The Grail Quest Books 1-3: Harlequin, Vagabond, Heretic

by Bernard Cornwell

  'Archers!' Thomas shouted, thinking himself back in France and responsible for a troop of Will Skeat's bow-men. 'Archers!' he bellowed, advancing to the hollow's lip. 'Now kill them!' Men came to his side, yelped in triumph and drew back their cords.

  Now was the killing time, the archers' time. The Scottish right wing was down in the sunken ground and the archers were above them and could not miss. Two monks were bringing spare sheaves of arrows, each sheaf holding twenty-four shafts evenly spaced about two leather discs that kept the arrows apart and so protected their feathers from being crushed. The monks cut the twine holding the arrows and spilt the missiles on the ground beside the archers who drew again and again and killed again and again as they shot down into the pit of death. Thomas heard the deafening crash as the men-at-arms collided in the field's centre, but here, on the English left, the Scots would never come to their enemy's shields because they had spilled into the low yellow bracken of death's kingdom.

  Thomas's childhood had been spent in Hookton, a village on England's south coast where a stream, coming to the sea, had carved a deep channel in the shingle beach. The channel curved to leave a hook of land that protected the fishing boats and once a year, when the rats became too thick in the holds and bilges of the boats, the fishermen would strand their craft at the bottom of the stream, fill their bilges with stones and let the incoming tide flood the stinking hulls. It was a holiday for the village children who, standing on the top of the Hook, waited for the rats to flee the boats and then, with cheers and screams of delight, they would stone the animals. The rats would panic and that would only Lncrease the children's glee as the adults stood around and laughed, applauded and encouraged.

  It was like that now. The Scots were in the low ground, the archers were on the lip of the hill and death was their dominion. The arrows were flashing straight down the slope, scarce am' arc in their flight, and strik-ing home with the sound of cleavers hitting flesh. The Scots writhed and died in the hollow and the yellow autumn bracken turned red. Some of the enemy tried to climb towards their tormentors, but they became the easiest targets. Some attempted to escape up the far side and were struck in the back, while some fled down the hill in ragged disarray. Sir Thomas Rokeby, Sheriff of Yorkshire and commander of the English left, saw their escape and ordered two score of his men to mount their horses and scour the valley. The mailed riders swung their swords and morningstars to finish the archers' bloody work.

  The base of the hollow was a writhing, bloody mass. A man in plate armour, a plumed helmet on his head, tried to climb out of the carnage and two arrows whipped through his breastplate and a third found a slit in his visor and he fell back, twitching. A thicket of arrows jutted from the falcon on his shield. The arrows became fewer now, for there were not many Scotsmen left to kill and then the first archers scrambled down the slope with drawn knives to pillage the dead and kill the wounded.

  'Who hates the English now?' one of the archers jeered. 'Come on, you bastards, let's hear you? Who hates the English now?'

  Then a shout sounded from the centre. 'Archers! To the right! To the right!' The voice had a note of sheer panic. 'To the right! For God's sake, now!'

  The men-at-arms of the English left were scarcely engaged in the fight because the archers were slaughtering the Scots in the low bracken. The English centre was holding firm for the Archbishop's men were arrayed behind a stone wall which, though only waist high, was a more than adequate barrier against the Scottish assault. The invaders could stab, lunge and hack over the wall's coping, and they could try to climb it and they could even try to pull it down stone by stone, but they could not push it over and so they were checked by it and the English, though far fewer, were able to hold even though the Scots were lunging at them with their heavy pikes. Some English knights called for their horses and, once mounted and armed with lances, pressed up close behind their beleaguered comrades and rammed the lances at Scottish eyes. Other men-at-arms ducked under the unwieldy pikes and hacked with swords and axes at the enemy and all the while the long arrows drove in from the left. The noise in the centre was the shouting of men in the rearward ranks, the screaming of the wounded, the clangour of blade on blade, the crack of blade on shield and the clatter of lance on pike, but the wall meant that neither side could press the other back and so, crammed against the stones and encumbered by the dead, they just lunged, hacked, suffered, bled and died.

