Warlord(9)

A man-at-arms in a knee-length hauberk was stirring the contents of a huge cooking pot hung over a fire as we charged into the camp. He gawped at me as I galloped straight at him: he was unarmed, apart from an eating knife at his belt, and I lifted my lance point above his head deliberately to miss as Shaitan and I charged towards him, nudging my horse with my left knee in a battle signal to my huge mount that I’d practised hundreds of times in the three months that I had had him. Shaitan responded immediately, changing his line of gallop smoothly and smashing his black glossy shoulder into the man as we passed, the fellow reeling away and stumbling into the dust. Another fellow ran into my path, a brave man, unarmoured, dressed only in a dirty chemise, braies and torn, muddy hose, who pointed a crossbow at me and pulled the lever to send a foot-long bolt of hissing death at my face. My boar-device shield came up instinctively, the moment I saw him on my quarter, and I felt the impact reverberate in the bone of my left forearm as the quarrel thwocked into the centre of my stout shield. I turned my head to glare at him as I galloped past, and saw one of the horsemen in my wake, behind me and to my left, punch his lance deep in the man’s chest and leave him writhing in his death agony on the ground.

It must be conceded that, once they had realized that they were under attack, the French reacted well: a ripple of sound and movement travelled out through the huge camp from our point of impact. The whole surface of the encampment seemed to shiver like the skin of a horse that is troubled by stinging flies. Men-at-arms were running hither and yon, calling their comrades to arms. Horsemen were swinging up into the saddle, whether they were in armour or not – I even saw one knight leap astride his charger bare-chested, helmet-less, shouting at his squire to throw him shield and lance. From my bounding saddle, I could see the walls of the castle clearly, six hundred paces away, the battlements dotted with the black heads of the defenders – and something most curious struck my eye: on the dark wood of the tightly shut doors of the main gate some crude hand had drawn a giant image of a man wearing a large crown in thick white chalk lines. The man was pictured standing sideways on, and his right arm reached between his legs to where a round-headed, spiked battle mace was depicted as springing from his loins. Underneath the chalk drawing the words ‘Philip Augustus’ had been scrawled.

I pulled my attention back to the situation at hand. A crowd of knights, perhaps twenty men, armed and armoured any old how in their haste to join battle, but mainly in hauberks and helms, lance and sword, were forming up directly to my front, barring the way to the castle. I shouted: ‘On me, on me. Westbury! Westbury!’ and guided Shaitan to head straight for the foremost knight, a big man on a bay horse, with a flat-topped tubular helmet and a bright gold-and-white device, a stag, on his shield.

He levelled his lance and spurred forward to meet me and I had only a heartbeat to raise my shield and aim my own spear at his lower belly before we collided with an ear-numbing crash of metal and splintering wood. A gigantic blow smashed my shield painfully against my left shoulder. The long ash lance in my right hand snapped in two, and though I didn’t have a moment to glance down at his midsection as we passed each other, I saw by the look of shock in his eyes through the slits of his helmet that I had found my target.

To my left I watched Hanno dip his spear and neatly skewer a half-armoured man on a frightened grey horse. But other enemy horsemen surged forward, swords and spear-points glinting in the sharp air. One man cut at me with a sword as he rode past, and missed, and I stopped a glancing axe blow from another with my quarrel-impaled shield. The rest of my cavalrymen were all around me now, protecting me, fighting like men possessed and steadily hacking, pushing, grinding their way forward. Pulling out my own side-arm – a beautiful sword, with a long, slim but strong blade and the word ‘Fidelity’ engraved in golden letters on it, and a great jewel set in the pommel – I looked to the castle. It was a scant four hundred paces away and I could clearly see the marks the French trebuchets had made on the walls. One section of the battlements east of the gate had been badly smashed, although it appeared the defenders had rebuilt that part with the rubble, and barrels and planks of green wood.

There were French troops coming from both sides, and from behind us; the enemy was fully alerted. An enemy knight charged out of nowhere and jabbed his lance at me and I flicked it out of the way with my sword, and cut savagely at his neck as he rode past me, my blade crunching against his mail. More of the foe were swarming towards us on foot, hundreds of them; the whole camp, it seemed, was flooding towards us like a great incoming tide of men. The archers had caught up with the vanguard and were now fighting alongside my lancers; hacking with their short swords and axes, stabbing with long knives. The back of a horse is no place to use a war bow. But I could see that my men were dying, as well as killing the enemy; their horses were crushed against the mounts of our foes, their blades ringing against helm and shield; though some were surrounded merely by a seething press of footmen. Somehow we had lost the momentum of our charge and become embroiled in a mêlée – a vicious slogging, hacking, shoving match against an enemy with twenty times our numbers.