reins and rode down the ridge at last, his mighty ax singing its terrible song about him as he went. The tales of his prowess were true; I saw men fall before him like scythed wheat.
The strain of standing so long and the tension of the day were giving me a headache. I could feel a throbbing pain behind my eyes. It was impossible for me to go lie down somewhere—anything might happen if I took my eyes from the field for a moment—so I bade Osbert fetch me water from the supply he had cached in the woods.
As soon as he was out of sight I attended to a call of nature and then seated myself on the fallen log. Once I was no longer standing, my feet and legs began to ache cruelly, and I longed to lie on the leafy earth, but I dared not.
To the west of the English position lay a steep gully, through which flowed a stream. Looking across the open ground behind our soldiers, I saw a group of Norman knights come charging right through our line and, unable to stop, ride their plunging horses straight over the lip of the gully and fall from sight. It was as if the earth had swallowed them up. The foot soldiers who followed them through the break in the line were terrified. In a frantic scramble they raced headlong down the slope of the ridge and into the marsh.
Above the din of battle came a new sound: the echoing scream of injured men and horses at the bottom of the gully. It was answered by the hysterical shrieks of the foot soldiers, who panicked and ran as from some supernatural occurrence. Not having my vantage point, they could not guess what had happened to the knights, and they must have been sore affrighted.
In a few short minutes the loss of the horsemen had been enough to turn the tide of battle in our favor. Normans by the hundreds, knights as well as infantry, caught the contagion of terror and fled. We saw the noonday sun on the backs of the invaders.
Osbert rejoined me then, but I impatiently pushed the waterskin away. “See, Osbert, see there!” I waved wildly to call his attention to the action before us.
Apparently the Bastard’s men thought he himself had been killed, for now we saw him galloping into the mass of deserters, snatching off his helmet that they might see his living face. Back and forth he rode, trying to rally them to return to the fight. It was a courageous act, for without his helmet he was a tempting target.
Seeing the Normans in flight, the Saxon line, which had stood like a rock until then, lost control. For three hours they had stood under a terrible attack; now they saw a chance to get revenge, and they broke ranks to race in pursuit of the enemy. Whooping with glee, our shire levies followed the Normans into the marsh to take terrible toll of them with club and spear.
I could see both armies breaking ranks and milling about in confusion. The only men who seemed to hold steadfast were our own officers, struggling to re-form the shield wall along the ridge. The frantic commands of the housecarles carried clearly: “Return to your posts! Re-form the line! Re-Form the line!”
By now a great number of our soldiers had abandoned the ridge and were either in the marsh or beyond Senlac, out of my sight. But the terror which had unmanned the Normans seemed to be over. William’s efforts began to succeed, and he and his officers stemmed the Norman retreat. His men turned back to stand and fight, now that the English had left their protected position on the heights. In hand to hand combat, our tired soldiers stood little chance against the fresh Normans and their superior equipment.
Most of what followed I could not see clearly, but I could guess at it from the maneuvering taking place around the command post under the standard of the Fighting Man. We had to be suffering heavy losses; the officers were desperate, and the trumpets blew Recall incessantly.
Harold galloped up the ridge, gave hasty orders to the thegns, and was gone again. After an endless time our men began to return to their places, but there were not nearly so many as had gone joyfully whooping after the Normans. The unarmored shire levies who had gone into the marsh did not come back at all, nor did the King’s brother Gyrth.
“Why don’t Edwin and Morkere arrive with reinforcements?” I asked Osbert time and again.
His answer was always the same. “I think they hang back, Your Grace, because their levies were so reduced in the campaign in Northumbria. But they will be here, surely!”
Under a sky as blue and tranquil as that of a May day, men screamed their lives away in that bloody place, trying to win a piece of land no victor could carry home with him. And when all these men are dead, their bones turned to dust and their names forgot, still the land will be here under other blue October skies.
I found myself exhausted, and when Osbert offered me a honeycake and ale I took them gladly.
When we finished our little meal, Osbert tried to get me to go back to the hut, but of course I would not. As he knew beforehand. While our decimated army regrouped, we, too, prepared ourselves for the next phase of the battle. On Gytha’s hill I saw two tall women standing before her tent, waiting also.
At last the trumpets sounded Charge, and it all began again.
The afternoon became a long blur to me. The yelling was as dreadful as ever, but it came from fewer, tireder throats. The clash of arms and stench of blood seemed to have filled this place forever. Our men stood in their solid defense line once more, but the Normans broke through it again and again, and each time there were less shields on the wall.
Sometimes I could see the King’s bare golden head and swinging ax. Once or twice I glimpsed Duke William, each time on a different horse. We were slaughtering his horses, at least!
Ansgar the marshal dragged a Norman knight from his horse not too far from where we watched among the trees. The two of them struggled on foot, each man seeking an advantage that would allow him to kill the other. The Norman had lost his sword somewhere; all Ansgar had left was the broken shaft of a javelin. Neither wanted to get within the reach of the other and so they circled round and round, like chained bears put in the pit to fight.
Ansgar grabbed up some scruffy little bush and lashed the knight across the face with it, then jumped back. I saw his teeth gleam in a ferocious grin. The enraged Norman closed with him and was rewarded with a knee in the groin. Rolling on the ground, grunting and cursing, they looked much as my brothers had in so many childhood scuffles. Then a red pool began to leak out from beneath them, and when Ansgar stood up I could see the splintered haft of the javelin driven through the
Norman’s mouth and up into his brain. The man died so close to us we could smell the odor of his bowels opening. Ansgar reeled with fatigue above him, then righted himself and went off to catch the Norman horse.
My brain was scalded with the sights I saw.
Again I saw the invaders break and retreat, much as they had done in the morning, and again the English ignored their orders and raced after them. The outcome was the same as before. The Normans led their pursuers some distance away, then turned on them and cut them down. In their reckless courage, the Saxons and Angles died, and fewer returned each time to Senlac Ridge. By now the Normans knew our men would follow, even to their doom, if they thought their enemy was retreating. A cold and calculating brain used this knowledge to great advantage, and the Saxon leaders were powerless to prevent the suicide of their own men. Each feigned retreat meant further casualties.
It was a pitifully small group by now, the English fyrd. Where just that morning they had stood in a grand army the length of the ridge, now they were a small knot of desperate men. Harold pulled together what remained of his troops and formed them about his standard, with the remaining shielded housecarles along the front. They were the wall against which the Norman sea must break, and their steadfast courage was the King’s last defense.
Dead and gone were the shire levies who had rallied to Harold’s standard from all the corners of the land. Men from York and Gloucester, from London and Lincoln and Lindsey, their broken bodies littered the Hastings Road. In their coarse peasant robes, the dirt from their fields still under their nails, they sprawled dead in the marsh and on the slopes. Some of them had been cowards, and many of them had been foolish, but their massed numbers had been the backbone of the army and now they were gone. The ceorls with their spears and their skullbreakers were gone. Even the Kentish men, famed for their skill in warfare, were gone.
The Wind From Hastings Page 22