Thomas takes a new bag of arrows and drifts up the slope towards the front. He peers ahead, to his right, looking for Riven’s flag, but can see nothing above the shoving ranks in the sleety snow. He nocks an arrow and looses it, guessing where Perers might have seen Riven’s flag, then another, and another. He imagines each one striking Riven or the giant, and he takes pleasure in every loosing. When he is out of arrows, a centenar is there with a boy carrying another bagful of shafts. Thomas takes it and ducks around behind the rearmost archer, and is gone.

Here is a man in good plate, lying stretched on the ground with his eyes unblinking as snow and ash flakes fall on his waxen face. He has been left there by his people, and already another man, one of the naked men, vicious as a stoat, stands over him, going through his things, taking what he wants, discarding what he does not. He tosses aside a glove almost at Thomas’s feet as he passes. Thomas stoops for it and slips it on. It is still warm, the leather wet with the man’s sweat, the steel-plated knuckles bloodstained. After a moment’s hesitation, he takes up the second glove where it has been cast aside. And here a bill, lying abandoned in the grass, a rough-made thing with a chipped blade on a bent staff. Thomas picks that up too, and then with a moment of regret, he sets aside his bow, and so now he is a billman. A billman in bloodied gloves, with an unreliable glaive and an archer’s helmet.

He starts again, moving eastwards, up towards the right flank, but across the field down to his right the trumpets are blasting with real urgency, and men are bellowing at one another, and down in the village companies of footmen are surging into life, hurrying up the slope to reinforce the left flank.

Something is happening. The next development of the day.

The army’s left wing – Warwick’s battle – has canted around, taken a step back. The dead and wounded are thicker on the ground down there and they are streaming back from the line in numbers. The boys are running too, and the prickers are moving up fast, circling like sheep dogs, using sticks and staffs to herd the men back into the fight. He can see the flags of the enemy. They are close to breaking through.

This is the crisis point. The day hangs on the next five minutes. Bugles and trumpets sound and messengers ride hard across the back of the battles.

Thomas turns and finds himself in the path of a company of Fauconberg’s reserve billmen, being harried down the field to join the fight, to prop up Warwick’s battle on the left. He tries to step aside but the sergeant catches him by the arm and swings him around.

‘On! On!’