Free The King’s Assassin by Angus Donald

of the plug, was shouting, ‘For Locksley, for Locksley!’ His face was as pale as whey, blue eyes glittering like wet sapphires.
    The short bar of five men, as fragile as a sheep hurdle, came into position between the two loose groups of our spearmen, almost filling the gap just moments before the French footmen struck. I was bawling at the men, hauling them bodily into position, shoving them back into the wall, urging them to link up, lock shields with their comrades and brace themselves.
    A huge blond figure in grey mail leapt out from the centre of our wavering wall and, howling defiance like a madman, he rushed out alone to meet the first wave of oncoming French infantry, his axe swinging, a shining smear across the smoky air.
    Little John barged straight into the mass of advancing French infantry, cutting the leading man completely in half, the double-headed axe carving through guts, ribs and spine in a burst of scarlet. His back-swing decapitated a second man, the severed head leaping high over our coalescing shield wall and bouncing away and into the river. Spears jabbed at John, swords thwacked against his mail, but the big man was a whirlwind of flashing steel and gouting blood – he stopped the enemy charge against the feeble centre of the wall, stopped it dead entirely with his own heroic ferocity. His foes cowered back in fright, or went around him, and space opened up, a hole in the battle an axe-swing distant from Little John. The time he gave us with his lunatic bravery was just enough for me to re-knit the shield wall together.
    But he was only one man.
    Away from the giant and his gory sweeping axe, to the left and the right, iron mail shining in the orange light of the burning town, the French infantry came on, a hundred men at least in that one charge. They crashed into our wall, batting away our wavering spearpoints and hurling themselves at the line, lunging with swords over the top of the shield rims, stabbing at the faces of our terrified men. I saw Miles duck and take a sword thrust on his helmet, but his head came up swiftly and he killed the man with a beautiful overhand lunge that skewered the hollow of his neck below his Adam’s apple and pushed the blade a foot out the other side. Two of our men fell, faces gashed, at the weak join between the five-man plug and the left hand part of the wall, and once more our line was breached. I took two steps forward, shieldless, into the open space and hacked Fidelity double-handed into the shoulder of a mail-clad man-at-arms who was surging forward with an axe, and felt the jar of steel on bone all the way up my arms. He staggered, the mail split and bloody. I kicked him in the belly, shoving him off my sword and he dropped. I killed another behind him with a straight lunge to the chest; and lopped the left forearm off yet another fellow beside him, his shield hitting the cobbles with a clatter. But my desperate attack had taken me beyond the line of the wall now and there were enemies all around me. Indeed, such was the ferocity of the French charge that the wall was broken again – no more than a chain of knots of struggling men, French and English, shoving, slicing, hacking, slipping on the blood-slick cobbles, screaming and dying.
    This was the mêlée, pure and simple, every man for himself. And with their superior numbers they must prevail.
    ‘Back,’ I shouted, ‘back to the bridge. John, John, get them back. Now!’
    Over the heads of the struggling men, I saw more French footmen coming out of the fire-lit smoke, another two score, massing on the far side of the open space. John was heedless of me: he was surrounded by at least a dozen men-at-arms and he seemed to be fighting them all at once. I felt rather than saw Sir Thomas hurtle past me, and charge into the pack around the big man, reaping lives like a man possessed, and in two heartbeats I was there too, dodging a looping backswing from John’s axe and dropping the nearest French