1356

by Bernard Cornwell

  It was a simple thing. A stave of yew, a little longer than the height of a man and preferably cut from one of the lands close to the Mediterranean. The bowyer would take the stave and shape it, keeping the dense heartwood on one side and the springy sapwood on the other, and he would paint it to keep the moisture trapped in the stave, then nock it with two tips of horn that held the cord, which was woven from fibres of hemp. Some archers liked to add strands of their woman’s hair to the cord, claiming that it stopped the strings from breaking, but Thomas, in twelve years of fighting, had found no difference. The cord was whipped where the arrow rested on the string, and that was the war bow. A peasant’s weapon of yew, hemp and horn, shooting an arrow made from ash, hornbeam or birch, tipped with a steel point and fledged with feathers taken from the wing of a goose, and always taken from the same wing so that the feathers curved in the same direction.

  The war bow was cheap and it was lethal. Brother Michael was not a weak man, but he could not draw a bow’s cord more than a hand’s breadth, but Thomas’s archers hauled the string back to their ears and did it sixteen or seventeen times a minute. They had muscles like steel, humps of muscle on their backs, broad chests, thick arms, and the bow was useless without the muscles. Any man could shoot a crossbow, and a good crossbow outranged the yew bow, but it cost a hundred times as much to manufacture and it took five times longer to reload, and, while the crossbowman was winding the ratchet to haul back his cord, the English archer would close the range and shoot a half-dozen points. It was the English and the Welsh archers who had the muscle, and they began training as children, just as Hugh, Thomas’s son, was training now. He had a small bow and his father expected him to shoot three hundred arrows a day. He must shoot and shoot and shoot until he no longer had to think about where the arrow would go, but would simply loose in the knowledge that the arrow would speed where he intended, and every day the muscle grew until, in ten years’ time, Hugh would be ready to stand in the archers’ line and loose goose-feathered death from a great war bow.

  Thomas had thirty archers at the edge of the wood and in the first half-minute they launched more than one hundred and fifty arrows, and it was not war, but massacre. An arrow could pierce chain mail at two hundred paces, but none of the Count of Labrouillade’s men were wearing armour or carrying shields, all of which they had loaded onto packhorses. Some of the men had leather coats, but all had taken off their heavy plate or mail, and so the arrows slashed into them, wounding men and horses, driving them to instant chaos. The crossbowmen were on foot and a long way behind the count’s horsemen, and anyway they were cumbered with their sacks of plunder. It would take minutes for them to ready for battle, and Thomas did not give them the minutes. Instead, as the arrows plunged into the screaming horses and fallen riders, Thomas led his twenty-two men-at-arms out of the woods onto the count’s flank.

  Thomas’s men were mounted on destriers, the great stallions that could carry the weight of man, armour and weapons. They had not brought lances, for those weapons were heavy and would have slowed their march; instead they drew their swords or wielded axes and maces. Many carried a shield on which the black-barred badge of le Bâtard was painted, and Thomas, once they were out of the trees, turned the line to face the enemy and swung his sword blade down as a signal to advance.

  They trotted forward, knee to knee. Rocks studded the high grassland and the line would divide around them, then rejoin. The men were in mail. Some had added pieces of plate armour, a breastplate or perhaps an espalier to protect the shoulders, and all wore bascinets, the simple open-faced helmet that let a man see in battle. The arrows continued to fall. Some of the count’s horsemen were trying to escape, wrenching their reins to ride back northwards, but the thrashing of the wounded horses obstructed them and they could see the black line of Hellequin men-at-arms coming from the side, and some, in desperation, hauled out their swords. A handful broke clear and raced back towards the northern woods where the crossbowmen might be found, while another handful gathered around their lord, the count, who had one arrow in his thigh despite Thomas’s orders that the count was not to be killed. ‘A dead man can’t pay his debts,’ Thomas had said, ‘so shoot anyone else, but make certain Labrouillade lives.’ Now the count was trying to turn his horse, but his weight was too great and the horse was wounded, and he could not turn, and then the Hellequin spurred into the canter, the swords were lowered to the lunge position, and the arrows stopped.