  But on the English right, where Lord Neville and Lord Percy commanded, the wall was unfinished, nothing more than a pile of stones that offered no obstacle to the assault of the Scottish left wing that was commanded by the Earl of March and by the King's nephew, Lord Robert Stewart. Their sheltron, closest to the city, was the largest of the three Scottish divisions and it came at the English like a pack of wolves who had not fed in a month. The attackers wanted blood and the archers fled from their howling charge like sheep scattering before fangs and then the Scots struck the English right and the sheer momentum of their assault drove the defenders back twenty paces before, somehow, the men-at-arms managed to hold the Scots who were now stumbling over the bodies of the men they had wounded or killed. The English, cramming themselves shoulder to shoulder, crouched behind their shields and shoved back, stabbing swords at ankles and faces, and grunting with the effort of holding the vast pressure of the Scottish horde.

  It was hard to fight in the front ranks. Men shoved from behind so that Englishmen and Scotsmen were close as lovers, too close to wield a sword in anything except a rudimentary stab. The ranks behind had more room and a Scotsman chopped down with a pike that he wielded like a giant axe, its blade crunching down into an enemy's head to split helmet, leather liner, scalp and skull as easily as an unboiled egg. Blood fountained across a dozen men as the dead soldier fell and other Scots pushed into the gap his death had caused, and a clansman tripped on the body and screamed as an Englishman sawed at his exposed neck with a blunt knife. The pike dropped again, killing a second man. and this time, when it was lifted up, the dead man's crumpled visor was caught on the pike's bloody spike.

  The drums, those that were still whole, had begun their noise again, and the Scots heaved to their rhythm. 'The Bruce! The Bruce!' some chanted while others called on their patron, 'St Andrew! St Andrew!' Lord Robert Stewart, gaudy in his blue and yellow colours and with a thin fillet of gold about the brow of his helmet, used a two-handed sword to chop at the English men-at-arms who cowered from the rampant Scots. Lord Robert, safe from arrows at last, had lifted his visor so he could see the enemy. 'Come on!' he screamed at his men. 'Come on! Hard into them! Kill them! Kill them!' The King had promised that the Christmas feast would be in London and there seemed only a small screen of frightened men to break before that promise could come true. The riches of Durham, York and London were just a few sword strokes away; all the wealth of Norwich and Oxford, of Bristol and Southampton was only a handful of deaths from Scottish purses. 'Scotland! Scotland! Scotland!' Lord Robert called. 'Scotland!' And the pikeman, because the trapped visor was obstructing his blade, was beating on a man's helmet with the hook side of his weapon's head, not chopping through the metal, but smashing it, hammering the broken helmet into the dying man's brain so that blood and jelly oozed from the visor's slits. An Englishman screamed as a Scottish pike struck through his mail into his groin. A boy, perhaps a page, reeled back with his eves bloodied from a sword slash. 'Scot-land!' Lord Robert could smell the victory now. So close! He shoved on, felt the English line jar and move hack, saw how thin it was, fended off a lunge with his shield, stabbed with his sword to kill a fallen and wounded enemy, shouted at his squires to keep a watch for any rich English nobleman whose ransom could enrich the house of Stewart. Men grunted as they stabbed and hacked. A tribesman reeled from the fight, gasping for breath, trying to hold his guts inside his slashed belly. A drummer was beating the Scots on. 'Bring my horse!' Lord Robert called to a squire. He knew that the beaten English line had to break in a moment and then he would mount, take his lan
ce, and pursue the beaten enemy. 'On! On!' he shouted. 'On!' And the man wielding the long-hafted pike, the huge Scotsman who had driven a gap into the English front rank and who seemed to be carving a bloody path south all by himself, suddenly made a mewing noise. His pike, high in the air where it was still fouled with the bent visor, faltered. The man jerked and his mouth opened and closed, opened and closed again, but he could not speak because an arrow, its white feathers bloodied, jutted from his head.

  An arrow, Lord Robert saw, and suddenly the air was thick with them and he pulled down the visor of his helmet so that the day went dark.

  The damned English archers were back.

