At that moment, the man in front of Thomas, one of Hastings’s men, is caught with a billhook in the groin and he is hooked off balance so that he crashes back into Thomas, and his killer comes forward. Thomas has seen men like this before: an open-faced sallet, a padded jack, a breastplate and chains on his shoulders, his face set in a ferocious grimace. He is caught up in this, elated at catching and killing a man in plate, and he lunges at Thomas’s face.
But Thomas is fresh to the fight.
The billhook is two hands’ length of hammered iron, a spear with a cutting blade such as you might use for hedge trimming on one edge and a hook on the other. It is almost ideal for tight spaces such as this, but it is not as good as the pollaxe. Thomas catches the thin iron of the bill in the angle between pick and shaft and twists it aside so that the thrust is diverted. Then he slides the axe down on to the man’s fingers and turns them to boneless pulp. The man drops the bill with a howling scream. Thomas could now just thrust the point into his face, but another man – better harnessed – comes at Thomas and he knocks aside Thomas’s hammer and drives him back with tangled jabs.
But there is something else, behind him, to the left. A great swirling movement in the mist, more shouting than fighting. Hastings’s men are flanked, and they know it, and they are throwing down their weapons and turning to run, and Oxford’s men are filled with fresh heart and fresh ferocity, and as they come down the slope they beat and batter those who try to remain, scattering and killing them. Even those immune to the panic, those who know that they will die if they try to run, end up doing so, and they are hacked down from behind.
The disintegration spreads through Hastings’s battle, taking each man like a plague: your neighbour goes, so do you. Hastings’s men are rubbing off in numbers now, and fleeing, and are being killed as Oxford’s men bear in on them from the west. Thomas fights off jabs and hammer blows and tries to inflict some damage himself and already his arms, unaccustomed to such work, ring with pain and fatigue, but Oxford’s men press in on them, and they all must give ground. If any orders are being shouted, Thomas cannot hear them, but in fact the thousands of men in King Edward’s army come together to act as a single organism, as if they are following those unheard orders, and the line begins a slow turn along its length as King Edward’s right-hand battle, under the Duke of Gloucester, must overlap Warwick’s left flank on the opposite flank, to the east, on the other side of the road.
There is a chance, if they can just hold on.
But Hastings’s battle shreds, its shape disintegrating into tatters, as more men turn and flee. Mortal dread makes anyone thrice as strong as usual, and they tear at one another to get past. That is why the prickers – the men at the back, there to stop this sort of thing – are always armed with lances, and are always the most experienced sort of men who’d not mind stabbing anyone.
Only those around Hastings himself remain, pressed up now against King Edward’s men in the centre battle, and the others – hundreds, certainly – now lie dead or are crouched wounded in the field or have run or hobbled back towards the village, or even to London beyond. They will have gone back through the horse lines and the little baggage camp, spreading panic as they pass, and all Oxford’s men need do now is to press their attack into Hastings’s flank. All Oxford needs do is bring some horsemen into the field and the day is his.
As Thomas is thinking this he sees horses looming out of the mist to his left, and even above the crash of weapons and the shouts of the men he can feel their weight through his boot soles. There may be cries of despair among Hastings’s few remaining troops but, as with the orders, they go unheard.
Men cant around, and a great lurch goes through the ranks as the horses come on, huge shapes as big as boats, thundering unstoppable through the mist, and Thomas thinks that this is it. This is how he will die. After everything. He turns to face the horsemen, along the field to his left, though he must still fend off the cuts and the thrusts of the footmen, but that is easier, less wearying, than trying to attack them.
But the horses are going too fast. They are not turning on Hastings’s flank. No. They are riding past. They are – can it be? They are going after the remnants of Hastings’s men. They’re going after the easy targets, after the men they can ride down, men whose backs they can skewer, men they can smash with their hammers just as they smash turnips training in the tilt yard! They are after the baggage train perhaps, or the horse lines!