  The archers stopped for fear of hitting their own horsemen, then discarded their bows and pulled out swords and ran to join the killing as the men-at-arms struck.

  The sound of the charge striking home was like butchers’ cleavers hitting carcasses. Men screamed. Some threw down swords and held their hands out in mute surrender. Thomas, not as comfortable on horseback as he was with a bow, had his lunge deflected by a sword. He crashed past the man, backswung his blade that hammered harmlessly against leather, then swept it forward into a man’s red hair. That man went down, spilling from his saddle, and the Hellequin were turning, coming back to finish the enemy. A rider wearing a black hat plumed with long white feathers lunged a sword at Thomas’s belly. The blade slid off his mail, and Thomas brought his sword back in a wild swing that sliced into the man’s face just as Arnaldus, one of the Gascons in the Hellequin, speared the man’s spine with another sword. The count’s rider was making a high-pitched keening sound, shaking uncontrollably, blood pouring from his shattered face. He let his sword drop, and Arnaldus speared him again. He fell slowly sideways. An archer seized the reins of the man’s horse. The dying man was the last to offer any resistance. The count’s men had been taken by surprise, they had fought an unequal skirmish against men in armour whose lives were spent fighting, and the struggle was over in seconds. A dozen of the count’s men escaped, the rest were dead or prisoners, and the count himself was captured. ‘Archers!’ Thomas shouted. ‘Bows!’ Their job would be to watch the northern woods in case the crossbowmen had fight in them, though Thomas doubted any would want to fight after their lord was captured. A dozen archers collected arrows, cutting them out of dead and wounded horses, picking them from the ground and filling their arrow bags. The prisoners were herded to one side and made to yield their weapons as Thomas walked his horse to where the wounded count lay on the turf. ‘My lord,’ he greeted him, ‘you owe me money.’

  ‘You were paid!’ the count blustered.

  ‘Sam,’ Thomas called to the archer, ‘if his lordship argues with me you can fill him with arrows.’ He spoke in French, which Sam understood, and the bowman put an arrow on his string and offered the count a happy grin.

  ‘My lord,’ Thomas said again, ‘you owe me money.’

  ‘You could have pleaded your case,’ Labrouillade said.

  ‘Pleaded? Argued? Wrangled? Delayed? Why should I let your lawyers weave spells?’ Thomas shook his head. ‘Where are the genoins you took from Paville?’

  The count thought of claiming that the coins were still at Villon’s castle, but the archer had his string half drawn and le Bâtard’s face was implacable, and so the count reluctantly told the truth. ‘They are in Labrouillade.’

  ‘Then you will send one of your men-at-arms to Labrouillade,’ Thomas said courteously, ‘with orders that the money is to be brought here. And when it is, my lord, we shall let you go.’

  ‘Let me go?’ The count was surprised.

  ‘What use are you to me?’ Thomas asked. ‘It would take months to raise your ransom, my lord, and in those years you’d consume a greater value than the ransom in food. No, I shall let you go. And now, my lord, when you have sent for the coins you might permit my men to take that arrow from your thigh?’

  A man-at-arms was summoned from the prisoners, given a captured horse and sent south with his message. Thomas then called Brother Michael. ‘You know how to take arrows out of flesh?’

  The young monk looked alarmed. ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Then watch as Sam does it. You can learn.
’

  ‘I don’t want to learn,’ Brother Michael blurted out, then looked abashed.

  ‘You don’t want to learn?’

  ‘I don’t like medicine,’ the monk confessed, ‘but my abbot insisted.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Thomas asked.

  Michael looked confused. ‘To serve God?’ he suggested.

  ‘Then serve him by learning how to extract arrows,’ Thomas said.

  ‘You’d better hope it’s a bodkin,’ Sam told the count cheerfully. ‘It’s going to hurt either way, but I can get a bodkin out in an eyeblink. If it’s a flesh arrow I’ll have to cut the bastard out. Are you ready?’

  ‘Bodkin?’ the count asked faintly. Sam had spoken in English, but the count had half understood.

  Sam produced two arrows from his bag. One had a long slender head without barbs. ‘A bodkin, my lord, made for slipping through armour.’ He tapped it with the second arrow that had a barbed triangular head. ‘A flesh arrow,’ he said. He drew a short knife from his belt. ‘Won’t take a moment. Are you ready?’

