Free We Speak No Treason Vol 2 by Rosemary Hawley Jarman Page A

for all his youth, and on the death-day I watched them rise and fall, to deliver great buffeting blows with club and bill and maul; and at one moment he seized the giant Brandon’s bloody sword from his dead hand and struck down a Breton knight with such puissance and skill, bringing the gore bursting from his shattered hauberk in bright clustering gouts. I thought then: He should surely be knighted for this work. Soon now he will feel the hemp, and not the steel, about those mighty shoulders. I will give him such consolation as I can.
    His brow is wet, and the hay-coloured hair, matted with dust and bog-mire, curls flatly. We are all bound upon the same road, but he is still a yeoman and I a knight, so he attempts to rise. Swiftly I kneel beside him, facing his father, and we are like two priests beside a corpse, for he is dumb and still. In kneeling I realize that I have taken a wound—rather that my old injury has renewed itself. It is far from mortal, a piercing of the hip where, thirteen winters ago, a sword-point fleshed betwixt the steel lappets of my brigandine. Now, a glancing cudgel-blow has broken it afresh. Master William Brecher has noticed my cumbrousness in kneeling.
    ‘You are hurt, zur?’
    They are from Devon, these men. Their harvest will be wasted this year. Unless there are other sons to garner the apples and the grain. Or bring in the hay under a thunderous blue sky... next year. The year after. The last scraps of flesh will have rotted from our heads by then. I pray my wife will not come Leicester-ward to see the face she once possessed, caressed, speared high upon a pike.
    I place my arm about the boy. The roving eyes fall to the welt of dried blood upon my side. His thick fingers reach out and touch gently.
    ‘Do it give pain?’ he asks curiously.
    I shake my head. ‘Nay, master. The hurt left it many years ago.’
    ‘
I
am not wounded,’ he says with pride.
    ‘You fought valorously.’
    My answer throws him into a fit of shuddering, while his father clicks his tongue and our glances meet—his begging pardon for what he reckons a craven display.
    ‘His first battle,’ he says in exoneration.
    And his last. Your last, Master William and mine. And my King’s. I would tell them of past battles, though those are long-gone, fallen victim to this ecstasy of despair. There is only the Now, with its hourglass and scythe.
    ‘It is the waiting,’ I say, and Master Brecher bows his head. There is a man-at-arms from York who has cursed and sworn day-long, calling up all the demons in Hell to smite one, H.T. and he stands belabouring the door, shouting for water, which comes slopping in a greenslime bucket and is passed from mouth to mouth. I hold the water to young Brecher’s lips. He smiles. His teeth are like fence-posts ill set-up, and I love him. The father is speaking.
    ‘When he was little, I talked often to him of battles,’
    ‘You fought for King Edward?’
    ‘I was at Barnet Field,’ he answers. And from the deep reaches of desperation, lo, there comes a bad jest:
    ‘I did not see you there,’ say I.
    He can still smile; and there, I have them both smiling, one from water, the other from wit.
    ‘I saw naught but mist,’ says Master Brecher.
    I saw blood at Barnet. I saw thick fog, laden with groans and screams of man and horse. I saw confusion, with the Silver Star of Oxford shimmering in the thick dawn. And while swearing and blind-striking in that broth, I saw the wheeling flanks of Montagu robbed of reason, for they chopped down their own allies like men bewitched.
    ‘They thought it to be King Edward’s standard.’
    ‘Yea, the Sun in splendour, with its streaming rays.’ They turned, they clashed with one another, crying of treason, and were slain.
    I saw the end of the House of Neville on that day. And, lying in the surgeon’s tent, I cursed beneath the doctor’s probe, and watched them bring in Richard Plantagenet, who dropped blood from his wrist, and talked wildly