1356 (Special Edition)

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘I have a man,’ Douglas said, ‘who has been helping the Cardinal Bessières these last few weeks. I’m not sure he is a man, sire, because he’s more of an animal and he fights like a demented fiend. Christ’s bowels, he frightens me, so God knows what he does to the enemy. And earlier this evening, sire, an English archer shot that arrow at my animal. It hit him plumb on the breastplate. The bastard shot the thing from no more than thirty or forty paces away, and my creature is still alive. He’s more than alive, the lucky animal is making babies with some girl in the village right now. And if a man is shot by an English arrow at forty paces and survives to make the two-backed beast a couple of hours later, then there’s a message for us all.’

  The king fingered the arrowhead. It had once been four inches long, smooth and sharp, but was now bent and squashed. So the arrow had not penetrated a breastplate. ‘We have a saying, my lord,’ the king said, ‘that one swallow does not make a summer.’

  ‘We have the same saying, sire. But look at it!’

  The Scotsman’s peremptory tone irritated the king who was notoriously short-tempered, but he managed to control his anger. He ran his finger over the crumpled arrowhead. ‘You’re telling me it’s badly made?’ he asked. ‘One arrow? Your beast was simply lucky.’

  ‘They make arrows by the thousands, sire,’ Douglas said. He was talking in a low voice now, earnest rather than hectoring. ‘Every shire in England has a duty to make so many thousands of arrows. Some men cut the wood, some men trim the shafts, others collect goose feathers, some men boil the glue, and smiths make the arrowheads. Hundreds of blacksmiths, all across the land, forging heads by the thousand, and all those things, the shafts, the feathers and the heads are collected, assembled, and sent to London. Now one thing I know, sire, is that when you make things in the hundreds of thousands then they’re not as well made as a single object fashioned by a craftsman. You eat from gold plates, sire, and so you should, but your subjects eat off cheap clay. Their platters are made by the thousand, and they break easily. And arrows are harder to make than bowls and plates! The blacksmith has to judge how much bone to add to the furnace, and who is going to make certain he even did that in the first place?’

  ‘Bones?’ the king asked. He was fascinated by what Douglas was saying. Was that really how the English made their arrows? Yet how else? They shot hundreds of thousands in a single battle and so they had to be made in vast numbers, and clearly that demanded organisation. He tried to imagine arranging such a thing in France, and sighed at the impossibility of the thought. ‘Bones?’ he asked again, then made the sign of the cross. ‘It sounds like witchcraft.’

  ‘If you smelt iron ore in a furnace, sire, you get iron, but if you add bones to the fire you get steel.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘They say the bones of a virgin make the best steel.’

  ‘That would make sense, I suppose.’

  ‘And virgins are in short supply,’ Douglas said, ‘but your armourers, sire, take care over their steel. They make good breastplates, good helmets, good greaves. So good that they’ll stop a cheap English arrow.’

  The king nodded. He had to admit that the Scotsman was making sense. ‘You think we’re too frightened of English archers?’

  ‘I think, sire, that if you charge the English on horseback then they’ll rip you to shreds. Even cheap arrows will kill a horse. But fight on foot, lord, and the arrows will bounce off well-made steel. They might pierce a shield, but they won’t pierce armour. They might as well throw rocks at us.’

  The king stared at the arrow. At Crécy, he knew, the French had charged on horseback and the horses had been killed in their hundreds, and in the chaos that followed the men-at-arms had died in their hundreds too. And the English had fought on foot. They always fought on foot. They were famous for it. They had been beaten in Scotland, cut down in their hundreds by Scottish pikemen, and that was the last time they had charged on horseback, and the king reflected that his enemies had learned their lesson. So must he, then. French knights believed there was only one way to fight, on horseback. That was the noble way to fight: the magnificent, frightening way, men and metal and horse together; but common sense said that Douglas was right. The horses would be slaughtered by the arrow storm. He fingered the bent arrowhead. So fight on foot? Do what the English did? And then the arrows would fail? ‘I shall think on what you’ve said, my lord,’ he told Douglas, offering the arrow back to the Scotsman, ‘and I thank you for your counsel.’

