by Angus Donald
The Marshal had brought no more than forty knights with him, and yet they were some of the hardest fighting-men in our army. First, he attacked the southern portion of what had been the French line of march, slicing through a mass of militiamen on foot, a hundred spearmen at least, dispersing them like a pack of wolves descending on a flock of sheep. The militia broke apart and fled for their lives, but the Marshal’s men did not waste their time killing the fugitives; the knights quickly reformed again like the superb troops they were, making neat, close lines, many riders with unbroken lances, others holding their bright swords aloft, and on they came, trotting up the hill towards us.
King Richard had recovered himself, perhaps at the brave sight of the Marshal’s charge, and he was shouting to his knights, dispersed all over the field, urging them to come to him and reform. Then he saw me, and shouted: ‘To me, Sir Alan, to me. One more time, one more time and we shall have them. One last charge for victory!’
I turned my head and saw Thomas at my side; I was a little surprised for I had seen nothing of him in the battle and had feared that he might be among the fallen — but my squire was whole except for a long, shallow cut just below the ear and, and miracle of miracles, he was offering me a fresh lance. Beyond him I saw Ox-head and Kit, both apparently unwounded, and still looking eager for the fight, and another two Westbury men. I grinned at them all, wordless. And so the six of us trotted over to join the King.
There was no time to waste: William the Marshal was coming up fast, and the King had gathered some twenty knights and sergeants around him. ‘One more charge!’ the King kept repeating, he was laughing wildly again, white teeth gleaming in the gore-flecked gold of his beard, supremely happy in that moment. ‘We’ve got him, we’ve got the wretched thief!’ And then he bellowed: ‘For God and my right!’ and we charged up that incline together, all of us, King Richard, Robin, Little John, Thomas, a dozen living Locksley and Westbury men, a handful of household knights — with William the Marshal’s fresh troop of forty knights drumming the earth hard on our heels. We charged up that slope, filthy, bloody, our bodies wrenched by fatigue, we threw ourselves heedlessly once more into the milling, pristine ranks of the enemy.
And they fled.
Chapter Twenty-seven
We chased them; how we chased them, and the slower ones we killed. They were slaughtered in their saddles or ridden down, but if they had the sense to surrender, and managed to communicate this desire to our knights through the mayhem and gore-madness of battle, we made them captive. However, God in his wisdom did not see fit to deliver the French King unto us that day. The Almighty did, however, deign to humble that haughty monarch more than a little.
When our ragged band of exhausted men charged that loose group of French household knights gathered around the fleur-delys, I thought for a moment that we might even break through and reach the King himself. I killed two knights in that last blood-crazed, howling assault, and I truly believe we might well have made Philip a captive that day, such was our lust for victory — and that would have ended the war at a stroke — but the French King decided that his life and freedom were worth more than his honour, and he ran away, like the cowardly dog that he was. I knew nothing of this at the time, having received something of a shock. I had found myself exchanging vicious sword blows in that last desperate charge with a young blond knight with a long handsome face, although it was disfigured by a battle-grimace and a curious red, shiny mark on the left-hand side of his face, the mark of a healed burn. He cut hard at me and I blocked him; I returned the blow, but uncertainly, and then we both drew back at almost exactly the same time, reining our destriers in. ‘Greetings, Cousin,’ I said, breathing hard.
‘Alan,’ came the equally breathless reply. And then Roland d’Alle smiled tightly and said: ‘God go with you!’ and he turned his horse and galloped towards the royal standard and the remaining French knights, who were already beginning to turn their horses away to accompany their King to safety. I watched him go; glad he was alive, and very happy that we had not tried with any more vigour to slaughter each other.
The French King and his surviving knights retreated northwards, but this was no orderly withdrawal, it was a full-scale rout with the wild despairing cries of ‘ Sauve qui peut ’ ringing in the warm September air. They galloped away with all speed, and our fresher men, the Marshal’s men, were right behind, chivvying them like a herd of panicked deer.
