He thought of that in the eyeblink before the charging figure came down on him, featureless in his bucket helm, waving a battleaxe and trying to rein in the over-eager warhorse. Bruce danced to one side, slashed out with his sword and spun the palfrey as the warhorse went plunging mad, half its tail sheared off and all of its rump bloody and fired with agony; the knight sailed off and hit the ground with a clatter. The German Method …
Bruce had little time to exult and none at all to see if the knight got up, for others were on him and his own mesnie closed in protectively. He realized at once that this was no battle and was lost whatever you called it – there was only a mêlée now and Bruce was master of that.
He ducked a swinging blade, banged the man out of the saddle with his shield, cut right, cut left, took a blow that made him grunt and hope his maille was good and the sword blunt. A man plunged out, on foot, to grab the bridle of his horse, helmetless and roaring with triumph that he had taken the King.
Bruce slashed down and the man shrieked and fell away, while the rouncey threw up its head and panicked at the grisly ornament of hand and wrist that dangled, clenched and bloody in the bridle. Bruce lost a foot from one stirrup and sat deep while the rouncey plunged itself to a trembling halt.
The knight who had first attacked suddenly lurched from the other side, having thrown away his bucket helm and dragged out a sword. He was bleeding from a broken nose and snoring in desperate breaths, but he reached out a free hand and tried to grab Bruce by his leg, missed and grasped the free stirrup.
‘He is mine,’ he bellowed in a spray of blood. ‘Yield yerself sirra –aaaaah.’
His triumph ended in a shriek when Bruce rammed his booted foot back in the stirrup, grinding fingers into the metal and trapping the hand; when he spun the rouncey the knight was dragged off his feet and whirled sideways, screaming, until he bowled into a knuckle of men, scattering them and tearing his fingers free.
Then a blow seemed to stave in the whole side of Bruce’s face, a crash as if the world had fallen on him and he reeled at the edge of consciousness, hanging on to the palfrey by some last reserve of tourney skill.
‘I have him,’ yelled a voice. ‘I have him.’
He saw a silver lion on a red shield and thought it might be Mowbray – but he was dimly aware that everything was red on the left side, felt the sudden strange coldness there. God help me, he thought wildly, I am blinded …
He felt himself dragged off the horse, saw hands frantic to grasp him – then there was a roaring sound which he thought was his own blood in his ears and he lay, staring blindly up at the red-misted sky, watching the flurry of legs. Mailled, hooved, booted, they stamped and circled –there was a rushing crash and someone fell full length, so that when Bruce turned – oh, so laborious and slow – he saw the twisted agony that was Mowbray falling from a vicious blow, blood washing down over unfocused eyes.
Hands gripped him, hauled him up.
‘Into the saddle, Your Grace,’ said an urgent voice and Bruce felt himself hefted up, found a reflex that cocked a leg and dropped him into the cantled security of a fresh horse. He looked dazedly down through the blood, saw the black figure of Simon Frazier grinning back at him.
‘Seton – tak’ the King to safety. He is sore hurt.’
Sore hurt. Bruce did not want to know how sore his hurt was; he could feel it like a great numbing on the side of his face and was sure he had lost it, eye, cheek and all.
Lost. All was lost on this Malachy-cursed day …
Methven
Late evening, the same day
The priests droned like flies in the growing dim and de Valence thought of the abbot, somewhere back in Perth, carefully out of the way of matters, so he could not see what sins were being done here under the dragon banner.
There were a lot of sins, de Valence knew, as many as there were flies, and the flattened fields of rye and barley around Methven were as good as a pewter plate smeared with meat juice to them. Flies and shadows flitted in the dark, both of them stripping the corpses.
De Valence sat on his warhorse, surrounded by grim-iron men and sweating in the heavy drape of his heraldry, wishing the last dregs of this mummery were done with and he could climb off the beast and out of the war gear.
It was as well he had won here, he thought, otherwise he would have to face the wrath of Longshanks for failing to capture Bruce – or anyone else who mattered – and losing Badenoch’s murderer en route to Berwick.
The bitter sauce of it all was having to sit here and smilingly acknowledge and reward all the galloping fools who came up clutching a pennon, or hauling in some luckless lordling of no account until it became dark enough to admit that the battle was over.