Revenge (30 page)

His free hand groped behind the Yorkist’s back, and closed on the hilt of a stiletto. He slipped it round and up between the Yorkist’s thighs, into his unprotected groin. The emerald green eyes widened in shock, and their owner screeched in unspeakable agony. A warm gush of blood flowed down over Richard’s gauntlet. He released the stiletto, straining to push the dying Yorkist away, and almost fell over as the entire Yorkist line shuddered and retreated.

Now there was room for Richard to bring his poleaxe into play. He stepped over the writhing body of the man he had stabbed, planted his feet wide for balance and thrust the stabbing point of the weapon at the exposed face of another Yorkist. His opponent, who wielded a glaive, parried the thrust, but Richard skilfully reversed the point and struck downwards, impaling one of the Yorkist’s feet. The stricken man screamed and fell onto one knee. Giddy with bloodlust, Richard smashed the hammer-head of the poleaxe down onto his helm, crumpling the iron and staving in his skull. A third Yorkist stabbed at him with a spear, but he dodged and buried his bloody point into the man’s face, dropping him where he stood.

All along the line it was the same. Despite having the advantage of the slope, the Yorkists were being slaughtered, and each casualty they suffered struck fear into the men behind. Dismayed and demoralised, Fauconberg’s division was forced to give ground.

Richard lunged at an unprotected kneecap and cracked it open. His poleaxe blade sliced with ease through a leather jack and chopped open a belly. Trampling on the mess of entrails that poured forth, he risked a glance to his left and saw Henry grinning like a madman as he wielded his two-handed broadsword, red to the elbows in Yorkist blood. Richard uttered a wordless cheer. They were winning. God and Saint George were on the side of Lancaster. And the white hawk.

***

Fifteen miles away, King Henry knelt and prayed in the keep of York Castle. No-one was listening. Not his commanders, who had ignored his wish for the battle to be postponed since it was Palm Sunday. Not his Queen, who sat in a window-seat, gaunt and pale and quivering with tension as she turned over her rosary beads. Not his son, just eight years old and a miniature Attila, playing on the floor with his toy soldiers and uttering a gleeful cry each time he knocked one over.

And not God, who is deaf to my pleas and allows men to slaughter each other on a holy day.

Why did he pray? Because Christ was his Saviour and England was his charge. Henry had no other security. The deaths of thousands of his subjects were on his conscience. If he had been born a better man, a stronger man, all might have been avoided. Instead God had seen fit to punish the House of Lancaster in the third generation from its unjust usurpation and murder of Richard II. Henry was nothing more than the tool of persecution.

He wept. God was cruel and terrible and undeniable. Out there, in the snow and ice, his people were murdering each other, and Henry could do nothing to stop it.

“Oh, for the blanket of madness to cover me again,” he whispered, “and veil me from the world’s evil.”

***

On the crest of the hill of Towton, King Edward rode up and down the line of his army, followed by his household knights. He hoped the sight of him would encourage his men, but they were tired and outnumbered and hard-pressed.  Fear welled in the pit of his stomach as the relentless storm-wave of the Lancastrian assault forced the Yorkists to keep giving ground, pushing them back towards the ridge of the plateau they had marched over that morning.

The charge of Somerset’s vanguard was ably supported by the Lancastrian left wing under Lord Dacre and the Earl of Northumberland, and their rearguard under Sir Andrew Trollope and the Duke of Exeter. This enormous mass of men, over forty thousand strong, pressed and pressed against the Yorkist lines, causing it to sag and buckle – but not break. Edward’s soldiers fought on with grim tenacity, knowing that defeat here would mean the death of most of them.

The majority of casualties in a battle occurred when one side broke and ran, exposing their backs to the enemy. Edward was confident this would not happen here, for there were a great many bold and experienced veterans in the Yorkist ranks. Men like Lord Clinton and the Stanley brothers and John Fogge and Sir John Wenlock, who had all witnessed and survived stricken battlefields in their time. They acted as bulwarks in the Yorkist line, fighting like demons and urging their troops to hold firm.

