Simon de Montfort saw me and gave me a jolly wave. His helm was resting on his knee, and he was smiling. He called to me, and I trotted over.
‘Do you think we will be in time?’ I asked.
‘It seems so,’ he said, and his face fell. ‘The king could not control himself, of course, rushing for safety like a …’ He blew out his cheeks and sighed, exasperated. ‘A fine example. Still, Lusignan’s men are still with us.’ He pointed over to where the blue and red flag of Marche, with its three lions, waved out on the left. ‘I am surprised. I thought old Hughues would have slipped away.’
‘Has he betrayed us, then?’
‘God knows. The Lusignans, and the Queen Mother, are all mad. They are schemers. If Lusignan has betrayed us, the fault is Henry’s, for taking the bait.’
I was thinking that it must be because we were surely about to fight a battle that a great lord could gossip to a commoner like this, when there was a scream, faint but shrill, and then an ugly din. The end of the column was close now, less than a mile, but the road behind them was no longer white and empty. It was boiling with mounted men, and like a serpent they had already swallowed up the last English carts. As I watched, the great serpent, with teeth of steel, devoured the carts of the noblewomen. A pennant waved bravely, and went down.
Chapter Thirteen
‘God’s bloody hands!’ shouted de Montfort. ‘The French! The French are here!’ He slipped on his great helm and turned the black eye-slits towards me. ‘Are you ready to fight?’
I nodded. My stomach felt empty and my blood had left my head, but I still nodded. ‘Then follow me. And pick up a shield as soon as you can, or you’ll lose your arm,’ he barked. ‘To me, to me!’ he yelled, drawing his sword and waving it high over his head. ‘King’s men, to me!’
All the English nobles and knights were riding to the road, and in a few minutes a short, thick line had formed, a packed mob of shouting men and the tossing heads of horses.
‘The king is here!’ somebody called, and there was Henry, looking very young and not half so composed as he had been yesterday at Taillebourg. But he raised his hand and the trumpets sounded. The lions of England snapped out, and a great cheer went up.
The French were pouring down the road now, and were trying to form up into battle lines, but the vineyards were hampering them. The foot soldiers in the column who had been straggling along just ahead of the carts had turned and thrown themselves at the enemy and the crossbows of both sides were pouring bolts into the air. The sight of the French attacking the women’s carts seemed to have enraged the English. Where yesterday men had all been cool and workmanlike, today they roared and shook their swords.
Richard of Cornwall had joined the king, not a pilgrim now, but shining in mail, and with a gold-banded helmet on his head. His horse was dancing from left to right in its impatience.
‘Give tongue, brother!’ cried Richard. The trumpet blared again. Henry drew his sword and held it high, and with a sound like a great sheet of ice sliding down a stone roof, a thousand swords came out, and my own with them.
‘By the Holy Face!’ yelled the king, and his own placid face was transformed suddenly into a straining web of sinew and muscle. ‘On, king’s men!’ There was a huge, incoherent roar, and I found myself screaming along, one word, hollow as a plundered reliquary to me these many years but rising now like desperate joy from my throat:
‘JESUS!’
My sword was out. Yelling, I stabbed it towards the enemy. With a creaking lurch, as a heavy ship will make when a strong wind catches its slack sail, the English army began to gather speed: my horse was trotting, taking its lead from the mounts beside it, and I was rising and falling in the saddle, left hand tangled in reins and mane. We had the advantage of a gentle slope that was carrying us, faster and faster, towards the French knights where they were hacking their way through the foot soldiers.
‘King’s men! King’s men!’ I shouted with the rest.
‘Montjoie! ’ the French screamed back at us. ‘Montjoie, et Saint Denis!’ And there was Montjoie itself, the Oriflamme, flying above our enemies. No quarter. But I only remembered that much later. As I charged that day I thought of nothing save how strange it was that the blood sang in my ears as if I had seashells pressed to them. I felt no fear. It had left me when I drew my sword. But I have talked to the mad, and those who have fallen in and out of madness, and I think, in those hours in the vineyards before Saintes, that I was perhaps a madman.
I was rushing down a narrow lane between two plantings of vines. Simon de Montfort was in front of me with two other knights. I could see the shield of John Maunsell; and Ralph Fitz-Nicholas, the king’s seneschal, was beside me. Then we crashed into the first line of the French.
A man flashed past me on the right. I swung my sword at him but cut thin air. A horse screamed and then another horse ran across my path. I saw black slits in a gold cross, eyes staring from a helmet, and a lance shot past my left shoulder. The wooden shaft slapped against me and I swung at the man, a high overhand blow. A shock jolted my arm but I was already beyond whatever I had done, and a foot soldier was scrabbling at the bridle of my horse. I stuck him in the neck with the tip of my sword and he screamed and flailed backwards, his blood spattering my leg. My horse was plunging in terror. As I fought to calm him another shape rose up and I saw the glint of steel barely in time to parry the man’s blow and I thrust at him, striking nothing. He swung again and again I parried, his sword slamming into the hilt of mine and almost knocking it from my hand. He was wearing an open helmet and his eyes were wide and white. I yelled and sent my half-numb sword arm flying at him back-handed, but as I did a lance caught him in the small of the back and went straight through, the point tearing off the ear of his horse. An English knight, still holding the lance, crashed into the back of the impaled Frenchman and all went down in a shrieking boil of horse-legs and bloody chain-mail.
