The Complete Kingdom Trilogy (42 page)

It was not Bedale or even Heydin Captain – for all their shouting and waving – who did the serious work for Addaf and his fellows: that task belonged to Rhys, the Master. Mydr ap Mydfydd, they called him – Aim the Aimer – and with good reason.

He brought them to within a hundred paces, while the remaining knights circled aimlessly round the thicket of spears, waving weapons and trying to dart in now and then and stab with their lances – though most of them had thrown them down. They saw the Welsh archers come up and frantically spurred or staggered away from the
schiltrons
as if the men in them had plague; they did not want to be anywhere near the arrow storm when it fell, for they knew the Welsh would take as great a delight in killing English horse as the enemy.

There were no more enemy bowmen left, Addaf saw, peering through the two ranks ahead of him – all scattered and cut down. Yet someone snugged in the ring of spears had a crossbow and was shooting it at that portion of the line where Addaf stood; he did not like the angry whip of the bolts.

Aim the Aimer ignored them as if they were spots of light rain, strolling down the front ranks, his own bow raised, judging wind and distance from the red and green ribbon fluttering from the end. The Gascon crossbowmen, sweating and sullen at being left to do the work on their own, belly-hooked their bows to the latch, firing in slow, uncontrolled flurries and the Welsh curled a lip at them.

‘Nock.'

There was a rustle as the long arrows snugged into braided string.

‘Draw.'

The great creak of tensioned wood was like the opening of a heavy door.

‘Shoot.'

God ripped the sky as if it were cheap linen and the spear-ring began to shriek. The real killing had begun.

It was like a giant wasp byke someone had kicked, a mad, black, humming mass that fell on them. The cry went up when the arrows were loosed and Hal saw the man nearest him, a whey-faced boy, turn his face to the sky to try to find them.

‘Get yer head down, Tam ye arse,' his neighbour hissed and the boy saw that everyone else was hunched up and staring at the ground, as if their eyes could dig holes in the mud and blood. Those with steel helmets hunched up as if to climb inside them, those with leather or none instinctively covering up with their arms; spears rattled and clacked like a forest of reeds in a high wind. Hal braced, feeling his flesh crawl, ruching up tight as if hardening against the impact.

The wasps buzzed and zipped. Tam thought it sounded like the gravel he had thrown against the wattle wall of Agnes's place when he had been trying to entice her out into the night. Instead, he remembered, her da had stormed out and told him to bugger off …

He straightened, turned to Erchie to thank him for the good advice – Christ, yin of those in the eye would have ruined my good looks, he started to say. Then he saw the feathers perched incongruously in the side of Erchie's neck, like some wee bird. When he realised it was all that could be seen of the yard of metal-tipped wood that had gone in the top of Erchie's shoulder and was slanted down into his kneeling, still upright body, he gave a wail.

Hal saw the whey-faced boy weep and start to pat his neighbour as if he was an injured dog. He wanted to tell the boy that his friend wasn't injured, was certainly dead for no man could survive what that arrow had done to his insides. But he thought the boy probably already knew all that.

There was no time to tell him much, for the second sleet was lancing on them and Hal saw three shafts spit the turf at his feet. In front, a man reeled with the deep spanging bell of a hit on a steel plackard and the arrow splintered sideways in ruin. Yet the man fell like a mauled ox, gasping like a fish from lungs collapsed by the shock of the impact. Even without penetrating, Hal saw, fighting the rising panic in him, their arrows are killing us; he was not alone in the thought.

‘They will shoot us to ruin,' Wallace bellowed. ‘If we are here to allow it. Time we were away, lads. Step now, in time. Towards the woods. Now – step. Step. Step.'

Towards the woods. A short walk across a litter of dead horses, groaning men and the bloody dead. You could pick your way into the trees in five minutes, Hal thought, unless you were in an ungainly ring of men all trying to move in the same direction and keep some semblance of a shape. Thirty minutes if we are lucky, he thought mournfully – any longer and it will not matter much.

