The Red Knight

But the king is coming. Knights of the Holy Order of Saint Thomas came at nightfall on the thirteenth day to tell us we were saved. And yet we fought all day and the king did not come.

Where is the king?

Michael looked at the last line. He took the butt of the stylus to rub that line out. Then he shook his head, and went to wake the captain.

Near Lissen Carak – The King

The sun was an arc of fire in the east.

The king’s magnificent golden armour and brilliant red and blue heraldry caught the first rays of the sun so that he seemed to catch fire.

Behind him stood three hundred of the most heavily armoured knights Alba had ever seen, their heavy horses left in camp.

The golden helmet moved to the right and left, examining the dressing of the long line of chivalric warriors that vanished into the woods on either flank, each with his heavily armoured squire at his back.

His golden gauntlet was raised high, and fell, and the line of the vanguard advanced along the line of the old Bridge Road. The three hundred knights were each a man’s height apart, their line was a half-mile long, and the men at either end had hunter’s horns – noted horns, which they played back and forth like huntsmen.

The figure of the king seemed to dance forward joyfully.

He pressed through the woods, and the woods parted before him. There is nothing in the woods that can impede a man in full harness – no branch, no trailing vine, no bank of thickset canes, no matter how thorny, will stop a man in armour. Or slow him.

The line ground forward at a walking pace.

Half a mile.

A mile.

He raised his hand and his own horn bearer played a long note and the line stopped.

Men-at-arms raised their visors and drank water, but the morning was still early and it was cool in the dark woods.

Men pulled the branches out of their knee-armour, out of their elbow cops, out of the joints in their faulds.

And then, with the sounding of two horn calls, the line swept forward again, like a great boar hunt.

A mile behind them, the rest of the army lurched into motion.

The van pressed forward into the woods. Led by the king, in person.

Bill Redmede – Jack of the Jacks – saw the armoured figures coming on foot, armoured cap à pied, and the bitterness in his heart was enough to melt steel.

So much for Thorn and his contempt for men.

Jack turned to his lieutenant – Nat Tyler, the Jack of the Albin Plain. ‘Bastard aristos have a spy, brother.’

Tyler watched the inexorable approach of the armoured men. ‘And we’re in deep brush.’

‘Thorn said they’d be mounted on the road,’ Jack said. ‘Fuck!’

‘Let’s loose and get gone,’ Tyler said.

‘This is our day!’ Jack argued. ‘Today we kill the king!’

Seventy yards away, the king stood virtually alone. He stood in a shaft of light in the deep forest, and he raised his arms – he had a four-foot sword in one hand and a sparkling buckler in the other.

Redmede drew his great bow and, suiting thought to deed, loosed.

Beside him, Nat Tyler’s bow twanged deep, the harp of death.

All along the line, Jacks rose from ambush and loosed at the king.

The king’s figure twinkled as he pivoted on his back heel and spun, his buckler sweeping over his head, his sword scything through the first fall of arrows.

All around him, men-at-arms broke into a dead run, charging the line of archers.

The king stood his ground – stepped and swung, stepped, cut, and then ran forward.

‘Good Christ,’ Jack muttered. Not a single arrow had gone home. ‘Too far – too damned far!’

But the Jacks were robbers and partisans, not battlefield men, and they turned and ran.

A hundred paces to the rear, the line of Jacks steadied. Nat Tyler got them into a line at the edge of a meadow of flowers a third of a mile long and two hundred yards deep – an ancient beaver meadow, crisscrossed by a stream. Bill led them over the stream, emerging wet to the waist, and they formed a new line on the far side.

‘Better,’ Nat Tyler said with a grim smile.

The men-at-arms must have paused to drink water and rest. The sun was much higher when they came – and they came all together. Forward in a line. This time the captain yelled at them to pick their targets and leave the king to the master archers, and the shafts flew thick and heavy over open ground.

He could no longer cut every arrow in the air, and heavy shafts rang off his buckler, his helmet – he was leaning forward like a man walking into a storm, but his heart was singing, because this was a great deed of arms. He laughed, and ran faster.

The stream opened under his feet and he fell – straight down the banks and into a thigh deep pool.

Two peasants stepped to the edge of the pool and loosed arrows at him from a few feet away.

Gaston saw the charge falter and blew his horn. Men were falling into something – a line of pits, a hidden trench-