The Grail Quest 1 - Harlequin - Bernard Cornwell

Saint George!"

Spread wide!" Will Skeat shouted, wanting his men to be on the flanks of the Earl's attack so they could use their arrows when the French stood to receive the charge, but the water rapidly grew deeper as Thomas moved upstream and he could not go as far as he wanted.

Kill them! Kill them!“ The Earl was wading up to the bank now. Keep ranks!” Reginald Cobham shouted.

The French men-at-arms gave a cheer, for the proximity of the English charge meant the archers" aim would be blocked, though Thomas did manage to loose two arrows as the defenders stood and before the two groups of men-at-arms met at the river's edge with a clash of steel and shield. Men roared their war cries, Saint Denis contending with Saint George.

Watch right! Watch right!" Thomas shouted, for the peasant infantrymen had started forward and he sent two arrows whistling at them. He was plucking shafts from the arrow bag as fast as he could.

Take the horsemen!" Will Skeat bellowed, and Thomas changed his aim to send an arrow over the heads of the fighting men at the French horsemen who were advancing down the bank to help their comrades. Some English horsemen had entered the ford now, but they could not ride to meet their French counterparts because the ford's northern exit was blocked by the wild melee of men-at-arms. Men slashed and hacked. Swords met axes, falchions split helmets and skulls. The noise was like the devil's blacksmith shop and blood was swirling down tide in the shallows. A Englishman screamed as he was cut down into the water, then screamed again as two Frenchmen drove axes into his legs and trunk. The Earl was thrust-ing his sword in short hard lunges, ignoring the hammer blows on his shield.

Close up! Close up!" Reginald Cobham shouted. A man tripped on a body, opening a gap in the English line, and three howling Frenchmen tried to exploit it, but were met by a man with a double-headed axe who struck down so hard that the heavy blade split a helmet and skull from nape to neck.

Flank them! Flank them!“ Skeat bellowed, and his archers waded closer to the shore to drive their arrows into the sides of the French formation. Two hundred French knights were fighting eighty or ninety English men-at-arms, a brawl of swords and shields and mon-strous clangour. Men grunted as they swung. The two front ranks were locked together now, shields against shields, and it was the men behind who did the killing, swinging their blades over the front rank to kill the men beyond. Most of the archers were pouring arrows into the French flanks while a few, led by John Armstrong, had closed up behind the men-at-arms to shoot into the enemy's faces. The French infantry, thinking the English charge stalled, gave a cheer and began to advance. Kill them! Kill them!” Thomas shouted. He had used a whole sheaf of arrows, twenty-four shafts, and had only one sheaf more. He drew the bow back, released, drew again. Some of the French infantry had padded jackets, but they were no protection against the arrows. Sheer numbers was their best defence and they screamed a wild war cry as they pounded down the bank. But then a score of English horsemen came from behind the archers, pushing through them to meet the mad charge. The mailed riders chopped hard into the infantry's front ranks, swords flailing left and right as the peasants hacked back. The horses bit at the enemy, and always kept moving so that no one could slash their hamstrings. A man-at-arms was hauled from his saddle and screamed terribly as he was chopped to death in the shallows. Thomas and his archers drove their arrows into the mob, more horsemen rode to help slaughter them, but still the wild rabble crowded the bank and suddenly Thomas had no arrows left and so he hung the bow round his neck, drew his sword and ran to the river's edge. A Frenchman lunged at Thomas with a spear. He knocked it aside and brought the sword's tip flashing round to rip the man's gullet. Blood spilled bright as dawn, vanishing into the river. He hacked at a second man. Sam, baby-faced Sam, was beside him with a billhook that he sliced into a skull. It stuck there and Sam kicked the man in frustration, then took an axe from the dying enemy and, leaving his billhook in its victim, swung his new weapon in a great arc to drive the enemy back. Jake still had arrows and was shooting them fast.

A splashing and a cheer announced the arrival of more mounted men-at-arms, who drove into the infantry with heavy lances. The big horses, trained to this carnage, rode over the living and dead while the men-at-arms discarded the spears and started hacking with swords. More archers had come with fresh arrows and were shooting from the river's centre.