The dust was roiling around us, thick and white like smoke. I heard ‘King’s men! King’s men!’ in front of me, and saw the red shield and white lion of de Montfort. ‘Devon!’ I yelled in answer. A dozen French knights appeared out of the dust, their horses just breaking into a run, lances in a ghastly row levelled at my chest. I slashed at the nearest lance, knocking it aside, and kicked hard, driving my horse between the spears. Hacking to left and right I forced my way through, turned and went at their backs. There was a whizzing in the air – it had been going on the whole time, I realised – and a crossbow bolt plucked at the mail on my stomach. I was already surrounded by chopping, stabbing swords when de Montfort’s red shield crashed into a face very close to my own. Maddened by the burning in the flesh of my belly I turned the other way and swept my sword down, and found I had split a man’s shoulder down to the breast-bone.
‘Pick up his shield! Pick up his fucking shield!’ de Montfort was shrieking at me. He had lost his helmet and his face was streaked with blood and spittle. The man I had struck had fallen off his horse and was writhing feebly beneath me. My stroke had split his chest so that it hung open as if hinged by the rent muscles, and the purple bag of his lung worked feebly in the wound. I swung myself out of the saddle, leaned down, and clapped my hand to my stomach, for the pain was tearing at me. But I did not find my guts, just chain-mail, so I put my foot on the Frenchman’s neck, wrenched off his shield and climbed back into the saddle. The shield was heavy and strange on my arm. In a daze I peered over the top of it to see what sign it bore, when a crossbow bolt struck it with a thwack.
‘To the carts!’ The cry was to my right. I wheeled and charged towards it. There were the carts. Two of them were burning – so it was smoke after all, I thought, distantly. By now my thoughts were so buried in the havoc of the battle that they came to me one by one, shyly and delicately, as though I were drawing pictures for myself in the margins of some vast, illegible book. Letice! That thought was distinct enough, though. The wagons were empty save for the headless body of a driver. I rode down the line
. Nothing. Another driver’s corpse, his severed arm still tangled in the reins. The oxen stood and grazed stolidly even as the carts they were lashed to blazed behind them. As I searched, one great white beast took a crossbow bolt in the eye and dropped with a thud that shook the ground.
‘Yield!’ It was a voice I recognised. A man I recognised, an earl of somewhere or other, had knocked a Frenchman from his horse and was kneeling on his chest. ‘You! Help me,’ he called, pointing in my direction. I dropped from my horse and ran over.
‘Get his helmet off!’ the nobleman ordered. I did so. The Frenchman was of middle years, ruddy and full of face.
‘Sir John de Barres!’ said the English knight. ‘Delighted to see you again. We met at the tourney two years since.’
‘Enchanté,’ wheezed the Frenchman. Some English foot soldiers were running towards us so I got back on my horse and galloped down to the end of the wagon line. All were empty. The battle had passed over here, and I saw the shields of Earl Richard and Pierre de Moings dancing in the midst of the vineyards to the east.
‘King’s men! King’s men!’ I yelled, and spurred my sweating, almost blown mount back into the fray. The quiet man drawing those careful illuminations in my mind was holding up a concise little painting of Letice lying dead, the finger of guilt pointing at me. The dust had closed around the earl. My horse ripped through a wall of vines into a narrow lane. In front of me were three knights beating upon the shield of a fourth. As I watched, they knocked him from his saddle and, with a French oath, two knights slid from their horses, swords raised. Without thinking, I kicked my beast at them, knocking the mounted knight aside with my shield and thrusting at the nearest man on the ground. I missed, and my blade slid under his armpit, but I must have cut him as I pulled it back for he cursed and tripped backwards into the vines. Meanwhile the other man had grabbed my bridle and was trying to pull my horse down. I smashed at his helmet with the pommel of my sword until he let go. A blow fell on my shield and I had time to swing my sword around and catch the knight with the flat of my blade upon his mailed neck. Yelling, I turned and flailed at the other knight, who seemed to have lost his sword. The Englishman who had fallen was sitting up, his face in his hands. I bent down, grabbed him by his mail hood with my left arm and put spurs to my horse, dragging him down the lane of vines until my arm felt as if it were being torn out of its socket. So I reined in and dropped the man I had rescued, who lay in the dust, his face floured white with it, coughing. The only colour in his face was the red that rimmed his eyes and a smear of dark blood on his brows, but even so I realised that I had just saved the Bishop of Balecester.
I must have seen his shield out of the corner of my eye and followed it, for he would have been near Earl Richard, so this was not the blind chance it seemed, and I saw all this almost at once, but in the instant that we stared at each other wild-eyed and panting it seemed that the Devil must have brought me here. That was my first thought. My second was that I could bend down and stab him through the neck, and no one would ever know. But then the bishop spoke.
