Saladin had picked his battlefield well: a wide, gently rising plain of short springy turf, which might have been designed by God for horsemen to exercise on. Naturally, he took the higher ground, to the east, farthest from the sea. As we marched out of a deeply wooded area to the north, and on to the wide plain of Arsuf, as this place was known, I saw the whole Saracen host arrayed against us: a great moving smear of black and brown and white, almost a mile long. It was difficult not to be awed by their numbers. Rank upon rank of Turkish cavalry on their small wiry ponies, green and black flags flying above them, helmets shining in the clear air; thousands of warriors in neat rows, bows in their saddle holders, their horses’ heads down cropping the grass. In the centre of the line were the huge Berber horses, their riders’ heads draped with white cloth against the heat, long, sharp lances gleaming in the morning sunshine. Here and there were regiments of footmen, with big swords and small round shields. These were strange semi-naked dark men from the far south of Egypt, I had been told, well-muscled brutes, with faces and skins the colour of aged oak, and brilliant teeth. It was rumoured that they could leap over a horse with a single bound, that they felt no pain, and drank their enemies’ blood from cups made out of skulls.
The scouts had reported the presence of the Saracen army before we debouched from the forest, and Richard had issued clear orders to the whole army. We were to stay together, all the divisions tightly connected, the rows of men so close together that an apple thrown into the ranks would not hit the ground, and wait for them to attack us. We were to hold fast and not to attack until the King gave the signal. He repeated this point many times. We were to endure their assault until the time was ripe, and then on the King’s signal, we would charge: two trumpet blasts from the first division, two from the second, and two from the third. Robin had issued extra arrows to our bowmen, some of the last of the ones we had brought from England. Then he checked that everybody understood the King’s orders.
As we filed out from the forest that early morning in September, the King was in the vanguard with his military household and two hundred white-clad knights of the Order of the Temple of Solomon. They were followed by the warriors from the wide Angevin lands and Aquitaine; the Normans came next, and we English, and I gazed up at the great red and green Dragon Banner of Wessex that Robin’s men had been personally charged with protecting by the King that dawn. It was strange to see a great Saxon symbol in all this Norman pageantry, but our men were proud to have been chosen as its guardians, and walked all the taller to be carrying the flag that our people had fought so bravely under since the time of King Alfred.
Behind us came the Flemish under James of Avenses, a great hero to his men, and then the French knights, who had recovered some of their bounce since the disastrous first day of the march and looked eager for a fight, and last of all came the Hospitallers, two hundred and thirty warriors as skilled in war as they were in mending men’s broken bodies, riding close to the precious baggage train. This time no mistakes were made and the ox-wagons, the sides of the great brown beasts trickling with blood from the urging of sharp goads, were hard on the heels of the French. I could have thrown an apple, had I been so inclined, and hit the cheerful face of my clever and kindly friend Sir Nicholas de Scras, who was riding in the front rank of the Hospitallers. Instead, I waved a friendly hand, and received a salute in return.
When the whole army had emerged on to the plain, nearly twenty thousand men, the King gave the signal for a halt as the vanguard approached a shallow, marshy river that ran directly across our path and down to the sea. The trumpets rang out and a message was passed from commander to commander down the line. We all had turned left to face the vast enemy, who were now less than a mile away, the spearmen and archers on the right of our march, the seaward side, the west, pushing through the horses to form up in front of our cavalry ranks facing east. We were a great, fat line of men and horses and beasts of burden. Our right flank, in the south, the King’s division, was anchored on the river. The left, the Hospitallers and the baggage, received some protection from the woods. A mile away, the enemy sat still on the higher ground to the east, making no advance, content, it seemed, to allow us to make our formations, although I could see units of horsemen and their dust in the far distance moving laterally behind their front lines. For a quarter of an hour nothing happened. There was just the rustle and chink of our men sorting out their weapons and equipment, and the murmur of soldiers talking quietly with their neighbours. ‘Now what?’ said a loud voice from in front of me: Little John, of course. ‘Now,’ said Robin in his carrying battle voice, ‘now, we wait. Stand down, but don’t leave your positions. We wait for them to make the first move.’
