Yet the hands that hold that spear are mine, the cunning of bone and joint and broken nails was made to answer my order and no one else’s, just as were the sweating, stinking feet in the battered shoes and the legs atop them.
He was Will the chandler’s boy and he was sixteen and lived in himself, somewhere under the ribs or inside his skull, thinking thoughts that had never been thought, feeling things that were so big and full no one had ever experienced them.
Will the chandler’s boy, melting like wax and waiting to be smeared like old grease. No chance now to make a name as great as Master Overhill, who had invented the candle clock. No chance to find some cleverness to combat the creeping horror of steel cogs and wheels that was the fancy Frenchified horologe, no chance to raise himself from dipping wick in tallow to make nothing better than poor light the rest of his life.
No place for candles this, he thought, hearing the booming roar of the vintenars to keep close — charge your pikes. Behind him, in the thinned centre of the ring, barely enough room for him alone, he knew the lord Randolph stood. How he stayed upright in this heat, with maille and plate and padding all over him, was something approaching magic, part of the mystery of the nobiles and what they did.
Yet he was not only upright, but roaring defiance and demands that they hold to the ring; out beyond the shoulders of the man in front, Will saw two riders and tried to dash the sweat out of his eyes with a fist swathed in thick leather gauntlet. It made his spear sway and clatter off the helmet of the man in front, but he only grunted, did not turn round.
The riders came on. Just three — someone laughed in disbelief but the men around Will suddenly seemed to stop breathing and Will saw that the riders were coming straight at his part of the ring; if they kept going they would crash into it.
‘Hold to the ring!’
Surely no sane man or beast would plunge straight in a hedge of points … Will did not even realize he had said it aloud until the man next to him growled out a reply.
‘They are no’ sane, beast nor man,’ he declared and Will turned to look briefly at the grizzled face. It smiled at him.
‘Dinna fash, lad. Hold to the ring, keep your pike charged as you trained and it will be fine enough.’
‘You have done this afore?’
Will heard the tremble in his voice and was ashamed of it, but the man did not seem to notice and merely grinned brownly.
‘Och, this is auld cloots an’ gruel to the likes o’ us,’ he said and men to his front and side laughed agreement. Will could not understand why anyone would want to do this more than once. Then the grizzled man looked to his front and shifted as if to plant himself.
‘Fuck,’ he said and Will saw the horsemen, big as giants and growing larger, the huge legs of the beasts pounding the ground to dust as they came on them at a full gallop.
Gray’s fury thundered with every hoofbeat, a blood pulse that sent him shrieking at the ring of spears, cursing Bruno’s slowness and raking him until he squealed. Even the sight of the spear points, wavering as they drew together to point at him, provided only the briefest spasm of apprehension, no more.
That was driven away by the sight of Sir William Deyncourt spurring past him, sitting forward and almost lunging with his lance — bad posture that, he thought, for you are off balance when you hit and will go straight through the gatehouse, out between the ears like a slung stone …
Deyncourt rode Bruno’s stablemate, a big Frisian cross called Morningstar. The pair of them had been trained together, at the straw men in ranks, at the weak withy hurdles so that they believed there was no barrier they were put to which was stronger than their own muscle and bone. All it took was a madly determined rider and they would try to punch a hole in a castle wall — or a deadly shrike’s nest of points.
Gray sat back, legs stuck almost up by the arched neck of Bruno, the last furious gallop into the ring a great roar that rang inside his helm and deafened the splintering crash.
Will saw the leading horseman as a flicker to the left of him, heard the grating crash and felt the slam of bodies rippling away from the impact point. Staggering, frantic, he was peering to see when the second knight erupted out of the golden haze, a massive monster with bared yellow teeth topped with a featureless creature of metal.
There was a brief confusion of red and white, a glimpse of a silver lion on a shield and then the horse struck the front rank as if it did not exist; there was the sound like a great tree falling and Will saw the man in front of him flung into the air to disappear with a shriek. He ducked instinctively at the great whirl of splintered wood from broken spears, saw the snapped-off points lanced into the horse’s chest and head — straight through the flaring nostril and out of the other eye.
Then there was a moment when the world seemed to stop, when the man on the dying horse’s back took his lance to within a foot of Will and skewered the astonished grizzle of the veteran through the neck; he seemed to float up in the air, higher and higher so that Will started to follow him with a tilt of his gape-mouthed stare.
The dying horse, legs flailing still, screaming a high-pitched shrill, ploughed on and skittled the ranks of men. Time sucked back to Will, just as the horse capsized, the last mad shriek and kick arriving into the sunlight of Will’s world like a huge black cloud.
He felt the blow, felt himself hurled backward into other men and wanted to apologize. He saw himself as if he stood outside the blackness that had cloaked him, with his fine sprout of red-gold beard like stubble on a sparse field, big-handed, big-footed and awkward. Proved and not a coward, all the same, he thought, even if I am in the dark and afraid of it.
I need a candle.
Gray knew Sir William was already dead when Bruno hit the spearwall and died in an instant. He barely had time for the regret of such a loss before he was shot upward as if launched from a trebuchet, sprung up but not cleanly; one foot was briefly caught in the stirrup and he felt his leg wrench. Then it was free and he was flying in a whirl of arms and legs, like the tumblers he had seen at a fair day once. There was a brief flicker through his helmet slit, an eyeblink vision of a boy with his mouth open.
He crashed down in a great heap, the air driven from him. He thought he had been pinned like a sheep’s eye on a crow beak, but felt himself dragged and kicked, felt his mind narrowing to a last small point of light. I am too young, he thought frantically. I have achieved nothing … he felt the savage wrenching of his neck, then light flared as his helm was torn off; blind, stunned, he blinked into a growl of shadows.
God preserve my soul …
This was chaos and Randolph flailed in the centre of it, bawling for the bodies to be cleared away, the dead spat out like gristle, for the ring to hold, for it to crab away from the dead horses. Someone flung a body at his feet and he stared down into the glassed daze of the knight, his red surcote torn, the silver lion streaked with gore.
‘Yield, my lord?’ he asked, out of politeness’ sake, and Sir Thomas Gray, his senses rushing back into the dubious blessing of a world of pain, could only nod.
A few feet away, Davey the Cooper fought the splintered length of lance from the neck of Bannock and rolled him away — helpful feet kept him going, feeding him out of the ring as it drew back. Peel o’ the Bannock, Davey thought, the hero of Linlithgow who had driven the haywain under the cullis and stopped it dropping long enough for men to spring through and take the place. It is a weeping shame to be leaving him in his own blood for the birds to peck, him who had sworn to defend his own birthplace. Him and a dozen others, he saw, torn and savaged to death by only three knights.
He examined the boy at his feet, hearing him softly moaning out of his smashed face.