1356 by Bernard Cornwell
The prince’s army was a mile or more behind him, travelling south on roads leading through apparently endless forests, and all around the army were small bands of horsemen like this one that the captal led. They were the army’s scouts, and beyond the scouts were the enemy’s scouts. There was an enemy army somewhere too, but the prince’s scouts just saw bands of horsemen.
Those horsemen had tracked the army from the day it had left the safety of Gascony, but now there were far more. At least a dozen groups of French horsemen were keeping track of the English. They rode as close as they dared and sheered away if they were opposed by a larger force, and the captal knew they were sending their messages back to the French king. But where was he?
The prince, having been turned away from the river at Tours and thwarted of his ambition to join the Earl of Lancaster, was going back southwards. He was riding for the safety of Gascony and taking his plunder with him. The whole army was mounted, even the archers had horses, and the baggage carts were mostly light and horse-drawn so that the army could move fast, but it was evident the French were travelling just as fast, and any fool could understand that King Jean was doing his utmost to get ahead of the prince. Get in front, choose a battlefield, and kill the impudent English and Gascons.
So where were the French?
There was a faint smudge of grey in the eastern sky, which the captal suspected was smoke from the remnants of the fires that the French had lit in their encampment the previous night. And that smudge was close, too close and too far to the south. If that smudge was a marker of the French night-time position then they were already abreast of the prince, and a prisoner, taken two days before, had confirmed that King Jean had dismissed the foot soldiers from his army. He travelled like the English, every man on horseback. Foot soldiers would slow his march and he did not want to be slowed. It was a race.
‘Twenty-one now,’ a man said.
The captal stared at the horsemen. Were they a lure? Were a hundred other cavalry waiting in the trees to pounce if any Englishman or Gascon rode to attack the twenty-one? Then he would set his own lure. ‘Hunald!’ he called to his squire. ‘The bag. Eude? Your horse and two men to go with you.’
The squire took a leather bag that hung from his saddle, dismounted and rooted around the forest floor to find stones. There were not many that were heavy enough, and so it took time to fill the bag. The Frenchmen, meanwhile, were gazing westwards. They were being cautious, and that, the captal decided, was good. They would be more confident if they were supported by a larger band of hidden cavalry.
The filled bag was tied by its laces to the right forefoot of Eude’s horse. ‘Ready, sire,’ Eude said. He had dismounted.
‘Then go.’
The three men, two in their saddles and with Eude leading his horse, left the cover of the trees and went southwards. The horse, cumbered by the bag of stones, walked awkwardly. It shied every few steps, and when it did walk docilely it dragged its right forefoot, and to a distant observer it looked as though the beast was painfully lame and that its owner was trying to lead it back to safety. The three men appeared to be easy prey, and the French, doubtless hoping that one of them was rich enough to yield a ransom, took the bait.
‘It works every time,’ the captal said in wonderment.
He was watching and counting the French horsemen who were coming from the trees. Thirty-three. The years of our Lord, he thought, and saw the enemy turning towards their prey and spreading apart. Lances dropped to the rest, swords were drawn, and then the Frenchmen spurred their horses across the pasture that separated the two stretches of woodland. They went from the trot to the canter. They were racing themselves now, eager to take the prisoners, and the captal waited a few heartbeats longer, then jerked up his own lance and touched the courser with his spurs. The horse leaped forward.
Twenty-nine horsemen burst from the trees. Lances were levelled. The French had not shortened their lances, and so had an advantage, but they had been taken by surprise and to meet the charge they needed to turn. They were slow, and the long lances were ponderous, and the captal struck them hard before they had a chance to realign themselves.