  ‘My own physician will treat me!’ the count shouted at Thomas.

  ‘If you wish, my lord,’ Thomas said. ‘Sam? Cut the shaft off, bind him up.’

  The count yelped as the arrow was cut. Thomas rode away, going to where the Lord of Villon lay in his cart. The man was curled up, naked and bloody. Thomas dismounted, tied his horse to the shafts and called Villon’s name. The count did not move and Thomas clambered into the wagon, turned the man over, and saw he had died. There was enough congealed blood in the cart to fill a pair of buckets, and Thomas grimaced as he jumped down, then wiped his boots on the pale grass before going to the caged cart where the Countess Bertille watched him with wide eyes. ‘The Lord of Villon is dead,’ Thomas said.

  ‘Why didn’t you kill the Lord of Labrouillade?’ she asked, jerking her head towards her husband.

  ‘I don’t kill a man for owing me money,’ Thomas said, ‘but only for refusing to pay it.’ He drew his sword and used it to snap the feeble lock of the cage door, then held out his hand to help the countess down to the grass. ‘Your husband,’ he said, ‘will be free to go soon. You also, my lady.’

  ‘I’m not going with him!’ she said defiantly. She stalked to where the count lay on the grass. ‘He can sleep with the pigs,’ she said, pointing to the two carcasses on top of the cage, ‘he won’t know the difference.’

  The count tried to get to his feet to slap his wife, but Sam was binding his wound with a strip of linen torn from a corpse’s shirt and he yanked the linen tightly so that the count yelped with pain again. ‘Sorry, my lord,’ Sam said. ‘Just stay still, sire, won’t be but a moment.’

  The countess spat at him and walked away.

  ‘Bring the bitch here!’ the count shouted.

  The countess kept walking, clutching her torn dress to her breasts. Genevieve touched her shoulder, said something, then approached Thomas. ‘What will you do with her?’

  ‘She’s not mine to do anything with,’ Thomas said, ‘but she can’t come with us.’

  ‘Why not?’ Genevieve asked.

  ‘When we leave here,’ Thomas said, ‘we have to go to Mouthoumet. We might have to fight our way there. We can’t take useless mouths that will slow us down.’

  Genevieve smiled briefly, then gazed at the crossbowmen who were sitting at the edge of the northern woods. None of them had a weapon, instead they just watched their lord’s humiliation. ‘Your soul has hardened, Thomas,’ she said softly.

  ‘I’m a soldier.’

  ‘You were a soldier when I met you,’ Genevieve said, ‘and I was a prisoner, accused of heresy, excommunicated, condemned to death, but you took me away. What was I but a useless mouth?’

  ‘She’s trouble,’ Thomas said irritably.

  ‘And I wasn’t?’

  ‘But what will we do with her?’ he asked.

  ‘Take her away.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘From that hog of a husband,’ Genevieve said, ‘from a future in a convent? From being clawed by dried-up nuns who hate her beauty? She must do what I did. Find her future.’

  ‘Her future,’ Thomas said, ‘is to cause dissension among the men.’

  ‘Good,’ Genevieve said, ‘because men cause enough trouble for women. I’ll protect her.’

  ‘Dear God,’ Thomas said in exasperation, then turned to look at Bertille. She was, he thought, a rare beauty. His men were staring at her with undisguised longing, and he could not blame them. Men would die for a woman who looked like Bertille. Brother Michael had found a cloak rolled up behind the cantle of the count’s saddle and he shook it out, carried it to her and offered it as a covering for her torn dress. She said something to him and the young monk blushed as scarlet as the western clouds. ‘It looks,’ Thomas said, ‘as though she already has a protector.’

  ‘I will do a better job,’ Genevieve said, and she walked to the count’s horse and reached for the blood-stained gelding knife that hung by a loop from the saddle’s pommel. She crossed to the count, who flinched at the sight of the blade. He glowered at the silver-mailed woman who looked down at him with disdain. ‘Your wife will ride with us,’ Genevieve told him, ‘and if you make any attempt to take her back then I will cut you myself. I will cut you slowly and make you squeal like the pig you are.’ She spat at him and walked away.

