Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

Towards midnight all who were still on their feet jumped through the flames, those who were not on their feet but awake copulated with the girls, but many just snored through a senseless stupor until dawn.

As I have said. Brother Peter was much taken with the bladder-game, which he called 'footie', and a fortnight or so later suddenly revealed what may have been his purpose all along in taking us south and east instead of north and west: there was annually held, round about the tenth day of July, a particularly watchable contest between two villages on the banks of the river Nene a mile south of a town called Northampton. These were Sandyford and Hardingstone, which was a further mile or so to the south. We arrived on the site late on the evening of the ninth, wet through after two days of continual rain, and almost immediately ran into a picket of armed men on horses guarding the ford.

'Ah,' said Peter, 'these will be constables placed here to ensure that no members of either team will break the prescribed bounds of the contest by crossing the river and thereby stealing a march on the others.'

'Maybe,' I said, looking down into the swirling, rushing water, 'but believe me, no one is going to cross here without a boat.'

For fordable though it may have been on an ordinary day, on this day, on account of the rain, it looked deep and fast-flowing,

We walked on through the gathering dusk and presently came to the road to the south, the highway. Between the river and the undulating plain it crossed a low rise.

'This will be a capital vantage-point from which to follow the course of tomorrow's contest,' Peter exclaimed with glee, and we followed it to the top.

A gang of twenty or so men, in half-armour and supervised by another horseman, was dragging a large cannon up the hill from the river to join four more that were already deployed across the crest. They protected the approach to the town, whose towers and spires loomed through the murk a mile or so behind us and on the other side of the river.

'No doubt,' Peter continued, 'these men belong to the Sandyford team and are here to defend the extremity of their territory.'

He seemed not to have noticed the cannon, or chose to ignore them. It was then that I noticed something abnormal about his appearance.

'Peter,' I said, 'do you realise you are wearing your spectacles? Normally you only have them on when you are reading.'

A moment later, while Peter was still fumbling with his lenses and peering about him with ever-increasing signs of surprise, the supervising horseman accused us of being Yorkist spies and ordered his men to tie us to a gnarled and lichened apple tree that grew on the top of the rise.

'You can jolly well stay there,' this unpleasant youth added, in the accents I had learnt to associate with the Norman tribe, 'until we've seen your beastly friends awff. Then we'll take you deown to the teown and find out what colour your insides are.'

On top of everything else it rained all night.

I woke, yes, woke, although I was tied upright, facing outwards, my wrists to Peter's wrists, my ankles to his, with the trunk of the tree between us. A bough of tiny immature apples bumped my forehead, a patch of piss was running down my inside leg, and the sound of a skylark shrilled in my ears. We were both intolerably stiff, aching in every joint and muscle, but as we stirred the sun rose over the plain to the east and a few moments of warm sunshine eased the pain.

Around us and below, the gunners were also stirring, lighting fires and cooking a breakfast in which, from the smell of it, bacon and black pudding played a considerable part, smells both of us found disgusting for a time though soon even in my Muslim soul and Peter's Franciscan one they wakened hunger. Presently a sergeant-gunner, a barrel of a man with long yellow hair, a huge moustache of the same colour and a week's growth of beard, dressed in brown studded leather, a mail skirt, a breastplate and rimless helmet took pity on us and made one of his crew give us some bread, which, of course, he had to hold for us.

From his side of the tree, Peter asked me what I could see of what was happening.

Since I was facing east and south I had to screw up my eyes against the sun, still low in the sky beneath a bank of black cloud. 'Well,' I said, 'the slope is uneven but gentle, and loses itself in a plain that is yet not completely flat. There is common land, pasturage, a couple of villages, one of which I suppose is Hardingstone, with fields about them. Beyond them is the forest. The road winds down the slope, between the villages, and loses itself amongst the trees.' 'Is there much in the way of activity?'

'Quite a lot. A hundred yards away the men are trying to adjust the position of the cannon under the direction of the bastard lordling who put us here. But they are having a lot of difficulty since during the night they have sunk almost to the axles of their small wheels in the clay. Our young friend is growing very bad-tempered about it.'

‘I can hear him.'

'No doubt you can hear, too, a monotonous hammering noise, wood on wood. This is because many more men, armed and armoured, are coming into the scene and are hammering stakes into the ground with sharpened points angled upwards, digging a ditch and throwing up a rampart, stretching three hundred paces or more on either side of the road, in a line at right-angles to it. That's about it. No. I'm wrong. Suddenly they are all excited and I can see why. Coming out of the forest and heading up the gap between the villages is a long column of soldiers carrying lances on their shoulders, and here and there in the column groups of fifty or more men in heavy armour on big horses

'How far away?'

'A mile or so.'

'And you can see them in that much detail?' 'My one eye is better than your two.'

A moment of silence from my friend, possibly a touch of chagrin. I sought to mitigate any offence I might have given. 'And what can you see on your side?'

'Not a lot. A large camp of soldiers. Tents. The King's standard. No sign of footballers, though, But it's early yet.'

The morning wore on. More and more men came up from the river and formed up behind the stakes, many of them archers with those vicious longbows. There were horses, too, clad in plate armour and carrying armoured men. Whenever they got into a declivity or a marshy patch – there was one such over to my left where a stream meandered through fields to join the Nene, which was out of my view – the combined weight was too much and the horses sank to their knees, whinnied and neighed in distress and panic and threatened to unseat those of the knights who had not already dismounted. But most were foot-soldiers, also in full armour and carrying billhooks with axe- or mattock-like blades, and heavy swords at their sides.

About mid-morning we heard trumpet calls and drum-beats and, Here we go. I thought, but, no. it was for a parley that they sounded. Out of the more distant ranks now serried in front of the forest to the south came twenty or so horsemen with a herald's trumpet in front, carrying big banners covered with the complicated devices all Europeans carry into battle as means of identification. Though how an ordinary soldier is meant to distinguish each from the other, to know friend from foe in the heat of battle, without a dictionary of heraldic devices as part of his battle-kit, defeats me. Probably defeats him too.

Our popinjay, now mounted since the ground on the rise was firmer than below, shaded his eyes and spoke to a couple of similarly mounted and armoured young men who had come up to join him. 'Oh, Christ, it's the Godgang,' he exclaimed.

'Godgang, Justin? What's a fellow meant to make of that?'

'Bishops, dear Maurice. There's old Bourchier there, Archbish of Canterbury, can't mistake his white beard. Cousin of York's, ain't he?'