The Brothers of Gwynedd (87 page)

  "You heard," I said, "what Llewelyn said to me when he sent me with you. I am the custodian here of his honour and my own, and more than mere honour, of his love and mine. I will not leave you or separate my fate from yours while we both live. And God willing, I will carry Llewelyn word of your triumph as he bade me."

  "God's will," said Earl Simon, "is dark to us, but bright to those who will behold it afterwards. I am content. Do what you must."

  So we went down and took our places, every one. And he took bread and meat in his hands and ate as he stood, his horse gently grazing beside him, looking steadily towards the north.

The tips of the lances and the banners rose out of the crest, the mailed heads after them, all cased up in steel, then the steel-plated heads of the horses, and the turf vibrated and the earth beneath it shook with hooves. The line of horsemen spread and folded in upon us, a hand closing. Earl Simon wheeled his own knights into a fan, and all those braced spearheads went down, levelling as one. And then there was a great shout, and they were upon us.

  What can be said about that battle, so unequal and so brief? They came rank after rank out of the ground, growing from the grass like seams of corn. I suppose now that they were not so many as they seemed, yet they outnumbered us twice over, and they could come, and recoil, and come again, and we could but stand, or fall where we stood. Yet I remember clearly that Edward was the spear-head of the first shock, he was the thrust of the lance, and time and again he sprang back only to recover like the gathering wind and sweep forward again. Whatever any man may deny to Edward, I have seen his appalling gallantry, fitter to kill than to spare, more ardent to kill than to live. Nor did his hate run away with him, this time. No, it carried him, like a destrier not subject to wounds or death. He made a method of his hate, for now not only his heart and blood, but also his mind and spirit were in it. And I saw, and I testify, that at the third onset he detached the heaviest-armed of his knights, and hurled them at the vulnerable point where our lancers and archers met, with all their weight fresh and vengeful, and orders to scatter and kill.

  That charge, avoiding the earl's mounted men, shattered the Welsh foot, driving in where their spears were not braced, and crumpling them rank by rank, thrusting the long shafts aside and trampling the men. What could they do but break? The archers who gave them their only cover were ridden down, though they took some toll before they fell. The spear-men broke, left without weapons. They were used to fluid hill-fighting, thrust and run, double and strike again, with tree and bush to harbour them. Instead, they were exposed in open ground, ridden down and ridden over, rolled up like soiled rushes, swept aside before the storm-wind. They broke and ran, what else could they do? They scattered like hares over that heath and turf, plunged for shelter into cornfields and gardens, that barely covered them and sheltered them not at all.

  But Edward had learned since Lewes. He detached but a minor part of his strength to pursue, the rest he concentrated about our tightening circle, and bit with all his teeth to devour us.

  The half our beasts were crippled or dead, more than half our mounted knights left to the sword or mace, having broken their only lances. Those whose horses still could carry them kept a thin outer circle about the centre where the king was, huddled, dazed and shrinking while the fight raged round him. Those barons and knights and other troopers now bereft of horses drew close into an inner circle, and held off the second charge, and the third, with the sword, and the archers who still lived picked off without mercy the mounts of the attackers to bring them down within hand-grip. It was less a battle than a massacre. We had known from the beginning that no retreat was possible. Neither was surrender. Therefore the only end there could be was when all of us were dead, disabled or prisoner, or, for the last few of us, fled the field when everything else was lost. I marvel it took them as long as it did, our broken foot soldiers being scattered and slain, to make an end with the rest of us.

  They had remounts, and used them. They had reserves of lances and arrows, and made good, leisurely use of those too, until we were stripped of all but our swords and daggers, and stood among the ramparts of our own dead. And still Edward struck, and circled, and struck again, with fury but without haste, and dimly it came to me, as I wheeled still to face the next thrust, that I should know the arms of the knight who kept so lightly and fiercely at Edward's left flank wherever he turned, and matched his movements like a twin brother. Quartered red and gold, the shield flickered before me here and there, a wandering sun, and was never still, until suddenly they drew off again to look for our weakest place in the circle, and for a moment my eyes were clear of sweat, and I saw on the red and gold the countercoloured lions of Gwynedd. Then I knew the easy seat and the graceful carriage, though doubtless the harness he wore he had by Edward's grace and favour. Thus for the first time after two years I saw my breast-brother again closer than across the meadows of the Dee.

  But that was near the end, and he did not see me, or if he did see me I was so streaked with sweat and dust and blood that he did not know me. Not then. The deaths of so many had levelled us all, man-at-arms and clerk and squire and earl all drew brotherly into the circle and kept one another's flanks faithfully as long as they could stand. Humphrey de Bohun the younger, the only great marcher lord who fought on the earl's side in that battle, went down wounded at my side. Peter de Montfort of Beaudesert, faithful from first to last without wavering, died trampled and hacked under Edward's final charge. So did Hugh le Despenser and Ralph Basset his kinsman, who had both refused to escape the slaughter and live for a better day.

