Toby Clements - Kingmaker - Winter Pilgrims

Thomas is pushed forward by the press of men. He thrusts and jabs with his glaive, aiming for faces, for eye-slits, for fingers on weapon shafts. He is barely defending himself. The noise is deafening. Rough steel and iron blades are everywhere. He can smell terror and blood and men who’ve soiled themselves.

The man before him has a helmet that encases his face and a sword he holds with both mailed gloves. He is straddling a body, standing on the chest of another dead man. Over his shoulder more men thrust glaives at Thomas’s face, and from below men are crouching and stretching to hook his legs away. He tries to push back, to get away, but the sergeants are there behind him, pushing men into the maw.

Thomas’s glaive is caught by the big man in the helmet. He wrenches it free. It is caught again. Pushed down. He is defenceless. Using his sword quillon as a mace, the big man raises it to bring it down to kill Thomas but the man next to Thomas surges forward and drives the blade of his bill under the big man’s armpit. He kills him with a roar. Then an axe or a maul swings through the air from the other side and catches Thomas’s saviour in the teeth, snapping his head back. Thomas is blinded with blood, and there are broken teeth and fragments of bone from the wreck of the billman’s chin.

Neither of the dead men falls. They are held upright by the press of bodies. They are pushed forward, chest plate to chest plate. Thomas seizes his glaive and wrenches it free, but another man throws himself forward and crashes something on to his helmet.

Dear God.

The blow rips down the side of his head, glancing off his shoulder. He is paralysed by the pain. He can hear himself lowing like a bull. He wants to die. He stares down the length of a bill’s shaft. A whiskered old man is coming at him. He has a long spike and his eyes are red with fury. Then Thomas’s glaive comes free. He endures the pain, thrusts his own blade into the man’s face, feels it bite, nag at something, rip free. He stabs again, grinding the blade into the old man’s face. He can feel the blade in the hole behind his nose. He jerks at it, turning the old man.

Blood is everywhere, like rainwater. It mixes with the snow. It rises as steam from the ground.

How many men does Thomas strike? How many does he kill? He cannot say. There are always, always more. His fingers are ringing with pain, and at last he can stand it no more. His strength ebbs so suddenly that one moment he is slashing at a man in a green and white livery, and the next he can hardly raise his newfound hammer to break a clumsy blow from a farmer’s bill. Then he feels himself being plucked from behind, roughly shouldered out of the way, and thrust backwards. All he can do is obey, follow where he is sent. He lurches away, every ounce of will drained.

One of the sergeants is there, standing among the bodies of dying men, the same one who’d thrust him into the line.

‘Get some ale,’ he shouts, grabbing another man and forcing him up to the front. ‘And get back here!’

Away from the fighting his body rings. He is deafened by the noise; his arms vibrate from the tip of his numb fingers to his shoulders; his back burns; and the blood of other men is mixed with sweat to sting his eyes. His legs are shaking, and when he drops the hammer his fingers remain curled, and the ale woman has to press the greasy leather beaker into his hand.

He drinks. Ale courses down his cheeks and his neck. It runs down his chest under his jack. He doesn’t care. He wants to drown in it, to let it fill his mouth and throat.

He holds the cup out again and the ale woman splashes in more watery ale.

He drinks; then the ale woman takes the cup and passes it to another man, pressing it into his hands also. The man remains blank-eyed, his gaze fixed on the distance. Blood trickles from his helmet. He drinks just as Thomas has done.

Thomas turns and stares back at the line where Warwick’s banner still flies. Though the line has given, though it has taken a pace back, it has not broken. They have held it, saved the flank. Men still hurry from the rear to stiffen it, but the job is done for the moment. The crisis has passed.

And just as he thinks this, there is a further great shout of dismay and a shrinking of the line, as if peeling back, and Thomas feels the thunder of a thousand hooves through the soles of his boots. From the stand of trees to the west, half hidden in the mist and swirling snow, hundreds of horsemen are thundering up the slope towards Warwick’s position. For a moment Thomas can only think they are on King Edward’s side, but no, it is an ambush, such as they tried that day at Newnham.

The horsemen are a bowshot away from where Thomas stands. They ride with their fifteen-foot lances and their hammers, two hundred perhaps, more even, and in their path Warwick’s men can do nothing other than break.

Seeing this, the ale woman throws down her jug and runs for the seat of the wagon. Her man throws aside the turnip he is eating and jumps to his feet. He begins thrashing the oxen with stinging slashes of his whip. The wheels of the cart pull free of the mud with a jerk and the cart rolls down the hill. And suddenly the prickers and the sergeants are back among them, shouting and screaming and forcing men back in the line. Trumpets blare and messengers set off.

‘You! In! Now! Go! On! ON!’

The horsemen come in a wedge. They crash into the fleeing remnants of Warwick’s left flank, scattering them, using their spears, riding men down, killing them with hammer blows. The shock of the ambush travels down the line, and just when they are most needed, there are no archers to hand, no one to knock the riders from their horses, no one to kill their horses under them.

A sergeant is there. A big man with a red face. He thumps Thomas with a staff, screaming at him, pushing him back up the field. Thomas has no weapon but it hardly matters. The line is breaking. They need numbers.

New companies come running from the village.

‘A Warwick! A Warwick!’

Thomas finds himself pinched between those falling back and those coming up. The men running back are wild-eyed and slack-mouthed and there is no way to hold them. They’ve cast away their weapons and torn off their armour.

Thomas can do nothing other than join the rest moving up to brace the line. He snatches up a bill with a bloodstained shaft.

The horsemen are slowed only by the number of dead on the ground. The northerners’ footmen have taken fresh wind from the spears too, and they’re pushing through the wall of bodies and clambering over it to press Warwick’s men everywhere and Warwick’s men step back, back down the slope up which they came.

Where are the archers?

Everywhere the northerners are gaining the upper hand and what had seemed like the crisis point earlier that morning now reveals itself to have been the first in a succession. Everywhere they are knocking Warwick’s men back, stabbing them as they fall, hooking them forward and killing them with hammer blows. Men on horseback are forcing their mounts forward, battering men from above.

Thomas is drawn back into the fray and all he can do is try to defend himself, breaking their spear thrusts and turning aside their blades with now a bill. But for every point he beats aside another swings across, jabbing always jabbing. A blade flashes at his eyes. He ducks. It strikes his helmet. He seizes the shaft and pulls. Another point wavers across his vision, a sharp side-to-side chopping motion. He lets go of the first shaft and sways back, battering the second point away with the back of his arm. Then another point, straight into his jack. He edges sideways, but his linen is laid open to the skin, his hip scorched by the passing blade. He lashes out, catches someone with his bill.