Lord of the Isles (Coronet Books) (25 page)

For hectic minutes, then, there was utter and bloody havoc and turmoil along that sector of the front, a smiting, swiping, hacking struggle for mastery. But, once a defensive barrier is breached, charging and attacking men usually have the edge over stationary, waiting men. The spearmen broke at a number of points, and once that happened the rest of the line speedily collapsed.

And now a further disadvantage of tight-packed defence was demonstrated. The broken spearmen had to go somewhere to escape the flailing broadswords, and of course they could only push blindly back amongst their own waiting ranks of men-at-arms in their desperation, disordering all, masking their weapons, creating a belt of major chaos along the lower slopes of the hill at this eastern end.

It was not to be expected, to be sure, that Somerled’s people could remain an orderly and controlled unit in all this stramash; but at least they had the initiative, knew what they were doing, had more space to operate, and had effective leadership. Their impetus flagged, inevitably, nevertheless.

Somerled, recognising that further decision was required of him, and quickly, sought to disengage and draw back a little, to view and consider. This was all very well, but it could speedily develop into disaster. They could not press on into that mass for much longer, before they were swallowed up and annihilated. Admittedly some of Cospatrick’s Lothian men were now coming up behind them. But once these got involved in the struggle, the chaos would be but the greater, all inextricably mixed. He would then have great difficulty in holding his men together as a unit—which he was determined to do. Better to try to withdraw now whilst they could.

He stared round, seeking to take in and assess the general scene. From this position he could not see all the battle area, the western sector being hidden. There was no sign of the cavalry now. In the centre the remnants of the Galloway force appeared to be withdrawing, after a fashion, and William’s and Strathearn’s foot taking over the assault. So far little impression seemed to have been made on the main enemy mass, and the ranked Norman knights higher were still not engaged. David and the Scots reserve remained where they had been.

Somerled had been doubtful from the start as to the probabilities of success in this attack, considering the strong defensive position of the English, their archers and their great weight of armour. Now he was convinced that the Scots could not win the day, not if the enemy remained solidly on this hill and did not risk a counter-attack. In other words, it was either defeat or stalemate for David, a most dire failure. Should he himself try to return and tell the High King so? Little point in that, when David himself was scarcely in control of his army. Anyway,
could
all be set in reverse now? Would these fire-eating lords heed any such command? His own concern must be to extricate his Argyll people at minimum cost.

He blew a long continuous note on his horn, the signal for disengagement. It was never easy for men involved in mortal struggle to break it all off and retire; but in this case it was likely to be less difficult than sometimes, for the disordered defenders looked to be only too eager to let their immediate attackers go. The English ranks further back, no doubt, would have desired to take a hand and punish these Scots whilst they were vulnerable; but so close-packed were they that they could not move forward without trampling down their own backward-pressing front rows, amongst the tangle of cast and broken eight-foot-long spears.

So, gradually the Highlandmen heeded that horn’s note and withdrew, singly and in groups, most not having to actually fight their way out. Some they left behind, inevitably, fallen, and a few were wounded, although most of these were aided out by their colleagues. Many managed even to snatch up discarded plaids in the by-going. Fortunately no arrows were coming down on them, the bowmen no doubt having a superfluity of less difficult targets, with the main Scots assault in progress.

Before the last Argyll men were extricated, the Lothian ranks were pushing through and past them in their hundreds, thousands. This indeed was more difficult to cope with than the disengagement from the English, not to get caught up and swept forward again by the eager newcomers. There was much confusion for a while and Somerled saw his force almost utterly dispersed and swallowed up, an infuriating development. This was not his idea of warfare. He kept blowing and blowing on his horn and hoped that its message would get through all the yelling, bellowing frenzy.

