the pain. The armour was all in front!
‘Hellequin! Follow me!’ he shouted. ‘Hellequin! Follow me!’
He snatched up his arrows and ran to his left. He floundered in the mud and muck of the swampland, but he forced himself on. Get to the side, he told himself, get to the side. ‘Follow me!’ he repeated and snatched a look back to see his men obeying. ‘Run!’ he shouted, and hoped to God that no one thought they were running away.
He went forty, perhaps fifty paces, and thrust the arrows back into the marsh, plucked up a flesh arrow, laid it on the stave, pulled the bow up and drew the cord, aiming again at the horse with the red heart on its gaudy trapper. Now he was aiming at the horse’s flank, just behind the front leg and in front of the saddle. He did not think. He looked where he wanted the arrow to go and his muscles obeyed his look and his two fingers released the string and the arrow slashed across the bog and vanished into the horse and the horse reared, and now more arrows were flying across the marsh and the arrows were biting at last and the horses were falling. The Earl of Warwick’s archers had understood. The enemy’s horses had all their armour in front and none on the
flanks and backsides of the horses. A rider wearing a jupon
quartered in red and yellow with a white star in one corner was shouting at the earl’s archers to join Thomas’s men. ‘Go to the flank! Go, fellows, go, go, go!’
But the French were close. Their visors were down so their faces could not be seen, but Thomas could see where the trappers had been ripped and bloodied by their spurs. They were urging their horses on, and he loosed again and this time slapped a bodkin through the overlapping scales of a horse’s neck armour. The beast stumbled to its fore knees, and its rider, trapped by the high pommel and cantle of his saddle, desperately tried to kick his feet from the stirrups before the horse rolled. The beast was still on its back legs, tilted forward, and the rider was falling onto its neck when two arrows struck his breastplate. One crumpled, the other pierced it and the man jerked back under the impact of the blows. He started falling forward again and was hit again. Archers jeered. Back and forward he went, tormented until a man-at-arms wearing the lion of Warwick stepped forward and swung an axe that cracked through the helmet to spray blood. A horseman tried to cut the Englishman down, but the arrows were flying thick from the flank now, striking the horses’ unarmoured sides, and the rider’s horse was hit in the belly by three arrows and the horse screamed, reared and bolted.
‘Sweet Christ, kill them! Saint George!’ The horseman with the white star on his jupon was just behind Thomas. ‘Kill them!’
And the archers obeyed. They had been scared by the failure of their first arrows, but now they were vengeful. They could each loose fifteen arrows in a minute, and by now there were over two hundred archers on the French flank and those French were defeated. The leading riders were all down, their horses dying or dead, and some horses had turned and fled, screaming as they tried to escape the awful pain beside the river. The Earl of Warwick’s men-at-arms were advancing into the chaos to hammer axes and maces on fallen riders. The horsemen at the rear were turning away. Two of Warwick’s men-at-arms were leading a prisoner back to the ford, and Thomas saw that the man was wearing a jupon of bright blue and white stripes. Then he looked for the red heart of Douglas and saw the horse had fallen, trapping the man, and he sent a bodkin at the rider and saw it pierce the man’s rerebrace. He shot again, driving an arrow into the man’s side, just under the armpit, but before he could loose a third arrow three men, all dismounted, seized the fallen rider and dragged him out from under his horse. Arrows slapped at them, but two of them lived, and Thomas recognised Sculley. He was wearing a visored helmet, but his long hair with its yellowing bones hung beneath its rim. Thomas drew his bow, but two wounded horses galloped between him and Sculley, who had managed to heave the fallen rider onto an unwounded and riderless horse. Sculley slapped the horse’s rump. The wounded horses galloped clear and Thomas shot, but his arrow bounced off Sculley’s backplate. The horse with the rescued man struggled out of the marsh to the shelter of the trees, followed by Sculley and four other men wearing the red heart.
