1194, Nottingham

Oh, Jeeezz … this is it. This is it.

Liam felt bile roll up his throat as his stomach did its best to jettison the last meal he’d had. He spat it out along with the mouthful of grit he’d breathed in.

‘They are coming,’ said Bob, standing beside him. He had a shield strapped tightly to the stump of his upper left arm. He flexed it. It functioned almost as well as if he’d had a whole arm to use. He flourished the long blade of a broadsword in his right hand as he took several steps up the mound of loose rubble and fallen stone, into the swirling eddies of dust.

Liam could hear the excited roar of Richard’s army, racing heavily across the arrow-strewn ground outside towards the breached wall. It sounded like a locomotive coming down a track: the jangle of hundreds of harnesses swinging, the clatter of chain mail; men jogging as best they could under their bodyweight again in armour.

The inexperienced men of Nottingham’s garrison standing either side of him looked anxiously at Liam. Young boys, old men who’d done little more than drill with wooden swords.

Come on. Don’t chicken out on me now, he commanded his quivering legs.

Liam raised his heavy blade above his head. ‘FORWARD!’

He picked his way up jagged boulders of shattered and sharp-edged flint, to join Bob standing at the very top of the recently formed mound of masonry, and in that moment the roiling dust finally blew aside.

Before them, closing the distance of several dozen yards of already flattened arid grass, the front rank of Richard’s army thundered towards them, a sea of different colours – the coats of arms and livery of a dozen or more noble families. A juddering line of sunburnt and bearded faces split uniformly by mouths open, stretched wide and roaring as the arid tufted ground between them narrowed all too quickly.

Here’s all that history Foster promised you’d get to see, Liam. Right up close.

He braced his shield arm in front of him and looked to his right. Bob standing protectively beside him, a three-foot-wide immovable wall of chain mail and muscle.

‘Bob … I’m scared,’ he muttered, hoping his voice carried no further than his support unit.

‘Remain close,’ rumbled Bob. He looked down at Liam, his round tufted coconut head lost inside a coif of chain mail, grey eyes and thick-bridged nose lost in the shadow of his helmet.

‘Remain close to me, and you will be fine, Liam O’Connor.’

The front rank was clambering up the clattering mound of masonry, arrows from civilian archers posted on the walls either side of the breach finding targets amid the solid mass of men.

Liam had time enough to draw in one last ragged puff of air before he felt the terrific jarring impact of something against the edge of his shield, the vibration running painfully up his arm and almost knocking the breath from him. He instinctively ducked his head below the crinkled rim of his shield, and blindly swung his sword downwards. It bounced with a heavy ring off something.

To his left, one of his men, one of his recruited garrison, a man perhaps only five years older, grinned at him, showing no more than a handful of yellowing teeth framed by a blond beard. He swung his sword down on to the man in front of him, its edge biting the curve between shoulder and neck. Dark blood arced into the air as he yanked his sword free.

Liam felt his shield suddenly lurch downwards. He saw the fingers of a hand clad in a thick leather glove on the rim, yanking it roughly down and outward. Caught unawares, Liam found his left hand losing its grip on the shield’s handle.

Jay-zus, no!

His shield clattered on to the rubble at his feet and he had only the briefest moment to register the florid, hot face of the man in front of him. A face he was never going to forget. He was sure, as long as he lived … this man was destined to live on in his nightmares.

Liam’s response was ungainly and entirely reflexive, a lunge of desperate panic now that his shield had been ripped away and he felt naked and exposed, despite his thick leather quilted underlay and the heavy mail on top of it.

In the terrible slow-motion of heightened awareness, he saw the heavy blade of his sword swing down and bite deep into the side of the man’s neck.

Time seemed to slow down to almost a complete stop, as their eyes met. The mercenary’s cornflower blue, wide with surprise – slowly realizing that the blade lodged in his neck signalled the moment his life had come to an end.

