XXXIII

 

 

THERE WAS SOMETHING primal, something animal about the way Locksley drew a bow. It seemed to possess his entire body, every muscle stretched to bursting point, his hands heaved apart across his chest as if ripping it asunder. It was like an act of violent destruction – like watching a bear tear a man in half.

But there was also a curious grace, in that continuous, unrestrained movement. There was no hesitation, no thought, no pausing to aim. The instant the bowstring reached its apogee, it was loosed.

Gisburne had seen it more times than he could count. Still it fascinated and astounded him. And never more so than today.

Locksley flexed – one, long, powerful gesture – not breathing, squinting along the arrow’s length, bow and bowstring creaking in protest as if being taken beyond the limit of their capabilities. As he did so, a great clamour welled up to the left of them, amongst their own ranks. Urgent shouts and stamping horses. Locksley did not hear it. He eased back as he drew, giving the arrow height, adjusting for the southerly breeze.

The barbed point of the arrow stopped against the yew bowstave, and was gone.

Gisburne – desperately blinking his desert-dry eyes – saw Salah al-Din flinch, and turn towards the clamour. A figure behind him flung up one arm and fell. The Sultan wheeled around, glaring straight at Gisburne and Locksley’s position, and two huge men – his Mamluk bodyguards – leapt in front of him, obscuring him from view.

Locksley howled in frustration. “Find me arrows, boy – I don’t care how or where!” But the cowering boy simply pressed his hands over his ears and rocked back and forth, whimpering at the growing noise.

Locksley ripped a Saracen arrow from the flank of a Flemish crossbowman and shot wildly at the Sultan’s tent with a horrifying roar, as if willpower alone could drive the bloodied tip to its mark.

But there were other, greater moves afoot – the very actions, in fact, that had turned the Sultan’s head just seconds before.

To their left, Gisburne now saw, a party of Christian knights – those few who still had their horses and their lives – had formed up and were preparing to charge the Saracen lines. It seemed a futile act. But before Gisburne had realised what was happening, the tiny remaining force had thundered full tilt down the slope, smashed through the front lines of the astonished Muslim army and beaten and battered its way almost as far as the Sultan’s tent.

He felt a kind of visceral thrill shudder through what remained of the army; there were cries of “God wills it!” – every man about him emboldened by the cavalry charge. Locksley gave a great laugh, raising his fist in the air and straining forward like a dog on a leash as if ready to rush down and join them. Chest-deep in men, stabbed with lance and spear and lashed at with every kind of flailing weapon, the knights’ horses were finally overwhelmed. Some fell. Others withdrew, not yet ready to give up the fight. Finally, with a blast of trumpets, Salah al-Din’s army, no longer content to simply let the Christians die, surged up the slope with a terrible roar as the knights regrouped and were upon them again.

The clash was terrible. Fresh flights of arrows flew. In the right flank, still dozens of yards from the advancing horde, Gisburne gripped his sword, ready to fight to the last. As he did so, a young knight – his head bloody, and a look in his eye that he tried to fashion into defiance, but which Gisburne knew to be terror – rode between him and the enemy. He drew his blade – then jerked horribly as two arrows struck him almost simultaneously in the neck and chest.

Locksley did not hesitate.

“Time to become a knight!” he hollered, and, dashing forward, hauled the still twitching figure off his mount. Gisburne shuddered as the knight hit the ground heavily, head first, his neck twisting and cracking as he did so. Locksley flung himself into the vacated saddle, and then, in that moment – with all Hell breaking loose and himself a heartbeat from death – took the time to give a wry shrug and say, almost with a note of apology: “God wills it...” With that, he grinned at the big, bearded infantryman, who stared back at him, dumbfounded, and made as if to doff his cap. “See you again, John Lyttel – in this life or whatever follows!” And he was gone, bow slung over his back, sword drawn, plunging down the slope towards the heaving mass of men and blades.

Gisburne – who, in recent weeks, had wanted nothing more than to get away from Locksley – now felt, with a kind of perverse indignation, that he was buggered if he was going to let the bastard leave without him. He wheeled around, his blood fired with a new, crazed energy, knowing exactly what he was looking for, but with no expectation of finding it. But there, no longer bucking but stamping in circles, was a Saracen mount. It had lost its saddle, but that hardly mattered. “If it’s got four legs and a mane, you can ride it,” de Gaillon would say. “And I wouldn’t be too picky about the mane.”

Gisburne ran, sword still in his hand, grabbed the horse’s reins and somehow scrambled onto its steaming back. He tried to turn the horse with his knees. It went left when he urged it right, and right when he urged it left – but there was no time to take up the matter now. He’d go with whatever the horse wanted.

Ahead of him, infantry and cavalry had become mixed in the mêlée – but to the right, in the rapidly advancing Saracen lines, there was a weak point. Only footsoldiers. He could make a decent mark in that. It was an act of madness – little more than a final gesture of stubborn defiance. A gobbet of spit in the face of a charging, fully armoured foe. But anything was better than nothing.

He spurred the horse. It leapt forward, seeming to go straight into the gallop. And Gisburne rode out, wading into the surging ocean of flesh and metal, an unrestrained cry in his throat, flailing at faces, lances, hands, anything, with a strength he did not know he had.