And then, at that moment, Thomas sees the reserves from the rear of King Edward’s battle come surging forward to augment Hastings’s ward, and there is the beginning of a reversal, of the pushing back at Oxford’s levies, who must be thinking that they are fighting while others are profiting and so they take steps back. This gives everyone in Hastings’s livery encouragement and for the first time since the two sides met, Thomas takes two steps forward, over a man face down, and he drives the pollaxe at someone with the intent of not just knocking his bill away but of killing him and moving on to the next.
There are shouts for King Edward he can hear now, and the blare of a bugle for Hastings, and suddenly every man knows this is not lost yet, and they start to drive Oxford’s troops back up the slope, tripping them backwards over the bodies of men lying scattered in the blood-slick grass. But there are not enough of them to reclaim the lost ground, and soon the advance falters. Thomas can imagine Oxford must be frantically gathering those gone in search of easy plunder, trying to get them back on the field. His captains – Brougham? – and prickers will be out after those horsemen – or perhaps the horsemen were the prickers? – and they will be battering at them with the flats of their swords, threatening eternal damnation and excruciating deaths for their families just to get the men to give up their lust for gain, to drop their pilfered mugs of stolen ale and return to the field.
But Montagu’s men are still ahead of them. And Warwick’s men too. They have not broken in pursuit of Hastings’s men, and now they are filing across from the centre, and they are well trained and with their added weight Hastings’s gain is made temporary, and now even King Edward’s line is buckling, pivoting. And so Thomas, who started the day facing north up the road, up the slope, now finds himself facing west, with the road under his heels. He thinks for a moment the men he can see are Warwick’s, but then he snatches sight of a badge that is more like a bird than a bear, and he knows they are Montagu’s, but it does not matter, for he and those who have remained with Lord Hastings are driven back. The faint glow of the sun is behind him, and it turns the mist before him billowing white, beautifully soft, when underneath it is all hard steel edges and ribbed points that tear and gash at flesh and ring against plate.
At last they move back up on to the road, forced there by weight of Montagu’s red-coated numbers. They hold the high ground at the top of the ditch for a moment, but then the man on Thomas’s left goes down clutching his face and kicking, and Thomas is isolated, and the man who killed him – in impenetrable plate with a slit like a frog’s mouth across the dome of his head – comes for him with a hammer, and Thomas knows he is no match for this man and the three other billmen who are jabbing and cutting at him with their long bills, aiming for his eyes. He slams the visor down with his wrist, and though now he is as if in a hole, he lashes out, and catches something.
But then there is an odd cry to the south, from the way of Barnet, and though Thomas can hardly hear it, there is a curious ripple that communicates itself up and down Warwick’s line, and Montagu’s men falter a hesitating moment. And perhaps they believe this has been too easy, and that Hastings’s capitulation was a trap, for out of the mist down to the south comes a division of King Edward’s men, their banners displaying the golden sunburst.
The men about to kill Thomas take steps back, uncertain now. They cannot see how many of King Edward’s men there are because of the mist, but they know they are over-committed and that they are now being flanked themselves, and unless they can withdraw, it is they who are th
e dead men.
But they are good soldiers, and well trained by Montagu, and he has his archers with him still, behind the lines, and they turn on the newly arrived King’s men and it is possible to see a smudge of arrows as they loose volleys down the length of the road at them. Thomas knows King Edward’s men must attack as quickly as they can now or they will be cut to pieces before they even reach Montagu’s men.
And they do. They charge forward. And as they do, King Edward comes to his left flank, and he gives courage to all those around him, and frightens all those who oppose him, so that he creates bulges in the lines. They attack back across the road with him, and Thomas goes too, though his glove is filled with blood and his head is ringing and he is hardly able to lift the pollaxe, because he knows this is another hinge on which the battle turns.
