The Ill-Made Knight (14 page)

Slam, slam, bang.

Like an armourer’s shop in Cheapside.

Another French knight appeared, and another, plunging into the marsh.

The Earl had sent his war horse to the rear. I don’t know why Hawkwood hadn’t, but the Earl shouted his war cry and appeared at Hawkwood’s stirrup with a poleaxe. He thrust up, and caught the first French knight in the aventail at the base of the helmet, throwing him from the saddle.

Two more French knights joined the fight. Every one of them was going for the Earl, who was now obvious in his bright Italian plate armour and his red and yellow arms and coronet. Remember that he’d come across the marsh with his standard bearer and a few picked men, as well as his archers.

Sir Edward, my cousin, appeared by his side.

The French knights circled for the kill. They were close.

I levered myself to my feet. I won’t say it was the bravest moment of my life. I’ll only say that I didn’t have to.

But I did.

I got to my feet and the world changed, and after that point I can only tell you what I remember.

First, about the time I got to my feet, the French knight the Earl had put down
bounced
to his. Christ, he was eager. Or angry.

And, once again, I was in his way.

This time, I didn’t have an old gelding between my knees. I had my buckler off my hip and on my hand, and when he swung his sword, I didn’t flinch, even though it was the longest sword I’d ever faced.

Fighting in mud is horrible, because everything is wrong. I wanted to close with him and get inside his absurdly long blade, but my legs were literally trapped. It was worse for him, though, in sabatons and leg armour, the mud just sort of ate you. I had on good high boots, and although one was full of water – the things you remember – I got one foot clear of the mud. He hit my buckler hard enough to dent the steel boss, and I lost my balance and was back where I started. We must have looked like antics.

I wasn’t even afraid.

I finally got my left leg out of the mud and forward, and I cut. His blow cut the rim of my buckler and lightly cut my arm, while my blow rang on his helmet. A perfect cut.

Unfortunately, my blade snapped and he was unhurt, because he was wearing a fine helmet. The bastard.

Now I had a four-inch sword stump and a buckler against an armoured knight.

I’d love to tell you how I wrestled him to the ground and took him, but the truth is that one of the archers put a quarter-pounder arrow into his arse, and down he went.

I just stood there.

Alive.

He was trying to get up.

Then I took his sword. It was a magical thing – long, curiously heavy and yet marvellously light. He was face down in mud, and I stepped, hard, on the back of his helmet, and pushed his face down. His thigh and groin were pouring blood. I sat on his backplate, drew my dagger, and thrust it deep. Up. From the bottom, so to speak.

He died.

I took his steel gauntlets. Right there. With another man coming for me.

I got the right one on, and then I was using the longsword to parry, again and again, as a mounted Frenchmen – three bars gules on a field d’or – cut at me over and over as his horse pushed against me. The horse was desperate, locked in the mud’s embrace. The French were churning it into the foam, and the horses were sinking further and further, but the first French knights had ridden in, and the sight of them encouraged more and more of them to try.

The blows rained down from over my head.

I can’t remember what happened to three bars gules. That fight seemed to go on for ever, but it can’t have been that long, because then I was standing by the Earl, thrusting my new longsword up at an eagle argent on a field azure, who had a war hammer and had just put John Hawkwood down with a blow to the helmet. After three failed thrusts, I changed tactics and thrust my sword into the horse, up from under the jaw, right into the brain, and the monster died instantly and fell.

The Earl’s poleaxe cured the eagle knight of his attempt to get to his feet.

I bent over and sucked humid air. The world smelled of swamp and blood.

I straightened up, painfully aware that my cousin Edward and the Earl were only an arm’s length away. My heroes. It took me three breaths to realize there was no one to fight.

No one.

In ten heartbeats, we went from desperate mêlée that might have won the battle for the King of France, to complete victory in our corner of the swamp. I’ve heard men say we won because the French couldn’t get at the archers. Crap. We won because the French knights didn’t want to kill archers; they wanted ransoms and chivalrous contests, so they all went for the Earl’s banner. Had just three or four of those monsters gone off to kill archers . . .

