The thunder murmured far off to the north. There was no rain, just the dark clouds, and the Hellequin rode towards them.
The rain had moved southwards leaving a cloudless sky and a hot sun. It was mid September and felt like June.
The prince’s army was following the clouds, going south, labouring on a high wooded ridge. The baggage train, heavy with the plunder of the chevauchée, was to the west, using roads in the valley, but the main part of the army, the mounted archers and men-at-arms, were following tracks through the high trees.
It had become a race, though to what conclusion no one yet knew. The prince’s advisers, those wise and experienced warriors sent by his father to keep Edward out of trouble, believed that if they could get ahead of the French king and find a suitable place to make a stand, then they could fight a battle and win it. If they could force the French to climb a steep hill into the face of the lethal English archers, then there was the chance of a great victory, but those same advisers feared what would happen if King Jean turned the tables and managed to put his army across the path of the retreating English. ‘I’d rather not attack,’ the Earl of Suffolk told the prince.
‘God, it’s hot,’ the prince said.
‘It is always better to defend,’ the earl, who was riding on the prince’s right, said.
‘Where in God’s name are we?’ the prince asked.
‘Poitiers is over there,’ the Earl of Oxford, on Edward’s left, pointed vaguely eastwards.
‘Your grandfather, forgive me, made that mistake at Bannockburn,’ Suffolk said.
‘Mistake?’
‘He attacked, sire. There was no need, and he lost.’
‘He was an idiot,’ the prince said cheerfully. ‘I’m not an idiot, am I?’
‘Indeed not, sire,’ Suffolk said, ‘and you will remember your father’s great victory at Crécy. Yours too, sire. We defended.’
‘We did! My father’s no idiot!’
‘God forbid, sire.’
‘But grandfather was. No need to apologise! Had the brains of a squirrel, that’s what my father says.’ The prince ducked under the low branch of an elm. ‘But what if we see the bastards on the road? We should attack then, yes?’
‘If the circumstances are propitious,’ the Earl of Oxford said cautiously.
‘And what if we don’t find that convenient hill?’ the prince asked.
‘We keep going south, sire, till we do find one,’ Suffolk said, ‘or till we reach one of our fortresses.’
The prince grimaced. ‘I don’t like running away.’
‘You’ll find it preferable to imprisonment in Paris, sire,’ Oxford said drily.
‘I hear they have very pretty girls in Paris?’
‘There are pretty girls everywhere, sire,’ Suffolk said, ‘as you know better than most men.’
‘God is good,’ the prince said.
‘Amen,’ Oxford added.
‘And pray God he’s slowing the French,’ Suffolk said grimly. The last reliable information he had heard said that the French king was only some ten or twelve miles away, and his army, which, like the prince’s, was all mounted, was travelling faster. King Jean, having dallied all summer, was now suddenly full of energy and, Suffolk assumed, confidence. He was looking for a battle, though he was not so foolish as to risk fighting on disadvantageous ground. The French wanted to trap the prince, force him to fight in a place they chose, and Suffolk was apprehensive. A prisoner taken by the Captal de Buch had confirmed that King Jean had sent all his foot soldiers away because they would slow his army, yet even without that infantry he still outnumbered the prince, though by how many no one knew, and he was not being forced to travel over this damned wooded ridge. He was using good roads. He was racing south. He was looking to close the trap.
Yet the damned wooded ridge was the prince’s best hope. It was a short cut. It might gain a day’s march, and a day’s march was worth gold. And perhaps, at the end of the ridge, there would be a place to ambush the French. Or perhaps not. And Suffolk worried about the baggage. So long as it was separated from the army it was vulnerable, and even if the day’s march was gained they would need to wait half a day for the baggage to catch up. And he worried about the horses. There was no water in this high land, the animals were thirsty, and the men riding them were hungry. The army’s food supplies were desperately low. They needed to reach low, fertile land where the granaries were full, they needed water, they needed rest, they needed respite.
