The Ill-Made Knight (13 page)

I laughed.

Talleyrand glared at me.

The Prince was watching the crest of the hill to the north, which divided us from the King of France. Banners were starting to appear.

‘Give me one hour to make peace, my gracious lord. In the name of Jesus Christ.’ The Cardinal bowed.

The Prince turned from looking at the gathering French banners, the way a shipman might turn from watching a gathering storm. He nodded. ‘One hour?’ he asked, looking at me of all people.

‘Just one,’ Talleyrand said.

The Prince bowed. ‘I will hear your proposals if the King of France will do,’ he said.

Talleyrand took a cup of wine from my hand, drank it and put his hand on my head. ‘God’s blessing on you, child, even when you are rude to your betters.’

That’s how I met the great Cardinal, of whom John Hawkwood said, ‘He farts gold.’

After he rode away, the Prince took wine and water from me. He looked at my boots, which were wet from riding into the stream so many times. ‘Good water?’ he asked.

‘Yes, my Prince.’ Oh, how I remember those words. I was speaking to the Prince.

He nodded. ‘The Cardinal may speak to his heart’s content while we water our horses and have a bite,’ he said. He looked past me to Burghersh. ‘And then, my lords, we will pick up our banners and march – away.’

They nodded and smiled. Listen, my friends – we had loot and an intact army, and they outnumbered us four to one. While I served the Prince and his lords, I watched the far hill as they did, and we counted eighty-seven banners. King John of France had 12,000 knights. We had about 2,000 men-at-arms. Of belted knights, we had fewer than 800.

We had our archers, and they had a veritable horde of infantrymen, but their infantrymen, with the exception of the communal militias, weren’t worth a donkey’s watery piss.

After a few minutes, I went back to the Earl, who, with Warwick, was commanding on the left, near the marshes and the river. The insects were fierce, but the French were far away. We watched the Prince canter his beautiful black charger across the fields towards the Cardinal, who was sitting with his his French knights under a banner of truce.

The Earl and Warwick already knew we were going to move. Men ate hurriedly, but suddenly the whole army – at least, all the men I knew – were in tearing good spirits. We’d marched around the French, and the Black Prince, bless him, was doing the right thing: turning his backside and slipping away. We weren’t going to fight at all.

No one was more relieved than the same men and boys who’d been counting dead Frenchmen the night before, believe me. Sound familiar, messieurs?

Every man was standing by his fed and watered horse. Most men had at least a canteen full of water. We stood to our horses, ready to move.

The Prince cantered back across the fields. Men started cheering.

He was a fine sight, and we weren’t going to fight.

We cheered, too, and he vanished into the centre of the army. An army of 6,000 men is a little less than a mile long, all formed in order, and he wasn’t so very far away.

One of his squires galloped up to Warwick and bowed in the saddle.

Warwick laughed and waved to Oxford, who nodded and rode along the hillside to where I sat with his men-at-arms.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘We will be leaving before the party.’

We all smiled, and the left wing of the army began to pick their way south, led by a dozen of the Prince’s elite archers. All we needed was to get across the swamp.

The ground to our left was a damp swamp – deeper than it should have been in early autumn. I rode with the Earl, because he was using me as a mounted messenger. I was, at least in his eyes, a squire. Squires are generally accounted among the men-at-arms and not the servants. Or so I chose to account myself.

At any rate, I was near the head of the column as we marched off to the left. Marched is the wrong term. We slithered and slid down the steep ridge, then we squelched our way through the reeds and mud. We weren’t moving very fast.

But I was nearly at the dry ground around the ford marked by the Prince’s archers – I could see them – when there was a great shout behind me. It was a panicked shout. We were strung out across the hillside in a loose column, four men wide, all mounted. Ahead of me I could see our baggage carts, already crossing the ford. The Prince had this one in the bag – he’d sent our baggage ahead.

Down in the reeds, I could see the hillside behind me, but I couldn’t see anything happening except the shouting of some of the men – mostly retinue archers – at the top of the ridge. They were pointing behind them.

‘Go see,’ the Earl said. I think he meant to send Beauchamp, but I had my horse turned out of the column and picking his way across the reeds before Beauchamp or Amble got the idea. In fact, I didn’t go back along the column – the horses were chewing the trail to a morass – but laboured across the marsh a few paces, then rode straight up the ridge.

