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

by Bernard Cornwell

  But Sir Thomas had no shelter and no advantage. He had a small force and the enemy a great one, and his men were being forced backwards by sheer pressure of numbers. Shields crashed on shields, swords hammered on helmets, spears came under the shields to tear through men's boots, a Breton flailed an axe, beating down two Englishmen and letting in a rush of men wearing the white ermine badge who shrieked their triumph and cut down still more men. A man-at-arms screamed as axes hacked through the mail covering his thighs, then another axe battered in his helmet and he was silent. Sir Thomas staggered backwards, parrying a sword blow, and saw some of his men running into the dark spaces between the tents to find refuge. Their visors were down and they could hardly see where they were going or the enemy who came to kill them. He slashed his sword at a man in a pig-snout helmet, back-swung the blade into a shield striped yellow and black, took a step back to make space for another blow and then his feet were tangled by a tent's guy ropes and he fell backwards onto the canvas.

  The knight in the pig-snout helmet stood over him, his plate mail shining in the moon and his sword at Sir Thomas's throat.

  'I yield,' Sir Thomas said hurriedly, then repeated his surrender in French.

  'And you are?' the knight asked.

  'Sir Thomas Dagworth,' Sir Thomas said bitterly and he held up his sword to his enemy who took the weapon and then pushed up his snouted visor.

  'I am the Viscount Morgat,' the knight said, 'and I accept your surrender.' He bowed to Sir Thomas, handed back his sword and held out a hand to help the Englishman to his feet. The fight was still going on, but it was sporadic now as the French and Bretons hunted down the survivors, killed the wounded who were not worth ransoming and hammered their own wagons with crossbow bolts to kill the English bowmen who still sheltered there.

  The Viscount Morgat escorted Sir Thomas to the windmill where he presented him to Charles of Blois. A great fire burned a few yards away and in its light Charles stood beneath the furled sails with his jupon smeared with blood for he had helped to break Sir Thomas's band of men-at-arms. He sheathed his sword, still bloody, and took off his plumed helmet and stared at the prisoner who had twice defeated him in battle. 'I commiserate with you,' Charles said coldly.

  'And I congratulate your grace,' Sir Thomas said.

  'The victory belongs to God,' Charles said, 'not to me,' yet all the same he felt a sudden exhilaration because he had done it! He had defeated the English field army in Brittany and now, as certain as blessed dawn follows darkest night, the duchy would fall to him. 'The victory is God's alone,' he said piously, and he remembered it was now very early on Sunday morning and he turned to a priest to tell the man to have a Te Deum sung in thanks for this great victory.

  And the priest nodded, eyes wide, even though the Duke had not yet spoken, and then he gasped and Charles saw there was an unnaturally long arrow in the man's belly, then another white-fledged shaft ham-mered into the windmill's flank and a raucous, almost bestial, growl sounded from the dark.

  For though Sir Thomas was captured and his army was utterly defeated, the battle, it seemed, was not quite finished.

  Richard Totesham watched the fight between Sir Thomas's men and Charles's forces from the top of the eastern gate tower. He could not see a great deal from that vantage point for the palisades atop the earthworks, the two great trebuchets and the windmill obscured much of the battle, but it was abundantly clear that no one was coming from the other three French encampments to help Charles in his largest fortress. 'You d think they'd be helping each other,' he said to Will Skeat who was standing next to him.

  'It's you, Dick!' Will Skeat exclaimed.

  'Aye, it's me, Will,' Totesham said patiently. He saw that Skeat was dressed in mail and had a sword at his side, and he put a hand on his old friend's shoulder. 'Now, you're not going to be fighting tonight, Will, are you?'

  'If there's going to be a scrap,' Skeat said, 'then I'd like to help.'

  'Leave it to the young ones, Will,' Totesham urged, 'leave it to the young ones. You stay and guard the town for me. Will you do that?'