  ‘Keep the arrow, sire,’ Douglas said, ‘and win this great victory tomorrow.’

  The king abruptly shook his head. ‘Not tomorrow, no! Tomorrow is Sunday. The Truce of God. The cardinals have promised to talk to the prince and persuade him to yield to our demands.’ He glanced north. ‘If the English are still there, of course.’

  The Lord of Douglas restrained himself from ridiculing the idea of keeping a holy truce on a Sunday. So far as he was concerned one day was as good as any other for killing Englishmen, but he sensed he had persuaded the king that the enemy was vulnerable so there was no point in antagonising the man. ‘But when you do win this great victory, sire,’ he said, ‘and take your prisoners back to Paris, then take that arrow too and keep it as a reminder of how the English put their faith in a weapon that doesn’t work.’ He paused, then bowed. ‘I bid you good night, sire.’

  The king said nothing. He was turning the bent arrow over and over in his hands.

  And dreaming of Paris echoing with cheers.

  At dawn there was a mist in the trees. Everything was grey. Smoke from a thousand fires thickened the mist through which men in mail coats walked like ghosts. A horse broke from its tether and stamped through the oaks, then down the slope

  towards the distant river. The hoofbeats faded in the mist. Archers kept their strings dry by coiling them inside their helmets or in pouches. Men drew stones along the edges of grey blades. No one spoke much. Two servants kicked acorns out of reach of picketed horses. ‘It’s strange,’ Keane said, ‘you can feed acorns to ponies, but not to horses.’

  ‘I hate acorns,’ Thomas said.

  ‘They poison the horses, but not ponies. I’ve never understood that.’

  ‘They taste too bitter.’

  ‘You should soak them in running water,’ Keane said, ‘and when the water runs clear they’ll not be bitter any more.’

  The acorns were thick beneath their feet. Mistletoe hung in the oak branches, though as Thomas and Keane walked to the western edge of the woods the large oaks gave way to chestnut, wild pear, and juniper. ‘They used to say,’ Thomas said, ‘that an arrow made of mistletoe couldn’t miss.’

  ‘How in God’s name would you make an arrow of mistletoe? It’s nothing but a bundle of twigs.’

  ‘It would be a short arrow.’

  The two hounds ranged ahead, noses to the ground. ‘They’ll not go hungry,’ Keane said.

  ‘You feed them?’

  ‘They feed themselves. They’re hunting dogs.’

  They left the trees, crossing a rough strip of grassland to where the hill dropped steeply to the river valley. The river itself was hidden by mist. The army’s wagons were down there somewhere, parked on a track that led to a ford. Treetops showed above the mist. To the west was another valley, much shallower. In Dorset, Thomas thought, they would call it a combe. The nearer slope was terraced for vines, the farther slope was arable land that rose to a wide, flat-topped plateau. Nothing moved there. ‘Is that where the French are?’ Keane asked, seeing where Thomas was staring.

  ‘No one seems to know. They’re close, though.’

  ‘They are?’

  ‘Listen.’

  They fell silent, and after a pause Thomas heard the distant sound of a trumpet. He had heard it a moment before and wondered if he had imagined it. The two hounds pricked their ears and stared northwards, and Thomas, out of curiosity, walked towards the sound.

  The English and their Gascon allies were camped among t
he high trees on a long, wide and high hill that ran north from the River Miosson. If they were to escape the French they must cross that river. It was not large, but it was deep, and to cross it the army could use the bridge by the abbey and a ford that lay farther to the west, and such a crossing would take time and give the French an opportunity to attack while the army was only partway across the river. So perhaps the army would stay here. No one knew.