The enemy made straight for the castle of Gisors, some hundreds of men galloping madly on the narrow road north towards the River Epte, desperate to escape the wrath of Richard’s seemingly invincible warriors. But I did not ride with them. Shaitan had received a serious wound, a bad sword cut to his haunch; such was my noble beast’s bravery that I had not known when or where it had been inflicted. Only in the course of the pursuit, after a mile or so, did my courageous black friend begin to stumble and limp, and soon we halted at the top of a slight rise by a stand of alders, not far from the river. As I dismounted to look at Shaitan’s glossy rump, now sheeted with blood, I had a perfect view of the massive castle of Gisors and the narrow bridge before it that crossed the River Epte. I was content to take no further part in the battle. We had won; Richard, with his uncanny ability to judge the balance of these things, had destroyed an army by applying the right amount of pressure at the right place and time: a few score men had defeated and put to terrified flight an army of many hundreds. I was proud to have been part of it, but as I watched the bright dabs of colour as the French knights streamed northwards, I offered up a prayer to St Michael for my cousin Roland’s safe escape; and gave humble thanks to God for my own survival.
I was tenderly mopping the blood from Shaitan’s trembling haunch, and wondering what had become of Thomas in that last terrible assault, whether he lived or not, and God forgive me, whether he might bring up a spare horse for me, when my eye was drawn to the bridge over the Epte. From the west, along the line of the river, I could see the pluming dust and swift-moving shapes of mounted troops approaching, the leader carrying a black flag with flashes of gold on the sombre flapping fabric. Mercadier was on the field and joining in the rout, harrying the broken French with enthusiasm. But on the bridge itself there seemed to be a blockage: a great press of men and horses, forty or fifty of each, jammed, almost immobile between its narrow wooden sides. I knew that bridge, I had reconnoitred it with the Westbury men not six months ago, and I knew it to be old, crumbling and only a single wagon-width at its narrowest part. I could well imagine the terror of the Frenchmen, crammed together in that constricted pass, their horses maddened by the press of bodies, kicking out, biting, blundering into the railing, with yet more knights trying to force themselves into the crush. That old bridge could not possibly support the jostling weight of fifty or sixty huge, frantic destriers and their heavily armoured riders…
I heard the noise, even from my position a mile away, when that old bridge over the Epte collapsed. A deep crack and rumble, and above that, the tiny screams of men and terrified neighing of stricken horses as they tumbled into the slow brown river beneath them; churning it a creamy blood-streaked yellow with their death frenzy. Mercadier’s men, and the knights of William the Marshal, were coming up fast, and I could just make out Richard with them, his red-and-gold standard, and a half-dozen of his household knights, but I noticed that three score Frenchmen were trapped on the wrong side of the bridge, our side, surrendering, handing over swords, lifting their arms and demanding the mercy that their rank permitted.
The river by now was a thrashing carnival of drowning men, fighting each other for survival, hampered by their hysterical mounts, a few, including King Philip himself, I learnt later, managed to scramble to the further shore and were hauled out on to the bank by their friends. But Mercadier’s crossbowmen had come up by this point and they began a withering shower of quarrels that fatally skewered many a man who had narrowly escaped drowning in his heavy armour — perhaps by scrambling over the living bodies of
his comrades, pushing them below the surface — and had thought himself safely crawled up upon the far bank.
We were at the gates of Gisors, albeit with a deep, wide and now bridgeless river between it and us, but we had not the strength to take that stronghold. Our horses were blown, for the most part, or wounded like poor Shaitan, the King’s knights dispersed and exhausted. The great siege engines, the castle-breakers, were some twenty miles away, and Philip, the coward, was mewed up tight in his fortress and able to defy us with his fifty remaining men. But if that was a slightly bitter note, the day had been an overwhelmingly sweet one: we were victorious, we had taken on a giant and slain him. Or perhaps more accurately, we had confronted a creature that roared as if it were a mighty lion and had trounced him, and chased him like a mouse into his hole.
