Master of War (16 page)

‘Downriver!’ he cried to the men and was already running along the riverbank beyond the stanchions. They were Warwick’s men, but they responded to the command because archers needed a clear target and the mêlée on the other shore already consumed English and French men-at-arms. They realized Lord Marldon’s man must have seen something they had not. Two hundred yards along the bank showed the approaching infantry. Northampton and the others had their backs to the river, the spearmen’s numbers would overwhelm them.

One of the older men in Warwick’s contingent shouted, ‘Right, lad. We see the bastards.’

There was no need for a command. The archers hauled back their bowcords and, despite how few they were, began a steady killing fire. The infantry faltered but came on. Blackstone saw Sir Gilbert turn with a dozen men-at-arms to face the attack.

As more men got across the river the French began to fall back. It could not have been a main force from the French army, Black­stone reasoned, but a flying column sent to secure a crossing they thought already destroyed. They were dying too quickly to succeed. More archers joined Blackstone, others got across the river. They had to keep the slender foothold that was the army’s escape.

Elfred ran into view with Richard Blackstone at his shoulder. Weston, Longdon and all the others took up position on the opposite end of the riverbank and began firing steadily. Blackstone saw his brother at Elfred’s shoulder. A pang of uncertainty gripped him. Had the boy found a new guardian? Elfred was a kinder, older man who could easily have been their father. A thought shot through his mind like a bodkin piercing armour: was he happy to see responsibility for his brother gone from his life? He gripped his father’s war bow, his hand the breadth of his father’s. The man’s spirit lived on – so too the demands he had placed on his eldest son.

Men-at-arms were pushing the French back, but Blackstone had stopped firing. He wanted to fight with the comrades he knew.

‘That’s my company,’ he told the Warwick man. And then, knowing the answer to his own uncertainty, ‘My brother’s there.’

‘Aye. Off you go then, son. You did well bringing us here. We’ll hold the flank. Northampton and his men have the day, I reckon. He’s a lunatic bastard, thank God. You have to love him for it.’

Blackstone ran the few hundred yards to his friends. Richard saw him and his braying made John Weston turn as he nocked another arrow.

‘You took your time! Barely got your breeches back on, did you? Don’t mind us, we can win this fight without you.’

‘Thought you’d run off with her!’ Will Longdon said as he loosed another shaft.

Blackstone took his place with the others and drew back. ‘No, that’s later,’ he answered.

By the end of the day several hundred French lay dead; others were hunted down as they ran. Some managed to retreat towards Paris and deliver the news the French King would despair at hearing: English infantry with men-at-arms, flanked by Welsh spearmen and archers, held the crossing at Poissy. Edward had lost many men in the bitter fighting, but he had his bridge. Now he could escape the tightening noose – that sent a message of fear to the French King. No foreign invader had ever sacked the capital. He was not about to let Edward’s savage, mongrel army be the first. Philip prepared his army to do battle on the outskirts of the city.

The exertion of the fighting had reopened Sir Gilbert’s wound sustained at Caen. He sat on a log without chest armour and chain mail as a surgeon inserted stitches to the sides of the raw gash.

‘I wouldn’t let you wipe my arse with silk, you damned butcher, if it weren’t for my lord’s grace in sending you,’ he said as Godfrey de Harcourt looked on.

‘The Prince’s surgeon should be accorded some respect, Gilbert,’ de Harcourt chided him gently.

‘So too should this damned wound on my back. You’d think the man was stitching a pig for roasting.’ Sir Gilbert swigged from a flask. ‘The brandy helps – to a point. I hope you’ll thank him in case I don’t survive his cripple-fingered administration.’

‘I’ve done all I can, Sir Gilbert,’ said the surgeon.

Sir Gilbert held up the pot of salve. ‘Then smear this on and dress it with a clean piece of linen, and your duties will be discharged.’

The surgeon sniffed the pot. His nose wrinkled.

‘It’s not a brothel salve; it’s honey and lavender from the monks at Caen. Do it and be gone and make sure the linen is clean. Then bind me.’ The surgeon did as he was told.

‘Can you ride?’ de Harcourt asked.

‘What is it you want, Sir Godfrey?’ he answered. The Norman’s question seemed to him tantamount to an insult.

‘I’m to lay waste as close to Paris as I can get – it’s a diversion. Edward has to get the army north and across the Somme to meet up with Hastings and the Flemish. He’ll be running like a stag with the French hunt on his scent.’

