We Speak No Treason Vol 2 (9 page)

His brow is wet, and the hay-coloured hair, matted with dust and bog-mire, curls flatly. We are all bound upon the same road, but he is still a yeoman and I a knight, so he attempts to rise. Swiftly I kneel beside him, facing his father, and we are like two priests beside a corpse, for he is dumb and still. In kneeling I realize that I have taken a wound—rather that my old injury has renewed itself. It is far from mortal, a piercing of the hip where, thirteen winters ago, a sword-point fleshed betwixt the steel lappets of my brigandine. Now, a glancing cudgel-blow has broken it afresh. Master William Brecher has noticed my cumbrousness in kneeling.

‘You are hurt, zur?’

They are from Devon, these men. Their harvest will be wasted this year. Unless there are other sons to garner the apples and the grain. Or bring in the hay under a thunderous blue sky... next year. The year after. The last scraps of flesh will have rotted from our heads by then. I pray my wife will not come Leicester-ward to see the face she once possessed, caressed, speared high upon a pike.

I place my arm about the boy. The roving eyes fall to the welt of dried blood upon my side. His thick fingers reach out and touch gently.

‘Do it give pain?’ he asks curiously.

I shake my head. ‘Nay, master. The hurt left it many years ago.’

‘
I
am not wounded,’ he says with pride.

‘You fought valorously.’

My answer throws him into a fit of shuddering, while his father clicks his tongue and our glances meet—his begging pardon for what he reckons a craven display.

‘His first battle,’ he says in exoneration.

And his last. Your last, Master William and mine. And my King’s. I would tell them of past battles, though those are long-gone, fallen victim to this ecstasy of despair. There is only the Now, with its hourglass and scythe.

‘It is the waiting,’ I say, and Master Brecher bows his head. There is a man-at-arms from York who has cursed and sworn day-long, calling up all the demons in Hell to smite one, H.T. and he stands belabouring the door, shouting for water, which comes slopping in a greenslime bucket and is passed from mouth to mouth. I hold the water to young Brecher’s lips. He smiles. His teeth are like fence-posts ill set-up, and I love him. The father is speaking.

‘When he was little, I talked often to him of battles,’

‘You fought for King Edward?’

‘I was at Barnet Field,’ he answers. And from the deep reaches of desperation, lo, there comes a bad jest:

‘I did not see you there,’ say I.

He can still smile; and there, I have them both smiling, one from water, the other from wit.

‘I saw naught but mist,’ says Master Brecher.

I saw blood at Barnet. I saw thick fog, laden with groans and screams of man and horse. I saw confusion, with the Silver Star of Oxford shimmering in the thick dawn. And while swearing and blind-striking in that broth, I saw the wheeling flanks of Montagu robbed of reason, for they chopped down their own allies like men bewitched.

‘They thought it to be King Edward’s standard.’

‘Yea, the Sun in splendour, with its streaming rays.’ They turned, they clashed with one another, crying of treason, and were slain.

I saw the end of the House of Neville on that day. And, lying in the surgeon’s tent, I cursed beneath the doctor’s probe, and watched them bring in Richard Plantagenet, who dropped blood from his wrist, and talked wildly of his esquires.

‘John Milwater—I saw him fall. Is there news?’ he asked.

‘Dead, my lord,’ said the surgeon, watching a fresh red seeping through clean linen.

‘Thomas Parr... he was beside me when I took this blow...’

And just then they carried in that same knight, stripped of course of his rings and his purse, and with the life only lately gone from him; and those who brought him cried with joyful tongue that Earl Warwick had gone deathward, trampled underfoot, but whole enough to be displayed in St Paul’s on the morrow, together with his brother Montagu of the Pie’s Nest. And Richard Plantagenet, plucking his arm from the surgeon’s ministry, walked with unsteady step over to the corpse of Sir Thomas Parr, and kissed its face, and wept; wept, for Warwick and all that was gone.

But is there only the Now? Could I not counterfeit a dream, a dream that will soon be ended? Master Brecher’s son has closed his eyes. How old is he? Seventeen? Eighteen? And there I was calling him a child. It is because I am old to his eyes. A grandad in his mind. My dream, if I can will it back again, is still full of steel-shriek and the dog-like moans of the dying. I was nineteen, at Tewkesbury. I had a fair young wife in my bed, and the kiss of a King on my cheek, for my work at Barnet Field.

