The Grail Quest Books 1-3: Harlequin, Vagabond, Heretic

by Bernard Cornwell

  A Frenchman lunged at Thomas with a spear. He knocked it aside and brought the sword's tip flashing round to rip the man's gullet. Blood spilled bright as dawn, vanishing into the river. He hacked at a second man. Sam, baby-faced Sam, was beside him with a billhook that he sliced into a skull. It stuck there and Sam kicked the man in frustration, then took an axe from the dying enemy and, leaving his billhook in its victim, swung his new weapon in a great arc to drive the enemy back. Jake still had arrows and was shooting them fast.

  A splashing and a cheer announced the arrival of more mounted men-at-arms, who drove into the infantry with heavy lances. The big horses, trained to this carnage, rode over the living and dead while the men-at-arms discarded the spears and started hacking with swords. More archers had come with fresh arrows and were shooting from the river's centre.

  Thomas was on the bank now. The front of his mail coat was red with blood, none of it his, and the infantry was retreating. Then Will Skeat gave a great shout that more arrows had come, and Thomas and his archers ran back into the river to find Father Hobbe with a pack mule loaded with two panniers of arrow sheaves.

  'Do the Lord's work,' Father Hobbe said, tossing a sheaf to Thomas, who undid its binding and spilled the arrows into his bag. A trumpet sounded from the northern bank and he whirled round to see that the French horsemen were riding to join the fight.

  'Put them down!' Skeat shouted. 'Put those bastards down!'

  Arrows slashed and sliced at horses. More English men-at-arms were wading the river to thicken the Earl's force and, inch by inch, yard by yard, they were making progress up the bank, but then the enemy horsemen drove into the mêlée with lances and swords. Thomas put an arrow through the mail covering a Frenchman's throat, drove another through a leather chanfron so that the horse reared and screamed and spilled its rider.

  'Kill! Kill! Kill!' The Earl of Northampton, bloodied from his helmet to his mailed boots, rammed the sword again and again. He was bone tired and deafened by the crack of steel, but he was climbing the bank and his men were pressed close about him. Cobham was killing with a calm certainty, years of experience behind every blow. English horsemen were in the mêlée now, using their lances over the heads of their compatriots to drive the enemy horses back, but they were also blocking the aim of the archers and Thomas again hung his bow round his neck and drew his sword. 'St George! St George!' The Earl was standing on grass now, out of the reeds, above the high-water mark and behind him the river's edge was a charnel house of dead men, wounded men, blood and screaming.

  Father Hobbe, his cassock skirts hitched up to his waist, was fighting with a quarterstaff, ramming the pole into French faces. 'In the name of the Father,' he shouted, and a Frenchmen reeled back with a pulped eye, 'and of the Son,' Father Hobbe snarled as he broke a man's nose, 'and of the Holy Ghost!'

  A French knight broke through the English ranks, but a dozen archers swarmed over the horse, hamstrung it and hauled its rider down to the mud where they hacked at him with axe, billhook and sword.

  'Archers!' the Earl shouted. 'Archers!' The last of the French horsemen had formed into a charge that threatened to sweep the whole ragged mess of brawling men, both English and French, into the river, but a score of archers, the only ones with arrows now, drove their missiles up the bank to bring the leading rank of horsemen down in a tangle of horses' legs and tumbling weapons.

  Another trumpet sounded, this one from the English side, and reinforcements were suddenly streaming over the ford and spurring up onto the higher ground.

  'They're breaking! They're breaking.' Thomas did not know who shouted that news, but it was true. The French were shuffling backwards. The infantry, their stomach for battle slaked by the deaths they had suffered, had already retreated, but now the French knights, the men-at-arms, were backing away from the fury of the English assault.

  'Just kill them! Kill them! No prisoners! No prisoners!' the Earl of Northampton shouted in French, and his men-at-arms, bloody and wet and tired and angry, shoved up the bank and hacked again at the French, who stepped another pace back.