His own lance caught a man beneath his shield. The captal felt the shock of the blow as he tightened his arm on the lance’s stock. The high cantle of his saddle held him in place as the lance bored deep. It went through mail and leather, through skin and muscle into soft tissue and there was blood on the enemy’s saddle and the captal had already let go of the lance and was drawing his sword. He backslashed the blade, hitting the dying man’s helmet, and used his knees to turn the courser hard to the right and so towards another Frenchman whose lance was tangled in a companion’s horse. The man panicked, let go of the long ash lance and tried to draw his sword, and he was still drawing it as the captal’s blade gouged his unprotected throat. A massive blow crashed against the captal’s shield, but then one of his horsemen drew off that assailant. A horse was screaming. A dismounted man was staggering with blood spilling from a gash in his bascinet. ‘I want a prisoner!’ the captal shouted. ‘At least one prisoner!’
‘And their horses!’ another man shouted.
Most of the Frenchmen were fleeing and the captal was content to let them go. He and his men had killed five of the enemy, wounded another seven, and they had their prisoners as well as the valuable horses.
He took them all back to the woodland where the ambush had been sprung and there he questioned the captives whose horses all bore the brand of the Count of Eu. That brand, a stylised lion burned into the horses’ flanks, told the captal that these men were Normans. They were talkative Normans too. They told how the Count of Poitou’s men, drawn from the southern counties of France, had joined the French king’s army. So now the enemy was reinforced. They said, too, that they had ridden less than five miles from their overnight encampment to the meadow where the captal’s men had torn into their flank.
So the French were nearby. They had been reinforced, they were marching hard, they were trying their best to cut the prince off from safety. They wanted a battle.
The captal went to find the prince to tell him the hunters had become the hunted.
And the retreat went on.
Eleven
It was a strange journey.
Thomas could feel the nervousness in the land. Towns kept their gates closed. Villagers hid when they saw horsemen coming; they either fled to nearby woods or, if taken by surprise, sheltered in their churches. Harvesters dropped their sickles and ran. Twice the Hellequin found cows lowing in pain because they needed to be milked after their owners had fled. Thomas’s archers, nearly all of them countrymen, milked the animals instead.
The weather was uncertain. It did not rain, yet it always seemed about to rain. The clouds were low and the incessant north wind unseasonably cold. Thomas led thirty-four men-at-arms, which, except for those left to guard Castillon d’Arbizon, was every man fit enough to travel, and each of those men had two horses, and some had three or four. They had squires and servants and women who, like Thomas’s sixty-four archers, were all mounted, and horses inevitably cast shoes or went lame, and each incident took time to remedy.
There was little news, and what there was could not be trusted. On the third day of the journey they heard church bells clanging. It was too noisy and discordant to be the tolling for a funeral and so Thomas left his men hidden safe in a wood and rode with Robbie to discover what caused the commotion. They found a village large enough to boast two churches, and both were ringing their bells, while in the market square a Franciscan friar in a stained robe was standing on the steps of a stone cross proclaiming a great French victory. ‘Our king,’ the friar shouted, ‘is rightly called Jean le Bon! He is indeed Jean the Good! John the Triumphant! He has scattered his enemies, taken noble prisoners, and filled the graves with Englishmen!’ He saw Robbie and Thomas and, assuming them to be French, pointed at them. ‘Here are the heroes! The men who have given us victory!’
Th
‘I wasn’t at the battle,’ Thomas called, ‘do you know where it was fought?’
‘To the north!’ the friar declared vaguely. ‘And it was a great victory! The King of England is slain!’
‘The King of England!’
‘Glory be to God,’ the friar said. ‘I saw it myself! I saw the pride of England slaughtered by Frenchmen!’
‘The last I heard,’ Thomas said to Robbie, ‘the king was still in England.’
‘Or fighting Scotland,’ Robbie said bitterly.
‘There’s a truce, Robbie, a truce.’
‘The Lord of Douglas doesn’t recognise a truce,’ Robbie said bleakly. ‘That’s why I’m here, because I told him I couldn’t fight against the English.’
‘You can now. You’re bound by no oaths.’
‘By gratitude, then?’ Robbie asked. Thomas gave a brief smile, but said nothing. He was watching a small boy, probably no older than Hugh, who was annoying an equally small girl by trying to lift her skirts with a nuthook. The boy saw Thomas’s gaze and pretended to be interested in what the friar was saying. ‘You think he’s right?’ Robbie asked. ‘There’s been a battle?’
