1356

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘Might not?’

  ‘The churchmen have come up with terms. We pay the bastard French a fortune, give them hostages, return all the land we’ve conquered, and promise to behave ourselves for the next seven years. The prince has agreed.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Thomas said quietly.

  ‘I doubt he has anything to do with it. And if the French agree to the church’s proposal? Then tomorrow we give them hostages and slink away.’ He sounded disgusted. ‘And you’re one of the hostages.’

  ‘Me!’

  ‘Your name’s on the list.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Thomas said again.

  ‘So why would the French want you?’

  ‘Cardinal Bessières wants me,’ Thomas said. ‘I killed his brother.’ This was not the time to talk of la Malice, and the killing of the cardinal’s brother was explanation enough.

  ‘His brother?’

  ‘An arrow. Bastard deserved it too.’

  ‘He was a churchman?’

  ‘God no, a rogue.’

  Sir Reginald chuckled. ‘Then my advice, Sir Thomas, is to ride away from here if the truce is declared.’

  ‘And how will I know?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘Seven trumpet calls. Long blasts, seven of them. That means there’ll be no battle, just humiliation.’

  Thomas thought about the last word. ‘Why?’ he finally asked.

  He sensed that Sir Reginald shrugged. ‘If we fight,’ the older man said, ‘we’d probably lose. We think they might have ten thousand men, so we’re badly outnumbered, we’re exhausted, there’s no food and the damned French have plenty of everything. So if we fight we condemn a lot of good Englishmen and loyal Gascons to death, and the prince doesn’t want that on his conscience. He’s a good man. Too easily distracted by ladies, perhaps, but who’d blame a man for that?’

  Thomas smiled. ‘I knew one of his ladies.’

  ‘You did?’ Sir Reginald sounded surprised. ‘Which one? God knows there are enough.’

  ‘She was called Jeanette. The Countess of Armorica.’

  ‘You knew her?’ The surprise was still there.

  ‘I often wonder what happened to her.’

  ‘She died, God rest her soul,’ Sir Reginald said bleakly, ‘she and her son both. The pestilence.’

  ‘Dear God,’ Thomas said, and made the sign of the cross.

  ‘How did you know her?’

  ‘I helped her,’ Thomas said vaguely.

  ‘I remember now! There was talk that she escaped Brittany with an English archer. That was you?’

  ‘Long time ago now,’ Thomas said evasively.

  ‘She was a beauty,’ Sir Reginald said wistfully. He was silent for a moment and when he spoke again his voice was brusque. ‘One of two things will happen tomorrow, Sir Thomas. One, you hear seven blasts on the trumpet and if you’ve any sense you mount up and ride like hell to escape the cardinal. And two? The French decide they win more by fighting us, which means they’ll attack. And if that happens I want the baggage over the river. The damned French usually take hours to ready for a battle so we’ve a chance to slip away before they know it. And to escape we need this ford. You’ll have help if there’s going to be fighting, but you know as well as I do that nothing goes to plan in a battle.’

  ‘We’ll hold the ford,’ Thomas said.

  ‘And I’ll ask Father Richard to come here before dawn,’ Sir Reginald said, going back to his horse.

  ‘Father Richard?’

  There was the creak of leather as Sir Reginald climbed back into the saddle. ‘He’s one of the Earl of Warwick’s chaplains. You’ll want to hear mass, won’t you?’

  ‘If there’s a fight, yes,’ Thomas said, then helped Sir Reginald find his stirrups. ‘What do you think will happen in the morning?’

  Sir Reginald’s horse stamped on the track. The rider was a dark shadow against a dark sky. ‘I think we’ll surrender,’ Sir Reginald said bleakly. ‘God help me, but that’s what I think.’ He turned the horse and rode towards the hill.

  ‘You can see your way, Sir Reginald?’ Thomas called.

  ‘The horse can. One of us must have some sense.’ He clicked his tongue and the horse’s pace quickened.

  It seemed the night would never end. Darkness was complete, and with it came the sense of doom that darkness brings. The river ran loud over the shallow ford. ‘You should try to sleep,’ Genevieve said, surprising Thomas. She had waded the ford to join him on the northern bank.

  ‘You too.’

  ‘I brought you this,’ she said.

  Thomas held out his hand and felt the familiar heft of his bow. A yew bow, tall as a man, the stave thick in the centre and straight as an arrow. It felt smooth. ‘You waxed it?’ he asked.