  We were then but the sparse remnants of the circle, drawing in ever closer, and in that last charge they rode us down and crashed into the centre. I was shouldered from my feet and flung some yards aside by the great war-horse of one of Gloucester's knights, and escaped hooves and swords to be stunned against the ground. When I got my wits again and heaved myself up to my knees there was a swaying tangle of men, mounted and afoot, where our ring had been, and I hung winded and dazed at the rim of chaos, witness to the ending I could not prevent.

  I saw the blow, but do not know who struck it, that sheered deep into Earl Simon's shoulder and neck, and sent him reeling back with blood drenching his left side. I heard young Henry shriek as his father fell, and saw him leap to intercept the following blow, with only a broken sword in his left hand, and his right arm dangling helpless, and saw the axe-stroke that split his skull and flung him dead over the earl's body. And Guy, the third of those brothers, lying wounded almost within touch of them, vainly stretched out a hand towards his father's empty sword-hand, that lay open and still in the dappled turf.

  And I saw, and still I see when the winter is harsh and the night dark and all men show as evil, how two or three of the knights of Edward's army lighted down like eager hunters from their saddles, and reaved off Earl Simon's helmet, stripping the torn mail from his neck, that was already half-severed, and hewing off with random, butcher's strokes that noble head that had conceived, and almost achieved, a vision of order, justice and accord fit for a better world than this.

  Then I could look no more, for everything was over.

  I got to my feet, leaving my sword where it lay, and turning my back upon that dolorous sight walked aimlessly away, across the field littered with the bodies and arms and cast harness and crippled men. And it was due only to the king that I ever left that field alive. There were some of Edward's men still coursing at large about the fringes of the fight, hunting down fugitives, and one of them might well have dealt with me, but suddenly all their attention was drawn inward to the swaying mass of men I had left behind, for King Henry, buffeted and ridden down unrecognised among the rest, shrieked aloud in terror of his life that he was their king, and no enemy. And someone—they say it was that same Roger Leyburn who led the young men of the marches when they called Earl Simon home—was quick enough to understand and believe, and haled him grazed and frightened out of the press.

  Those who had heard rallied eagerly to him. No one had any eyes for me, straying like a sleep-walker between the corpses. And it chanced that the horse of one of those who had leaped down in such haste to the kill was also straying, unhurt, to where there was clean grass to crop. I slid a hand down to gather the rein, and at the touch life leaped again in me like a stopped fountain, and I remembered I still had a lord, and had even a vow on my heart to carry this fatal field back to him, for better or worse to share with him all that burden I had come by at Evesham.

  A fine, fresh horse it was, and from the corner of my eye I saw the fringes of thick woodland away to the north, where the Welsh lancers, such of them as survived to get so far, might well have gone to ground. I set my toe in the stirrup and mounted, and crouching low on his neck, drove my heels into his sleek sides and sent him away at a gallop towards the trees. And if any of the many cries that filled the air behind me was an alarm after my flight, it was lost among all the rest, for no man followed me. So I fled from that lamentable place.

All that night they hunted us, and I did not keep that fine horse, for the roads were watched, where I could have made use of him, and in the forest north of Evesham, where I was forced to go to cover, he was only a means of betrayal to me. I turned him loose at the edge of the wood where no one was in sight, and sent him off with a slash of a branch behind, to be picked up as a stray from the battlefield. And I took to the deep thickets, and put a stream between me and pursuit, in case they brought hounds after us, and there lay up until night, when I trusted the hunt would slacken. For Edward had his king to care for, and urgent matters enough to occupy his mind, and all those he most hated were already dead or captive, all the de Montfort race, all but the children with their mother in Dover, and young Simon agonising with dread and self-blame in Kenilworth, as yet unaware of his bereavement.

  There were others of my own race there cowering in the bushes. The first I stumbled on drew a knife on me, and knowing him for what he was I spoke him quickly in Welsh, and he thanked God for me, and put up his weapon. Before nightfall we were seven living men who had thought to be dead. And to make but a short tale of this sorry escape, the hunt we had dreaded reached our station about dusk. We heard hooves on the narrow ride apart from us, and voices high and confident in victory, and the threshing of bushes. We were crouched in thick growth, and lay still as stones, but even so one of those riders checked, and pricked his ears and turned aside towards us. I never traced the moment when he dismounted and slid forward afoot, so lightly and silently he stepped, until a hand thrust through the branches and parted them right before my face, and a face looked down at me between the leaves.

  Tall and straight and arrogant he stood, staring down into my face with eyes wideopen and light blue as harebells, fringed with lashes as black as his uncovered hair, for he went unhelmed and light-armed to this cleansing work. Even in the dusk the blue of those eyes shone. He knew me, and I knew him. I got up from my hiding-place and stood fronting him, and I knew he had a drawn sword in his right hand while the left hand held the bushes apart between us.

  He never said word to me then, neither smiled nor frowned. His face was as still as marble, and as mute. Only when someone called to him from the ride did he utter a word. He turned his head, and cried back through the trees: "No, nothing! Go forward, I'm coming!"

  He had ears as quick as the fox in the covert, he knew there were more of us, though not, perhaps, how many. He held the screen apart between us a moment more, and as his hand was withdrawn I think the pure, motionless stone of his face shook with the wryest of smiles, before it drew back and vanished.