The horsemen come in a wedge. They crash into the fleeing remnants of Warwick’s left flank, scattering them, using their spears, riding men down, killing them with hammer blows. The shock of the ambush travels down the line, and just when they are most needed, there are no archers to hand, no one to knock the riders from their horses, no one to kill their horses under them.
A sergeant is there. A big man with a red face. He thumps Thomas with a staff, screaming at him, pushing him back up the field. Thomas has no weapon but it hardly matters. The line is breaking. They need numbers.
New companies come running from the village.
‘A Warwick! A Warwick!’
Thomas finds himself pinched between those falling back and those coming up. The men running back are wild-eyed and slack-mouthed and there is no way to hold them. They’ve cast away their weapons and torn off their armour.
Thomas can do nothing other than join the rest moving up to brace the line. He snatches up a bill with a bloodstained shaft.
The horsemen are slowed only by the number of dead on the ground. The northerners’ footmen have taken fresh wind from the spears too, and they’re pushing through the wall of bodies and clambering over it to press Warwick’s men everywhere and Warwick’s men step back, back down the slope up which they came.
Where are the archers?
Everywhere the northerners are gaining the upper hand and what had seemed like the crisis point earlier that morning now reveals itself to have been the first in a succession. Everywhere they are knocking Warwick’s men back, stabbing them as they fall, hooking them forward and killing them with hammer blows. Men on horseback are forcing their mounts forward, battering men from above.
Thomas is drawn back into the fray and all he can do is try to defend himself, breaking their spear thrusts and turning aside their blades with now a bill. But for every point he beats aside another swings across, jabbing always jabbing. A blade flashes at his eyes. He ducks. It strikes his helmet.
He seizes the shaft and pulls. Another point wavers across his vision, a sharp side-to-side chopping motion. He lets go of the first shaft and sways back, battering the second point away with the back of his arm. Then another point, straight into his jack. He edges sideways, but his linen is laid open to the skin, his hip scorched by the passing blade. He lashes out, catches someone with his bill.
He takes a step back. And then another.
They are losing the fight, and soon they will not be able to hold the line.
And then suddenly the air is thickened with arrow shafts. A horseman lurches in his saddle and throws himself back while another horse screams and claws the air with an arrow deep in his mouth. More horses go down.
The riders turn their horses. Some dismount. Others are knocked to the ground.
A cry goes up to suggest King Edward is coming.
‘Hold fast! The King! The King!’
‘Thanks be to sweet St John!’ a man yells. ‘The King!’
And now it is the northerners’ turn to waver.
For there is the King’s standard and under it perhaps twenty men, in best plate armour, almost impenetrable to sword thrust or hammer blow, swinging their pollaxes and driving the northerners back.
But where the King goes, so does the fiercest fight. Everyone wants to be the man to kill him, and soon ranged on the other side of the new wall of corpses are the enemies’ noblest lords. Men with plumes on their helmets, fighting with their own household men under their own banners. These are the proper soldiers. These are men who’ve trained to fight all their lives, and there is none of the clumsiness of the billmen.
Instead there is a rippling fluency of precisely delivered and shockingly powerful blows. Hammer flukes crash down and blades are thrown up. For every attack there is a defence and for every defence an attack, and the noise is one long percussive roll, like the beating of a drum, and to watch it, it is even elegant in its way, like a dance, save the men are so monstrous in their armour and the price of missing a step is a dagger point in the eye or the groin or the armpit.
And in the middle of it all, under his banner, King Edward is supreme.
None can match him. His height and range are immense and he scatters all before him, throws them back, clears them out. He wades into the crowd and swings his axe, crushing hands, helmets, heads and faces, knocking weapons aside and driving on. He kills a horse with a single blow and despatches its rider with the return swing of his axe.
Beside him his men are a blur of calculated speed, defending his flanks, darting forward to finish off anyone on the ground so that he will not be stabbed from below. Thomas watches as a man in plate falls under the King’s hammer and lies stunned for a moment too long. His visor is ripped off and a dagger is punched into his face and that is that.
But no man can fight like that all day, and soon even King Edward is forced to retire, exhausted by his efforts and the heat trapped within his armour. His space is taken up first by his household men and then a succession of lesser knights until, suddenly, Thomas is back in the line again, fighting for his life once more, swinging and thrusting at the pale faces of other men. His arms are burning, his ears are ringing and his hip throbs. But on it goes, the endless furious flurry of steel, until his strength flees again.