  Skeat nodded and Totesham turned back to stare into the enemy's camp. It was impossible to tell which side was winning for the only troops he could see belonged to the enemy and they had their backs to him, though once in a while a flying arrow would flash a reflection of the firelight as proof that Sir Thomas's men still fought, but Tote-sham reckoned it was a bad sign that no troops were coming from the other fortresses to help Charles of Blois. It suggested the Duke did not need help, which in turn suggested that Sir Thomas Dagworth did and so Totesham leaned over the inner parapet. 'Open the gate!' he shouted.

  It was still dark. Dawn was two hours or more away, yet the moon was bright and the fires in the enemy camp threw a garish light. Totesham hurried down the stairs from the ramparts while men pulled away the stone-filled barrels that had formed a barricade inside the gateway, then lifted the great locking bar that had not been disturbed in a month. The gates creaked open and the waiting men cheered. Totesham wished they had kept silent for he did not want to alert the enemy that the garrison was making a sortie, but it was too late now and so he found his own troop of men-at-arms and led them to join the stream of soldiers and towns-men who poured through the gate.

  Thomas went to the attack alongside Robbie and Sir Guillaume and his two men. Will Skeat, despite his promise to Totesham, had wanted to come with them, but Thomas had pushed him onto the ramparts and told him to watch the fight from there. 'You ain't fit enough, Will,' Thomas had insisted.

  'If you say so, Tom,' Skeat had agreed meekly, then climbed the steps. Thomas, once he was through the gate, looked back and saw Skeat on the gate tower. He raised a hand, but Skeat did not see him or, if he did, could not recognize him.

  It felt strange to be outside the long-locked gates. The air was fresher, lacking the stench of the town's sewage. The attackers followed the road which ran straight for three hundred paces before vanishing beneath the palisade which protected the timber platforms on which Hellgiver and Widowmaker were mounted. That palisade was higher than a tall man and some of the archers were carrying ladders to get across the obstacle, but Thomas reckoned the palisades had been made in a hurry and would probably topple to a good heave. He ran, still clumsy on his twisted toes. He expected the crossbows to start at any moment, but no bolts came from Charles's earthworks; the enemy, Thomas sup-posed, were occupied with Dagworth's men.

  Then the first of Totesham's archers reached the palisade and the ladders went up, but, just as Thomas had reckoned, a whole length of the heavy fence collapsed with a crash when men put their weight on the ladders. The banks and palisades had not been built to keep men out, but to shelter the crossbowmen, but those crossbowmen still did not know that a sortie had come from the town and so the bank was undefended.

  Four or five hundred men crossed the Callen palisade. Most were not trained soldiers, but townsmen who had been enraged by the enemy's missiles crashing into their houses. Their women and children had been maimed and killed by the trehuchets and the men of La Roche-Derrien wanted revenge, just as they wanted to keep the prosperity brought by the English occupation, and so they cheered as they swarmed into the enemy camp. 'Archers!' Totesham roared in a huge voice. 'Archers, to me! Archers!'

  Sixty or seventy archers ran to obey him, making a line just to the south of the platforms where the two biggest trebuchets were set. The rest of the sortie were charging at the enemy who were no longer formed in their battle line, but had scattered into small groups who were so intent on completing their victory over Sir Thomas Dagworth that they had not been watching behind them. Now they turned, alarmed, as a feral roar announced the garrison's arrival. 'Kill the bastards!' a townsman shouted in Breton.

  'Kill!' An English voice roared.

  'No prisoners!' another man bellowed, and though Totesham, fearful for lost ransoms, called out that prisoners must be taken, no one heard him in the savage roar that the attackers made.

&n
bsp; Charles's men-at-arms instinctively formed a line, but Totesham, ready for it, had gathered his archers and now he ordered them to shoot: the bows began their devil's music and the arrows hissed through the dark to bury themselves in mail and flesh and bone. The bowmen were few, but they shot at close range, they could not miss, and Charles's men cowered behind thei shields as the missiles whipped home, but the arrow easily pierced shields and the men-at-arms broke and scattered to find shelter among the tents. 'Hunt the down! Hunt them down!' Totesham released his archer to the kill.

