piece, kite-shaped shield and long spear, a sword at my waist, the misericorde in my boot; knee-length chain-mail hauberk to protect my body over a big padded jacket known as a gambeson or aketon, leather gauntlets on my hands and stout boots sewn with strips of steel to guard my ankles and shins.
Within a few heartbeats, the first shouts of alarm were sounding from Murdac’s camp. And out of the darkness, down the gently rolling hill, the spots of flickering orange light grew and took shape and revealed themselves. Out of the black night thundered three wild moorland ponies, eyes rolling in terror, shrill neighs torturing the darkness, hooves madly churning the damp turf – and the source of their terror was firmly harnessed to them: for behind each wild pony was a wooden cart, piled high with wood and straw and soused with oil and pig fat, and burning like the infernos of the Devil’s own demesne.
The noise from the camp in the field below me was enough by now to wake the dead from their slumbers. But above the yells, and the hellish music, I thought I could make out a lone woman’s voice, with a slight Norman-French accent, shouting in English over and over again: ‘It is the horse-demons, the steeds of Satan – run, run. They are coming; the horse-demons are coming to steal your souls.’
The wild horses, maddened by the fiery carts they could not escape, charged straight down the hill into Murdac’s camp sowing destruction in their flaming wakes. They charged into the outskirts of the camp, trampling tents and crushing half-sleeping men beneath their hooves and the wheels of the heavy wooden carts. Many tents and shelters of the men-at-arms were burning by now; flags and pavilions set alight, pyramids of stacked spears collapsed and snapped like twigs beneath the wheels. The camp was humming like a kicked ants’ nest, half-dressed men running hither and yon, screaming in rage and fear and confusion. And the lone Frenchwoman’s voice continued to shout: ‘The horses of the Devil are coming; the steeds of Satan; they are coming for your souls,’ adding her mad shrieks to the bounding chaos. And the wild, eerie Saracen music wailed, boomed and screeched on, its hideous sounds adding eldritch notes of terror to the night.
Then the arrows began to hiss out of the darkness.
Men silhouetted by the leaping firelight were spitted like red deer by unseen skilful hands as they stumbled out of their shelters, barely armed, fuddled by sleep, confused by the noise, the blaze and the hot winds of panic. One man appeared to be more in control of himself, a captain no doubt, but as he barked orders to the men running about his tent, three arrows smacked into him in less than half a heartbeat. I knew that Robin’s archers, scattered around the perimeter of the camp and shielded only by darkness, had orders to shoot down first any who appeared to be in command. And there were few who were still in possession of their faculties on this night of chaos and cacophony, as the archers plucked the lives of Murdac’s men from this world one by one.
The wild horses with their fiery burdens were in the centre of the camp now, galloping in screaming terror, and as I watched, the wheel of a cart struck a large iron cooking pot and careered over, spilling its flaming, roaring load over a swathe of the camp and starting a dozen fresh fires. The arrows whizzed through the darkness, thumping home into the bodies of terrified running men who had nowhere to hide. One brave figure appeared out of the darkness and shot dead a maddened pony, which was galloping past him, with a single, well-aimed crossbow bolt to the head. But while the poor horse stumbled and died, and the cart tumbled forward and tipped its burning load over the convulsing animal’s dying body, the crossbowman was in turn skewered through the neck by a yard-long arrow that flickered out of the darkness to leave him choking on his knees in a circle of burning straw and roasting horse blood.
A high, clear trumpet blast, easily heard even over the noise of the blaring Saracen horns, dragged my eyes up to the north, where a mass of strange cavalry had appeared. The heavily armed, mounted men, about thirty of them, seemed huge and menacing, draped as they were in long, dark cowled cloaks that swept over the