by Robert Low
An earl needs me. The thought made Tam get up, wobbling on shaky legs; he glanced out to where the enemy archers stood, on the far side of the steep-banked stream and with a clear shot. Randolph, with a satisfied grunt, turned away and shouldered into the struggling, howling mass of the schiltron as if he was only trying to get to a friend across a crowded courtyard.
The men in front of Tam suddenly seemed to tremble and stir, then braced with a great stream of sibilant curses – the English horse, spiked like shrike offerings, were being rammed into the wall of spears by the blind eagerness of those behind.
This, Tam thought, leaning his shoulder against the man in front and bracing, his head down at the man’s waist, seeing shit-streaks down the naked legs and sucking in the stench of it, really is the worst moment of my life.
Kirkpatrick felt the pressure of his bladder and tried to ease the crush of maille and gambeson on it by shifting himself slightly in the saddle. That made the warhorse think movement and action was imminent, so it dragged the bit and jerked him forward. Cursing, he reined it savagely back, clattering lance against shield; the visor of his fancy new bascinet dropped with a clang and blinded him.
‘You need to pinch that.’
Kirkpatrick, fumbling with four things and only two hands, raised the visor into the sardonic grin of the Earl of Ross, sitting easily on his own mount. He made a gesture with one gauntleted hand, the lance locked upright in the crook of his arm and firmed into the stirrup fewter.
‘Smithing nips,’ he elaborated, beaming. ‘Get your man to pinch the hinges a little, so that it stiffens and remains up until you want it down. That’s what I did with mine.’
Kirkpatrick hated him and his good advice, hated the bloody warhorse which had cost an entire season’s wool tolts and hated the beast’s name – Cerberus – which he was starting to realize was because it had clearly been spawned in Hell.
Above all, he hated being here in the metal huddle of Sir Robert Keith’s horse, nervous and awkward on a baiting destrier, being clumsy with shield and lance. Aware that his skills with weapons and horse were not only inadequate, but marked him as a rank beginner to the armoured men around him, he knew they watched and sneered, enjoying the sight of Bruce’s loathsome ‘auld dug’ trying to be a true knight of the realm.
‘Thank you, my lord,’ he managed to grit out and Ross nodded politely, but then frowned.
‘Would you not be better with the baggage, Sir Roger?’ he asked innocently. ‘For certes you seem a little out of place. Should you be here?’
Kirkpatrick, rocked back and forth by the head-tossing Cerberus, felt the rush of blood through him at this casual viciousness, washing away the cold sweat on his spine.
‘No,’ he answered thickly. ‘For certes I should not. Nor any of us. Nor would I be if it had not been for those less than loyal.’
Which made the Earl of Ross jerk so hard with shock and anger that his own horse threw its head up and squealed. Kirkpatrick’s smile was a twisted ugliness, for he thought Ross more than deserved the lick of a viperish tongue; here was the man who had been on the English side until recently, who had broken the sanctuary of a holy place to capture Bruce’s queen and sisters seven years ago, sending them to captivity and Bruce’s brothers to death.
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.
He remembered Geordie in the Black Bitch Tavern in Edinburgh, thrusting the gift-whore at him and grinning the remains of his bad teeth. Sweetmilk had been part of that, too, Dog Boy recalled, and glanced at the straining forest of legs; he is somewhere in that.
‘I hope he did not owe you money, lads,’ said a resonant voice and they looked up into the maille-framed face of Jamie Douglas, greasy with sweat and joy. Parcy, with a bitter grunt, flung himself away and back into the fray, while Dog Boy looked into Jamie’s grin, marvelling at how the gentle, lisping courtier vanished to be replaced by this, a hellish version written in hate.
‘Ye’re a hard man, Sir James,’ he offered and had back a wolfish grin.
‘Hard times. Besides, have you not heard that I am called the Black?’
Then he was gone, axe in one hand, shield in the other and roaring out his name so that folk glanced over their shoulders and tried to make way for him.
In case he cuts them down to get to the English, Dog Boy thought savagely. Which he may well do.
He became aware then, sitting by Buggerback Geordie’s shattered remains, with the great haze of dust sifting like gold down into a ground made slurry by blood and shit, that he wanted no more of this. He thought of Bet’s Meggy and the bairns.
My son, he said aloud. All that needs be done to get back to him and Bet’s Meggy is to kill Englishmen until they give up and go away … or are all dead.
Then, as if in a slow-motion dream, the ranks ahead seemed to part for a moment, opening like the Red Sea to Moses. Beyond, across a rampart of dead men and horses, he saw a knot of riders surrounding a single man, blazing with colours unstained, the gold pards gleaming, his helm proud with a padded silk lion on it and a clear crown embracing it with gold.
