“A blessing,” Melisande said. She had at last found a bolt and was fumbling to fit it in the crossbow’s groove, but the crossbow was inside the sack and it was hard to feel its mechanism, let alone be certain the bolt was properly in place. Sir Martin was kneeling between her legs and leaning over her, propped on his left hand and using his right to grope between her thighs. A small stream of spittle swayed from his mouth.
“I don’t like it,” Sir Martin said and took his right hand away from her groin to rub at the charcoal lettering. “Don’t like your blessing. You should look pretty for me! You’re not staying still, girl! You want me to hit you?”
“I am still,” Melisande said, though in truth she was shifting desperately, heaving up as she tried to dislodge the awful weight that pressed on her. Sir Martin abandoned his attempt to clean her forehead and put his hand back between her legs. Melisande screamed at his touch and the sound made the priest grin.
“The woman is the glory of the man,” he said, “which is the holy word of Almighty God. So let’s make a baby, shall we?”
She thought the bolt was in the groove, she was not sure, but nor could she wait to be sure, and so she wrenched the crossbow around, dragging the whole sack with it as Sir Martin raised himself, ready to plunge down. “Ave Maria,” he said, “ave Maria,” and Melisande thrust the sack into the space between her belly and his, then pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
The crossbow had been lying untended and fully cocked in her sack and the trigger mechanism must have rusted. She screamed. Sir Martin’s spittle fell and slapped across her face and she jerked her finger again and this time the pawl gave way to release the cord, the steel-shanked span made its vicious sound and the short, thick, iron bolt ripped through the sacking.
Sir Martin seemed to be lifted off her. He stared at her, wide-eyed, his mouth shaped into a horrified circle.
Then he bellowed like a boar being gelded. Blood spurted from his groin to pour warm and sudden on Melisande’s thighs. The leather fledging of the bolt protruded from his bladder while the rusted point was protruding between his legs, and Melisande twisted away, scrambling desperately, and Sir Martin’s clawing hands caught hold of her torn dress and held on. He was screaming now, clutching the linen as though it could save him, and Melisande tore herself away from him, abandoning the dress, and he curled up on the wet ground, whimpering and gasping, thrusting the torn linen into his ravaged groin.
“You’ll die,” Melisande said. “You will bleed to death.” She stooped beside him and his bloodshot eyes looked up at her desperately. “And I shall laugh as you die,” she added.
Another scream sounded. It came from the village and Melisande saw strangers among the baggage. She saw more people running toward the wagons and other folk coming along the stream’s bank. They were local people, bringing hoes and axes and cleavers, peasants who wanted plunder. A man had spotted her and was heading toward her with the same hungry expression she had seen on Sir Martin’s face.
Melisande was naked.
Then she remembered the jupon.
She took one last look at Sir Martin, who was dying in agony, snatched up her sack and his leather purse of coins, then jumped into the stream.
THIRTEEN
The Sire de Lanferelle spat curses. A man at his feet, his visor dented and sheeted with blood, moaned and gasped. The whole of the man’s lower right leg had been lopped off and the blood pulsed slow and thick onto the corpse beneath him. “A priest,” the man gasped, “for the love of God, a priest.”
“There are no priests,” Lanferelle said angrily. He had thrown away his mace, deciding that a poleax would be a more vicious weapon, and viciousness was what he needed if he were to pull a victory from this apparent disaster. Lanferelle understood well enough what had happened. The French, exhausted by their slog through the mud and half blinded by their closed visors, had been easy victims for the English men-at-arms, but he also understood that those men-at-arms could not stretch their thin line to fill the whole space between the two woods. The ends of the line were manned by archers, and the archers, so far as he could tell, had no arrows. He snapped up his ripped visor, forcing the split metal over the rim of his helmet. “We’re going left,” he said.
None of his men answered him. The first French battle had pulled back a score of paces and the English, as if by agreement, had not followed. Both sides were tired. Men leaned on their weapons to draw breath. Between the two armies was a long heap of armor-encased bodies, some dead, some injured, many piled on top of others. The fallen men’s plate, polished in the night to a bright sheen, was jagged with rips, plastered with mud, and streaked with blood. Banners had fallen among the casualties, and a few Englishmen dragged those proud flags free and passed them back to where the French prisoners were being gathered. The oriflamme, which had proclaimed its merciless purpose above the French center, had vanished.
