Insurrection (67 page)

Duncan clutched his broken spear, his hands seeming to have seized around it. The knight whose horse he had stuck was struggling on the stake, gagging on his own blood. Duncan could see a bulge appearing in the man’s back, under his surcoat, where the spike had gone clean through to the other side. He choked back an urge to vomit and closed his eyes, breathing in lungfuls of stinking air. Beside him, Kerald set down his spear and slunk out of the line. Bending, he pulled off the knight’s helm, revealing the pale, sweat-soaked face of a young man. His eyes were slits of agony, but he hissed something through his bloodstained teeth at Kerald. The old Scot drew a dirk from his belt with his good hand. Moving in front of the knight, obscuring his face from Duncan’s view, Kerald thrust up. Duncan saw the knight’s body spasm and a gout of blood flow, then the man sagged over the palisade. Kerald tugged a skin from the knight’s belt, then, sheathing his bloody dagger, returned to the line, pulling the stopper from the skin and sniffing suspiciously. Satisfied, he drank greedily, his eyes widening in appreciation, before handing it to Duncan, who took it gratefully. The wine was strong and sweet. Duncan managed to force it from his dry lips to pass it to the man beside him. Grinning, Kerald took up his spear, his beard flecked with red.

Around the schiltrom, the voice of William Wallace sounded, roaring at his men to stand firm.

I have brought you to the ring
, their leader had yelled that morning, as they formed up.
Now let us see if you can dance
!

Dance they had. After months of oppression under the English yoke, bowing to officials and cowering from soldiers, months as outlaws living in the wild, this was their chance to win back their liberty. Wallace had led them to victory on the meadows outside Stirling, despite overwhelming odds. Now, Scotland’s new guardian seemed determined to win through again.

Buoyed up by Wallace’s words of encouragement, Duncan cast aside his broken spear to draw an undamaged one from the muddy ground. The English horns were still sounding, but instead of reforming for another charge the knights were riding back to the main body of the army, where King Edward’s banner was raised.

‘We’ve got them now,’ growled Kerald. ‘They cannot keep this up. They’re losing too many knights.’

Duncan stayed silent, watching with the others as a long line of men jogged on to the field in the wake of the knights. His eyes narrowed as he saw the curved weapons in their hands.

‘Archers,’ murmured someone.

Kerald’s grin faded.

Duncan had heard rumour of the Welsh archers and their deadly longbows. He tightened instinctively, moving his arms in close over his body. He had no shield, none of them did – they needed both hands for the spears and, besides, the rings were shields themselves, protecting the men within. Like most of the men in the schiltroms, Duncan wore little in the way of armour, except for a pair of ill-fitting schynbalds taken from the body of an English soldier after the battle at Stirling. He wished now that he had taken a coat of mail.

The archers formed up. Despite the distance, Duncan could see that some had different weapons: squarer and squatter than the great curves of the longbows.

‘Crossbows,’ muttered Kerald. ‘The bastards have crossbows.’

The men fixed quarrels and arrows to their weapons. At the call of a horn, arms drew back, bows arcing. As they loosed, the sky in front of the Scots darkened and rushed towards them. Duncan closed his eyes and pulled his body in tight, his spear thrust uselessly before him. He felt the force of the missiles all around, the air filling with screams. At a violent jolt in his side he was thrown to the ground. For a second, he thought he’d been hit and clenched his teeth against the shock of pain he knew must come. When it didn’t, he opened his eyes and realised it was Kerald who had struck him. The old Scot had a crossbow bolt in his face. It had entered his cheek, just below his eye. Duncan cried out as Kerald convulsed, the man’s weight pushing him further into the soft mud. More arrows were shooting in around them, men falling. The shield ring across from theirs was breaking apart under the onslaught. Duncan struggled beneath Kerald’s body, but someone else was on his leg, pinning him. He couldn’t move. His face was sinking into the soil, the mud rising cold and thick to his lips. Through panicked eyes, he saw the English cavalry lining up, saw them begin to ride, felt a tremor in the ground.