But they didn’t. And Sir Edward and John Hawkwood, Sir Gareth Crawford, William Rose and I stopped them.

Heh.

The Earl started issuing orders. I did something absolutely brilliant for a raw soldier: I went and looked in the mud for the other steel gauntlet. They were a fine fit, and I knew what I wanted.

I wanted armour. I wanted to be able to go toe-to-toe with the French. I had learned a lot in one fight. I had learned that if you want to fight mounted, you need a good horse, and that if you want to fight on foot, you have to wear gauntlets.

See?

I got the second gauntlet out of the mud. It had a fancy engraved brass cuff, and that was just above the muck. I spent three or four very long minutes cleaning the muck out, and when I put it on my hand, the leather glove, a nice German chamois, was like slime, or the inside of a dead man’s entrails.

I didn’t care.

All over the edge of the marsh, archers were looting the dead or taking the wounded for ransoms. We’d cut down sixty of the richest men in France – just sixty, of 12,000 – but we broke the back of the French Marshal Audreham’s attack. The great man himself was taken prisoner a few horse lengths from where I was cleaning a dead man’s gauntlets, and brought to the Earl.

Again, being green, I thought we’d won.

But being halfway to canny, I looked around and saw that everyone older than me was either combing the ground for arrows or looting, and all of them looked like we weren’t done.

I drew the right conclusion.

A page boy emerged from the mud and now-trampled reeds and handed me the reins of my gelding, who didn’t even have the grace to look sorry. I thanked the boy – even then thinking that might have been me, holding the horses – and walked my horse to the edge of the marsh, where Oxford was drinking water from a cup and looking up the ridge to where the rest of the English Army was straightening itself out. The bulk of the French knights had fallen on Warwick and the old Earl of Salisbury. They’d all failed, although they’d probably come closest against us.

But by our saviour, the plain – from the top of the next ridge, where Cardinal Talleyrand had held his peace conference, all the way to the place where the Noailles Road crossed the Poitiers Road – was full of French soldiers.

For a moment I couldn’t breathe, and I’m pretty sure every Englishman there felt the same.

How could there be so much armour in one place?

It was as if the fields of Noailles had grown a crop of iron and steel.

The French chivalry had dismounted.

And now they were coming.

They were in six great divisions, with banners prominently displayed. I knew a few. In the centre of the rear was the great red blot that was the Oriflamme, the sacred banner of St Denis and France. Under it would be Geoffrey de Charny, the best knight in the world, and the King of France.

I could see the Dauphin’s banner in the front. I was too green to know who the others were, but every great lord in France was present – I hadn’t known there were that many knights in the world – and they started up the valley at the Prince and Salisbury.

The Earl of Oxford ordered his archers forward to the edge of the firm ground. We wouldn’t be taken by surprise again – armoured men on foot can be fast, but not as fast as horsemen. Our archers formed neater ranks, and boys and camp servants brought up more sheaves of arrows as we began to loose them into the flank of the French advance.

The French flinched away.

The Earl turned to me. ‘Judas!’ he said. ‘Go to the Prince and tell me what he desires. Tell him how we fare here.’

I nodded. I was by my horse. Richard was nowhere to be seen, and all the Earl’s noble squires were, as it proved, struggling to come up from the baggage.

I rode back along the base of the ridge to keep clear of the French, then up the hill, into the Forest of Noailles at the back of our army, and along our ridge to the middle of our line, where I could see the Prince’s banner. The ride only took me as long as it takes to read a Gospel reading, maybe a little longer, but when I left the Earl, the French were far away, suffering under our shafts, and by the time I reached the standard . . .

The fighting had started.

What I hadn’t known, because I was with the Earl, was that at the top of the ridge, the whole face of the English army was protected by a trio of hedges, with two great gaps. The gaps were about forty men wide.

The whole of the Battle of Poitiers was played out in those gaps.

Only about a hundred men at a time could fight. It was like some kind of terrible tourney, because a thousand English men-at-arms duelled eight times their number of French men-at-arms, but both sides were able to rotate men out of the line. The fighting was fierce and protracted in a way I’ve seldom seen.