The English were passing skins of water or wine from man to man and Lanferelle suddenly felt parched. “Where’s the wine?” he asked his squire.
“I don’t have any, sire. You didn’t tell me to bring any.”
“Do I have to order you to piss? Jesus, you stink like a midden. Did you shit yourself?”
The squire nodded miserably. He was not the only man whose bowels had loosened in terror, but he quailed under Lanferelle’s scorn. “We’re going left!” Lanferelle called again. He had tried and failed to reach Sir John, so now he planned to lead his men to attack the lightly armored archers instead. He could see the bowmen were carrying maces and poleaxes, but that was better than having them armed with yew bows and ash arrows. He would cut the bastards down and lead Frenchmen through the stakes so they could turn the flank of the English men-at-arms. “This battle isn’t lost,” he told his followers, “it hasn’t even begun! They have no arrows left! So now we can kill the bastards! You hear me? We kill them!”
Trumpets sounded from the northern end of the field. The second French battle, its armor still gleaming and its banners untorn by arrows, was advancing on foot through the morass of plowland churned deep by horses and by the eight thousand Frenchmen of the first attack. That second battle was passing the small group of heralds, English, French, and Burgundian, who watched the battle together from the edge of the Tramecourt woods and the reinforcements, another eight thousand men-at-arms, would reach the killing place in another minute. Lanferelle, not wanting to be caught by the crush of the new arrivals, worked his way toward the flank of the French men-at-arms. He had eleven men with him now, and he reckoned they were enough to cut their way through the archers. And if the twelve led, other men would follow. “Those goddam archers aren’t trained to arms,” he told his men. “They’re tradesmen! They’re nothing but tailors and basket-weavers! They’re just hacking with those axes. So don’t attack them first. Let them hack, then you parry and kill, you understand me?”
Men nodded. They understood, but the field reeked of blood, the oriflamme was gone, and a dozen great lords of France were dead or missing, and Lanferelle knew that victory would only come when men began to believe in victory. So he would give that belief to them. He would fight his way through the English line and he would give France a triumph.
Englishmen saw the second attack closing and they straightened and hoisted weapons. The second French battle had reached the first and the newcomers gave a huge shout. “Saint Denis! Montjoie! Montjoie!”
“Saint George!” the English responded, and the hunting howls started again, the mocking sound of men inviting their quarry to come and die.
But the second battle could not reach the English because the survivors of the first were in their way, and they could only push those survivors forward, and so they churned through the mud, lances leveled, driving tired men onto the heaps of dead and onto the English blades beyond. The noise rose, the clash of steel and the screams of the dying and the desperate blare of trumpets as eight thousand new French men-at-arms went to the killing ground.
And Lanferelle went for the archers.
The women and servants fled from the English baggage, running uphill toward the embattled army while behind them serfs and peasants scrambled over the English wagons in search of easy plunder.
Melisande was in the stream that ran fast, full, cold and muddy, fed by the torrential rain of the last few days. She floundered in the water, pushing past low-growing branches until she saw the jupon snagged on a willow bough. She unhooked it, then forced her way through the briars and nettles that grew on the stream’s bank. She pulled the jupon over her head. The wet linen clung cold and clammy, but it covered her and she crept slowly northward through brambles and hazel scrub until she saw the horsemen.
There were fifty or sixty riders who were standing their horses to the west of the village and just watching the English encampment. They had no banner, and even if they had flown a flag Melisande doubted she would have recognized its badge, but she was certain that the small English army could never have spared so many horsemen to linger behind their line. That meant these riders were French, and Melisande, though she was French herself, now thought of the horsemen as her enemy and so she crouched in the bushes, hiding her bright surcoat behind a thornbush.
Then a new anxiety struck her. The surcoat covered her, but it also gnawed at her soul. “Forgive me,” she prayed to the Virgin, “for wearing the jupon. Let Nick live.”
She sensed no answer. There was just silence in her head.
