The King’s Assassin (34 page)

‘I did not force him to come out to save me,’ I said, sulkily.

‘He worships you, Sir Alan, you are his model. He would do anything, no matter how stupidly reckless, to earn your admiration. And I will not have it, sir. I must ask you to behave more responsibly in future.’

And he turned his back and stalked off to his section of the wall.

Well, he was right. I had behaved irresponsibly, and I knew it. But that did not make being spoken to like a naughty schoolboy any easier to swallow.

To take my mind off my scolding, I pushed my body through the packed ranks of our men and took stock of the battle from the outside of the hollow phalanx.

The first thing I saw was that the French were on the attack. It looked very much like a general advance, which was always the last throw in any desperate, hard-fought battle. All along the line the French were moving forward: barons, knights and mounted men-at-arms, spearmen, pikemen, crossbowmen, too, they were all converging on one point. Even the Oriflamme, and the household knights of Philip, even the King himself, were on the move – the whole French army, still several thousand strong, was coming forward, marching away from the burning bridge and heading towards our lines. With a shameful sense of relief – and a misplaced one, too – I saw where the hammer blow of the French attack would fall.

Philip was making for Otto.

Trumpets called. Noblemen from Burgundy and Orleans, Berry and Ponthieu, Champagne, Maine and Touraine, bellowed their war cries, thrust back their spurs. And many hundreds of cavalrymen charged at the centre of our lines where the Holy Roman Emperor’s standard, the eagle mounted on a dragon, towered above the impassive ranks of the Saxon guard.

The French cavalry slapped into the first line of the Saxons. And were held. Those superb German warriors refused to give an inch of ground; they fought with magnificent courage, their big axes swinging like Death’s own scythe, blood flying, men falling screaming to the ground. But still the French piled into their ranks.

It was the enemy crossbowmen who tipped the balance. Hundreds of them came forward in their pairs, two slight men with one huge shield between them, and from both flanks they poured death into the ranks of the Saxon warriors. Quarrels whipped and cracked into their files, slaying mighty men with one-foot iron rods and leaving gaps into which the French thrust their armoured horses, their lances jabbing. The Saxons died by the score. More brave men stepped forward from the ranks behind to fill their places. To no avail. The pressure from the French was unrelenting.

Before my eyes, the Saxon line bent, buckled – and broke, quite suddenly. A great shout went up from the French. And at the same moment, the Emperor’s eagle-dragon standard tumbled. I saw that the Germans at the rear of the battle were edging back, and now, O sweet God, they were running. Otto was running. Even some members of Saxon guard were throwing their shields and axes away and streaming east with the other men, a panicked herd of humanity all sprinting for their lives.

In the space of a hundred heartbeats the centre of our lines completely disintegrated. A few of the better men stood their ground, knots of three or four back to back, gore-slathered axes in hand, defying the enemy to the last.

The crossbowmen made short work of them, punching quarrel after quarrel into their flesh until even these brave men were felled.

The sun was little more than a hand’s breadth above the western horizon, and I was able to survey the whole battlefield to the south of our hollow phalanx. Bodies littered the turf across the whole field, the stench of blood and ordure was so strong as to be almost visible. Great flocks of black crows wheeled in the air above, waiting for their chance to feed. Count Ferrand of Flanders and his men were gone; Otto and his surviving Germans were streaming away to the east. Only we – the couple of thousand or so men who owed their loyalty to the Earl of Salisbury or the Count of Boulogne – remained of the army that had boldly challenged the French King that day.

We were alone.

It is most painful to tell of the events of the next few hours, the last hours of that terrible dying day. The French surrounded us on all sides. Their horsemen were thick as flies around a dung pile. The cavalry charged our ranks, again and again, one or two brave men making a dash for us. Or occasionally a dozen men under a bold captain, who hoped to make a name for himself by smashing our formation. But, while our men died in ones and twos, skewered on the knights’ long lances, or their skulls crushed by a well-wielded mace, the French could make no hard impression on our hedges of steel. They were tired, after all, dog-tired; their horses were exhausted, too. Some of the French knights had been fighting all day – against Ferrand, then against Otto and now they came against us. Some of us, too, had been in the fray since before noon. But they could not get into our square. Neither could we escape.

