Revenge
THE WHITE HAWK (I): REVENGE
Copyright David Pilling 2014
More Books by David Pilling
Leader of Battles (I): Ambrosius
Leader of Battles (II): Artorius
King’s Knight (I)
Caesar’s Sword (I): The Red Death
Caesar’s Sword (II): Siege of Rome
Caesar’s Sword (III): Flame of the West
Robin Hood (I)
Robin Hood (II): The Wrath of God
Robin Hood (III): The Hooded Man
Nowhere Was There Peace
The Half-Hanged Man
The Best Weapon (with Martin Bolton)
Sorrow (with Martin Bolton)
Follow David at his blogs at:
www.pillingswritingcorner.blogspot.co.uk
http://www.boltonandpilling.com
Or contact him direct at:
CONTENTS
Book One - Pages 3-209
Book Two - Pages 210-320
BOOK ONE
1.
Blore Heath, 23
rd
September 1459
Richard Bolton, gentleman of Staffordshire, felt dreadful. He hadn’t slept, nor been able to eat any breakfast. His guts churned with fear, and his hands were slick with sweat as they clutched the staff of his pole-axe.
He was one of six thousand infantry – pikemen, billmen and archers - drawn up behind a great hedge of trees that lined the ridge west of Wemberton Brook. The stench of so many unwashed bodies packed together filled his mouth and nostrils, adding nausea to his woes.
To his left, arrayed on a hill overlooking the brook, were four thousand heavy cavalry. They made for a dazzling sight in the pale autumn sunshine.
The knights and men-at-arms were clothed from head to toe in plate armour of burnished steel, and wore richly woven tabards decorated in the arms of their respective houses. Their horses were destriers, enormous beasts bred and trained for battle, snorting and pawing the earth as they waited for their masters to spur them into action.
The heavy cavalry were the elite of the Lancastrian army. Among them was Richard’s father, Edward Bolton, an experienced soldier and veteran of the French wars. By contrast, this would be Richard’s first battle.
The younger Bolton stood and waited in nervous silence, enduring the cramp and cold stealing across his limbs, while the mist rose from the heath and curled about the forest of banners, standards and streamers. They bore the sigils of Lords Audley and Dudley and hundreds of lesser noblemen, all come to fight for the Lancastrian cause.
East of the brook he could see the Yorkist army under the command of the Earl of Salisbury. For the past hour he had watched them emerge from the clump of woodland to their rear known as Burnt Wood, and start to deploy roughly parallel to the stream.
Heavily outnumbered, the Yorkists had arranged their wagons into a defensive circle north of a barren heath. Their pikes, bills and archers were drawn up in long lines south of the wagons.
The Yorkist deployment was slow. Richard glanced anxiously at his commander, Lord Audley, sitting on his destrier at the head of the infantry. Audley was another veteran of the French wars, and Richard wanted to trust in the old soldier’s judgment. The sight of him biting his lip and giving no orders did nothing to encourage that trust.
At some point Audley would have to order an attack. Richard’s father would be foremost among the men that charged through the stream and fought their way up the opposite ridge. His breath caught in his throat as he imagined his dear father’s body lying broken and lifeless, pierced by mortal wounds.
A wave of insults and ironic cheers rippled down the Lancastrian line, snapping him out of his thoughts. They were aimed at the Yorkist knights clustered around Salisbury’s banner, who were kneeling to kiss the muddy ground.
“Why so eager, traitors?” bawled Alan, a young billman standing next to Richard. “You will be kissing the earth soon enough!”
“They mean to live or die where they stand,” Richard said quietly. It seemed to him that the Lancastrians were over-confident, secure in their greater numbers and the righteousness of their cause. He could understand this, since they were fighting for their anointed King, Henry VI. The Yorkists were traitors who had dared to raise arms against Henry, and therefore surely doomed. Even so, he thought it foolish to take victory for granted.
A squall of trumpets from across the stream drowned out the jeers. The infantry in the centre of the Yorkist line turned and began to withdraw, back towards Burnt Wood.
“They’re retreating,” said Alan. He was painfully young and underfed, his hollow-cheeked face smeared with the pathetic shadow of an attempted beard. His voice trembled with nervous excitement. Richard was barely twenty, but felt like a hardened veteran beside this chick.
“They’re shamming,” he said, peering through the tangled hedge. “The bastards want to provoke us into attacking, so they’re trying to lure us across the stream. A child could see that.”
A child might, but not Lord Audley. Trumpets rang out, and the huge mass of heavy horse to the left of the Lancastrian line shook itself into life.
Richard watched, open-mouthed, as the horsemen rumbled down the slope towards the waters of Wemberton Brook. Their enormous destriers slowly gathered speed, churning up the muddy ground and making the earth quake. He could not see his father among that glistening tide of metal and flesh, but suspected that Edward felt a great deal less terrible than he looked.
The Yorkist retreat proved to be a feint after all. Salisbury’s infantry turned and hurried back into line, while his archers poured flights of arrows into the Lancastrian horsemen floundering through the stream below.
A few Lancastrians fell, shot from their saddles and sent tumbling into the stream where they were drowned or trampled, but the rest thundered on and reached the opposite bank. Richard strained to glimpse the sigil of the Boltons, a white hawk with outspread wings against a blue field, but it was lost in the throng.
