Sacrifice

by David Pilling

  Oxford nodded, and adjusted his grip on his pole-axe. “Agreed. What of the mercenaries?”

  “Superb troops,” Martin answered without hesitation, “some of the best in Christendom, led by one of the finest captain-generals alive. Their training and discipline is unequalled. Any one of them is a match for two or even three of our men-at-arms.”

  Oxford swallowed. Martin could guess at his thoughts. The royalist vanguard had marched swiftly to meet the enemy, here, on a field close to the village of East Stoke. Too swiftly. The rest of the royal army was somewhere behind them, undisciplined levies straggling through the summer heat in slack and unsoldierly fashion.

  King Henry himself was in charge of the rearguard. No soldier, he was content to leave Oxford and his uncle Pembroke to fight the battle for him. Pembroke was supposed to command the main body of the army. Martin imagined the frantic old man galloping up and down the disordered lines, shouting at his officers and men to hurry, hurry, else the day was lost.

  “To hells with this,” rasped Oxford, “I can’t spend all day waiting for the old bugger to find us. We have enough men here to settle the affair. Archers!”

  He flung up his hand, and the order to advance rippled down the line. Martin’s mouth and throat filled with the familiar coppery tang of fear - it tasted like blood - as hundreds of archers broke forward and approached the escarpment in staggered lines.

  The Yorkists had almost no bowmen of their own, else they might have rained missiles down on the royalists. As it was, they could only stand and watch as the archers halted, notched arrows to their war bows, and took aim.

  “Loose!”

  The shouts of their officers filled the air, followed by the whistle of hundreds of shafts taking to the sky like so many wild geese.

  As Martin predicted, the arrow-storm wreaked carnage among the Irish. Their defiant shouts died away as scores of men were shot down and lay piled in heaps on the ridge, dead and dying mixed up together. Great holes opened in their ranks, quickly filled again as brave men stepped forward to fill the gaps.

  Brave fools. Martin was impressed by the futile courage of these men, brought over from their native land to set up yet another pretender on the English throne.

  The new claimant was perhaps the most ridiculous of all: a boy of ten, plucked from low-born obscurity by an ambitious priest who claimed the child was in fact Edward, Earl of Warwick, son of the late Duke of Clarence and cousin to the princes who vanished inside the Tower.

  There were all kinds of rumours about the boy’s true name and origin. Some said he was really Lambert (or John) Simnel, the son of a baker, or a tradesmen, or an organist.

  Martin cared little for the rumours. He suspected the boy was a dupe, a convenient puppet used by the surviving Yorkists to recover their power and topple Henry Tudor from his unsteady throne. The real Warwick was in the Tower, where he would remain the rest of his days. As the last true Plantagenet, he was too dangerous to set free.

  The real enemy, the real leader of the resurgent Yorkist cause, was John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln. King Henry had unwisely spared the man’s life after Bosworth, and offered him a seat on the royal council. In return Lincoln feigned submission for a while, and then fled abroad to beg for military aid from Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy and sister to Richard of Gloucester.

  Accursed brood, thought Martin, Henry should have lopped off Lincoln’s head, and sent a hired blade to stick a knife into Margaret’s flesh.

  Margaret, who hated the Tudor with deathless passion, was only too eager to hire the services of Schwartz and his mercenaries. With his tame priest and the hapless Simnel in tow, Lincoln sailed to Ireland to raise more support from the Irish lords, who wanted a Yorkist king again. The Irish welcomed Lincoln with open arms, paraded Simnel before cheering crowds in Dublin on the shoulders of a gigantic man-at-arms, and proclaimed him as Edward the Sixth, rightful King of England.

  The fug of politics was too dense for Martin to comprehend. As ever, the knives came out when the talking ended, and now thousands of men would die for the sake of a few.

  “They will have to attack,” said Oxford, “come down off that ridge and meet us hand-to-hand, or else stand and die.”

  There was a note of satisfaction in his voice. The earl clearly relished the prospect of coming to blows with the Yorkists. To settle things man to man, blade to blade, and let God decide the victor.