Sir Gilbert let the brandy catch the back of his throat, its warmth easing the pain in his body. ‘He was never going to attack Paris. I knew that. We would be caught in a thousand streets and alleys. It’d be a hundred times worse than Caen. How much time does the King need?’

‘Nine days at the most.’

‘And what do you want of me and my men?’

‘Find a crossing on the Somme.’

‘Dear God, haven’t we done with trying to cross rivers? That’s the devil’s gate of a ditch. Worse than this place. Let’s do battle now and finish it.’

‘Edward’s ordered more archers and supplies. There’s a port north of the river at Le Crotoy, and to reach there we need to cross the Somme. There’s no victory unless we meet Hastings then turn and fight Philip. Supplies and men. That’s what we need.’

‘And a miracle.’

‘We’ll meet north of Amiens.’ De Harcourt turned his horse away.

Sir Gilbert grunted as the last binding was tied off. Six weeks of fighting sucked more than energy out of man and horse. They needed rest and food and care for their injuries. The army marched on worn-out shoes, and horses travelled on a meagre diet. Wounds festered and men died, desertion was not uncommon and soldiers had been hanged for looting monasteries. Yet still the warrior King asked more of his men. It was remarkable that they held him in such esteem that they bound up their feet, ignored their suffering and pushed onwards. And now there was to be a seventy-mile dash to get across another major river. Exhaustion was claiming them all.

The army crossed the Seine at Poissy and made certain the bridge was destroyed completely. Philip would not be able to attack from their rear, for now the race was on to march north. De Har­court’s raiding party had burned their way to the outskirts of Paris itself, but the French army was on the move, and once he had done all that could be done the tireless baron rode hard to join the reconnaissance parties that were trying to find a crossing. The army had left the difficult terrain of the hedgerows and
bocage
of Normandy and, fuelled by desperation, cut across the plain of Picardy in a straight line for seventy miles with barely a mile’s divergence either side of the column. The sea to the north-west was close, the Somme’s salt marshlands and estuary to the west – and a determined French King, knowing his English cousin’s bedraggled army was making a last great effort to reach his Flemish allies, pursued him from the south. The English had slipped the noose once, he would tighten it again. And kick away the stool.

Sir Gilbert’s men-at-arms and archers, like every other recon­nais­sance group, burned every village and hovel they found. Smoke clung to the land as if the whole of France was a funeral pyre. But no bridge had been found and, as Philip’s men had stopped the crossing of the Seine, so too he stopped the English at the Somme. Edward’s strategy had failed and the cost of trying to attack the fortified bridges on the river had cost too many lives. Time was running out as fast as the river’s tide, and Edward, King of England, would soon be stranded and forced to face an overwhelming army and fight them at a place not of his choosing.

The day before St Bartholomew’s Day was a fast day. Not that the men had a choice. There was neither meat nor fowl to eat. John Weston tethered his horse and, grinning like a monkey, scurried to where his own company of archers camped after their day’s fruitless search for a crossing. He dragged a dead swan behind him, its silk-like feathers saturated with its own blood. He dumped it on the ground in front of the others.

‘All right then, lads, got us a morsel here that’d grace the King’s table.’

‘Sweet Jesus, don’t let Sir Godfrey see it or he’ll have it himself,’ Roger Oakley said, as he dragged the heavy carcass out of sight. Two of the men began cleaning the bird.

‘Get some more wood on that fire. We’ll need a few rocks as well,’ Blackstone told Will Longdon, ‘and dig the pit deeper. We’ll cook it slow.’

‘Right y’are, your highness, sire, my lord,’ Longdon teased. A swan was a fine meal and this was no time to worry about a younger man organizing the fire pit. ‘Bull’s balls, lad! You’d make a fine nobleman,’ Elfred said.

‘If he weren’t a guttersnipe archer,’ Weston told him.

‘And you would know,’ Blackstone answered with a smile. The men were in good cheer now that there was to be a succulent bird for their next day’s breakfast.

Sir Gilbert walked across to them. ‘There’ll be a fight on your hands in the morning when the others smell those juices. I daresay I can keep things under control for the price of a drumstick.’

‘That’s exactly what we were saying a minute ago, Sir Gilbert,’ said Elfred, ‘weren’t we, lads?’ There was good-humoured agree­ment from the archers.

