Heretic. Bernard Cornwell
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black and onto which he had fixed a silver plate showing a strange beast holding a cup, still had a few Frenchmen’s souls in it.
He did not see the English horsemen charge the flank of the French attack because the hovels of Nieulay hid the brief fight. He did see the bridge fill with fugitives who got in each other’s way in their haste to escape the French fury, and above their heads he saw the horsemen ride towards the sea on the river’s far bank. He followed them on the English side of the river, leaving the embanked road to jump from tussock to tussock, sometimes splashing through puddles or wading through mud that tried to steal his boots. Then he was by the river and he saw the mud-coloured tide swirling its way inland as the sea rose. The wind smelt of salt and decay.
He saw the Earl then. The Earl of Northampton was Thomas’s lord, the man he served, though the Earl’s rein was loose and his purse generous. The Earl was watching the victorious French, knowing that they would come to attack him, and one of his men-at-arms had dismounted and was trying to find a path firm enough for the armoured horses to reach the river. A dozen more of his men-at-arms were kneeling or standing across the French approach path, ready to meet a charge with shield and sword. And back at the hamlet, where the slaughter of the English garrison was finished, the French were turning wolfishly towards the trapped men.
Thomas waded into the river. He held his bow high, for a wet string would not draw, and he waded through the tide’s tug. The water came to his waist, then he was pushing out onto the muddy bank and he ran to where the men-at-arms waited to receive the first French attackers. Thomas knelt just beside them, out in the marsh; he splayed his arrows on the mud, then plucked one.
A score of Frenchmen were coming. A dozen were mounted and those horsemen kept to the path, but on their flanks dismounted men-at-arms splashed through the swamps and Thomas forgot them, they would take time to reach the firm ground, so instead he began shooting at the mounted knights.
He shot without thinking. Without aiming. This was his life, his skill and his pride. Take one bow, taller than a man, made from yew, and use it to send arrows of ash, tipped with goose feathers and armed with a bodkin point. Because the great bow was drawn to the ear it was no use trying to aim with the eye. It was years of practice that let a man know where his arrows would go and Thomas was shooting them at a frantic pace, one arrow every three or four heartbeats, and the white feathers slashed across the marsh and the long steel tips drove through mail and leather into French bellies, chests and thighs. They struck with the sound of a meat-axe falling on flesh and they stopped the horsemen dead. The leading two were dying, a third had an arrow in his upper thigh, and the men behind could not pass the wounded men in front because the path was too narrow and so Thomas began shooting at the dismounted men-at-arms. The force of an arrow’s strike was enough to throw a man backwards. If a Frenchman lifted a shield to protect his upper body Thomas put an arrow into his legs, and if his bow was old, then it was still vicious. He had been at sea for more than a week and he could feel the ache in his back muscles as he hauled the string back. Even pulling the weakened bow was the equivalent of lifting a grown man bodily, and all that muscle was poured into the arrow. A horseman tried to splash through the mud but his heavy destrier floundered in the soggy ground; Thomas selected a flesh arrow, one with a broad, tanged head that would rip through a horse’s guts and blood vessels and he loosed it low, saw the horse shudder, picked a bodkin from the ground and let it fly at a man-at-arms who had his visor up. Thomas did not look to see if any of the arrows were on target, he shot and picked another missile, then shot again, and the bowstring whipped along the horn bracer that he wore on his left wrist. He had never bothered to protect his wrist before, revelling in the burn left by the string, but the Dominican had tortured his left forearm and left it ridged with scar so now the horn sheath guarded the flesh.
The Dominican was dead.
Six arrows left. The French were retreating, but they were not beaten. They were shouting for crossbowmen and for more men-at-arms and Thomas, responding, put his two string fingers in his mouth and let loose a piercing whistle. Two notes, high and low, repeated three times, then a pause and he blew the double notes again and he saw archers running towards the river. Some were the men who had retreated from Nieulay and others came from the battleline because they recognized the signal that a fellow archer needed help.
Thomas picked up his six arrows and turned to see that the first of the Earl’s horsemen had found a passage to the river and were leading their heavily armoured horses across the swirling tide. It would be minutes before they were all across, but archers were splashing towards the farther bank now and those closest to Nieulay were already shooting at a group of crossbowmen being hurried towards the unfinished fight. More horsemen were coming down from the heights of Sangatte, enraged that the trapped English knights were escaping. Two galloped into the marsh where their horses began to panic in the treacherous ground. Thomas laid one of his last arrows on the string, then decided the marsh was defeating the two men and an arrow would be superfluous.
A voice came from just behind him. ‘Thomas, isn’t it?’
‘Sire.’ Thomas snatched off his helmet and turned, still on his knees.
‘You’re good with that bow, aren’t you?’ The Earl spoke ironically.
‘Practice, sire.’
‘A nasty mind helps,’ the Earl said, motioning Thomas to stand. The Earl was a short man, barrel-chested, with a weatherbeaten face that his archers liked to say looked like the backside of a bull, but they also reckoned he was a fighter, a good man and as hard as any of his men. He was a friend of the King’s, but also a friend of any who wore his badge. He was not a man to send others into battle unless he led them, and he had dismounted and removed his helmet so that his rearguard would recognize him and know that he shared their danger. ‘I thought you were in England,’ he said to Thomas.
‘I was,’ Thomas said, speaking now in French for he knew the Earl was more comfortable in that language, ‘then I was in Brittany.’
‘Now you’re rescuing me.’ The Earl grinned, revealing the gaps where he had lost his teeth. ‘I suppose you’ll want a pot of ale for this?’
‘As much as that, my lord?’
The Earl laughed. ‘We rather made fools of ourselves, didn’t we?’ He was watching the French who, now that a hundred or more English archers lined the riverbank, were thinking twice before launching another attack. ‘We thought we might tempt forty of their men to a battle of honour by the village, then half their bloody army comes down the hill. Do you bring me news of Will Skeat?’
‘Dead, my lord. Died in the fight at La Roche-Derrien.’
The Earl flinched, then made the sign of the cross. ‘Poor Will. God knows I loved him. No better soldier ever breathed.’ He looked at Thomas. ‘And the other thing. Do you bring me that?’
He meant the Grail. ‘I bring you gold, my lord,’ Thomas said, ‘but not that.’
The Earl patted Thomas’s arm. ‘We shall talk, but not here.’ He looked at his men and raised his voice. ‘Back now! Back!’
His dismounted rearguard, their horses already led to safety through the rising tide, now hurried to the river and crossed. Thomas followed and the Earl, his sword drawn, was the last man to wade the deepening water. The French, denied their valuable quarry, jeered at his retreat.
And that day’s fighting was done.
The French army did not stay. They had killed the Nieulay garrison, but even the most hot-blooded among them knew they could do no more. The English were too many. Thousands of archers were just praying for the French to cross the river and offer battle, so instead Philip’s men marched away, leaving the trenches of Nieulay filled with the dead and the windswept ridge of Sangatte empty, and next day the town of Calais surrendered. King Edward’s first instinct was to slaughter every inhabitant, to line them beside the moat and cut the heads from their emaciated bodies, but his great lords protested that the French would then do the same to any English-held town they captured in Gascony or Flanders and so the King reluctantly reduced his demand to just six lives.
Six men, hollow-cheeked