  Martin was less sanguine. He was only thirty-four, and yet a life of constant war and exile, loss and disappointment had aged him beyond his years. Once, in his ardent youth, he had burned to test himself against other men in single combat. Now he felt slow, weighed down inside the weight of steel that covered his fragile body like a second skin. He had one more fight in him, perhaps, and then he was done.

  His breath came quick and fast as trumpets rippled along the length of the escarpment. Oxford’s prediction was correct. The Yorkist captains could not afford to let their army wither under the hail of arrows. They had to advance, quit the advantage of high ground, and meet the royalists on equal terms.

  “Courage, lads!” shouted Oxford above the brassy wail of trumpets and thunder of drums, “don’t let this rabble frighten you. Stand fast, show them your steel, and they will run back to their holes quick enough!”

  His words raised a cheer, though not from Martin. It would take a deal more than a show of arms to repel the Irish, not to mention Schwartz and his hardened professionals.

  At the first sound of trumpets, the kerns broke ranks and swarmed down the ridge, with no thought to order or discipline. Once again their wild shrieks filled the air. Behind them advanced the mercenaries, tramp-tramp-tramp to the steady beat of a drum, a steel phalanx of pikes and bills with missile troops on the flanks. The wings of the Yorkist host were made up of the rebellious Lancashire gentry and men-at-arms that had joined Lincoln on his march south.

  The royalist archers discharged one final volley of arrows, then turned and retreated in good order, back to the safety of their own lines. At a bark of command from Oxford’s marshals, the ranks parted to let them through, then closed up again.

  “Ready!” screamed Oxford, his voice now hoarse with shouting. The royalist vanguard was drawn up in a long line, several ranks deep, of pikes and billmen on foot. Groups of armoured noblemen and their retainers were placed at intervals to buttress the line.

  Oxford himself stood in the centre under his standard, surrounded by his household knights. Martin stood close to the earl’s right hand.

  He longed to have his old comrades about him. After Bosworth the remnant of The Company of the Talon had dispersed, each man to his own country. There was no profit in staying in England now the wars had ceased.

  If only we had known, thought Martin. He took in a final deep breath, slammed his visor shut, and planted his feet wide for the shock of impact.

  His eyes narrowed as they watched the tidal wave of Irishmen roll closer, ever closer. Save in the final moments at Bosworth, he had seldom faced such a furious storm-charge. As a rule, professional soldiers were mindful of their own skins, and took care not to take undue risks in battle.

  The kerns were wild men, not soldiers, whipped into a berserk passion by their masters and hurled into the fray.

  Martin sensed a tremor run through the royalist line. The front rank wavered in the face of the enemy, and some of the fainter hearts took a step backwards.

  “Stand fast, damn you!” Oxford’s voice was almost shrill. “Keep the line straight! Straight, in God’s name!”

  Fear stabbed at Martin. He absorbed it and let his instincts took over.

  A half-naked kern leaped at him, javelin in one hand, hatchet in the other. The hatchet scraped harmlessly against Martin’s armoured shoulder as he hacked off the kern’s legs under the knee.

  Crippled, blood streaming from his stumps, the Irishman fell onto his back. His comrades trampled him in their eagerness to get at the enemy. Martin’s axe swung again, and again. Two more
kerns fell, one with his face split in half, the other squirting gore from a deep gash in his throat.

  Still the Irish came on, careless of wounds, careless of casualties, leaping and climbing over their own dead and wounded. Martin could scarcely believe the depth of their fury, their hatred, the insane battle-rage that drove them onto the royalist blades.

  “Madness!” he cried inside the depths of his helm, “run away, you poor fools, back to your own land! Why fight and die like this in an evil cause?

  None heard him, or would have understood if they did. Martin gritted his teeth as he slew, one after another, these hopelessly brave peasants who didn’t know how to fight properly. It was sheer butcher’s work, as though he cut the throats of dumb beasts in a slaughterhouse.

  Still, the sheer weight of bodies started to tell. Slowly, slowly the royalist line bent backwards, unable to stand its ground against such a frenzied onslaught. The men in the front rank, including Martin, were so cramped and hard-pressed they had little space to ply their weapons.