The wasps arrived again, a fierce, angry sting. Men shrieked and screamed and fell, clattering into their neighbour, to be pitched away with a curse. Slowly, like a huge dying slug, the
schiltron
lurched towards the trees, spitting out a slime-trail of bloody dead and wounded.

***

‘One wants Wallace, my lords,' Edward rasped, listening to the thrum and rasp of his archers at work. Like music, he thought. The song of battle, as the monks' chant is the song of the church.

‘One wants the Ogre,' he repeated and the Earl of Lincoln, spattered with mud and blood, grinned, saluted him with his sword and clapped down his fancy new pig-snout visor.

‘The cruel Herod,' he bellowed, metallic and muffled, ‘the madman more debauched than Nero. He will be brought to Your Grace's footstool.'

Hal knew the knights were circling like wolves on a stag, waiting for the moment of supreme weakness to pounce – it would not be long, he thought. He did not know how the other rings fared, but the one he was in was a nightmare of sweat and fear and bloody dying.

It stretched slowly, became egg-shaped and halted on one side for the ranks to re-form. It thinned – the space in the middle was larger, so that Hal could walk now, helping those shuffling backwards to negotiate the dead horses, the still groaning men, some of them pleading to be taken – all of them disgorged with no mercy.

They stumbled over things that cracked out marrow, skidded in fluids and slithered entrails, heard the last, farting gasp of the dead they stepped on and had breath themselves only for a muttered ‘Ave
Maria, Gracia plena
…
'

Hal saw a sword, bent to pick it up and looked into the unseeing bloody remains of MacDuff of Fife, a great blue-black hole in the side of his head like a blown egg. He blinked once or twice, thoughts whirling in him – so MacDuff had not run after all and paid the price for it. Then Wallace knelt suddenly and, for a shocking moment, Hal thought he had been hit. The arrows were coming in flocks like startled starlings out of a covey, steady and fast from practised hands.

‘Ach, Christ's Mercy on him,' Wallace said, rising up, and Hal saw the bloodied face and battered, muddy ruin that had been a cousin – Simon, Hal remembered, the sweet-voiced singer.

‘Keep moving,' bellowed a file commander. ‘Not far now.'

Far enough, Hal thought. It had taken an eternity – but the trees were closer, tantalisingly within touching.

The singing brought sweat-sheened, crack-lipped faces up, red as skelpt arses, with tight white lines of fear round mouths and eyes.

The song rolled out from triumphant throats away to their left, and everyone who heard it knew that the spear-ring there was shattered and gone – that both the other
schiltrons
were broken, with men shrieking and scattering, to be chased down and slaughtered like fleeing chicks.

‘The Auld Templar will be birling in his grave,' Wallace growled to Hal and then turned left and right into the grim faces around him, who had spotted the black-barred banner of the exultantly singing Templar knights.

‘Why do they do this?' Hal asked, plaintive and bewildered. Wallace braided a half-sneer of grin into the sweat-spiked tangle of his beard.

‘Because we are the only heathen they have left to fight, young Hal. They need us to dangle before God and the Pope, as proof that they have purpose.'

His teeth were feral as the grin widened and he hefted the long, clotted sword.

‘Weel – much can break in the proving, as any smith will tell ye,' he added, then raised his chin and raised his voice to a bull bellow.

‘Hold,' he roared. ‘Never be minding the Bawsant flag and their wee chirrups. They are heavy horse, same as ye have been ruining all the day, my bonnie lads. Stay in the ring …'

The Templars came on, across the field where they had ruined the left
schiltron,
ignoring the mad, fleeing screamers of the other two, leaving them to the snarling, vengeful spears and swords of the plundering Welsh and Brabancons. They came after the final spear-ring, the one they knew must have Wallace in it; there were a handful only, but seemed a grim black cliff of
serjeants,
with two white streaks marking the true knights. Above it, like an accusing stare, streamed the black-barred Beau Seant banner.