  Another enemy, Thomas thought.

  The genoins came as dusk shaded into night. The coins were loaded on two packhorses and, once Thomas was satisfied that all the coins were there, he went back to the count. ‘I shall keep all the coins, my lord, the bad and the good. You’ve paid me twice, the second payment for the trouble you caused me today.’

  ‘I’ll kill you,’ the count said.

  ‘It was our pleasure to serve you, my lord,’ Thomas said. He mounted, then led his men and all the captured horses westwards. The first stars pricked the darkening sky. It was cold suddenly because a northern wind had blown up, bringing a hint of winter.

  And in the spring that followed, Thomas thought, there would be another war. But first he must go to Armagnac.

  And so the Hellequin rode north.

  Three

  It would have been easy enough for Fra Ferdinand to steal a horse. The Prince of Wales’s army had left their horses outside Carcassonne, and the few men guarding the animals were bored and tired. The destriers, those big horses that the men-of-arms rode, were better guarded, but the mounts of the archers were in a paddock and the Black Friar could have taken a dozen, but a lone man on a horse is noticeable, a target for bandits, and Fra Ferdinand dared not risk the loss of la Malice, and so he preferred to walk.

  It took him ten days to reach home. For a time he travelled with some merchants who had hired a dozen men-at-arms to guard their goods, but after four days they took the road south to Montpellier, and Fra Ferdinand continued northwards. One of the merchants had asked him why he carried la Malice, and the friar had shrugged the question away, ‘It’s just an old blade,’ he had said, ‘it might make a good hay knife?’

  ‘Doesn’t look like it could cut butter,’ the merchant had said, ‘you’d do better to melt it down.’

  ‘And maybe I will.’

  He had heard news on the journey, though such travellers’ tales were always unreliable. It was said that the rampaging English army had burned Narbonne and Villefranche, others said Toulouse itself had fallen. The merchants had grumbled. The English chevauchée was a tactic to destroy a country’s power, to starve the lords of taxes, to burn their mills, uproot their vines, to demolish whole towns, and the only way such a destructive force could be stopped was by another army, yet the King of France was still in the north, far away, and the Prince of Wales was running riot in the south. ‘King Jean should come here,’ one of the merchants had said, ‘and kill the English princeling, or else there’ll be no France to rule.’

  Fra Ferdinand had kept silent. The other travellers were nervous of him. He was gaunt,
stern and mysterious, though his companions were grateful that he did not preach. The Black Friars were a preaching order, destined to wander the world in poverty and encourage it to godliness, and when the merchants turned southwards they gave him money, which Fra Ferdinand suspected was in gratitude for his silence. He accepted the charity, offered the donors a blessing, and walked north alone.

  He kept to the wooded parts of the country to avoid strangers. He knew there were coredors, bandits, and routiers who would think nothing of robbing a friar. The world, he thought, had become evil, and he prayed for God’s protection and his prayers were answered because he saw no bandits and found no enemies, and late on a Tuesday evening he came to Agout, the village just south of the hills where the tower stood, and he went to the inn and there heard the news.

  The Lord of Mouthoumet was dead. He had been visited by a priest accompanied by men-at-arms, and when the priest left the Sire of Mouthoumet was dead. He was buried now, and the men-at-arms had stayed at the tower until some Englishmen had come and there had been a fight and the Englishmen had killed three of the priest’s men and the rest had run away.

  ‘Are the English still there?’

  ‘They went away too.’

  Fra Ferdinand went to the tower the next day where he found the Sire of Mouthoumet’s housekeeper, a garrulous woman who knelt for the friar’s blessing, but hardly ceased her chatter even as he gave it. She told how a priest had come, ‘He was rude!’, and then the priest had left and the men who remained behind had searched the tower and the village. ‘They were beasts,’ she said, ‘Frenchmen! But beasts! Then the English came.’ The English, she said, had worn a badge showing a strange animal holding a cup.

  ‘The Hellequin,’ Fra Ferdinand said.

  ‘Hellequin?’

  ‘It is a name they take pride in. Men should suffer for such pride.’

  ‘Amen.’