And wait we did, for an hour or more, as the sun rose over the hills to the east and began to burn the joy out of the day. We stood or sat on our horses, all in our full battle gear, sweat trickling down our ribs, staring at the ranks of the enemy in the distance, and trying to guess their numbers, and keep our fears at bay. Saladin had been reinforced, I had been told by Ambroise, and his force was now in excess of thirty thousand strong. It was a daunting thought: we had some fourteen thousand footmen, wielding spears, bows, swords and crossbows — but only about four thousand knights. We were heavily outnumbered and every man in the line knew it.
Priests moved along the front of the line reciting prayers and sprinkling holy water on the troops who knelt to receive the blessings of the holy fathers. Father Simon was working his way through our ranks, blessing weapons and assuring the men that God and all the saints were on our side and would come to our aid. ‘And any man who dies in this struggle can be assured of a place at the right hand of the Father in everlasting bliss,’ he said. I hoped it was true; that God would welcome all our dead into Heaven, for I felt that my death was close. Once again, the ice-snake of fear slithered in my belly — I had always been lucky in battle, perhaps this day my luck would run out. I mumbled the Pater Noster under my breath, hoping that the words that Christ himself had taught us would give me courage and strength.
‘God’s great bleeding arse-grapes, what’s the matter with these people? Are they shy? Don’t they want to fight? What are they doing up there, lined up so pretty and brave if they don’t want a nice battle? Christ on a crutch, this is beginning to get very dull.’ Little John’s blasphemous words shocked me back into reality. And strangely they gave me comfort, too. I had fought beside these men before and triumphed. I could not seriously imagine anyone killing Little John, or Robin for that matter. I looked to my right and saw the Earl of Locksley sitting his horse, as cool and unconcerned as if he were on a picnic. He was humming under his breath, as I knew he often did before battle; his helmet rested on the pommel of his saddle, a slight smile was playing over his face and he was idly twisting a long eagle’s feather in his fingers, admiring the play of sunlight on the tawny colours. He must have sensed me looking at him for he suddenly glanced over at me, and half-smiled. I looked away quickly, ashamed that he had caught me staring at him. Remember: his hands are stained by the innocent blood of Sir Richard at Lea, I thought, furious with myself.
A messenger came riding down the line, a trouvere whom I knew slightly; I noticed that he stopped and conferred with the commanders of each division in turn, and soon the word was out. We would move on; there would be no battle today. My cowardly heart gave a leap of joy. I had a reprieve. If the Saracens did not want to fight, well, we would just keep on marching down to Jaffa, which was now less than fifteen miles away. As the news spread, the whole column seemed to rise and shake itself like a large, long-bodied dog, a fierce wolfhound perhaps, getting up after a snooze by the fire. A flurry of activity ran all the way down the line, orders were shouted, those cavalrymen who had dismounted pulled themselves back up into the saddle, the footmen who had been seated got up, shouldered their arms and the whole pack of us prepared to march. Trumpets blared, whistles blew, junior officers shouted at their men and the whole massive column began to lumber off the field, away from the enemy, the first units splashing through the wide shallow river to the south of the plain. There would be no battle; we were on our way to Jaffa.
Just at that moment the enemy drums began to sound; a deep booming noise that vibrated the chest, and put a shiver into a man’s legs. Alien pipes shrieked, cymbals clashed, and brass gongs sounded. I could hear a faint cheer, and there was a ripple of movement in the enemy lines. And for a moment, the whole Christian army seemed to pause. It felt as if I had been sitting in a small room with another person, a stranger, neither of us speaking, and just as I had got up and decided to leave this churlish companion, he had suddenly addressed me. We were wrong-footed, slightly confused by the enemy’s timing. And while we hesitated, and their drums boomed, and their clarions blared, a huge mass of Turkish cavalry on right flank of the enemy, opposite the Hospitallers of the third division, broke away from their line and began to move slowly towards us. We had moved only about a quarter of a mile, perhaps less, when the enemy began to advance, but no one gave the order to halt, and so some of our men carried on marching and some stopped. Suddenly, disastrously, there were gaps appearing all along the column between those who had decided to march and those who had stopped to face the enemy. Men cursed and stumbled, knocking into the men in front; others were buffeted by men from behind. King’s messengers, heralds and trouveres charged up and down the line bellowing that we were to halt, and close up the gaps in lines again — urgent trumpets reinforced this message. And into this mess — an army, strung out on the march, trying to change its mind — charged a thousand highly trained Turkish cavalrymen, bows in their hands, pagan wickedness in their hearts.
