The Half-Hanged Man

by David Pilling

  “I’ve killed three of your pack, Page!” I howled, dropping the dead man and kicking him away, “now I want the pack-leader! Stop hiding behind the Raven’s skirts, you whore-keeper, you thief, you half-man!”

  I may as well have challenged the rising sun. Page was nowhere to be seen, though doubtless he was somewhere nearby, laying about him with that absurd Flemish club he favoured in battle. As instructed, Adam had retrieved my destrier, as well as his own horse. He plucked at my arm, urging me to get away from the massacre. There was nothing else to be done, so I climbed into the saddle and galloped north, making for Lancaster’s vanguard at Navarette, with the Wolves and their allies snapping at my heels.

  The Wolves pursued the remnants of my company right up to the outskirts of Lancaster’s camp, shouting “Castile!” and butchering the sentries. Fortunately, the Duke had taken greater care than I to keep watch during the night, and he and his knights were already armed when the enemy struck. Trumpets blasted through the camp as my destrier vaulted a barricade and galloped in among the tents and huts.

  English and Gascon soldiers hurried past me, following the pennons of their lords and marshals. There was little panic, and they drew up in order of battle on the fringes of the camp, the archers letting fly at the Castilians while the footmen arrayed themselves in a bristling hedge of swords and spears. Seeing they could not pierce our ranks, the enemy drew off, retreating in good order back the way they had come. A few of our knights mounted and rode after them, to tilt with individual Castilians, but the general engagement was over.

  I was left to count the cost of the ambush that had all but destroyed my company, and to endure an ear-burning rebuke from Lancaster, who condemned Felton and me for a couple of rank amateurs.

  “You blasted brigand!” he shouted, restraining himself with difficulty from striking me with his steel gauntlet, “you thriftless, selfish, amateur! I thought you were a soldier, but your true nature has become apparent this night, like dung beneath a rose-bush! You have lost over two hundred good men, and almost lost the vanguard. Where in God’s name is that other idiot, Felton?”

  I bowed my head and absorbed the deserved verbal lashing, though it was hard to accept a dressing-down from such a pup as the Duke, in front of all his officers. His mood was in no way improved a few hours later when a Gascon knight galloped into camp, bareheaded and breathless, with the news that Don Tello had encountered Felton again on their retreat south.

  “Sir William performed prodigies of valour before they brought him down, lord,” the knight said, kneeling before the Duke, “I saw him drive his lance clean through a Castilian knight, harness, body and all, and cast him dead on the ground.”

  The Duke was unimpressed by tales of Felton’s heroics. “Dead, is he?” he snarled, “at least that saves me the trouble of hanging him. What of his men?”

  The Gascon swallowed and wiped a smear of blood and grime from his face before replying. “Wiped out, lord. The survivors tried to make a stand upon a hill, but the Castilians advanced on them in a great body, with the Wolf of Burgundy at their head, and so swallowed them up. A few were made prisoners, and one or two like myself may have got away, but most died where they stood.”

  Lancaster groaned and covered his face, while his officers frowned and puffed out their cheeks and looked generally woebegone. The exception was Chandos, whom nothing could dismay, and regarded our catastrophic defeat as an opportunity.

  “Let us gather in strength, and pay back Don Tello for the losses he has inflicted on us,” he said, clapping his hands together, “the entire Castilian host is just a short ride to the south of here. When dusk falls, we should fall on them like ravening hounds, and do as much mischief as we can before withdrawing.”

  A few other knights growled their approval of this bone-headed course of action, but Lancaster held up his hand. “I will not pile up disaster on disaster,” he said firmly, “we will fall back to the main army.”

  So we retreated back across the Ebro. The prince and Lancaster were locked in discussion for six days, during which our army suffered greatly from want of provisions. We were camped in barren country and the Spanish winter gave us no respite, lashing us with strong winds, pelting rain and flurries of snow, and the price of bread among our starving soldiers rose to a florin a loaf.

  I was in disgrace, though my reputation was sufficient to make it temporary. Shunned by the other captains, I was left to scrape together the survivors of my company and nurse my grievances. The Wolf had made a sudden spring for my throat, and very nearly succeeded in tearing it out.

