The Conqueror (39 page)

The knights and the barons behind hurled themselves against the breastwork. Horses floundered in the ditch; cries of Dex Aie! and Turie! rose, answered by the roar of ‘Out, out!’ Away on the right wing Robert de Beaumont was earning laurels for himself for the gallantry of his many attacks; nearer to the centre the Lord of Moulines-la-Marche was fighting with a ferocity that made men call him William Sanglier thereafter.

In the forefront of the battle the gold lions of Normandy waved; Toustain was sticking close to the Duke, gritting his teeth, hanging on desperately to the shaft of the gonfanon. Mortain fought beside his brother; no axe before, no press of horsemen behind could force him from William’s side, but a terrific blow aimed at him cleaved his horse’s neck nearly through, and the beast sank under him. He sprang clear; Raoul cried: ‘Take mine, Mortain! Up! up!’ He forced his way back out of the press, and slid down from his destrier’s back. Mortain grasped the bridle with a brief word of thanks, and hoisted himself up. One of Raoul’s own men struggled to reach him, and thrust a bridle into his hand. ‘Here, master!’

Raoul mounted. ‘Good lad. Get you back out of this.’ He drove in his spurs and thrust forward into the mêlée again.

A tremor ran through the line. Away on the left the Bretons and Manceaux under Alain Fergant were wavering. Only the fyrd confronted them, but these men of peace were filled with a courage of bitter hatred, and the ferocity of their blows turned the Bretons’ hearts to water. They broke, and fell back; their leaders were yelling at them, and trying to beat them forward with the flats of their swords on the horses’ quarters, but a storm of slings and taper-axes settled the matter. The left wing turned and fled down the slope in headlong confusion, sweeping away their own foot which had formed again behind them.

‘Seigneur, seigneur, the Bretons have broken!’ Raoul struggled to reach William’s side. ‘Back, for God’s sake!’

The centre and right were already giving ground before the murderous Saxon axes. The Duke gave orders to draw off, and rode down the slope to a point from where he could observe the whole line of his front. His chivalry retreated in good order, but Toustain’s horse had been slain by a spear-thrust through its chest and men could no longer see the gold lions turning and twisting in the ranks. A rumour spread swiftly that the Duke was slain; dismay seized the host; a sort of groan went up.

‘He lives, he lives!’ Gilbert d’Aufay shouted.

The Duke pulled off his helmet, and galloped down the line, calling: ‘Behold me! I still live, and by God’s aid I will conquer!’ A flint sang past his ear; FitzOsbern snatched at his destrier’s bridle and dragged him down the slope to safety.

Someone furnished Toustain with a fresh mount; the lions waved on high again, and a cheer went up.

In the rear those in charge of the spare horses and the battle-harness saw the rout of the left wing, and were so filled with dismay that they began to retreat. A white horse dashed after them, a white alb fluttered. ‘Stand fast! stand fast!’ bellowed the Bishop of Bayeux. ‘We shall conquer yet!’ He waved his baston to his own men, and said: ‘Hold this rabble! Let them not stir!’

There was now a fresh movement on the left. The English fyrd, seeing their foes fleeing in panic away from them, burst out of their breastworks with yells of triumph, and surged after in a straggling horde.

The Duke saw the blunder, and wheeled his cavalry. Led by Néel of Côtentin, and William, Lord of Moyon, the centre charged over the ground, and falling on the fyrd’s flank, rode down the peasantry in their hundreds. The serfs, ill-armed, unprotected by mail, were cut to pieces almost to a man; the Bretons halted in their flight; their leaders got them into some sort of order, and brought them up again to assist in a slaughter that was by then complete. More than half the English right wing was slain in that brief encounter; the Norman horse drew back from a field of dead, and the squadrons, swinging about, cantered back to the centre.

A breathing-space, much needed, was snatched while the Breton lines were formed again, and those who had lost their destriers in the first attack mounted the fresh horses which their squires brought up. The Norman ranks were shaken and thinned. William de Vieuxpont had been slain, Tesson’s son Raoul, and many others, and their bodies lay spread-eagled on the hill. Gilbert de Harcourt had been wounded in the thigh, but he had bound his scarf tightly round his leg, and seemed little the worse for wear.

Eudes’ sorrel destrier pushed up to Raoul’s Bertolin; Eudes grunted: ‘This is a bloody fight, by my head! I suppose you are grown used to such battles, hey?’

