The Soldier’s Stand (Lord’s Learning Book 2)

…Good fortune ran with him, through open fields where crops stood tall or had been trampled down and the ragged edges of battle turned straw and grain from gold to red. The soldiers he ran past must have seen him, but were too focused on their own flight or fighting to pay heed to him.
Running as fast as his legs could, he was not far from the trees when he stumbled over something and measured his full length in the spoiled crops. The fall took the breath from his lungs and left him dazed. As he gathered himself he saw it was a pole that had tripped him. But then he realised there was fabric there too, bright fabric. The embroidered face of a blue lion with its tongue out looked back at him from amidst a scattering of red hearts. Someone groaned and he finally realised that this was a flag and the man who had been carrying it was partly under the folds of cloth.
Jorrit was half way back to his feet when a hand gripped his wrist, tight as a vice, pulling him down. The wounded man beneath the flag had rolled on his side. He was bleeding profusely from a cut to his chest, and one leg was at an angle it should never naturally achieve. But for all that, his grip was steel and he had a knife in the hand not holding Jorrit’s wrist. Off balance and gripped as he was, Jorrit knew the knife could be in his side before he could pull free.
“What is the word?”
The man who held him had hair the colour of the ripened grain that was all around them and his eyes were bluer than the bright sky above them. Though he spoke German there was a marked lilt to his accent.
“For God and King Christian.”  As he spoke, Jorrit hoped that God was feeling kind that day and he had not chosen wrongly.
The fallen man moved then, faster than Jorrit would have thought he might from all the blood on his body, looping the cords attached to the fabric over Jorrit’s head and shoulders, pulling them tight.
“Take it. Take it, keep it safe and don’t let the enemy have it.”
Jorrit staggered to his feet arms full of the heavy folded cloth and the dying man shoved Jorrit so hard as he did so that he almost fell over again.
“Løb dreng, løb! Run, boy,” the soldier snarled.
Jorrit staggered and ran, ran as fast as before but his arms were now full of fabric. The pounding of hooves separated from the noise of battle and there were suddenly cavalry going full pelt up the field where he had been. Glancing back he saw them running right over the fallen soldier, the riders’ faces white and desperate, bent only on escape. Behind them, he saw there was another mass of horses pursuing them. Jorrit kept running, hoping the soldiers would be too busy with each other to bother with him.
Slowed by the cloth he still carried, he struggled with it briefly trying to cast it away. But the loops the dying soldier had put over him were too tight, and unless he stopped to try and untangle or cut them, he was not going to free himself. And there was no time to stop even for that.
As he fought with the flag, there was a shout from some of the horsemen and he started running again, still not free of the thing, but it was now partly unfolded, huge and trailing like a cloak in his wake. He was yards from the shelter of the forest, but before he could reach the sanctuary offered by the trees, there were cavalrymen all around him.

He glanced up just as a sword sliced down…