  And then the enemy did break. It was sudden. One moment the two forces were locked in grunting, shoving, hacking battle, and then the French were running and the ford was streaming with mounted men-at-arms who crossed from the southern bank to pursue the broken enemy.

  'Jesus,' Will Skeat said, and dropped to his knees and made the sign of the cross. A dying Frenchman groaned nearby, but Skeat ignored him. 'Jesus,' he said again. 'You got any arrows, Tom?'

  'Two left.'

  'Jesus.' Skeat looked up. There was blood on his cheeks. 'Those bastards,' he said vengefully. He was speaking of the newly arrived English men-at-arms who crashed past the remnants of the battle to harry the fleeing enemy. 'Those bastards! They get into their camp first, don't they? They'll take all the bloody food!'

  But the ford was taken, the trap was broken and the English were across the Somme.

  Part Three

  Crécy

  Chapter 11

  The whole English army had crossed before the tide rose again. Horses, wagons, men and women — they all crossed safe so that the French army, marching from Abbeville to trap them, found the corner of land between the river and the sea empty.

  All next day the armies faced each other across the ford. The English were drawn up for battle with their four thousand archers lining the river's bank and, behind them, three great blocks of men-at-arms on the higher ground, but the French, strung out on the paths to the ford, were not tempted to force the crossing. A handful of their knights rode into the water and shouted challenges and insults, but the King would not let any English knight respond and the archers, knowing they must conserve their arrows, endured the insults without responding.

  'Let the bastards shout,' Will Skeat growled, 'shouting never hurt a man yet.' He grinned at Thomas. 'Depends on the man, of course. Upset Sir Simon, didn't it?'

  'He was just a bastard.'

  'No, Tom,' Skeat corrected him, 'you're the bastard, and he was a gentleman.' Skeat looked across at the French, who showed no sign of trying to contest the ford. 'Most of them are all right,' he went on, evidently talking of knights and nobles. 'Once they've fought with the archers for a while they learn to look after us on account of us being the mucky bastards what keeps them alive, but there's always a few goddamn idiots. Not our Billy, though.' He turned and looked at the Earl of Northampton, who was pacing up and down by the shallows, itching for the French to come and fight. 'He's a proper gentleman. Knows how to kill the goddamn French.'

  Next morning the French were gone, the only sign of them the white cloud of dust hanging over the road which was taking their huge army back to Abbeville. The English went north, slowed by hunger and the lame horses that men were reluctant to abandon. The army climbed from the Somme marshes into a heavily wooded country that yielded no grain, livestock or plunder, while the weather, which had been dry and warm, turned cold and wet during the morning. Rain spat from the east and dripped incessantly from the trees to increase men's misery so that what had seemed like a victorious campaign south of the Seine now felt like an ignominious retreat. Which is what it was, for the English were running from the French and all the men knew it, just as they knew that unless they found food soon their weakness would make them easy pickings for the enemy.

  The King had sent a strong force to the mouth of the Somme where, at the small port of Le Crotoy, he expected reinforcements and supplies to be waiting, but instead the small port proved to be held by a garrison of Genoese crossbowmen. The walls were in bad repair, the attackers were hungry and so the Genoese died under a hail of arrows and a storm of men-at-arms. The English emptied the port's storehouses of food and found a herd of beef cattle collected for the French army's use, but when they climbed the church tower they saw no ships moored in the river's mouth nor any fleet waiting at sea. The arrows, the archers and the grain that should have replenished the army were still in England.

  The
rain became heavier on the first night that the army camped in the forest. Rumour said that the King and his great men were in a village at the forest's edge, but most of the men were forced to shelter under the dripping trees and eat what little they could scavenge.

  'Acorn stew,' Jake grumbled.

  'You've eaten worse,' Thomas said.

  'And a month ago we ate it off silver plates.' Jake spat out a gritty mouthful. 'So why don't we bloody fight the bastards?'

  'Because they're too many,' Thomas said wearily, 'because we've only so many arrows. Because we're worn out.'