We gathered up our dead and wounded and retreated to the ring of forts around Gisors: Dangu, Courcelles, Serifontaine and Boury. We had captured almost a hundred French noblemen and knights that day — Mercadier had taken thirty himself. And I cursed my unthinking naivety in not securing even one enemy captive, a rich one that would have made my fortune. My part in the battle had been a series of reckless, desperate, almost suicidal attacks, with no time for the protocols of war: and when poor Shaitan had been wounded and unable to bear me any further, I had no way of joining in the orgy of prisoner-taking before the fallen bridge. Robin, with the Locksley men’s help, had managed to take the surrender of a dozen men of various ranks. And when I met him in the courtyard of Dangu Castle, shortly after dusk, he had a deeply satisfied grin carved across his lean, handsome face.
‘Eight knights, three barons and a count,’ he said to me triumphantly by way of greeting, his silver eyes shining in the light of the castle torches. ‘They have all given me their parole. And the count is uncommonly rich — a cousin of King Philip’s, no less. What a marvellous day’s catch!’
‘Congratulations!’ I said, trying to be happy for him.
He looked closely at me: ‘No luck, Alan?’
‘Shaitan was injured, and I had to break off the pursuit,’ I admitted. I was feeling deflated; stricken once again with my familiar post-battle melancholy.
‘How awful for you; I am so sorry.’ Robin’s expression was the soul of compassion itself; Our Lord Jesus Christ — our Saviour himself — could not have bettered it.
‘Well, we won the battle,’ I said, struggling to sound cheerful. ‘And we are both still hale and mostly whole.’ I had discovered after the battle that I had a shallow cut below my cheekbone, and absolutely no recollection of how I had come by that wound.
‘Yes, there is that, I suppose,’ Robin said doubtfully. ‘Alan — I know you must be bitterly disappointed, but there will be other opportunities to take prisoners, I’m sure of it. Now, if you will excuse me, I must see to the men.’ And he gripped my shoulder for a moment and turned away.
I nodded and walked away to roust out Thomas, who was sleeping in one of the store sheds. I was thinking of what there might be for our supper when the quiet of the night was interrupted by a terrible howl of pain, followed by a gust of boozy laughter. It was coming from a side of the castle courtyard near the stables, an area that I had been deliberately ignoring, filled as it was with a drunken squad of Mercadier’s routiers.
That terrible scream caused me to swing around and observe what was occurring in that particular dark corner of Hell, and I thank the Good Lord that I did.
About thirty of Mercadier’s men — their scarred captain was absent — were grouped around a dozen of the poorer French knights, bound hand and foot, who had been taken captive that day. Some of the knights were weeping, others praying, some just sat stoically, grim-faced and silent. There was a large wooden box about three feet high in the centre of the group, which the men had been using as a kind of table for their dice games earlier that evening. And I saw that there was a man stretched across it — a French knight, I guessed, though he had been stripped of his armour and most of his clothes. His back was to the box, his body arched over it, his eyes pointing heavenwards: what was left of them. As I looked, a routier, was lifting a pair of iron pincers holding a large red-hot coal from the brazier away from his face. The knight was whimpering from the pain, and I could see a stream of viscous fluid running down his cheek, and it was clear to me that he had been blinded in both eyes only moments before.
As I looked on, I saw the other routiers guffawing with laughter as they cut the poor man loose and shoved him into a corner against the wall, one routier hurling a wine-soaked cloth after him to allow him to bind up his burnt face. Then another French knight, this one fighting like a madman, was wrestled by a dozen of Mercadier’s cut-throats down on to the table. He was secured in a few efficient moments and, as the man jerked his body against the ropes frantically and whipped his head left and right, I saw with a horrible, sickening sense of despair that it was Roland d’Alle.
He caught my eye, stopped his wild thrashing and fixed his terrified gaze on mine in mute appeal, but I was already striding over to the mercenaries, my hand on my sword hilt.
‘Hold hard,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘What does it look like… Sir Knight?’ said the man by the brazier, and I realized that I recognized him from that long ago day when he and his mates had held Brother Dominic in their grasp, and Hanno had shot their red-haired friend stone dead with the crossbow bolt. I would have given my right arm, at that moment, to have Hanno, shaven-headed, fully armed and growling by my side.
