"Now plague me if my soul is left alone on the field when all the rest troop off to Purgatory," he thought indignantly. Then he grinned with relief to find himself yet alive, to see John Doust blowing like a whale as he washed outside the tent, and to smell the unforgettable mingled odour of wood smoke, burned frying pan, and sizzling bacon.
This, then, was the morning, not the night, of Pont-de-Foy.
* * * *
Thorismund's rear was to the forest, Conrad's to the river. Thorismund had the rising ground and the interior lines, but Conrad had the advantage of numbers and space in which to move them. Instead of four armies there were now two, for the young king had abandoned the Ververon road and the bridge head of Pont-de-Foy rather than risk a battle back-to-back with Saulte. The northern rebels had joined forces with their chief; it was plain to both sides that neither could retreat without great slaughter. And when the sun dissolved the morning mist along the river bands there came a murmur and a shaken glitter as over a hundred thousand men rose armed from prayerful kneeling to the voices of their clergy, who from either side called out upon God for remission of sin and for just and merciful victory.
The royal standard carried before Conrad from Hautarroy drooped from the summit of a mound – the middle tumulus of three which stood amid the willow holts between Pont-de-Foy and Angmer. Over against it, on the first rise of ground behind the Inn of Harmony, rose Thorismund's banner; to avoid confusion in the field, the king had unfurled his own gay device, quartering the arms of Neustria and Franconia, with the portcullis of Hastain on an inescutcheon. And there through the sunlit morning they stirred to a rising wind, which in the early afternoon brought ragged clouds and a thin drizzle of rain.
The right wing of Thorismund's army was commanded by the gaunt Duke of Boqueron, with Raoul of Ger to second him; red scallop shells on white, with the black gerfalcon on yellow, confronted the Volsberghe gryphon, the Barberghe chevrons, and the wolf heads of Montcarneau. And from that angle of the field Juhel looked first on killing; the rumour and terror of the great battle rang faintly enough in his memory before he died, but when the first onset closed it seemed all things wee come together with a clang.
One moment he herd a wood pigeon in the dark fringes of the Forest of Honoy; the next, the air was filled with shouting and trampling and the hum of longbows, while behind roped stakes and heavy shields the men of Ger stood fast with pike and guisarme amid the dew-wet grass and young green bracken.
Couched lances, slanted shields, bright helms whose shapes made of the charging chevaliers one snouted grinning family – all rocked upon them with the roaring Volsberghe war shout; and a sleet of arrows drove uphill and down to the first screams of wounded horses and the first metallic clatter of the fall of armoured men. Then a crash, and the front of the whole wing was a surge of criss-crossed thrusting steel.
Juhel watched rise and fall the estoc of John Doust; a stumbling charger flung its rider full against the Englishman, but the latter only crouched to the shock and a moment later swung up his weapon again, the solid ranks of yellow coats hiding from Juhel the fate of the fallen chevalier. To left and right the destriers were rearing, plunging, wheeling before the unbroken line; horsemen were dragged to earth with the hooks of guisarmes, or smitten through the armpit mail as they raised sword or mace to strike beyond the stakes. Presently a trumpet wailed, and all along the attacking front blue figures leaned away and reined their chargers back.
A curt cheer went up from the crest of the rise; the enemy were retiring, leaving a glittering fringe of fallen on the slope above them. A gust of arrows from below heralded the first upward roll of Gaston's bearded Franconian mercenaries; four free companies surged abreast toward the rough stockade. Close beside Juhel the trumpeter of Boqueron woke a double blast; in half-a-dozen places the pikemen loosed or dragged aside the stakes and ropes they had planted, while the duke waved his hand to the Count of Ger. Through the gaps went trampling six troops or horse – deploying as they emerged, linking up and fanning out to follow gray Safadin downhill. Three hundred lances sank to the charge; badges of Ger and Marckmont and Guarenal mingled with Boqueron's and with devices of individual chevaliers. With a drumming rush between the thickets of the gay mass of steel and colour gathered force and hurtled against the dark advancing line; Juhel, with heart in his mouth, stood holding the bridle of the count's spare charger and calling silently upon all saints to uphold and defend Raoul of Ger.
