Three Great English Victories: A 3-book Collection of Harlequin, 1356 and Azincourt. Bernard Cornwell
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‘Well, you can pray for us, I suppose.’
‘I can kill for you too.’
Skeat had eventually let Thomas join the band, not least because the boy brought his own horse. At first Skeat thought Thomas of Hookton was little more than another wild fool looking for adventure – a clever fool, to be sure – but Thomas had taken to the life of an archer in Brittany with alacrity. The real business of the civil war was plunder and, day after day, Skeat’s men rode into land that gave fealty to the supporters of Duke Charles and they burned the farms, stole the harvest and took the livestock. A lord whose peasants cannot pay rent is a lord who cannot afford to hire soldiers, so Skeat’s men-at-arms and mounted archers were loosed on the enemy’s land like a plague, and Thomas loved the life. He was young and his task was not just to fight the enemy, but to ruin him. He burned farms, poisoned wells, stole seed-grain, broke ploughs, fired the mills, ring-barked the orchards and lived off his plunder. Skeat’s men were the lords of Brittany, a scourge from hell, and the French-speaking villagers in the east of the Duchy called them the hellequin, which meant the devil’s horsemen. Once in a while an enemy war band would seek to trap them and Thomas had learned that the English archer, with his great long war bow, was the king of those skirmishes. The enemy hated the archers. If they captured an English bowman they killed him. A man-at-arms might be imprisoned, a lord would be ransomed, but an archer was always murdered. Tortured first, then murdered.
Thomas thrived on the life, and Skeat had learned the lad was clever, certainly clever enough to know better than to fall asleep one night when he should have been standing guard, and for that offence Skeat had thumped the daylights out of him. ‘You were goddamn drunk!’ he had accused Thomas, then beat him thoroughly, using his fists like blacksmith’s hammers. He had broken Thomas’s nose, cracked a rib and called him a stinking piece of Satan’s shit, but at the end of it Will Skeat saw that the boy was still grinning, and six months later he made Thomas into a vintenar, which meant he was in charge of twenty other archers.
Those twenty were nearly all older than Thomas, but none seemed to mind his promotion for they reckoned he was different. Most archers wore their hair cropped short, but Thomas’s hair was flamboyantly long and wrapped with bowcords so it fell in a long black plait to his waist. He was clean-shaven and dressed only in black. Such affectations could have made him unpopular, but he worked hard, had a quick wit and was generous. He was still odd, though. All archers wore talismans, maybe a cheap metal pendant showing a saint, or a dried hare’s foot, but Thomas had a desiccated dog’s paw hanging round his neck which he claimed was the hand of St Guinefort, and no one dared dispute him because he was the most learned man in Skeat’s band. He spoke French like a nobleman and Latin like a priest, and Skeat’s archers were perversely proud of him because of those accomplishments. Now, three years after joining Will Skeat’s band, Thomas was one of his chief archers. Skeat even asked his advice sometimes; he rarely took it, but he asked, and Thomas still had the dog’s paw, a crooked nose and an impudent grin.
And now he had an idea how to get into La Roche-Derrien.
That afternoon, when the dead man-at-arms with the split skull was still tangled in the abandoned ladder, Sir Simon Jekyll rode towards the town and there trotted his horse back and forth beside the small, dark-feathered crossbow bolts that marked the furthest range of the defenders’ weapons. His squire, a daft boy with a slack jaw and puzzled eyes, watched from a distance. The squire held Sir Simon’s lance, and should any warrior in the town accept the implicit challenge of Sir Simon’s mocking presence, the squire would give his master the lance and the two horsemen would fight on the pasture until one or the other yielded. And it would not be Sir Simon for he was as skilled a knight as any in the Earl of Northampton’s army.
And the poorest.