  Though it was certain the army would stay for at least a while, because banners were being planted on the grassland that edged the high woods at the crest of the long hill. The banners ran from the south to the north and they marked where the men-at-arms must assemble. The distant trumpet was sounding more insistently now, and its call was bringing the English and Gascons from the trees. They wondered if the sound presaged an attack. The Earl of Warwick’s lion banner was at the southernmost point of the crest and, though that was Thomas’s place, he kept walking northwards. The combe was to his left. The combe’s slope was precipitately steep where the hill met the River Miosson, but as he and Keane walked northwards the slope became ever more gentle as the valley floor rose, and by the time Thomas reached the great banner blazoned with the Prince of Wales’s feathers the slope to his left was long and shallow, a mere dip between this crest and the flat-topped hill to the west, though it would hardly be an easy approach if the French chose to attack from that far hill. The long slope was crossed by vineyards, the grapes tied with willow slips to hemp lines stretched between chestnut posts. To make things more difficult there was the thickest hedge Thomas had ever seen stretching across the slope, a hedge as wide as ten or twelve feet to make a long and impassable thicket of brambles and saplings. There were two wide gaps in the hedge where carts had left great ruts in the soil, and archers were now gathering at either side of those gaps. The English banners were some forty or fifty paces behind the rutted openings.

  Keane watched the English army assembling. Lines of men in mail and steel. Lines of men with axes and hammers, with flails, clubs, swords, and lances. ‘They’re expecting an attack?’ he asked, sounding anxious.

  ‘I don’t think anyone knows,’ Thomas said, ‘but nothing’s happening yet.’

  Then a trumpet sounded again, but much closer. The archers, who had been sitting, stood up and some strung their bows. They planted arrows in the turf, ready to be plucked up and shot.

  ‘That came from the hill there,’ Keane said, staring at the wide, flat hill to the west.

  Nothing showed on that far hill. Two horsemen wearing the Prince of Wales’s livery galloped from the trees and stood in one of the hedge’s great gaps from where they gazed westwards. Men-at-arms were thick beneath the English banners now, and Thomas knew he should go back to the southern end of the line where the hill loomed over the Miosson valley, but just as he turned to go the trumpet called again. Three brazen notes, each held for a long time, and when the third note faded a horseman appeared on the flat-topped hill. He was a half-mile away, perhaps more, but Thomas could see he wore a gaudy tunic, then watched as the man raised and waved a thick white stick over his head. ‘A herald,’ he said.

  There was a pause. The French herald just sat watching the English-held hill, though he could see little of the prince’s army because it was obscured by the thick hawthorn hedge. ‘Is he just going to stay there?’ Keane asked.

  ‘He’s waiting for an English herald,’ Thomas guessed, but before any of the prince’s heralds had a chance to meet his French colleague, a group of horsemen showed on the far skyline. They were dressed in red or black and they spurred their horses down the long slope to where the vines began. ‘Three cardinals!’ Thomas exclaimed. There were six men-at-arms in plate armour, but the riders were mostly churchmen: priests and monks in black, brown or white being led by three men in cardinal’s bright red robes. One of them was Bessières. Thomas recognised the bulk of the man and pitied the horse that had to carry him.

  The horsemen, all but one, stopped in the dip of the land, while one cardinal came up the slope alone. He threaded the vines on a narrow track, watched by scores of Englishmen and Gascons who were crowding into the hedge’s wide gaps.

  ‘Make way! Make way!’ voices shouted behind Thomas. Men-at-arms wearing royal livery were ploughing through the crowd, dividing it to make a space for the Prince of Wales. Men went on their knees.

  The prince, mounted on a grey stallion and wearing a jupon with his coat of arms above a mail coat, and with a helmet surrounded by a gold coronet, frowned in puzzlement as the cardinal came closer. ‘It’s Sunday, isn’t it?’ he asked loudly.

  ‘Yes, sire.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s come to give us a blessing, boys!’

  Men laughed. The prince, not wanting the approaching cardinal to see too much of what lay behind the hedge, walked his horse a few paces forward. He waited, his right hand resting on the gilded hilt of his sword. ‘Anyone recognise him?’ he called.

  ‘That’s Talleyrand,’ one of the prince’s older companions grunted.

  ‘Talleyrand of Périgord?’ the prince sounded surprised.

  ‘The same, sire.’

  ‘We are honoured,’ the prince said sarcastically. ‘Stand up!’ he called to the men behind him. ‘We don’t want the cardinal to think we’re worshipping him.’

  ‘He’d like us to worship him,’ the Earl of Warwick growled.