The enemy riders made straight for our extreme left flank: the baggage train guarded by the Hospitallers. Like a wheeling flock of sparrows, but with the noise and thunder of a mountain avalanche, they swooped in, drums booming in unison, like the heartbeat of a giant, coming closer and closer to the slowly moving wagons. A thousand bowstrings twanged as one, a thousand shafts were loosed, forming a black smudge in the pale blue sky, and they descended like a thousand tiny thunderbolts on to the Hospitallers, foot and horse, clattering against arms and armour like a child drawing a stick along the palings of a wooden garden fence; another volley swept up into the air, but lower this time, and smashed into our rearguard, and then the horsemen swung away, turning their ponies as neatly as dancers, and loosing one last volley as they raced away back to their lines. The attack had taken no more time than a Pater Noster: but the effect on us was devastation. The shafts had slammed into the ranks of the footmen guarding the baggage train, spitting Christian limbs and dropping good men in bloody twitching heaps. It seemed the Turks had learnt from their previous failures to pierce our mail and this time they had held their fire until the horses were merely dozens of yards away from the Christian lines. The spearmen of the third division had stood firm; meeting the blizzard of arrows with their teeth gritted and their shields high, and many died for their bravery, pierced with a handful of shafts at the same time; others took horrific wounds to face or neck. A few crossbows answered the arrow storm with a return fire of wicked black quarrels; and when the Turks pulled back, I was glad to see that they left a trail of bodies in their wake.
I saw a knight in the black habit of a Hospitaller, racing his horse up the rear, seaward side of the line towards the King’s division. ‘That’ll be them asking for permission to charge,’ said Sir James de Brus.
‘They won’t get it,’ was Robin’s laconic reply.
And then the second wave of Turkish cavalry began their charge. While the first wave had been attacking the Hospitallers, a second formation as large as the first had moved forward and, as the first unit sped away from the baggage train, firing backwards from their retreating saddles, another thousand screaming light cavalrymen thundered in their comrades’ hoofprints to bring a storm of death to the battered black knights and their beleaguered foot soldiers. Some Hospitallers led their horses to safety behind the lines and took their place, afoot, long lance in hand, in the thinning line of spearmen.
And still the drums boomed, pipes squealed, cymbals clashed, and the Turkish arrows thrummed through the air; I could hear the screams of the wounded and the war cries of the knights and footmen above the hellish din — and then I had to tear my eyes away from the valiant defense on the left for, suddenly, we had our own problems. A large force of Saracen light cavalry — some hundreds of them — had peeled away from the main body of the enemy and was trotting directly toward Robin’s men. The battle was now coming to us.
‘Shield wall,’ bellowed Little John. And eighty burly spearmen moved with smooth precision into a formation they had practised a hundred times. They formed a line, standing shoulder to shoulder, fifty paces long, their big round shields overlapping and held tightly together, long spear shafts resting in the dip between adjoining shields, and creating a barricade of wood, muscle and steel; a wall with an impenetrable hedge of spearheads protruding frontwards. If it held firm, no horse would willingly charge that barrier — for the animal to launch itself on those spears would be suicide.
Behind our wall of spearmen stood a double line of archers in dark green tunics, bows strung, short swords in their belts, their arrows stuck point first into the turf front of them. And behind the archers, twenty yards behind, was the mass of our cavalry, with myself next to Robin and Sir James de Brus in the front line, ready to deliver my master’s orders or relay his messages anywhere on the field.