  “But he failed,” I said to Adam, who helped me draw up the muster roll, “and that was his last opportunity. As I promised all those years ago, the Bull will gore the Wolf.”

  Adam nodded and grinned - a horrible sight, for he has a face like an African ape.

  6.

  After six days of deliberating, during which time the Castilians made no attempt to advance and offer battle, the prince resolved to cross the Ebro with his entire host, and force the enemy to battle.

  Having failed to oppose our entry into his kingdom, King Enrique advanced to meet us at a leisurely pace until he reached the plains of Najéra, a few miles south-west of Navarette. There he made his stand with the River Najarilla at his back. Years later, Du Guesclin told me that Enrique was much swollen with arrogance after his brother’s little victories against us, and boasted that these Englishmen were all noise and fury, with no substance to their fearsome reputation.

  Chandos, that good man, had spoken privately to the prince on my behalf, assuring him of my worth. After some muted opposition from Lancaster, I was given shared command of the mounted rearguard, along with the Comte de Armagnac.

  I thanked Chandos, who dismissed my gratitude with his usual modesty. “You are a good soldier, Sir Hugh, and we will need all the good men at our disposal,” he said, “for the Castilians outnumber us severely. Our scouts report that they have three thousand heavy horse, seven thousand jinetes, twenty thousand men-at-arms, ten thousand arbalasters, and some forty to fifty thousand levies. Quite an assembly.”

  “Nothing but a rabble led by traitors, remember?” I said with a smile, “those were the words of Don Pedro, who should know his own subjects better than most.”

  Chandos grimaced in distaste. “He is still threatening to slaughter any prisoners we take, in cold blood and with his own monster-hands. I tell you, in confidence of course, this Pedro is nothing but a murderer and a tyrant. Nothing good will come of placing him back on his throne.”

  “And yet here you are, Sir John, about to fight and risk your life and honour to do just that.”

  “I do my duty, nothing more. As we all do.”

  I wasn’t so certain of that, as the army left Logrono and marched in order of battle along the road leading south-west towards Najéra. My participation had little to do with duty: I wanted revenge on the Wolf, and fat ransoms from prisoners taken in the battle to come. To that end, I cast wary glances at the royal banner of Castile fluttering alongside the prince’s standard at the head of the second division. If Don Pedro tried to lay his murderous hands on any of my captives, I was resolved to cut them off, and to hell with politics.

  We arrived before Navarette at about nine in the evening, where the prince despatched scouts to spy out the Castilian host waiting for us on the plain to the south. I remember seeing that huge and glittering array as the light faded in the west, drawn up in three lines with their backs to the river, battalion after battalion of horse and foot, dwarfing our host.

  “They could smother us with sheer numbers,” remarked Sir Thomas Percy, who commanded a division of horse on the left of the prince’s battalion. He looked nervous, so I tried to reassure him.

  “See there,” I said, pointing at the dark mass of footmen drawn up on the banks of the river, “thirty to forty thousand conscripts and peasant levies. Ill-trained, ill-equipped and unmanageable. They are no threat to us unless we break and flee,
in which they will join in the rout. So that’s half their army accounted for.”

  “There is Du Guesclin, with their best troops,” I went on, indicating the two thousand or so men-at-arms and arbalasters drawn up under the Frenchman’s banner in the front line of the Castilian host, “King Enrique will expect them to do most of the fighting for him.”

  “Captain-General du Guesclin is a valiant and shrewd fighter,” said the Comte de Armagnac, who had wandered over, chewing on a bit of bread and cheese, to listen to my wisdom, “he is the only man I fear in the enemy host.”

  I shrugged. “A good soldier, yes, but nothing to fear. I have beaten him twice in the field, and he has twice been my prisoner.”

  “What of their knights, Calveley?” asked Percy, standing up in his stirrups and peering through the gathering dark at the divisions of light and heavy horse drawn up on Du Guesclin’s flanks, “they make a fine show, but do they fight well? You’ve served in Spain before, and must know something of them.”

