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the rail, all crying, ‘A Locksley! A Locksley!’ to identify ourselves, fearful the cavalry in the madness of their victory would cut us down too.
    I saw Miles, bare-headed, his long fair hair flying out behind him, clatter past on a pure white stallion, his lance-point red and glistening. He set himself at a big fellow, wounded in the leg, who was limping away through the northern gateway, just yards from quitting the bridge. Miles’s lance dipped and he plunged it into the running man’s back with a cry of triumph, the force of the blow lifting the man in the air, his feet kicking ludicrously as he tried to run.
    In the middle of the bridge, the knights were cutting down the last of the enemy, those too slow or too fearful to trust themselves to the river. Screams for mercy, hands waving in a vain attempt to ward off the chopping blades. Horses reared and plunged, their hooves shattering skulls and limbs and sinking into a writhing carpet of bodies. In the flickering light of the
conroi
’s torch bearers, the bridge seemed littered with dying men, the whole area drenched with blood, as if vast barrels of gore had been poured on to it. A man gashed by many swords slipped over the rail and splashed down below. The last enemy to escape.
    The bridgewas still ours. In the dark water below it, I could hear the slosh of oars and the panicked shouts of men, and on the fringes of the light the shapes of small boats, the rowers straining to carry themselves away as swiftly as they could.
    Then I smelled it, a choking acrid taste in the back of my mouth, and the first thin tendrils of smoke leaking upwards through the cracks between the blood-soaked planks, snaking over the bodies of the dead. Now a trickle but within a dozen heartbeats a stream, then thick grey plumes appearing from both sides of the bridge. An orange glow from underneath, like walking past the mouth of a forge.
    ‘Fire!’ I shouted. ‘They have fired the bridge!’

Chapter Five
    Twodays later, early morning in October, grey and dismal, and my lord and I were playing chess in the grand hall of the keep of Rochester Castle using one of the slim windows on the northern side to light the board.
    ‘We won, didn’t we?’ I said to Robin. ‘We beat them off. The cavalry destroyed at least half of them. The victory honours must go to us, surely?’
    ‘Depends what you mean by victory,’ said Robin. ‘If you look out that window, you can see that they achieved exactly what they set out to do. King John charged them with destroying the bridge, cutting us off from aid from London, and it is destroyed.’
    I glanced out of the narrow arch and saw that what he said was true. Where the bridge – the only practical crossing of the Medway for fifteen miles – had once stood was now a large expanse of brown water, with two charred gatehouses and the skeletons of a dozen blackened rowing boats littering both muddy banks.
    ‘
That
was a victory for King John, I would say. But
this
one is mine,’ said Robin, moving his queen and trapping my lonely king behind a wall of three pawns. ‘Checkmate, I believe.’
    I lookedat the board dumbfounded. I hated playing this stupid, dry-as-dust game with him. Mainly because he beat me almost every time.
    As Robin began to reset the pieces, I said: ‘So you think we are now beyond help from London?’
    ‘The destruction of the bridge has certainly made it harder for aid to reach us,’ he said. ‘But it’s not impossible. If Fitzwalter is determined enough he could ford an army at a couple of places upstream. And if he could commandeer enough small boats …’
    Lord Fitzwalter, our leader, captain-general of the Army of God, had ridden across the burning bridge with a pair of his knights almost immediately after the enemy had been cleared by his charge. He had paused only to confer with Robin, who had wisely pulled his archers off the bridge just before the cavalry charge.
    ‘If I am going to go, I must go now,’