DEREK TURNER revisits a medieval Lincolnshire folktale, of the dragon of Castle Carlton

The song of the lark was abroad in the Marsh, with March greening the tips of the willows – but in Hugh Barde’s heart it was December.

He’d come out of his door in disgust, and now stood in the shadows, looking at his courtyard in deep dissatisfaction. Damn Hildegard! She’d been at him again. The same bloody subject – Sir Guillaume. How much better their knightly neighbour was as landlord. How much more successful. How much better maybe even as a man.

The despicable knight– him, a knight! – had just expanded his estate again, so his holdings now nudged right up against Hugh’s on two sides. The little hill on which Sir Guillaume’s handsome castle stood had always been irritatingly visible from Hugh’s chamber window, but now his churls could also be seen not far from Hugh’s front door, cutting brushwood and digging a ditch to drain the two carucates Hugh had not been granted by the King.

Guillaume, it was well known, was also manoeuvring to get the acres of waste along the coast road – right where Hugh had always intended to plant his town. Soon the jumped-up bastard’s corn would be waving right in front of Hugh’s own gates, his sheep baa-ing balefully on all sides. If this wasn’t stopped, soon the fame of the Bardes would start to fade, their line bleed into the peasantry. One day, Hugh thought, trees could be growing in this garth, uprooting all the Bardes’ embankments.

Guillaume, blast him to Hel, was cousin to the King, thanks to artful marriage into one of the oldest families in Falaise. That was why he was granted lands. That was why he was Lord Justiciar, holding life and death over the district, and with entrée at Court. All this, although both Barde lines were older, and incomparable at war. Yet Hugh’s father – a descendant of both Charlemagne, and the man who had won the way up out of the Malfosse – hadn’t even been given permission to fortify his own bailey! Hugh looked around sourly, thinking how shabby his holdings seemed, and how small. Ever since coming back from the wars, everything had seemed unsatisfactory.

It appeared not even Heaven favoured the family. Hugh had spent three whole years in the Holy Land, and at Aleppo had felled the Saracens’ giant champion – while Guillaume had stayed at home eating, reckoning up deeds and scrip with his fat fingers and soft hands. They didn’t even have a halfway-decent house-chaplain, Hugh reflected bitterly, as he noticed that shaven-headed spiritual advisor slinking out of the chapel, and towards the kitchens with their ale-barrels. As well as being a sot, he was also ignorant and lecherous, spending less time with the Church Fathers than with the miller’s mooncalf daughter.

Hildegard couldn’t really understand the way courts worked. She was only an English noblewoman, and so scion of a failed nation – although that little detail didn’t stop her having commanding airs. Hugh’s mother had had these too – sniffily conscious of her Mercian bloodline, and obviously regarding her husband’s people as brutal arrivistes. Once, when especially exasperated, Hugh’s father had confided in him that he wished he had found some nice quiet bride from the old country.

National pride lurked in even the mangiest and muddiest of Karleton’s vassals, for all their bowing and scraping and tugging of their stringy forelocks – as if they still hated, just waited to overturn their nation’s fate. Our nation’s fate now, Hugh corrected himself glumly. Two of these half-fellow countrymen trundled past at that moment, inclining their heads in what Hugh was sure was false fealty, towing a cart piled with fresh-cut reeds. Hugh looked sourly at their smocked backs, suspecting they were smirking.

Hugh’s Norman ancestors had now been in England for over a century, and of course his English antecessors since time out of mind. Hugh’s Norman grandfather had symbolically placed their bailey on the outline of an ancient fort. Yet Hugh still often felt he was not fully of this place. He wasn’t quite accepted, not privy to its secrets – didn’t know its still half-heathen gods. The full-bloods seemed a people of primitive beliefs, dwelling in a realm of ghosts.

Their superstitions could be contagious, even for Hugh, who had read a little, and travelled widely. There were odd moments, even on the bravest of days in the season of the year, when Hugh was eager on the trail of the boar, that he would find himself drifting into peculiar reveries, as if suddenly seeing himself from outside. All earthly sounds would die away, and he was suddenly unsure about where on earth he was, and what he was doing and why. Moments when it seemed nothing was real.

