A figure launched from the undergrowth of the spearwall, naked dirk stabbing for Thweng’s helmet slit; he stepped into it, shouldered the man to the ground with the shield and cut the throat from him as easy as parting cheese rind. A hooked bill caught his surcote and tore it, pulling him further forward and off balance, so that he half fell at the feet of the Scots.
Another figure came at him and Thweng had time to see that he was bare-headed and part-bald so that the hair left to him stuck up in tufts like a moulting owl. The man collided with him, trying to wrestle him to the ground and thrust the narrow-bladed dirk inside the great helm, but Thweng got his shield in the way and heaved.
The man flew over Thweng, landing on the Earl’s dead horse with a thump that drove the air out of both of them with a great farting groan; before he could recover one of the Shadows stabbed him repeatedly with his lance until it stuck and he had to let it go.
Thweng staggered back from the spearwall just as Badenoch forced himself between them, throwing his lance. He would, Thweng was sure, have hauled off his helm and hurled that, too, save that arrows were flicking at him.
Then he heard a horn blast; Hereford had recovered himself and was ordering the Van to break off the attack. Sir Marmaduke trudged away, seemingly contemptuous of the enemy at his back but, in reality, too staggeringly weary to care. He saw Badenoch canter up, salute with his sword and then remain a little way away as a polite escort; Thweng was grateful and made a vow to thank the little Scots lord personally.
A little way into the forest he saw two knots of sweating knights, half dragging, half carrying the bodies of Henry de Bohun and his squire and he wondered how many lives had been lost to achieve that. Yet he knew it was something rescued from the stunning disaster of a knight’s death. It was an almost unheard-of event, even in war, for a knight of such high degree to be slain.
The stun of it was already being felt, Thweng thought, seeing the trembling horses and the sweat-soaked, disbelieving riders trail back through the trees, chased by the flickering shadows and the arrows and the jeers of the men they had failed to best.
Sitting slumped on his expensive horse, streaming with tears and sweat, was the black misery of the Earl of Hereford watching his nephew’s corpse bob past him, one bloody hand flapping as if waving a last farewell.
ISABEL
Liberation: from liber, meaning free. Little Constance told me that, come to comb and dye my hair, enjoying it because she is not allowed to perform such an act on herself. The crowds in Berwick town roll like waves, fleeing the armies of both sides, seeking sanctuary here and finding madness. There is drink and dancing, Constance tells me, half excited, half fearful, but that does not surprise me – half will fall on their knees to worship God, the rest will worship, for as long as they can, their own bodies. Constance tells me that one of her own, a nun who has decided to call herself Giles in honour of the saint, has demanded to be immured. She had first demanded to replace me in my cage on the wall until she discovered that I did not live in it all the while, but had a Hog Tower room with a privy pot, a decent cot and a fire in winter. Too soft, she said.
I told Constance that Sister Giles was welcome to my cage, as I shall be leaving it soon enough. God wills it.
The sky is thick and umber, heavy with that thunder that brings no rain, only oppressive heat – there has been no rain for weeks.
CHAPTER TEN
Bannockburn
Vigil of the Feast of St John the Baptist, June 1314
There had been no rain for weeks, so six hundred cantering hooves slashed up the sere grass and dirt of the carse into a haze that filtered the sun to a gold coin. The Carse was supposed to be boggy, cut about by vicious little streams and hard going for horses, but Sir Robert Clifford saw only a trickle of water in the bottom of steep-sided, bush-choked ditches.
‘Still a barrier, my lord,’ William Deyncourt noted, indicating the dark-streaked horses, foamed at the neck where the reins champed the sweat into a lather; they’d had to work hard to cross the dry streams.
‘Yet the undergrowth is green enough,’ Sir Thomas Gray added, ‘which means it is watered regularly.’
Beaumont, grimming along in a world of reeling heat, wished he had the energy to argue, to growl at Deyncourt that it was only a barrier if men defended the opposite side of it, to spit at Gray that none here were bloody churl farmers and who cared where a bush got water? But Clifford nodded as if he understood what Gray had meant, which only flared Beaumont the more.
Too clever by half, he thought hotly. He did not like Deyncourt much, the more so because he was in Gray’s retinue. He liked Gray even less and knew he should not harbour the feeling, which made matters worse still. Sir Thomas Gray had almost been killed saving him at the last siege of Stirling – Christ’s Bones, a decade ago now.