  I didn’t reply. I had run my eye over the rest of the Castilian host, and glimpsed the hated wolf’s-head banner among the forest of pennons in their second line, King Enrique’s own battalion. Page’s five hundred were all mounted, and part of some seven thousand horse and twenty thousand foot gathered around the royal banner and the person of the king, with detachments of arbalasters on the flanks.

  “He won’t slip away this time,” I muttered through gritted teeth, ignoring Percy and Armagnac’s quizzical looks.

  I endured a sleepless night wandering restlessly through our lines, my exhausted mind stuffed with lurid images of what I would do to Thomas Page if I met him in the field. Trumpets rang out through the darkness at regular intervals as King Enrique shuffled the dispositions of his army, thus depriving himself and his men of any rest. The infernal din also kept a great many Englishmen awake, and it was two grumbling, weary and haggard-looking hosts that broke camp at sunrise and slowly advanced towards their bloody meeting on the flat, barren plain of Najéra.

  The prince’s battalion halted on a small hill, and I saw Chandos leave the head of his contingent and ride towards Edward, holding a furled banner in his hands. He presented it to the prince, words passed between them, and then a great cheer rippled through our army as Chandos was given permission to unfurl the banner displaying his personal arms – an inverted red stake against a white field – and galloped back across the line, his lugubrious face shining with fierce pride.

  This moment of chivalrous theatre was followed by the prince’s marshals ordering the trumpets to sound, signalling the host to dismount and send our horses to the rear, save the rearguard and the divisions under Percy and the Captal de Buch. The prince raised his arms to heaven, beseeching God to give him the victory this day – I daresay King Enrique was also troubling the Almighty for assistance – and then he drew his sword and gave a great shout:

  “Advance banners, in the name of God and Saint George!”

  From my position at the rear I watched, nervously chewing my bottom lip, as the forward divisions of Lancaster and Du Guesclin advanced eagerly to meet each other. The French arbalasters on Du Guesclin’s flanks rushed forward in staggered lines, but had no time to shoot before our English and Welsh archers filled the air with the same whispering bodkin-tipped rain that had humbled the might of France on so many battlefields. The arrows fell among the hapless crossbowmen like deadly snow, carpeting the ground with their bodies and dispersing the panic-stricken survivors.

  The real butcher’s work began as the gleaming lines of men-at-arms crashed together in the middle of the plain. De Guesclin and Lancaster’s battalions were equally matched, and for the rest of the battle stood toe-to-toe, both sides refusing to give up an inch of bloody ground as they hacked and bludgeoned at each other.

  Now the trumpets screamed, and the Castilian horse moving up in support of Du Guesclin drove in their spurs and charged the mounted divisions of Percy and the Captal de Buch. The lightly-armed Castilian jinetes raced ahead of the knights, an old Spanish tactic that I recognised: the role of the jinetes was to soften up the enemy with a hail of javelins, before dispersing and allowing the heavy horse to thunder in and finish their work.

  “Fools,” I murmured, watching with folded arms as the unwary Castilians galloped into range of the bowmen flanking our horse. The grey goose feather took wing once more, plucking astonished riders from their saddles and drilling their ponies full of arrows, so they resembled hedgehogs. The jinetes went down in droves under the relentless storm, and many more died as they scattered and turned to flee.

  The arrows had little effect on the hundreds of steel-plated Castilian knights that came thundering against our flanks, making the earth quake under the hoofs of their destriers. Our knights, led by Percy and the Captal de Buch, spurred forward to encounter them, and all four divisions met with a crash that must have shaken the vaults of Hell.

  You should have seen it, Froissart. The sluggish blood in my veins courses a little faster when I bring to mind that wild, roaring tumult – the broken lances sailing through the air, the spray of hot blood, crumpling of helms and bursting of harness, mighty blows given and received, shattered bones and broken bodies, charges and counter-charges – the very stuff of war that you, silly little scrivener, cannot hope to convey the truth of with your pen.

