Across the top of the wall, their shields met ours. The sound of steel upon limewood rang out as all along the line blades and bosses clashed. My feet were braced, ready for the impact, but even so it jarred through my entire body and I was forced to take half a pace back to steady myself. The man who faced me was a giant; easily more than six feet tall, he towered the better part of a head above me. The bloodlust was in his eyes; wordlessly he yelled as he tried to thrust his spear down towards my groin, but I saw it coming and used the face of my shield to trap it against the wall, before smashing the upper edge into the base of his chin. His jaw streaming with crimson, he reeled back, stunned. Before he had a chance to recover I lunged forward, aiming for his groin, gritting my teeth as I tore upwards into his bowels and then quickly wrenched my weapon free. Like a great oak uprooted in a storm, he toppled backwards, almost falling on top of one of his comrades, who just managed to dodge aside as he crashed to the ground.
Blood and shit pooled around his limp body. The stench of fresh-spilt guts filled the air, so thickly that I could almost taste it. Burning bile rose in my throat but I held it back. Dimly I was aware of others around me, of shouts and screams and men falling on either side; my world had narrowed and I saw only myself, my spear and my shield, and the next Englishman who had come to meet his fate. This was the moment that the poets and the troubadours often told of. As the killing began, so they sang, at the same time came the battle-calm, and they were right, for I could feel it happening then. Blood surged through my veins, filling my limbs with renewed vigour. No longer did I need to think as I became lost to the dance of blades, to the clash of shields, to the rhythm of thrust and parry and cut, each movement ingrained in me through years of training so that it came as if by instinct, until suddenly the English were falling back.
Blinded by the bloodlust and deaf to the warnings of their lords and comrades, a few of our men followed them, breaking from their lines, clambering over the wall and rushing forward after the enemy, either alone or in groups of two, three and four. They started to cut down those who were limping or injured or otherwise straggling behind, but in doing so they were making themselves vulnerable.
‘Hold back!’ I bellowed, hoping that the other barons would hear me and prevent their men from committing similar folly. If the enemy had been in full flight then I might have allowed them to free their sword-arms and inflict some slaughter. But they were not; this was merely a lull while the enemy gathered their wits and their numbers for the next assault.
When people who have not known the sword-path hear tales of what happens in battle, they sometimes imagine endless clashes of steel upon steel, men standing toe to toe, trading blows, hacking at each other for hours at a time in fearsome duels of strength. Of course there are times when the lines will meet and there are such flurries of swordplay, but always there are moments of respite in between, when the lines fall back and all feels strangely still. Moments like this. They can be the hardest, for it is then, when his thoughts are no longer solely on keeping himself alive and he sees the corpses strewn across the field, that a man’s senses and confidence are most likely to desert him. In the final reckoning battles are more usually won not by the most experienced warriors or those with the best sword- or spear-arms but by those with the staunchest wills, the strongest heads.
‘Come and die, you bastards,’ Eudo called out, partly to taunt the enemy but also partly, I thought, to inspire our own host. ‘You goat-turds, you sons of whores, you worthless Devil-spawn! Fight us!’
Whether any of the enemy heard him above the din, I could not say, and I doubted they would have understood in any case, for few among their kind knew anything of the French tongue. But they came nonetheless, led by their thegns, who in times of peace were their lords and in war their leaders. I recognised them not just by the flags nailed to their spears, but also because they had the means to possess mail and helmets, to decorate their scabbards with bands of copper inlaid with gold and silver and precious stones. I searched about for Wild Eadric, hoping to identify him by some such embellishment or else by the size of his retinue, since I’d never seen his face and did not know his device. Perhaps he was among them, but I failed to spot him.
The English came a second time and a third, and with each assault the crude barricade was gradually weakened further, the carts either dragged to one side or else hacked to pieces by men armed with axes, while the wall, which was not mortared, crumbled and in some places fell down altogether. It had done its purpose and broken the first few onslaughts, allowing us to kill more than we might have managed otherwise. As they fell back again I saw that all that remained were loose stones, broken timbers and splintered fragments, like the detritus that the tide washes up on to the shore, strewn across the field together with the bodies of their countrymen and no doubt more than a few of our own. It was hard to tell amidst the blood and the long grass, although as I glanced down our front line, I saw several faces that had not been there before.
On our right wing, where Wace, Maredudd and Ithel were commanding, we seemed to have lost fewer men, but then the ground was trickier there and the enemy seemed to have found it difficult crossing the bogs. Several score had fallen to Maredudd’s archers before they had even reached the shield-wall. Their corpses lay in the mud; from their chests and their sides protruded long goose-feathered shafts, which the bowmen were now rushing to recover before the enemy returned.
I felt down the front of my shirt for the little silver cross that hung there, which for years had protected me, and also for the pendant that contained St Ignatius’ toe-bone, grasping both tightly in my fist as I closed my eyes and silently said a prayer to God.
‘Christ be my shield,’ I murmured when I had finished, and put the cross to my lips just for a heartbeat before tucking it back underneath my mail.
Again the English rushed forwards, marching now in ordered lines, with their thegns once more leading the assault, and it seemed that they were throwing the greater part of their force against our wing: against myself and my knights and Eudo. They knew that if they could breach our line in one place then it would not be long before the rest of our ranks broke. Not that that meant there would be any respite for Wace and the princes fighting to our right, since I saw one of the two lion banners making its way down from the ridge. Beneath it marched a horde of Welshmen, and at their head rode one of their kings: either Bleddyn or Rhiwallon, though I had no way of knowing which.
Obviously they’d decided that they had played with us for long enough. They were throwing their full force against us and now the real fight would begin. Sweat rolled off my brow, stinging my eyes, and I did my best to blink it away, breathing deeply, knowing that if we could not hold the line we would all be dead men very soon.
‘Stay close,’ I called out. ‘Keep your shields together! For Normandy-’
It was all that I had time to say before our lines clashed once more.
The shield-wall is a brutal place to be. In all my years I have known nothing else like it, and to those who have not experienced it, it is a hard thing to describe. For until a man has stood shoulder to shoulder with his fellow warriors and stared death in the face — until he has stood so close to the man trying to kill him that he can gaze into his eyes, that he has smelt his putrid ale-stinking breath, his shit-filled braies and the sweat running from his armpits; until he has buried his blade in that enemy’s belly and watched his guts spill forth and his lifeblood slip away — until he has done all that and survived to tell the tale, he has not truly lived.