‘Deus lo vultV
They all heard it and turned, fearing the worst. Up behind them came a rider, mailled top to toe, the pointed Templar cross blood-bright on a billowing white camilis, streaming behind him like a snow wind, another gracing the linen purity of the horse barding. Behind him came a handful of men on foot, grim in black tunics and hose and porridge-coloured, rust-streaked gambesons. Their rimmed iron hats were painted black, with white on the crown and the black cross of Christ on the front.
Deus lo vultV the knight bellowed, the words crushed and muffled inside the great, flat-topped barrel heaume. He thundered up past Hal and his pillar of Sim, while men scattered away from him. He circled his wrist with quick flick, so that the hammer in his armoured gauntlet, an elegance of gleaming steel with a fluted head and a pick on the other side, glittered like ice.
The great warhorse hardly balked at the splintered wreckage and the bell, leaping delicately over the first and round the second; a wounded man screamed as an iron hoof cracked his shins, others tried to scramble from underneath the delicately stepping beast.
The ranks on the bridge broke like a dropped mirror. They turned and ran and the knight rode them down, while the handful of men he brought charged, red mouths open, faces twisted in savage triumph. Bodies flew over the parapet of the bridge and crashed into the stream, others were bounced into the splintered planks and mashed with iron hooves, and, all the time, the arcing gleam of hammer swung right to left and back again; with every swing a head cracked like an egg.
Deus lo vult. God wills it, the cry from the time Jerusalem fell, a potage of vulgar Latin and French and Italian, the lingua franca everyone used to make themselves understood on crusade.
‘Sir William,’ Hal said dazedly.
‘Blessed be his curly auld Templar pow,’ Sim muttered and they looked at each other, heads down, hands on knees. Will Elliot was throwing up and Thom was dead; in the river, Dand turned and floated like a bloated sheep, while John the Lamb hauled himself, dripping, out of the other side. A cow bawled plaintively.
‘Aye til the fore, then,’ Sim said and Hal could only nod. Still alive. God had willed it. They almost laughed, but the great white knight reappeared, his horse high-prancing delicately over the debris and blood, the great helm tucked under his shielded arm, offering them a salute with the gore-clotted silver hammer.
His snowy robes and the horse’s barding were spattered red, so that even the small cross over his heart seemed like a splash of gore; his face, framed by maille coif and the steel of a bascinet, was as blood-bright as the cross and sheened with sweat.
‘I am thinking,’ he said, as if remarking on the rain, ‘that if ye shift, ye can gather up some of they kine and drive them across the bridge. I am thinking that the Templars of the Ton deserve a whole coo to themselves.’
Then he grinned out of the scarlet, streaming, grey-bearded face
‘Best no stand like a set mill,’ Sir William Sientcler added, ‘for it is my opinion that this brig can no longer be held.’
‘I am standing beside you there, Sir Will,’ Sim declared and went off to fetch the sumpter horse. Hal stood on wobbling legs and looked up at the Templar knight.
‘Timely,’ he declared, then sagged. ‘More than timely . . .’
‘Ach,’ Sir William said, his voice clearly alarmed that Hal was about to unman himself. ‘I had a fancy to some beef.’
Beef, Hal thought, watching men sort out the mess, picking their way back over the litter of corpses and bloodstained timbers, guddling in viscous muck for what they could plunder. All this was just for something to eat. He said as much aloud.
‘Ave Maria, gratia plena,’ Sim declared cheerfully, backing the horse between the cartshafts. ‘And may the Lord God help us when all this starts to get serious.’
They left the bloody-wrapped body of Red Cloak Thom to be buried at Temple Ton, whose quiet, grim-faced warrior monks went about the gentle business of piously collecting, washing and burying the English they had so recently fought. Everyone, especially John the Lamb, was painfully aware that Dand had drifted far down the Annick, but took some comfort from the assurances that he would be found and decently buried.
‘You will be in a peck of trouble for riding the Temple against King Edward,’ Hal said to Sir William and the Master, a man in a black robe and the soft hat of a monk, with the hard eyes beneath hinting at how he had been a wet-mouthed, spear-wielding screamer not long before.
‘We defended our Temple,’ the Master declared. ‘Crossing the bridge placed you on Commanderie ground and in our hospitality, so they have no-one to blame but themselves for attacking those under the protection of the Order.’