  Less than a hundred of Sir Thomas Dagworth's me were still fighting and most of those were the archer who had gone to ground in the wagon park. Some of the others were prisoners, many were dead, while most were trying to escape across the earthworks and palisades, but those men, hearing the great roar behind them, turned back. Charles's men were scattered: many were still hunting down the remnants of the first attack and those who had tried to resist Totesham's sortie were either dead or fleeing into shadows. Totesham's men now struck the heart of the encampment with the savagery of a tempest. The townsmen were filled with rage. There was no subtlety in their assault, just a lust for vengeance as they swarmed past the two great trebuchets. The first huts they encountered were the shelters of the Bavarian engineers who, wanting no part of the hand-to-hand slaughter that was finishing off the survivors of Sir Thomas Dagworth's assault, had stayed by their billets and now died there. The townsmen had no idea who their victims were, only that they were the enemy, and so they were chopped down with axes, mattocks and hammers. The chief engineer tried to protect his eleven-year-old son, but they died together under a frenzy of blows, and meanwhile the English and Fleming men-atarms were streaming past.

  Thomas had shot his bow with the other archers, but now he sought Robbie whom he had last seen by the two big trebuchets. Widowmaker had been winched down ready to launch its first missile in the dawn and Thomas stumbled over a stout metal spike that protruded a yard from the beam and acted as an anchor for the sling. He cursed, because the metal had hurt his shins, then he climbed onto the trebuchet's frame and shot an arrow above the heads of the men slaughtering the Bavarians. He had been aiming at the enemy still clustered at the foot of the windmill and he saw a man fall there before the gaudy shields came up. He shot again, and realized that his wounded hands were doing what they had always done and were doing it well, and so he plucked a third arrow from the bag and drove it into a firelit shield painted with a white ermine, then the English men-at-arms and their allies were climbing the hill and obscuring his aim so he jumped down from the trebuchet and resumed his search for Robbie.

  The enemy was defending the mill stoutly and most of Totesham's men had veered away into the tents where they had more hope of finding plunder. The townsmen, their Bavarian tormentors killed, were following with bloody axes. A man in plate armour stepped from behind a tent and cut at a man with a sword, folding him at the belly, and Thomas did not think, but put an arrow on the cord, drew and loosed. The arrow went through the slit in the enemy's visor as cleanly as if Thomas had been shooting on the butts at home and moon-glossed blood, glistening like a jewel, oozed from the visor slits as the man fell backwards onto the canvas.

  Thomas ran on, stepping over bodies, edging past half-fallen tents. This was no place for a bow, everything was too cramped, and so he slung the yew stave on his shoulder and drew his sword. He ducked into a tent, stepped over a fallen bench, heard a scream and twisted, sword raised, to see a woman on the ground, half hidden by bedding, shaking her head at him. He left her there, went out into the firelit night and saw an enemy aiming a crossbow at the English men-at-arms who attacked the mill. He took two steps and stabbed the man in the small of the back so that his victim arched his wounded spine and twisted and shook. Thomas, dragging the sword free, was so appalled by the noise the dying man made that he hacked the blade down again and again, chopping at the fallen, twitching man to make him silent.

  'He's dead! Christ, man, he's dead!' Robbie shouted at him, then snatched at Thomas's sleeve and pulled him towards the mill and Thomas took the bow from his shoulder and shot two men wearing the white ermine badge on their jupons. They had been trying to escape, running down the back side of the hill. A dog streaked across the shoulder of the slope, something red and dripping in its jaws. There were two great bonfires on the hill, flanking the mill, and a man-at-arms fell backwards into one, driven there by the strike of an English arrow. Sparks exploded upwards as he fell, then he began to scream as his flesh roasted inside his armour. He tried to scramble out of the flames, but a townsman thrust him back with the butt of a spear and laughed at the man's desperate squeals. The clash of swords, shields and axes was huge, filling the night, but in the strange chaos there was a peaceful area at the back of the windmill. Robbie had seen a man duck through a small doorway there and he pulled Thomas that way. 'He's either hiding or running away!' Robbie shouted. 'He must have money!'

