Thomas pulls away. He opens his mouth to say something but the sergeant raises a hammer.

‘Get the fuck in!’

Thomas has no choice. He turns and joins them, the sergeant pushing him on. They retrace his steps, past the man from whom he’d looted his gloves, past his own company loosing shafts over the heads of the men in the centre battle, past Perers and the Welshman, and then down through the ditches and across the road. Footmen in Warwick’s livery hurry up from the village, their sergeants howling at them, purple-faced with fury and urgency.

Warwick’s banner is a long red tongue. Beyond it the line thins and sergeants are flailing at their men, driving them forward, forcing them to fill the gaps. A man in Warwick’s livery shoves Thomas to where men are fighting over a great berm of fallen bodies, three or four men deep. It is a long slug of bristling steel that divides the armies. Men are climbing on the wounded and scrambling over corpses to get at one another. Toe to toe they grapple, punch and elbow one another. They butt and gouge. There is no space to swing a sword. It is all about pointed weapons, thrusts and short-arm blows. Daggers, hammers, axes. He would give anything for that pollaxe now.

Thomas is pushed forward by the press of men. He thrusts and jabs with his glaive, aiming for faces, for eye-slits, for fingers on weapon shafts. He is barely defending himself. The noise is deafening. Rough steel and iron blades are everywhere. He can smell terror and blood and men who’ve soiled themselves.

The man before him has a helmet that encases his face and a sword he holds with both mailed gloves. He is straddling a body, standing on the chest of another dead man. Over his shoulder more men thrust glaives at Thomas’s face, and from below men are crouching and stretching to hook his legs away. He tries to push back, to get away, but the sergeants are there behind him, pushing men into the maw.

Thomas’s glaive is caught by the big man in the helmet. He wrenches it free. It is caught again. Pushed down. He is defenceless. Using his sword quillon as a mace, the big man raises it to bring it down to kill Thomas but the man next to Thomas surges forward and drives the blade of his bill under the big man’s armpit. He kills him with a roar. Then an axe or a maul swings through the air from the other side and catches Thomas’s saviour in the teeth, snapping his head back. Thomas is blinded with blood, and there are broken teeth and fragments of bone from the wreck of the billman’s chin.