Four miles ahead of where the prince and the two earls rode through the trees, the Captal de Buch sat in his saddle at the ridge’s end. Ahead of him a long slope dropped to a road and the glint of a river, while to his right, beyond some low wooded hills, was a smudge of smoke dirtying the sky that he knew must mark the cooking fires of Poitiers. The far slope of the valley was covered in vineyards, row after row of thick vines.
It was a beautiful day. Warm and sunny, with just a few high white clouds. The trees were heavy with leaves that had started to show a tinge of autumn colour. The grapes were plump, almost ripe for picking. It was a day, the captal thought, to take a girl to the river and swim naked there, and afterwards make love in the grass and drink wine before making love again.
Instead he was watching the enemy.
An army had passed through the gentle valley. The ground on either side of the road had been churned by hooves, thousands upon thousands of hooves, to leave a dark scar of broken turf. One of the captal’s scouts, mounted on a small fast horse, had watched the army pass. ‘Eighty-seven banners, sire,’ he said.
The captal grunted. Only the greatest lords flew their banners on the march so that their followers would know their place in the column, but how many men did that mean? No great lord would take fewer than a hundred men to battle, so ten thousand? Twelve? A lot, the captal thought grimly. The English and their Gascon allies would not be flying more than forty such banners, but his scout had counted eighty-seven! Yet now, as the sun shone on the scarred valley and the gentle river, the captal could only see two banners flying above a crowd of men and horses who rested beside the river. ‘This is the rearguard?’ he asked.
‘Yes, sire.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘There’s no one behind them.’ The scout gestured eastwards. ‘I rode a league that way. Nothing.’
And the French rearguard was resting. They were in no hurry, and why should they hurry? They had overtaken the English and the Gascons. The prince had not gained a day’s march, the French had won the race, and the captal summoned one of his men and told him to take that bad news back to Edward. ‘Go,’ he said, ‘hurry,’ and then, like the French, the captal waited.
‘How many do you reckon?’ he asked a man-at-arms, nodding at the men beside the river.
‘Six hundred, sire? Seven?’
So six or seven hundred Frenchmen were motionless in the valley. Most wore no helmets because of the day’s heat, though many were wearing wide-brimmed hats with extravagant white feathers, clear evidence that they expected no trouble. There was a handful of light carts, which carried lances and shields. These Frenchmen had no idea that an enemy was this close to them. Some had dismounted and a few were even lying in the grass as if catching up on sleep. Servants were walking riderless horses in the pasture where others grazed. Men stood in small groups, handing around wineskins. The captal could not distinguish the two banners because they hung listless in the windless heat, but their presence meant that there were lords among those men-at-arms, and lords meant ransoms.
‘They outnumber us,’ the captal said, then paused as his horse thumped the leaf mould with a forefoot. ‘We’re outnumbered two to one,’ he continued, ‘but we’re Gascons.’
He had just over three hundred men-at-arms, all helmeted, all with shields, all ready to fight.
‘Why are they waiting?’ a man-at-arms asked.
‘Water?’ the captal suggested. The day was hot, both armies had marched fast, the horses were thirsty and
there was no water on the high ground, and he guessed that this rearguard was letting their stallions drink from the small river. He turned in his saddle and gestured to Hunald, his squire. ‘Helmet, shield, lance, have the axe ready.’ He looked at his standard bearer, who caught his eye and grinned. ‘Close up!’ he called to his men. He took the helmet, pushed up the visor and crammed it over his mail hood. He pushed his left arm through the loop of the black and yellow shield, then gripped the handle. His squire helped him couch the lance. All along the edge of the trees men were doing the same thing. Some men just drew swords, while Guillaume, a huge man mounted on an equally huge horse, carried a spiked morningstar. ‘No trumpet,’ the captal called. If he signalled the charge with a trumpet then the enemy would gain a few seconds of warning. Better just to burst from the woods and be halfway down the slope before the French realised that death had come visiting on a warm afternoon. His horse whinnied and thumped its hoof again. ‘In the name of God, Gascony and King Edward,’ the captal said.
And kicked his heels back.