  Thomas was not sure what Robbie was talking about, but he followed anyway; he just had time to sling his bow again and draw the sword a second time before Robbie smashed the door down with his mail-clad shoulder and plunged into the darkness. 'Come here, you English bastard!' he shouted.

  'You want to be killed?' Thomas roared at him. 'You're fighting for the goddamn English!'

  Robbie swore at that reminder, then Thomas saw a shadow to his right, only a shadow, and he swung his sword that way. It clanged against another sword and Robbie was screaming in the dusty_ dark and the man was shouting at them in French and Thomas pulled back, but Robbie just slammed his sword down once, twice, and the blade chopped through bone and flesh and there was a crash as an armoured man fell onto the upper millstone. 'What the hell was he saying to me?' Robbie wanted to know.

  'He was trying to surrender.' A voice spoke from across the mill and Thomas and Robbie both spun towards the sound, their swords banging against the wooden tangle of joists, beams, cogwheels and axles, and then the unseen man called out again. 'Whoa, boys, whoa! I'm English.' There was a thump as an arrow struck the outside wall. The furled sails tugged against their tethers and made the wooden machinery squeal and shudder. More arrows thumped into the boards. 'I'm a prisoner,' the man said.

  'You're not now,' Thomas said.

  'I suppose not.' The man climbed over the millstones and pushed open the door and Thomas saw he was middle-aged with grey hair. 'What's happening?' the man asked.

  'We're gralloching the devils,' Robbie said.

  'Pray God you are.' The man turned and offered his hand to Robbie. 'I'm Sir Thomas Dagworth, and I thank you both.' He drew his sword and ducked out into the moonlit night, and Robbie stared at Thomas.

  'Did you hear that?'

  'He said thank you,' Thomas said.

  'Aye, but he said he was Sir Thomas Dagworth!'

  'Then maybe he was?'

  'So what the hell was he doing in here?' Robbie asked, before taking hold of the man he had killed and, with much effort and the clank of armour against stone and timber, dragged him to the door where the fires offered light. The man had discarded his helmet and Robbie's sword had split his skull, but under the gore there was the glint of gold and Robbie dragged a chain from beneath the man's breastplate. 'He must have been an important fellow,' Robbie said, admiring the gold chain, then he grinned at Thomas. 'We'll split it later, eh?'

  'Split it?'

  'We're friends, aren't we?' Robbie asked, then pushed the gold under his haubergeon before shoving the corpse back into the mill. 'Valuable armour that,' he said. 'We'll come back when it's over and hope no bastard has stolen it.'

  There was tangled, bloody horror in the encampment now. Survivors of Sir Thomas Dagworth's attack still fought, notably the archers in the wagon park, but as the town's garrison swept through the tents they re-leased prisoners or brought other survivors out of the dark places where they had been hiding. Charles's crossbowmen, who could have stemmed the garrison's attack, were mostly fighting against the Eng
lish archers in the wagon park. The Genoese were using their huge pavises as shelters, but the new attackers came from behind and the crossbowmen had nowhere to hide as the long arrows hissed through the night. The war bows sang their devil's melody, ten arrows flying to every quarrel shot, and the crossbowmen could not endure the slaughter. They fled.

  The victorious archers, reinforced now by the men who had been among the wagons, turned back to the shelters and tents where a deadly game of hide and seek was being played in the dark avenues between the canvas walls, but then a Welsh archer discovered that the enemy could be flushed out if the tents were set on fire. Soon there were smoke and flames spewing all across the encampment and enemy soldiers were running from the fires onto the arrows and blades of the incendiarists.

  Charles of Blois had retreated from the windmill, reckoning his position on the hill made him conspicuous, and he had tried to rally some knights in front of his own sumptuous tent, but an overwhelming rush of townsmen had swept those knights underfoot and Charles watched, appalled, as butchers, coopers, wheelwrights and thatchers massacred their betters with axes, cleavers and reaping hooks. He had hastily retreated into his tent, but now one of his retainers unceremoniously pulled him towards the back entrance. 'This way, your grace.'