  Sir William Douglas had not realized how deep and steep-sided was the bracken-covered saddle in the ridge's flank until he reached its base and there, under the flail of the archers, found he could neither go for-ward nor back. The front two ranks of Scottish men-at-arms were all either dead or wounded and their bodies made a heap over which he could not climb in his heavy mail. Robbie was screaming defiance and trying to scramble over that heap, but Sir William unceremoniously dragged his nephew back and thrust him down into the bracken. `This isn't a place to die, Robbie!'

  'Bastards!'

  'They may be bastards, but we're the fools!' Sir William crouched beside his nephew, covering them both with his huge shield. To go back was unthinkable, for that would be running from the enemy, yet he could not advance and so he just marvelled at the force of the arrows as they thumped into the shield's face. A rush of bearded tribesmen, more nimble than the men-at-arms because they refused to wear metal armour, seethed past him, howling their wild defiance as they scrambled bare-legged across the heap of dying Scots, but then the English arrows began to strike and hurl the clansmen back. The arrows made sounds like bladders rupturing as they struck and the clansmen mewed and groaned, twitching as more arrows thumped home. Each missile provoked a spurt of blood so that Sir William and Robbie Douglas, unscathed beneath their heave shield, were spattered with gore.

  A sudden tumult among the nearby men-at-arms provoked more arrows and Sir William bellowed angrily at the soldiers to lie down, hoping that stillness would persuade the English archers that no Scotsmen lived, but the men-at-arms called back that the Earl of Moray had been hit. 'Not before time,' Sir William growled to Robbie. He hated the Earl more than he hated the English, and he grinned when a man shouted that his lord-ship was not just hit, but dead, and then another hail of arrows silenced the Earl's retainers and Sir William heard the missiles clanging on metal, thumping into flesh and striking the willow boards of shields, and when the rattle of arrows was done there was just the moaning and weeping, the hissing of breath, and the creak of leather as men died or tried to extricate them-selves from under the piles of dying.

  'What happened?' Robbie asked.

  'We didn't scout the land properly,' Sir Villiam answered. 'We outnumber the bastards and that made us confident.' Ominously, in the arrowless quiet, he heard laughter and the thump of boots. A scream sounded and Sir William, who was old in war, knew that the English troops were coming down into the bowl to finish off the injured. 'We're going to run back soon,' he told Robbie, 'there's no choice in it. Cover your arse with your shield and run like the devil.'

  'We're running away?' Robbie asked, appalled.

  Sir William sighed. 'Robbie, you damned fool, you can run forward and you can die and I'll tell your mother you died like a brave man and a halfwit, or you can get the hell back up the hill with me and try to win this battle.'

  Robbie did not argue, but just looked back up the Scottish side of the hollow where the bracken was flecked with white-feathered arrows. 'Tell me when to run,' he said.

  A dozen archers and as many English men-at-arms were using knives to cut Scottish throats. They would pause before finishing off a man-at-arms to discover whether he had any value as a source of ransom, but few men had such value and the clansmen had none.

  The latter, hated above all the Scots because they were so different, were treated as vermin. Sir William cautiously raised his head and decided this was the moment to retreat. It was better to scramble out of this bloody trap than be captured and so, ignoring the indignant shouts of the English, he and his nephew scrambled hack up the slope. To Sir William's surprise no arrows came. He had expected the grass and bracken to be thrashed with arrows as he clambered out of the hollow, but he and Robbie were left alone. He turned halfway up the slope and saw that the English bowmen had vanished, leaving only men-at-arms on this flank of the field. At their head, watching him from the hollow's farther lip, was Lord Outhwaite, who had once been Sir William's prisoner. Outhwaite, who was lame, was using a spear as a stave and, seeing Sir William, he raised the weapon in greeting.

  'Get yourself some proper armour, Willie!' Sir William shouted. Lord Outhwaite, like the Knight of Liddesdale, had been christened William. 'We're not done with you yet.'

  'I fear not, Sir William, I do indeed fear not,' Lord Outhwaite called back. He steadied himself with his spear. 'I trust you're well?'

  'Of course I'm not well, you bloody fool! Half my men are down there.'

  'My dear fellow,' Outhwaite said with a grimace, and then waved genially as Sir William pushed Robbie on up the hill and followed him to safety.