  The tides of battle swung back and forth, and all the while I kept one eye on King Enrique’s battalion, which had yet to engage, and that accursed wolf’s-head banner. I took some comfort from the knowledge that Page couldn’t hope to escape as he had at Auray. His line of retreat was blocked by the enormous mass of Spanish foot, and behind them was the river. In his insane over-confidence, King Enrique had chosen to fight with his back to the Najarilla, and in so doing had delivered the Wolf into my hands.

  My opportunity came when Don Tello’s division suddenly collapsed, and his two thousand knights fled in all directions, hotly pursued by Percy’s men. This left a gaping hole in the right flank of the Castilian army, and King Enrique had to swiftly bring up his reserve up to plug it. Company after company rushed to fill the breach, and the Wolves were foremost among them.

  “Now’s our time,” I shouted, waving at the Comte de Armagnac to signal the advance. He hesitated, for we had received no orders from the prince, but this was no time to wait on formalities. The outcome of the battle, and my prospect of revenge, hung in the balance.

  I led my portion of the rearguard across the open ground to the right of the prince’s battalion, and surged into the first company of Castilian reinforcements as they tried to arrange into a defensive line. They were well-equipped foot with steel helms and leather jacks, glaives and axes, but demoralised and unwilling to stand against a charge of heavy horse. I skewered a sergeant in the front rank with my lance and rode over him as the men behind him scattered, yelling in fear and hurling their banners away as they ran.

  If all the Castilians had behaved in such a manner, we would have had an easy time of it, but now Enrique flung his household knights into the fray. It had started to rain heavily, sheets of water blown by strong winds across the battlefield, and a phalanx of Castilian lancers on destriers came plunging out of the murk, smashing into the front rank of my division. A lance shattered against my cuisse, almost knocking me from the saddle, but I kept my seat and slashed at the knight with my broadsword as he hurtled past, chopping an iron leaf from the chaplet encircling his basinet, but doing no other damage.

  My men held together under the Castilian charge, and soon there was a fine swirling mêlée in progress. I was surrounded by visored helms and glittering blades, men yelling and horses screaming, and glimpsed my standard bearer ahead of me, shouting and fending off two Castilians with the butt of his lance. Another Englishman rode in to help him, throwing his arms around one of the Castilians and heaving him out of the saddle with sheer brute strength, and then a fresh wave of steel and horseflesh, thrown up by the violent, shifting eddies of battle, closed over the
m and shut off my view.

  I couldn’t bear to lose my banner again, and charged into the mass of fighting men, clearing a path with the sword’s edge. A mace or similar hammered against my back-plate, sending bolts of agony shooting up my spine, and my foot slipped out of the stirrup as I leaned drunkenly in the saddle, black spots reeling before my eyes.

  Someone dragged my destrier clear of the fighting, allowing me time to recover and draw breath. I lifted my visor and saw my rescuer was Richard Fyling, the captain of archers with a penchant for burning Breton peasants.

  “Hot work, Captain-General,” he shouted, grinning up at me. His tabard was spattered with blood, and his mouth a red ruin – a dagger-thrust had knocked two of his front teeth out, doing nothing to improve his looks.

  “The Wolves!” I bellowed, righting myself in the saddle and pointing my dripping sword at the wolf’s-head banner, fluttering limply over a mass of fighting men to my front. The ground between me and heart’s desire was choked with dead horses and men, and the rain was churning the battlefield into a bog, but I cared little for the conditions. My voice was drowned out by the rain and screams and a sudden cacophony of trumpets, followed by a noise like distant thunder – I didn’t know it then, but the prince had hurled his battalion into the fight, enveloping the flanks and rear of De Guesclin’s men, still embroiled with Lancaster.

  Fyling was no fool, and nodded excitedly as he looked where I pointed. “Form up, you bastards!” I heard him shriek as he ran off to round up his archers, most of whom were busy cutting throats and plundering the dead.

  An English knight urged his horse towards me, carrying my bedraggled standard across his shoulder. The visor of his battered helm was hanging awry by a slender thread of metal, and his right leg was missing below the knee.

  “I believe this is yours, Captain-General,” he murmured through ashen lips, thrusting the standard at me. I took it gratefully and nodded at him.