62

Astride his smoke-grey courser in the centre of the Scottish cavalry line, James Stewart watched with mounting dread as the Welsh archers took aim. The first volley of arrows tore through the outer rows of the schiltroms, men struck with such force they were catapulted into those behind. Gaps appeared instantly, some dead, others wounded, many more dropping spears and throwing themselves to the ground to avoid the deadly hail.

‘Christ, save us,’ breathed someone.

James hardly heard. He stood in his stirrups, seeing the Scottish bowmen under the command of his brother answering the lethal volleys with shots from their own bows. But it was clear from the first barrage that they would have little effect on the enemy, whose powerful bows allowed them to stay out of range. A horn was being blown, lifting over the distant screams. James recognised the deep and hollow sound. It was Wallace’s horn – his signal for the cavalry to enter the fray. The others around him heard it too, men snapping down visors and shortening reins in their fists.

‘Wait!’ shouted John Comyn, pointing his sword down the hillside to where the English knights were forming up beneath the banners of the earls of Lincoln, Hereford, Norfolk and Surrey. One standard was larger than the rest. Faded red, it had a tarnished golden dragon in the centre. The longbowmen had stopped shooting. Now, the knights, under the command of the earls, began to charge the schiltroms, no longer impenetrable rings of spears, but disorderly, undisciplined chaos.

‘We must ride to their aid!’ James yelled.

‘We cannot win here,’ growled the Lord of Badenoch, his gaze on a company of English knights spurring up the hill towards them. Two schiltroms had broken apart with the first charge of the English horses, the Scots scattering. Wallace’s horn was blowing, urgently. Raising his voice, Comyn addressed the men around him. ‘The battle is lost. We have no hope except to flee.’

‘We cannot leave them to die!’ James protested. Other voices joined his in agreement, but some were already urging their horses towards the woods, away from the approaching English.

‘You cowardly sons of whores!’ roared one of Wallace’s men.

Riding out of the line, he charged his horse recklessly down the hillside, followed by a handful of Wallace’s commanders. They loosed a desperate battle cry as they went. A few English knights broke away to counter this band as they galloped towards the schiltroms, now surging apart across the hillside, many Scots running for the woods. The Welsh infantry were spilling out across the boggy ground around the burn in pursuit.

As the English knights kicked their horses determinedly up the hillside towards the Scottish cavalry, John Comyn wheeled his horse around, followed by his son. His departure signalled a massive exodus from the cavalry line, many of whom were kinsmen or supporters of the Lord of Badenoch.

Malcolm, the handsome young Earl of Lennox, locked gazes with James. ‘What use will you be to your king, Sir James,’ he called, ‘if you are sharing the cell next to his?’

As Lennox and his knights spurred their horses hard towards Callendar Wood, James lingered, his eyes searching frantically for his brother, somewhere in the turmoil.

‘Sir?’ questioned one of his men, his gaze moving between the steward and the English knights, getting closer every second.

With a cry of frustration, James turned his grey courser brutally around and kicked the beast towards the woods.

All semblance of command William Wallace had over his forces was gone, swept away in the terror of the disintegrating troops. Spent arrows and spears littered the hillside, where many Scots lay dead. The cries of the wounded rose to merge in a mangled howl. Those who had survived the volleys of arrows that had torn through the schiltroms crawled through the bodies of comrades to escape the charging knights. Some ran for the woods, others headlong down the hillside towards the banks of the burn. Here, the mud was as thick and sticky as glue, in places treacherously deep. The battleground, chosen by Wallace for the natural protection afforded by the burn, now turned on the Scots. Those who reached the waters leapt in and splashed desperately for the other side, but most never made it that far, becoming stuck in the surrounding bogs. Trapped in the stinking filth, they were easy targets for Welsh archers.

Into this chaos rode the Knights of the Dragon, the flame-wreathed monster on their shields glimmering in the ashen morning. They rode with their fathers, the men of the Round Table. Rode for their king.

Aymer de Valence led the men of Pembroke, most of whom had served his father for decades. His blue and white striped banner flying high above him, he led a brutal assault on Wallace’s archers, punching straight through their lines. It was Aymer’s lance that slammed into the chest of John Stewart, picking the man off his feet then hurling him to the ground to be rolled over and over, until one of the hooves of Aymer’s destrier crushed the Scot’s head into the mud. Leaving the limp body of the steward’s brother behind, Aymer swept on, drawing his sword to strike at the backs and necks of the fleeing archers. As he rode, he roared savagely.