The Franconian formations paused and stiffened, but even their quick bristle of pikes could not withstand that impact. They had no stakes to shelter their bodies, no ropes to entangle the pounding horsehoofs; by sheer weight their lines were crumpled and borne backward in struggling disarray. Behind them the mounted ranks were reforming; the mercenaries knew that if once they really broke they would be ridden down in Gaston's second onset, and in five minutes their trained valour cost them scores of loves. Then Ger and his men were wheeling and cantering away up the slope; Safadin halted at the side of Boqueron's white charger, and two riders who reeled from their saddles were dragged behind the rough stockade before the pikemen closed their gaps and waited for the re-enforced assault.
Again a storm of long shafts sighed amid the shouting; in front of Juhel an archer sat heavily backward and doubled up, groaning and whipping off his shooting glove to clap hand to his smitten shoulder. Juhel glanced up at the count; Raoul had seen, and nodded to him. To tether the horse to a hawthorn bush was the work of thirty seconds; Juhel stepped forward and snatched up bow and gauntlet, tucking a fistful of arrows clumsily into his belt.
Then he was shooting hard just over the bright helm of Captain John Doust. The longbow was too big for him, but he slanted it a little, drawing feathers trimly to his ear. Seven shafts he loosed, and then lost count; horse and foot were pressed together against the quadruple line of his comrades, and thrice he saw his arrow rebound from casque or gorget or elbow cop of an advancing chevalier.
Piers was standing near him, also with a longbow; cooks and grooms and camp followers were dodging about in the long grass, picking up hostile arrows and crossbow quarrels to thrust them at beckoning bowmen who formed the rear-most rank.
Juhel's mind began to blur; he saw things and failed to understand them until they were altered or lost. Once he knew Piers was singing – he even caught the shrill words, that twisted in his own head for half an hour thereafter:
"Spikes on your spurs are seven,
Stay, love, stay!
The Plough is wheeling up the heaven,
Hey, now, and away!"
Once he heard a voice say that the Inn of Harmony was burning; and he noticed a great smoke blowing northward from somewhere beyond and beneath the Saulte banner that waved don Boqueron's left. Once he heard Nino Chiostra laughing … but that was before the fourth attack, when the royalists wing gave on the extreme right, where men were stumbling in licked groups through thickets of holly and thorn at the edge of the dense forest. Scores of fully armed riders were dismounted, plying lances and pikes with a will; horses seemed disappearing strangely from between the battle and the row of tents that fringed the first beech glades. The Duke of Boqueron himself went thundering to the end of his line, and presently restored it; Juhel saw him riding back with visor lifted and a great battle ax held crosswise on his saddlebow.
My lord himself walked Safadin up and down where the defending front grew thinnest, leaning now and again from his saddle to deal a wicked lance thrust between the bodies of his hard-pressed men. Juhel found he was gripping a guisarme, but did not remember having dropped the bow; now he stumbled over sprawling bodies, now jumped to catch a charger's bridle with the hook of his weapon, hanging back hard while stronger arms than his beat from the saddle a smiting, cursing Barberghe chevalier – the only rebel of them all to pitch to earth right through the ranks of Ger.
"Yield you, De Medrincourt!" shouted the Squire of Ger, who kneeled beside him to twitch up the battered visor and bring a dagger point
against the rim of the gorget. But the fallen warrior was fighting mad, and his guantleted fist flailed up from the grass to clash on the other's shoulder plate; the squire lurched, and his red excited face went white and wicked beneath the bascinet rim. Juhel saw him shut his eyes and blindly press the dagger home; and the sensechal of the Tower of Ath kicked and lay still at the feet of its lawful lord.
Juhel felt a gray sickness springing and spreading under his ribs, but it passed and died at a new shouting; there seemed a sudden access of daylight, although the clouds were leaning low above the loop of Varne. Again the attacking masses were falling back from before the shattered stockade; where Juhel had seen only steel and faces and bright colour, were now the pine-clad bluffs beyond Pont-de-Foy, darkling-clear a mile away above the welter of withdrawal.
Grunting men leaned on each other and wiped their sweaty faces; a few whom battle fever had sustained sank down with suddenly discovered injuries. The Count of Ger cried strongly out to summon his English war captain; and from the centre of the line John Doust came thrusting toward him, raising visor with one hand and using the great two-handed sword as a staff in the other.
