The Complete Kingdom Trilogy: The Lion Wakes, The Lion at Bay, The Lion Rampant. Robert Low
a great whirl of pearl sky and wet bracken that dropped him into darkness.
Sim’s great bellow of triumph was swallowed in the crashing tide of men, four wide and infinitely deep, it seemed, who rolled up to the hedge of Jeddart staffs and clashed into it, so that it rocked and slid a little before bracing on all those bared right feet. Mindless as some beast, the ranks piled on, those in front unable to move or do much more than waggle their too-long lances.
Bangtail Hob and Hal stabbed and cut. Will Elliot and Red Cloak Thom slashed and hooked, while Sim spanned his bow and shot between their heads into the packed ranks, where he could not miss. Men screamed; curses went up and the front four men, the sense crushed out of them, lost the use of their limbs and suddenly vanished as if sucked under a bog. Four more were crushed forward; the wooden archway splintered and rocked.
Red Cloak Thom’s staff snapped and he threw it away with a curse and whipped out his bollock dagger. He parried a thrust that would have skewered him, missed another and took it in the throat, went over gurgling and drowning in his own blood. Hal leaped, shrieking, to Thom’s slumped, twisting, gasping corpse, heedless of the blindly stabbing lance points. A huge figure moved forward, as if wading into a hip-deep stream, and a man went backwards with the bolt of a crossbow in the face.
Hal felt a hand grip and pull him free, then he was staring up into Sim’s scowl.
‘No more of that, ye sou’s arse,’ he growled. ‘Yer father would take ill of it if I was to let ye be killed dead here.’
‘Never fash yourself,’ Hal managed and then grinned, ashamed at his stupidity and knowing Red Cloak was dead from the moment his throat had been opened.
‘I am a lad of parts, me’ he added. ‘Such bravery is auld cloots and gruel to the likes of me.’
The archway lurched and the bell clanged. Cries and grunts and shrieks splintered their conversation and Sim dropped the crossbow and dragged out his sword, the blade of it dark with old stains and notched as a wolf’s jaw, the end honed to a point thin enough to get between the slits of a barrelled heaume.
‘A Sientcler,’ he bellowed and leaped in long enough to stab and slash before losing his balance in the slither of it all and stumbling out again
‘The bell,’ said Hal, hearing it clang as the arch swayed. The English weight shoved the Scots back, their bared feet scoring ruts in the mud; they were almost at the sumpter cart now, almost pushed away from the narrow part of the bridge. Once that happened, the English would spill out right and left and numbers would do it.
The English sensed victory and the men in the rear ranks pushed relentlessly and started to sing, while the ones in front, crushed even of breath, lost consciousness and slid under the feet of the next rank.
Hal was aware of the sea of helmets and snarls, the great bristle of spears, as if some massive, maddened hedgepig was trying to crush itself under the arch – then he felt a hot burn in his calf, slipped to one knee and felt himself falling backwards, slashed wildly with the spear. Lying on the wet, smelling the fresh-turned earth like ploughland round Herdmanston, he saw the forest of straining legs and feet and the last splinters of wood uncurl slowly as the arch buckled.
Then the bell fell, smashing the front ranks of the battering English spearmen. The great, hollow boom of it drowned their screams.
There was a pause then, while thoughts and rain whirled with the dying echoes of the tolling bell. Hal, deafened and stunned like everyone else, felt himself hauled out and up, stared, mouth open, trying to make sense of the screaming and the dying, while the ranks of men washed away from where the bell had fallen.
Gloria, Hal saw and laughed like a grim wolf, for he knew what Bangtail Hob had seen – Gloria In Excelsis Deo, lovingly engraved along the slowly rocking bell’s rim, now fluted with rivulets of blood and crushed bone.
‘Deus lo vultV
They all heard it and turned, fearing the worst. Up behind them came a rider, mailled top to toe, the pointed Templar cross blood-bright on a billowing white camilis, streaming behind him like a snow wind, another gracing the linen purity of the horse barding. Behind him came a handful of men on foot, grim in black tunics and hose and porridge-coloured, rust-streaked gambesons. Their rimmed iron hats were painted black, with white on the crown and the black cross of Christ on the front.
Deus lo vultV the knight bellowed, the words crushed and muffled inside the great, flat-topped barrel heaume. He thundered up past Hal and his pillar of Sim, while men scattered away from him. He circled his wrist with quick flick, so that the hammer in his armoured gauntlet, an elegance of gleaming steel with a fluted head and a pick on the other side, glittered like ice.
The great warhorse hardly balked at the splintered wreckage and the bell, leaping delicately over the first and round the second; a wounded man screamed as an iron hoof cracked his shins, others tried to scramble from underneath the delicately stepping beast.
The ranks on the bridge broke like a dropped mirror. They turned and ran and the knight rode them down, while the handful of men he brought charged, red mouths open, faces twisted in savage triumph. Bodies flew over the parapet of the bridge and crashed into the stream, others were bounced into the splintered planks and mashed with iron hooves, and, all the time, the arcing gleam of hammer swung right to left and back again; with every swing a head cracked like an egg.
Deus lo vult. God wills it, the cry from the time Jerusalem fell, a potage of vulgar Latin and French and Italian, the lingua franca everyone used to make themselves understood on crusade.
‘Sir William,’ Hal said dazedly.
‘Blessed be his curly auld Templar pow,’ Sim muttered and they looked at each other, heads down, hands on knees. Will Elliot was throwing up and Thom was dead; in the river, Dand turned and floated like a bloated sheep, while John the Lamb hauled himself, dripping, out of the other side. A cow bawled plaintively.
‘Aye til the fore, then,’ Sim said and Hal could only nod. Still alive. God had willed it. They almost laughed, but the great white knight reappeared, his horse high-prancing delicately over the debris and blood, the great helm tucked under his shielded arm, offering them a salute with the gore-clotted silver hammer.
His snowy robes and the horse’s barding were spattered red, so that even the small cross over his heart seemed like a splash of gore; his face, framed by maille coif and the steel of a bascinet, was as blood-bright as the cross and sheened with sweat.
‘I am thinking,’ he said, as if remarking on the rain, ‘that if ye shift, ye can gather up some of they kine and drive them across the bridge. I am thinking that the Templars of the Ton deserve a whole coo to themselves.’
Then he grinned out of the scarlet, streaming, grey-bearded face
‘Best no stand like a set mill,’ Sir William Sientcler added, ‘for it is my opinion that this brig can no longer be held.’
‘I am standing beside you there, Sir Will,’ Sim declared and went off to fetch the sumpter horse. Hal stood on wobbling legs and looked up at the Templar knight.
‘Timely,’ he declared, then sagged. ‘More than timely …’
‘Ach,’ Sir William said, his voice clearly alarmed that Hal was about to unman himself. ‘I had a fancy to some beef.’
Beef, Hal thought, watching men sort out the mess, picking their way back over the litter of corpses and blood-stained timbers, guddling in viscous muck for what they could plunder. All this was just for something to eat. He said as much aloud.
‘Ave Maria, gratia plena,’ Sim declared cheerfully, backing the horse between the cartshafts. ‘And may the Lord God help us when all this starts to get serious.’
They left the bloody-wrapped body of Red Cloak Thom to be buried at Temple Ton, whose quiet, grim-faced warrior monks went about the gentle business of piously collecting, washing and burying the English they had so recently fought. Everyone, especially John the Lamb, was painfully aware