Free Wars of the Roses: Bloodline: Book 3 (The Wars of the Roses) by Conn Iggulden Page B

perform wondrous feats. He thought nothing of standing to face armed ranks. He had done so before in St Albans, when the lords Somerset and Percy had fallen. Their sons were lesser men – and they would not make him afraid. Though the sudden appearance of the queen’s battle ranks had surprised him, the month of waiting and building his brother’s defences had worn heavily. It had been almost a relief to hear the church bells, for all the shock of an attack coming from the south. John Neville gripped the leather wrap of his hilt, feeling he had the strength. This was still his chance to take a sword and smash it into the face of an enemy, perhaps the very man who had butchered his father. Dazed and in pain, he remembered roaring orders and sendingmessengers back for support. He could taste blood and felt it gumming his lips. They’d broken through his first ragged lines by then, rushing and howling.
    Thousands of men had pounded down the hill towards his position, a flood of queen’s soldiers carrying axes, swords and bows. His hatred had given way to a sense of dread as the massed ranks had torn his standing flank apart. He recalled a dying knight dragging him down and the roar and heave he had made to fling that man away. Another had come running in, depending on speed and the weight of armour to break through the shields held to stop him. John Neville’s knights were sent tumbling, though they hammered his attacker into the ground. Two more lads with heavy billhooks had come at a sprint and the rain had begun to fall.
    Montagu remembered that moment as clearly as any other, when the sky had suddenly filled with pale drops as far as he could see, so that the hill of St Albans blurred. In the wet and the mud, men slipped and went down, with limbs wrenched the wrong way, their screeching more pitiful than a death cry.
    John Neville shook his head again, realizing he had been standing still for too long, like a bloodied statue. He could feel his scalp throbbing, but his spinning thoughts were slowing, growing clearer. He was John Neville. He was Lord Montagu. He could move. At his back, horns sounded and he knew Warwick was turning the army, bringing the main centre square out of its embankments and trenches. Norfolk would be riding along the open flanks, treading carefully across the trapped and spiked ground, to reach what had been the camp and the baggage and the safest spot on the field.
    John Neville blinked rain and blood out of his eyes. His guards seemed to have gone; he stood alone. He turned to see the enemy and in that moment he was borne down, knocked on to his back in the mud with an axe half buried in his armoured chest and a man’s heavy foot pressing down on his head.
    ‘Pax! I am Montagu!’ he shouted over the pain, spitting mud and foulness. ‘John Neville. Pax.’
    He was not sure if he had said the call for mercy and ransom aloud or just in the echoing vault of his head. His eyes rolled up and he did not feel his body lifted with the axe, crashing back into the soft mud as the blade came free from the metal.

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    Standing in his stirrups, Warwick watched in horror as his brother’s position was engulfed. The furthest wing was overrun, but Warwick could see John standing alone. It could not have been more than a few heartbeats, yet it seemed an age, with the battle swirling around that one, still spot.
    All his brother’s guards had run or been slaughtered, the Montagu banners thrown down and trampled. Warwick found himself breathing shallowly, unable to look away as he gripped his reins and waited to see his young brother killed. The moment grew quiet, with all the clamour of his messengers and captains going unanswered. Warwick sucked in a sudden breath of freezing air, almost sobbing as he saw a line of roaring axemen thump John from his feet. Over a distance of six hundred yards, they were separated by thousands of soldiers, with trenches, carts and cannon. He could see nothing