I remember only fragments of that last terrible fight. One last desperate sortie by the Count of Boulogne and his handful of remaining cavalry: we opened our wall in the south, the section I had command of, and the Count and thirty men charged out and smashed a
conroi
of French cavalry that was dressing its ranks for a charge against us. The French were scattered – but other knights swarmed towards the fight from all corners of the field and Boulogne’s men found themselves in a fierce mêlée, surrounded. French pikemen joined the fight, too, running in and spiking their long blades into our knights’ backs as they fought hand to hand with the other mounted men. The Count and a scant eight horsemen managed to fight their way clear and make it back to the square – but it was clear we would never have the strength to make a sortie again that day.

I fought beside Little John on foot for most of that last battle, in the press with one-eyed Claes beyond John on my left, Thomas on my right, and a dozen good men from Kirkton and Westbury all around me. The French came on, again, and again. We kept them out, fighting like men possessed, using our poleaxes to cut and stab at the horsemen above us, and hooking unwary knights to haul them from their mounts’ backs and down to destruction. It was a weapon I came to love, in truth: efficient, deadly, evening the odds between a man on foot and the man a-horse. And with every strike of the pole, every grunt of exertion, I breathed Robert’s name.

We fought magnificently, truly we did, but each enemy charge weakened us, and at every assault, bloodily repulsed, a few more of our men fell to their long lances. It was quite clear now how this nightmare would end. There could be no surrender, the French knights had made that plain, calling us mercenary dogs, vermin, taunting us with the prolonged execution that would face us when we were captured; and there was clearly no escape to be had.

In a lull between attacks, when I was dazed with exhaustion, my arms like lead after wielding the unfamiliar poleaxe for so long, the wound in my back burning like the fires of Hell, Little John came over to me with a canteen of water and wine.

As I slurped down a good pint of that sweet mixture in one draught, Little John said: ‘You know something strange, Alan?’

I was too tired to speak; I could only stare at him mutely over the rim of the canteen.

‘I had a dream last night that Gavin was with us. It was so real, I felt I might have reached out and touched him.’

I grunted something and took another huge swig.

‘He begged me to be with him,’ said Little John.

That brought me up short. ‘He spoke to you?’

‘Yes, he asked me to join him in the light of God’s grace. He said it as plainly and simply as I am saying it to you now.’

‘It was a dream, John, a strange fancy of the mind on the eve of battle. I don’t think it really means—’

I stopped suddenly. The unfinished thought instantly wiped from my head. For at long last I could see our doom approaching. Five companies of marching crossbowmen. The French had decided to take us seriously.

So began the duel of the bowmen. The crossbowmen formed up in five blocks all around our hollow square – although by now it was not the neat, box-shaped object it had once been. Now it was more a shrunken circle of desperate bleeding men, spear-points facing outwards like a gigantic hedgehog. The largest groups of crossbowmen were formed up in the south, the south-west and the west in blocks of about a hundred and fifty men each. Two smaller companies of enemy bowmen took up positions to the north and the east.

They planted their huge shields. They spanned their bows. And methodically, calmly, with an absence of fury or any kind of passion, they began to kill our men.

Our Sherwood bowmen answered them, of course, but they were few in number by then, many having fallen in the phalanx walls, and they were sadly short of shafts. They had been shooting all day and some men had fewer than four or five arrows left in their arrow bags. But they killed crossbowmen as well as they could, shooting the enemy down when they emerged from behind their shields to loose at us. But it was cruelly one-sided. I saw Philip himself, briefly, back at his old command position by the bridge, and he seemed to be directing a large number of knights to their duties.

It was clear what was in the King’s mind. For the knights – perhaps all the remaining able-bodied chevaliers of the French army, some three hundred horsemen – were forming up to the west, with the blood-red sun setting at their backs, in one huge company behind the crossbowmen stationed there. When the crossbowmen had weakened us sufficiently, when there were but a few hundred of our battered men still standing, the French knights would make one last glorious charge, crash through our wavering spear-wall and complete the day’s slaughter.