"Wounded, John?" called the count from his saddle; and the Englishman's little mouth twitched in his red good-natured face.
"Winded," he answered wheezily. "But by the harrowing of hell, my lord, this is the trimmest fray you have yet shown me."
"Scant credit to me, John," said Raould of Ger above him, "but wait awhile, for I believe these two armies will destroy each other in the field."
For a moment they talked together, and then were interrupted by a horseman galloping upon them from the centre – a horseman who flung down his shield because it was riven in twain, and bared a heavy-featured brown face above a coat of checkered white and blue.
"How goes it, Enguerrand?" demanded the count; and Juhel saw that the newcomer was Piers's cousin, that Sieur du Varanger who had fought by my lord at Karmeriet and Alanol and Gramberge.
"Ding-dong," replied the portly vavasor, saluting the duke as he drew rein. "The castellan presses hard upon Camors and Ahun, but the fighting abbot is slain and the Inn of Harmony twice retake; the constable has it now, and Conrad and he have brought up all reserves against the king. Saulte holds Queranay, but we can do no more. The King's grace bids me say: If the Count of Ger be alive, let him risk that folly he spoke of. Am I understood?"
"Well enough!" grated Boqueron, eyeing the Volsberghe banner on the level ground below. "So be it Ger; when strength and craft fail it is time for madness. Take your chosen men and adventure it; and God go with you – sparing an Eye for us, for we shall need it. Must you have your Captain Doust?"
"Ay, that I must," said the young count soberly. "Up on my spare charger, John, and summon those we prepared."
Along behind the line rode the big Englishman, calling out upon this man and that of the archers and men at arms of Ger. By twos and threes the latter left their comrades, striding back between the tents to where some sixty horses waited.
"A dozen are done for," grumbled John Doust. "I bade them keep the rear rank till we needed them; I doubt if even the words I know can reach them now in Purgatory."
Juhel and Piers stepped forward together; the count frowned and looked over their heads.
"Enguerrand!" pleaded the older boy, turning to his kinsman. "Ask my lord to take us with him!"
"In faith, Raoul," smiled the Sieur du Veranger, "my lord Duke here believes you good as dead; a dead count needs no pages any more."
"Off with you, Ger!" barked tall Boqueron. "Gaston is trying again. Lift your shield from the bridge, and I will come down on them with all my force. Farewell!"
"Come then, boys," rapped out the count. "Bring arrows, each of you, quickly, and follow us."
Truly, Gaston was trying again; but for Juhel the roar of battle thinned and died, for presently he was urging his mount through the gloomy forest in the wake of disappearing Safadin. "Spikes on your spurs are seven – stay, love, stay…" For the first time he noticed that a thin rain was falling; beech boughs glistened gray, and toadstools shone demurely amid the sodden mast. "The Plough is wheeling up the heaven – hay, now, and away!" Horse hoofs rasped in the rank grass of little tumbled glades; birds called and fled, and pine trunks showed on the higher slopes, processional against red earth or wet gray sky. All the air was laden with the tireless murmur of rain on leaves; that sense which noticed such things, awoke in Juhel, finding suddenly absurd this stiff and weary boy's body that rocked above and through them from butchery to butchery.
Somewhere ahead of all rode Master Nino Chiostra; for Nino, it seemed, knew of a secret ford whereby a wide detour would bring swift-moving men to Pont-de-Foy itself, full in the left rear of the rebel army.
Once, on that difficult ride, the gray curve of river below him bore to Juhel's ears the shredded tumult of the battle two miles or more away; but at the ford itself was only silence of wet summer afternoon until the calling and splashing began in the wake of Nino's charger. It was nearly an hour after leaving the tented hilltop that Raoul of Ger checked Safadin amid the pines on the low crest behind Pont-de-Foy.
Below lay other tents, revealing the camps of Barberghe and Montcarneau. Beyond them was the hamlet, and the high-arched bridge itself; and Juhel's pulse galloped as he saw the great fight unfolded from Angmer to the high woods where Boqueron's line still held.
"Now, Nino," said the count, "I and John will take twenty ahead and seize the bridge; do you trickle the others madly after, roaring all of you as though a thousand followed."
And like a volley of slung stones the first score of mounted men at arms plunged down the quarter mile of sloping ground upon Pont-de-Foy.