The moment my head was clear of the reeds, I saw it all.

The French had attacked. Fast and hard, and well led. Their chivalry were coming straight as an arrow across the low valley that separated the Prince’s army from the ridge where Talleyrand had held his peace talk. They were mounted on armoured horses the size of dragons, and they made the earth shake, even from where I was.

Warwick was with the tail of our column and had seen the threat immediately. Whether by bad fortune or cunning plan, the French were attacking in two deep battles of cavalry, one aimed at the Prince, the other aimed at the gap where we’d left the line. So Warwick was dismounting his own retinue archers and all his men-at-arms to form a hasty line at the top of the ridge, slightly back to form a shallow ‘L’, with the Prince’s battle to cover our now naked left flank.

It takes a half a cup of wine to explain, but I saw it in one glance.

I rode back down the ridge to the Earl, who had already picked his way clear of the morass. I reined in, but my horse fidgeted – curvets, bites.

‘The French are attacking the ground we quit,’ I said. ‘My lord, Lord Warwick is forming a battle from the rear of our division. He will be hard pressed, and—’

The Earl was a young man, but old in war, and he didn’t need any more of his fifteen-year-old squire’s views. He raised his hand for silence and looked up the hill – he stood in his stirrups and looked at his column.

I watched him, and I watched John Hawkwood, who tugged his beard, reached down and loosened his sword in its scabbard.

The truth is, I was green as grass. It looked to me as if we were beaten, and I was on the edge of panic. But neither the young Earl nor the middle-aged professional seemed flustered. Rather, both of them wore the looks of men in a good game of chess – the Earl might have said ‘good move’ aloud.

My horse stopped fidgeting. You know why? Because I stopped fidgeting.

‘On me,’ the Earl shouted. He turned his horse’s head and began picking his way along the marsh, not up the hill.

As it was – certainly by the Earl’s intent – he had his picked men about him, but we were at the head of his elite archers, men who wore his livery. Men like Master Peter wore as much harness as a man-at-arms – Peter wore leg armour, a brigantine covered in red and yellow leather with rose-head rivets, a fine German basinet with a mail aventail. Most of his mates – the veteran archers – wore the same. The Earl had 120 of these men, and he had placed himself at their head when he called, ‘Follow me.’

We rode. Riding through a swamp on a hot autumn day in armour is unpleasant, but I can’t say I noticed.

The sound of cheers and war cries grew louder and louder.

As we emerged from the reeds, I could hear the French and feel the movement of their horses. I was shaking with fear and excitement. I thought we might have lost the battle by the time we got through the swamp, although when I went over it later, we rode only about 200 paces through the marsh.

Where we came out, at the base of the ridge, we were below the fighting. The French had crashed into Warwick’s division at the hedge. The hedge saved us – nothing can stop a French knight with a lance on open ground, as I have reason to know – but even with the hedge, the first contact had pushed Lord Warwick and his men-at-arms back, and back again. His archers had shot their quivers empty – a good man can loose fifteen arrows in a minute. There was a handful of French men-at-arms or their horses lying like butterflies after a storm, dead and feathered, on the slope.

As soon as the head of our column was clear of the reeds, the master archers took over. The archer’s pages – their servants – appeared out of the column and took their horses – one boy for each six horses. The archers walked forward about twenty paces. Their bows were ready strung. They all looked at Master Peter like musicians look at their conductor. He was watching the French chivalry on the ridge.

He had an arrow in his hand. He pointed it. ‘Shoot for the rumps and backs,’ he said. We’d come out of the reeds on the flank of the French, of course – and even in Milanese plate, man is
far
more vulnerable from the back then the front. I’ve seen a man shot through armour by a heavy bow, but not often.

Master Peter nocked his arrow. He didn’t appear to aim. He drew and loosed.

His arrow vanished into the mêlée.

The hundred or so archers around him began to draw and loose, even as the first light-armed archers began to emerge from the marsh. The Earl sent them off further to the left, further around the flank of the French. I saw Monk John trot by, his eyes on the French. He gave his horse to a boy and sprinted along the dry ground, headed to the left.

