1356

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘Build an ark, sire.’

  ‘And fill it with what? Women? Two by two? Now that is a beguiling notion! Two girls with golden hair, two with black, and a pair of redheads for variety?’

  ‘They’ll prove better company than animals, sire.’

  ‘You know that from experience?’

  The men laughed. Men always laugh at the jests of princes, but this laughter was genuine enough because Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, Earl of Chester and lord of Lord knew how many other territories, was a genial, easygoing and generous young man. He was tall and would have attracted the eyes of women even if he had not been heir to the throne of England and, according to the lawyers and lords who served his father, heir to the throne of France too. King Jean II disputed that, naturally enough, but the pursuit of that claim was why the English army was in France. The prince’s coat-of-arms was the royal coat, showing the three golden lions of England quartered with the fleur-de-lys of France, above which was a silver bar with three pendant labels indicating that he was the eldest son of the king, though the prince himself preferred to carry a shield painted black on which his three feathers glowed alabaster white.

  The prince looked moodily at the sky. ‘Goddamned rain,’ he said.

  ‘It must stop soon, sire.’

  The prince made no answer to that comment, but stared between the twin oak trees that stood like sentinels at the tent’s entrance. The city of Tours was barely visible because of the heavy rain. The place did not look formidable. True, the Cité was well enough protected with towers and heavy stone walls, but the bourg, which was surely where much of the city’s wealth lay, was low-lying and ringed only by a shallow ditch and by a wooden wall that was broken in many places. The prince’s troops, hardened by war,

  could cross that barrier in their sleep, except that the River Loire had overflowed its banks, and Tours was now protected by flooded fields, by farmland turned to marsh, and by thick mud. ‘Goddamned rain,’ the prince said again, and God answered with a peal of thunder so sudden and loud that every man in the tent flinched. A jagged sky-splitting lance of lightning slid down to the low hill on which the tent stood, making everything stark white and black for an instant, then a second crash of thunder echoed across the sky and, though it had seemed that it could not rain any harder, the intensity of the downpour was doubled. Rain bounced off the muddy ground, poured off the tent and made streams on the hill. ‘Jesus,’ the prince said, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!’

  ‘Saint Martin has his ear, sire,’ one of his companions remarked.

  ‘Saint Martin?’

  ‘Patron saint of Tours, sire.’

  ‘Did he drown to death?’

  ‘I believe he died in his bed, sire, but I’m not sure.’

  ‘The bloody man bloody deserved to bloody drown if he sent this bloody rain.’

  A horseman appeared at the foot of the hill. His horse was draped in a cloth showing a badge, but the cloth was so wet that the device could not be distinguished. The horse’s mane lay flat on its neck, dripping water. Its hooves slopped through the mud while the rider, who was wearing a mail hood beneath a bascinet, slumped in the saddle. He kicked the reluctant beast up the shallow slope and squinted towards the tent. ‘Is His Majesty there?’

  ‘That’s me!’ Edward called. ‘No, no, don’t dismount!’ The man had been about to get out of the saddle to kneel to the prince, but instead he just bowed. Rain bounced off his helmet.

  ‘I was sent to tell Your Majesty that we’re going to try again,’ the messenger shouted. He was only five paces away, but the rain was too loud for a normal voice.

  ‘You’re going to swim to the damned place?’ the prince called and waved to show he wanted no answer. ‘Tell him I’ll come!’ he shouted, then turned back into the tent and snapped his fingers towards a servant who waited in the shadows. ‘A cloak! A hat! Horse!’

  Another crash of thunder deafened the world. Lightning stabbed onto the ruined church of Saint Lidoire, the remnants of which had been pulled apart to provide stone to repair the Cité’s walls. ‘Sire,’ one of the men at the gaming table called, ‘you needn’t go!’

  ‘If they’re attacking then they need to see me!’

  ‘You’ve no armour, sire!’

  The prince ignored that, lifting his arms so a servant could attach the sword scabbard to the silver chains hanging from the belt. Another servant swathed Edward in a thick black cloak. ‘Not that one,’ the prince said, pushing the cloak away, ‘the red one! The one with gold fringes!’

