Kingmaker: Broken Faith (39 page)

‘This is it, boys,’ someone says. ‘Say your prayers.’

There is a susurrus and a murmuring among the men, and Thomas joins them in a mumbled paternoster, and then there is a flurry of arms crossing chests. One or two of the older men bend a knee and mark their place with a cross in the dirt under the heather roots, and some of them take a small piece of this earth and place it in their mouths, but the younger archers don’t bother. It must be something from France, Thomas thinks, when the English fought the French, rather than one another.

Another trumpet. Distant shouts in the cold grey afternoon.

Now Somerset propels his horse through the ranks and he rides out a little way, before turning to face them. He has his helmet raised and his bevor undone, and he is carrying a horseman’s hammer, but it is for show, since they all know he must dismount and send his horse back, and fight on foot like a proper Englishman. But for now, it is a good thing, something to wave, something to emphasise his rhetoric.

‘Men of Lancaster!’ he begins, raising the hammer. ‘Men of England. On this day, in this hour, now, the fate of the kingdom – our kingdom – hangs in the balance. If we let past this mob of false traitors sent by the treacherous Duke of York to seek the succour of the enemies of our dread liege King Henry, we will lose. Not just the day, but everything. We will lose our names, our lands, our lives. And all the hardships we have shared over the years, all the privations, all the sacrifices, all the time we have been denied our lands, our hearths, our dogs, our wives – they will count as nothing. All the blood we have shed. All the blood our fathers have shed, all the blood our sons and brothers have shed – it will count as nothing. But if we stop them here today, if we send them back whence they have come, then news of this day’s work will resound throughout Christendom. We will turn the tide, and we will show the world that we, we men of the north, we are equal and greater to anything they might throw at us, and that we remain loyal. We remain steadfast where others falter, and that we are the true beating hearts of this our land.’

Somerset’s oratory is undercut by the sight of a similar-looking man in similar-looking harness riding out to address his own troops across the moor. It might be Montagu, Thomas supposes, and it is easy to imagine him saying the same sorts of the things. At length Somerset finishes with an appeal to St George to send them safe and victorious, and there is a rousing cheer, echoed a moment later by a distant cheer from the ranks opposite, and while Somerset gallops along the front of his army, so does Montagu, and then both men ride through gaps that have been left open for them in the ranks of the men-at-arms and now there is nothing left to do but wait for the signal to get on with it.

Thomas wishes more than ever that he had ale. They all need it, really, to face what they are about to face. It gives them bodily strength, the energy to do what they must, and it gives them the spirit to do it, too. He peers ahead. It is perhaps the middle of the afternoon, and the sky is still moving quickly, still west to east, but it does not look as if it will rain, and Montagu’s men are moving forward, quickly, and Jack is on his toes peering over to see if Riven’s gunners will soon open up.

Thomas tries to control his breathing.

‘Let them come,’ he says. ‘We have the height.’

Though he knows this advantage is almost negligible and is perhaps reversed by having so few men with good bows, it is something to say. His mouth is so dry. Sweat slips from the leather lining of his helmet. He distracts himself, fiddling with his arrows. He leaves one linen bag of them on the ground at his feet, though he makes sure to open the string, and he takes the other and shakes out his arrows and puts a dozen point first in the ground and a dozen through the loop in his belt. He steals a look around, towards Hungerford and Roos’s men, where Riven’s men are, and though he knows Riven is not there, he remembers those other two, so he slips a couple of shafts around his belt so that they are at his back. They are both weighty, with long tapering bodkins, and he will keep them, just in case. Next he nocks his bow. It is hard. He needs his whole body to get the wood to bend enough to slip the string over its end, but when it is done, the thing is alive in his hands, singing with its own taut energy. He picks his first arrow, and nocks that on the string. Good fletching, he thinks. Grey goose feathers. Green-tinged bindings. Lots of glue. A heavy shaft, aspen, bulbous toward one end, and a rough iron bodkin to top it off.

