After their volley, the gunners were supposed to rapidly retire behind the pikewall to reload, if they had time, but these remained in place. If the Scots had been observing at close range, they would have seen each gunner draw back his serpentine, carefully turn the big, heavy iron cylinder affixed within the breech of his weapon, and shove it forward to fit tightly into the tapered rear of the barrel. After thumbing back the cover of a small pan at the rear of the cylinder and glancing down to make sure that it still was filled with priming powder, each gunner blew on his match, took aim, and fired.
By the time the seventh volley had been fired, and gunners and assistants were cooperating in fitting another iron cylinder to each arquebus, hundreds of clansmen were down, still or kicking and screaming, and most of the initial impetus of the advance had been lost. Justly renowned for their courage and tenacity, the Highlanders did continue the advance, but considerably more slowly. And this gave the gunners time to pour seven more withering volleys into the oncoming foe.
Even with their losses, however, the Scots still were far more numerous than the English right and, when it was obvious that they would vastly overlap and be able to flank the English formation, Foster’s dragoons, reinforced with three troops of lancers, were ordered to charge.
Holding the lances back for the nonce, Foster led his dragoons against the left flank of the yelling mob. They poured in a single pistol volley, then retired, reformed with the lancers, and charged in a triangular, spearpoint formation that cleaved through the motley throng like a hot knife through butter. Then they turned, regrouped and rode through again . .. and again, and yet again.
For the extent of those long, busy minutes, Foster could never after recall much more than a terrible, jumbled kaleidoscope of faces twisted in bloodlust or agony; hairy, sinewy
arms; and a vast assortment of weapons, their points and edges all seeking his flesh and blood.
He rode with Bruiser’s loose reins clenched between his teeth, his superposed two-barreled horsepistol (cut down by Pete Fletcher from one of the two Browning over-under shotguns which had been part of Webster’s load) in his left hand, his long, flashing Tara-steel sword in his right A superbly trained destrier, the big, spotted horse was perfectly tractable when the smells of powder and blood were in his wide-flared nostrils and acres of manflesh awaited his square, yellow teeth and steel-shod hooves.
Foster remembered confronting a tall, slender man, probably a chief, as he was mounted on a bay cobby and wore a rust-spotted chain-mail hauberk. The foeman’s head and face were hidden from view by a flat-topped barrel-helm that probably dated from the thirteenth century. Both horses reared, and Foster fenced briefly with the Scot around and over Bruiser’s muscle-bulging neck, until the stallion’s savage ferocity and superior weight brought the small, ponylike horse crashing onto its back, the mailed rider beneath it.
Another mounted man loomed over the press of infantry ahead. His mount was bigger but his armor was just as ancient and sketchy—jazeran and dogfaced basinet with a two-hand claidheamh, five feet in the blade. Instantly aware that he could never effectively parry a full-force blow from that twenty-pound sword, Foster used his last pistol charge to shoot the huge, stocky man out of his old saddle, then had to hack and slash his way through the press of berserk clansmen.
A wolf spear was thrust at him; he grasped the crossbar and Jerked the wielder close enough to drive his dripping sword-point into a bulging, red-rimmed eye, while Bruiser’s lashing hooves caved in chests and cracked skulls. The sharp-edged Tara sword cut through pikeshafts and the arms that powered them, sliced through straining muscles and took hirsute heads from off hunched shoulders. The arm that impelled that sword was become a single, whitehot agony with the unceasing impacts, but when he sensed his battered command once more clear, he hastily grouped them after a fashion and once more hurled them and himself at the foe.
But this time opposition was scant and sketchy. Those front-rank Scots still able to crawl or hobble were in full retreat from the serried formation of red-dripping Welsh pikes. A few of the clansmen behind pressed forward, but most— bereft by Foster’s squadron of a large proportion of their chiefs—milled in aimless confusion, the berserkers striking out blindly at anyone who moved, and frequently being cut down by fellow clansmen simply as a matter of self-protection.