  ‘The dye will run, sire.’

  ‘Damn the dye, they must see me. The red one! They need to recognise my pretty face. Give me that hat, the small one. Is a horse ready?’

  ‘Always, sire,’ a servant said.

  ‘Which horse is it?’

  ‘Foudre, sire.’

  The prince laughed. ‘That’s bloody apt, eh? Foudre!’ Foudre was the French for lightning, and the prince, like his entourage, preferred to speak in French. It was only when he needed to speak with the common soldiers that he used English. He ran into the rain, cursing as he slipped on the wet grass. He steadied himself by grabbing the groom holding Foudre. ‘Help me up!’ He was already soaked through. ‘I’ll want dry clothes when I get back!’ he called to a servant inside the tent, then tugged on the reins.

  ‘Wait!’ someone shouted, but the prince was already spurring away, squinting because the rain was lashing into his eyes. The wind had risen, thrashing wet branches, and Foudre shied away from a low, heavy-leaved oak bough that shook in the gale. Lightning ripped across the sky, revealing the limestone bluffs beyond the river with a sudden brilliant white light and was followed a few seconds later by a crash of thunder that sounded as if the towers of heaven were collapsing.

  ‘You’re an idiot, sire!’ Another horseman had caught up with the prince, who was laughing.

  ‘I’m a wet idiot!’

  ‘We can’t attack in this!’

  ‘Maybe that’s what the bloody enemy thinks?’

  The prince’s horse pounded across a waterlogged meadow towards a stand of willows where a mass of mailed men looked dark in the day’s gloom. The river was just beyond them, its wide surface made turbulent by the incessant rain. To the prince’s left, closest to the feeble defences of the bourg, but separated from them by a wide stretch of half-flooded marsh, were archers. They were wading north towards the town, but the prince noted none of them was drawing bows and loosing arrows. ‘Sir Bartholomew!’ he called as he ducked under a willow branch.

  ‘Bloody strings are wet,’ Sir Bartholomew Burghersh said without looking at him. He was a stocky, dark-faced man a little older than the prince, and a man noted for his violent hatred of all things French, except possibly for their wine, gold, and women. ‘Bloody strings are sopping wet. Might as well spit at the bastards rather than loose arrows. Let’s go!’

  The mass of mailed men-at-arms trudged north behind the archers, who, because their bowstrings were soaked, could not shoot at anything near to their usual range. ‘Why are the bowmen out there?’ the prince called.

  ‘A fellow slipped into our lines and said the bastards had pulled back into the Cité,’ Burghersh said. His men-at-arms, all on foot and carrying shields, swords and axes, were struggling through the soggy ground and into the face of the rain-drenched gale. The wind was so strong that it was making waves on the flood water; there were even whitecaps. The prince spurred behind the men-at-arms, staring into the tempest and wondering if it could be true that the enemy had abandoned the bourg. He hoped so. His army was bivouacked on what higher ground they could find. A few lucky men had cottages or hovels for shelter, a handful possessed tents, but most had to put together a shelter from branches, leaves, and turf. The bourg could shelter all his men till this wretched weather relented.

  Sir Bartholomew, mounted on a fine destrier, rode alongside the prince. ‘Some of the bows will shoot, sire,’ he said, somewhat nervously.

  �
��Are you sure of your fellow? The one who said the bastards had fled?’

  ‘He seemed very certain, sire. He claimed the Count of Poitou ordered every defender into the Cité.’

  ‘So the puppy Charles is here, is he?’ the prince said. Charles was the eighteen-year-old dauphin, heir to King Jean of France. ‘The boy made a quick march from Bourges, didn’t he? And he’s just going to let us take the town?’ The prince peered through the rain. ‘His banners are still on the wall,’ he added dubiously. The feeble defences of the bourg were hung with banners, though it was hard to distinguish what they displayed because the rain had smeared the dyes in the cloth, but there were saints and fleurs-de-lys, and the presence of the flags suggested the defenders were still behind their palisade.