‘No man alive has seen so stern a fight as this,’ Raoul answered. He wiped the red stains from his sword; his hand shook slightly; there was a smear of blood on his cheek; and his hauberk was dinted across one shoulder.

Messengers rode down the ranks; the trumpets sounded the signal for the second attack; again the chivalry thundered up the slope. The breastworks, already broken and sagging, were swept away, but a wall of shields met the horsemen. The line swayed; the ditch was full of limbs and shattered helmets and bodies mutilated beyond recognition. Now and then a Saxon fell amongst the Norman dead, but the shields never broke, and the axes swung as fiercely as ever.

A Saxon in the forefront of the battle rushed straight at the Duke and struck with all his might at the big Spanish horse he rode. It fell with a scream of agony; the Duke flung himself clear, still grasping his mace, and turned, and dealt his assailant a blow that smashed through his helmet of bronze and felled him to the ground. He had a brief vision of a fair face, startling in its resemblance to Earl Harold’s; an anguished cry rose throbbingly: ‘Gyrth! Gyrth!’ and a young man burst from the Saxon lines, and bestrode the fallen body. A knight rode at him, shouting: ‘Saint-Marcouf! Sire Saint-Marcouf!’ and was cleaved almost in twain by a terrific axe-blow. For a fleeting moment Raoul saw the young Saxon heroically defending Gyrth’s body; then the Normans closed round him, and he sank, and the horses swept over him.

A roar of fury came from hundreds of Saxon throats; a single voice howled: ‘Gyrth and Leofwine! Both, both! Out, Norman butchers! Out!’

The Duke slipped on a repulsive bleeding tangle of horses’ guts, and caught at a destrier’s bridle. A knight of Maine bestrode it; he tried to thrust past the Duke, shouting: ‘Loose my bridle! God’s eyes, let me go!’

The muscles on the Duke’s arm stood out hard as steel. He forced the plunging destrier back. ‘Splendour of God, know your over-lord!’ he said. ‘Dismount! I am Normandy!’

‘It is each man for himself! I will not dismount!’ gasped the knight recklessly.

The Duke’s eyes blazed suddenly. ‘Ha, dog!’ He seized the man by his belt and heaved him out of the saddle as though he had been a featherweight. The knight fell sprawling; the Duke vaulted on to the destrier’s back and pressed forward to the front again.

The martlets of William Malet’s gonfanon fluttered before him; somewhere down the line the men of Cingueliz were yelling their fierce battle-cry of Turie! Closer at hand men were calling on Saint-Aubert, their patron saint. The Lord of Longueville’s voice rose above the cries. ‘A Giffard! a Giffard!’ Old Walter, fighting hand to hand on foot with three Saxon warriors, was beaten to his knees, and shouted his watchword as he fell.

The Duke forced a way through the pack, and charged down upon the Lord of Longueville’s foes. ‘Up, up, Walter, I am with you!’ he called. His mace crashed down upon a wooden helmet; a man’s brains spilled on the torn ground; the Duke’s horse was plunging and snorting; he held it hard; the Saxons scattered, and Giffard struggled to his feet. ‘Back, old war-dog!’ the Duke commanded above the din of the fight.

‘Not while I can still wield a lance!’ panted Giffard, and grabbed at a riderless horse, and hoisted his bulk upon into the saddle.

Thousands of Saxons lay dead on the field, but still the wall of shields held. It was long past noon, and the sun beat pitilessly down on the sweltering hosts. The Norman chivalry was limping and spent; they fell back a second time, and saw the Saxon lines above them broken but invincible.

The field reeked of blood; the ground was slippery under it, and all over the slope of the hill dreadful relics were strewn: hands still rigid on spear shafts; whole arms cleaved clean away from the shoulder, here and there a gory head battered to a shapeless mass, sometimes no more than a finger, a horse’s ear, or the half of a horse’s nostril that had been velvet-smooth before and was now sticky with congealing blood.

The weary squadrons drew up out of range of the Saxon missiles, which still continued to hurtle down at them. Men sat their horses like sacks of flour; the horses themselves stood with trembling wide-spread legs, foam at their mouths and on their bardings, their heads hanging down and their flanks torn by the riders’ spurs.

All thought of Edgar had left Raoul, even as he had prayed it might. The world contained nothing but blood: blood spurting from cut arteries, blood oozing sluggishly from flesh wounds, blood drying on the dismembered corpses that littered the field.