Fury erupted inside him when he glimpsed a familiar banner – displaying a green wyvern against a red field – flying above the Yorkist lines, close to the circle of wagons. . He knew this banner well; it belonged to Sir Thomas Malvern, one of his neighbours in Staffordshire.
“Traitor,” Richard growled. He watched the tide of horsemen flooding up the slope, careless of the arrows that fell about them. He pictured his father, encased in steel, his vision restricted by the narrow slit of his visor. Soon Edward would be among the Yorkists, felling hapless footmen like wheat before the scythe and watering good English soil with their treacherous blood.
The Yorkist trumpets screamed into life, prompting a forest of bills, glaives, pikes and halberds to spill down the slope. The Lancastrian knights hacked at them with swords and maces and the butts of lances, relying on the sheer brute momentum of their destriers to force the Yorkists back.
A groan passed through the ranks of Lancastrian infantry. The slope was too steep, and the Yorkists fought savagely, refusing to buckle under the weight of metal and horseflesh hurled at them. A few knights gave up the fight and turned their horses to flee. Panic spread and the rest soon followed. They left the muddy slope west of the stream carpeted with fallen horses and men, dead and wounded.
Richard looked to Lord Audley. The commander’s sunken cheeks were burning with rage at seeing his cavalry beaten so easily. It was common knowledge in the Lancastrian host that the Queen had given Audley an ultimatum - bring her Salisbury’s head, or face the consequences.
Richard reckoned Audley’s best hope of victory was to send a detachment to outflank the Yorkists from the south, while the rest of the Lancastrian army was thrown into another frontal assault.
But who listens to me,
he thought
. I am but one step up from common spear-fodder, and not fit to advise great lords.
“They will try again,” he said to Alan as the surviving horsemen regrouped on the hill from where they had commenced their futile charge. “That fool Audley seems intent on throwing away his army.”
Alan gaped at him. “Don’t say such things about his lordship,” he whispered. “You could be whipped, or have a hole bored in your tongue!”
“I am no peasant, to be punished or mutilated as Lord Audley sees fit,” Richard replied sharply. He had taken pity on Alan and befriended him, but the youth was a mere commoner – he needed reminding of his place.
The Lancastrian trumpets split the skies, signalling another charge, and once more the horsemen charged down the slope and splashed through the stream. Richard could only admire their courage as they rode back up the opposing bank, over the bodies of their comrades, and braved a second Yorkist arrow-storm.
As before, the Yorkist commanders sent their infantry rushing down the bloody, corpse-strewn hill to intercept the charge. Richard winced at the collision, and looked in vain for the white hawk among the great crowd of men and horses struggling for mastery of the slope.
A sick feeling suddenly flared in his belly. His father was dead. He had rarely felt so certain of anything, and had to cling to his poleaxe for support as shock engulfed him. His eyes filled with tears, and it was through a moistened blur he witnessed the Lancastrians once repelled and sent in headlong flight back across the water.
“Lord Audley isn’t with them,” cried Alan, clutching at Richard’s arm. “I can’t see his standard! He must have been killed! We are lost!”
“I care nothing for Lord Audley,” Richard hissed. “The traitors have killed my father.”
He was still in the grip of shock when the trumpets sounded again, and the captains and marshals of the Lancastrian infantry began moving among their men, shouting at them to re-assemble on the heath, north of the hedge. Richard had no choice but to shuffle along with the rest. His mind was still splintered by its terrible premonition, and he paid little heed to what was going on until the infantry were ordered to halt.
Alan was right. Lord Audley had failed to return with the twice-beaten cavalry, and his body was presumably lying somewhere on the bloody slope west of Wemberton Brook. Lord Dudley now assumed command, and the surviving horsemen dismounted and joined the infantry, now formed up on the ridge facing the stream.
Stiff in his heavy armour, Dudley clambered off his horse and send it to the rear with the others. “Today we shall conquer or die!” he cried, his face empurpled as he strained to make himself heard. “Forward banners, in the name of King Henry and Saint George!”
He clanked down the slope, sword held aloft, and a cheer broke from the Lancastrian ranks as they followed, thousands of men stumbling and slithering down the muddy incline in a ragged charge.
Richard was swept along with the rest and lost his footing near the bottom of the slope, cursing as his soft brown shoes slid in a patch of wet mud. He fell into the stream, dropping his poleaxe and cutting his hand on the blade as he scrabbled for it in the shallows. Someone tripped over him and landed heavily on his back. For a few ghastly seconds Richard lay crushed in suffocating darkness, water clanging in his ears and filling his mouth and nostrils.
The dead weight pinning him down shifted and rolled away. He emerged from the water, gasping for breath and looking around furiously for the fool who had nearly drowned him.
Richard spotted him nearby, thrashing and shrieking as he tried to pull an arrow out of his neck. Yorkist arrows were falling like deadly steel-tipped rain among the horde of men floundering through the stream. Screams mingled with the curses and war-shouts as many found their mark.
Richard ducked as one of the shafts whipped overhead, and groped in the stream again for his weapon. Blood seeped from his injured hand, turning the water a cloudy red, but his fingers closed about the staff. Rage had overcome his shock, and it was with murder in his heart that he waded after his comrades, careless of the arrows that zipped and darted around him.