The noise of battle going on around them seemed to be a hundred miles away. All Liam could hear was the roaring of blood through his veins, the hammer thump of his heart, the sound of his panting breath in his ears … and this man before him, now spitting dark gouts of crimson from his mouth and gurgling something – a defiant curse, a last prayer?

Liam found himself mouthing I’m so sorry to him, as if the dying man would actually understand, might even forgive him.

Then the moment was gone: slow-motion back to normal speed, Liam’s ears once again filled with the sound of grunts and cries, scraping and battering clang of metal on metal. The man with cornflower-blue eyes grabbed a firm hold of the blade with both hands, as if he was attempting to pull it out of him. But his strength was fast bleeding out, and Liam watched …

the man I just killed

… slowly collapse to his knees in front of him, then fall backwards, disappearing amid the churning quagmire of struggling bodies, taking Liam’s sword with him.

Liam found himself empty-handed as another thickset and red-faced man, sweating under forty pounds of mail armour, took his place. Liam cursed as the man grinned at his good fortune and pulled back to skewer him on the tip of his halberd.

Liam’s face screwed up with anticipation, his arms held out in front of him in a vain attempt to fend off the point. But then, all of sudden he felt himself being lifted off the ground by the scruff of his mail vest and tossed backwards down the clattering pile of rubble towards the marketplace.

He cracked the side of his head on the sharp rim of a jagged piece of masonry.

It left him stunned, his ears ringing. He watched dark shapes stepping over him, clambering up the slope to join the press of men in the breach; further above, the darting flicker of arrows heading into and out of the city; and high up in the rich blue sky a pair of swallows chasing each other in slow playful circles, oblivious to the carnage beneath them.

A face full of bristles and a mouth containing a solitary tooth leaned over him. ‘Ye alroight down there, sire?’ Liam vaguely recognized the face as one of Nottingham’s blacksmiths.

He nodded. A rough hand grasped his and pulled him up on to legs that wobbled uncertainly.

‘I – I lost my weapon and my shield …’ he said.

‘Not to worry,’ the man grinned. ‘There’ll be plenty more to pick up soon enough, sire,’ he said, then turned away, scrambling up the gravel to join the thick ruck of men fighting to hold the breach.

At the top, Liam thought he caught sight of Bob: the back of his head, his broad shoulders; one arm swinging a long-handled axe to and fro like a scythe.

His head was swimming with pain, a sharp stabbing agony that almost made it impossible to gather together a single coherent thought.

But he just about managed one.

When the hell’s Becks coming back?

John watched the distant struggle from the balcony of the keep’s Great Hall. From this far away the squirming press of men looked like insects fighting over a dung hill.

Every last man of the garrison was over there, and a good proportion of the town’s menfolk, all fighting for their town.

And fighting for me.

He felt sick of his weakness, his cowardice. The sight of blood had always left him in a cold dread.

You have not the heart of a king – that’s why you shall never be one; something Richard had once said to him back when their father had been alive.

‘Perhaps you are right,’ John whispered miserably. And yet … he thought he’d caught a glimpse of something inside himself. Perhaps ‘courage’ was too grand a word for it, but it was a firmness of resolve, perhaps even a hint of defiance as he’d parlayed with Richard earlier.

I was strong then, was I not?

Strong?

He stroked his beard absently with a hand that trembled like an autumn leaf ready to take flight on a fresh breeze. ‘No … you are just a weak fool,’ he answered himself.

‘Sire?’

John looked over his shoulder to see one of the keep’s squires standing beside the drapes. A pale-faced, effeminate man in expensive linens. ‘Sire? Should we – should we not close the castle’s gates? Should they break through, we would be safe in the castle a while longer!’

John felt something deep inside him turn away in disgust.

‘No,’ he said finally. ‘Have you a sword and mail?’

The squire’s eyes rounded. ‘Sire?’

‘You heard.’

‘I – I – I suppose I have … somewhere …’

‘Then fetch it.’

‘F-fetch it, S-sire?’

‘Yes.’ John took a deep breath to steady the timbre of his voice. ‘We shall be joining them.’