‘Is one bird all you could manage, John Weston?’

‘There were two pairs, Sir Gilbert, but I had to wade in to grab this one before the tide took him out to sea,’ John Weston told him, as he slit the neck free from the body. ‘The others weren’t about to paddle around and wait on another arrow coming their way. Just as well, mind you, damned near drowned m’self in that current.’

Blackstone threw more wood on the fire. What John Weston said reminded him of the river at home where he and Richard would set fish traps. The swans there were for Lord Marldon’s table, but they were usually taken at low tide when they were feeding.

‘Were they feeding?’ Blackstone asked.

‘That they were. Head down, arse up. I couldn’t miss, not that I ever do. Mind you, the bloody tide nearly took my legs away and I can’t swim, so thank the good Lord, he brought me back with you wretches’ breakfast.’

Blackstone turned to Sir Gilbert. ‘If there is a low tide on the estuary, shallow enough for the swans to feed, and John got him­self out into the stream, then perhaps that’s where we can cross, Sir Gilbert.’

‘John?’ Sir Gilbert asked the forager.

‘Aye, it could be done, I suppose. Risky as tickling the devil’s arse with a wet fletching, though.’

‘Show me.’

‘Right you are, Sir Gilbert. But your authority would go some way to saving the bird from being thieved by the time we’re back.’

‘The bird stays in the pit. Cook it slow, lads. It’ll be ready for the morning,’ Sir Gilbert told the men. ‘Elfred, Thomas, John, with me.’

They rode under moonlight until they crested a hill and saw the Somme’s estuary widen across the tidal marshland, its water a glistening ribbon that stretched towards the sea. A breeze rippled the broad reach of water whose eddies testified to the truth of Weston’s assertion of a strong tidal current. Sir Gilbert followed the archer’s route down through the edge of the marshes and then dismounted.

‘I went in about here. Had about a hundred-odd paces to where the nearest bird was feeding. The others were midstream. Didn’t see no point in risking the loss of an arrow.’

The squelching marsh gave under their weight, but they walked further towards the river.

‘Tide’s on the turn, Sir Gilbert,’ Blackstone said. ‘You remember the river at home? It’ll be a death trap if men are out there when the flood starts.’

Sir Gilbert ignored him and waded out further into the stream. Blackstone gathered the horses’ reins and gave them to his brother. No further instruction was needed. The disgraced boy was to stay behind.

The archers followed their captain into the deeper water that tugged at their thighs. The men spread out a hundred paces across, each testing his own foothold in the silt. After a while Elfred raised his arm.

‘It’s here,’ he called. ‘It’s firm underfoot.’

The others waded towards him and felt the riverbed harden. Elfred stared across the moonlit water to the far bank. ‘Has to be a mile if it’s a cloth-yard,’ he said.

‘Mile and a half,’ Blackstone said quietly. ‘At least.’ The fright­en­ing prospect of wading that distance if there were Genoese crossbows waiting for them was more chilling than the cold water lapping his groin.

‘Mile and a half it is, then,’ Sir Gilbert acknowledged. ‘At least.’

The swan was left in the fire pit, abandoned when Godfrey de Harcourt’s scouting party returned to the main force with news of the crossing. They needed sleep and food, but neither was given once the King was told of the chance that his army could cross the Somme. Trumpets blared, the army roused and each captain told his men what was expected.

‘If we don’t ford the river we’ll be trapped. The French vanguard is less than seven miles to our rear. We’ve only the sea ahead of us. It’s as simple as that,’ said Sir Gilbert. ‘And we haven’t come seven hundred miles to be slain like rats in a pit by a rabid terrier.’ He walked along the line, making sure that every archer and man-at-arms could hear. ‘We march tonight through the marshes.’

There was a shuffle of worn boots and a murmur of uncertainty among the gathered men. Moving across marshland at night was exhausting and dangerous. ‘There’s nothing for it, lads. We have to get across. There are Frenchmen to be killed and a crown to be gained. We’ll be at the river by dawn. Sir Reginald leads and I follow.’

He turned and faced the bowmen. By now he knew every name under his command. ‘Archers will go across first,’ he said solemnly.

Blackstone’s exhausted gaze followed the water’s current.

‘It’s still too high.’

‘We wait,’ Sir Gilbert said. ‘And pray the French are still yawn­ing and scratching their balls.’