for one of the six to accept his challenge.
One man did. He was from Paris, a brutal man, quick as lightning and strong as a bull, and his armour was unpolished, his jupon a blue so dark it looked almost black. His device, embroidered on the jupon and painted on his shield, was a red crescent moon. He faced Roland de Verrec. ‘Traitor!’ he shouted.
Roland said nothing.
Both sides were watching. The other champions had withdrawn from the vineyard beneath the hedge and watched from behind their companion.
‘Traitor!’ the Parisian shouted again.
Still Roland said nothing.
‘I won’t kill you!’ the Parisian called. His name was Jules Langier and his trade was fighting. He hefted his lance, sixteen feet of ash tipped with a steel head. ‘I won’t kill you! I’ll take you in chains to the king and let him kill you instead. Would you rather run away now?’
Roland de Verrec’s only answer was to prop his lance against his right knee and close his visor. He lifted the lance again.
‘Jules!’ one of the other champions called. ‘Watch his lance. He likes to lift it at the last minute. Protect your head.’
Langier nodded. ‘Hey, virgin,’ he called, ‘you can run away now! I won’t chase you!’
Roland couched the lance. His horse took tiny skittering steps. A faint rough cart track crossed diagonally in front of him and he had noted it; he had seen where the wheels had made ruts in the soil. Not deep ruts, but enough to make a horse falter slightly. He would ride to the left of the ruts.
He felt little emotion. Or rather he felt as though he watched himself, as if he was disembodied. The next moments were all about skill, about cold-blooded skill. He had never faced Langier in the lists, but he had watched him and he knew the Parisian liked to bend low in the saddle as he struck home. That made him a small target. Langier would bend low and use his thick shield to throw off his opponent’s lance, then turn snake-fast and use his short, heavy mace to attack from behind. It had worked many times. The mace was kept in a deep leather pocket attached to the right side of his saddle behind his knee. It could be snatched up in an eyeblink. Snatched and backswung, and all Roland would know was the sudden flare of white in his skull as the mace smashed into his helmet.
‘Coward!’ Langier called, trying to provoke Roland.
Roland still said nothing. Instead he held out his left arm. He dropped his shield. He would fight without it.
The gesture seemed to infuriate Langier who, without another word, dug in his spurs so that his destrier leaped forward. Roland responded. The two horsemen closed. They were not far enough apart for either to reach a gallop, but the horses were straining as they closed. Both horses knew their business, both knew where their riders wanted them to go. Roland steered his mount with his knees, keeping it just to the left of the rut, and he raised his lance point so that it threatened Langier’s eyes, and they were close now, their world the beat of hooves, and Langier swerved his horse slightly right and it faltered a tiny bit as a hoof hit uneven ground, and Langier was bending down, shield protecting his body as the lance was pointed plumb at the base of Roland’s breastplate, and then the lance flew up and the horse was stumbling and Langier was desperately trying to pull it right with knee pressure, but the horse was down on its knees, sliding in grass that was slicked with frothy blood and Langier saw that his opponent’s lance, instead of being aimed at his head, had pierced his horse’s chest.
‘This isn’t a tournament.’ Roland spoke for the first time. He had turned his horse, abandoned his lance and drawn the sword he called Durandal, and he rode back to where Langier was struggling to extricate himself from his fallen, dying horse. Langier tried to find his mace, but the horse had fallen on the weapon, and then Durandal smacked across his helm. His head was jerked violently to one side, then to the other as the sword came back to smash the helmet again.
‘Take your helmet off,’ Roland said.
‘Go and piss in your mother’s arsehole, virgin.’
The sword swiped him again, half dazing Langier, then the point of the sword was thrust between the visor’s upper edge and the helmet’s rim. The blade bit into the bridge of Langier’s nose, and stopped. ‘If you want to live,’ Roland said calmly, ‘take the helmet off.’ He pulled the sword free.
Langier fumbled at the buckles that held the helmet in place. The other champions watched, but made no effort to help. They were there to fight man against man, not two men against one because that would be unchivalrous, and so they just watched as Langier at last lifted the helmet clear of his lank black hair. A trickle of blood ran down his face from where Durandal had cut him.
‘Go back to your army,’ Roland said, ‘and tell Labrouillade that the virgin is going to kill him.’
It was Langier’s turn to say nothing.
Roland turned his horse away, sheathed Durandal, and kicked back his heels. He had delivered his message. He heard cheers from the Englishmen who had seen the fight through the hedge’s gap, but it meant nothing to him.
It was all for Bertille.
The Lord of Douglas would kill no Englishmen this day. His leg had been broken when his horse fell, his arm was pierced to the bone by an arrow, and another had broken a rib and punctured a lung so that he was breathing bubbles of blood. He was in pain, horrible pain, and he was carried to the house where the king had spent the night, and there the barber-surgeons stripped him of his armour, cut the arrow flush with his skin, leaving the head embedded in his chest, and poured honey onto the wound. ‘Find a cart and take him to Poitiers,’ one of the surgeons ordered a retainer wearing the red heart. ‘The monks of Saint Jean will care for him. Take him slowly. Imagine you’re carrying milk and don’t want it turning to butter. Go. If you want him to see Scotland again, go!’
‘You can take him to the bloody monks,’ Sculley said to his companions, ‘I’m going to fight. I’m going to kill.’
More men were being carried to the house. They had charged with Marshal Clermont, attacking the archers at the right of the English line, but there the enemy had dug trenches and the horses floundered, others had broken their legs in pits, and all the while the arrows had struck, and the charge had failed as miserably as the attack in the marsh.
But now that the champions had flaunted their defiance and Langier had been unhorsed in full view of the French army, the main assault was closing on the English hill. The dauphin led the first French battle, though he was well protected by chosen knights from his father’s Order of the Star. The dauphin’s battle was over three thousand strong and they came on foot, kicking down the chestnut stakes of the vineyard and trampling the vines as they climbed the gentle slope towards the English hill. Banners flew above them, while behind them, on the western hill, the oriflamme flew proudly from the ranks the king commanded. That flag, the long, twin-tailed banner of scarlet silk, was France’s battle-flag and so long as it flew it meant that no prisoners were to be taken. Capturing rich men for ransom was the dream of every knight, but at a battle’s beginning, when all that mattered was to break the enemy and shatter him and kill him and terrify him, there was no time for the niceties of surrender. When the flag was furled, that was when the French could look to their purses, but till then there would be no prisoners, only killing. So the oriflamme flew, waved from side to side like a ripple of red in the morning sky, and behind the dauphin’s battle his uncle’s second battle was advancing towards the valley’s shallow bottom where the nakerers beat their vast drums in a marching rhythm to drive the dauphin’s men uphill to a famous victory.
To the English and Gascons, at least to those who could see past the hedge, the far hill and the nearer valley were now filled with the panoply of war. With silk and steel, with plumes and blades. A mass of metal-clad men in bright surcoats of red and blue and white and green, marching beneath the proud banners of nobility. Drums hammered the morning air, trumpets seared the sky, and the advancing Frenchmen cheered, not because they had a victory yet, but to raise their spirits and frighten the enemy. ‘Montjoie Saint Denis!’ they shouted. ‘Montjoie Saint Denis and King Jean!’
Crossbowmen were on the French flanks. Each archer had a companion who carried a great pavise, a shield large as a man behind which the crossbow could be rewound safe from the deadly English arrows. Those arrows were not flying yet. The leading men of the French advance could see the great hedge, and the wide gaps, and through those gaps were the English beneath their banners. The French visors were up and would stay up till the