The Order have ruined themselves, Hal thought, wild and sad. Ruined, as sure as if they had cursed God and spat on the Pope – what merchant, lord or priest, after this, will believe the word of a Templar, entrust his riches to the care of a brotherhood dedicated to saving Christians and who now prey on them?

They were a tight black fist aimed at the last mis-shapen ring of spearmen, the two white knuckles of Brian De Jay and John de Sawtrey blazing in the front. Like a long-haired star, the black-clad
serjeants
of the Order trailed other knights after them like embers, but these could not move with the arrogant fast trot of the Templars.

Poor knights, Hal thought bitterly, supposed to ride two to a horse – yet even the least of the Templars had
destrier
that were better than some ridden by the chivalry, who were stumbling over the dead and dying at no better than a walk.

The Templars trotted, the highly trained warhorses delicate as cats. It took five years to train the best warhorse, Hal recalled wildly, almost hearing his father's voice in his head. From two, before it can even be ridden, until the age of seven when, if you have done it properly, you have a mount which will charge a stone wall if the rider does not flinch. With luck, the beast will survive to the age of twelve, when it will be too old for the business of war and you put it out to breed more of its kind.

No sensible horse will suffer this, so what you have is a mad beast on four legs – and if you add a rider who fears only displeasing God you have a combination fit to punch a hole through the Gates of Hell.

The mad beasts broke into a canter; someone whimpered and Hal saw that it was the whey-faced boy, his filthy face streaked with tears.

‘Stay in the ring. Hold to the ring.'

Wallace's bellow went out on a rising note, growing more shrill as the ground trembled; the last file captains beat and chivvied their men, the last men-at-arms, the armoured
nobiles
who had opted to fight on foot, braced themselves and hunched into their
jazerant
and maille.

‘Hold to the ring.'

Beyond, the black tide curled on them, their iron-rimmed kettle hats painted black round the rim, white on the crown and with a great red cross to the fore. Their reins were loosed entirely, leaving both hands free, and the crosses on their black shields were like streaks of blood.

‘Hold to the ring.'

Deus lo vult.

The Templars throated it out on the last few thundering strides and came in like a ram, knee-to-knee and at a rising canter where, all day, no horseman beyond the first clatter of them had managed better than a fast walk.

There should have been a great shudder, a splintering of spears, a loud lion roar of desperate, defiant Scots – but the ring, too thinned by bolts and arrows, too worn by fear, shattered like an egg hit by a forge hammer.

The whey-faced boy was plucked from Hal's side and torn away with a vanished, despairing shriek as a lance skewered him; the rider swept past Hal like a black wind. On the other side, a great shaft went over Hal's head, slamming into men like a swinging gate – Hal fisted his battered shield into the rider's armoured foot, braced straight out and high on his mount's shoulders and the man reeled wildly, then was gone, tilting and crashing into the mass of men.

The Templars carved through the struggle of foot like claws through an apple, bursting out the far side, lances splintered or tossed aside, their great warhorses rutting up the blood-skeined turf in ploughed riggs as they fought to turn. The riders hauled out swords or little axes.

‘Run,' yelled a voice, but Hal was already moving. A lumbering bear he seemed, his limbs moving as if he was underwater, fighting a current – yet he remembered hurdling a dead horse, remembered the whip and smear of thin branches, the collision with a tree that spun him half-round and lost him his shield.

Then he was on his knees spitting blood, the world a whirl of sky and trees and torn earth that smelled of autumn.

‘Up,' said a voice, as mild as if lifting a bairn from a puddle. Hal leaned in the iron grasp, looked up into the blood and mud of Wallace's face and had back a grin.

‘Aye til the fore,' the Guardian said, then glanced back over his shoulder, to where the milling riders were slaughtering the slow. ‘Into the woods.'

No sensible knight risked a good warhorse by forcing it into a tangle of undergrowth and trees, where his vision, already no more than a narrow slit, was arrowed down to nothing by leaves and branches, so that it was impossible to resist the temptation to rip off the heavy constriction of helm. Vulnerable, slow, unable to use weight and power, a man in his right mind knows woods are not for heavy horse.