  ‘Sam gave me the last of his wool fat.’

  Thomas ran his hand up the stave. At its thick centre, where the arrow rested before the cord sent it on death’s mission, he could feel the little silver plate. It was incised with a yale holding a cup, the badge of the disgraced Vexille family, his family. Would God punish him for casting the Grail into the cold sea? ‘You must be frozen,’ he said.

  ‘I pulled up my skirts,’ she said, ‘and the ford isn’t deep.’ She sat beside him and rested her head on his shoulder. For a time neither spoke, but just stared into the night. ‘So what happens tomorrow?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s today,’ Thomas said bleakly. ‘And it depends on the French. Either they accept the church’s terms or they decide they can do better by beating us. And if they do accept, we ride south.’ He did not tell her that his name was on a list of men who must be surrendered as hostages. ‘I want you to make certain the horses are saddled. Keane will help you. They have to be ready before dawn. And if you hear seven trumpet calls then we go. We go fast.’

  He felt her head nod. ‘And if the trumpet doesn’t call?’ she asked.

  ‘Then the French will come to kill us.’

  ‘How many are there?’

  Thomas shrugged. ‘Sir Reginald thinks they have about ten thousand men? No one really knows. Maybe more, maybe fewer. A lot.’

  ‘And we have?’

  ‘Two thousand archers and four thousand men-at-arms.’

  Genevieve was silent and he supposed she was thinking about the disparity in numbers. ‘Bertille is praying,’ she said.

  ‘I suppose lots of people are praying.’

  ‘She’s kneeling by the cross,’ Genevieve said.

  ‘Cross?’

  ‘Beyond the cottage, at the crossroads, there’s a crucifix. She says she’ll stay all night and pray for her husband’s death. Do you think God listens to prayers like that?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think God is weary of us.’

  ‘Labrouillade won’t fight in the front rank,’ Thomas said. ‘He’ll make sure other men are in front of him. And if things go badly he’ll just surrender. He’s too rich to kill.’ He stroked her face, feeling the leather patch she wore across her injured eye. She was blind in that eye, and it had gone milky white. He told her it did not disfigure her and he believed that, but she did not. He hugged her close.

  ‘I wish you were too rich to kill,’ she said.

  ‘I am,’ Thomas said with a smile. ‘They could ransom me for a fortune, but they won’t.’

  ‘The cardinal?’

  ‘He doesn’t forgive or forget. He wants to burn me alive.’

  Genevieve wanted to tell him to be careful, but that was as much a waste of words as Bertille’s prayers at the roadside cross. ‘What do you think will happen?’ she asked instead.

  ‘I think we’ll hear the trumpet sound seven times,’ Thomas said.

  And then he would ride south as if all the fiends of hell were at his heels.

  King Jean and his two sons knelt to receive the wafer that was Christ’s body. ‘In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,’ the Bishop of Châlons intoned. ‘And may Saint Denis guard you and keep you and bring you to the victory that God wills.’
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  ‘Amen,’ the king grunted.

  Prince Charles, the dauphin, stood and went to a window. He pulled open a shutter. ‘It’s still dark,’ he said.

  ‘Not for long,’ the Earl of Douglas said, ‘I hear the first birds.’

  ‘Let me go back to the prince.’ Cardinal Talleyrand spoke from the room’s edge.

  ‘To what purpose?’ King Jean asked, annoyed that the cardinal had not called him ‘sire’ or ‘Your Majesty’.

  ‘To offer them a truce while the terms are clarified.’

  ‘The terms are clear,’ the king said, ‘and I am not inclined to accept them.’

  ‘You proposed the terms, sire,’ Talleyrand said respectfully.

  ‘And they accepted them too easily. That suggests they’re frightened. That they have cause to be frightened.’

  ‘With respect, sire,’ Marshal Arnoul d’Audrehem intervened. He was fifty, wise in war, and wary of the archers in the enemy army. ‘Every day they linger on that hilltop, sire, weakens them. Every day increases their fear.’

  ‘They’re frightened and weak now,’ Jean de Clermont, the second marshal of the French army, said. ‘They’re sheep to be slaughtered.’ He sneered at his fellow marshal. ‘You’re just afraid of them.’