Some unanticipated movement might cause him to pause – or breaking through an arras of trees to find some hot and muffled clearing, where something important seemed just about to happen, or maybe had just been. Moments when the only noise was Bayard’s breathing, as the great big-eyed bay laid back his ears in fear, and goosebumps rose along his glistening neck. Some deeper than usual dappling or shadow – the monstrous shape of some trunk – the way roots seemed to swarm out of the ground… Hugh would foolishly imagine darting eyes amid the tangling leaves, cold watchers among the boskiest brakes of thorn.

There were wolves out here sometimes, of course, and cats – not to mention brybours, wandering robber-gangs who sometimes stooped to murder, about whom Guillaume naturally did nothing. The only crime he cared about was poaching, as might have been expected from such a voluptuary – who reportedly enjoyed watching miscreants being beaten in his basements.

But Hugh also sensed less corporeal dangers – dangers not easily driven away by the angriest barking of alaunts, or the most stoutly-wielded steel. The boars themselves could be more than just meat – capable of biting and excreting as burningly as any bonnacon, giving off infernal fetor, some even capable of shapeshifting. Witches still lingered in some corners of the woods, and leaf-clad wodewoses padded the greenest glades of all.

Even out on the open moor there were sunsets that seemed significant, dangerous dawns, and aery phenomena. The moon sometimes had a corona, at that season when ice-floes encrusted the beach, and your breath hung before your face like your essence escaping. On the night the old king had died at Thorney, a flaming star had arced over Karleton, charging eastwards at colossal speed before dousing its glim somewhere out at sea. The year of the Great Hunger, a vast skeleton had been seen by many out over the waters, grinning and stretching a long arm towards the land.

On the clearest and coldest nights, the alaunts would sometimes bay for unknown reasons, joined by the limers and greyhounds, signalling something unseen. These would awaken other dogs, and so others, and so others – on endlessly out across the silvery east, across expectant leagues of fen and moor, broad river and misty ditch, making churls curse and scratch on their paillasses, lords stir and mutter in their tapestried chambers, and wakemen look upward in interest. These eldritch alarums could carry all the way to Lincoln, to vex the uneasy moneylenders in their fancy new houses on the Hill, and the canons in the Cathedral, whose slumbers were too often filled with sin.

Even under the fullest light of day’s eye, there were lanes no-one liked going down, and particular pools in the fens, black and cold as could be, showing shivering facsimiles of the firmament, and tremulous reflections of reeds – whole worlds inverted, as if reversed men might be growing downwards into some underland. Summer’s lightning-flash adderbolt flies betokened the nearness of vipers, whose red tongues also lolled forth from the marsh-flowers gathered as simples by the goodwives.

The Anglais thought these pools held hags, or monsters they called nicors, Sir Guillaume had once informed Hugh superciliously (well knowing Hugh’s half-blood inheritance) – serpent-spirits that crept out at night to drain the udders of kine, or batten on the tender throats of children before taking them below. Their vapours were blamed when men sickened in the Marsh with unaccountable fevers, and grew yellow with unhealth and waking dreams. Women grew fractious and thin-haired in the noxious fumes, and brats often died at the dug.Hugh didn’t reject these stories nearly so readily. It couldn’t be denied that strange things did happen.

The Blue Stone, for instance, that had been dragged with such labour from the Bishop’s bovate, had eventually needed to be reinstated to stop the bad luck. Even Hugh’s hall was visited in the night by what the maids called boggarts – casting charms or stealing, sometimes just nuisances, sometimes something much worse. The maids propitiated them with dishes of milk, which would be empty the following day – although Hugh guessed this sometimes had more to do with cats, house-cousins of those at large in the greenwood. Hildegard had one – a grey Grimalkin that would sit with her while she span, glaring at Hugh, and hissing if he came too close. It was with her now, he knew – a changeling for a fine lady’s chamber, a watchful reminder of old darkness under trees.

Hildegard was right, though. It was unfair the way they were treated. If only, he thought yet again, he could find some way to distinguish himself. There were so many things he yearned to do, to turn the waste into fine estate, and secure a future for the boy. He saw the bailey made good, an elegant abbey arising, rows of robbers in gibbets, the trim roofs of a gated town with carts coming clopping from the coast, each carter leaving a token of respect to the Bardes, who had made the Marsh to bloom. 

He turned his head. What was that? Something odd was happening down by the ash-grove. There was a crowd – a very large crowd, several hundreds perhaps, with others coming at a run. They couldn’t allbe from Karleton. But whoever they were, they should all be working, he thought, as he walked their way irately.