And by God, he thought, there was nothing like this feeling. A good horse, a tight high saddle, a lance, and an enemy taken by surprise. The thunder of hooves filled the afternoon, clods of earth hurled high by heavy feet as three hundred and seventeen horsemen erupted from the trees and hurled themselves down the slope. The captal’s banner, its silver scallop shells bright on the black cross against the yellow field, flapped as the standard bearer raised it high. Men were shouting now, ‘Saint Quiteira and Gascony!’
The captal laughed. Saint Quiteira? She had been a Christian virgin who, refusing to marry a pagan lord, had been beheaded, but her headless trunk had picked up its own severed, bloody head and carried it uphill to a place where, to this day, miracles were said to happen. She was Gascony’s saint. A damned virgin! But maybe she would bring the miracle they needed. Eighty-seven enemy banners might need a miracle? ‘Saint Quiteira and Saint George!’ he shouted, and he saw a Frenchman turn a horse to meet the charge, and the man had neither lance nor shield, just a drawn sword, and the captal pressed his left knee against his destrier’s flank and the horse turned obediently. It seemed to sense where the captal wanted to go, and the destrier was at the full gallop as it crossed the road, and the captal let the lance slide into the enemy’s belly, just a slight jar as it went through mail and struck a lower rib and he let go of the lance and held out his right hand so that his squire could give him the axe. He preferred an axe to a sword. An axe would smash through mail, even plate, and he touched the horse with his knee again and pursued a fleeing man, swung the axe and felt the blade crunch through the skull. He wrenched the blade free, raised his shield to parry a feeble sword stroke from his left, and glimpsed that man vanish in a welter of misting blood as Guillaume’s morningstar obliterated a white-feathered hat, skull and brain together.
The Gascon horsemen drove into the enemy. It was not a fair fight. The French rearguard had been relaxing, confident that if anyone in their army saw the enemy it would be their vanguard, but instead that enemy was among them and killing them. The captal killed and spurred forward, not letting the Frenchmen form in any kind of order. They were thickest about the ford where there was a crowd of men and horses beneath some willows, and the captal swerved towards them. ‘Follow me!’ he shouted. ‘Follow me! Saint Quiteira!’
His men turned their destriers to follow, men in mail carrying bright steel on heavy horses. The destriers were white-eyed, teeth bared and hung with blood-spattered trappers. The captal plunged into the disorganised mass of Frenchmen and swung the axe, hearing the screams, panicking the enemy horses, driving into the crowd, and shouting all the while. The French were already running. Men were scrambling into saddles and spurring away. Other men were shouting that they yielded, and all across the water meadow the Gascons were galloping, killing, wheeling, and spurring back to kill again. The captal had thought he would need to fight through the crowd of men, but instead the crowd was falling apart, it was fleeing, and he was in pursuit and there was no easier way to kill than when a man was in pursuit. His destrier would line itself on a fugitive’s horse, speed up, wait for the pressure of a knee to say the axe had done its work, and then look for another victim, and to the captal’s left and right other Gascons were doing the same. They left a trail of bleeding, wounded, twitching men, of riderless horses, of dead men, and still they spurred on, pursuing and killing, all the frustrations of days of retreat being salved by this orgy of death. A Frenchman panicked and turned his horse hard to the left and the beast lost its footing. The bloodied bodies of two plundered geese were tied to the saddle’s cantle, and feathers flew as the horse collapsed. The man screamed as his leg was trapped and broken by the falling horse, then tried to twist away as the captal’s axe swung. The screaming stopped. A woman was calling for help, but her man had fled and she was left surrounded by Gascons in a bloodied field.
The captal shouted for his trumpeter. ‘Sound the disengage,’ he ordered.
His men had killed, they had triumphed, they had taken at least three great lords captive, they had left scores of dead with hardly a scratch to themselves, but the pursuit was galloping towards the main body of the French, and it would be only a matter of minutes before that army reacted and sent heavily armed and armoured men to counter-attack. And so the captal swerved up the small slope and vanished back into the trees. The valley, which had looked so peaceful, was flecked blood red, and littered with bodies.
The armies had met.