  ‘If we fight,’ d’Audrehem said, ‘you’ll be staring at my horse’s arse.’

  ‘Enough!’ King Jean snapped. Men feared his notorious temper and fell silent. The king frowned at a servant who carried a pile of jupons over his arm. ‘How many?’

  ‘Seventeen, sire.’

  ‘Give them to men in the Order of the Star.’ He turned and looked at the window where the faintest light showed in the east. The king already wore a jupon of blue cloth decorated with golden fleurs-de-lys, and the seventeen coats the servant carried were identical. If there was to be a battle then let the enemy be confused as to who was the king, and the men in the Order of the Star were among the greatest fighters of France. It was King Jean’s own order of chivalry, an answer to England’s Order of the Garter, and today the Knights of the Star would protect their monarch. ‘If the English are stupid enough to accept a few days more on the hilltop, so be it,’ he told Talleyrand.

  ‘So I may extend the truce?’ the cardinal asked.

  ‘See what they say,’ the king said and waved Talleyrand away. ‘If they beg for time,’ he told the men remaining in the room, ‘it means they’re scared.’

  ‘Scared men are easily beaten,’ Marshal Clermont observed.

  ‘Oh, we’ll beat them,’ King Jean said, and felt a flutter of nervousness about the decision he had made.

  ‘So we fight, sire?’ the Lord of Douglas asked. He was confused as to whether the king really meant to fight or extend the truce. All the men in the room had been awake half the night as armourers clad them in leather, mail and steel, and now the king was again flirting with the idea of a truce?

  The king frowned at the question. He paused. He shifted his weight and scratched at his nose, then reluctantly nodded. ‘We fight,’ he said.

  ‘Thank God,’ Clermont muttered.

  The Lord of Douglas went to one knee. ‘Then with your permission, sire, I would ride with Marshal d’Audrehem.’

  ‘You?’ The king sounded surprised. ‘You’re the one who told me to fight on foot!’

  ‘I shall indeed fight on foot, sire, and take pleasure in beating your enemies into bloody pulp, but I would ride with the marshal first.’

  ‘So be it,’ the king allowed. The French feared the enemy archers and so they had assembled five hundred knights whose horses were elaborately armoured, heavy with mail, plate, and leather. Those great destriers, protected from arrows, would charge the archers on the English flanks, and when the horsemen had scattered the bowmen and beaten them down with axes, swords and lances, the rest of the army would advance on foot. ‘When the archers are dead you will join Prince Charles,’ the king commanded Douglas.

  ‘I am honoured, sire, and I thank you.’

  The dauphin Charles, just eighteen years old, would command the first battle of French men-at-arms. Their job was to advance up the long slope and crash into the English and Gascon knights and slaughter them. The king’s brother, the Duke of Orléans, commanded the second line, while the king himself, along with his youngest son, would lead the rearmost troops. Three great battles, led by princes and a king, would assault the English, and they would attack on foot because horses, unless they were armoured like men, were too vulnerable to arrows.

  ‘Order all lances to be shortened,’ the king commanded. Men on foot could not wield long lances, so they must be cut down to manageable lengths. ‘And to your battles, gentlemen.’

  The French were ready. The banners were flying. The king was armoured in the best steel Milan could make. It had taken four hours to clad the king in plate steel, each piece first blessed by the Bishop of Châlons before the armourers buckled, strapped or tied the item comfortably. His legs were protected by cuisses, by greaves, and by roundels over his knees, while his boots had scales of overlapping steel. He wore strips of steel fixed to a leather skirt, above which were his breast- and backplates, which were buckled tightly over a mail coat. Espaliers covered his shoulders, vambraces and rerebraces his arms, while his hands were in gauntlets that, like the boots, had scales of steel. His helmet had a snouted visor and was circled by a crown of gold, and over his body was a surcoat blazoned with the golden fleur-de-lys of France. The oriflamme was ready; the French were ready. This was a day to go into history, the day that France cut down its enemies.

  The Lord of Douglas knelt for the bishop’s blessing. The Scotsman was still nervous that the king might change his mind, but he dared not ask questions in case those very queries made Jean cautious. Yet what Douglas did not know was that the king had received a sign from heaven. During the night, as the armourers had fussed and measured and tightened, the Cardinal Bessières had come to the king. He had dropped to his knees, grunting with the effort, and then looked up at the king. ‘Your Majesty,’ he had said, and offered with both hands a rusty, feeble-looking blade.