In fact, I’ll say that I think the hand-to-hand fight at Poitiers was the worst I ever saw. The French sent their very best, and the English wouldn’t give a foot.

When I rode to the standard, the Dauphin’s division had crashed into Salisbury’s at the right-hand gap, and the fighting sounded like a riot, with pots and pans as participants. The French roared, ‘St Denis!’ and the English roared, ‘George and England!’

The Prince stood by his banner with his war horse. Around him stood Chandos and the Captal and twenty other commanders and great lords. They were watching.

Chandos spotted me and called, ‘Messenger from Oxford, my lord.’

I slid from my horse and knelt. ‘The Earl of Oxford sends his respectful greetings, my lord. We are behind the right flank of the French advance, holding the line of the marsh. We have defeated one party and captured the Marshal d’Audreham. The Earl desires to hear what my lord wishes.’

The Prince smiled at me. ‘That was nicely put. Have you fought?’

‘Yes, my Prince.’ Now that made me glow.

He smiled. Then he started walking. He walked to the hedge, and archers got out of his way. Fifty knights followed him.

The archers had hacked an opening in the hedge too narrow to crawl through, and the other side of the hedge was crawling with Frenchmen, but it gave a view, like the crenellation on a castle curtain wall. The hedges themselves were twice the height of a man, and as thick as a road is wide.

He looked out over the swarm of French knights who filled the hillside, though in no particular order.

‘Where is the Earl of Oxford?’ the Prince asked me.

I pointed down the ride and well off to the left. ‘My Prince, you can just see the leftmost tail of our division – the light-armed men and some Welsh – see?

The Welsh were men of Cheshire, in green and white parti-colour that blended into the marsh reeds all too well.

‘
Par dieu
– that far? So the French are behind us, too?’ he said.

The Captal leaned in to us. ‘The hill is nearly round, n’est pas? So of course the Earl is almost behind us, and yet on the flank of the French.’

The Prince nodded. ‘Anything the Earl can do to prick the flank of the French assault will help relieve the pressure on Salisbury and Warwick,’ he said. ‘Go with God, boy.’

To be sure, I sat my horse for three long breaths, watching the shocking havoc of the two mêlées at the gaps. Blood actually flew – it rose like a hideous mist off the stour.

Then I rode down the ridge and through the marsh, back to the Earl.

By the time I returned – perhaps half an hour after I’d left – our archers were utterly spent of shafts. Let me be frank, they had hit many men, and every hit from a heavy arrow wears a man, saps his courage, reminds him of his mortality and the weight of his sins. But the archers hadn’t slain more than two or three hundred, for all the weight of their shafts had darkened the sun.

On the other hand, the whole French right wing had flinched, perhaps unconsciously, away from us. And as the morning wore into afternoon, the archers who had no place to loose their shafts up on the ridge – blocked by the hedge or by the mêlées – came in twenties and hundreds down to us on the flank, pouring their murderous barbs on the flank of the French again, galling them like spur rowels and pushing them a little further. And as our archers gained this ground, so the Earl moved his banner forward, so that by the time the sun was high in the sky, the Earl’s banner was more than a hundred paces clear of the marsh. The result – I had no idea of this at the time, but I understand it now – was to take almost all the pressure off Warwick’s men.

In the centre, the flower of the English knighthood stood chest to chest with the French chivalry. Neither side gave. From our newest position, I could see it all, and they were all intermixed, a great, writhing steel millipede.

About that time, Burghersh released the last reserves of arrows. Our archers were spread along the whole line of the Moisson, as far as the marsh protruded into the French lines, and there was no particular order. Our men would go forward to within range of the French and launch two or three shafts with great care, and return, discussing their shots. It was like watching a village archery contest. The French had all their archers – mostly crossbowmen – with their last division under the King of France’s hand, and they didn’t loose a shaft at us.

But when we received about a hundred sheaves of arrows, just at nones, Master Peter gathered his men and gave them ten arrows apiece. He had a brief exchange with the Earl, and the Earl sent me for the rest of the squires, who were busy watering horses. With the squires and all the men-at-arms, we had perhaps a hundred armoured men.