King Edward, by the Grace of God.
An Englishman.
The squire flogged up on a failing palfrey, wet mouth open and the sweat almost trailing behind him in the wind. Before he had reached two lance-lengths from the King, d’Argentan had spurred forward and raised a halting hand.
De Valence saw the squire’s livery, with the lions of Clifford smeared and spattered; he grew cold as the squire and d’Argentan exchanged words, the former panting, mouth open like a dog. The wheyed shock of his face made de Valence grow colder still, but he was turned from the sight by the King’s uncertain voice.
‘My lord Earl of Pembroke, have we sent for the foot?’
De Valence nodded politely.
‘We have, sire. They will be along presently.’
‘It seems to me’, Edward said querulously, ‘that our horse is being sore hurt. Get archers here, de Valence, and with all speed.’
D’Argentan arrived back, his sweating face twisted with concern.
‘Clifford is down. Dead,’ he said. Then he blinked a little and added harshly: ‘Sir Miles de Stapleton also. And both his sons.’
‘God blind me,’ de Valence spat. ‘They are carving us like a joint.’
The King turned, his grim face puzzled beneath the lappets and ermine and padded lion confection of his visored helm.
‘Who orders there now?’
‘Huddleston, according to that squire,’ d’Argentan answered, pleased that he had remembered to ask. The King shook his heavy head.
‘No, no, no – that will not hold. Huddleston does not have the rank for that. Tailleboys, or Leyburn – de Valence, send word that Leyburn is to order poor Clifford’s host.’
God curse it, de Valence thought bitterly as he screwed round in the saddle to where his retinue sat expectantly, what does it matter who orders? In that heaving mass no order given could be obeyed anyway … he caught the glow of a shield with a barred cross and waved to the man. A moment later, Sir William Vescy cantered away in search of the dead Clifford’s command.
‘Well, my lords,’ the King said, lowering his visor until his voice grew to a metal muffle. ‘It is time for the King to strike a blow. Give them heart.’
‘Certes, Your Grace. We will scatter them like chaff,’ boomed d’Argentan, grinning.
Christ’s Wounds, de Valence thought. Is he seriously contemplating riding his royal person into this? God save us all …
He followed, all the same, urging his mount to the King’s left side while men, caught out by the quickness of it, fumbled with shield and lance on the backs of their fractious, eager mounts.
Even as they picked a way over the scattered dead, the screaming, kicking horses slick with fluid, the groaning men, de Valence saw the thickening carpet of it, then the mound, piled with horse and man – some were still alive and pinned, limbs waving like weary beetle feelers.
And over it, sliding out from the bristling ranks and through a gap in the jammed wall of horse, he saw figures, creeping horrors winking with naked blades.
Dog Boy knew the knight, knew him from old and, it seemed to him in that moment, had been fighting him all his life. Blue and white stripes and a rondel of little red birds – an important knight, for sure, and there was a name for him somewhere in Dog Boy’s head, but h
e could not recall it. He went for him, all the same, half-crouched and snarling, aware of Patrick and Parcy and others at his back.
De Valence saw the figures, the leading one with a feral scuttle, axe and long dirk in his hands, his rimmed iron hat dented and his black-bearded face twisted; he was slavering, de Valence saw with wonder, like a rabid wolf …
The curving overhand blow of the axe made him cry out and the destrier reared – too late, de Valence saw that had been the intent, for the dirk flashed out and the warhorse shrieked and lashed out front and back; de Valence felt the shock that told him someone close behind had received the brunt of it.
Trying to cut the saddle girths, he thought wildly – and then his men surged forward and he lost sight of the slavering man. There were others, all the same, and de Valence knew they had recognized the King.
‘The King,’ he bawled. ‘Ware the King.’
De Valence, Dog Boy thought suddenly. His name is de Valence and he is an earl, no less – then he was whirled away by the sudden arrival of more horsemen, found himself next to a prancing power of a horse, a white beast draped in red and glowing with gold pards. He looked up into the metal face and the surmounting lion. King Edward, by the Grace of God – an Englishman …
Dog Boy struck and the King, unable to lower his shield enough, felt the shock of the axe blow on the padded armour of his warhorse, which squealed and snaked out a vicious bite. Dog Boy jerked away from it, slashing with the dirk; he saw, out of the corner of his eye, the screaming figure of Patrick launch himself forward.
The sword that snicked the iron hat from Patrick’s head, and most of his skull with it, came from a knight in red and silver, who hurled his shield at Dog Boy and then used the free hand to grab the king’s rein.
‘Away, sire …’
Dog Boy, staggering under the battering of the shield, blinded by the vision of Patrick’s iron hat flying bloodily into the air, gave a last, despairing lunge and a mad swipe of the axe – but the King of England was gone.