Thomas was on the bank now. The front of his mail coat was red with blood, none of it his, and the infantry was retreating. Then Will Skeat gave a great shout that more arrows had come, and Thomas and his archers ran back into the river to find Father Hobbe with a pack mule loaded with two panniers of arrow sheaves. Do the Lord's work,“ Father Hobbe said, tossing a sheaf to Thomas, who undid its binding and spilled the arrows into his bag. A trumpet sounded from the northern bank and he whirled round to see that the French horsemen were riding to join the fight. Put them down!” Skeat shouted. Put those bastards down!" Arrows slashed and sliced at horses. More English men-at-arms were wading the river to thicken the Earl's force and, inch by inch, yard by yard, they were making progress up the bank, but then the enemy horsemen drove into the melee with lances and swords. Thomas put an arrow through the mail covering a Frenchman's throat, drove another through a leather chanfron so that the horse reared and screamed and spilled its rider.

Kill! Kill! Kill!“ The Earl of Northampton, bloodied from his helmet to his mailed boots, rammed the sword again and again. He was bone tired and deafened by the crack of steel, but he was climbing the bank and his men were pressed close about him. Cobham was killing with a calm certainty, years of experience behind every blow. English horsemen were in the melee now, using their lances over the heads of their compatriots to drive the enemy horses back, but they were also blocking the aim of the archers and Thomas again hung his bow round his neck and drew his sword. Saint George! Saint George!” The Earl was standing on grass now, out of the reeds, above the high-water mark and behind him the river's edge was a charnel house of dead men, wounded men, blood and screaming.

Father Hobbe, his cassock skirts hitched up to his waist, was fighting with a quarterstaff, ramming the pole into French faces. In the name of the Father,“ he shouted, and a Frenchmen reeled back with a pulped eye, and of the Son,” Father Hobbe snarled as he broke a man's nose, and of the Holy Ghost!"

A French knight broke through the English ranks, but a dozen archers swarmed over the horse, hamstrung it and hauled its rider down to the mud where they hacked at him with axe, billhook and sword.

Archers!“ the Earl shouted. Archers!” The last of the French horsemen had formed into a charge that threatened to sweep the whole ragged mess of brawling men, both English and French, into the river, but a score of archers, the only ones with arrows now, drove their missiles up the bank to bring the leading rank of horse-men down in a tangle of horses" legs and tumbling weapons. Another trumpet sounded, this one from the English side, and reinforcements were suddenly streaming over the ford and spurring up onto the higher ground.

They're breaking! They're breaking." Thomas did not know who shouted that news, but it was true. The French were shuffling backwards. The infantry, their stomach for battle slaked by the deaths they had suffered, had already retreated, but now the French knights, the men-at-arms, were backing away from the fury of the English assault.

Just kill them! Kill them! No prisoners! No prisoners!" the Earl of Northampton shouted in French, and his men-at-arms, bloody and wet and tired and angry, shoved up the bank and hacked again at the French, who stepped another pace back.

And then the enemy did break. It was sudden. One moment the two forces were locked in grunting, shoving, hacking battle, and then the French were running and the ford was streaming with mounted men-at-arms who crossed from the southern bank to pur-sue the broken enemy. Jesus,“ Will Skeat said, and dropped to his knees and made the sign of the cross. A dying Frenchman groaned nearby, but Skeat ignored him. Jesus,” he said again. You got any arrows, Tom?“ Two left.”

Jesus.“ Skeat looked up. There was blood on his cheeks. Those bastards,” he said vengefully. He was speaking of the newly arrived English men-at-arms who crashed past the remnants of the battle to harry the fleeing enemy. Those bastards! They get into their camp first, don't they? They'll take all the bloody food!" But the ford was taken, the trap was broken and the English were across the Somme.

PART THREE Crecy

The whole English army had crossed before the tide rose again. Horses, wagons, men and women, they all crossed safe so that the French army, marching from Abbeville to trap them, found the corner of land between the river and the sea empty.

All next day the armies faced each other across the ford. The English were drawn up for battle with their four thousand archers lining the river's bank and, behind them, three great blocks of men-at-arms on the higher ground, but the French, strung out on the paths to the ford, were not tempted to force the crossing. A handful of their knights rode into the water and shouted challenges and insults, but the King would not let any English knight respond and the archers, knowing they must conserve their arrows, endured the insults without responding.

Let the bastards shout,“ Will Skeat growled,'s houting never hurt a man yet.” He grinned at Thomas. Depends on the man, of course. Upset Sir Simon, didn't it?"

He was just a bastard."