The crossbowmen decimated our ranks, one or two men fell every heartbeat to the whirring black bolts. Our ragged hedgehog began to melt away like a snowball by a Christmas hearth. Men were dropping on all sides of our redoubt as the evil bolts sliced into our ranks from all corners of the compass. The whole circle of spearmen seemed to twist and shrink under the deadly onslaught, as bolt after bolt slammed into our ranks, and the screams of the wounded split the air again and again. There was nothing we could do about it except to stand – and die. Right beside me, I heard a shout of pain and a man stumbled into me and collapsed. I caught him and lowered him to the grass but he was stone dead before he touched the ground. It was Claes, a veteran of many of Robin’s bloody battles, a good man now gone, with a black quarrel sticking from his one remaining eye. As I crouched over his body, the tears welling in my own eyes at yet another comrade ripped from this earth, I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up into Robin’s face.

‘I’m not going to stay here and watch my sons die,’ he said quietly into my ear. ‘I’m not going to watch you or Little John or any more of my good men throw away their lives in this cause. It’s time for us to go home.’

We ran. It was as simple as that. Robin spoke quietly with a dozen of his senior men. He had all the archers loose one last volley at the crossbowmen directly in our path. And we ran. The Earl of Salisbury must have caught wind that something was happened, for just before we made our move he called across the shrinking circle in the centre of our redoubt, asking Robin what was amiss. Robin did not deign to answer him. Instead, he gave the word of command and with a howl we charged out of our positions and sprinted directly at the crossbow company to the south.

Little John led the charge, with myself and Sir Thomas just behind him, and Robin and his two sons brought up the rear. Between us were some ninety of Robin’s men-at-arms, bowmen and dismounted cavalry and even a few of the Earl of Salisbury’s men who had either also decided it was time to depart or who had just been swept up in the movement of our running men.

Within ten heartbeats we were in among the crossbowmen – dodging between the huge planted shields and killing like fiends. Taking a bloody revenge for the carnage we had suffered at their hands. My wound felt like a red-hot poker being thrust into my back, but I gritted my teeth, determined to ignore the pain. I swung Fidelity at a man who was in the act of spanning his crossbow, bent over the weapon with one foot in the stirrup on the end of the bow on the ground, hauling back with both hands on the string. My blade caught him in the centre of his spine, chopping through leather, flesh and bone and dropping him in an unstrung mess on the ground. I killed another man, a lunge to the groin, even as he pointed his loaded weapon at my chest. He fell back as he pulled the lever and the string twanged and loosed the bolt high into the sky.

But Robin was shouting: ‘On, on, make for the woods. Don’t tarry, don’t stop for anything. We must get to the trees.’ For we were heading for the Cysoing woods due south of the battlefield, where the battle for Bouvines had begun several lifetimes ago. Night was falling, it was already a pinky-grey twilight, and in the woods, in darkness, we would be safe, or so Robin had promised. But before we could find safety in the trees we had a thousand yards to run across a battlefield swarming with victorious French men-at-arms.

I ran, snatching glances behind me, looking for enemy horsemen – for that is what I feared most, the galloping horseman and his long lance that would punch through my backbone as I ran. But it seemed that we had taken the French by surprise. The enemy horse were still forming up in the west, opposite the circle of desperate men that we had abandoned. Already there were several knights shouting and pointing in our direction, and it would not be long before we were pursued and brought to battle. I saw too that the Earl of Salisbury was rapidly filling the gap we had made in his circle of steel by our precipitate departure. He and the Count of Boulogne were grabbing men and shoving them into the space where Robin’s men had stood. I blessed Robin then: I would rather die on my feet running, dodging, perhaps even able to strike a blow myself, than standing in a thin line of men patiently waiting to be felled by an anonymous crossbow bolt.

An instant later, I regretted my thoughts, for I could feel the thunder of horses’ hooves through the turf below my flying feet, and looking back I saw that a
conroi
of cavalry fifty men strong was galloping down the field towards our fleeing men.