He hadn’t seen the Earl of Warwick and Lord Fauconberg in some time. Both had long since disappeared into the thick of the fighting. Edward knew it was time he did the same. His left wing was threatening to disintegrate, and in places the Lancastrians had broken through and fallen on the men in the centre.

“Light down!” he shouted at his standard bearer, who held aloft the royal arms of England. “We shall stand and fight with the rest!”

He dismounted as he spoke and gave his destrier a slap on the rump, compelling her to gallop away.

“Saint George!” he cried, drawing his sword, and plunged into a knot of Lancastrian men-at-arms. Seeing their royal master put himself in such danger, his retainers followed, calling on the patron saint of England and wielding axes and maces and broadswords to lethal effect.

***

Down in the hell of Towton Dale, Richard’s limbs – smeared and spattered with the blood of the men he had killed – were starting to cramp. The initial force and impetus of the Lancastrian charge was spent, having taken a brutal toll in Yorkist casualties, but the enemy refused to break. Heavy snow continued to fall, obliging him to wade uphill through an ankle-deep bog of wintry mush, thick with the blood of dead and dying men. His harness weighed on him like a suit of lead, and sweat cascaded down his face in spite of the cold, conspiring with the pelting snow to blind him.

A Yorkist poleaxe had almost felled him, hooking behind his knee to wrench at his hamstring. Richard reacted just in time, chopping the staff clean in two and ramming the spike of his own weapon into the Yorkist’s breast.

Despite his quick movement, however, the enemy blade had broken his skin and damaged a sinew. Pain throbbed up and down the injured limb, forcing him to hobble and shift his weight onto his right leg.

There seemed no end to the Yorkists, no matter how many he cut down. He had long since lost sight of Henry. In the tiny corner of his mind still capable of rational thought in the midst of all this carnage, he prayed for his brother-in-law’s survival. It had long since occurred to him that his family had far greater need of Henry of Sedgley than him. There were other male heirs to the Bolton estates, but his sister only had one husband, and his mother just one son-in-law. Unmarried, childless and outlawed, Richard Bolton knew himself to be mere surplus.

The sagging Yorkist line was pushed back parallel with Castle Hill Wood, a patch of woodland crowning Towton Dale to the east, above the River Cock. Just as Richard felt his strength failing, a war-horn split the sky, and the thunder of galloping hoofs echoed inside his helm.

A weary cheer gasped from the red-raw throats of the Lancastrians. He dimly recalled a rumour that the Duke of Somerset had posted a detachment of mounted spearmen in the wood. Fresh hope surged through his exhausted body as he pictured them charging out of the trees to fall on the unsuspecting Yorkist left flank, riding men down and smashing their already decimated ranks to pieces.

Now, surely, the Yorkists would break. Disregarding the pain in his suffering lungs, Richard willed himself to another effort and forced out his war-cry:

“The white hawk!”

***

To the south, the Yorkist reinforcements led by the Duke of Norfolk had advanced towards the battlefield at a pace entirely to the taste of Sir Geoffrey Malvern. Having failed to rendezvous with the Yorkist army at London, and then again when it crossed the River Trent, Norfolk had plodded north at the head of his five thousand men-at-arms with the same lack of urgency that he had displayed at Saint Albans.

Norfolk’s sluggishness was explained by his sickness of body and slowness of mind. A heavy, red-faced man of forty-six, but looking a decade older, he was plagued by gout and frequent agues and other unpleasant ailments that he preferred to keep private.

After carrying a futile message to him at Saint Albans, Geoffrey had decided to stick close to Norfolk’s person and worm into his good graces. Here, he realised, was a commander who would never be first to any battlefield. Geoffrey’s best hope of surviving the war lay in the service of such a man.

“You are a blessing,” Norfolk informed him whenever Geoffrey insisted on personally changing the bandages on the Duke’s gout-ridden feet. “A young man of unusual patience and courtesy. You must stay with me until King Edward summons you.”

Fortunately, that summons had never arrived, and Geoffrey was spared the horrors of the fight at Ferrybridge. He had seen the debris of it, as Norfolk’s army moved up the Great North Road, in the wake of the Yorkist supply train, and smelled the swollen, rotting corpses littered about the riverbank and floating in the water.