Screaming like the demons of Hell, the wiry horsemen raced towards us. At a hundred and fifty paces they pulled back their bow cords, nocked their arrows and prepared to darken the sky with their shafts — but we were much quicker off the mark. Owain the master bowman shouted a command and with a noise like an old oak tree creaking in a gale, a hundred and sixty archers pulled back their bowstrings to their ears and loosed a wave of grey death over our shield wall directly into the surging tide of charging Turks. The arrows smashed into the front rank of the enemy horsemen like a gigantic swinging sword, cutting down the entire forward line, hurling men from their saddles and plunging steel arrowheads six-inches deep into the chests and throats of the charging ponies. The animals tumbled forwards, veered to the side or tried to rear away from the pain, throwing the whole mass of horsemen behind them into confusion. Our bows creaked and the arrows whirred again, and another swarm of needle-pointed death thrummed into the enemy formation. The horses behind the first rank crashed into their dead or dying leaders; delicate equine legs snapped like twigs under the impetus as half-ton charging animals, maddened with pain, barged into one another; men cartwheeled out of their saddles, limbs spread, weapons flying, and landed with a sickening thump on the dry ground; and another volley of arrows scythed into the press of the enemy punching into the third and four ranks and creating yet more carnage. A few hardy souls, still a-horse, nimbly picked their way through the dead and dying men and animals, and tried to continue the charge, but they were soon cut down by the archers, firing at will and picking their targets. The whole charge had come to nothing, destroyed by a few hundred yard-lengths of ash, hurled by a long stick and a piece of hempen string. I could see that the rearmost ranks of the enemy were pulling their mounts around and heading back to their lines. Riderless horses trotted aimlessly across the field: an unhorsed man, his black turban unwound in a long black trail of cloth to reveal a shiny spiked helmet, was cursing and rubbing his bruised body. He shook his sword at us in rage and then, as an arrow thumped into a horse carcass beside him, he backed away, and, looking fearfully over his shoulder, he started to run back up the hill to safety. The archers let him live, and they cheered themselves lustily for having broken the charge — but halfway through the celebrations, the cries died in their throats, for only seventy yards away, coming round the side of the wreckage of the Turkish squadrons, which had screened their advance, and coming on at a canter in perfect order, was the brigade of Berber lancers. Five hundred men advanced, wrapped in fine-mesh steel mail and loose white robes, each armed with two short light throwing javelins and one long stabbing spear, on big fresh horses. And they were coming for our blood. We just had time for one ragged volley of arrows from the archers and these elite and savage horsemen were upon us.
The Berber charge came at us obliquely, from the right, avoiding the tangle of broken men and maimed, kicking horses that strewed the ground directly in front of our lines; they came from the right, and their charge was preceded by a lethal shower of javelins, which fell like a dark killing sleet on our thin line of footmen. The yard-and-a-half-long weapons rose in an elegant arc and sank into the bodies of the archers and spearmen, dropping them in a shambles of flailing arms and spurting gore; I saw one bowman taken straight through the neck by the slim throwing spears, another man sitting on the earth looking bemused and holding tight with both hands to the javelin that grew from the centre of his blood-darkened belly. Little John was bellowing for the shield wall to close up, close up, when a second flight of javelins crashed into the shields of our men. On the back of Ghost, I raised my own shield, and tucked my left shoulder behind it.
The throwing spears were much heavier than the few arrows that the Turkish horsemen had managed to loose at us. As they crashed into the heavy round shields, the spearmen were often sent reeling back, the line breached until the man could regain his footing and press back into his appointed slot. Stuck with a javelin, a shield became unwieldy, unbalanced, difficult to use with any skill. I saw one spearman killed instantly by a javelin to the face, and at the same time his shield-mate on the right stopped two missiles with his wooden round and, unsupported on the left, the double blow threw him off balance. He staggered back leaving a two-man hole in the shield wall — through which a brave Berber lancer immediately spurred his horse. He stabbed at an archer who scrambled away just in time, and screaming a high ululating challenge — it sounded like a child shrieking ‘la-la-la-la-la’ — to the line of our cavalry now facing him, he spurred forward.
Sir James de Brus was the first to react; he kicked his horse and it eagerly leapt a few yards towards the Berber. Using his shield to bat aside the savage lance thrust from his opponent, Sir James deftly jabbed forward and jammed the point of his spear up under Berber knight’s chin and hard into his brain. The man fell back, pouring blood from the wide gash in his neck, and Sir James calmly pulled his bloody point free of the man’s lolling head, tipping the body from the saddle, and walked his horse forward to fill the gap in the shield wall with its bulk. Elsewhere in the line, under the deadly shower of javelins, holes had appeared but Little John seemed to be everywhere, his height and long reach allowing him to wield his great double-headed war axe with devastating efficiency against the mounted foe. He pushed and pulled spearmen back into the line, bawled at them to close up, and when a Berber threatened to breach the wall, he snapped lances with an axe blow, and cut down any horses and riders within reach like some insane forester, swinging the great weapon as if it were no heavier than a hatchet. And our archers had not been idle: they knew that their lives depended on keeping the Berbers beyond the shield wall, where the white-robed horsemen now milled about looking for a gap in the line and hurling their slim missiles with terrible accuracy. Between dodging javelins, and avoiding lance thrusts, the bowmen kept up a steady stream of arrows hissing at the enemy horsemen. Sometimes shooting at a range of as little as a dozen feet, the archers’ shafts frequently passed straight through the bodies of the Berbers, sometimes even striking men or animals on the other side. Arrows and javelins flickered through the bright air, and the horseman directly behind me suddenly gave a great cry and fell back in the saddle with a javelin in his shoulder. I turned and saw that it was Will Scarlet. His face was white, his eyes staring, blood streaming down his hauberk, and he slipped from the saddle without a word. I gritted my teeth and turned back to face the front. We had strict orders not to break rank, even to help our wounded. Another javelin whistled over my head; I snuggled deeper into the lee of the shield, hardly daring to look beyond it…
And suddenly it was over. The surviving Berbers rode away leaving the dead and wounded piled in a low, stinking writhing mound in front of our line. We had held on by the skin of our teeth; and Ghost and I had not moved a hoof in the whole course of that desperate fight.
