Hal saw the whey-faced boy weep and start to pat his neighbour as if he was an injured dog. He wanted to tell the boy that his friend wasn’t injured, was certainly dead for no man could survive what that arrow had done to his insides. But he thought the boy probably already knew all that.
There was no time to tell him much, for the second sleet was lancing on them and Hal saw three shafts spit the turf at his feet. In front, a man reeled with the deep spanging bell of a hit on a steel plackard and the arrow splintered sideways in ruin. Yet the man fell like a mauled ox, gasping like a fish from lungs collapsed by the shock of the impact. Even without penetrating, Hal saw, fighting the rising panic in him, their arrows are killing us; he was not alone in the thought.
‘They will shoot us to ruin,’ Wallace bellowed. ‘If we are here to allow it. Time we were away, lads. Step now, in time. Towards the woods. Now – step. Step. Step.’
Towards the woods. A short walk across a litter of dead horses, groaning men and the bloody dead. You could pick your way into the trees in five minutes, Hal thought, unless you were in an ungainly ring of men all trying to move in the same direction and keep some semblance of a shape. Thirty minutes if we are lucky, he thought mournfully – any longer and it will not matter much.
The wasps arrived again, a fierce, angry sting. Men shrieked and screamed and fell, clattering into their neighbour, to be pitched away with a curse. Slowly, like a huge dying slug, the schiltron lurched towards the trees, spitting out a slime-trail of bloody dead and wounded.
***
‘One wants Wallace, my lords,’ Edward rasped, listening to the thrum and rasp of his archers at work. Like music, he thought. The song of battle, as the monks’ chant is the song of the church.
‘One wants the Ogre,’ he repeated and the Earl of Lincoln, spattered with mud and blood, grinned, saluted him with his sword and clapped down his fancy new pig-snout visor.
‘The cruel Herod,’ he bellowed, metallic and muffled, ‘the madman more debauched than Nero. He will be brought to Your Grace’s footstool.’
Hal knew the knights were circling like wolves on a stag, waiting for the moment of supreme weakness to pounce – it would not be long, he thought. He did not know how the other rings fared, but the one he was in was a nightmare of sweat and fear and bloody dying.
It stretched slowly, became egg-shaped and halted on one side for the ranks to re-form. It thinned – the space in the middle was larger, so that Hal could walk now, helping those shuffling backwards to negotiate the dead horses, the still groaning men, some of them pleading to be taken – all of them disgorged with no mercy.
They stumbled over things that cracked out marrow, skidded in fluids and slithered entrails, heard the last, farting gasp of the dead they stepped on and had breath themselves only for a muttered ‘Ave Maria, Gracia plena . . .’
Hal saw a sword, bent to pick it up and looked into the unseeing bloody remains of MacDuff of Fife, a great blue-black hole in the side of his head like a blown egg. He blinked once or twice, thoughts whirling in him – so MacDuff had not run after all and paid the price for it. Then Wallace knelt suddenly and, for a shocking moment, Hal thought he had been hit. The arrows were coming in flocks like startled starlings out of a covey, steady and fast from practised hands.
‘Ach, Christ’s Mercy on him,’ Wallace said, rising up, and Hal saw the bloodied face and battered, muddy ruin that had been a cousin – Simon, Hal remembered, the sweet-voiced singer.
‘Keep moving,’ bellowed a file commander. ‘Not far now.’
Far enough, Hal thought. It had taken an eternity – but the trees were closer, tantalisingly within touching.
The singing brought sweat-sheened, crack-lipped faces up, red as skelpt arses, with tight white lines of fear round mouths and eyes.
Alma Redemptoris Mater, quae pervia caeli
Porta manes, et stella maris, succurre cadenti,
Surgere qui curat, populo: tu quae genuisti,
Natura mirante, tuum sanctum Genitorem
The song rolled out from triumphant throats away to their left, and everyone who heard it knew that the spear-ring there was shattered and gone – that both the other schiltrons were broken, with men shrieking and scattering, to be chased down and slaughtered like fleeing chicks.
Loving Mother of our Savior, hear thou thy people’s cry
Star of the deep and Portal of the sky,
Mother of Him who thee from nothing made.
Sinking we strive and call to thee for aid
‘The Auld Templar will be birling in his grave,’ Wallace growled to Hal and then turned left and right into the grim faces around him, who had spotted the black-barred banner of the exultantly singing Templar knights.
‘Why do they do this?’ Hal asked, plaintive and bewildered. Wallace braided a half-sneer of grin into the sweat-spiked tangle of his beard.
‘Because we are the only heathen they have left to fight, young Hal. They need us to dangle before God and the Pope, as proof that they have purpose.’