In consequence, it was quite some while before the Highlanders could reform, even after a fashion, to gather around their leaders in a dazed and bemused state, finding themselves in a sort of no-man’s-land eastwards behind the fierce battlefront. By which time the entire engagement had developed significantly. From back here it was possible to gain a fairly accurate overall picture—and it was not a cheering prospect. For one thing, the Scots cavalry, which had been supposed to curve in and support Fergus’s assault on the right, had completely disappeared. Presumably, for some reason, it had ridden around the western side of the hill. At any rate, its task of riding down the tight ranks of the English men-at-arms, once the Gallowegians had disposed of the bristling menace of the spears, was not being effected, with dire result for the entire front. Everywhere the Scots foot was held up against that barrier, hacking and dying whilst the arrows rained down on them, most of the manpower on both sides frustratingly unable to get at each other in the dense press. Clearly little impact had been made on the English front, despite the heavy Scots casualties; and the knightly Norman host on the higher ground was still waiting motionless. With all the noise and shouting and blood being spilt, little or nothing was being achieved.

To Somerled’s eyes, the position was in fact hopeless. He did not see how the Scots were going to improve on the situation. They would go on dying uselessly on the heaps of the already slain until they were exhausted—or, hopefully, until the archers ran out of arrows. Then, no doubt, the fresh and unbloodied Norman chivalry would at last sweep down upon them in their armoured might and it would become little more than a massacre, complete defeat. For the life of him he could see no strategy which might change this and give them any sort of victory.

Presumably a similar recognition had been dawning upon David and his lieutenants back at the Scots base. He had sent part of the reserve to reinforce certain sectors of the battle, but most evidently no major breakthrough was being effected. Even as Somerled sought to make up his mind as to whether there was anything that he could usefully do in a desperate effort—as perhaps race his men east-about round to the rear of this hill, in the hope that it might be more assailable from behind, and so a diversion might be created—the blare of David’s trumpets rang out, sounding the recall. On and on the trumpeting shrilled, and for the first time a great roar rose from the English host, a triumphant shouting as they recognised the message.

As though the fog of war had not been sufficiently demonstrated already that day, the confusion which followed almost equalled what had gone before. Retiral was not achieved swiftly nor coherently. Not all, indeed, were prepared to retire, and were forced to do so only when they found themselves isolated and their flanks exposed by the retiral of others. Some, on the other hand, were only too glad to withdraw and did so in haste and disorder. Fortunately the actual configuration of the ground was a help in this, in that the enemy hill resembled an island, from which the tide could ebb away almost naturally.

That it was all not much worse, to be sure, was aided by the attitude of the English. The fear was that at this stage they would go over to the attack. But throughout, their strategy had been defensive, and successfully so. It would have taken strong and aggressive leadership to reverse that posture now, when thankfulness to have survived, and won the day, after a fashion, against superior numbers, undoubtedly would be the natural reaction. Moreover those mail-clad knights, the elite of the army, were used to fighting on horseback and were presently unmounted—and their heavy armour would in itself be a dissuasion from any chase. The English, then, stood firm, as they had done all along; they could well have anticipated that this was only a temporary withdrawal and regrouping, anyway, and that the attack would be resumed. The more responsible of the Scots leadership heaved sighs of relief.

Somerled, by the nature of things, was one of the first leaders to arrive back at the base. All around David were much too busy and preoccupied to indulge in debate, argument and blame over the débâcle, at this moment; but clearly one over-riding transgression was held to be largely accountable—and undoubtedly, to the High King’s added sorrow and distress, it was his son’s responsibility. The cavalry, under Prince Henry and the Earl of Fife, had failed hopelessly in their duty. Apparently, just when they should have swung in, on the right wing, to aid Fergus’s Gallowegians, a horsed force of the enemy had appeared from behind the hill. Henry and Fife had turned, necessarily, to deal with this; but having indeed won this cavalry tussle and broken the English array, the two young men had made the grievous mistake of forgetting their obligations towards the Scots foot and gone chasing off after the fleeing enemy horse. Where they had gone none knew, but they still had not returned.