‘Who are you, my son?’ he gasped.
‘Petrus Zennorius,’ I said without thinking. And then I thought: I am covered in this dust. He would not have known me.
‘Help me up,’ he said. I reached out and he pulled himself to his feet. ‘My thanks …’ he began, wiping streaks across his face with the palms of his hands.
‘Are you hurt, my lord?’ I said. ‘No? There are horses down there—’ I pointed down to where the carts were burning.
‘Where is the battle?’ he said, shaking his head stupidly.
‘All around us, my lord!’ I cried. ‘There are no French that way, though. Hurry and find a horse, and get away from here! You are hurt.’ It was true. His ears were leaking blood and he staggered like a drunkard, but he could walk, and I was done with him. I should have said Go! I could have struck him down, or left him for the French. Would that have been right or wrong? Would it have mattered with a man like Balecester? But instead I saw him totter, an old man, his knees too loose. I pictured those same legs striding across the rectory barn. The wolf, the bloody wolf. But it was too late now: I had let him live.
‘Get up behind, my lord,’ I told him, and gave him my stirrup so he could heave himself up, cursing. I wheeled my horse and went off to look for Earl Richard.
I found the earl in the midst of a small company of knights and nobles at the top of a small hillock. All of them leaned on their horses’ necks, and all were white and red with dust and gore.
‘I have found my lord Balecester,’ I called, as soon as I had come up to them. It was quieter up here away from the shrieking of men and the ring of steel against steel, the crash of hooves and the snap of breaking vines, and the whining of the crossbow bolts. I was yelling even so, for I had forgotten how to use my voice any other way, but when they recognised me, two knights yelled back. It was Edmund de Wykham and Gervais Bolam, the boys who I had fought with on the Lychway. I raised my sword and laughed out loud. Simon de Montfort was there next to Earl Richard, and they were both pointing down the slope I had just climbed. Turning, I saw the battlefield for the first time.
The Taillebourg road was below me and about half a mile distant. The walls of Saintes were on my right. The neat, straight lines of the vineyards ran down to the road and up the far side, divided by other narrow lanes rutted by farmers’ wagons. The English charge had struck the French where they had been gathering on the road, and the force of it had shattered both lines, sending shards, splinters of battle out into the vines. There was a confused mêlée on the road, and like a vast spider’s legs, dark lines of combat radiated away up the lanes and rows of vines. Another desperate fight was going on between our hill and the city, and the flags of Marche and Poitou waved above it.
A foot soldier and a couple of pages were helping the bishop down. I found de Montfort and Earl Richard beside me.
‘Well, well,’ said Richard. ‘What are you doing with the good bishop?’
‘He drove off ten verminous Frenchmen who were about to take me captive!’ rasped Balecester.
‘Ten?’ said Richard, looking at me incredulously.
‘Ten! Ten, I say! Would I have been taken by any lesser number of French lice?’ roared Balecester and crumpled in a fit of coughing.
‘My lord bishop is hurt,’ I said, and they laid him down and gave him wine, although he seemed to be feeling a good deal better.
‘Look, Richard! Zennorius killed the Sieur de Bourbon,’ said de Montfort, tapping my shield with his sword.
‘Good God! So he has. Archambaud Dampierre. Well, well.’ I studied the shield again: it was red, with two stalking leopards in gold. There were three crossbow bolts jutting from it, and a gash of raw wood from a sword-stroke.
‘Well done, sir! And saving my lord bishop from ten …’
‘To reduce that number would dishonour my lord Balecester,’ I said hurriedly, ‘but if I said it were true, it would dishonour me.’ To my relief, the two earls laughed, as if we were all sitting down in some comfortable hall and not up on this dusty hill with bolts flying about our heads.
‘You should make him a knight, Richard,’ said de Montfort, jovially. ‘He has slain a very notable man, and rescued my friend, after all. Would you allow a commoner to bear Dampierre’s shield?’
‘Oh, very well,’ said Earl Richard. He might have been agreeing to another round of cards. ‘Down from your horse, Petrus Zennorius.’
It was no more or less dream-like than any other moment in that day. I knelt on the chalk pebbles, and Richard of Cornwall tapped me on the shoulders with his sword, and told me, ‘Be thou a knight.’
‘Get him a shield,’ someone was calling.
‘You can’t carry that one any more,’ de Montfort agreed. ‘An Englishman will kill you. Here: they have brought you a buckler. Can you use it?’
I nodded and accepted the round foot soldier’s shield, plain hide-covered wood studded with iron nails. I wa
s glad to be shot of the bulky kite-shaped one anyway.
‘What are your arms?’ asked Gervais. He and Edmund were crowding round me, slapping my back with their mailed hands. It hurt.
‘My arms?’ I said stupidly, holding them out.
‘Your coat of arms, Sir Petrus!’ they hooted.
‘I don’t know. My family … were without such a thing,’ I muttered.
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