I saw a knight in the black habit of a Hospitaller, racing his horse up the rear, seaward side of the line towards the King’s division. ‘That’ll be them asking for permission to charge,’ said Sir James de Brus.
‘They won’t get it,’ was Robin’s laconic reply.
And then the second wave of Turkish cavalry began their charge. While the first wave had been attacking the Hospitallers, a second formation as large as the first had moved forward and, as the first unit sped away from the baggage train, firing backwards from their retreating saddles, another thousand screaming light cavalrymen thundered in their comrades’ hoofprints to bring a storm of death to the battered black knights and their beleaguered foot soldiers. Some Hospitallers led their horses to safety behind the lines and took their place, afoot, long lance in hand, in the thinning line of spearmen.
And still the drums boomed, pipes squealed, cymbals clashed, and the Turkish arrows thrummed through the air; I could hear the screams of the wounded and the war cries of the knights and footmen above the hellish din — and then I had to tear my eyes away from the valiant defense on the left for, suddenly, we had our own problems. A large force of Saracen light cavalry — some hundreds of them — had peeled away from the main body of the enemy and was trotting directly toward Robin’s men. The battle was now coming to us.
‘Shield wall,’ bellowed Little John. And eighty burly spearmen moved with smooth precision into a formation they had practised a hundred times. They formed a line, standing shoulder to shoulder, fifty paces long, their big round shields overlapping and held tightly together, long spear shafts resting in the dip between adjoining shields, and creating a barricade of wood, muscle and steel; a wall with an impenetrable hedge of spearheads protruding frontwards. If it held firm, no horse would willingly charge that barrier — for the animal to launch itself on those spears would be suicide.
Behind our wall of spearmen stood a double line of archers in dark green tunics, bows strung, short swords in their belts, their arrows stuck point first into the turf front of them. And behind the archers, twenty yards behind, was the mass of our cavalry, with myself next to Robin and Sir James de Brus in the front line, ready to deliver my master’s orders or relay his messages anywhere on the field.
Screaming like the demons of Hell, the wiry horsemen raced towards us. At a hundred and fifty paces they pulled back their bow cords, nocked their arrows and prepared to darken the sky with their shafts — but we were much quicker off the mark. Owain the master bowman shouted a command and with a noise like an old oak tree creaking in a gale, a hundred and sixty archers pulled back their bowstrings to their ears and loosed a wave of grey death over our shield wall directly into the surging tide of charging Turks. The arrows smashed into the front rank of the enemy horsemen like a gigantic swinging sword, cutting down the entire forward line, hurling men from their saddles and plunging steel arrowheads six-inches deep into the chests and throats of the charging ponies. The animals tumbled forwards, veered to the side or tried to rear away from the pain, throwing the whole mass of horsemen behind them into confusion. Our bows creaked and the arrows whirred again, and another swarm of needle-pointed death thrummed into the enemy formation. The horses behind the first rank crashed into their dead or dying leaders; delicate equine legs snapped like twigs under the impetus as half-ton charging animals, maddened with pain, barged into one another; men cartwheeled out of their saddles, limbs spread, weapons flying, and landed with a sickening thump on the dry ground; and another volley of arrows scythed into the press of the enemy punching into the third and four ranks and creating yet more carnage. A few hardy souls, still a-horse, nimbly picked their way through the dead and dying men and animals, and tried to continue the charge, but they were soon cut down by the archers, firing at will and picking their targets. The whole charge had come to nothing, destroyed by a few hundred yard-lengths of ash, hurled by a long stick and a piece of hempen string. I could see that the rearmost ranks of the enemy were pulling their mounts around and heading back to their lines. Riderless horses trotted aimlessly across the field: an unhorsed man, his black turban unwound in a long black trail of cloth to reveal a shiny spiked helmet, was cursing and rubbing his bruised body. He shook his sword at us in rage and then, as an arrow thumped into a horse carcass beside him, he backed away, and, looking fearfully over his shoulder, he started to run back up the hill to safety. The archers let him live, and they cheered themselves lustily for having broken the charge — but halfway through the celebrations, the cries died in their throats, for only seventy yards away, coming round the side of the wreckage of the Turkish squadrons, which had screened their advance, and coming on at a canter in perfect order, was the brigade of Berber lancers. Five hundred men advanced, wrapped in fine-mesh steel mail and loose white robes, each armed with two short light throwing javelins and one long stabbing spear, on big fresh horses. And they were coming for our blood. We just had time for one ragged volley of arrows from the archers and these elite and savage horsemen were upon us.
The Berber charge came at us obliquely, from the right, avoiding the tangle of broken men and maimed, kicking horses that strewed the ground directly in front of our lines; they came from the right, and their charge was preceded by a lethal shower of javelins, which fell like a dark killing sleet on our thin line of footmen. The yard-and-a-half-long weapons rose in an elegant arc and sank into the bodies of the archers and spearmen, dropping them in a shambles of flailing arms and spurting gore; I saw one bowman taken straight through the neck by the slim throwing spears, another man sitting on the earth looking bemused and holding tight with both hands to the javelin that grew from the centre of his blood-darkened belly. Little John was bellowing for the shield wall to close up, close up, when a second flight of javelins crashed into the shields of our men. On the back of Ghost, I raised my own shield, and tucked my left shoulder behind it.
The throwing spears were much heavier than the few arrows that the Turkish horsemen had managed to loose at us. As they crashed into the heavy round shields, the spearmen were often sent reeling back, the line breached until the man could regain his footing and press back into his appointed slot. Stuck with a javelin, a shield became unwieldy, unbalanced, difficult to use with any skill. I saw one spearman killed instantly by a javelin to the face, and at the same time his shield-mate on the right stopped two missiles with his wooden round and, unsupported on the left, the double blow threw him off balance. He staggered back leaving a two-man hole in the shield wall — through which a brave Berber lancer immediately spurred his horse. He stabbed at an archer who scrambled away just in time, and screaming a high ululating challenge — it sounded like a child shrieking ‘la-la-la-la-la’ — to the line of our cavalry now facing him, he spurred forward.