The Earl’s retinue of archers – 120 men, remember – filled the sky with arrows. The volume of their shafts was incredible. It’s one thing to watch a few men at the butts on a hot Sunday after Mass; it’s another thing entirely to watch a hundred men, every one of whom was probably his village champion. Their arrows were big and heavy – four or five to the pound, with the heads on. They cost a fortune.

They made a sound in the air like a woman beating pots when they struck.

The French at the top of the hill were scarcely annihilated. They were, as we later found, the picked men of 12,000 men-at-arms – the best armed and armoured – but their horses took a great many hits.

Even as I watched, a grey-bearded archer known as Gospel Mark shouted, ‘Horse killers!’ and drew from his quiver a misshapen thing like a child’s drawing of an arrow. Some men emulated him. The big-headed arrows could knock down a horse. The fine bodkin-point arrows that were supplied by the government were better for penetrating chain and leather – if they were well tempered, which they were not always.

The French recoiled from the arrow storm. Then one of them turned his horse, and suddenly fifty of them – they looked to me like a thousand – angled their horses across the hill and came for us.

They had the hill behind them, and as soon as they put their horse’s heads at us, instead of away from us, they stopped falling. The war bow isn’t so powerful as to drive through the three or four layers a French knight wore in front.

Again, they made the earth shake.

The Earl walked back into the marsh until he was standing on a tussock, about thirty yards into the morass.

Master Peter turned and, leg armour and all, his veterans ran back, shouting, cursing and making the black mud fly.

The army servants – of whom, had things gone otherwise, I might have been accounted one – appeared as if by one of Merlin’s spells and began to hand out sheaves of arrows. The veterans had already shot their quivers empty, and they couldn’t go forward to retrieve their shafts.

Battles, my friends, are won and lost by brave men, but also by boys with sheaves of arrows, and the clerks who counted the arrows and made sure that the boys did their work. That was Bishop Burghersh. A mediocre man-at-arms, but a fine administrator. Because of him, and because of an order he’d issued fifteen minutes before, the boys came with the arrows, brought in a cart to the far side of the marsh. The boys were barefoot and quick.

The French knights crossed the open ground in about the time it takes to say a paternoster.

They came up to the edge of the marsh and kept coming. Many horses baulked at the reeds, because horses are smarter than men, sometimes. And the horses that baulked turned broadside to the archers.

Monk John and the lighter-armed archers were just now forming, still further to the left, so that the new French attack was once more caught in the flank by our heavy bows.

It was close, my friends. It was all a matter of heartbeats and inches.

The lead French knight put his head down, and shafts whanged off his helmet so hard that his whole body rocked. His lance caught one of Master Peter’s archers and killed him, punching all the way through his body. The man screamed and blood shot from his mouth.

The French knight dropped his lance and drew his sword. He was about two horse-lengths from me, and once again I thought we had lost. I was still on my little riding horse, and I had my looted French sword in my hand. And I thought something like, Jesus Fuck, because the French bastard was a foot higher than me or more on a gigantic horse, and his sword was five-feet long.

He killed a second archer, even as Master Peter swung his bow and loosed at the knight, who was practically at the point of his arrow.

The arrow slammed into the man’s chest armour and stuck, but the knight didn’t seem affected. He didn’t want to kill archers; he wanted to fight knights, and he saw the Earl and the Earl’s standard, and he turned to go for them. Unfortunately, my horse and I sat between him and the Earl.

My horse was not a war horse.

His was.

His stallion bit my horse savagely in the neck and bore it down, and my little gelding collapsed, half reared, threw me into the muck of the marsh and ran, bleeding, from the stallion’s bite.

So much for my first encounter at Poitiers.

I lay, half-stunned, in the mud – nice, soft mud, which, if you must be thrown, is the very nicest landing – and watched as the Frenchmen went sword to sword with John Hawkwood. John was still mounted – it is possible the French knight thought he was the Earl – and they both cut one handed. It was curious to lie and watch them above me, like birds in the sky – I had time to see things I’d never have seen if I’d been fighting. Neither guarded himself at all. They both cut hard, high, sweeping blows meant to stun or injure right through armour. One of those blows would have split an unarmoured man in half.