As the surviving archers drew their short swords, and ran out beyond the shield wall to cut the throats of the wounded Berbers and Turks, and loot the clothing of the dead, I looked back to where Will Scarlet had been. His place was now filled by another cavalryman and I could see behind the lines that Father Simon was tending to my red-headed friend by the mound of personal baggage. Will was not the only casualty by any means; in fact I could see scores of our men, mainly archers and spearmen, lying or sitting behind the lines, and waiting to receive the attention of Reuben, who was hobbling about from man to man, trying to save those he could. William and the other servants were scurrying about taking water to the worst hurt, and bringing bandages to Reuben. I looked away from that scene of blood and pain and glanced right at Robin. His face was devoid of expression, save for a grim tensing of the muscles around his mouth.
I looked past my master and could see that we were not the only ones who had faced the fury of the Saracen cavalry. At least two other parts of the line were under attack by units of the Turkish horsemen. Even though we had just faced an attack such as these, and many of our friends had suffered and died in it, I still found it an impressive sight to watch. The horsemen were superb, galloping in with enormous skill, loosing their arrows in great clouds on the part of the line they were challenging, and then, right in the face of the enemy, turning their horses about with their knees and galloping away, still keeping their enemies under attack as they retreated. They were inviting our men to charge, to break their ranks, and come out into the field to be slaughtered. By and large, their casualties were very low: we had few archers in the army, the majority being with Robin, and so the only damage they suffered was from a few well-aimed crossbow bolts as they thundered into range and swiftly out of it.
‘They are merely probing for weakness all the way up and down the line,’ said Robin to me. I was shocked: probing? I felt we had survived a major attack. I was also slightly surprised that Robin should address me, as our relations were still frosty, but then I realised that with Sir James de Brus out of position, he was just making a remark to the next man in the line. ‘And I think they may have found a weak spot,’ Robin continued. And he pointed past me to the left where the gentle Hospitallers were once again being menaced by another horde of enemy horsemen, which was trotting purposefully towards the extreme left of our line.
‘Ride to the King, will you, Alan, and tell him that we in the centre are firm, but the left is about to take another battering. Ask if he has any orders for us.’
I turned my horse around and threaded my way through the wounded to the seaward side of the army. As I came clear of our pain-racked men, I twisted my head to look north behind me and saw that Robin was right: the Hospitallers were once again being mauled by massed formations of mounted bowmen. Ignoring the deep humming of the Turkish bows and the screams of wounded knights and horses behind me, I galloped south towards the King’s division to relay Robin’s warning. It was glorious to be moving in that terrible heat, to feel the wind on my face, and smell the tang of salt in the air from the sea which was no more than a couple of hundred yards to my right. As I reached the group of knights that surrounded the King, ignoring a menacing glare from Sir Richard Malbete, I saw that a great argument was already in progress. My friend Sir Nicholas de Scras was gesturing passionately with his hands. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘I implore you, the Hospitallers must charge — and soon. We cannot take much more of this; the Turks’ arrows have nearly wiped out our footmen, and the horses,’ he swallowed painfully, ‘the horses are being slaughtered from under us, and we do nothing. We must charge — else there will be no mounted force left to charge with.’
‘Tell the Grand Master that you must stand, like the rest of us; we must all endure until the time is right.’