‘In the Name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, I create thee a knight.’ The heavy jewelled sword descending. That great golden face against mine. The joy, the wound-forgetting; the upsurging renewal. Richard Plantagenet, standing palely by the King. And the sound of the Frenchwoman’s host already sharpening our steel again. The men of the West Country behind her; the armies of Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire rallying to her fanatical voice. We had but a month to lick our hurts, to gather our force, and to borrow our money. Now I knew the meaning of livery and maintenance, but from the other end of the scale! Jasper Tudor (yea, the Dragon’s own uncle) waited in Wales for Queen Margaret to join him. I waged a stout company of friends. Some of those lives still hang heavy on my soul.

Tewkesbury was a fair little town, tranquil and flower-framed, with a sweet-running river girdling the Abbey and its green fields. I gazed at that stream with fierce longing, and craved above all to rid me of my harness and plunge into the clear flood, The past hours weighed on me burdensome as the steel lapping my body. Our march had started, long before day’s beginning, from Sodbury Hill northward to Gloucester. There, a hasty recognizance that its gates were barred to the French Queen; then hot on her heels all day. Hot, God’s truth, the heat of hell fire from a pitiless sun turning our mail into an oven. I stewed gently in my own sweat, my sodden shirt a penance. A choking dust, and no drink. All the streams we came upon were like cesspits from the host that fled before us.

My sorrel dropped her nose and sucked up mud, and I pressed her on. At times I fancied I had died and was in Purgatory, until I shook the sweat out of my eyes and looked for our leaders, and saw that if this were truth I was in fair company.

For the King, and Hastings, Sir John Howard and Richard Gloucester, struggled ahead of me, encased in full harness; thus was I shamed and counted myself lucky to be only wearing brigandines; and wondered if they envied me; then began to look jealous at my own men in their jacks and sallets, light as the deer that had once worn the skins clothing them.

Sir John Howard had given me words of comfort during that ride. ‘Remember,’ he said with his furrowing smile, ‘our quarry has fear as well as heat to combat. Jesu! One can almost scent their fear!
Her
fear!’ Watching him spur on, I pondered on loyalty; for he had sworn to have the elder John Paston’s head. I had lately learned that my erstwhile friend fought for Lancaster. So where did loyalty lie? There was naught to counsel me but the chafe of my flesh and the river running beneath my armour and the racing thoughts that numbed my mind—would the Frenchwoman wear harness and wield a sword? Like the saintly witch whom they burned before my time?

Thus we came to Tewkesbury in a fine moil, and took a field, because the Queen had done so, and we were all among thickets and bogs and thorn-hedges, and there were not three suns on that day, only the great yellow device on the royal pursuivant’s staff, and that blazing orb above. I swept my eyes along our array. The banners hung quiet, for there was little wind to stir them. Now and then a breeze touched at the Silver Lion of the Howards; Clarence’s Bull shook shyly in my keen sight. Its owner, however, was full of grace, plump with a pardon from his royal brother. George, my lord, where do you keep your allegiance? thought I, then I cast round at the thousands of men ranked behind us. I saw through the shimmering distance my sorrel, standing in the horse-park. One of the baggage-boys sat at her feet. And all this I marked over the fifth part of a league. The archers were thick on our wings, while on my either side steel mirrored steel. I glanced towards the vanguard, and was blinded.

Flame filled my eyes like a lightning stroke, and I was afraid, for I was minded of the physicians in my childhood days with their reflectors, which had caused me to cringe and them to mutter, perplexed by my unnatural sight. Is this, then, I thought in the great terror which was only battle-anxiety bloating my conscience, to be the end of my seeing? Yet as suddenly the fire left my eyes, for a cloud settled on the sun and I gave a laugh of relief which set my esquires looking at one another. My keen sight had caught and burned in Richard Gloucester’s mail, that was all. A foolish, witching phrase popped from memory. ‘A light about him, not of this world.’ Ah, who on earth... if it mattered. My mind went idling—a bad moment to choose.

