Robert Low - The Lion Rampant

And Isabel MacDuff, Kirkpatrick recalled suddenly. As well Hal is not here, since he would care even less than myself for Ross’s rank. As the King should have done, instead of gathering this earl into his peace with a forgiving kiss … the things you do when you want to wriggle your arse to fit on a throne.

‘Bigod,’ Ross spat out eventually. ‘When this matter is done …’

‘I will be back to my old tasks,’ Kirkpatrick finished and Ross clicked his teeth shut in his sweating face, remembering the fearsome reputation of the King’s right-hand man. He tried to pull his own visor down to cover his confusion, but it had stuck and Kirkpatrick grinned.

‘You need to loose the hinges on that,’ he offered in a voice like poisoned silk. ‘I have a wee sharp dirk that will do it.’

There might have been more, save that a knot of riders flogged up and, with a shock, Kirkpatrick saw the blazing lion and the gold-circleted helmet. Bruce …

He watched, feeling sick, as Keith, Marischal of Scotland, kneed his mount close to the King, who spoke quickly and gestured once behind him with an axe — he has a new one, Kirkpatrick thought wildly. To replace the one he broke yesterday …

Then, with a rush of spit to his dry mouth, he realized the Marischal was detailing men — and one of them was himself. Sixty or so, he reckoned, with that part of his mind not numbed. He fumbled Cerberus after the trail of them, finding himself next to a knight bright with gold circles on flaming red. Vipond, he recalled. Sir William …

‘What are we to do?’ he asked, feeling his voice strange. He was aware that, somehow, his lips seemed to have gone numb.

‘Chase away that wee wheen of bowmen,’ Vipond replied gruffly, ‘who are annoying the Earl of Moray.’

The bugger with the Earl of Moray, Kirkpatrick wanted to say. Let him look to himself …

‘Dinna fash,’ Vipond said and Kirkpatrick realized he had been muttering to himself and felt immediately shamed, another great rush of heat that made him dizzy.

‘Stay by me, my lord,’ the knight said, smiling a sweat-greased sickle on to his face. ‘You will be as fine as the sun on shiny watter.’

‘Form.’

Kirkpatrick found his hands shaking so hard that he could not make them do anything, but the loose visor of his bascinet clanged shut as if he had ordered it; the world closed to a barred view, as if he was in prison.

He heard the command to move at the trot and did not seem to do much, but Cerberus knew the business and followed the others; he heard his own ragged breathing, echoing inside the metal case of the helm, turned his head a little and saw Vipond sliding his great barrel heaume on, becoming a faceless metal ogre.

‘On — paulatim ,’ he heard and Cerberus surged forward so that the cantle banged Kirkpatrick hard in the back. He felt the warm, sudden, shaming flush as his bladder gave way.

Nyd hyder ond bwa .

They roared it out as they nocked, savaged strength into their draw with it and shrieked it out on the release of the coveys of whirring death they sent into the men struggling in their ragged square of spears.

There is no dependence but on the bow.

Addaf, striding up and down behind his men, streamed with sweat and his clothes stuck to him as if he had plunged into the stream they had just crossed. All the men were dark with stains, but there was no water in that stream, only a slush of bog at the bottom, ochre pools that stank.

Yet the sides were steep enough that men had had to haul themselves up by the choke of weeds — but it had been worth it, for they were now given a clear shot straight into the left of the rebel ranks.

The ripping silk sound of the arrows fletched away into the great roar of the battle and Addaf clapped a shoulder here, patted another there and bawled out for them to be steady, aware that there were not enough of them.

He looked across, trying to pick out one of the Berkeley lords; he needed more bowmen — even the Gascons with their silly, slow latchbows would do.

He turned and put a hand on the shoulder of Rhys, planning to bawl the message in his ear and have him repeat it before sending him away; it took him half a sentence to realize that Rhys was neither listening, not shooting, but staring, his mouth slightly open.

Addaf followed his gaze and felt as if he had been struck by lightning. Horses. Riders were coming at them, fast, and the banners they flew were all blue and white, red and gold.

‘Away,’ he roared and was astonished to hear a scream of outrage — and another voice, raised in shrill counter to his command.

‘Stand. Shoot. Kill the heathens.’

Y Crach, shaking with fervour, glared at Addaf and pointed his bowstave at him.

‘You run if you wish, old man.’

Addaf felt the rage in him, so rushed that it seemed the top of his head would explode and shower them all with the foul thoughts surging in it. Hywel, Y Crach, the whole sorry mess … he was, in the one small part of him still calm and sane, astonished to see the vale of Cilybebyll there in his head, the patch of land he had once owned and had not been back to see for decades. The ache was like a sudden blow.

Y Crach had not realized the old man had it in him. He knew he had badly miscalculated when the hand reached out and gripped the front of his tunic. The shoulder muscles, honed to a hump by years of pull and not yet completely ravaged by age, twitched like a horse’s rump and Y Crach felt himself fly.

Men gawped as the scabby archer whirled to the edge of the steep-sided stream, then vanished over it with a despairing yelp.

‘ A fo ben, bid bont ,’ Addaf roared, his red face scattering sweat drops and spit.

If you want to be a leader, be a bridge.

The old proverb, so aptly delivered, made the others laugh, but Addaf was done with it and turned from the hole Y Crach had left in the air when he vanished over the lip of the stream. He found the horsemen rolling relentlessly towards them. Too close, God blind me, he thought …

‘Run,’ he bawled, ‘if you want to live.’

This was the dark heart of the matter and Dog Boy knew it with every man he dragged out, with every man he grabbed by a handful of cloth and flung in. Most of those dragged out were not even bloody, just felled by heat.

Yet they are thinning us, Dog Boy thought. Down to four deep and growing less. He helped Parcy Dodd pull out a man, turned and took the first gambesoned shoulder he could find in a grimy fist.

‘There,’ he ordered. ‘Get ye there.’

There was little sound now, from men too weary to roar, but the eldritch shriek from beyond the line of backs ruched the skin on Dog Boy even as it leaked sweat. Horses never made such a sound, he thought. Not ever, save now, when they are dying in pain.

A knot of men surged past him, saffron cloth flashed and he realized that the moment had come for the madmen from north of the Mounth to go in, filtering through the spearmen ranks, baring their long axes and feral snarls. He saw shields with the black galley of Angus Og of the Isles and felt a brief moment of pity for the English.

Out in front, horsemen were stuck fast, some of them unable to move forward or back; there was a dead horse, belly to belly with its neighbours and held upright by the press as the man still struck wearily from its back. Two down from him, Dog Boy knew, was a knight either dead or heatstruck on his still living horse and sitting there like a wilted metal flower, again jammed in with his neighbours and unable even to fall.

‘Ah, Christ betimes.’

Parcy’s bitter voice turned Dog Boy into his face, then down his gaze to the body at his feet. Parcy had just dragged him out and the bloody waste of what had been Buggerback Geordie lolled like a discarded straw man.