His destrier was ten years old, hard-mouthed and sway-backed. His saddle, which was high in pommel and cantle so that it held him firm in its grip, had belonged to his father, while his hauberk, a tunic of mail that covered him from neck to knees, had belonged to his grandfather. His sword was over a hundred years old, heavy, and would not keep its edge. His lance had warped in the wet winter weather, while his helmet, which hung from his pommel, was an old steel pot with a worn leather lining. His shield, with its escutcheon of a mailed fist clutching a war-hammer, was battered and faded. His mail gauntlets, like the rest of his armour, were rusting, which was why his squire had a thick, reddened ear and a frightened face, though the real reason for the rust was not that the squire did not try to clean the mail, but that Sir Simon could not afford the vinegar and fine sand that was used to scour the steel. He was poor.
Poor and bitter and ambitious.
And good.
No one denied he was good. He had won the tournament at Tewkesbury and received a purse of forty pounds. At Gloucester his victory had been rewarded by a fine suit of armour. At Chelmsford it had been fifteen pounds and a fine saddle, and at Canterbury he had half hacked a Frenchman to death before being given a gilded cup filled with coins, and where were all those trophies now? In the hands of the bankers and lawyers and merchants who had a lien on the Berkshire estate that Sir Simon had inherited two years before, though in truth his inheritance had been nothing but debt, and the moment his father was buried the moneylenders had closed on Sir Simon like hounds on a wounded deer.
‘Marry an heiress,’ his mother had advised, and she had paraded a dozen women for her son’s inspection, but Sir Simon was determined his wife should be as beautiful as he was handsome. And he was handsome. He knew that. He would stare into his mother’s mirror and admire his reflection. He had thick fair hair, a broad face and a short beard. At Chester, where he had unhorsed three knights inside four minutes, men had mistaken him for the King, who was reputed to fight anonymously in tournaments, and Sir Simon was not going to throw away his good royal looks on some wrinkled hag just because she had money. He would marry a woman worthy of himself, but that ambition would not pay the estate’s debts and so Sir Simon, to defend himself against his creditors, had sought a letter of protection from King Edward III. That letter shielded Sir Simon from all legal proceedings so long as he served the King in a foreign war, and when Sir Simon had crossed the Channel, taking six men-at-arms, a dozen archers and a slack-jawed squire from his encumbered estate, he had left his creditors helpless in England. Sir Simon had also brought with him a certainty that he would soon capture some French or Breton nobleman whose ransom would be sufficient to pay all he owed, but so far the winter campaign had not yielded a single prisoner of rank and so little plunder that the army was now on half rations. And how many well-born prisoners could he expect to take in a miserable town like La Roche-Derrien? It was a shit hole.
Yet he rode up and down beneath its walls, hoping some knight would take the challenge and ride from the town’s southern gate that had so far resisted six English assaults, but instead the defenders jeered him and called him a coward for staying out of their crossbows’ range and the insults piqued Sir Simon’s pride so that he rode closer to the walls, his horse’s hooves sometimes clattering on one of the fallen quarrels. Men shot at him, but the bolts fell well short and it was Sir Simon’s turn to jeer.
‘He’s just a bloody fool,’ Jake said, watching from the English camp. Jake was one of William Skeat’s felons, a murderer who had been saved from the gallows at Exeter. He was cross-eyed, yet still managed to shoot straighter than most men. ‘Now what’s he doing?’
Sir Simon had stopped his horse and was facing the gate so that the men who watched thought that perhaps a Frenchman was coming to challenge the English knight who taunted them. Instead they saw that a lone crossbowman was standing on the gate turret and beckoning Sir Simon forward, daring him to come within range.
Only a fool would respond to such a dare, and Sir Simon dutifully responded. He was twenty-five years old, bitter and brave, and he reckoned a display of careless arrogance would dishearten the besieged garrison and encourage the dispirited English and so he spurred the destrier deep into the killing ground where the French bolts had torn the heart out of the English attacks. No crossbowman fired now; there was just the lone figure standing on the gate tower, and Sir Simon, riding to within a hundred yards, saw it was the Blackbird.
This was the first time Sir Simon had seen the woman every archer called the Blackbird