‘Not too late, Your Grace, to plead that you honour the saint whose feast day this is and refrain from fighting. The army needs rest …’
The chorus of protest that went up from the eager young throats round the King was loud and scornful enough for Gloucester to bristle. D’Argentan, Thweng noted, stayed silent.
‘It seems no one agrees with you, my lord earl,’ Edward growled, and nodded out towards the serried ranks of horse. ‘My lord Hereford is already with the Van.’
Which was a dismissal Gloucester should not have ignored, Thweng thought afterwards. But the Earl, almost desperately, repeated his plea for the army not to fight and everyone saw the drooping royal eye flicker dangerously.
‘You would have better employed your time fetching your cote than inventing reasons not to fight,’ Edward rasped out venomously. ‘But vacillating was ever your way – you allowed my Gaveston to die because of it.’
The only noise was a deep grunt of assent from behind the King – Aymer de Valence, of course, Thweng realized, who had pleaded with Gloucester to come to his aid when Lancaster threatened to sieze Gaveston. Gloucester had refused, Lancaster had succeeded and Gaveston had died.
All the raw wounds reopened and everyone saw it. Gloucester, his face purple, wrenched at the reins of his protesting destrier, the words flinging back over his shoulder as he went.
‘There is no treachery in me, my lord king, and the field will prove it.’
Badenoch, after a moment’s surprise, waved half-apology, half-farewell to the King and spurred after him; with a swallowed curse, Thweng kicked Garm into his wake.
Edward, blinking and uncertain at what he had created, tried a harsh laugh which came out too squeaked to be reassuring. The noise of voices and rasping last-minute whetstones on blades seemed suddenly deafening.
‘If the Scotch are standing,’ d’Umfraville offered into the awkwardness, ‘then we should reorder, Your Grace.’
Attentions were all sucked back into the moment; heads turned to the dark line of enemy and Edward frowned, stood up a little in his stirrups and pointed one mailled fist.
‘They are not standing, they are kneeling,’ he declared and then beamed. ‘Are they asking for my mercy?’
D’Umfraville, who had clearly had enough, almost spat and nearly choked on swallowing it.
‘No, lord King,’ he managed to rasp out politely. ‘They beg forgiveness, certes, but not from you. From God. They will win or die this day, it seems.’
The King scowled blackly at the admiration he heard in that voice, but the sudden great blare of horns made them all jerk; a few horses were taken aback, bounced and baited. Horrified, everyone saw the dark line seem to swell.
‘We should beg our own forgiveness,’ d’Umfraville added, ‘for they are not standing nor kneeling, my lords, but coming down on us.’
‘God’s Blood,’ de Valence bellowed. ‘Too late. Too late.’
Too late, Addaf thought with belly-clenching terror, to get the horse out of the way and the foot forward. Too late, as it was at this place’s bridge seventeen years ago, when the Scots of Wallace and Moray came down on the English, trapped in the coils of the river.
Now they were trapped again, and again by their own making, the reassurance against night attack of the streams and ditches on three sides now a deadly bag. Addaf remembered the last time, the frantic rabbit-running, throwing away everything he had save the bowstave itself, the desperate plunge into the river, the floundering like a wet cat to drag himself out, panting and half-drowned.
He turned, stunned as if by a blow to the temple, and Sir Maurice Berkeley saw it, saw the same look on other lordly faces around him and the bewilderment of those they led, waiting for orders that did not come.
‘Ware archers,’ he bawled, throwing one iron fist to his right. Heads turned and men fell into the unconscious movements that braced the stave and felt for the bowstring, though they would not string the bows until ordered by Addaf.
‘Addaf Hen,’ Maurice roared and that jerked the man as if stung, so that he seemed to shake himself like a dog, looked at his lord, then to where he pointed; enemy flitted like starlings, working their way to the flanks of the army and protected from horse by the steep-sided ditch of a tidal run Addaf had heard called the Pelstream.
‘Smart your sticks,’ Addaf bawled, starting to feel the reassurance that came with familiar things. ‘Pick your targets, look you. Shoot only when I say.’