After Flodden (42 page)

There was a fanfare of trumpets as the horse halted, and the soldiers untied the prisoner and dragged him to the gibbet. When they set him on his feet, his hands cuffed behind him, Gabriel
looked up at the swinging noose, then out across the marketplace, packed from wall to wall with onlookers. A few jeers came from the crowd, but they were quickly hushed.

The executioner led him up the steps, and turned him to face his audience. The hangman placed the noose around his neck and tightened it, like a valet adjusting his master’s collar.
Gabriel was offered no blindfold, and he stared, head held high, beyond the audience’s heads to the comfortless sky. His lips moved, though whether with fear or in prayer was impossible to
tell.

The drumbeat quickened. A seagull flew overhead, raucously mewling as if mimicking the mockers. Paniter could no longer look at the spy, whose legs were shaking. He stared instead at the
pikemen, who held their weapons at the ready, perhaps fearing this miserable roped man would break free and fly over their heads.

The seagull passed, the drums stopped, and after a never-ending minute, when nobody and nothing moved, the hangman pushed the prisoner off the steps, and Gabriel sank, kicking, into the air.

At the sight, Paniter felt he too was falling. He uttered a cry that was lost in the crowd’s bloodthirsty screams. The sky whitened before his eyes, and the world contracted and shrank to
the size of a coin. He dug his nails into his palms as he fought a tide of giddiness but while he kept his seat, he could do nothing to prevent the images and smells that engulfed him.

As the guards’ pikes flashed, and the crowd bayed, and Gabriel twisted and jerked like an old hound strung up by its master, Paniter saw and heard nothing of it all. The present scene was
hidden by a mist, out of which worse apparitions loomed.

*    *    *

From the top of Flodden hill, the English army looked wary. Their cannons were light, and the soldiers’ spears were short. They would need to be hand to hand with their
foe to do any damage.

On the lower hill, across the valley, Surrey’s men were planted, unmoving. After a gruelling race to switch hills, the Scots had hauled their guns into place, their horses were safely
tethered back at camp, and each commander was standing, grim-faced, at the head of his men. All was set for the fight.

The afternoon was dank with drizzle. James stood at Paniter’s side, a hand on the largest serpentine as he surveyed the enemy. His nose was purplish with cold, his face bright with
excitement, and beneath his helmet his long hair whipped as if to encourage the flags his standard bearers had raised. He smiled at the sight of the Scottish troops, whose pikes soared like a
harbour filled with masts.

The king’s eyes were sparkling. He kissed Paniter loudly on both cheeks, and slapped his back. ‘What a night we will have when this is over!’ he cried. He made the sign of the
cross, kissed the crucifix around his neck and raising his lance to the heavens roared, ‘For God and King and Country!’

At its cue the bugles blared, there was a cheer that could be heard far out at sea, and the guns on both sides roared. Heedless of the shots flying into their midst, the Scottish flanks moved
down the hill. As they seethed forward, like a wave beginning its deadly roll far from shore, the air went black. A hail of arrows from both sides blotted the light, and for a second Paniter
thought it was his own senses that were failing, and he were about to swoon. Useless against the Scots’ jerkins and bonnets, the arrows fell like kindling, crunched underfoot as Home and
Huntly’s men swept on.

It was the silence that startled Paniter. After the first cries of attack, the Scots moved as if by stealth. The English were chanting, jibbing their billhooks, hurling obscenities as they
awaited the order to advance, but the surly quiet of the Scottish soldiers was more intimidating than screams, and Paniter watched the English bravado falter, and their shouting fade in the face of
this ominous calm.

Borthwick was at his elbow, his helmet pushed far back on his head. He had regained his composure after his humiliation the day before, and was acting as if it were he, and not Paniter, who was
in charge of the guns. Indeed, it seemed to Paniter that he treated him with a hint of contempt. But that could not be so. Nerves must be making him fanciful.

After their opening salute, the gunners were biding their time as they had been instructed. Cannons of such size and weight would win the day, but should not be fired until the troops were well
advanced. So Borthwick’s men crouched at the ready, one to each hungry mouth.