The sight and stench almost made him puke. Not for their own sake, but because it could so easily have been him among the dead, shot through with Lancastrian arrows or drowned in the freezing river. A mile north of Ferrybridge, he saw the remains of Lord Clifford and the Flower of Craven scattered about the road at Dintingdale, their bodies half-buried in the snow.

It was at Dintingdale that he first heard the sound of battle from the direction of Towton. Norfolk heard it too, his empurpled jowls wobbling in dismay.

“Like a storm,” he said wonderingly, “a storm in Hell. But the fighting is not over, thank God. We may yet arrive in time to succour our friends.”

Geoffrey sincerely hoped not. There were grounds for optimism. Even now, with the battle so close, Norfolk failed to rouse his diseased carcass to any great haste, though his captains clustered about him and begged to be unleashed.

“Let me take the cavalry, lord!” pleaded one, an eager, sharp-faced fellow Geoffrey had disliked on sight. “You can bring the infantry on after. We must hurry!”

Norfolk shook his large head slowly, like a confused bear. “Peace, peace,” he mumbled, raising his hand. “It shall be as you say. Sir Ralph, you lead the cavalry, and I will follow with the foot as quick as I may.”

Geoffrey took care to remain by the Duke’s side. “I will guard you, lord,” he declared. “God knows you are too ill to fend for yourself.”

Norfolk wheezed appreciatively and patted his arm while Sir Ralph galloped away at the head of the cavalry, two thousand knights and men-at-arms. They surged up the road that led to the village of Saxton and beyond, and were soon lost to sight. The sound of their galloping hoofs was lost in the general clamour from over the ridge.

Geoffrey kept his destrier at walking pace, his hand firmly on the Duke’s bridle. The familiar rush of terror flooded his innards as the infantry marched steadily up the road.

The summit of the ridge offered a perfect view of the battle, which meant it offered a perfect view of Hell. The plateau north of Saxton was covered with fighting men, thousands upon thousands of them, engaged in an orgy of killing that far surpassed the slaughter Geoffrey had witnessed at Northampton.

For once he felt a twinge of compassion mingled with his own selfish preoccupation with survival. Here was no ordered clash of disciplined armies, engaging in clever manoeuvres and counter-manoeuvres, but an obscene death-struggle in the midst of a howling blizzard. It was a shoving match between men reduced to their basest level, rending each other like beasts.

“No,” he said aloud, “not like beasts. Animals don’t make war on each other like this. This is madness.”

“What was that?” enquired Norfolk, turning his bloodshot eye on Geoffrey. The strange apathy that afflicted the Duke’s character had failed to lift, even when confronted with the tragedy of Towton.

“I was just saying, lord,” Geoffrey replied quickly, “that Sir Ralph has turned the enemy flank.”

He was right. Sir Ralph had led Norfolk’s two thousand cavalry straight up the road that led eventually to Tadcaster, bypassing the carnage on the plateau and then swinging inward to charge up the slope into Northumberland’s division on the Lancastrian left. Sometime before Norfolk’s arrival, the Lancastrians had executed a similar move against the Yorkist left, but the mounted spearmen that burst from Castle Hill Wood had failed to press home their advantage.

“By God, so he has,” rumbled Norfolk, mopping his streaming cheeks with a handkerchief. “On them, Ralph, that’s the way! Smash them to bits!”

He straightened from his habitual slump and lugged out his sword. “Forward,” he cried, turning with difficulty to admonish his footmen. “Follow me, you fellows, good fellows all, for England and King Edward!”

This sudden flicker of life in Norfolk, and by the deep-throated cheers uttered by the infantry massed behind him, alarmed Geoffrey to his core.

“Come, Sir Geoffrey!” Norfolk cried as his soldiers swarmed down the slope, baying like a pack of foxhounds. “On to the fray!”

With a last wave of his sword, the Duke swung his horse around and charged away to the slaughter. Geoffrey stayed where he was. Nothing on earth would drag him down that hill, and the mere thought of going anywhere near the battle made his teeth chatter.