Chapter Thirty-Five
Katrin’s heart pounded so hard she could feel it in her ears and in her fingertips. Her eyes stretched wide in an effort to see everything at once as a warrior should, each flicker of movement, great or small. The surge of a flank, the charge of a horse, the flash of a blade.
She needed to survive this. For her da’s sake, she did. Was it not why she was here?
If only Finlay were not. If only he were safe back at Murtray or on the road far, far to the north of here with Brada on his back.
She feared having him here. She feared.
She did—for Reagan, up ahead of her, who, once their division began to move, would take the brunt of the fight. For her da and all their clansmen whom she’d known from birth. For the man who stood so quiet beside her.
She felt connected to all of them. As if their group were one great being.
Ahead of them, a loud cry arose. The forward division went charging down the rough slope and the battle—the terrible battle—began.
Men twitched all around her. They shifted on their feet and cursed. For all they could do at the moment was stand as ordered, and watch.
Watch as Katrin did, with growing horror.
The English army was, nay, not so vast as their own. But as the Scots charged them, their mounted forces parted along with their footmen. A forest of bowmen appeared. Shifted positions.
Began to fire.
The breath caught in Katrin’s throat as she saw what the forward ranks of the English had been concealing. The bowmen.
The bowmen.
A hail of arrows crashed into the advancing Scots forces, far more lethal than the rain.
Men went down so quickly and so thickly, it did not look real.
Despite their shields they folded, row upon row, and the whole of the Scots army rippled with the effect, even though their commanders continued to urge them on.
Katrin could see it then, how the lay of the land favored the English rather than the Scots.
The charging Scots were held up by the rough ground and a stone wall near the bottom of the gully that separated the two forces, and were slain by the sleeting arrows.
They stumbled on the broken ground as many more fell.
With screams tearing from their throats, others ran on.
Katrin had never experienced a battle and was ill prepared for the sheer noise of it, a crashing blast that washed back over their waiting division like a wave upon a shore.
Howling, screaming, bellowing, a racket of fighting and dying.
She wanted to run. She could not, for those she loved stood here, and so also would she stand.
“The archers!” she cried to no one. “The archers!”
So many of them. They stood in ranks behind the screen of their footmen and knights, and fired. Fired again and again. Was there no limit to the numbers of their arrows?
And whence had they come by their thousand when the Scots had been told England lay open before them, all the English soldiers in France?
A lie. A deadly one.
The Scots army shifted down the slope, closer and then closer to death.
They possessed archers also, but not so many.
Most of their vast forces consisted of footmen armed with spears, far less effective on this broken ground.
For a spearman had to get within reach of his opponent before he could take him down. An archer could slay him from afar.
Their own archers fired to good effect. Yet even some of them fell to the enemy fire.
Beside Katrin, Da began to swear. A warrior, if an aged one, he could see what was happening and how the battle went. All of them could see.
Laird Stewart’s commanders came through again. Katrin saw Reagan, still at the head of their company, speaking to one of them. Gesturing wildly. He wanted in on the fight.
Despite her dismay and horror, Katrin’s heart bounded, unable to do anything but respond to such courage.
A warrior, was Reagan O’Hanlon, to the bone.
A warrior headed out to die?
Soon after Laird Stewart’s commander rode on, Reagan came back to speak with Da.
“They are holding us in reserve. We will go in soon.” His gaze slipped over Katrin and latched on to Finlay. “Ye will be ready?”
“It does no’ go well,” Da rumbled.
“Nay,” Reagan agreed. “Not yet. But a battle can change swiftly. Be ready.”
The rain slackened, and then came down so heavy that Katrin could no longer see the stone monument on the opposite rise. Time slowed and, like a trickster, sped up all at once, and the sickness inside her grew.
The one thing that did not change was the sound of it—the groaning and cursing and screaming and pleading and exhorting that made one great, ululating cry. It filled Katrin’s ears, and her mind.
She could not have said how much time passed before they were given leave to move. When the order came, they swung around the flank of their own army and charged down the slope through the rain. Into the flying death of the arrows, which did not cease.
Da drew his sword, a hard look in his eyes. Unlike many of the Scots forces, he had a shield. Katrin could only hope it might protect him.
They pushed forward and steeply downward. A cry went up. “The king! The king—he is struck!”
Katrin turned her eyes to the place where King David had been holding a front position since the battle began. His knights had gathered around him in a clutch. She could not see—
“Keep moving!”
Reagan glanced back at them. Finlay touched Katrin on the arm and began to speak.
She could see agony in his eyes—he wanted her to fall back, her and Da.
But it was too late, too late. They could not hold back for the press of men behind them and around them moving in a great wave.
For the sake of courage, she would have to fight.
They charged. Into the hail of arrows. Into the deafening sound of it and the death all around.