‘No, it’s rumour.’
The friar was now haranguing the crowd to donate coins to two younger men, both in friar’s robes, who were carrying small barrels about the crowd. ‘Our brave men have suffered wounds!’ the friar shouted. ‘They have suffered for France! For the love of our Lord Jesus Christ help them in their distress! Be generous and receive Christ’s blessing! Every coin will help our wounded heroes!’
‘He’s a fraud,’ Thomas said dismissively. ‘Just a rogue making some money.’
They moved on northwards. The Hellequin had to avoid towns because any place that had a wall inevitably had a score of men capable of shooting a crossbow, and Thomas wanted to finish his journey without losing a man to some squalid skirmish. He had tended to the eastward because he was more likely to find Englishmen in that direction, and he found a score of them in a village dominated by a high-towered church. That church was the only stone building; the rest were all made of timber, plaster, and thatch. There was a smithy with a furnace built in the back yard beneath a scorched oak tree, and a tavern surrounded by a huddle of small cottages, and when Thomas first glimpsed the village amidst the vineyards he had also seen a crowd of horses being watered in the small stream that flowed beside the impressive church. There were more than fifty horses, which suggested at least twenty men, and he had presumed the horses must belong to Frenchmen, but then he had seen the flag of Saint George, its red cross bold against the white field, leaning against the tavern wall. He had led his men down the hill and into the small square where men-at-arms leaped up in alarm. ‘We’re English!’ Thomas called.
‘Jesus,’ a tall man said in relief as he ducked under the tavern’s lintel. He wore a jupon showing a golden lion rampant against a background of fleurs-de-lys on a blue field. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘Sir Thomas Hookton,’ Thomas said. He rarely used the honorific ‘sir’, but he had been knighted by the Earl of Northampton and it was useful sometimes.
‘Benjamin Rymer,’ the tall man said. ‘We serve the Earl of Warwick.’
‘You’re with the army?’ Thomas asked in hope.
‘We’re looking for the bloody army,’ Rymer said, then explained that he and his conroi of men had been aboard a ship that had sailed from Southampton, but had become separated from the fleet that had been carrying the rest of the earl’s reinforcements to Gascony. ‘The wind blew up and the bloody shipmaster panicked and we ended up in Spain,’ he said, ‘and it took the bastard two months to make repairs and get us to Bordeaux.’ He looked at Thomas’s men. ‘It’s a relief to be with some archers again. Ours were on another ship. Do you know where the prince’s army is?’
‘No idea at all,’ Thomas said.
‘The blind leading the blind,’ Rymer said. ‘And there’s no ale here, so no end to bad news.’
‘Is there wine?’
‘They say so. Tastes like cat piss to me. Did you come from Bordeaux?’
Thomas shook his head. ‘We’re from a garrison east of Gascony,’ he said.
‘So you know the damn country?’
‘Some of it. It’s big.’
‘So where do we go?’
‘North,’ Thomas said. ‘The last rumour I heard said the army was at Tours.’
‘Wherever the hell Tours is.’
‘It’s to the north,’ Thomas said, and slid out of the saddle. ‘Rest the horses,’ he called to his men. ‘Walk them! Let them drink! We’re moving again in an hour.’
Rymer and his troop travelled with Thomas’s men, and Thomas wondered how the man had survived so far because he expressed surprise when Thomas sent scouts ahead. ‘Is it that dangerous?’ he asked.
‘It’s always dangerous,’ Thomas said. ‘This is France.’
Yet no enemy disturbed them. Once in a while Thomas saw a castle and led his column on a wide detour to avoid trouble, but the garrisons made no attempt to challenge or even identify the mounted soldiers. ‘They’ve probably sent most of their men north,’ Thomas told Rymer, ‘and just left a handful to hold the battlements.’
‘Pray God we’re not too late for any battle!’
‘Pray to Saint George there isn’t a battle,’ Thomas said.
