1356 (Special Edition)

‘Jesus,’ Thomas said, ‘sweet Jesus.’ He was on his knees, shaking. He stared at the sword. A miracle? He saw that someone had made a new wooden hilt for the ancient blade, and that hilt was slick with blood.

He stood. Robbie’s horse was beside him and, in a spasm of anger, he cut the hair that held Robbie’s head. It thumped on the ground. He would have to find the rest of his old friend and dig a grave, but before he could think how he might do that he saw Roland de Verrec standing helpless in front of a fat man in armour. The fat man had a green and white jupon and, as Thomas watched, he drew his sword and held it towards Roland. It was the Count of Labrouillade. There was shit dribbling down the back of his armoured legs. ‘I am your prisoner!’ he announced loudly.

Thomas walked towards the two men. Sam and a half-dozen archers had seen Thomas and they now rode towards him, bringing Thomas’s horse with them.

‘He surrendered,’ Roland called to Thomas.

Thomas said nothing. Kept walking.

‘I have yielded,’ the count said loudly, ‘and will pay a ransom.’

‘Kill the fat bastard!’ Sam called.

‘No!’ Roland de Verrec held up his hand. ‘You cannot kill him. That is dishonourable.’ He stumbled over the English word.

‘Dishonourable?’ Sam asked, incredulous.

‘Sir Thomas,’ Roland looked desperately unhappy, ‘a man who has surrendered is safe, is he not?’

Thomas ignored Roland, seemed not even to see him. He still said nothing. He walked up to the count, who was holding his sword out in surrender.

‘Chivalry dictates that he must be kept alive,’ Roland said. ‘Is that not so, Sir Thomas?’

Thomas had not even looked at Roland. He just gazed at the count and then, almost as fast as Sculley, he backswung la Malice so that the blade chopped into the count’s neck. The sword sliced beneath the helmet’s rim, cutting through the aventail to bite deep into the fat neck, and Thomas sawed it back, thrust it forward with an archer’s strength and was hit by even more blood as the Count of Labrouillade sank to his knees, and Thomas gouged the blade deeper and deeper until the life went from Labrouillade’s eyes and he fell hard onto the grass.

‘Sir Thomas!’ Roland said in outrage.

Thomas turned wide-eyed on Roland. ‘Did you say something?’

‘He had surrendered!’ Roland protested.

‘I’m deaf,’ Thomas said. ‘I was hit on the head and I can’t hear a thing. What are you telling me?’

‘He had surrendered!’

‘I can’t hear what you’re saying,’ Thomas said. He turned away and winked at Sam.

Fifty yards away men were fighting around the King of France. His standard had fallen, the standard bearer was dead, and his son was trying to help his father. ‘Look left, Father! To the right! Watch out!’ The king was fighting with an axe, though no one was trying to kill him, just to capture him. The decoys who had worn his colours were dead or had fled, but everyone knew this was the real king because his helmet was surmounted by a golden crown, and men wanted to take him alive because his ransom would be unimaginably huge. Men grabbed at the king, fought each other to get close to him, and the king shouted that he could make them all rich, but then two horsemen forced their great destriers into the crowd and bellowed at all the men to step back on pain of death.

The Earl of Warwick and Sir Reginald Cobham confronted King Jean and Prince Philippe. Both men dismounted and both men bowed low. ‘Your Majesty,’ the earl said.

‘I am a prisoner,’ the King of France said.

‘Alas, Your Highness,’ Sir Reginald said, ‘it is the fate of battle.’

The king was taken.

One of the archers played pipes made from oat straw, the tune wistful and thin. A campfire burned, throwing twisting red light onto the branches of the oaks. A man sang; other men laughed.

The King of France was being feasted by the Prince of Wales, while on the flat hilltop where the battle had ended the birds and beasts gorged themselves on the dead. The dead went all the way to the gates of Poitiers because the English and Gascons had pursued the enemy that far, and the citizens of Poitiers, fearing an English invasion, had refused to open their gates and so the fugitives had been trapped under the walls and there the last of them had died. The old Roman road that ran to the city was littered with the dead, but now the living sat around fires and ate food they had plundered from the enemy’s abandoned camp.

Thomas had joined the pursuit, riding with Sam and a dozen other archers. Those archers would all become rich on their plunder, but Thomas had not ridden to find jewels or plate armour or an expensive horse.

‘You found him?’ Genevieve asked. She sat beside him, her head on his shoulder, and Hugh leaned against her.

‘I found them both.’

‘Tell me again,’ she said, like a child wanting to hear a familiar and comforting story.

So Thomas told her how he had caught up with Cardinal Bessieres and how the cardinal’s men-at-arms had tried to protect their master, and how Sam and the archers had beaten them down, and Thomas had confronted Father Marchant, who had loudly declared that he was a priest and not a combatant, and Thomas had used la Malice to disembowel him so that his guts slid out from his robe and spilt onto the saddle and then down to the ground, and Thomas had laughed at him. ‘That’s payment for my wife’s eye, you bastard.’ He had been tempted to let the priest die in agony, but then killed him with another swing of la Malice.

Cardinal Bessieres had been begging for mercy.

‘You are a combatant,’ Thomas had said.

‘No! I am a cardinal! I will pay you!’

‘I see no red hat,’ Thomas said, ‘only a helmet,’ and the cardinal had tried to pull the bascinet off his head, then screamed as he saw la Malice coming, and the scream only stopped when Saint Peter’s blade had ripped open his throat. Only then had Thomas turned back towards the battlefield where the dead now lay beneath the stars.

Roland was with his Bertille. ‘I should have shouted at you,’ he told Thomas, ‘I didn’t realise you had been deafened.’

‘It was a terrible mistake,’ Thomas lied gravely, ‘and I apologise.’

‘It was not dishonourable,’ Roland said, ‘because you were not to know he had surrendered. He was still holding a sword, and you were deafened.’

‘It was God’s will,’ Bertille said. She looked radiant.

Roland nodded. ‘It was God’s will,’ he agreed, then, after a pause. ‘And la Malice?’

‘She’s gone,’ Thomas said.

‘Where?’

‘Where she cannot be found,’ Thomas said.

He had taken la Malice to the largest gap in the hedge where men were piling weapons discarded on the battlefield. The good weapons were put into one pile, the cheap and worthless weapons onto another. There were broken swords, shattered crossbows, an axe with a bent blade, and a score of rusted falchions. ‘What happens to them?’ Thomas had asked a man wearing the Prince of Wales’s three-feathered badge.

‘Melted down, like as not. That looks like a piece of shit.’

‘It is,’ Thomas had said, and he had tossed the Sword of the Fisherman onto the pile of worthless junk. It looked no different to all the other cheap falchions. A shattered spear had landed on top of it, then a broken sword had clattered onto the heap. When he had looked back Thomas could not even tell which sword was the relic and which was not. It would be put into the fire, melted, and then reforged. Perhaps a ploughshare?

‘Now we go home,’ he said. ‘Castillon first, then back to England.’

‘Home,’ Genevieve said happily.

The Sword of Saint Peter had come. It had gone. It was over. It was time to go home.