  ‘They want us to think they’re still in the bourg, sire,’ Burghersh said.

  ‘And I want this town,’ the prince said.

  He had led six thousand men out of Gascony, and they had burned towns, captured castles, razed farms, and slaughtered livestock. They had captured noble prisoners whose ransoms would defray half the cost of the war, indeed they had taken so much plunder that the men could not carry all they had stolen. From the treasury at Saint-Benoît-du-Sault alone they had taken no less than fourteen thousand golden écus, each worth three English silver shillings. Over two thousand pounds in good French gold! They had met almost no resistance. The great castle at Romorantin had held out for a couple of days, but when the fire arrows of the prince’s archers had succeeded in setting fire to the roof of the great keep, the garrison had stumbled out, escaping the falling rafters that were collapsing in spectacular gouts of flame. A priest in the prince’s household reckoned the army had covered two hundred and fifty miles so far, and it had been two hundred and fifty miles of plunder and destruction and pillage and killing, two hundred and fifty miles of impoverishing the French and showing that England could march with impunity throughout the enemy’s land.

  Yet the prince knew his army was small. He had led six thousand men for two hundred and fifty miles, and now he was in the very centre of France, and France could assemble thousands of men to oppose him. Rumour said the King of France was gathering an army, but where, and how large, the prince did not know. But of one thing he could be certain: the army of King Jean would be larger than his army, and the reason he wanted Tours so badly was that this was the route by which he could join the smaller force of the Earl of Lancaster. Lancaster had marched out of Brittany to lay waste a swathe of land in northern France, and was now said to be coming south, hoping to join the prince, while the prince was working his way northwards, but to join Lancaster he needed to cross the Loire, and to cross the Loire he needed the bridge, and to take the bridge he needed to capture Tours. If the prince could join Lancaster he would command enough men to keep going north towards Paris, to ravage the enemy’s heartland and take on the French royal army, but if he could not cross the river then he would have no choice but to retreat.

  The archers edged their way through the swamp. The rain seethed and the wind drove the water in quick wavelets. One man drew his bow and loosed an arrow at the bourg’s wooden palisade, but the bow’s string had been weakened by the rain and the arrow fell well short. ‘Don’t waste your bloody sticks!’ a ventenar, a man who led a score of archers, called angrily. ‘Wait till you can kill a bloody Frenchman.’

  ‘If there are any to kill,’ Burghersh said. No enemy showed on the bourg’s feeble defences. ‘Maybe the bastards really have gone?’ he added hopefully.

  ‘But why would he abandon the bourg?’ the prince asked.

  ‘Because he’s an idiot, sire?’ Burghersh suggested.

  ‘I’ve heard the dauphin’s ugly,’ the Prince said, ‘but no fool.’

  ‘Whereas you, sire?’ his other companion suggested, and Burghersh looked astonished at such insolence, but the prince laughed, enjoying the jest.

  Some of the archers were using their bows as staffs, probing for firmer ground or else just balancing themselves. And still no enemy showed. One group of archers, closest to the river, found a strip of higher land that gave firm footing and they ran towards the pathetic wall beyond which were the rich houses and fat churches of Tours’s bourg. Other archers moved towards the same drier ground, and the men-at-arms, struggling through the floods and mud, followed them till there was a crowd of men on the slightly higher and drier land.

  And the crossbows shot.

  Dozens of crossbows, kept dry because their archers were in the upper floors of houses close to the wall. The bolts slashed through the rain, and the first archers were being thrown backwards by the force of the missiles. A couple of men tried to reply with their long war bows, but the damp strings had stretched and the arrows fell feebly short of the wooden wall that suddenly bristled with men holding axes, swords, and spears.

  ‘Jesus,’ the prince cursed.

  ‘Another fifty paces,’ Burghersh said, meaning that in another fifty yards his archers would be able to shoot into the bourg, but the crossbows were spitting quarrels too fast. The prince saw a man struck in the face, saw the blood misting sudden and almost immediately washed out of the air by the rain as the man fell back and splashed into the flood with a short black bolt protruding from an eye.