He can almost feel the impact of this second army of King Edward’s. It hits Montagu’s men and sends them staggering. And then – it is chaos. No one knows what is happening, because these are not King Edward’s men. These are Oxford’s men, returned, rounded up and brought back on to the field by men such as Brougham, only to be turned on by and shot at by Montagu’s men. And now they are fighting against one another and every man seems to be shouting about treachery and traitors.
And for a moment Thomas is able to stop fighting and just watch as the man who’d so nearly killed him a moment earlier is brought down on his back by three of Oxford’s levies. One of them puts his foot on the helmet while the other forces his bill blade into that frog’s mouth and pushes down with all his weight while the disarmed and dying man waves helpless arms.
And here is Flood, alive, with his visor up. He has lost his mace and found a short falchion and he is laughing with incredulous delight.
‘Look! Look!’ He gestures. ‘They think – they must think Oxford is the King! That his starburst is our sunburst!’
And he’s right! Above the men whom Thomas thought belonged to King Edward is the banner of the Earl of Oxford. It is clear now, but too late. Each man in Warwick’s line suspects his neighbour of treachery. Old Lancastrians have turned on old Yorkists, and old Yorkists are fighting back. And as they turn on one another, and as the sun rises, King Edward’s men, from having been on the verge of extinction, now surge forward to fight anyone who will stand to fight them, and they attack Warwick’s men as they are fighting against Oxford’s, or against Exeter’s, or against Montagu’s.
Horses are brought up from Barnet, now back in King Edward’s hands after Oxford’s men are chased away, and so begins the last act of the battle: the chasing and killing of those whom God has abandoned. And the release of terror brings with it a sort of murderous, destructive rage: the desire to hit, stab, crush, bite, stamp, gouge, break, break and break again. You can see it: suddenly blood becomes something in which to wallow, in which to dress yourself, to anoint your hands and face and hair. To dig so deep into the mire is the only way to block out the terror, and the horror of what you’ve been through.
‘But where is Warwick?’ Thomas shouts.
Someone points a bloody blade, and a whole crowd of men go churning forward and Thomas goes with them. A fully harnessed man on the ground raises a rondel dagger to try to stop him passing or to fend him off, and Thomas swings the axe, his hands loosening on the shaft the exact moment it punctures the smooth dome of the man’s helmet. But he’s not alone. Five or six others descend on the man on the ground, stabbing and punching at his joints, at the glimpses of soft cloth at the back of the knee, under the arm, the groin, the eyes. Thomas wrenches at his pollaxe to extract the pick.
Hastings’s men are surging forward, competing now with King Edward’s men, and the Duke of Gloucester’s, as they batter their way up the slope, and through the hedge and along the road. Wounded men are murdered where they are found, and the dead are now only obstacles in the way of whom they really seek: the Earl of Warwick.
But Thomas is too slow. He does not see it done, and afterwards, when it is over, or there is nothing useful he might do, he walks with Sir John Flood and two other men up to see the body where it lies by the fork in the road to St Albans. The bells are ringing for Easter Day. Flood is limping, and blood drips from Thomas’s numb right hand. The mist is lifting, and there is a strange atmosphere among the small crowd gathered about.
No one is talking, and it is as if all the men know they are witnessing something they will never forget, the sort of thing they will tell their grandchildren. There are a few bodies lying around, men tossed aside, their best bits and pieces already taken, ignored now, but the Earl lies apart, as if even in death, even having been stripped down to his braies, he remains greater than any man, even those left alive.
Thomas goes over to him.
He lies on his back. His body, still muscular despite his age, is mottled blue-green with bruising across the chest, and the wheals under his chin where they have pulled his helmet off by force are purple. Otherwise he does not look to be wounded sufficiently to kill him, but Thomas knows what will have happened and sees his head lies on a pillow of his own blood. They would have held him down while someone pulled his helmet off, and they would have stoved in the back of his head. Then they would have stripped him of everything until someone with some authority over them would have stopped them removing his linen braies, for dignity’s sake. And then, realising what they’ve done, they would have stolen away, so as not to be blamed for his death. Because even though he was the enemy, King Edward will value this earl many times more than he will value them, however valiantly they may have fought for him and his cause.