She had sworn not to wear the jupon, believing that wearing her father’s badge would doom Nick to death in the high plowland, but now she was wearing the badge of the sun and the falcon, and the Virgin had given her no answer, and she knew she was breaking her bargain with heaven. She shivered, cold and wet, and suddenly trembled.
Nick would die, she was sure of it.
So she took the jupon off so that Nick might live.
And she crouched. She was praying, naked, cold and frightened. And from the north, beyond the horsemen and beyond the village and beyond the skyline, the sound of battle rose again.
“We killed them before,” Thomas Evelgold yelled, “and we can kill them again! Kill for England!”
“For Wales!” a man shouted.
“For Saint George!” another man called.
“For Saint David!” the Welshman responded and on that battle cry the archers surged forward to attack the new enemy. They had already savaged the first French battle, and some men reckoned they would become rich from the prisoners they had taken. Those prisoners, without helmets and with their hands tied with spare bow cords, were behind the stakes, guarded there by a handful of wounded archers. Now the bowmen went to make new corpses and take new prisoners.
They went in a rush, and by now they knew how to take down men-at-arms who could not move in the thick mud, and so the archers crashed into the flank of the French and they hammered their enemy to make a new line of dead men, most stabbed through an eye by an archer’s knife after they had been felled by a hammer blow. The screams were unending. The plateau seethed with mud-spattered steel-clad men who lumbered toward the archers, pushed onto them by the thick ranks of men behind, and the clumsy men tripped on bodies, were smashed on their helmets, were murdered with knives, and still they came. Some wore gold or silver chains around their necks, or wore armor that, by its magnificence, proclaimed the wearer’s wealth or position, and those men the archers tried to capture. They would kill the rich man’s companions and, like deerhounds about a bayed stag, would taunt and threaten the man until he pulled off his gauntlet.
“Come on, you bastard!” Tom Scarlet jeered at a man whose white surcoat bore the badge of a red swan. “Come on!” The Frenchman was watching him, blue eyes visible through a raised visor. His helmet was chased with silver swirls and his red velvet sword belt was studded with golden lozenges. He picked his way among the corpses, lunged with his lance at Scarlet’s belly, and Scarlet swatted the lance away with his poleax. A second Frenchman, wearing the same swan insignia, slashed a broad-bladed sword at the poleax, but the steel bounced off the iron-sheathed staff. Scarlet drove the ax hard forward, cracking its spike against the swan-badged belly armor and the man staggered back. The swordsman struck again and Scarlet just managed to block the cut with the ax shaft, then Will Sclate was beside him and grunted as he swung his poleax, which crushed the swordsman’s helmet as though it were made of parchment. The helmet collapsed, bursting at its seams in a spray of blood and brains, and Sclate, huge and vicious, drew the hammerhead back.
“We want him, Will! Bastard’s rich!” Tom Scarlet shouted and he slammed the poleax into the rich man again, and the lord, Scarlet was sure he opposed a nobleman, struck with his lance and this time Scarlet seized the lance one-handed and tugged hard. The man stumbled forward, tripping, and Scarlet gripped the bottom rim of the man’s helmet and dragged him out of the killing line. Will Sclate was hammering down more men, helped by a dozen of Sir John’s archers, as Scarlet turned his prisoner over. He crouched and grinned into the man’s face. “Rich, are you?”
The man stared back with hatred, so Scarlet drew his knife. He held the point just over the man’s left eyeball. “If you’re rich,” he said, “you live, and if you’re poor, you die.”
“Je suis le comte de Pavilly,” the man said, “je me rends! Je me rends!”
“Does that mean you’re rich?” Scarlet asked.
“Behind you, Tom!” Hook’s voice bellowed, and Tom Scarlet turned to see Frenchmen coming toward him, and at that moment the Count of Pavilly drove his own knife up into Tom Scarlet’s groin. Scarlet screeched, the count heaved up from the mud, and stabbed again, this time into Tom Scarlet’s belly, ripping and cutting, and then Will Sclate’s poleax swung in a hay-cutting slash and the ax blade tore into the Count of Pavilly’s face, breaking his remaining teeth and driving their fragments to the back of his skull. His blood mingled with Tom Scarlet’s. The two bodies, rich man and poor man, were lying together as Sclate ripped his blade from the snagging tangle of steel and bone before being driven back by the sudden rush of Frenchmen.