  ‘Call them back,’ the prince commanded.

  ‘But …’

  ‘Call them back!’

  Burghersh shouted an order at his trumpeter who sounded the retreat. The wind and rain were loud, but not loud enough to drown the jeers of the defenders.

  ‘Sire! You’re too close!’ the prince’s companion insisted. He was Jean de Grailly, the Captal de Buch, a Gascon who had followed the prince from his lavish tent. ‘You’re too close, sire!’

  ‘There are four hundred men closer than I am,’ Edward said.

  ‘You’re wearing a red cloak, sire. It’s called a target.’ The captal spurred his own horse next to the prince’s. ‘Bastards,’ he spat. He was as young as the prince, a black-browed young man with intense dark eyes and, despite his youth, he had a formidable reputation as a leader of men. He had brought his own followers out of Gascony, all of them wearing his badge of five silver scallop shells on a black cross displayed against a field of gold. His horse wore the badge, and his cloak was striped black and yellow, making him as prominent a target as the prince. ‘If a bolt hits you, sire,’ he said, but did not finish the sentence because a bolt hissed close to his face, forcing him into an involuntary flinch.

  Prince Edward was watching the archers and men-at-arms struggle back through the watery mud. ‘Sir Bartholomew!’ he called to Burghersh, who had ridden a few paces closer to the wading men.

  ‘Sire?’

  ‘The bastard who told you they’d retreated. Where is he?’

  ‘At my quarters, sire.’

  ‘Hang him. Hang him slowly. Make it very slow.’

  A crossbow bolt struck the marshland just in front of Foudre and tumbled in a spray of water past the horse’s hooves. Two more missiles came close, but still the prince would not move. ‘They can’t see me running away,’ he told the captal.

  ‘Better to run away than die, sire.’

  ‘Not always,’ the prince said. ‘Reputation, my lord, reputation.’

  ‘Being dead before your time isn’t the way to great reputation,’ the captal said.

  ‘My time isn’t now,’ the prince said. ‘I had my fortune told in Argenton.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘A filthy crone, she was, but folk said she sees the future. She smelled like a cesspit.’

  ‘And what did she say?’

  ‘She said I was destined for marvellous things,’ the prince said.

  ‘Did she know you were the Prince of Wales, sire?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Then she’d hardly say you were going to die in a mucky rainstorm a week later, would she? The better the fortune they give the better you pay them. And I’ll wager you were generous?’

  ‘I think I was, yes.
’

  ‘And most likely one of your courtiers told the crone what to say. Did she say you’d be lucky in love?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘That’s an easy prophecy to give a prince. A prince can look like a toad and they’ll still spread their legs.’

  ‘God is indeed good,’ the prince said happily. Scarlet dye was leaking from his hat and making faint trickles on his face so that he looked as if he was bleeding.

  ‘Come away, sire,’ the captal pleaded.

  ‘In a moment, my lord,’ the prince said. He was determined to wait until the last Englishman or Welshman had retreated past his horse.

  A crossbowman on the upper floor of a leather-worker’s house that lay close to the southern gate had seen the two horsemen’s rich cloaks. He wound the handles of his weapon, drawing the cord back inch by slow inch, tensioning the wood and metal bow that creaked as it took the enormous strain of the thick cord. He felt the cord click over the pawl that held it, then searched through his bolts to find one that looked sharp and clean. He laid it in the groove, then rested the weapon on the casement sill. He sighted it. He noted that the wind was gusting hard from left to right and so he edged the weapon slightly leftwards. He put the stock against his shoulder, took a breath and felt for the trigger with his right hand. He waited. The horsemen were not moving. The foot soldiers were fleeing, some were falling as the bolts struck through leather or mail to pierce bone and flesh, but the crossbowman ignored them. He sighted on the red cloak again, raised his aim very slightly to allow for the missile’s fall, steadied himself, held his breath, and pulled the trigger. The crossbow thumped into his shoulder as the bolt sped away, a black streak in the torrential silver rain.