The broken ground underfoot made it almost impossible to go at a steady pace. Ahead, Katrin saw the Gallowglass engage the enemy, and her heart reached for Reagan.
Let him survive.
Then the battle was upon them and it did not seem anyone would survive.
The arrows took out fully a third of their company before they engaged the enemy, either maiming or killing them outright.
Snarling faces were everywhere—with some part of her mind Katrin imagined they were ugly English faces, but she did not truly focus on that then.
The deadly barrage of arrows came from behind those faces, piercing into flesh, felling men she knew.
Horses thundered past them in an effort to cut off their charge.
She could see the wall now, the one that intersected the broken ground, with dead heaped around it like sea wrack on the shore after a storm. Men were climbing over the dead and dying.
Beside her, Da was hollering, “Murtray, Murtray!”
The Gallowglass were now in the thick of the fighting. She had one glimpse of Reagan swinging his great claymore with both hands. He wore armor but had no shield. Her heart leaped to her mouth in a sudden conviction that he would die.
They would all die.
But for a moment—one suspended in time—the enemy began to waver and fall back. Men died by the scores, the hundreds. Yet the Scots had so many more men.
Did the king yet survive? And her Da…
In the noise of the conflict, she could barely think. The Gallowglass at the head of their company kept the knights and some of the ugly faces at bay for the moment, but could do naught about the arrows.
Da was screaming, trying to push forward, the warrior in him coming to the fore. Then he was not. Though he’d been running but an arm’s reach from Katrin, he disappeared as if winked magically out of sight.
She gasped, “Da!” and attempted to turn. But his men followed him, their motion like a boulder rolling downhill. She saw faces of men she knew, twisted in fear and agony. She saw the fallen. Others of the fallen, for if Da were not still beside her, there was but one place he could be.
She went back, facing now a forest of spears held by their own men. Scanning the ground, searching, searching. She found him not far back with two of his clansmen hunkered down supporting him, his grizzled head between their younger ones. For an instant, her heart stood still.
Dead?
But nay, for one of the young spearmen, named Rabbie, gestured to her. “Mistress.”
She threw herself at them, down onto the ground. Feet continued to pound past and sometimes over them.
“The chief is struck!” cried Rabbie unnecessarily.
Aye, so he was. She met her father’s eyes and beheld the agony there.
The second young man, Davey, possessed a shield, which he held not to protect himself but his chief where he lay. For the arrows still rained down.
One had gone through Da’s thigh.
It looked monstrous there, obscene. Yet she knew in her heart it was not a mortal wound—at least, it need not be, if she could get him away out of this.
She looked at the sweat-and-rain-streaked faces of his men. “Ye maun help me. Let us get him fro’ the field. Finlay—”
She looked around for the man who had been so attached to her in both body and spirit that she assumed he’d moved with her now. He was not there.
He was not there.
Desperate now, she tried to look around. But they were at ground level with feet thudding by, over and around them, and she could not see him.
Oh God, oh God, she could not see him!
“Help me. Carry yer chief.”
Her first duty must be to her father. Get Da away, even if she felt like her heart had been torn out by the roots, and her very spirit flayed.
They rose to their feet, Katrin doing her best now to cover them with Davey’s shield, which he had handed to her. Still, looking around, she could not glimpse a red head—one particular red head—through the rain.
Had he fallen? Did he lie somewhere beneath all these feet? Bleeding his life away.
Bleeding her life away. Because at that moment, she knew, if he lost his life, hers was lost also. She might, aye, live on. But to what purpose?
They moved against the tide of that mighty horde, fighting their way, Da groaning and protesting all the while. Saying he wanted to go back and fight. That his men should not be allowed to go on through battle without their chief.
A fine sentiment, but Da’s face was the color of bleached stone and all the courage in the world would not help him stand.
“Hush, Da!” she shouted. “Ye canna. Trust in Reagan. Reagan is there.”
Was he, though? Or had he too fallen? Like Finlay.
Not like Finlay. She would not permit that thought; she would not. She shot another desperate look behind. No one there. Not following.
Gasping and cursing—for Da was not a small man—they carried their chief back up the slope. Out from the range of the arrows, Katrin aching all the while to turn and look behind her. To see Finlay loping after them. Aching, aching to go back.
She could not. She had her da, and the army still surged down the hill toward what now seemed like certain defeat.
“There,” she told the two bearers, gesturing to a clump of bracken turned yellow with the autumn. They were not the only ones to make their way back out of the battle. Others were wounded. Some walking, some crawling, some collapsed and more than likely dead.
The two young clansmen laid their burden down gratefully and looked at her.
“Mistress Katrin, should we go back?”
Back into that hell of pain and terror.
She looked at Da, now barely conscious. Would he order them back? Should she?
She could not.
“Nay,” she said. “I need ye to help him. Sta wi’ me.”