He let the greasy reins fall on Bertolin’s neck, and tried to wipe his hands on his gartered hose. He wondered how many of his friends still lived; he thought he had heard FitzOsbern’s voice in the press, and he could see Grantmesnil and Saint-Sauveur now, wiping the sweat from their faces.

Someone nudged his arm. ‘Here, drink some of this,’ said Eudes in his phlegmatic way.

Raoul looked up. His brother was pushing a costrel into his hand; he looked dirty and blood-stained, but his stolidity was unimpaired. ‘Saints bless you, Eudes!’ Raoul said gratefully, and took a pull at the heady wine. ‘I was nearly spent. What now? Do you still like warfare?’

‘Well enough,’ said Eudes placidly. ‘But I have a grudge against some swineshead out of Caux, who jostled me into the ditch in that last skirmish, so that I was like to have foundered. When this affair is ended I shall have a score to settle with him. He bears a pennon with a stag’s head caboosed. Do you know him?’

‘No,’ said Raoul, beginning to laugh. ‘Not I.’

A horseman went galloping down the line; the barons who had been conferring with William dispersed and came riding back to their posts. Word ran through the ranks: the squadrons re-formed, and stood waiting.

The right wing now charged up the slope, and what had been done by accident on the left was repeated by the men of Boulogne under Count Eustace. After a wild exchange of blows with the English fyrd the troops wavered, and broke, and fled down the hill with all the appearance of utter rout. On the crest of the hill the thegns scattered among the peasantry sought in vain to hold them back. The serfs were mad with the lust for blood; they had not seen the disaster on their right; all they saw was a beaten foe flying from the field. They broke from their leaders uttering yells of fierce triumph, and swarmed down the hill in pursuit of the enemy. Axes, scythes, clubs, javelins waved in the air; thousands of serfs were screaming: ‘Victory! Victory! Out, out! We have conquered!’

The Norman centre was again swung round; a deep roar of ‘Dex aie!’ drowned the shouts of the fyrd, and the chivalry came crashing down on to the English flank. The lower slopes of the hill were thick all at once with fallen men, writhing and struggling under the chargers’ hooves; the Norman feinting-party checked, wheeled about, and rode back to attack the English front. Those on the hill-crest saw the shire-levies mowed down in their hundreds. A few escaped, a few managed to crawl back to their comrades on the hill, but thousands lay dead on the torn ground, weltering in their gore, crushed and battered by the cavalry riding over them.

But the ruse brought disaster upon the Norman right. The foremost of those who had feigned flight, hurtled down the slope in an assumed disorder that soon became real. A deep fosse dug at the foot of the hill and concealed by brushwood and clods of turf lay in their path; they blundered into it, man after man, till the pit was full of living bodies struggling and heaving in one smothered mass. The horsemen behind, unable to check the impetus of their rush, rode over them in scores. Backbones were smashed, heads beaten in, limbs broken, and those at the bottom of the pit perished from asphyxiation, and their bodies were flattened to shapelessness by the weight of men above.

A cheer rose from the Saxon ranks. These were terribly thinned, but round the standards a solid core stood fast. The ditch was filled with dead, the breastworks were beaten underfoot, but a wall of shields confronted the Norman host.

A series of attacks was now made upon the English front. Charge after charge was led; the Norman horse plunged and trampled over the filled ditch; lance and sword strove against the axes; the Saxon line gave under the sheer force of the impacts, but each time the gain was only temporary, and the chivalry was thrown back with heavy loss.

William’s second horse was slain under him; Count Eustace, swept from his post on the right, was beside him, and offered his own destrier. ‘Take mine, Normandy,’ he puffed, heaving his bulk from the saddle. ‘If the host see you not the day is lost. Holy Face, these Saxons are made of iron! Will they never break?’

The Saxon shields danced before Norman eyes, barbaric colours glaring in the sunlight; the ranks stood firm; the axes, red with blood, swung and fell with a force that cleaved hauberk and bone in one murderous blow. The Duke’s helmet had been smashed in; a lance-thrust almost unseated him; his third horse was slain by a Saxon
seax
ripping up its belly, and fell with a squeal of agony, nearly pinning him beneath it. He managed to fling himself clear; a destrier reared up suddenly above him, and was wrenched round with violence that came near to pulling it over backwards.