  ‘You’re giving me a peasant weapon, Your Eminence?’ the king had said, irritated that the fat cardinal had interrupted his preparations. ‘Or do you want me to reap some barley?’ he asked because the crude sword, its blade broader at its tip than at the base, looked like a grotesquely lengthened hay knife.

  ‘It is the sword of Saint Peter, Your Majesty,’ the cardinal had said, ‘given into our hands by the providence of God to ensure your great victory.’

  The king had looked startled, then disbelieving, but the earnestness with which Bessières had spoken was reassuring. He had reached out and touched la Malice nervously, then held his finger on the pitted blade. ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘I am sure, Majesty. The monks of Saint Junien were given guard of it, and they delivered it to us as a sign from God.’

  ‘It has been missing these many years,’ the Bishop of Châlons had said reverently, then knelt to the relic and kissed the pitted blade.

  ‘So it is real?’ the king had asked, amazed.

  ‘It is real,’ Bessières had replied, ‘and God has sent it to you. This is the sword that protected our Saviour and the man who possesses this sword cannot know defeat.’

  ‘Then God and Saint Denis be praised,’ the king had said, and he had taken the sword from the cardinal and touched it to his lips. The cardinal had watched, hiding his pleasure. The sword would bring victory, and victory would raise King Jean to be the mightiest monarch of Christendom, and when the Pope died the King of France would add his persuasion to the men who would advocate Bessières’s candidacy for the throne of Saint Peter. The king closed his eyes momentarily and kissed the blade a second time before returning it to the cardinal’s gloved hands.

  ‘With Your Highness’s permission,’ the cardinal had said, ‘I shall give this holy blade to a deserving champion so he can cut down your enemies.’

  ‘You have my permission,’ t
he king had said. ‘Give it to a man who will use it well!’ His voice was firm because the sight of the blade had given him a new confidence. He had been wanting a sign, some hint that God would grant France a victory, and now he had that sign. Victory was his. God had decreed it.

  Yet now, as dawn edged the world, the king felt his old doubts return. Was it wise to fight? The English prince had accepted humiliating terms, so perhaps France should impose those terms? Yet victory would yield much greater riches. Victory would bring glory as well as treasure. The king made the sign of the cross and told himself that God would prosper France this day. He had confessed his sins, he had been forgiven, and he had been sent a sign from heaven. Today, he thought, Crécy will be avenged.

  ‘What if the cardinal arranges a truce, sire?’ d’Audrehem interrupted his thoughts.

  ‘The cardinal can fart for all I care,’ King Jean said.

  Because he had made his choice. The English were trapped, and he would slaughter them.

  He led the way from the house into a world made grey by the day’s first wolfish light. He put an arm around the shoulder of his youngest son, the fourteen-year-old Philippe. ‘Today, my son, you will fight at my side,’ he said. The boy had been equipped like his father, head to toe in steel. ‘And today, my son, you will see God and Saint Denis shower glory upon France.’ The king lifted his arms so an armourer could strap a great sword’s belt about his waist. A squire held a war axe with a haft decorated with golden hoops, while a groom led a handsome grey stallion that the king now mounted. He would fight on foot like his men, but at this moment, as the dawn promised a bright new day, it was important that men should see their king. He pushed up his helmet’s visor, then drew his polished sword and held it high above his blue-plumed helmet. ‘Advance the banners,’ he ordered, ‘and unfurl the oriflamme.’

  Because France was going to fight.

  The Prince of Wales, like the King of France, had spent most of the night being armoured. His men had spent it in their lines, beneath their banners. They had been drawn up in battle order for twenty-four hours, and now, in the dawn, they grumbled because they were thirsty, hungry, and uncomfortable. They knew a battle had been unlikely the previous day; it had been a Sunday and the churchmen had proclaimed a Truce of God, though still they had waited in line in case the treacherous enemy broke the truce, but now it was Monday. Rumours flickered through the army. The French numbered twelve thousand, fifteen thousand, twenty thousand. The prince had surrendered them to the French, or the prince had arranged a truce, but despite the rumours there were no orders to relax their vigilance. They waited in line, all but those who went back to the woods to empty their bowels. They watched the skyline to the north and west, looking for an enemy, but it was dark and unmoving there.