Henry Percy, fired by the chance to avenge the humiliation suffered by his grandfather at Stirling, rode into the fray with knights from his Yorkshire estates. A few Scots turned to stand their ground against them. One man managed to jab his spear into the side of a horse, causing the animal to crash to the ground, tossing its knight. The Scot was lanced through the throat a second later, by one of Percy’s men, the rest cut down viciously in great sprays of blood. The Scottish nobility had fled the field, leaving the peasant host to be destroyed. The only hope these men had lay in escape, or swift death. King Edward had wanted William Wallace and the ringleaders of the rebellion taken alive, but in such disorder it was impossible to guarantee the fate of one man.

Humphrey de Bohun, his face drenched with sweat inside his helm, charged in the midst of his father’s retinue, along the lower slopes where the Scots were running towards the burn. The battle, he knew, was won. Now, their task was to destroy every man on this field. Humphrey had spent his lance and his broadsword was in his fist. He swung it viciously into the neck of a man fleeing in front of him, felt the shock of impact, then release. The Scot, decapitated, crumpled behind him. Humphrey’s father was some distance ahead, pursuing a group of spearmen stumbling towards the stream. The earl pursued them doggedly, his lance swinging down. All at once, his horse collapsed beneath him.

Humphrey shouted as he saw his father go down. The destrier, whose massive weight was further augmented by its mail trapper, saddle and Hereford himself in all his armour, had plunged into a bog. Yelling for his men to follow, Humphrey kicked his horse towards his father, who had dropped his lance and was trying to urge the animal out of the thick mud. The beast was squealing and thrashing its head, the movement making it sink deeper. Three of the Scottish spearmen the earl had been chasing now turned on him. Lighter and more agile, without armour to weigh them down, they were only knee-deep in the mire. Humphrey cried a warning, the sound echoing madly in his helm, as two of the spearmen lunged at his father.

The earl managed to crack one of their spears away with his shield, but the other caught him in the side, under his ribs. The force of it snapped the links of mail, driving them and the cloth beneath into his flesh. It wasn’t a fatal wound, the mail stopping much of the force, so only the tip penetrated, but at the moment of impact the horse sank deeper, almost to its neck, throwing the earl off balance. As Hereford toppled, the momentum pushed him on to the spear, plunging it deep into the muscle between his ribs to enter his lung.

Humphrey roared as his father curled over, slipping out of the saddle of the drowning horse. The Scot dropped the spear and scrabbled away after his comrades, heading for the waters of the burn. Pulling his destrier up sharp, Humphrey swung awkwardly down from the saddle and waded into the mud, not heeding the shouts of his men. The mud claimed him quickly, the grey porridge sloshing up his mail hose to his thighs. His father was some distance ahead, half submerged, the spear protruding from his side, his face turned towards the mud. Humphrey gasped with effort as he fought his way through the bog. The ground gave way suddenly beneath him, plunging him in up to his chest. His father was yards ahead, the earl’s face now fully submerged, only the humps of his head and back visible. The mud was sucking and eager; Humphrey felt himself sinking, panic making him struggle. As hands grabbed him from behind, he roared and fought, seeing his father slip under. A swirl of blue silk slashed with white drifted on the surface for a moment longer, before it too was claimed by the earth.

63

The cart wheels splashed through the sodden ground, the oxen bowing their horned heads into the downpour, hooves sinking in the red clay. Robert watched them come, the warm rain trickling down his face, his eyes on the backs of the carts, piled high with timber for Ayr’s new palisade.

‘There are four more to come today, sir. The rest will be here before the week is out.’

Robert glanced at the man hunched in the wet beside him, a local carpenter whom he’d made master of works. ‘I want work to begin tomorrow on the barracks,’ he said, turning to the wooden buildings that rose behind him on the banks of the river that flowed sluggishly through the north side of the town into the sea. They had been built for Henry Percy’s men, but on the liberation of the town Robert had taken them for himself. ‘When that is done you will start on the town’s defences.’