Now Montagu’s men are within five hundred paces. They are impressively trained, keeping order as they come, moving as one. Thomas has seen this before somewhere. Men moving like this. It was snowing though, then, and were they on a bridge? He cannot recall. They negotiate a stream, a rivulet really, with no bunching, and they come on up after it with no hesitation. They are spreading wide now, along a front just as broad as Somerset’s. It is as if Somerset has invited them to something – a dance – and they have accepted the invitation. So strange to think of so many men marching so far, as if by appointment, to come and try to kill one another.

But then something odd happens, and for a moment every man falters, even Montagu’s, and some stop, and murmuring spreads along the front, and men lower their weapons, because between the converging ranks some large hares have emerged in the heather and gorse. They are racing around, springing up at one another as if fighting, a strange comical impression of what is to come, and it is so good to see, they are so careless and free, that there is a pause, and one old man calls out that he would put a groat on the one on the left winning the doe, and there is a moment of speculation, and then hearing them, the hares stop and turn and it seems as if they are sniffing the air, and then, as one, they are gone in an instant, and after a moment of silent contemplation, the men in the two armies seem to sigh, and the drums pick up and the men-at-arms lower their visors where they have them, and take a step forward.

‘Nock!’

This is a moment easily orchestrated. Everybody knows how to nock an arrow. Thomas’s is held loose in his right-hand forefingers, its foreparts resting on the bridge of the knuckle of his left hand where it grips the bow shaft. He squeezes his shoulders, rolls them up to his ears. Here they go. A deep breath. Murmured prayers. Nervous laughter. Something Jack has said. Then a moment of profound tension until:

‘Draw!’

And now they lean forward, weight on the left leg, then haul their bows back, balancing their weight, and up, hauling back on the string, letting it cut into the fingers despite the leather tags, pulling, pulling, pulling, the muscles on his back instantly warm, his view down the foreshortened shaft of the arrow and the string coming to his eye, and then from the tail of his eye he notices without seeing, seven or eight hundred pale wood bows, their curved lines cross-hatched by the straight lines of the arrows, and then before anyone has time to shout loose, they loose.

The bowstrings boom and snap against bracers and the shafts leap into the sky, merging into a slate-coloured band, like flocking starlings, and they pause in mid-flight at the top of their arc, and if the archers weren’t already nocking and hauling on their strings again, they might have time to stop and admire that moment, which lasts as long as the time between two heartbeats, when the arrow shafts seem to dither in the sky before they begin to drop, gathering speed again as they plummet to thunder on the heads of the men below.

But it is not all one way. Montagu’s archers have sent up their own shafts and there is a noticeable darkening of the sky where the clouds of arrows drift through one another and there are some that collide to knock one another down, to fall to the ground like dropped lines.

‘Here they come!’

And suddenly the arrows thicken the air around him, pale slashes before his eyes, thumping into the ground. There are cries and sudden thrashing movements. It sounds like a busy smithy. Some men stop loosing and hunch their shoulders. They try to turn themselves into as narrow a column as possible under their helmets. These are always the men with those wide brim helmets, the old kettle helmets, since with such a hat, the temptation to do this is too great, which is why anyone with a retinue of his own will not issue these helmets and why they have become unpopular, for they are like a badge of future cowardice, and only the bravest of the brave can wear them, and continue to loose, and no one is that brave.

Thomas draws and looses, draws and looses, and the bow is becoming easier as he warms, but all around him there are men being struck by Montagu’s archers’ arrows. They are knocked backwards, or skewered, and rarely fall silently. There is screaming, not so much at the pain, since that is known to come later, but in anger at seeing your arm stuck through, its bones broken, or at being thrown on to your arse or your back, or at being hit on the helmet and having your ears ring and your vision waver, and at being made to stagger like a calf and loose your bowels, or at having a shaft stuck in your thigh and seeing your blood suddenly everywhere, unstoppable, in your eyes, and it so hot!

The pain of loosing the bow builds slowly across his back and his arms. His fingertips sting, his wrist is bruised despite the bracer. He has loosed twenty arrows. He has seen five of his own men knocked to the ground; two of them are dead, but John the Cutler is not among them, nor is Jack, who is sweating and red-faced from the effort, but he wears a childish grin, and his teeth show, and his eyes are so bright, and he seems to imagine that he can see exactly where he is aiming his shafts.

