‘Now is the time. Go, boy, and do not look back.’
He reined round, seeing Henry and the other Gloucester men craning for a better look; others were climbing to their feet to watch the gilded passage of the King, riding to the rear. Thweng felt the whole day shudder, like a sweated horse in a chill wind.
He cantered after them, caught up and forced himself alongside a flustered, bewildered de Valence.
‘Turn about,’ he yelled, scorning protocol for an earl. The Earl of Pembroke turned his streaming, boiled-beet face, the scowl on it like a scar; he reined in a little so that the pair of them fell behind the cavalcade.
‘They think the King is leaving, that the day is lost,’ Thweng roared out. De Valence’s scowl grew deeper, his eyes black caves of misery in the blood of his face.
‘What makes you think it is not?’ he answered.
Thweng, astounded, jerked Goliath to a halt and let the Earl surge away to join his king. What now, he thought, that the truth is out?
He looked left and right, at first disbelieving that the great host of men he saw, uncommitted and waiting, were defeated. Even as he stood, bewildered, he saw the resting foot surge to their feet as someone shouted and pointed off to the right, up to the wooded heights.
Thweng followed the gesture … there, fey as Faerie, figures moved on the distant hill beyond the Scots. A rider with a banner – he squinted to make it out, saw other banners floating above thick clumps of black shapes. The sun – God, it was not even noon yet – flung itself back and forth like fire from sharp metal tips.
More men? Thweng could not believe it. More Scots, coming down on the flank of the army? And that banner – black and white. The one the rider carried had a huge cross on it, he was sure even at this distance and with his old eyes.
It could not be, was impossible … yet the thrilling terror that the banner might be Beauseant, that the God-rotted proscribed Templars had launched their perfect vengeance on all Christendom’s chosen warriors, shot through Thweng like a fire.
Unbelievable …
Others believed it and even those who did not saw an armed host, for certes. They shouted it, one to another, sucked up the memory of their king riding to safety and drew their own conclusion. Men began trotting, aimlessly at first and then, like a covey of starlings, all in the one direction.
Away.
In a second, Thweng saw the brittle might of Edward’s host shatter like poor pottery.
The big banner seemed to have a life of its own, a bedsheet straight off the Earl of Hell’s canopy, as far as Hal was concerned. It did look right, he admitted as he glanced up at it, for the limner’s blue paint had smeared from the arms of the cross and produced, almost perfectly and by divine accident, the shivering blue cross of the Sientclers on the spread of linen.
That, at least, was an acceptable device to ride under, he thought, and then looked to where Davey the Smith strode, forge hammer in one massive fist, Beauseant in another and the black and white Templar hat just one among the many.
Last wave of that banner, Hal thought. I hope it works, for the Bruce’s wrath will be mighty and only victory will turn it to smiles. If we fail, then I am a lost man for bringing the spectre of the Order to his army and his great battle; he will think it the final curse of St Malachy on his head. It will not matter, for if we fail then Isabel is lost and it does not matter about the world after that …
The idea had been daring, but the camp on Coxet Hill had embraced it like a fervent lover, since it let them loose with little or no danger to plunder the fallen. So they took up the Templar gear uncovered in the unpacking and put it on, laughing, and Sir John Airth, glowing like an ember and puffing in the heat, had been carried up in a litter to present the Beauseant, unwrapped from the bottom of the Templar armoury like the sick horror of a bad dream.
‘You mun be hung for the whole sheep as the half lamb,’ he growled and then shook his head, scattering drips from his jowls, his face like a raspberry mould and his fat legs bandaged against the gout.
‘I will pray for you, Sir Hal, as I pray for the soul of my son,’ he added and watched as the silk Beauseant was tacked crudely to a tall pole and handed to the smith, who could carry it one-handed.
I hope Sir John is praying now, Hal thought, and that I have timed it right.
He looked right and left at the straggling mass, loping like wolves down the hill and into the fringe of the fighting and the scattering of bodies. If it came to a fight, of course, they would run like leaping lambs, but all they had to do was look fierce and magnificent for a glorious eyeblink.
The figure loomed up at his stirrup and he glanced down to see the impish grin of Bet’s Meggy, an iron hat tilted sideways on her head and a pole clutched in one fist. It had a sharp kitchen knife tied to the end of it.