And then there was a sudden quiet, except for the eternal sound of the river and the birdsong and the screams of horses and the beat of hooves striking the ground in the animals’ death throes.
The archers unstrung their bows so that the yew staves straightened. Prisoners, some wounded, some staggering, were being led to the ford while Englishmen were stripping dead horses of precious armour and harness and saddlery. Some put horses out of their misery by unbuckling the chamfrons and then striking them hard between the eyes with a war axe. Other men unbuckled plate armour from dead knights and hauled mail coats off corpses. An archer strapped a French knight’s sword around his waist. ‘Sam,’ Thomas shouted, ‘fetch the arrows back!’ Sam grinned and led a dozen men into the remnants of the carnage to collect arrows. It was also a chance for plunder. A wounded Frenchman tried to stand. He raised a hand to an English man-at-arms who knelt beside him. The two men spoke and then the Englishman lifted the Frenchman’s visor and stabbed him through the eye with a dagger. ‘Too poor to have a ransom, I suppose,’ the rider behind Thomas said. He watched as the man-at- arms sheathed his dagger and began to strip the corpse. ‘God, we’re cruel, but we’ve captured Marshal d’Audrehem, and isn’t that a good beginning to a bad day?’
Thomas turned. The man’s visor was lifted to reveal a grey moustache and thoughtful blue eyes, and Thomas instinctively went to a knee. ‘My lord.’
‘Thomas of Hookton, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, sire.’
‘I wondered who in Christ’s name was wearing Northampton’s colours,’ the man said, speaking in French. Thomas had ordered his men to wear jupons with Northampton’s badge, a badge that most men in the English army would recognise. A few had the red cross of Saint George strapped around an upper arm, but there were not enough armlets for all his men. The horseman who spoke to Thomas wore the white star on his red and yellow jupon, while the gold chain about his neck proclaimed his rank. He was the Earl of Oxford, brother-in-law to Thomas’s lord. The earl had been at Crecy and afterwards Thomas had met him in England, and he was astonished that the earl remembered him, let alone remembered that he spoke French. He was even more astonished when the earl used his brother-in-law’s nickname. ‘It’s a pity Billy isn’t here,’ the earl said grimly, ‘we need all the good men we can get. And I think you should get your men back up the hill now.’
‘Up the hill, sire?’
‘Listen!’
Thomas listened.
And heard the war drums.
The French horsemen had attacked at the ford and at the right-hand end of the English line, but as those charges went home other horsemen rode in front of the dauphin’s battle to challenge the English on their hill.
Six men chose to ride. Each was a tournament champion of fearsome reputation. They rode superbly trained destriers, and their winnings in the lists had bought them the finest armour that could be made in Milan. They rode close to the English hedge and called out their challenge, and the English archers ignored them. Six men did not make a battle, and there was no honour and not much usefulness in killing a solitary horseman when so many other men-at-arms were approaching on foot.
‘Pass the word that they’re to be ignored,’ the Prince of Wales ordered.
The challengers were part of battle’s dance. They went to taunt the English and in the hope of finding an opponent they could unhorse and kill, and so dispirit the English. They shouted their defiance. ‘Are you women? Do you know how to fight?’
‘Ignore them,’ the commanders growled at their men.
But one man disobeyed. He owed no allegiance to any commander on the English side, and he knew the impudent challengers were meant to be ignored. Let them waste their breath, the real battle was not fought between champion and champion, yet still that one man mounted, took a lance from his squire, and rode out from the left of the English line.
He wore no jupon. His armour had been scrubbed so that it shone. His horse took small steps as he restrained it. His helmet was a tournament helmet, crowned with pale blue plumes, and his small black-painted shield bore the symbol of the white rose, the rose without thorns, the flower of the Virgin Mary. Around his neck he wore a blue scarf of finest silk, a woman’s scarf, a gift from Bertille. He rode a track that twisted through the vineyard until he reached the open grassland in the valley’s shallow base, and there he turned his horse and waited
