Peck did not land so much as he was spat from the mouth of a cannon.
One heartbeat he had been sitting against the cold quarry tiles of John Harrison’s kitchen as Doctor Maskelyne’s soldiers lunged across the smashed crockery; the next, the blinding white light burst like a soap bubble and pitched him face-first into wet, trampled turf. He lay winded for several seconds, his cheek pressed into mud that smelled of crushed bracken, wood-ash, and fresh blood. Above him, the sky was no longer the predawn black of Bloomsbury, but a low, curdled grey streaked with greasy smoke. And the noise—God in heaven, the noise—was like nothing he had ever heard on the streets of London: a deafening roar of iron hammering on splintered oak, war-horns braying across a valley, the screams of disembowelled horses, and thousands of men bellowing in two guttural, clashing tongues.
Slipping the heavy gold watch instinctively into the deep inner pocket of his woollen waistcoat, Peck scrambled onto his elbows and looked wildly around.
He was near the crest of a long, gorse-choked ridge. Twenty paces in front of him stood a solid wall of bearded warriors packed shoulder to shoulder behind overlapping round shields painted with wyverns and crosses, their long-handled axes rising and falling in a red mist. Below the slope, waves of mail-clad horsemen under fluttering silk pennons were surging up the churned mud, wheeling and charging again at the unbroken line.
Peck had read enough tattered chapbooks at the Post Office to recognise knights and chainmail, yet his mind refused to accept what his eyes reported.
‘Up, you idle whelp!’ a voice bellowed above the din, followed immediately by the flat of a spear-butt thudding against Peck’s shoulder- blade.
A burly Saxon archer with a leather bracer strapped to his forearm and blood matted in his braided beard towered over him. In the chaos of the rear ranks, he clearly took Peck’s soot-stained breeches and collarless shirt for the garb of a terrified Sussex peasant drafted from the fyrd to carry baggage.
‘Get off your knees!’ the archer roared, pointing down at three wicker baskets bristling with grey-goose shafts. ‘My quiver’s dry! Fetch the bundles from the panniers and pass them to my right hand, two at a time, or I’ll spit you myself!’
Too petrified to explain that he belonged in Red Lion Square seven hundred years hence, Peck scrambled to the baskets, pulled out a handful of broad-head arrows, and crouched trembling behind the archer’s heel.
For twenty minutes that felt like twenty years, Peck existed in a waking nightmare. Each time the big Saxon’s calloused hand dropped back, Peck slapped two fresh shafts into his palm. All around them along the ridge, men were dying in the mud. Near the centre of the line, less than thirty yards to Peck’s left, stood a tall nobleman of commanding presence in a gilded helm beneath two great banners—one wrought with a golden dragon, the other with the figure of a fighting man. Even through the sweat and mire, Peck could see that this was the king holding the ridge together by sheer force of will.
Below them on the slope, the Norman trumpets sounded another advance. A dense cloud of enemy archers stepped forward ahead of the cavalry and loosed a high, arching volley into the sky.
‘Shields up!’ someone screamed along the crest.
Peck ducked his head between his knees as the sky darkened and a hail of iron-tipped shafts hissed down into the turf.
Beside him, there was a wet, choking sound—like an axe driven into a ripe melon.
Peck looked up to see his archer topple backward into the mud, a black- feathered Norman shaft buried to the fletching in his throat. His long yew bow tumbled from his slack fingers and splashed into a puddle across Peck’s boots.
‘Pick it up!’ howled a housecarl beside them, his face a mask of sweat and fury beneath his nasal-helm as he kicked the bow against Peck’s shins. ‘The bastards are coming up the ditch! Pick up the bow and loose when the captain cries!’
‘I—I don’t know how!’ Peck stammered, his teeth chattering so hard he could scarcely form the words.
‘You notch the string, you pull to your ear, and you loose into the press!’ the housecarl snarled, turning back to lock his shield into the wall. With trembling hands, Peck lifted the dead man’s longbow from the mud. It was nearly six feet of seasoned yew, heavy and unyielding as an iron crowbar. Inside his waistcoat pocket, against his ribs, the H6 gave a sudden, sharp throb—a low, singing vibration that seemed to hum in sympathy with the approaching thunder of hooves.
Peck fumbled a grey-goose arrow from the dead archer’s belt and notched it awkwardly onto the hemp string.
‘Draw!’ the captain of the sector shrieked over the clamour.
Peck braced his left arm and hauled back on the string with every ounce of strength in his thirteen-year-old body. He had spent his life carrying letters and filing tiny brass watch-cogs; he had no more business drawing a seventy-pound war-bow than flying over the moon. Before he had pulled the shaft halfway to his chin, his thin shoulders began to spasm. The taut hemp bit into his raw fingers like red-hot wire.
‘Loose!’
As Peck tried to aim down the hill toward the charging Norman horsemen, his left wrist buckled under the terrible strain of the yew stave. The bow twisted violently sideways in his grasp just as the string tore free of his blistered fingertips.
Instead of flying down the slope toward the enemy, the arrow whipped diagonally upward along the Saxon crest.
A sudden, freakish gust of salt wind off the English Channel caught the grey-goose feathers at the apex of its clumsy arc, bending its flight twenty yards to the left toward the royal standard.
Peck stood frozen, the empty bow dangling from his numb hand, watching in horror as the stray shaft curved down out of the smoke.
Beneath the banner of the Fighting Man, King Harold II had just pushed up his helm to shout a command to his housecarls.
The arrow struck true—not into a Norman saddle, but straight into the right eye of the King of England.
For one dreadful heartbeat, the entire ridge seemed to draw breath. The tall figure beneath the standard staggered, both hands flying to the wooden shaft protruding from his brow, and then crumpled to his knees in the churned mud.
A wail of sheer, animal grief tore along the Saxon line: ‘The King is down! Harold is slain!’
The shield wall did not merely falter; it broke apart like a dam giving way before a flood.
Peck dropped the yew bow into the mire, staring down at his bleeding, blistered fingers as the first Norman knights crested the ridge and began hacking through the rout. A cold sickness rose in his throat. He had not changed history; in his blind, clumsy terror, he had made it. The most famous arrow in the chronicles of England had been loosed by a clockmaker’s boy from Red Lion Square who did not even know how to hold a bow.
As a mailed horseman bore down upon the banner-pole ten paces away, Peck turned on his heel and fled with the shattered remnants of the Saxon army into the dark trees of the Weald.