  The army had marched itself into the ground. Jake, like a dozen other of Will Skeat's archers, had no boots any more. The wounded limped because there were not enough carts and the sick were left behind if they could not walk or crawl. The living stank.

  Thomas had made Eleanor and himself a shelter from boughs and turf. It was dry inside the little hut where a small fire spewed a thick smoke.

  'What happens to me if you lose?' Eleanor asked him.

  'We won't lose,' Thomas said, though there was little conviction in his voice.

  'What happens to me?' she asked again.

  'You thank the Frenchmen who find you,' he said, 'and tell them you were forced to march with us against your will. Then you send for your father.'

  Eleanor thought about those answers for a while, but did not look reassured. She had learned in Caen how men after victory are not amenable to reason, but slaves to their appetites. She shrugged. 'And what happens to you?'

  'If I live?' Thomas shook his head. 'I'll be a prisoner. They send us to the galleys in the south, I hear. If they let us live.'

  'Why shouldn't they?'

  'They don't like archers. They hate archers.' He pushed a pile of wet bracken closer to the fire, trying to dry the fronds before they became their bed. 'Maybe there won't be a battle,' he said, 'because we've stolen a day's march on them.' The French were said to have gone back to Abbeville and to be crossing the river there, which meant that the hunters were coming, but the English were still a day ahead and could, perhaps, reach their fortresses in Flanders. Perhaps.

  Eleanor blinked from the smoke. 'Have you seen any knight carrying the lance?'

  Thomas shook his head. 'I haven't even looked,' he confessed. The last thing on his mind this night was the mysterious Vexilles. Nor, indeed, did he expect to see the lance. That was Sir Guillaume's fancy and now Father Hobbe's enthusiasm, but it was not Thomas's obsession. Staying alive and finding enough to eat were what consumed him.

  'Thomas!' Will Skeat called from outside.

  Thomas pushed his head through the hut opening to see a cloaked figure was standing next to Skeat. 'I'm here,' he said.

  'You've got company,' Skeat said sourly, turning away.

  The cloaked figure stooped to enter the hut and, to Thomas's surprise, it was Jeanette. 'I shouldn't be here,' she greeted him, pushing into the smoky interior where, throwing the hood from her hair, she stared at Eleanor. 'Who's that?'

  'My woman,' Thomas spoke in English.

  'Tell her to go,' Jeanette said in French.

  'Stay here,' Thomas told Eleanor. 'This is the Countess of Armorica.'

  Jeanette bridled when Thomas contradicted her, but did not insist that Eleanor left. Instead she pushed a bag at Thomas that proved to contain a leg of ham, a loaf of bread and a stone bottle of wine. The bread, Thomas saw, was the fine white bread that only the rich could afford, while the ham was studded with cloves and sticky with honey.

  He handed the bag to Eleanor. 'Food fit for a prince,' he told her.

  'I should take it to Will?' Eleanor asked, for the archers had agreed to share all their food.

  'Yes, but it can wait,' Thomas said.

  'I shall take it now,' Eleanor said, and pulled a cloak over her head before vanishing into the wet darkness.

  'She's pretty enough,' Jeanette said in French.

  'All my women are pretty,' Thomas said. 'Fit for princes, they are.'

  Jeanette looked angry, or perhaps it was just the smoke from the small fire irritating her. She prodded the hut's side. 'This reminds me of our journey.'

  'It wasn't cold or wet.' Thomas said. And you were mad, he wanted to add, and I nursed you and you walked away from me without looking back.

  Jeanette heard the hostility in his voice. 'He thinks,' she said, 'that I am saying confession.'

  'Then tell me your sins,' Thomas responded, 'and you won't have lied to His Highness.'

  Jeanette ignored that. 'You know what is going to happen now?'

  'We run away, they chase us, and either they catch us or they don't.' He spoke brusquely. 'And if they catch us there'll be a blood-letting.'

  'They will catch us,' Jeanette said confidently, 'and there will be a battle.'

  'You know that?'