But as he neared, he realised the reason for this strange stoppage. One word stood out amid a hubbub of wildly excited noise – wyrm, wyrm. As they noticed his presence, the crowd faltered and fell sullenly silent, looking down, or at each other, or away.

Hugh spotted a solid sort of servitor – Asser of Markebi, the master-mason. “Well, Asser? What is all this?”

Asser cleared his throat. “It’s a worm, sire! They say a great worm has come to Ormesbi – burning everything, eating people! A worm, sire, with a single huge eye like a burning wheel!”

“Nonsense!” said Hugh reflexively – but his heart sank into his stomach. Everyone knew dragons existed outside the tales boys were told – the saint taming the Tarasque, the dreadful Guivre of the Seine, the Shaggy Beast of La Ferté-Bernard, the loathly Lambton worm, Piers Shonks of Pelham, the white wyvern of the West and the crimson firedrake of the Welsh, locked together forever in fight far under Cambria, contesting for the country in eternity.

Had not the most learned geographers written of terrible lizards, and hadn’t Ptolemy set a dragon in the night-sky? Hugh had himself seen a crocodile in the Holy Land, and dragon’s blood on sale in apothecary shops. Kings of England had carried a dragon device. The Conqueror too had been called dragon for his desolations. Were not huge bones sometimes found in fields, or seen in the faces of cliffs? At Conisbrough of the Warennes was a stone showing a writhing beast beset by bishops. Hadn’t Sir Richard Buslingtorp bested a fierce Python just a few years before? The gold he had found afterwards had been the making of his fortune. Tiny dragon-like things could even be seen in Lindsey’s ponds, cousins to the cave-dwelling salamander, which crouched amid all flames unscorched.

In any case, the Bible was clear – such terrors had been in Babylon and would squirm forth again, crawling masters of the ground, agents of Chaos, emissaries of evil, harbingers of The End. Every Rogation-day, the churls carried a dragon effigy while they beat the bounds, immolating it after to feed the fields, and as insult to creeping Pontius Pilate. There would always be such beasts, until all lands were drained and tamed, and the End of Days.

Asser propelled a scarlet-faced man forward. “This is John of Ormesbi, sire. I knew his father – a man right worthy. He has run here to tell us what he has seen this day.”

John looked up defiantly into Hugh’s face, obviously not expecting to be believed.

“This morning, sire, a giant serpent, with wings, and a great rolling eye, landed on our hill like thunder! Longer than the church, it was – taller than the trees, blacker than night, hungrier than the wolf! It ate the sheep, the swine, and some of our people – and scorched up all the earth with its foul breath and trampling claws. Everyone fled! No-one can withstand such! I and all these others ran all the way, to warn you.”

The crowd burst back into babble, while Hugh tried to assess John’s worth. Eventually, he asked, “Did you take this report to the Lord Justiciar?”

“Yes, sire, with these men, and other men from Ormesbi, and Calesbi, and Wormesgay, and Burwell. From everywhere. But the lord just said – well…“. He paused, and looked away in indignation.

“Well?”

“The lord sent down a message, sire, by his steward, saying these were lies, and that we had better return to work, or face whipping!” The crowd groaned and seethed and muttered. “Norman scum! Always the same! That’s how they treat the people!”

John spoke up again: “But these are no lies, sire. I swear it, on the Virgin’s life!”

Asser interposed gravely. “Master Barde, I believe this man is in the right.”

Hugh’s brain was awhirl. Of course Guillaume wouldn’t go. He’d always been a coward, though who wouldn’t be when it came to dragons? Cowardice could never be an excuse, though – not for such as valued their honour. And now all were looking to him. There was no-one else. And sometimes – he gulped – even the worst fears needed facing. At last he nodded.

“I believe you, John of Ormesbi! I believe you.” He clapped John on his shoulder, startling him, and himself, with his condescension. “I will go!” he said, and the crowd inhaled in admiration. Before he could change his mind, he started issuing orders. “You, boy – to the hall! Send for the priest Godric, and Athelstan my esquire. Bid them meet me in the courtyard!”

“Yes, sire!” Several boys raced away to be first with the news, as Hugh walked quickly towards his hall, followed by most of the crowd. As he approached, Hildegard was already issuing forth, holding the hand of their wide-eyed son, three-year-old future of the line.

“I have heard this strange news, husband! Is it true? And are you then riding out?”

