Tombland

Then came the sudden boom of a cannon firing from the rebel gun platform. We did not see the cannonball but heard a whistling and saw the standard-bearer’s leg, and the shoulder of his horse, explode in a fountain of blood. Both dropped, instantly dead; the standard dropping to the dusty ground.

Behind us came a shout from the back, passed up the line, ‘To battle!’

With booms and crashes, both sides fired their artillery, the rebels’ superior height and quantity of cannon wreaking havoc among Warwick’s forces, men and horses screaming and falling, gunballs hitting the ground and bouncing into the men. More orders were shouted from behind us, and a hail of arrows whistled through the air, over us, and fell among Warwick’s men, bringing more terrible screams.

Then the arquebusiers lit their gunpowder pans. It was Nicholas who shouted, ‘Crouch down!’ – the stakes pinning us at either end made it impossible to lie – and everyone fell to their knees. The arquebuses fired, with a great crashing sound that nearly deafened me, and a volley of iron such as I could never have imagined crashed into the rebels behind us. I believe the mercenaries tried to avoid hitting us where they could, though I saw several men at the other end of the line judder and fall, most shot through the body, blood and intestines gushing forth. Some bullets hit the chains, breaking them, sparks flashing. Many of the rebel horsemen behind us were hit by the hail of bullets and crashed to the ground, their horses, too. I looked at Nicholas, and saw that he was, with great courage, kneeling and trying with all his strength to pull the stake beside him from the ground. ‘Help me!’ he shouted. Boleyn and I pushed forward, drawing the chain taut, and helped him pull. We felt the stake move in the sandy soil and then suddenly it was up and out.

‘The other end,’ I said breathlessly, but Nicholas pulled us down again as a fresh volley, from the second rank of the arquebusiers, hit the rebel lines behind us, mowing down another line of horsemen attempting to advance through the remains of their dead comrades.

‘I think the chain at the other end’s broken,’ Boleyn said breathlessly, and looking along the line I saw that where the prisoners hit by the arquebusiers lay dead, bullets had also broken the chain in several places, separating it from the other stake. Perhaps the arquebusiers had fired thus deliberately.

‘Go!’ Nicholas shouted, just as a fresh volley of arrows thudded into Warwick’s men, several hitting the landsknechts, who let out mighty cries as they fell.

I am certain we would all have died that morning had not Nicholas begun to scuttle, crouched on all fours, to the right, between the two armies, separated now only by the ditch and stakes. From the other end of the chain everyone except those who had been hit followed Nicholas in the same crouching scuttle, until at last – it seemed like hours – we were beyond the ranks of the armies and stumbling downhill. We crawled up a knoll and down the other side, staggering into one of the many exposed rabbit warrens dotting the heath, the rabbits having been dug out for food weeks ago. Then someone near the front caught his foot in a rabbit hole and crashed to the ground, bringing everyone else down with him. Under the weight of all the men, the hollowed-out earth gave way beneath us, as it had the time gunpowder had been used on the warren on Mousehold, and we all found ourselves lying in a shallow earthen depression. Only just behind and above, we could hear the unbelievable din of battle, yells and crashes and gunfire that almost deafened us. We pressed ourselves into the ground, waiting for some of Kett’s men to follow and kill us, but after a few minutes I realized we had been forgotten.

Panting, I looked around me. Ahead, the ground sloped down to the city walls, closer than I would have thought, with the gates broken by cannon fire in the days before. Some of Warwick’s men stood on top of the walls. They could easily have shot us down, but must have known who we were. For the moment at least, we were safe.

‘Thank you,’ I said to Nicholas. ‘You saved us.’

‘So much for your rebel friends,’ Boleyn said angrily. ‘They betrayed you in the end.’

‘No,’ I answered. ‘That was Michael Vowell.’ I sighed. ‘These men are fighting because they can no longer believe in promises. Who can blame them?’

‘I can,’ said one man beside me. ‘Beasts, dogs, serfs and traitors, death to all of them!’

Dale laughed again – the sound was a little more high-pitched and shaky this time. He said, ‘Do you know what you look like, lying there with earth on your faces, arguing away?’ His laugh changed to a bloody splutter as a volley of half a dozen arrows came whistling from the sky, and one hit him in the heart, killing him instantly. Another pinioned a man to the ground by an arm. He lay screaming helplessly as blood welled out over the ground.