Sir John Howard was readying our wing. We were spread out—Hastings’s men so close to the stream that the last man in his flank was braced against a willow-tree and glancing down at the ripples, then back to where all eyes looked greedily. For in the Abbey’s stone shadow lay the enemy. A great puissance of men, and no Frenchwoman among them that I could see, But one little figure in the distance, opposite our King. I strained for the cognizance, and saw that his standard-bearer flaunted the Silver Swan. My eyes went to the right wing and who there but Beaufort of Somerset, closing his visor. Placed no doubt to aid the French Prince. And Lord Wenlock... and our clarions sounding, and the throat-tearing cries of: ‘England! England!’ and ‘York! À Edward! À Howard! Clarence!’ immediately followed by that sound of a thousand geese in flight, the air-thrashing swoop of arrow-shot, and the uncertain cannon bludgeoning the ear. Then the two stout lines ran at one another like lovers long-parted and a tall knight mantled with the lilies of France sought me out and blunted his weapon on my shield while I hammered at his weakest join, finding the rift between neck and shoulder and feeling my sword in flesh, and glad of it. All around it seemed as if banners fell like trees in a storm. Two friends kept close and we struck in harmony, with a fine rhythmic force, the parry and the feint and the clang, clang of steel on iron, on steel, on lead, and the sweet suck of metal in the body of a foe. Why, this is but a little skirmish, I thought, and also thought how the sound of man’s dying is nearly always one of surprise—not a scream of anguish but a long grunting ‘aaaah’ and there was another of the French traitress’s henchmen gone to his just reward; then my boastful bloody humour turned to dismay as a body of men, with Beaufort at its head, smashed into our left flank from behind, and we were all swept together in a flailing mass near to the thickets where they had concealed themselves during the first moments of close confusion. Two came for me at once. A knight of John Howard appeared alongside me, and did well, for he struck off the hand of one assailant cleaner than any surgeon or headsman might. And we were still hard pressed. Back and back. I slithered on someone’s bowels, spread out on the ground like a glistening white necklace. Naught separated us from the enemy save a carpet of slain. And all the time we were cumbered by the foul lanes and the hedgerows and the clumps of briar which ruined many a fair stroke and gave solace and shelter to many a French dog. One such kept harassing me. He bore the powderings of the Prince Edward, and he was like a ghost in harness, for while I fought him back against a clump of oak trees, and struck at him again and again, still he dodged aside and came at me thundering blows on my shield, striking fire from his heavy broadsword, and we feinted and thrust until in amazement I felt the ground becoming reedy and treacherous under my feet and knew then that he had tricked me down towards the river and I actually heard him laugh behind his visor, which chilled me through, for my steps had no purchase yet he seemed light as air and nimble as a court-dancer or a tumbler, while my leg which had taken a blade at Barnet was stiffer than it should be. My eyes were full of red dust—my ears crammed with a thousand sensations: the roar of the battle around me, the rasping music of my own mail, and the great dolorous boom of the Abbey’s bell, sounding out as if the House of God were shocked by this slaughter so near its precincts. Then we were rolling down the bank, my adversary and I, and the cool swim I had promised to myself became reality. He flailed at me with the flat of his sword, raising waves as I rolled with him out of the shallows and dived for his legs and drew him under, and we must have resembled two great steely salmon floundering together; for while I sought to ride him underneath the ripples he clawed at my visor and got it open and his poignard came close to my face before I kicked him in the belly. But Jesu! he was full of strength and valour and he came for me again, the sun catching the edge of his blade like it winks off the monstrance uplifted in Church... and I would have had no face left had not fortune been with me in the shape of a dead man-at-arms, one who came plunging down the slope to hurtle head over heels on top of us both... and in that moment of confusion when victory was mine I did not recognize him as one of my own waged men and feel sorrow and gratitude, for I was busy serving the silver-swan-bearer with the coup he would have bestowed on me. I wrenched his helm apart like one of Sir John Howard’s Colchester oysters, and stuck him to the death, my knife spitting him through his teeth, right to the back of the skull. Then, pulling myself up the bank with my hands full of rushes and mud, I saw that the tide of war had turned in our favour, that Beaufort of Somerset was besieged from the rear in his turn. ‘God bless our King!’ I shouted, hastening upward to see the small band of spears who roared like ten thousand, bearing down on the enemy. Edward had foreseen the contingency, stationing these upon a little knoll. Our flank no longer gave ground. I saw Gloucester, his bright mail bloody, and the Blanc Sanglier held aloft; I heard the command—‘Reform your lines!’ hot-followed by the trumpet-bray. I saw briefly Sir John Howard and the other captains, and then we were no longer a sinking straggling mass, but running together in orderly puissance and the fine dance-like rhythm of hack and stab and thrust, feint and weave and parry rich-flowing once more. I came close to Richard Gloucester—a few yards away, I saw the bright windmill of his swinging axe: one, two, three, they went down, he pressed on, keen-footed, swift-sighted, chivvying and maiming and killing, his esquires body-hot around him. And as I looked I realized how far forward we had moved and Jesu! the host of Lancaster was falling back. The cries around me took on a savage note of triumph; fierce laughter mingled with the oaths... the baggage-boy whom I had sighted beforehand was suddenly at my side. ‘Up ahead!’ he cried. ‘Look! Ah, good sir, ’tis sport! They are butchering each other!’