How long we held them there I could not say. It felt like hours, and perhaps it was, for the next I could recall the skies had grown black with cloud and the rain was lashing down upon us, bouncing off my helmet and ringing in my skull, running down my face and dripping from my chin, soaking through my mail and plastering my tunic against my skin. Men fell to my blade, and more than once I had to let someone in the rank behind take my place while someone passed me a fresh spear when the one I’d been holding had had its head snapped off or its shaft sheared through. I lost track of the number I had killed, and yet however many it was, it was not enough. Still the enemy came, and gradually we were being pushed back from what remained of the wall towards the river. Not by much, but with every step I knew we were losing ground, losing the fight.
To my left Turold gave a yelp of pain as he staggered back. The young knight’s shield had splintered and he was clutching his bleeding side as a lank-haired foeman swung wildly with his seax, trying to finish him. Except that in doing so, he had abandoned the safety of his own wall. Even as he pressed his advantage he found himself in the midst of more Frenchmen than he could probably count, and before he could get close enough to Turold to finish him, Serlo had driven him through, burying a wide spearhead in his lungs and gouging a deep wound in his breast.
Turold lay on the ground, wide-eyed as crimson dribbled thickly from under his mail shirt.
‘Stand up!’ I shouted to him desperately. ‘Stand up!’
No sooner had the words left my lips than I realised how futile they were. He could not stand, let alone fight. The next man stepped over him, taking his place in the front rank, and then other hands were dragging Turold back out of reach of the enemy’s weapons, and that was the last I saw of him.
I had my own worries, though. An axe bore down upon me: a weak blow that I fended away easily; or so I thought until my opponent managed to hook the curved part of his blade behind the top edge of my shield. Too late I understood what he meant to do. With one heave he forced my shield-arm down and out of position, at the same time tugging me off balance and bringing me stumbling out of the wall. The ground was slick with mud and guts from the foemen I had dispatched, and I slipped, falling at his feet as he raised his weapon for the telling blow.
In the distance war-horns bellowed out their doleful cry. Close by, voices cried out, but the blood was thundering in my head and I could not make out what they said or even if it was meant for me. Rolling on to my back, I managed to lift my shield just in time to meet the Englishman’s strike. The impact shuddered through my arm as the blade rang off the boss, hewing chunks of leather from the face and shattering the rim. How it missed my neck I will never know. Again he hefted his weapon above his head, and at the same time a satisfied, gap-toothed grin spread across his face as he glimpsed my helmet-tails and sensed that glory would shortly be his.
‘Godemite!’ he yelled, his pox-scarred face red with anger.
My spear lay on the ground just beyond arm’s length and I reached to my sword-hilt instead, freeing the blade with a flourish. Before he could bring his axe to bear for a second time I swung it around, aiming for his legs. It was a wild, brutish strike, lacking in finesse, but none of that mattered, for he did not see it coming. The edge bit into his ankle, ripping through sinew, smashing bone, cutting clean through so that he was left with a crimson mess of a stump where his foot had once been. With a scream he fell backwards, limbs flailing as he crashed through the shields of the men standing behind him, the axe falling from his grasp.
Hardly believing I had survived, I scrambled to my feet, taking my place again in the wall, all the while expecting to find more spears thrust at me than I could count. But Eudo and Serlo were protecting my flanks, holding the enemy off, and for some reason the English seemed to be wavering, unsure whether or not to press their advantage, even though they must have seen that our numbers were dwindling. In battle even the slightest hesitation can prove fatal, as I had often seen, and I knew we had to seize this chance.
‘Forwards!’ I shouted, in spite of my splintered shield. My voice was hoarse as I raised my sword to the sky. ‘Forwards!’
The strength of the shield-wall lies in its numbers and its close-packed ranks, and yet for all that it is a fragile thing, for if those ranks are ever broken it can quickly collapse. And so it did then as we rushed forward, driving a wedge into the gap where the man whose foot I had severed had stood, and which the English had not yet filled. My sword had a life of its own as it struck out left and right, dancing from one foe to the next: parrying, carving, thrusting, cleaving a way through the enemy’s midst. This was the melee, the truest test of a warrior’s footwork and sword-skill, and we were winning: sending the English to their deaths, or else fleeing back towards their Welsh allies. We might have succeeded in fighting off the first few attacks, but as I surveyed our host, I saw what the cost had been. Dozens had been wounded and scores more lay dead. Their broken bodies lay sprawled in the mud, spears lodged in their bellies with pennons drooping limply from their hafts, their clothes and their faces plastered with a sticky red-brown mess. Some of those faces were ones that I recognised, men I had made conversation with over the last few days, spearmen and knights and other barons. We could not withstand another assault like that.
Except it seemed that the two lion banners were on the move. Rather than making their way down the hill to try to finish us, to my surprise the Welshmen were marching along the valley to the north, beyond the mill. Again the horns blew, and this time I realised where the sound was coming from, and what it meant.
Riding from out of the rain and the gloom to the north came conrois upon conrois of mailed horsemen, too many to count, kicking up mud and stones as they came. Held high above them, streaming in the wind, were black pennons and flags, and emblazoned in white upon each of them was a device that I recognised, in the shape of a wolf.
Earl Hugues had arrived.
Sixteen
There he was, surrounded by his knights, riding up the valley through the driving rain, between the copses and the briar patches and across the fields and the meadows towards us.
‘The Wolf!’ Eudo cried out, laughing and whooping with joy at the same time. ‘It’s him!’
Word must have reached him, and now he had come to give battle in person, together with his army of fifteen hundred men. In an instant our fortunes had turned, and now it was the Welsh who were shouting rallying cries, bellowing orders and trying desperately to encourage their men. Under the twin banners of the blue-tongued lion, they rallied against the greater threat coming from the north, and this time I could make out both their kings, Bleddyn and Rhiwallon, each on horseback and each surrounded by his teulu. Meanwhile the Englishmen who not so long ago had been throwing themselves in their scores against our shield-wall were now falling back, leaving their Welsh comrades to stand alone against the onrushing wave of Norman horsemen sweeping across the flood plain of the valley floor. Clods of turf and mud were thrown up by their passage, and their hundreds upon hundreds of hooves raised a thunder that resounded off the hills.
Above that din came a repeated cry, one that was taken up all along the line, until they were shouting with one voice: ‘Normandy!’
And then they were upon the enemy. Often horses will refuse to go up against a properly formed line bristling with spears firmly set against them, but equally a mounted charge is a terrifying thing to face, and any shield-wall lacking in either discipline or nerve will quickly crumble. So it was then, as the Wolf’s knights drove wedges into the massed shields of the Welsh lines. Like nails being hammered into timber they smashed through their ranks, skewering foemen on their lances and trampling their corpses into the dirt. The tide of battle was turning; suddenly the enemy were being pushed back towards the ridge, and all that lay between us and Earl Hugues was open ground, albeit open ground that was strewn with loose stones from the destroyed wall, with what remained of the carts, with broken bodies, snapped spears and splintered shields.