The villagers had mostly fled into the forest, but a huddle of camp followers broke yelling from the crazy street toward the rear of the battling array. Half a cozen Barberghe men-at-arms guarded tents and baggage, but they ran or were cut down, and when two farm wagons were dragged to form a barricade a third of the way across the bridge, the count swung his shield aloft on the head of the upthrust lance.
Dimly on the opposite hill, beneath the edge of the forest, the red and white of Boqueron's banner dipped in ready reply.
Juhel and Piers were among the first to break downhill as re-enforcement. Side by side, and shrieking their loudest, they hurtled into the narrow street, leaping to earth and crowding their mounts into the hedged churchyard, where already Safadin and a score of other destriers trampled uneasily to and fro or cropped grass amid the little mounds.
The count and John Doust and four more stood upright in the wagons; the rest were stretched or crouched or kneeling, with weapons poised over shafts, between wheels, or beside their comrades; legs across the width of the clumsy carts. Half a dozen wielded bows, and for an age-long moment they waited, hearing first the bellowing of their own slender reserves, and then the swelling battle cry of down-charging Boqueron.
Juhel slid beneath a wagon, and wriggled until he could draw string sideways, with one horn of his weapon beyond the thick spokes of a forewheel and the other almost touching the stones of the parapet. Sheltered above in front, he knew a moment's hard amusement; then he was only aware of a darkening rush of horsemen against the barricade.
A medley of stamping hoofs that blotted out the meadow – galloping legs stockinged with white, or richly black or brown or gray between black-brown caparisons – lance points promising ugly death, swords swinging out of sight – Barberghe coulours everywhere, red and black and cloaking polished steel.
Crash! They were at it over Juhel's head before he had twice let fly. Wood splintered to smashing horseshoes; shreds of the wicker wagon side rained down upon the slippery stones, a shard of yellow-painted shield dropped and bounced; a horse screamed dreadfully and slithered against the parapet. Thinly from a closed helm rang the curses of Barberghe; the Fox himself had headed this rush, and the Fox himself was the first to fall to the sweep of John Doust's estoc. Down clanged the bul
k of steel; blood welled beneath the riven gorget and soaked the red shoulder of the short surcoat. The bow was beaten from Juhel's grasp by the whirl of a pointed solleret; the boy gasped and bunched himself backward and a man-at-arms stooped behind him and thrust the haft of a great pike beneath his empty hand.
"Make sure of him, lad!" boomed the man-at-arms. "Have at him while you may!"
But the groaning struggling count of Barberghe was already pinned to the cobbles and whelmed and lost beneath two of his fallen followers; Juhel screamed with excited dismay and fumbled with the heavy weapon, fearing to strike at dying men, shamed by his fear and angered by his shame.
"Horses off the bridge, you dolts!" thundered a voice beyond the immediate tumult; but a fourth figure blocked Juhel's view – a figure with boy's brown hands that clutched at the great wagon wheel, and loosened grasp, and fell, while a steel cap clashed on the wet stones, and a face that grinned in agony slew down as though to peer between the spokes.
It was Gavin, once page to the Viscount Robin – Gavin, leaping to rescue the Fox with the rash fury of seventeen years – and the end of all his boasting was a death wound in the breast and a fainting fall across the Fox's dead charger. With Gavin's wide glazed eyes a yard from his own knee, Juhel pointed the pike and gave his mind blankly to battle; chevrons and wolf's heads crowded together as the tall Count Montcarneau led a savage rush to clear the bridge of this impudently lodged defence.
Abreast on the wagon above were now Raoul of Ger, John Doust, and Nino Chiostra; three such swords gave sufficient reason for no one to heed the boy crouching half hidden below them. The barricade was covered with swarming grappling men; Juhel never knew what part his own thrusts played in that last desperate issue. He only knew that before the end the bodies were piled so high that he could barely see in front of him; and by the war shouts from above, the three still kept their places in the midmost heart of the shambles that was Pont-de-Foy.
At length: "By God we have done it!" screeched Master Nino Chiostra; and suddenly all the living in front of Juhel seemed running, all behind him cheering and shouting on to another.
Joris of the Rock [The Neustrian Cycle, Book II] (Forgotten Fantasy Library) Page 26