by Dan Davis
“There is no time,” I said. “The French are there. You can see them, my lord, with your own eyes.”
“A handful of scouts, nothing more. There is time.” He turned from me and took position on the road, as did his knights and the other mounted men until there were perhaps three hundred of them.
It was then that I realised just how mad I had been in making war as a commoner, without any significant official position. It was true that every decade it became more difficult to buy my way into the nobility and yet I could have done it, had Stephen and Eva prepared my lineages properly beforehand. And yet in my arrogance I had thought my natural leadership qualities would overcome all social distinction during battle. Men would follow me, that had proved true enough, but lords would not step aside for me. How could I have been so utterly foolish? The coming disaster was Talbot’s making but it was mine also. Mine even more so, for I should have known better.
“Where’s the rest of the bloody army?” Walt cried. “What are they doing?”
“They are coming back, there, do you see? Banners and pennants above the hedgerow, coming this way.”
“Make ready!” the cry went up all along the line and my heart sank.
French men-at-arms appeared in their dozens and formed up, until they were hundreds.
Joan the Maiden was at the rear, her great white banner with the fleur-de-lys and the angels held aloft like a beacon, drawing in ever more French warriors, desperate to fight for the Maiden of Orléans and so for God. I understood then why the French were so revitalised. What it was that had possessed them. It was not simply courage and a new belief that they could win against us, finally. Joan had filled the French with the zeal of a holy war and they were become weapons of God to drive out the heretical English invader once and for all. Our presence upon French soil was sacrilege that would be cleansed only with our blood.
Our archers were halfway down the hill and spread out in no formation at all and almost none had planted their stakes in the ground to deter attack.
It took just a few moments for the hundreds of French to become a thousand and then so many that I lost count. Among them, I recalled later when it had meaning for me, was the black and gold banner of Gilles de Rais. Indeed, it was he who was commanding the forces of the vanguard and urging them on with great passion.
I could see what was going to happen. We all could.
“Shoot!” I called to the archers. “Get arrows into them. Shoot, now.”
It was a mad hope perhaps but I thought we could scare them away by showing we were waiting in the woods, coming out of the trees to shoot at them. But the French knights saw English archers scattered and unprepared and nothing was going to turn them from such a thing. It was the kind of thing a mounted soldier lived for. Something dreamed about but hardly realised.
They came at us in a great mass of horse and steel, with lances and axes and swords. Our archers shot what arrows they could but they were so many that they ran right over the scattered archers, cutting them down with such ease. I saw Old Simon amongst them, raging even as they hacked him to pieces. Around me, the archers cried out in anger at the sight of their brothers down on the road being so destroyed but still they turned and filed away through the trees.
“Stop, wait. Keep shooting!” I shouted. Walt and Rob attempted to stop them but they knew the battle was lost, even before I did.
“Fastolf has come,” Rob said, pointing with his bow down to the road. “A counter charge could hold them.”
When Fastolf and his mass of knights instead turned and fled, it was as though I saw England dying. Where were the great men of the past who would have ridden to their deaths? For glory, even if nothing else?
“All is lost, Richard,” Rob said.
“There must be something…” I muttered.
“It’s over, sir,” Walt cried. “It’s over.”
Before I pulled back through the trees with the archers, I saw Talbot and his knights riding hard, northward. Away from the battle. Away from the dying archers Talbot had sent to their deaths with his idiotic command. Talbot rode on by the rest of our army, who were spread out along the road coming to relieve archers who had already fallen, and Fastolf rode with him, escaping with their lives but leaving their honour trampled in the dirt.
The French vanguard slaughtered our archers and continued on until they smashed into our main force who were not deployed. It was not two armies fighting but knights against men. It was not battle but murder and Englishmen died in their thousands as we fled from the slaughter and were picked off one by one.
Out of our army of five thousand, we lost more than two thousand that day. Most of them were our archers. The French lost almost no one.
Fastolf escaped all the way back to Paris but Talbot was captured. Talbot actually had the gall to accuse Fastolf of deserting his comrades in the face of the enemy, a charge which he pursued vigorously once he had negotiated his release from French captivity. Fastolf hotly denied the charge and was eventually cleared of the charge by a special chapter of the Order of the Garter but everyone knew the truth. Every soldier of England. His name will forever be tainted, as rightly it should. Talbot, though deserves as much blame as anyone. But so do I. It was in my power to make myself a lord and so lead an army to victory but instead I was playing at being a soldier and it cost those brave men their lives and ultimately it cost England the throne of France.
The destruction of our army and the loss of veteran commanders had immediate and terrible consequences for our strategic and political position in France. It was a loss from which we would never recover. We were disorganised and frightened and over the following weeks the French swiftly regained swathes of territory to the south, east and north of Paris, filled with an energy that they had not possessed for a hundred years.
The French marched to Reims and there the Dauphin was crowned as King Charles VII of France on 17 July.