Thomas looks down and thinks about the Earl of Warwick, whom he has sworn to kill, and he thinks about how the Earl has manipulated so many lives, bringing some up, plunging some down. He has been greedy, generous, loyal only to his own ambition, a constant menace to the peace and happiness of the realm, to the peace and happiness of men such as Thomas Everingham, and now he is a mere lump of cooling meat from which the soul has fled.
Thomas turns and leaves him, and he feels as if he is leaving part of himself there, for like all of them here he has been caught up in the Earl’s schemes for what seems like all his life.
He finds Flood afterwards, sitting nearby on a dead horse so as to claim the saddle for his own. He has found some bread.
‘Lucky,’ he says, gesturing to the field. ‘Weren’t we?’
‘God-blessed,’ Thomas tells him.
Flood laughs.
‘I suppose so.’ He looks terrible.
By now the morning mist has risen, leaving the field clear all the way down to Barnet. It is a dismal sight. There are perhaps as many as two thousand bodies heaped and scattered in a circle where the two – in the end three or four – armies enacted their dance on the road, and there are many more scattered around. The smell of blood and eviscerations and shit coats your tongue. The guns are abandoned, and the Flems are sitting apart in a group of their own, looking after their own dead, which number quite highly since they are lightly armoured and their fire gives them away to enemy bowmen. There are priests and friars, gravediggers, looters. The whole village is out, sifting through the damp field for what they may find, wrenching cloth and plate and weapons from the dead, and from one another. Small fights still break out. Two men kill another man who’d been lying on his back and kicking his bootless feet in the air. A woman is trying on a jack for size, and is delighted, though perhaps she has not seen the stain on the back?
‘They killed Montagu, too,’ Flood says through a mouthful of food. ‘King Edward is said to be angry, but it could not be helped, I suppose.’
Thomas nods.
‘Though it’s murder, really, isn’t it?’ Flood goes on. ‘No one should be able to do it. I mean, afterwards like that.’ He gestures at the crowd around Warwick’s corpse.
Again Thomas nods. But he is not thinking of how Warwick and Montagu met their ends. He is thinking of the Prioress, and how she met hers. When she saw him ride down into the river, she k
new who he was, and what he had come for, and in a way it was as if she’d been expecting him. She had quoted a line that he recognised:
‘“And I looked,”’ she’d said, ‘“and, behold, a pale horse, and he that sits on him is named Death.”’
Thomas had said nothing. He had not thought how he was going to kill her. He only knew he must. She’d backed away from him, into deeper waters, and she had told him everything he wanted to know – everything she knew – about Katherine, and how she had come to the priory at Haverhurst.
And then he had climbed out of his saddle and he was waist deep in the freezing waters, and the Prioress had let her beetle float away and she had crossed herself, and he had walked towards her, and she let him, and then he had grasped her by the throat and pushed her back into the water and he held her under. She had not resisted at first, but as she started to drown she had fought back as anyone might, and though she was strong, she was not as strong as he, and he had held her under until she stopped struggling, and then he held her under longer still while he said the paternoster. And the Ave Maria. And when he had been certain of it, he had let her go, and the current turned her, and she eased away downstream.
Thomas had watched a while; then he had led his horse back to the bank and he had climbed back up into the saddle and ridden away, wet from the waist down, back to find Katherine.
PART FOUR
London, After Easter, 1471
22
They are in the shadow of St Paul’s when Hastings’s bloodhound, John Wilkes, returns to London with the news that Queen Margaret’s fleet has landed in Dorset. It is Tuesday, two days after the battle outside Barnet, and for the first time this year there is proper warmth in the sun’s rays and the rising scent of summer to come.
Kingdom Come Page 33