No, Tom,“ Skeat corrected him, you're the bastard, and he was a gentleman.” Skeat looked across at the French, who showed no sign of trying to contest the ford. Most of them are all right,“ he went on, evidently talking of knights and nobles. Once they've fought with the archers for a while they learn to look after us on account of us being the mucky bastards what keeps them alive, but there's always a few goddamn idiots. Not our Billy, though.” He turned and looked at the Earl of Northampton, who was pacing up and down by the shallows, itching for the French to come and fight. He's a proper gentleman. Knows how to kill the goddamn French." Next morning the French were gone, the only sign of them the white cloud of dust hanging over the road which was taking their huge army back to Abbeville. The English went north, slowed by hunger and the lame horses that men were reluctant to abandon. The army climbed from the Somme marshes into a heavily wooded country that yielded no grain, livestock or plunder, while the weather, which had been dry and warm, turned cold and wet during the morning. Rain spat from the east and dripped incessantly from the trees to increase men's misery so that what had seemed like a victorious campaign south of the Seine now felt like an ignominious retreat. Which is what it was, for the English were running from the French and all the men knew it, just as they knew that unless they found food soon their weakness would make them easy pick-ings for the enemy. The King had sent a strong force to the mouth of the Somme where, at the small port of Le Crotoy, he expected reinforcements and supplies to be waiting, but instead the small port proved to be held by a garrison of Genoese crossbowmen. The walls were in bad repair, the attackers were hungry and so the Genoese died under a hail of arrows and a storm of men-at-arms. The English emptied the port's storehouses of food and found a herd of beef cattle col-lected for the French army's use, but when they climbed the church tower they saw no ships moored in the river's mouth nor any fleet waiting at sea. The arrows, the archers and the grain that should have replenished the army were still in England.

The rain became heavier on the first night that the army camped in the forest. Rumour said that the King and his great men were in a village at the forest's edge, but most of the men were forced to shelter under the dripping trees and eat what little they could scavenge.

Acorn stew," Jake grumbled.

You've eaten worse," Thomas said.

And a month ago we ate it off silver plates.“ Jake spat out a gritty mouthful. So why don't we bloody fight the bastards?” Because they're too many,“ Thomas said wearily, because we've only so many arrows. Because we're worn out.”

The army had marched itself into the ground. Jake, like a dozen other of Will Skeat's archers, had no boots any more. The wounded limped because there were not enough carts and the sick were left behind if they could not walk or crawl. The living stank. Thomas had made Eleanor and himself a shelter from boughs and turf. It was dry inside the little hut where a small fire spewed a thick smoke.

What happens to me if you lose?“ Eleanor asked him. We won't lose,” Thomas said, though there was little conviction in his voice.

What happens to me?" she asked again.

You thank the Frenchmen who find you," he said, and tell them you were forced to march with us against your will. Then you send for your father.

Eleanor thought about those answers for a while, but did not look reassured. She had learned in Caen how men after victory are not amenable to reason, but slaves to their appetites. She shrugged. And what happens to you?"

If I live?“ Thomas shook his head. I'll be a prisoner. They send us to the galleys in the south, I hear. If they let us live.” Why shouldn't they?"

They don't like archers. They hate archers.“ He pushed a pile of wet bracken closer to the fire, trying to dry the fronds before they became their bed. Maybe there won't be a battle,” he said, because we've stolen a day's march on them." The French were said to have gone back to Abbeville and to be crossing the river there, which meant that the hunters were coming, but the English were still a day ahead and could, perhaps, reach their fortresses in Flanders. Perhaps.

Eleanor blinked from the smoke. Have you seen any knight carrying the lance?"

Thomas shook his head. I haven't even looked,“ he confessed. The last thing on his mind this night was the mysterious Vexilles. Nor, indeed, did he expect to see the lance. That was Sir Guillaume's fancy and now Father Hobbe's enthusiasm, but it was not Thomas's obsession. Staying alive and finding enough to eat were what con-sumed him. Thomas!” Will Skeat called from outside.

Thomas pushed his head through the hut opening to see a cloaked figure was standing next to Skeat. I'm here,“ he said. You've got company,” Skeat said sourly, turning away. The cloaked figure stooped to enter the hut and, to Thomas's surprise, it was Jeanette. I shouldn't be here,“ she greeted him, pushing into the smoky interior where, throwing the hood from her hair, she stared at Eleanor. Who's that?”

My woman," Thomas spoke in English.

Tell her to go," Jeanette said in French.

Stay here,“ Thomas told Eleanor. This is the Countess of Armorica.”

Jeanette bridled when Thomas contradicted her, but did not insist that Eleanor left. Instead she pushed a bag at Thomas that proved to contain a leg of ham, a loaf of bread and a stone bottle of wine. The bread, Thomas saw, was the fine white bread that only the rich could afford, while the ham was studded with cloves and sticky with honey.