Sir James de Brus was the first to react; he kicked his horse and it eagerly leapt a few yards towards the Berber. Using his shield to bat aside the savage lance thrust from his opponent, Sir James deftly jabbed forward and jammed the point of his spear up under Berber knight’s chin and hard into his brain. The man fell back, pouring blood from the wide gash in his neck, and Sir James calmly pulled his bloody point free of the man’s lolling head, tipping the body from the saddle, and walked his horse forward to fill the gap in the shield wall with its bulk. Elsewhere in the line, under the deadly shower of javelins, holes had appeared but Little John seemed to be everywhere, his height and long reach allowing him to wield his great double-headed war axe with devastating efficiency against the mounted foe. He pushed and pulled spearmen back into the line, bawled at them to close up, and when a Berber threatened to breach the wall, he snapped lances with an axe blow, and cut down any horses and riders within reach like some insane forester, swinging the great weapon as if it were no heavier than a hatchet. And our archers had not been idle: they knew that their lives depended on keeping the Berbers beyond the shield wall, where the white-robed horsemen now milled about looking for a gap in the line and hurling their slim missiles with terrible accuracy. Between dodging javelins, and avoiding lance thrusts, the bowmen kept up a steady stream of arrows hissing at the enemy horsemen. Sometimes shooting at a range of as little as a dozen feet, the archers’ shafts frequently passed straight through the bodies of the Berbers, sometimes even striking men or animals on the other side. Arrows and javelins flickered through the bright air, and the horseman directly behind me suddenly gave a great cry and fell back in the saddle with a javelin in his shoulder. I turned and saw that it was Will Scarlet. His face was white, his eyes staring, blood streaming down his hauberk, and he slipped from the saddle without a word. I gritted my teeth and turned back to face the front. We had strict orders not to break rank, even to help our wounded. Another javelin whistled over my head; I snuggled deeper into the lee of the shield, hardly daring to look beyond it…
And suddenly it was over. The surviving Berbers rode away leaving the dead and wounded piled in a low, stinking writhing mound in front of our line. We had held on by the skin of our teeth; and Ghost and I had not moved a hoof in the whole course of that desperate fight.
As the surviving archers drew their short swords, and ran out beyond the shield wall to cut the throats of the wounded Berbers and Turks, and loot the clothing of the dead, I looked back to where Will Scarlet had been. His place was now filled by another cavalryman and I could see behind the lines that Father Simon was tending to my red-headed friend by the mound of personal baggage. Will was not the only casualty by any means; in fact I could see scores of our men, mainly archers and spearmen, lying or sitting behind the lines, and waiting to receive the attention of Reuben, who was hobbling about from man to man, trying to save those he could. William and the other servants were scurrying about taking water to the worst hurt, and bringing bandages to Reuben. I looked away from that scene of blood and pain and glanced right at Robin. His face was devoid of expression, save for a grim tensing of the muscles around his mouth.
I looked past my master and could see that we were not the only ones who had faced the fury of the Saracen cavalry. At least two other parts of the line were under attack by units of the Turkish horsemen. Even though we had just faced an attack such as these, and many of our friends had suffered and died in it, I still found it an impressive sight to watch. The horsemen were superb, galloping in with enormous skill, loosing their arrows in great clouds on the part of the line they were challenging, and then, right in the face of the enemy, turning their horses about with their knees and galloping away, still keeping their enemies under attack as they retreated. They were inviting our men to charge, to break their ranks, and come out into the field to be slaughtered. By and large, their casualties were very low: we had few archers in the army, the majority being with Robin, and so the only damage they suffered was from a few well-aimed crossbow bolts as they thundered into range and swiftly out of it.
‘They are merely probing for weakness all the way up and down the line,’ said Robin to me. I was shocked: probing? I felt we had survived a major attack. I was also slightly surprised that Robin should address me, as our relations were still frosty, but then I realised that with Sir James de Brus out of position, he was just making a remark to the next man in the line. ‘And I think they may have found a weak spot,’ Robin continued. And he pointed past me to the left where the gentle Hospitallers were once again being menaced by another horde of enemy horsemen, which was trotting purposefully towards the extreme left of our line.