  A knight to his left was pulled down and vanished under a heap of kerns, howling like wolves as they clawed and tore at the man’s armour. Then his own vision went black as dirty fingers groped inside the narrow slit of his visor and tried to gouge out his eyes. Martin staggered backwards and truck out blindly with the shaft of his axe.

  The steel knuckles of his gauntlet met with soft flesh and brittle bone. A cry of pain ripped through his helm, and then he could see again.

  He was alone, save for the mangled bodies of a handful of kerns scattered about the grass. Baffled, he tried to peer through the red mist that drifted across the field, and heard the ominous beat of a drum.

  Vague, steel-clad figures appeared through the mist. Martin flicked up his visor to get a better view. His throat tightened when he recognised them for Swiss pikemen.

  They advanced at the steady, unhurried tread he had witnessed on so many battlefields. Six ranks deep, a moving forest of deadly steel points.

  “Retire!” Martin heard Oxford croak, “withdraw ten paces and re-form!”

  Martin tore his gaze away from the Swiss and looked around. The kerns had vanished, save for the bodies of their dead and wounded strewn about the ground, though he could hear the sound of fighting in the distance. Their insane charge had served to tear holes in the royalist battle-line, which now shuffled backwards in the face of the new threat.

  A fresh storm of war-cries echoed across the field. English voices, raised in shameless treason:

  “God for King Edward! God and Saint George for the House of York!”

  These were the Lancashire men who had joined Lincoln’s army as it marched across English soil. Martin flushed with rage when he heard them, traitors to a man, who had helped to shatter England’s peace and plunge the wounded kingdom into yet another war.

  They would die, every one, either on the field or the block. For a moment Martin forgot his discipline, and failed to withdraw with his comrades. Without meaning to, he stood alone against the advancing wall of levelled Swiss pikes, one man against two thousand.

  “Bolton, you dolt! Get back in line!”

  Oxford’s voice, a shrill cry of outrage. Martin hesitated, knowing that to turn his back on the pikes was fatal, and chose to stand his ground.

  “Come, lads,” he shouted, raising his axe, “I’ve had my fill of running. Here I am. This is my soil. My country. Slay me if you can.”

  He could have laughed as the front ranks of the Swiss broke into a jog. They alone, of all the mercenaries in Europe, could execute such a manoeuvre, and run forward without losing their tight shoulder-to-shoulder formation.

  Martin had misjudged the distance between himself and the front rank of pikes. There was no time to lift his axe before a pike-head stabbed against his helm, dented the steel and hurled him onto his back.

  Stunned, he lay helpless with the taste of blood in his mouth. Purple stars flashed before his eyes. Swiss curses rained down on his head. He gritted his teeth and waited for the death-blow.

  It didn’t come. The Swiss stepped over his body as the wall of pikes pressed on to crash into the royalist line. Martin curled into a ball and pressed his gauntlets over his visor. The eye-slit was his most vulnerable point. The blade of a dagger or a poniard, thrust through the narrow gap, would finish him off.

  For a time all was dust and noise and heat and darkness. Martin fully expected to die, trampled or stabbed where he lay.

  The long moment of danger passed, the voices receded a little, and he felt safe to try and stand. He groped blindly for his axe, snatched up the weapon and struggled to his feet. The blood and dirt in his mouth threatened to choke him, so he spat it out and blinked, trying to will away the stars that still wheeled in front of his eyes.

  An ugly shadow sprang at him. Martin struck out, double-handed. The blade of his axe rang against a helm, and the shadow fell away. He lurched forward, stamped on a breastplate, and swung again. This time his axe sheared through the visor of the man he had struck down. A gout of blood spurted against his leg-armour, and the body he stood on writhed violently, twitched, and went still.

  Martin fought like a man caught in a dream, striking any that came near, knights and men-at-arms and archers. He suffered many wounds, and his own warm blood splattered the earth, mingled with that of the men he killed.

  He tired. His breath came in gasps, his limbs weighed like lead, and each stroke was heavier and clumsier than the last. Light-headed with pain and loss of blood, Martin could feel the strength ebb from tired, over-stretched muscles.