  'I listen to what is reported to the Prince,' she said, 'and the French are on the good roads. We are not.'

  That made sense. The ford by which the English army had crossed the Seine led only into marshland and forest. It was a link between villages, it lay on no great trading route and so no good roads led from its banks, but the French had crossed the river at Abbeville, a city of merchants, and so the enemy army would have wide roads to hasten their march into Picardy. They were well fed, they were fresh and now they had the good roads to speed them.

  'So there'll be a battle,' Thomas said, touching his black bow.

  'There is to be a battle,' Jeanette confirmed. 'It's been decided. Probably tomorrow or the next day. The King says there is a hill just outside the forest where we can fight. Better that, he says, than letting the French get ahead and block our road. But either way,' she paused, 'they will win.'

  'Maybe,' Thomas allowed.

  'They will win,' Jeanette insisted. 'I listen to the conversations, Thomas! They are too many.'

  Thomas made the sign of the cross. If Jeanette was right, and he had no reason to think she was deceiving him, then the army's leaders had already given up hope, but that did not mean he had to despair. 'They have to beat us first,' he said stubbornly.

  'They will,' Jeanette said brutally, 'and what happens to me then?'

  'What happens to you?' Thomas asked in surprise. He leaned cautiously against the fragile wall of his shelter. He sensed that Eleanor had already delivered the food and hurried back to eavesdrop. 'Why should I care,' he asked loudly, 'what happens to you?'

  Jeanette shot him a vicious look. 'You once swore to me,' she said, 'that you would help restore my son to me.'

  Thomas made the sign of the cross again. 'I did, my lady,' he admitted, reflecting that he made his oaths too easily. One oath was enough for a lifetime and he had made more then he could recall or keep.

  'Then help me do that,' Jeanette demanded.

  Thomas smiled. 'There's a battle to be won first, my lady.'

  Jeanette scowled at the smoke that churned in the small shelter. 'If I am found in the English camp after the battle, Thomas, then I will never see Charles again. Never.'

  'Why not?' Thomas demanded. 'It's not as if you'll be in danger, my lady. You're not a common woman. There might not be much chivalry when armies meet, but it just about reaches into the tents of royalty.'

  Jeanette shook her head impatiently. 'If the English win,' she said, 'then I might see Charles again because the Duke will want to curry favour with the King. But if they lose, then he will have no need to make any gesture. And if they lose, Thomas, then I lose everything.'

  That, Thomas reckoned, was closer to the nub. If the English lost then Jeanette risked losing whatever wealth she had accumulated in the last weeks, wealth that came from the gifts of a prince. He could see a necklace of what looked like rubies half hidden by her swathing cloak, and doubtless she had dozens of other precious stones set in gold.

  'So what do you want of me?' he asked.

  She leaned forward and lowered her voice. 'You,' she said, 'and a handful of men. Take me south. I can hire a ship at Le Crotoy and sail
to Brittany. I have money now. I can pay my debts in La Roche-Derrien and I can deal with that evil lawyer. No one need know I was even here.'

  'The Prince will know,' Thomas said.

  She bridled at that. 'You think he will want me for ever?'

  'What do I know of him?'

  'He will tire of me,' Jeanette said. 'He's a prince. He takes what he wants and when he is tired of it he moves on. But he has been good to me, so I cannot complain.'

  Thomas said nothing for a while. She had not been this hard, he reflected, in those lazy summer days when they had lived as vagabonds. 'And your son?' he asked. 'How will you get him back? Pay for him?'

  'I will find a way,' she said evasively.

  Probably, Thomas thought, she would try to kidnap the boy, and why not? If she could raise some men then it would be possible. Maybe she would expect Thomas himself to do it and as that thought occurred to him so Jeanette looked into his eyes.

  'Help me,' she said, 'please.'

  'No,' Thomas said, 'not now.' He held up a hand to ward off her protests. 'One day, God willing,' he went on, 'I'll help find your son, but I'll not leave this army now. If there's to be a battle, my lady, then I'm in it with the rest.'