Hugh nodded rather stiffly, but then Hildegard broke out wonderfully into a radiant smile – a smile he had never seen before. “The Bardes are never fainthearts!” she cried proudly. Hugh straightened instinctively, and then she drew him apart, speaking in low and eager tones. “Our neighbour has spurned this challenge?”

“He has, wife!”

“This then is your chance – our chance! Kill this thing, and tell the King, and Guillaume too is finished. He cannot be Lord Justiciar if he does not do the Lord Justiciar’s work! And then, husband, and then…well, who could be better fitted than a dragon’s bane?”

Hugh was struck by this. But there was one obvious difficulty. “But what if I miscarry! What if… well, what if I don’t come back?”

“You will not fail, husband! But – if you do, then you will have died like Roland – an example to our son, and certain of a place at Heaven’s board. I should be proud to be widow of such a man!”

Hugh couldn’t help wishing she had seemed less easily accepting of that prospect. Hildegard however kept talking, “But I know you can do this, husband. And when you do, you will have your reward. Your rights. Do this thing, for our son. Do it, for your honour. The King cannot refuse you anything if you succeed. And nor” – she paused significantly – “nor could I!”

Hugh could see it all – the grateful countenance of the King – the downfall of Guillaume, reversion of his lands to the Crown and so to him – a barony, and crest – a market charter. Above even these swam that superb new smile of his wife’s – a smile that filled his heart, and seemed to strengthen his sword-arm. He inhaled deeply of fragrant future-time, and a new kind of life with a Lady as wife.

Then his esquire Athelstan arrived, with boys and accoutrements as brilliantly burnished as the day they had been stored – chainmail, breastplate, bascinet, helm, long shield, and sword. Another boy came struggling after, battling to balance the long lance last levelled in the Holy Land. The stable-boy also came hastening, leading Bayard by the bridle, and another boy trotting alongside, tightening the girths of the war-saddle last straddled against paynim in Palestine. Everywhere was frantic with life, as if half the Marsh had come.

“Hold!” Hildegard cried, and all astonishingly did, struck by her command and clarity. “Goodwife, lend me your dirk.” To murmured delight and surprise, she sliced a strip of blue cambric from her own bodice. “Here, husband. My token!” She smiled yet again, but Hugh had no time to dwell even on that as he found himself beset.

The courtyard teemed with clamouring men and women of all ages and degrees, and from several estates, noisily exchanging advice about the best ways to deal with dragons. Lore was dredged up from murky depths, rich and shiny and strange as upcast from a ditch. There was a cacophony of contradictory suggestions, drawn from everywhere and nowhere. “Look for the gold! – Don’t look in its eyes! – Watch for its tail! – Don’t let it speak! – Give it an ox head! – Give it milk! – Bind it with a virgin’s girdle! – Watch for the wart! – Its blood burns fire! – Quench it in the lake!”

Hugh’s soldiering sense somehow asserted itself, and he went over to the corner to urinate before donning his array. He had once disgracefully bewrayed himself outside Jerusalem. As he adjusted his britches, he saw the priest Godric emerging furtively from the fortuitously unattended kitchens, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, as if wiping ale away, which almost certainly he was. Hugh considered him dissatisfiedly; if only there’d been time to bring the Bishop, or even the Abbot from Louth.  

“There you are, priest! Look lively! We have a great work to do!” Hugh moved over to the waiting esquire and house-boys, and now stood still among them, arms outstretched, as they began to gear him up. Athelstan’s fingers moved swiftly over Hugh’s sturdy frame, expertly buckling and lacing, every moment weighing him down more heavily.  

“A great worm, sire!” said the priest. “Can it be true?”

“Why not? They’re in the Bible, aren’t they?”

The priest seemed unsure, then brightened. “There was one in the Garden, sire. It tempted the woman! And, err, there were some more, near the end!… Or were those gryphons?”

Hugh snorted. “I seem to remember there were a few more than that! But let’s not worry too much about fine exegetical points!”

The priest smiled ingratiatingly. “Of course not, sire! Of course not, ha ha!” He paused for a moment. “May I just say, sire, how admiring I am of your great courage? And how proud I am to have known you? It has been my great privilege to have served you in howsoever humble a capacity…”

 “You’re still serving, man! You’re coming with me! You, Father, are my spiritual buckler and shield! You’re the best I can do at short notice!”