  One more fight, and I am done. One more blow. One more stroke. One more kill, until there are none left to kill. Until I come into my own again. Until England is purged of treason and traitors. Until my kin are avenged. Until...

  He could see little through his damaged visor. A film of sweat, coupled with the aftershock of the blow to his head, blurred his vision into a mass of black and red shapes. The battlefield was draped in a curtain of blood, through which men fought like devils, all their ranks broken, all order and leadership swept away.

  Some lines from an old Marcher ballad surfaced through the chaos and pain in Martin’s head:

  “Fight on, my men, Sir Andrew said,

  I am a little hurt, but not yet slain,

  Let me lie down and bleed awhile,

  And then rise and fight again....”

  Like the knight in the ballad, Martin longed to lie down. It would be easy, so very easy, to sink to the earth and let his tortured life pump back into the soil from whence it came.

  Duty kept him on his feet. If he died, what then of his sister Elizabeth? She would be left penniless and landless, with none to protect her, dependent on the charity of the Tudor court.

  Martin smiled grimly. Elizabeth needed little protection. Whatever happened, she would survive, and make some kind of life for herself. Martin’s duty was not to her, but the rest of his kin. Victims, all of them, of a war they had not started and could not avoid.

  The crackle of gunfire burst through his mazed thoughts. Schwartz’s arquebusiers had opened fire. Martin pictured the lead bullets tear fresh holes in the ragged lines of Oxford’s vanguard, punch through steel with ease, fill the world with the stench and terror of black powder.

  Martin swayed on his feet. He had dropped his axe, and stood alone and vulnerable, all the fight knocked out of him. He could kill no more. Only stand, so long as his strength lasted, and wait for the end.

  Some time later - it might have been noon, or even dusk, he was never certain - they found him lying propped against a tree on the northern edge of the battlefield, near the road called the Fosse Way.

  Martin only had a dim memory of how he came to be there. He thought he had crawled on all fours, like a beast, careless of where he went, so long as he left the noise and clamour and bloodshed behind him.

  “Bolton.”

  A vaguely familiar voice. Martin stirred, and made a supreme effort to lift his head.


  “Bolton. I saw you move, Bolton. Stop playing the old soldier. You’re alive.”

  The voice merged with the shimmering edges of the man-shape that stood over him. Sir John Savage. A brave knight, Martin vaguely recalled. A lucky one, to be sure. Savage’s armour was plastered with blood, none of it his own.

  “Am I?” Martin said blearily, “God be thanked. Or cursed. Heaven knows He will listen to neither.”

  “That is impious,” said another man, “we should all give thanks to God. He has given us the victory. A great and lasting victory.”

  This was the Earl of Pembroke’s voice, deep and stern, still tinged with a Welsh accent despite long years of exile in Brittany.

  “Victory,” said Martin. He rolled the word around his mouth. It tasted foul. His brother Richard had tasted victory at Wakefield and Saint Albans. Small good they did him.

  “There are no lasting victories,” he added, “only brief bursts of good fortune. The wheel shall turn again. One day we reach the apex of glory, the next we are flung into a pit of snakes.”

  Savage reached down to grasp Martin’s hand, and drag him to his feet. “Not this time,” rumbled Pembroke, “Lincoln is dead. Schwartz is dead. Simnel and the priest are taken captive. Their army is smashed beyond hope of recovery. A few of their lesser captains have fled, true, but they will find no refuge in England. The House of York is ruined, and shall never again rise in arms to plague our realm.”

  With Savage’s aid, Martin managed to wrench off his battered helm. He looked around, blinking, at the field of slaughter.

  The dead lay in great heaps, at their thickest near the gully at the foot of the escarpment. Martin saw the broken bodies of hundreds of Swiss and German mercenaries. They had died where they stood, formed up around the banners of their captains, overwhelmed at the last.

  “Matters looked grim for a while,” said Savage, “until our reinforcements arrived and hit the Yorkists in flank. They fought well, mind, and refused to break until all their host was in tatters. Schwartz was among the last to die. God knows how many wounds the German swine took before he finally dropped.”