That wait was an agony, the gunners’ nerves strung so tight that taking no action was worse than being in the frontline, or so they thought. For Paniter, watching the first wall of
soldiers flatten the English, while they did not light a single fuse, felt criminal. But when Paniter looked to the king, he bade them wait. ‘Not yet,’ he mouthed, patting his hands in
the air to urge restraint.

The first engagement was dreamlike in its simplicity and success. Levelling their pikes at the short English billhooks, Home and Huntly’s men scythed the enemy flanks like weeds. Barely a
Scottish bone was broken in that fiendish attack. As they wheeled off the field, to the roars of their comrades, the centre of the army began to move, with James at its head.

The colours and finery of the Scottish side were a taunt to the drab, brown Englishmen, a sign of the confidence with which the north faced the south. As the soldiers unfurled, line by line,
they moved down Flodden hill like an avalanche, slow to start, then gathering speed. On the far hill, the English readied themselves. Paniter sent up a prayer and fingered the rosary beads at his
waist. Finally, the guns could be fired.

Not a day had passed since that afternoon when Paniter had not relived those terrible opening minutes when the artillery was in his charge. Screaming at the gunners to light the tapers, he
watched the first volleys with elation, his spirits flying high as the cannon balls. The thundering kick of the fuse-lit guns brought a moment’s exaltation, as if this smoking hill-top were
the very foundry of war, and these soldered warriors the arbiters of victory or defeat.

And so it proved. When the first curtains of smoke cleared and the enemy’s hill could be seen, the truth was plain. They were vastly overshooting. The howls of the English as they
flattened themselves beneath the artillery’s whistling flight soon gave way to cheers as the fist-sized balls flew far beyond the field. It was then that Paniter first thought he would
collapse. In the hours that followed, the dizziness came upon him in waves, so that the spinning behind his eyes was as much a part of the mayhem, in his memory, as the turmoil around him.

While the cannonballs were sailing wide, word spread through the ranks. Montrose was dead. Shortly after, it was Crawford. Then Argyll. Then Erroll. At that point Paniter’s heart took up
residence in his throat. From the crest of the hill, surrounded by his graveyard of iron, he looked down on a sea of reddening steel and falling bodies. While he stood, transfixed at the scene,
Borthwick repositioned the smallest culverins further back on the hill. He passed out hand-held guns to those prepared to follow the troops down the valley, though he might as well have sent them
to the executioner’s block. The time it took to reload and fire made them a childishly easy target, and none was ever to return.

Billowing smoke, rain and arrows turned day into dusk, but the darkening of Paniter’s mind was blacker still. At the hill’s foot a once douce little burn was a torrent, swollen by
weeks of rain. The blood drained from the secretary’s face as he watched his countrymen reach the valley bed, where they staggered and squirmed, sinking up to their knees in molten mud as if
it were wrapping them in chains. The charging ranks behind piled into them, tumbling under each other’s feet. Those who fell pulled themselves caked and sopping out of the glaur, like wraiths
rising from the grave. As word passed back, men wrenched off their boots and moved down the hill in their stockinged feet. The Highlanders went barefoot.

It was in the valley’s bed that the battle was most fierce. Fighting at close quarters, the Scottish pikes proved useless. A well-aimed chop from an English bill and they were gone,
leaving the Scots to take to the sword, which was no match against the billhook. As soldiers plunged into the quagmire, where they struggled like flies in resin, they were picked off one by one.
The place became a charnel, strewn with bodies, many dead, some crawling feebly like insects trodden underfoot, injured beyond repair. To Paniter it was a vision of hell, arms raised against blows,
teeth bared in pain, limbs and necks severed. All it needed were horned devils with tridents for the allegory to be complete.

He squinted into the rain for a sight of the king, and eventually found him. Clambering beyond the worst ruck James had made his advance upon the English hill, bringing down men on every side,
first with his lance then, when this was snapped by a billsman, with his two-handed sword. Where he fought, only the tattered lion rampant was visible, carried by a pageboy who risked death with
every step, since it took both hands to carry the flag.

By this banner, stealing steadily closer to the English centre, Paniter gauged the king’s progress. Even though he had a loyal knot of men around him, what he was doing was madness. For
every inch he gained, another inch was filling at his back with those intent on cutting off his retreat. Paniter could see no way out for him, save slaying the entire hillside, or killing Lord
Surrey, who was still some distance off, surrounded by a posse of prize fighters.