There was rough laughter from all within hearing as Godric gawped. “Me, sire? You don’t mean it, sire! I mean, you can’t. And…and what about the Rector at Ormesbi? Or Calesbi? I would not wish to impinge on their privileges… Or perhaps Oswald of Burwell …”

Hugh smiled grimly. “Eaten, for all I know! They’re probably choking the beast right now! It’s up to you, I’m afraid, Father. This is your chance! So go and get your book, and your cross, and your water, and get ready to ride – there’s a good priest. In fact, who not put on all your gear? It can’t do any harm. You, boy, go with him to help – and you, get the priest’s palfrey. You, fetch Dagobert and Manu. Today is the hunt of hunts!”

All the dogs had sensed the excitement, and were moving and moaning in the kennels, snapping impatiently at each other, whimperingly eager for the off. With difficulty, the kennel-hands eventually extricated white-and-black Dagobert and brindled Manu, Hugh’s favourites – veteran companions of la chasse, gashed with tusk of boar and tooth of wolf, slobberers over Hugh’s hands, and sires to many lusty pups. They almost pulled their handlers off their feet, nearly strangling themselves as they surged towards their master, drooling and whining. Everywhere was a-thrum with thrilling errantry and an acrid tang of fear, like the end of some age, or the start of a new.

All too soon, Hugh found himself clambering onto Bayard’s broad back, for what he couldn’t stop thinking might be the last time. Athelstan waited stolidly by, on his horse Godwine, Hugh’s lance resting in straps alongside his saddle until called for. The priest was being shoved unceremoniously up onto his mount, the humorously-named Godspeed, tricked out almost comically in full canonicals, holding miserably on with one hand, while the other clutched his book. Vials of holy water and chrism, plus some wafe, were in a bag belted across his body, sohe wasprepared for all eventualities. When he thought nobody would see, he slurped surreptitiously from a large leathern flask. Last came the huntsman and the whipper-in, who would run behind, or in front, depending on the fleetness of the hounds and the closeness of their quarry.

As the little group lined up to leave, an awed silence came down, broken only by the panting and whining of the dogs. Athelstan leaned down to rumple young Athelstan’s curly head, while his wife wept openly. At the back of the throng, the miller’s daughter’s eyes devoured Godric, but he was too preoccupied to notice, muttering intensely to himself. Hildegard stood out easily to her husband – noble in blonde and blue, holding the hand of the infant Hugh. As she and he exchanged a gaze of understanding, he fastened her cambric around his armoured neck, and nodded. She raised her right hand in salute, and smiled as if in wistfulness, or farewell. “Ride hardily, husband!” she called, clear as a church bell.

He weakened – but all eyes were on him – on the Bardes. He turned at last, and said “Let’s go” – and the retinue moved out amid cries of “Good luck!” and “God be with you!” People streamed out through the gates behind, and cheered the plucky party out of sight. Whatever happened hereafter, Hugh knew, Karleton wouldn’t be the same.

The fields fell unnaturally silent and still. Almost like the deserts in Isiah, thought Hugh, habitations of dragons and courts for screech-owls. Tools and barrows and lunch-pails lay where panicking people had dropped them. Bundles of reeds awaited unbound, eels were escaping from a basket, and a tree leaned crazily half-sawn. A cart of stone for the priory at Greenfield stood driverless, its still-yoked oxen grazing unconcerned. A hare that on any other day could have ended up on the high table raced away when it saw them, and a squirrel chittered angrily from an ash. The hounds had stopped barking, but were surging powerfully on, towing their stumbling and swearing attendants.

Hugh cantered at the head of the little line, wondering what he had let himself in for. It had been easy to be brave in the courtyard. But this really might be the last time he rode this road. That really might be his last hare. Those, his last sheep – and that his last oak burgeoning into leaf. Would he see it in full festoon? Would he see his son as man? A murder of crows going over brought back the battle-birds of Acre.

He wondered what his companions were thinking. These might be the last men he would see, and he realised he knew almost nothing of their lives. Yet even those now so cursingly busy with the dogs doubtless also had terrors. As for Athelstan, his esquire of twenty years – even he was an enigma, riding as always behind, expressionless as usual, sure and steadfast as a shieldwall, and just as blankly incommunicative. But the priest seemed the least knowable of all. Hugh had often wondered what possessed a man to take the tonsure, and now it looked like he’d never know. He observed Godric – so puny and uncertain in his seat, so ashen and muttering, letting Godspeed lag – and felt pity with his contempt.