‘We have to beat them!’ Rymer said cheerfully, and Thomas thought of Crécy, of blood in the grass and of the weeping in the night after battle. He said nothing, and his thoughts wandered to Saint Junien. He sensed they must be nearing the abbey where the saint was entombed, though that was merely a suspicion that could have been inspired by hope rather than by reality. Yet the country was changing, the hills were smaller and more rounded, the rivers wider and slower, the leaves were turning faster. Whenever he found a village or a traveller, he asked for directions, but usually folk only knew how to reach the next village or perhaps a town that Thomas had never heard of, and so he just kept going north.
‘You’re trying to reach Poitiers?’ the Sire Roland asked him on the sixth day.
‘I’m told the prince might be there,’ Thomas said, but as it had been Sir Henri who suggested that, and as Sir Henri knew no more than Thomas, it was at best a vague destination.
‘Or are you going there because it’s near Nouaillé?’ Roland asked.
‘Nouaillé?’
‘That’s where the blessed Junien rests.’
‘You’ve been there?’
Roland shook his head. ‘I’ve only heard of it. Are you going there?’
‘If it’s on the way,’ Thomas said.
‘Because you want la Malice?’ Roland asked, and it was almost an accusation.
‘Does it exist?’
‘I’ve heard so, yes.’
‘Cardinal Bessières believes it,’ Thomas said, ‘and the Black Friars must too, and my lord has ordered me to find it.’
‘So he can use it to fight against France?’ Roland asked indignantly. He might have joined the Hellequin and be willing to fight against King Jean’s army, but that was for Bertille. His deep loyalty was still with France, which meant he would do this thing for Bertille, only for Bertille, because she had asked him to do it and what she asked, he gave. He twisted in his saddle to look at her. She rode with Genevieve. Thomas had not wanted either woman to come north, but Bertille had insisted, and it had been impossible to deny her when so many of the archers and men-at-arms had their women mounted on rounceys.
A grumble of thunder sounded somewhere to the north. ‘You’re worried,’ Thomas said, ‘that I’ll find la Malice?’
‘I wouldn’t want the blade in the hands of France’s enemies,’ Roland said.
‘You want the church to have it?’
‘That’s to whom it should belong,’ Roland said, but his memories of Father Marchant made his tone uncertain.
‘Let me tell y
‘They were the men charged with guarding the treasures of the Cathar heretics,’ Roland said disapprovingly.
Thomas reckoned it wise not to say that he was descended from one of those same Dark Lords. ‘It’s said that they possessed the Holy Grail,’ he said instead, ‘and I’ve heard they rescued it from Montségur and then hid it, and that not so long ago other men set out to find it.’
‘I’ve heard the same thing.’
‘But what you have not heard,’ Thomas said, ‘is that one of those men found it.’
The Sire Roland crossed himself. ‘Rumour,’ he said dismissively.
‘I swear to you on the blood of Christ,’ Thomas said, ‘that the Grail was found, though the man who discovered it sometimes doubted what he had found.’
Roland stared at Thomas for a few seconds, then saw the sincerity in Thomas’s face. ‘But if it was found,’ he said urgently, ‘why isn’t it shrined in gold, mounted on an altar, and worshipped by pilgrims?’
‘Because,’ Thomas said gravely, ‘the man who found the Grail hid it again. He took it to a place where it cannot be found. He hid it at the bottom of the ocean. He gave it back to God because man cannot be trusted with it.’
‘Truly?’
‘I promise you,’ Thomas said, and he remembered the moment when he had hurled the clay bowl into the grey sea and had seen the small splash, and it had seemed to him that the world went silent after the Grail vanished, and it had been moments before he heard the sound of the waves and the noise of shingle being dragged to the ocean and the forlorn cry of gulls. Heaven itself, he thought, had held its breath. ‘I promise you,’ he said again.
‘And if you find la Malice,’ Roland began, then faltered.
‘I shall give it back to God,’ Thomas said, ‘because man cannot be trusted with it.’ He paused, then looked at Roland. ‘So yes,’ he said, ‘I want la Malice, even if it’s only to stop Cardinal Bessières from finding it.’