‘These men are prisoners of war,’ I said. ‘They are knights who have surrendered and given their word that they will not escape, and who will be ransomed by their families in the fullness of time.’
‘We know who they are… Sir Knight,’ said the man by the brazier, leering at me. I noticed that the lump of charcoal held in the iron pincers in his fist had been extinguished. He saw where I was looking, dropped the black lump into the brazier and selected another, this one glowing the colour of a ripe cherry. He moved towards Roland and I was transported back nearly a decade to a stinking cell in Winchester where an enemy of mine had threatened me with a similar torment.
‘No, wait,’ I said. ‘I forbid you. You cannot do this!’
‘And why not, Sir Knight?’ said a cold voice, chilling as the grave, that came from behind my right shoulder.
I turned to look upon Mercadier. His scar was a furrow of black that cut across his swarthy face; his eyes stagnant pools of malice.
‘Why can I not do this?’ he repeated.
‘It is inhuman — it is immoral. It runs against all the laws of God and chivalry.’
‘Chivalry?’ said Mercadier. ‘There is no true chivalry in war, that is a mere fancy, invented by milk-sop poets such as yourself for the amusement of bored ladies. There is only victory or defeat; the living or the dead; friend or foe.’
‘These men are prisoners; they have surrendered and so must be treated honourably. They can do us no harm.’
‘They are the enemy,’ he said in his quiet, stone-like tone. ‘Too often we have taken men in battle, accepted their surrender, handed over their living bodies for silver and then had to fight them again the next year. That will not happen with these knights. We will ransom them, yes. But they will never fight again against King Richard.’
‘Does the King know about this… this outrage?’ I was beginning to feel desperate.
Now Mercadier laughed, a slow, evil grating sound. ‘Do you think the King does not know what I do for him?’ he said. ‘Everything I do, Sir Knight, I do with his royal blessing.’
The man with the hot coal moved forward towards Roland. My cousin closed his eyes, and lay there, his brow beaded with sweat but immobile, accepting his fate.
‘Stop,’ I shouted. ‘Stop, right now. I will buy this man from you — unharmed! I will ransom him from you. Name your price, Mercadier.’
‘You, Sir Knight? You will ransom this Frenchman?’ For the first time, Mercadier showed emotion,
if greed can be called an emotion. ‘Now that is an interesting idea: what price shall I name then?’
I said nothing. Roland had opened his eyes and was looking at me. I kept my gaze fixed on him, willing him to take courage, silently promising him that I would not let him suffer this awful mutilation.
‘You can have him for a hundred pounds in silver,’ said Mercadier blandly.
‘What!’ I was genuinely astounded by the price. ‘A hundred pounds? You are jesting. He is a young knight, not a duke. His ransom should be no more than ten.’
I was not haggling for the sake of it; ten pounds was a year’s revenue from Westbury, and the most I could raise in Normandy, even if I went to the Jews of Rouen.
‘You refuse? Very well, Jean, carry on — blind him.’
‘Wait,’ I shouted, ‘wait!’ I thought about the King’s offer of a dowry of a hundred pounds — it was a huge sum of money, and if I promised it to Mercadier, it would mean that I might never be able to rebuild Clermont or buy another, better fief.
‘I will pay it,’ I said. ‘Release the prisoner.’
‘You want him very badly, it seems. But I think a man who will pay a hundred pounds for one enemy knight will willingly pay two hundred. The new price is two hundred.’
For a fleeting moment, I thought about drawing my sword and slicing my blade into his ugly face; but I knew I would not live to boast of my actions: Mercadier had thirty men there, I was alone. But I honestly could not pay the sum he asked. I did not have two hundred pounds and I had no way of raising it. I looked at Roland, and my despair must have been apparent. But he was smiling at me ruefully, and shaking his head. ‘I thank you for your efforts, Sir Alan,’ he murmured. ‘But apparently it is God’s will that I must suffer this.’