My blade found a man’s neck, tearing a gash between the bottom of his ear and his collarbone, and he reeled back, clutching as blood bubbled from the wound. Some way to the right, his countrymen had managed to partly shift one of the carts, exposing a gap in the wall wide enough for a couple of men to stand shoulder to shoulder, but none of them wanted to be first to try their luck against our stout shield-wall. The two at the front hesitated, uncertain what to do, until eventually the weight of bodies behind them forced them forward on to Norman spears.
‘Ut!’ the enemy bayed, a deep-throated call that put me in mind of wolves on the hunt. ‘Ut, ut, ut!’
It was a battle-cry I knew well. I remembered first hearing it that October morning at H?stinges, when with the glimmer of sun rising over the trees and breaking through the clouds, we had stared up the slope at the ridge they called Senlac, and shivered at the sight of so many hundreds of the usurper’s vassals and their retainers, their pennons flying defiantly in the breeze, their mail and their spearpoints flashing in the autumn sun.
Which meant that these men standing before us were not Welsh but English: some of those who had taken up arms under Eadric’s standard, I didn’t wonder.
Across the top of the wall, their shields met ours. The sound of steel upon limewood rang out as all along the line blades and bosses clashed. My feet were braced, ready for the impact, but even so it jarred through my entire body and I was forced to take half a pace back to steady myself. The man who faced me was a giant; easily more than six feet tall, he towered the better part of a head above me. The bloodlust was in his eyes; wordlessly he yelled as he tried to thrust his spear down towards my groin, but I saw it coming and used the face of my shield to trap it against the wall, before smashing the upper edge into the base of his chin. His jaw streaming with crimson, he reeled back, stunned. Before he had a chance to recover I lunged forward, aiming for his groin, gritting my teeth as I tore upwards into his bowels and then quickly wrenched my weapon free. Like a great oak uprooted in a storm, he toppled backwards, almost falling on top of one of his comrades, who just managed to dodge aside as he crashed to the ground.
Blood and shit pooled around his limp body. The stench of fresh-spilt guts filled the air, so thickly that I could almost taste it. Burning bile rose in my throat but I held it back. Dimly I was aware of others around me, of shouts and screams and men falling on either side; my world had narrowed and I saw only myself, my spear and my shield, and the next Englishman who had come to meet his fate. This was the moment that the poets and the troubadours often told of. As the killing began, so they sang, at the same time came the battle-calm, and they were right, for I could feel it happening then. Blood surged through my veins, filling my limbs with renewed vigour. No longer did I need to think as I became lost to the dance of blades, to the clash of shields, to the rhythm of thrust and parry and cut, each movement ingrained in me through years of training so that it came as if by instinct, until suddenly the English were falling back.
Blinded by the bloodlust and deaf to the warnings of their lords and comrades, a few of our men followed them, breaking from their lines, clambering over the wall and rushing forward after the enemy, either alone or in groups of two, three and four. They started to cut down those who were limping or injured or otherwise straggling behind, but in doing so they were making themselves vulnerable.
‘Hold back!’ I bellowed, hoping that the other barons would hear me and prevent their men from committing similar folly. If the enemy had been in full flight then I might have allowed them to free their sword-arms and inflict some slaughter. But they were not; this was merely a lull while the enemy gathered their wits and their numbers for the next assault.
When people who have not known the sword-path hear tales of what happens in battle, they sometimes imagine endless clashes of steel upon steel, men standing toe to toe, trading blows, hacking at each other for hours at a time in fearsome duels of strength. Of course there are times when the lines will meet and there are such flurries of swordplay, but always there are moments of respite in between, when the lines fall back and all feels strangely still. Moments like this. They can be the hardest, for it is then, when his thoughts are no longer solely on keeping himself alive and he sees the corpses strewn across the field, that a man’s senses and confidence are most likely to desert him. In the final reckoning battles are more usually won not by the most experienced warriors or those with the best sword-or spear-arms but by those with the staunchest wills, the strongest heads.