‘Saint Junien’s abbey?’ the peasant had said. ‘For sure, my lord, along the valley,’ he pointed north with a grubby finger, ‘not far, lord. You can drive an ox there and back in a morning.’ The man had been threshing grain when the Hellequin came to his village, and he had been oblivious of the horsemen until their shadows darkened the door of his barn. He had stared in dumb astonishment at the mounted men, then gone to his knees and scrabbled a
hand at his forelock. Thomas had told him he was safe, that they meant him no harm and then, as he had a hundred times on this journey, asked the man whether he knew of the abbey of Saint Junien, and now, for the first time, someone did. ‘There are monks there, my lord,’ the man said nervously, trying to be helpful. His eyes flickered to the left, doubtless to where his family lived.
His flail, two wooden clubs joined by a length of leather, lay discarded in case these grim men on horseback mistook it for a weapon.
‘Who is your lord?’ Thomas asked.
‘The abbot, my lord,’ the man said.
‘What sort of monks?’ Thomas asked.
The question puzzled the man, ‘Black monks, lord?’ he suggested.
‘Benedictines?’
‘Ah yes! Benedictines. I think.’ He smiled, but it was obvious he did not know what a Benedictine was.
‘Have other soldiers been here?’
He was more sure of this answer. ‘Not in a long while, lord, but some came on Saint Perpetua’s day, I remember that. They came; they didn’t stay.’
‘None since?’
‘No, lord.’
Saint Perpetua’s day was half a year past. Thomas tossed the man a silver coin and turned his horse away. ‘We go north,’ he told his men curtly, and spurred that way.
It was dusk, which meant it was time to seek shelter for the night. A river twisted in the valley bottom where a pair of hovels lay dark under oak trees, but at the valley’s northern end, hidden by a spur of wooded land, was a village or small town, betrayed by the thickness of smoke from its kitchen fires. The abbey had to be there. Two crows flew across the river, black against the darkening sky. A bell rang, calling men and women to their evening prayers.
‘Is there a town here?’ Rymer, the Earl of Warwick’s man, had spurred alongside Thomas.
‘I don’t know, but usually a village grows beside a monastery.’
‘A monastery!’ Rymer seemed surprised.
‘I’m going there.’
‘To pray?’ Rymer sugges
ted lightly.
‘Yes,’ Thomas replied.
Rymer was embarrassed by that answer and went silent. Thomas rounded a bend in the valley and he could see a willow-edged river, and, just beyond it, a large village and the towers of a monastery. The monastery was surprisingly big, surrounded by a high wall and dominated by its large abbey church. ‘We can stay in the village,’ Rymer said.
‘There’ll be a tavern there,’ Thomas said.
‘That’s what I was hoping.’
‘My men will stay there too.’ Thomas stared at the monastery, its high walls dark in the gathering dusk. Those walls looked as formidable as any castle’s ramparts. ‘Is that the place?’ he asked the Sire Roland, who had spurred his horse to catch up with Thomas.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ Roland replied.
‘It looks more like a fortress than a monastery,’ Thomas said.
The virgin knight frowned at the distant walls. ‘Saint Junien was told to keep Saint Peter’s sword safe, so maybe it is a fortress?’
‘If it even is Saint Junien’s.’ As Thomas rode closer he could see that the monastery’s huge gates were open. He supposed they would not be closed till the sun finally vanished in the west. ‘He’s buried there, yes?’
‘His earthly remains are there, yes.’
‘So perhaps la Malice is there too.’
‘And maybe we should leave it there,’ Sire Roland said.
‘I would, if I didn’t believe Bessières is looking for it, and if he finds it he’ll use it, not for God’s glory, but for his own.’
‘And will you use it?’
‘I told you,’ Thomas said curtly, ‘I shall lose it.’ He turned in the saddle. ‘Luc! Gastar! Arnaldus! With me. The rest of you stay in the village! And pay for your victuals!’ He had chosen Gascons to stay with him so that the monks would not suspect their allegiance to England.
Robbie, Keane and the Sire Roland also stayed with Thomas, then Genevieve and Bertille insisted on accompanying him too, though Hugh was taken under the care of Sam and the other archers. ‘Why not take the archers?’ Genevieve asked.