We knew the country so well and had been routiers and bandits for long that we slipped through the worst of it and smashed through the rest, until we made it back to Paris. We brought thirty-four archers with us, as well as a few pages and servants. It was a measly number and half of what we started with but those men were forever grateful to me for getting them home. So grateful that they stuck with us when we set out to fight the enemy once more. This time, I was determined to defeat the one who was responsible for the disaster.
I swore that I would find and kill Joan the Maiden.
17. Gilles’ Confession
October 1440
Stephen arranged it so that I was let into Gilles’ chambers in the dark of the night. We were able to lean on enough people to gain access but it was far from officially sanctioned and Stephen kept watch from the other side of the chamber door while I went in. He seemed convinced that we would be discovered and rousted out at any moment.
“Are you going to kill him?” Stephen had asked a dozen times on the way to his quarters.
“No, no, certainly not,” I said. “Most probably.”
Stephen grabbed my arm. “We shall have to flee immediately if you do.”
“I will restrain myself.” After I spoke, I pulled away my arm away.
“Why do this at all, then? Merely to satisfy your curiosity? You risk spoiling the entire trial.”
What could I say? That I wished to face the man who had defeated us on the battlefield? That I also needed to understand what had turned him into the monster that he was and whether such a degeneration was something that might lie in store for me or for my men?
“I simply must, that is all. I must.”
When I closed the door behind me and stepped within, I was still not certain if I would do the deed. A murdered Gilles would leave the bereaved families without the sense that justice had been done. There would be many who would say he had been innocent of the charges and where would that leave the people? I would have to kill Poitou and Henriet, also, although I was dearly looking forward to that.
But I was so curious. I wanted to speak to him and find out why. To find out what he knew of William.
Perhaps these were excuses I told myself while yet knowing deep down that I was there to cut out his heart and feed it to him.
He stood across the other side of the room, watching me enter. An imposing figure in his own hall and in the courtroom, seeing him standing close made his stature and bearing even more impressive. Broad at the shoulder, tall, and slim, he looked like a man of immense strength and also gracefulness. Dressed in black velvet with silver embroidery, he looked like a starry night or a pot of black ink spilled across a desk reflecting candlelight. His hair was as black as the midnight outside the window.
“So,” he said, holding his palms out by his side. “You have come at last.” His voice was level and self-assured.
“How do you know me?” I asked him.
He raised one eyebrow and peered at my face. “Do you not know me, sir?” he replied. “You do not recognise me?”
“Certainly, I do. But I do not know from where. Or from when. Was it long ago?”
His shoulders slumped. “Long enough. As for where, why, it was here.”
“Nantes?”
He seemed disappointed. “I suppose you have lived so long and done so much that it was an event of little significance to you. But it was near Tiffauges, a little less than a hundred years ago. Even then, I was the lord of Tiffauges, having taken it from another. But the castle was smaller then, and the lands about a little different. There is a hill, now bare and wind blasted and cropped close by the sheep but once the place was covered by a woodland. It was there where you ambushed me and my men. I called myself Charles de Coussey. You were looking for a knight who fought under a black banner. One of us.”
“By God, I think I do recall it. I lost most of my company.” That was the battle where Rob had been almost killed before I turned him and the other survivors into immortals.
“I very nearly defeated you,” he said, smiling. “Though, you killed my horse and put your heel through my face. I had never known strength like yours and it terrified me, certain that all my efforts were to be undone. But I played the mortal and told you what you wanted to know about and you ransomed me back to my men, thank God. I knew at once who you were. You are my lord’s evil brother, who he had warned me about so many years before.”
“Your lord? Your lord is William,” I said. “He told you that I was evil?” I scoffed at the audacity of it. “And William turned you into an immortal and he commanded you to become powerful and rich and to wait for his return.”
“Just so,” he said. “I was nothing when he found me, nothing. Not even a knight. My father was a carpenter, though I always liked to fight and I knew I would be a soldier one day. And then my lord found me and raised me up.”
“Well, I must say that you have done well to raise yourself up. Another generation or two and you might have made yourself into a duke and one day even a king.”
His lip trembled. “It was a long road from my beginnings to here.”
“My brother chose you well, that much is clear. You have done remarkably well and to have done it alone, without others like you to help you. But then you went mad. You began murdering children, and delighting in their deaths, and practising perversions upon them.”
He took a shaky breath. “Yes.”
“Why?” I asked him. “Why have you done this?”
“You ask why?” he said. “My lord promised to return but it has been two hundred years! He has abandoned us, sir. It is clear that he meant never to return. And so what was I to do with my wealth? With my power? I was ready ten years ago, twenty. But now I know that it will never be. All that effort wasted. All the deaths, for nothing.”
“But why the children, man?”
He shrugged. “Surely, you know the power in the blood of a child? It is powerful and pure. It gives us great strength, greater than a grown man can give. You have felt it.”
“I have not felt it, nor will I ever.”
“You pretend to some great morality? You, who are the incarnation of evil, like my master, your brother? Surely, you know that you are no different to me. How many have you murdered in your life? Hundreds? Thousands? There is no greater killer in all the days since Adam was thrown from the Garden than you, sir, and you look down on me for taking the lives of a few worthless peasant children?”