Fear and fury rose in the secretary’s throat, and he turned aside, to spit out his bile. He looked up, wiping his lips, to find Borthwick by him again. Time slowed to a crawl, and the
noise of the field grew faint as the master gunner pressed a pike into Paniter’s hand, and gestured down the valley. An odd smile played on his lips. Obedient as a pupil, the secretary took
the pike, balanced it before him, like a knight of old, and made off down the hill. He slipped on sodden grass and skittered over spread-eagled men, but in his mind the way was clear before him, a
tightrope that led straight to his king. He needed only a steady foot and a steely nerve to reach him.

No more at first than looming shadows in the mist, vicious packs of soldiers emerged in full colour when Paniter got close. As soon as he had passed, they melted out of sight, once more
shrouded. English shouts thickened the air, the boom of the deadly English cannonade louder still, but there was eerily little sound from the Scots. They put all their energy into their blows,
shrieking only when begging for mercy, which they neither gave, nor were given.

Blocking out the roars, Paniter crept across the western side of the hill, crossing the stream where the ground was least churned. Even so his boots grew heavy as if bathed in lead. He was
clambering up onto the English hill, using his pike as a staff, when a face glowered down at him out of the rain, a barrelling red-cheeked soldier whose hooked bill was pointed at his chest.
Paniter spitted the man like a boar. It was almost as hard pulling the spear out of him as it had been sucking his boots out of the mud.

Across the field the battle raged, a devilish dance daubed in crimson. On this lower slope, where the carnage was worst, the smell of butchered flesh and spilled guts was enough to dement a man.
If a cow going to slaughter can go mad with fear at the smell of blood, why not a soldier? Paniter’s feet slipped on the remains of men and his nose filled with their stench. He passed a hand
over his face, then fixed his eyes high on the English hill, where the king’s flag still fluttered. He pressed on.

To either side, men fell back before his pike. One who tried to bring him down by the legs breathed his last when the secretary stamped in his face. On he went, sliding, crawling, scrabbling,
hands and knees more useful than feet for covering the ground when it was a sheer rink of bloodied grass.

Men laboured all around him, and he could have joined any of a hundred fights. But he had no time. His vision narrowed as if it were a spy-glass, with room for no-one but his king, and finally
he found him. A huddle of Englishmen parted and there was James, spinning a flashing arc of steel around him as his sword sliced the head from a man with silver hair, which rolled off down the hill
like a bobbin of wool.

Paniter was less than ten feet from him, but between them was a wall of English. They circled the king like wolves, all but slavering in anticipation of what was to come. There was an ugly gash
on James’s cheek, and his jacket was ripped, wet with liquid thicker than rain. He leaned for a moment on his sword, and drew a rasping breath. As he did so, the wolves prepared to leap. An
archer’s bow was bent, a bill was bounced in a hand, a dagger unsheathed.

Paniter tried to shout, but his tongue would not work. It was like a dream, where no warning can be uttered, when arms and legs and voice are paralysed, and one can only watch. Before his
horrified stare the arrow was released, the bill swung, the dagger plunged.

The earth stood silent as Paniter saw his king stumble. He was on his knees, helmet knocked off, blood pouring over his face. Paniter caught a look of bewilderment and disbelief as James
observed a thickening pool of blood gathering under his hands. He tried to rise, and it was pitiful to watch as he staggered, arms out to fend off his attackers, blindly feeling for his fallen
sword. Those leaden, lifelong seconds, when the lost king looked around for help, knowing there was none, were for Paniter worse than his own death. As the pause lengthened, and his head throbbed,
it felt as if he was the one about to perish, that it was his life that would soon be ash, his hopes ground to dust.

It was a mercy when Surrey’s bodyguard brushed his way past the soldiers. Without ceremony, he kicked the king onto his back where he lay, turning his bloodied head from side to side as if
to make sense of this toppled world and his place in it. The bodyguard placed a boot on his chest. Ignoring the eyes that looked up at him, the cries of the pageboy and Paniter’s scream, he
brought down his axe.