The wind is dragging the arrow cloud wide, he sees, curving them in flight, so that they fall from a three-quarter angle, and he sees that Montagu’s arrows fall that way too, as predicted, and that the cloud is converging on the men to his left, on Roos’s and Hungerford’s men, on Riven’s men. Part of him celebrates it. Part of him laughs. Riven’s men are there. They are bearing the brunt. Taking casualties. It is possible to know without knowing that something worse than usual is happening on a battlefield, to know without knowing that someone somewhere is having a worse time of it than you, and everybody knows that the left flank is suffering, while the right flank is yet to engage.

He has four arrows left.

He looks along the line. Jack has already loosed his quota, and thank God he is gone. He is fast, Thomas thinks, better than me. He bends his back again. One more arrow, then another then another, until, finally, the last. He has done all he can be expected to do, and if he is caught between the two lines of men-at-arms, he is a dead man, so he does not look around among the dying on the ground for more arrows. He has ridden his luck.
Ave Maria, gratia plena. Ave Maria, gratia plena.
But stupid useless John the Cutler is still the slowest. He has six more arrows tucked in his belt.

‘John!’ he calls. ‘John! Leave them.’

John the Cutler looks around and later Thomas will wonder if he does not laugh at him, but when the boy turns back to his own business, an arrow hits him on his chin, the bit that used to stick out, and that shatters, and it is through his throat and a black tag appears between his shoulder blades with a spit of dark blood, and he drops, as if from a height, with his feet and hands thrust forward and the bow spilling for a moment he sits upright and then he throws himself back on the ground at Thomas’s feet, with his head banging and his arms thrown up, so that the nock of the arrow in his throat is presented to Thomas, offered up as if he might want to pluck it out and nock it on his own string, and above it, or below it, John’s eyes are still open and they even move, and they seem to focus on Thomas as if he has said something wounding, and then they swim and roll like something turning in the water, and then John the Cutler is dead. Blood gurgles from the wound, bubbling around the shaft of the arrow, staining it and his scarf as he makes a strange cacking sound.

Thomas can do nothing. He turns and runs. He pushes past the men-at-arms and the billmen who are now snarling and trying to steady themselves for what they next must do, and he emerges out of the back of them, through the few lines of the naked men, to where there should be ale carts, for the archers to slake their thirsts before collecting more arrows that ought to be piled here, and sending them over the heads of the men-at-arms and into the ranks of the closing enemy. But there are no arrows. Some archers are standing around, rueing the chance that is going begging, while others are no longer capable, and are spread about the ground, some of them blood-splattered, others stained shamefully, walking with spread legs and weeping. Some are dazed, while others sit by and watch and among them the wounded cry out as they drag themselves in search of help, or ale, or expire in the thickness of their own blood. Others stand with hands on knees, steaming from their efforts, while yet others are stretching their backs, groaning with the painful pleasure.

Some women are there, chunky camp followers in aprons and caps, as tough as the men they follow, but there is no ale, only water from the stream, and they are doling that out, or helping men on the ground, until, after a moment, it is clear there is something else going on. The women stop and straighten their backs and they look up and over to the left flank and Thomas turns to look and he sees men running. Can it be their lines have broken already? No one can credit it. There is a shocked murmur that swells into shouting. It is almost unbelievable. The left flank is disintegrating. It has broken. Men are running although they are yet to engage with Montagu’s men.

But there they are: Hungerford and Roos’s men in blue-and-yellow, and red-and-green, have turned their backs on Montagu’s men and are streaming away from their lines. Not in ones and twos, not in wounded dribs and drabs, but all of them, in their hundreds, casting their weapons aside and running.

And they are being led by Riven’s men, who are fleeing faster than anyone, able to outpace them, and it seems they are hardly encumbered by their weapons or any of the usual accoutrements of the battlefield, and there is something about them that makes Thomas think this is organised, planned, intended.