“Ride up with me, priest!” Godric grudgingly spurred alongside. Hugh spoke more jocosely than he felt. “What about a bit of praying, eh? In English, if you like! Better simple faith than Norman blood, eh?” He would have liked Latin, but Godric’s Latin was notorious.

“In English? Of course, sire! Err, let me see, dear Lord, deliver us from evil! Um, shield us from the beast. Err…deliver us from evil. Shield us from the beast that crawls in the dirt…”

Hugh listened impatiently for a while. “What about one of our own? Guthlac, maybe?”

“Good idea, sire! Good old Guthlac! Err, dear Blessed Guthlac, deliver us from evil. Shield us, o sainted one, from the beast that crawls in the dirt, err…”

Hugh shook his head regretfully, and spurred on – searching inside himself instead for words that might suit saints. But he was acutely aware of his inarticulacy, and conscious of certain past transgressions. Maybe any words would be inadequate. Norman blood might be needed after all. Deus vult, he sighed in conclusion, Deus vult – and might to the smiting hand!

The priest fell back. He took another draught from his flask, then another. Godspeed was soon overtaken even by the profane and puffing men on foot, who stared at the priest contemptuously as they were towed past. He fell yet further behind, and Godspeed stopped to tear at grass, as Godric’s flask swiftly emptied.

Not far now, Hugh knew. Not far enough! Ketsbi Lane (medieval records rarely seem to capitalise words like “lane” or “church” (see Calesbi below) and often join them with hyphens to proper nouns, but it’s up to you) unrolled into the valley, and up again the other side, to the crest beyond which he knew they would find…what they would find. Whatever would find them. He registered Calesbi church with its gleaming walls to the south, and Burwell’s little tower to the north – reassuring sights for a once familiar world now in perilous play, his world that might be coming to its end. A storm came even from the blueness behind, clouds piling over the nearby ocean, a sudden squall blowing them on, and setting the trees to frantic dancing. Not far now. Not far enough…

Sky white in front – too white to be right – and then that white was forming a flaw – a wavy uncertainty, shimmering like the air that radiated from the soil in the long month of Leo, cutting off men’s heads, and inverting all elements. A buzzard circling Ormesby Top seemed suddenly to stop, and just wink out. The breath of the basilisk, Hugh groaned, sickeningly realising he had brought nothing to shield his face. The very shape of the wold was snakelike – those tormented stones a supple spine, that boulder a bulging and baleful eye.

An enormous roaring was now around, and a clashing of claws on scales – metal on metal, like the swords they had beaten on shields at Aleppo as they eagerly awaited the infidel attack. Heats of Hel now too, and charge of lightning, and a rank stench emanating from everything – incendiarized exudations of a thousand charnel-houses and cess-pits, worse than the scourings of sickrooms or the foulest fewmets of the wickedest wolf. As Hugh bit back vomit, and fought a desperate urge to flee, vast and sweaty steams swirled down and cloaked the crest in cerements of dread.

Bayard was twitching and whickering, with staring eyes and shining flanks, terrified but still true – true like a steed of ancient times, this wonderful warhorse of the Norman world, the finest mount between England and Jerusalem. Hugh stroked him to soothe, stroked Hildegard’s cloth, and wondered how the world would be for their boy.

Athelstan was now alongside, for the first time ever unsure, eyes huge as Hugh’s, and as affrighted. “Sire, you see…?” But he recalled his duty, and place, and was handing Hugh his lance as the breathlessly boiling and mire-bespattered hound-handlers caught up, their frothing and straining charges only just held in check.

“The dogs, sire?” panted the almost expiring huntsman, as the maddened hounds reared up to claw the air.

“Unleash them!” Hugh somehow said, swallowing down his soul.

The slipped alaunts bounded away berserkers, frothing to be first to find, and rend, leaving their handlers rolling helpless on the ground.

Startlingly in that same second, the priest miraculously materialized, a pale rider on wings of storm, unnaturally upright and even in that moment faintly risible – shouting indistinguishable oaths as he incredibly overtook them all, holding on with one hand while waving the Cross, chasing the hounds towards the crest behind which lay certain death. With the hounds Godspeed melted into the monster’s mists, and vanished from view.

“He’s drunk!” shouted Athelstan, amazed.

“He’s full of spirit all right!” Hugh joked grimly – his last joke – and gritting his teeth and gripping the lance with his gauntlet, with a tremendous shout he spurred Bayard up the slope.  

All images: Derek Turner