Censure and castigation however must wait. Meantime the Scots leadership was fully engaged in the difficult business of gathering and marshalling the retiring fighting-men, exhausted, dejected or unruly and protesting, getting them into columns of some sort and marching them off the field northwards. The wounded, and there were large numbers, had to be attended to in some degree and aided on their way, the dead and stricken inevitably had to be left where they had fallen. And all the time the English waited watchfully on their hill.

David himself would not quit that sorry scene until he was assured that all was in as fair order as was possible in the circumstances, and a strong rearguard organised—of which the Argyll contingent was a prominent part. When at length the High King allowed himself to leave, still with no sign of his son or the cavalry, it was to turn in his saddle and look back.

“God forgive me,” he said, set-faced. “I drew the sword in vain. And leave behind those who had to pay the price. God in Heaven forgive me!”

These were the words of a caring and noble man. But in a way, even these were ill-judged. For they were quickly repeated throughout the dispirited host and so helped to perpetuate the superstitious notion that Almighty God had been very much involved against them, that the disaster was a judgement on the Scots for having attacked Holy Church and the Consecrated Host borne aloft on that standard—in what became known as the Battle of the Standard. This constituted a grievous burden on morale, and came to affect almost all, from highest noble to humblest footman, out of all proportion to the military reverse. For after all, in fact it was no great defeat. The Scots army marched off the field intact and unpursued, and still greater in size and might than the enemy. They had merely failed to take, at considerable cost, a strongly-defended position. Nevertheless, the aura of fate against them was strong as the host faced the long march back to Scotland.

Somerled, for one, felt no such weight of divine wrath, having only the scantest respect for the authority of the Romish church. He had done his duty by David and was now concerned to get his people back to Argyll with all speed, to resume a life and reality to which all this was in the nature of an irrelevance. Fortunately he was no longer tied to Fergus. That man had survived the battle, although wounded, and with his force greatly depleted. He chose to return homewards through the west country and Cumbria detached from David’s main army—no doubt, as most guessed, in order to spoil the Cumbrians
en route
and so to reach Galloway again at least much richer if lacking something in manpower. Somerled, whose Highlanders were much lighter of foot and quicker at covering ground than the generality of the Scots force, obtained David’s permission to make his own way northwards at speed, since he had so much further to go.

It was scarcely a joyful parting; but if Somerled’s respect for his High King’s military prowess had suffered a declension, his regard for him as a man had not diminished. After all, David’s reputation was not as a warrior-king but as an able monarch, lawgiver and man of peace. That would remain.

It was a celebration. Aros, on the Isle of Mull across the Sound from Ardtornish, was the first of Somerled’s new Norman-style castles to be completed. His great conception of protecting his Argyll kingdom against Norse and other attack, and at the same time to more firmly establish his own hold on these far-flung territories, by setting up this network of strongholds at strategic points, deserved and indeed required to be noised abroad. So the prominent from far and near were summoned to Aros, on its lofty promontory above the bay, this breezy day of May, to admire and take note. Feasting and jollification was the order of the day, on the face of it; but few present were in any doubts as to the serious purpose behind it all. The Lord of the Isles intended to be, and to remain, just that—for although he did call himself King of Argyll on occasion, more or less to keep that title valid, he, like others, thought of himself essentially as Lord of the Isles, a much more meaningful identification.

In mid-afternoon the proceedings were interrupted by the arrival in the bay of a strange ship. They had observed this vessel sailing down the Sound of Mull earlier in the day, noting it particularly in that it was of an unusual type for these waters, neither longship, birlinn nor galley, but a heavily-built merchanter of distinctly foreign aspect; in fact, Somerled had sent one of his captains after it, to enquire, since it was possible that it might be making for Ardtornish, across and further down the Sound, still the main seat of his lordship. Anyway, he made it his business to know what most of the traffic through his seaway was up to. Now his longship had returned with the stranger, into Aros Bay already crowded with shipping.