‘But, Sire, men will say that we are cowards, that we fear to attack the enemy because — ’
Richard turned on him savagely. ‘Hold your tongue, sir. I am in command. And we will attack on my orders. Not before. By God’s legs, be damned to your Grand Master and his talk of cowardice…’
A household knight was plucking at King Richard’s sleeve. ‘Sire, look!’ he said pointing down the line to the far end. We all turned our heads to look.
Nearly a mile away, a perfect line of black-clad horsemen stepped delicately out of the shambles of the shattered third division. They held their lances vertically, a pale fence of spears, sunlight winking from the points, and they walked their horses slowly forward. You could clearly see the white crosses of the Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem on the black trappers of their horses. We were all stunned into silence; I hardly dared to breathe. Then a second line of black knights emerged behind the first.
‘So they are going to charge anyway, without permission,’ muttered one of the King’s noble companions.
Ahead of the Hospitallers was a large crowd of Turkish horsemen; many had dismounted to have a more stable platform from which to shoot their arrows at the foe, others were forming up for another charge at the wavering Christian lines. They seemed as surprised as we that the Hospitallers had emerged from between the wagons of baggage train that they had defended for so long. A few loosed arrows at the black ranks of horsemen, but they had no visible effect. Then the Hospitallers smoothly, silently, like some great cat, moved on to the attack. The first rank of knights, perhaps seventy men, broke into a trot, the mail-clad bodies rising and falling in the saddles in unison, then the canter. The lances came down to the horizontal position; the first line moved up to the gallop. The Turkish enemy were still hastily mounting their ponies, desperately loosing a final arrow and scrambling to get out of the way when the first black rank of knights smashed into them. Men died screaming on the Hospitallers’ long spears, the weight of the heavy horse easily punching the steel spearheads through the light armour of the Turkish cavalry, the colossal impact of the charge splintering the mass of horsemen into tiny shards of individual Saracens fleeing for their lives. Few survived, as the first line swept through them like a roaring wind, and then the second line, the Hospitaller sergeants, came boiling into the fray, swords swinging, maces crushing skulls, more than sixty angry black-clad servants of Christ taking their revenge for the humiliations they had suffered all morning from the stinging arrows of these men. Behind them came a great mass of the remaining French knights, their boldly coloured surcoats gaudy in comparison with the sombre black of the first two lines of charging men. The whole of the cavalry of the third division, all those that still had horses to sit upon, charged. Some three hundred knights, the cream of our army, galloped forward to the attack — in total disregard of King Richard’s orders. The French horsemen, screaming their war cries, piled into the great mass of enemy cavalry, slaughtering any Turks they could find with glorious abandon, blades swinging, gore splashing, their big warhorses biting and kicking out at the behest of their blood-crazed Christian masters.
‘Sire,’ said one of the household knights, breaking the spell of stunned silence. ‘He is moving at last, look — I believe Saladin is committing his reserves to the battle.’ And he pointed at the enemy lines, where large masses of men, some thousands, it seemed, were moving forward on the left against the Hospitaller knights — who were still engaged in a furious melee, hacking at the surviving Turks with their great swords, carving men and horses into red ruin.
‘Well, that’s it, then. Saladin has weakened his centre. We must seize the moment,’ said King Richard. He looked at me: ‘Blondel,’ he said, ‘pass the word to Locksley. He is to move up in support of the third division; pull the Hospitallers’ chestnuts out of the fire, if he can, and then attack the enemy’s right flank — that’s on our left. Is that clear? He can take James of Avesnes and the Flemings with him. We will all attack now, all along the line. That is the order. Trumpeter!’
As I turned my horse to deliver the King’s message, my heart was beating hard with excitement. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him point directly at Sir Nicholas de Scras. ‘You, sir,’ he thundered, ‘you, sir, can tell your Grand Master that I will have words with him after this day is done, if he survives!’ And then the King turned and began to shout for his best lance and his new gauntlets.
I raced back to Robin’s men, but I could see the news of the order to advance had outstripped me. All along the line the horsemen were moving forward. I rejoined the line of Robin’s cavalry, taking my place beside my master. ‘The orders are to support the Hospitallers, sir, and then to attack the enemy’s right wing,’ I said to Robin. ‘The Flemings are to ride with us. It is a general attack, sir, all along the line.’ And, for no reason that I can easily explain, except that I must have been infected with the King’s battle-madness, I grinned at him.
‘Yes, it is, Alan; yes it is. And about time, too,’ and he gave me a wide, easy smile.