Addaf felt the rage in him, so rushed that it seemed the top of his head would explode and shower them all with the foul thoughts surging in it. Hywel, Y Crach, the whole sorry mess … he was, in the one small part of him still calm and sane, astonished to see the vale of Cilybebyll there in his head, the patch of land he had once owned and had not been back to see for decades. The ache was like a sudden blow.
Y Crach had not realized the old man had it in him. He knew he had badly miscalculated when the hand reached out and gripped the front of his tunic. The shoulder muscles, honed to a hump by years of pull and not yet completely ravaged by age, twitched like a horse’s rump and Y Crach felt himself fly.
Men gawped as the scabby archer whirled to the edge of the steep-sided stream, then vanished over it with a despairing yelp.
‘A fo ben, bid bont,’ Addaf roared, his red face scattering sweat drops and spit.
If you want to be a leader, be a bridge.
The old proverb, so aptly delivered, made the others laugh, but Addaf was done with it and turned from the hole Y Crach had left in the air when he vanished over the lip of the stream. He found the horsemen rolling relentlessly towards them. Too close, God blind me, he thought …
‘Run,’ he bawled, ‘if you want to live.’
This was the dark heart of the matter and Dog Boy knew it with every man he dragged out, with every man he grabbed by a handful of cloth and flung in. Most of those dragged out were not even bloody, just felled by heat.
Yet they are thinning us, Dog Boy thought. Down to four deep and growing less. He helped Parcy Dodd pull out a man, turned and took the first gambesoned shoulder he could find in a grimy fist.
‘There,’ he ordered. ‘Get ye there.’
There was little sound now, from men too weary to roar, but the eldritch shriek from beyond the line of backs ruched the skin on Dog Boy even as it leaked sweat. Horses never made such a sound, he thought. Not ever, save now, when they are dying in pain.
A knot of men surged past him, saffron cloth flashed and he realized that the moment had come for the madmen from north of the Mounth to go in, filtering through the spearmen ranks, baring their long axes and feral snarls. He saw shields with the black galley of Angus Og of the Isles and felt a brief moment of pity for the English.
Out in front, horsemen were stuck fast, some of them unable to move forward or back; there was a dead horse, belly to belly with its neighbours and held upright by the press as the man still struck wearily from its back. Two down from him, Dog Boy knew, was a knight either dead or heatstruck on his still living horse and sitting there like a wilted metal flower, again jammed in with his neighbours and unable even to fall.
‘Ah, Christ betimes.’
Parcy’s bitter voice turned Dog Boy into his face, then down his gaze to the body at his feet. Parcy had just dragged him out and the bloody waste of what had been Buggerback Geordie lolled like a discarded straw man.
He remembered Geordie in the Black Bitch Tavern in Edinburgh, thrusting the gift-whore at him and grinning the remains of his bad teeth. Sweetmilk had been part of that, too, Dog Boy recalled, and glanced at the straining forest of legs; he is somewhere in that.
‘I hope he did not owe you money, lads,’ said a resonant voice and they looked up into the maille-framed face of Jamie Douglas, greasy with sweat and joy. Parcy, with a bitter grunt, flung himself away and back into the fray, while Dog Boy looked into Jamie’s grin, marvelling at how the gentle, lisping courtier vanished to be replaced by this, a hellish version written in hate.
‘Ye’re a hard man, Sir James,’ he offered and had back a wolfish grin.
‘Hard times. Besides, have you not heard that I am called the Black?’
Then he was gone, axe in one hand, shield in the other and roaring out his name so that folk glanced over their shoulders and tried to make way for him.
In case he cuts them down to get to the English, Dog Boy thought savagely. Which he may well do.
He became aware then, sitting by Buggerback Geordie’s shattered remains, with the great haze of dust sifting like gold down into a ground made slurry by blood and shit, that he wanted no more of this. He thought of Bet’s Meggy and the bairns.
My son, he said aloud. All that needs be done to get back to him and Bet’s Meggy is to kill Englishmen until they give up and go away … or are all dead.
Then, as if in a slow-motion dream, the ranks ahead seemed to part for a moment, opening like the Red Sea to Moses. Beyond, across a rampart of dead men and horses, he saw a knot of riders surrounding a single man, blazing with colours unstained, the gold pards gleaming, his helm proud with a padded silk lion on it and a clear crown embracing it with gold.
King Edward, by the Grace of God.
An Englishman.
The squire flogged up on a failing palfrey, wet mouth open and the sweat almost trailing behind him in the wind. Before he had reached two lance-lengths from the King, d’Argentan had spurred forward and raised a halting hand.