Robert Low - The Complete Kingdom Trilogy - The Lion Wakes, The Lion at Bay, The Lion Rampant

Hal felt something smack the back of his armoured head, the glancing blow staggering him, deafening as a bell. He whirled as the rider, twisting in the saddle as the warhorse skidded and turned, tried to face front and find a better blow from the axe he swung. A pike swung sideways, caught in the horse’s legs and it went down with a high, angry scream, scabbing clods up with flailing hooves.

A figure covered in mud and streaks of blood lurched out of the press, swinging a sword in one hand and tearing off the domed full-face helm with the other, which he flung at Hal, roaring after it with his sword in both hands. The helmet clattered off Hal’s shield, knocking him sideways, and he barely wobbled a parry with his sword as the second blow cut low at his legs.

Then Sim was at the knight’s elbow, the crossbow slung and his long, thin dirk in one hand, the other snaking round the knight’s neck, dragging him backwards with a crash. The sliver of blade gleamed like a silver snake tongue, flickered at the corner of the knight’s eye and he shrieked and thrashed even before Sim lanced it into his skull.

The knight with the axe had crashed down, flailing in the mud. He scrambled away from the licking spear points of the hedgepig square while his horse kicked and shrieked, then he rolled over, sprang up, tearing off the great helm, as most knights did when it came to the heat of battle, eager for the air and the vision, leaving maille coif and open-faced bascinet to protect head and neck.

He stumbled towards Sim, ring-metalled feet sucking out of the mud, only to to take Hal’s sword on the side of his bascinet helm, a bell-clang that drove the metal in on his cheek and knocked him sideways. He fell down, blood leaking from his eyes in red tears.

Hal and Sim gripped each other upright.

‘Aye til the fore,’ Sim said, his face streaked with sweat and someone else’s blood.

Still alive, Hal thought.

Cressingham had balked at the final charge, but the maddened warhorse had the bit and did it anyway, somewhere in the maddened brain of it remembering all the training. Rearing and flailing, it struck out with huge metalled hooves and the fat Treasurer, a bad horseman at best, lost his seat and fell off into the mud, with a great crash that whirled stars into him.

Something huge and heavy stepped on his thigh – his own horse – and he heard the bone break. A great blow smacked him in the back as he struggled to rise and pitched him face first into the soft ground and he struggled like a pinned beetle, tasting the musky fresh earthworm of it, choking and blind because it had clogged up breathing holes and eyeslit.

He scrabbled frantically at the helmet ties, lost in the dark and airless cave of the bucket helm; finally, he tore it off in a mad, frenzied shriek and whooped in a breath, his vision no more than a blur. He saw the man come at him and lifted his good hand, free of weapons, out in front, sobbing with relief and pain. Ransomed.

Fat Davey saw a man fatter by far than himself these days, a man weeping with fear and holding his hand out, pleading for mercy. He had no idea who he was, only what he was.

Nae quarter the day wee mannie, he snarled to himself and drove the pike deep into the three swans on the man’s swollen belly, put his horny, crusted. bare foot on the astonished terror of the man’s iron-framed face and levered the weapon free again.

‘Remember Berwick,’ he growled and moved on.

***

No quarter today, thought Addaf, seeing the horses crashing and falling. Which made this no place for us. He turned to Heydin Captain and saw the grim set of his face.

‘Away lads,’ he heard Heydin say. ‘Away as you value your lives.’

Addaf looked at the bow and the nocked arrow. He had not shot once, he thought with disgust, drew back to his ear in a sudden, swift movement and released the shaft blindly into the air, heard it screech away from him as the air hissed through a maker’s flaw in the head.

He threw the bow-bag to one side and slung the weapon across his back still strung, wincing at what that would do to the tiller. He headed after the others, throwing away the entangling shoes from around his neck, the iron-rimmed hat, unlacing the gambeson as he went.

Down at the river, with the howling at his naked heels, he threw off the precious, expensive gambeson and wondered if he could dog-paddle well enough with a bow in one hand, for he would not give that up save at the very last.

They were broken and Thweng was not surprised. The French Method, he thought bleakly, which means ruin when inflicted on a wall of points. His own horse fretted and mewed from the pain of the great bloody scar down one shoulder, where a pike had torn through the thick padding, spilling out the wool in pink-stained skeins.

The Angels circled and milled, no more than a dozen of them now, balked by spearpoints, reduced to hurling insults and their lances and maces and even their great slitted helmets; he heard one chanting, as if he knelt in the cool still of a chapel – blessed be the Lord my strength, who teaches my hands to war and my fingers to fight.

Around him, Thweng saw the foot waver, take a step back, away from the wet-mouthed snarls behind the thicket of steadily approaching spearpoints. A blade was thrown down; a shield was dropped.

Then they were off like a flock of chickens before the fox.

‘The bridge,’ Thweng yelled and pointed. The Angels swung their mounts.

The bridge. The only way left to safety and plugged by a ragged square of points, like a caltrop in the neck of a bottle.

The arrow came out of nowhere, spinning and wobbling, the weight of the bodkin point dragging it down like a stooping hawk and shrieking as the wind howled through a small maker’s flaw.

Moray, who was trying to send the Selkirk bowmen to the right, down the river to dissuade the other two English Battles from crossing, had just turned to Berowald, smiling.

‘Et fuga verterunt angli,’ he had called out and Berowald, who knew the last words embroidered on the cloth story consecrated to Norman victory in Bayeux, waved one hand. And the English fled – he was chuckling at it still when he saw Moray look up at the sound of the thin whistling, his domed, crested helm under one arm so that he could call out clearly. He was smiling, because he knew they had won.

The arrow hit him below the right eye, drove downward, smashed the teeth on his right jaw, came out under the lip of the bascinet, speared through the coif and into the join between neck and shoulder, finding the thin treachery of space between flesh and the protection of padding, iron and maille.

Not long after, a rider churned his way over the litter of bodies and blood and bits that had been men until he found the panting, gasping figure he sought. Clotted with gore to the elbows, his wild hair stiff with it, Wallace snarled like a mad dog, dancing his own bloody jig in the raving centre of a knot of axemen. His new lion-blazoned jupon was shredded and he had long since hurled himself from the unfamiliar horse to fight on foot.

The rider was almost attacked, but someone spotted that he was the Flemish knight, the kin of Moray. Wallace heard the man’s news and the axemen, panting and straining impatiently at the leash to be led back into the mad slaughter, were rocked back on their heels at the great, rolling, dog-howl of pain and anguish that came from the flung-back throat of their hero.

Hal saw the knot of riders split from the mass. The pikes were being flung to one side now, the squares melting away into vengeful packs of men dragging out long daggers, swords and falchions. The kerns and caterans, whooping now, unshouldered the long axes looped on their backs and plunged, like joyful leaping lambs, into the slaughter.