“Your evil will soon be ended. The lords of this land have finally done their duty to end you, and so they will.”
He tilted his head, a small frown on his face. “The lords of this land are doing their duty? But, what on earth do you mean, sir?”
I scoffed. “The Bishop of Nantes has pushed for this investigation. And the Duke of Brittany also. The people could do nothing and that was what you counted on in order to carry out such an evil campaign of horror but your betters have done their duty.”
Gilles’ smile grew until he laughed. “You are more ancient and more powerful than I will ever be and yet you have a strange innocence about you. A guilelessness like that of a child… no, not quite. Not in all things. Only where lords and princes are concerned. It is a failing one sees in men cursed by noble birth such as yourself where you believe that the nobility are at their heart good and decent and virtuous yet the common man is base and petty and sinful. Well, let me tell you that I have been both commoner and noble and I see that there is no difference between the two.”
“Utter nonsense,” I said. “You are quite mad.”
“Why, then, has our Duke acted to stage this trial now, sir? Why has his cousin the Bishop of Nantes acted on his behalf now?”
“Because I gathered the necessary evidence,” I said, feeling uncertain.
“Indeed? And this could not have been done in the years gone by?”
“Why then?” I said, sharply.
“I am the vassal of Duke Jean of Brittany. And if I should be convicted of a capital crime, why, all my earthly property will become his. All of my castles, manors, my mills, villages, my libraries, and all my possessions. You should have no doubt that his first cousin and dear friend the Bishop will receive a considerable fraction of the total.”
“You ascribe base motivations to those who are doing no more than their duty,” I said. “You speak as though you are an innocent man being persecuted instead of a monster being dealt justice. I had hoped that there would be some secret to be revealed but now I see that you are nothing. For all your achievements, for all the wealth and power you hoarded, you are an empty vessel and when you are gone nothing will be different except that the children of these lands will be safe, finally.”
He snorted. “You are nothing like your brother. He was wise beyond measure and learned in the arts and poetry and history and in the faith. A demon in human form and evil to his core, yes, but he was wise as God Himself. Yet you know nothing at all. You think these children will be safe, now, when I am gone? What world is it that you are from, sir? Do you believe that we live in Heaven already or do you understand that the earth we walk upon is already Hell itself?”
“You speak so lightly of Hell but soon you will go there. Perhaps you will meet that poor girl you sent there by your actions, the poor mad girl Joan of Lorraine, who you used for your earthly gain only to abandon and then see sent to the eternal flames when she burned at the stake.”
He whipped around, eyes bulging, and he roared in my face. “Do not speak of her!”
Every inch of him shook as he stood with his fists raised. He was undoubtedly strong after so many years drinking vast amounts of blood every day and perhaps he was even stronger than I was. Still, he resisted attacking me and I resisted striking him.
Letting out a growl, he turned back and stalked away with his fists clenched at his sides.
“I will speak of what I like,” I said, though I said it softly. “And I may even have you tortured so that you would speak the truth to me about her.”
That brought him about again with fear in h
is eyes. Fear of the pain? Or of something else? The pain was enough, God knows.
“I will not have her good name sullied by doubters such as you.”
“Her good name?” I said, incredulous. “She was burned as a heretic, sir, and she has no good name.”
It seemed for a long moment that he was going to assault me after all but something passed behind his eyes and a forced casualness descended over him. “Even you must know her trial was a nonsense. An assassination by legal means.”
“Must I? What about it was a nonsense?”
“Everything about it, from start to finish. It was theatre, played to convince the masses that her brilliance was not only over but that it had always been false. I am astonished that you lack the wit to see that.”
“Why do you not convince me?”
He shrugged, suddenly affecting a lack of interest and turning away. “I have no need to convince you. Believe what you will, it is no concern of mine. Let us speak of it no longer.”
“I know all about what happened,” I said. Although I was guessing, I could not imagine it any other way. “What truly happened with you and Joan.”
“Oh?” he said, warily, half turning and pausing where he stood.
“You discovered her, did you not? Knowing of the prophecy about a maiden from Lorraine who would save the kingdom of France, you found a girl who would act the part. You engineered the theatrics of her appearance. And then, when you were done with her, you cast her aside and she burned for it.”
He turned slowly and gazed at me, his eyes narrowing twinkling dark in reflected lamplight. Then he snorted. “Yes, yes,” he said. “That is it. How insightful you are.”
His manner was profoundly irritating. Childish, almost. It was enough to make me want to throttle him. “Tell me the truth, then.”
He wafted a hand in the air. “The truth? You would not believe it.”
“Do you not understand that you will face the Inquisition, Gilles? Whatever you are doing with your attempts at delay, they have failed. The King is not coming to save you. We have had word from the King’s agents. You are abandoned. There will be no reprieve. All that remains is to have you put to the Question and there we will get the truth of your crimes from you.”