‘Ride to the King, will you, Alan, and tell him that we in the centre are firm, but the left is about to take another battering. Ask if he has any orders for us.’
I turned my horse around and threaded my way through the wounded to the seaward side of the army. As I came clear of our pain-racked men, I twisted my head to look north behind me and saw that Robin was right: the Hospitallers were once again being mauled by massed formations of mounted bowmen. Ignoring the deep humming of the Turkish bows and the screams of wounded knights and horses behind me, I galloped south towards the King’s division to relay Robin’s warning. It was glorious to be moving in that terrible heat, to feel the wind on my face, and smell the tang of salt in the air from the sea which was no more than a couple of hundred yards to my right. As I reached the group of knights that surrounded the King, ignoring a menacing glare from Sir Richard Malbete, I saw that a great argument was already in progress. My friend Sir Nicholas de Scras was gesturing passionately with his hands. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘I implore you, the Hospitallers must charge — and soon. We cannot take much more of this; the Turks’ arrows have nearly wiped out our footmen, and the horses,’ he swallowed painfully, ‘the horses are being slaughtered from under us, and we do nothing. We must charge — else there will be no mounted force left to charge with.’
‘Tell the Grand Master that you must stand, like the rest of us; we must all endure until the time is right.’
‘But, Sire, men will say that we are cowards, that we fear to attack the enemy because — ’
Richard turned on him savagely. ‘Hold your tongue, sir. I am in command. And we will attack on my orders. Not before. By God’s legs, be damned to your Grand Master and his talk of cowardice…’
A household knight was plucking at King Richard’s sleeve. ‘Sire, look!’ he said pointing down the line to the far end. We all turned our heads to look.
Nearly a mile away, a perfect line of black-clad horsemen stepped delicately out of the shambles of the shattered third division. They held their lances vertically, a pale fence of spears, sunlight winking from the points, and they walked their horses slowly forward. You could clearly see the white crosses of the Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem on the black trappers of their horses. We were all stunned into silence; I hardly dared to breathe. Then a second line of black knights emerged behind the first.
‘So they are going to charge anyway, without permission,’ muttered one of the King’s noble companions.
Ahead of the Hospitallers was a large crowd of Turkish horsemen; many had dismounted to have a more stable platform from which to shoot their arrows at the foe, others were forming up for another charge at the wavering Christian lines. They seemed as surprised as we that the Hospitallers had emerged from between the wagons of baggage train that they had defended for so long. A few loosed arrows at the black ranks of horsemen, but they had no visible effect. Then the Hospitallers smoothly, silently, like some great cat, moved on to the attack. The first rank of knights, perhaps seventy men, broke into a trot, the mail-clad bodies rising and falling in the saddles in unison, then the canter. The lances came down to the horizontal position; the first line moved up to the gallop. The Turkish enemy were still hastily mounting their ponies, desperately loosing a final arrow and scrambling to get out of the way when the first black rank of knights smashed into them. Men died screaming on the Hospitallers’ long spears, the weight of the heavy horse easily punching the steel spearheads through the light armour of the Turkish cavalry, the colossal impact of the charge splintering the mass of horsemen into tiny shards of individual Saracens fleeing for their lives. Few survived, as the first line swept through them like a roaring wind, and then the second line, the Hospitaller sergeants, came boiling into the fray, swords swinging, maces crushing skulls, more than sixty angry black-clad servants of Christ taking their revenge for the humiliations they had suffered all morning from the stinging arrows of these men. Behind them came a great mass of the remaining French knights, their boldly coloured surcoats gaudy in comparison with the sombre black of the first two lines of charging men. The whole of the cavalry of the third division, all those that still had horses to sit upon, charged. Some three hundred knights, the cream of our army, galloped forward to the attack — in total disregard of King Richard’s orders. The French horsemen, screaming their war cries, piled into the great mass of enemy cavalry, slaughtering any Turks they could find with glorious abandon, blades swinging, gore splashing, their big warhorses biting and kicking out at the behest of their blood-crazed Christian masters.