His horse stumbles to a halt among a group of young knights whose armour is as pristine as their white, beardless cheeks. 'Why?' he shouts, raising his eyes heavenward. To the left the Norman response, William's motto: Dex aie, God aid us.Įxcept that God is not helping them. The iron rims and bosses of Saxon shields flash in the corner of his eye. The sun is out now, burnishing blood and weapons, gilding the smoke pall. The men in the front line on top of the ridge shake their shields in time with the chanting. Over to his right he can hear the Saxon war cry: Goddemite, God Almighty. A voice in his head taunts him: Which is more than this horse will be if you don't move. Instinctively he turns the horse broadside to the archers, to shield himself and ducks behind its neck. He can hear it, feel its rhythmic rush and suck. It's possible he has been wounded, he can't remember, but there is such a pain in his heart. His helmet is a vice, branding the rings of the chain mail hood beneath it into his temples and the tonsured crown of his head. His eyes smart, full of tears, or sweat, or blood, he cannot tell. He is a prince of the Church, which is inclined to make a man assume he is immune from hell, but he knows now that he has never truly believed it. Perhaps he is dead, not William, and the din battering his hearing, the sting of tar and horse sweat and burning fat in his nostrils, the eerie sense of being both in the thick of it yet watching himself from somewhere else, perhaps this is hell. Heels down, weight forward, squeeze with the thighs, at one with the animal. The main thing is to stay in the saddle, clear of the melee of men on foot hacking and pulping one another. Norman? Saxon? Which side of the line is he? Doesn't matter.

Disorientated in the pall of dust and smoke, the animal rears to avoid a kneeling peasant trying to prise a severed hand from the hilt of a sword. His horse plunges down the ridge, shouldering its way past crowds of men on foot, stumbling over corpses and hummocks of maram grass, slipping on churned earth, slimy with blood and spilt guts. Lost his shield? What sort of soldier is he? God's soldier, he is God's soldier. He has let the reins go, one hand trails the borrowed sword, the other is clasped around the amulet he wears, the Tear of the Virgin, William's gift. The air is thick with smoke where fire-tipped arrows have set the grass smouldering. 'You said this couldn't happen,' he yells, in this voice like a cracked bell. Odo is afraid he's lost his reason, but if the rumours are true, and William is dead, it might be better to be out of his mind.

It sobs and growls, bellows and screeches like a cacophony of demons. The voice doesn't sound like his, though he can feel its vibrations in his throat.

The needle in the blood by sarah bower