  Sir William, once back on the high ground, took stock. He could see that the Scots had been beaten here on their right, but that had been their own fault for charging headlong into the low ground where the archers had been able to kill with impunity. Those archers had mysteriously vanished, but Sir William guessed they had been pulled clear across the field to the Scottish left flank that had advanced a long way ahead of the centre. He could tell that because Lord Robert Stewart's blue and yellow banner of the lion was so far ahead of the King's red and yellow flag. So the battle was going well on the left, but Sir William could see it was going nowhere in the centre because of the stone wall that obstructed the Scottish advance.

  'We'll achieve nothing here,' he told Robbie, 'so let's be useful.' He turned and raised his bloody sword. 'Douglas!' he shouted. 'Douglas!' His standard-bearer had disappeared and Sir William supposed that the man, with his red-hearted flag, was dead in the low ground. 'Douglas!' he called again and, when sufficient of his men had come to him, he led them to the embattled central sheltron. 'We fight here,' he told them, then pushed his way to the King who was on horseback in the second or third rank, fighting beneath his banner that was thick stuck with arrows. He was also fighting with his visor raised and Sir William saw that the King's face was half obscured with blood. 'Put your visor down!' he roared.

  The King was trying to stab a long lance across the stone wall, but the press of men made his efforts futile. His blue and yellow surcoat had been torn to reveal the bright plate metal beneath. An arrow thudded into his right espalier that had again ridden up on the breast-plate and he tugged it down just as another arrow ripped open the left ear of his stallion. He saw Sir William and grinned as though this was fine sport. 'Pull your visor down!' Sir William bellowed and he saw that the King was not grinning, but rather a whole flap of his cheek had been torn away and the blood was still welling from the wound and spilling from the helmet's lower rim to soak the torn surcoat. 'Have your cheek bandaged!' Sir William shouted over the din of fighting.

  The King let his frightened horse hack away from the wall. 'What happened on the right?' His voice was made indistinct by his wound.

  'They killed us,' Sir William said curtly, inadvertently jerking his long sword so that drops of blood sprayed from its tip. 'No, they murdered us,' he growled. 'There was a break in the ground and it snared us.'

  'Our left is winning! We'll break them there!' The King's mouth kept filling with blood, which he spat out, but despite the copious bleeding he did not seem over-concerned with the wound. It had been inflicted at the very beginning of the battle when an arrow had hissed over the heads of his army to rip a gouge in his cheek before spending itself in his helmet's liner. 'We'll hold them he
re,' he told Sir William.

  'John Randolph's dead,' Sir William told him. 'The Earl of Moray,' he added when he saw that the King had not understood his first words.

  'Dead?' King David blinked, then spat more blood. 'He's dead? Not a prisoner?' Another arrow slapped at his flag, but the King was oblivious of the danger. He turned and stared at his enemy's flags. 'We'll have the Archbishop say a prayer over his grave, then the bastard can say grace over our supper.' He saw a gap in the front Scottish rank and spurred his horse to fill it, then lunged with his lance at an English defender. The King's blow broke the man's shoulder, mangling the bloody wound with the debris of torn mail. 'Bastards!' the King spat. 'We're winning!' he called to his men, then a rush of Douglas's followers pushed between him and the wall. The newcomers struck the stone wall like a great wave, but the wall proved stronger and the wave broke on its stones. Swords and axes clashed over the coping and men from both sides dragged the dead out of their paths to clear a passage to the slaughter. 'We'll hold the bastards here,' the King assured Sir William, 'and turn their right.'

  But Sir William, his ears ever attuned to the noise of battle, had heard something new. For the last few minutes he had been listening to shouts, clangour, screams and drums, but one sound had been missing and that was the devil's harp music, the deep-toned pluck of bowstrings, but he heard it again now and he knew that though scores of the enemy might have been killed, few of those dead were archers. And now the bows of England had begun their awful work again. 'You want advice, sire?'

  'Of course.' The King looked bright-eyed. His destrier, wounded by several arrows, took small nervous steps away from the thickest fighting that raged just paces away.