  The cardinal reined in his mare. The horse was bridled in red leather that was trimmed with silver. The saddlecloth was scarlet with gold fringes, the saddle’s pommel and cantle were edged with gold. Even the stirrups were gold. Talleyrand of Périgord was the richest churchman in all France. He had been born into the nobility and had never taken to heart his church’s preaching on humility, though he respectfully bowed low in his saddle when he reached the waiting prince. ‘Your Majesty,’ he said.

  ‘Your Eminence,’ the prince replied.

  Talleyrand glanced at the archers and men-at-arms, and they gazed back, seeing a tall, thin-faced man with haughty dark eyes. He leaned forward and patted his horse’s neck with a red-gloved hand on which a thick gold ring, set with a ruby, glowed bright. ‘Your Majesty,’ he said again. ‘I come with a plea.’

  The prince shrugged, but said nothing.

  Cardinal Talleyrand looked up at the sky as if seeking inspiration, and when he looked back to the prince there were tears in his eyes. He stretched out his arms. ‘I pray you will listen to me, sire. I beseech you to hear my words!’

  He had looked to where the sun was burning through a layer of thin cloud, Thomas thought, to make his eyes water.

  ‘This is no time for a sermon!’ the prince said brusquely. ‘Say what you have to say and say it quickly.’

  The cardinal flinched at the prince’s tone, but then recovered his sorrowful look and, gazing into the prince’s eyes, declared that a battle would be a sinful waste of human life. ‘Hundreds must die, sire, hundreds will die, and they will die far from their homes to be buried in unconsecrated ground. Have you marched this far just to gain a shallow grave in France? For you are in peril, Your Majesty, you are in dreadful peril! The might of France is close, and they outnumber you! They will crush you, and I beg you, I beg you, sire, to allow me to seek another answer. Why fight a battle? Why die for pride? I promise you, sire, by the crucified Christ and by the Blessed Virgin that I will do all that I can to satisfy your wishes! I speak for the church, for the Holy Father, for Christ himself, who does not wish to see men die here. Let us parley, sire. Let us sit down and reason together. This is Sunday, a day unfit for slaughter, a day for men of goodwill to talk. In the name of the living Christ I beg this of you, sire.’

  The prince was silent. There was a murmur in the English ranks as men translated the cardinal’s words. The prince raised a hand for quiet, then just gazed at the cardinal without speaking for what seemed a long while. Then he shrugged. ‘Do you speak for France, Your Eminence?’

  ‘No, sire. I speak for the church and for the Holy Father. The Holy
Father desires peace, in the name of Christ, I swear it. He has beseeched me to prevent bloodshed, to end this senseless warfare and to make peace.’

  ‘And will our enemy keep a truce this day?’

  ‘King Jean has promised as much,’ Talleyrand said. ‘He has sworn to give this day to the church in the prayerful hope that we can forge an everlasting peace.’

  The prince nodded, then again sat silent for a while. The high clouds drifted to unveil the sun, which blazed in the pale sky, promising a warm day. ‘I shall keep the truce this day,’ the prince finally spoke, ‘and send emissaries to treat with you. They can talk there.’ He pointed to where the remaining churchmen waited at the foot of the slope. ‘But the truce is for this day only,’ the prince added.

  ‘Then I declare this day to be the Truce of God,’ Talleyrand said grandly. There was an awkward pause as if he felt he should say something more, but then he just nodded to the prince, turned his horse, and spurred back down the long sunlit slope.

  And the prince let out a long sigh of relief.

  Thirteen

  ‘Truce of God.’ Sir Reginald Cobham said the words sourly.

  ‘They’ll keep it, won’t they?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘Oh, they’ll keep it. They’d like the whole of next week to be a Truce of God,’ Sir Reginald said, ‘the bastards would love that.’ He kicked his horse down the slope towards the River Miosson. The mist had burned away under the September sun so that Thomas could see the river winding in the valley. It was a small river, scarcely more than thirty feet across at its widest, but as he followed Sir Reginald down the steep slope he could see that the valley bottom was marshy, which suggested the river flooded often. ‘They’d like us to stay here,’ Sir Reginald said, ‘and exhaust our supplies. Then we’d be hungry, thirsty, and vulnerable. Which we are already. Nothing to eat, no water on the hill, and we’re outnumbered.’

  ‘We were outnumbered at Crécy,’ Thomas said.