And Hook was also being driven back.
A wedge of Frenchmen was crashing into the archers. So far the archers had been winning because they attacked and because they were more mobile than their enemy, but at last the French had found a way to carry the fight back to the bowmen. They came shoulder to shoulder and they let the archers waste their blows by parrying instead of cutting back, and if an archer slipped, or swung too hard and was slow to recover his balance, a blade would flicker and an Englishman would sink into the mud to be hammered with a mace. “Just kill them!” the Sire de Lanferelle shouted as he led the wedge. “One at a time! God will give us time to kill them all! Saint Denis! Montjoie!” He sensed victory now. Up to this moment the French had panicked and had allowed themselves to be driven like cattle to the winter slaughter, but Lanferelle was calm, he was deadly and he was confident, and more and more Frenchmen came to follow him, sensing at last that someone had taken command of their destiny.
Hook saw the falcon in its sunlit splendor.
“Behind you, Tom!” he had shouted at Scarlet, and then he had seen the Frenchman in the red and white jupon suddenly heave up, but he had no time to see more because Lanferelle was ahead of him, and Hook was forced to step back as Lanferelle’s poleax stabbed at him. It was not meant as a killing thrust, but rather to unbalance Hook who had to step back a second time to avoid the spike and he might have tripped in the furrows except the small of his back struck one of the slanting stakes that held him upright. He swept his own poleax at Lanferelle’s weapon, but the Frenchman somehow flicked Hook’s cut aside and lunged again, and Hook had to twist around the stake, but the sharpened point caught in his haubergeon and he could not move. Panic blinded him. “Get close,” Saint Crispin said, and Hook rammed his poleax hard forward, struggling in the mud to find good footing, and Lanferelle was so surprised at the sudden counterattack that he checked his next thrus
t. Hook’s blade glanced off Lanferelle’s armor, but the thrust had released the haubergeon and Hook could step back just before a blow from one of Lanferelle’s men would have crushed his hand where it held the pole.
“I hoped we would meet,” Lanferelle said.
“You wanted to die?” Hook snarled. The panic still rippled in his body, but there was also a relief that he had survived, then he had to parry desperately as two blades darted toward his unarmored legs. Tom Evelgold came to his help, as did Will of the Dale.
“Tom’s dead,” Will said, then swept his big ax around to knock a lance aside.
“How’s Melisande?” Lanferelle asked.
“So far as I know,” Hook said, “she lives.” He thrust again and had the ax knocked aside again, but he had not put all his strength into the blow and recovered fast to sweep the lead-weighted head back to hit Lanferelle’s arm, but still without sufficient force and the Frenchman scarce seemed to notice.
Lanferelle smiled. “She lives,” he said, “and you die.” He began stabbing his weapon in short, very controlled strokes that came fast, sometimes low, sometimes high, and Hook, unable to parry and without time to counter-strike, could only retreat. Lanferelle had crusted blood beside one eye, but his face was strangely calm, and that calmness scared Hook. The Frenchman watched Hook’s eyes all the time, and Hook knew he would die unless he could somehow get past that flickering blade. Tom Evelgold had the same idea and he managed to shove a lance to one side and push past the blade so that he was on Lanferelle’s right, and the centenar, holding his poleax two-handed like a leveled lance, screamed a curse as he rammed the blade forward with its spike aimed at the Frenchman’s faulds. The spike would go through the plates, through the mail, through the leather to rip open Lanferelle’s lower belly, except at the last moment Lanferelle raised the butt end of his pole to deflect the lunge and so take its huge force on his breastplate. The Milanese steel withstood the blow and threw it off, then Lanferelle jerked his head forward, smashing his raised visor hard into Tom Evelgold’s face as another Frenchman skewered a sword into the Englishman’s thigh and twisted it. Evelgold staggered, blood pouring down his leg and spreading from his crushed nose. He had been blinded by the head butt and so did not see the poleax spike that drove into his face. He made a high-pitched whining noise as he fell, and another ax chopped into his belly, cleaving haubergeon and mail, opening his guts, and then the Frenchmen were past him, treading deliberately and carefully, driving deeper through the stakes and so ever closer to the English rear.