Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

“This from the man who took communion from a monkey’s head.”

“That really happened?”

“If we both remember it, I’d say yes.”

The priest’s face reddened with shame, and then he looked forlorn.

“Don’t take on so,” said Thomas. “Nothing cunting matters.”

“That’s the way a man talks before he damns himself.”

“It’s not the first time I’ve said it.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“Is our host sleeping soundly?”

As if to answer the question himself, Jehan the woodcarver exhaled horsily with his lips, making a sound like “Plah.”

The priest looked back at Thomas.

“Tell me.”

It had rained.

Just a quick August shower and then it was gone and everything smelled like late summer with just that hint of damp and rot. The farms in Picardy were stubbled where the wheat and barley had already been mowed. The ground was moist and Thomas could smell the good, black soil of his home province, even over the equally pleasant nose of horses and oiled steel.

His lord, the Comte de Givras, had sued for the pleasure of being in the first line of knights to charge the English where they set themselves on the field at Crécy, which meant he sued for Thomas’s right to be there, too. They drew up in the first line of attack along with Alençon, the king’s brother, and came up to the edge of the field, looking at their adversaries.

The invaders under King Edward of England had backed themselves up a terraced slope between two copses of trees with a flat field before them. At least, it looked flat on the approach. A bank with a drop the height of a man revealed itself as the French host drew up; to attack the English lines, the knights of France would have to ride around to where it flattened out, which was only about eighty yards from another run of trees, and then mount the hill.

It was a funnel.

It was a trap.

The crossbowmen, mostly little Genoese mercenaries whom the French called “Salamis,” went out first at the king’s command. They were bitching because the big shields they hid behind while reloading hadn’t come forward yet, and their hempen strings were wet from the rain; besides, it was late in the day and they would have to shoot uphill and into the sun. They wanted to wait for their pavisses . They wanted to wait until morning, when the sun would confound English arrows. King Phillip told them they would have worse than arrows to deal with if they didn’t do their work tonight. But, as the French were all about to find out, the king didn’t have anything worse than arrows.

The Salamis came running back after about ten minutes, more than a few of them bloodied and stuck with feathers; Thomas would always remember how one had an arrow stuck straight through his hand and was waving it about as if it were on fire and he might put it out. A French knight yelled, “They’ve switched sides!” and another yelled, “Cowards!” and soon the impatient knights were riding over the Genoese through that narrow pass to get at the English. Some even struck down at the fleeing men, but Thomas’s lord did not, so neither did Thomas.

They rode hard at the line of English knights, who were standing at the top of their tawny slope like bait. They were standing with their poleaxes and swords, confident the French would not reach them in any shape to hurt them. They were flying the banner of the dragon, as the French were flying the sacred red oriflamme, which the Valois king had fetched with great ceremony from St. Denis; both banners meant the same thing—no quarter. Thomas’s seigneur wanted at the English king, whose camp sat by a large windmill, or at his son, the Prince of Wales. He wanted to punish them for the insult of their small numbers; the French had them three to one, as men-at-arms went. Most knights, lords of manors and castles large and small from the breadth of France, had only contempt for the rows of farmer-soldiers arranged in wedge formations between the English knights, but Thomas’s blood wasn’t so far above theirs. And he had a bad feeling. The archers were standing like dogs at the crouch with their longbows strung and little fences of arrows stuck into the ground at their feet. They were waiting. Thomas guessed that they had picked a landmark to range their first flight, and that they would loose when the French vanguard passed it. Now the hill got steep and took the speed out of their charge, the horses sweating and blowing hard from their nostrils. Thomas looked at a knobby shrub jutting out, and thought, That’s it , even as Alençon’s horse drew beside it.

The English archers, rough plowmen from Lancashire to Kent with overmuscled right shoulders and no feeling in the first three fingers, sank into their hips and pulled their heavy bowstrings back to their ears. As did the pale, dark-haired Welsh bowmen in their parti-colored green and white. Some five thousand archers in all.

They loosed.

Thomas couldn’t hear the slap of all those bows through his padded aventail and helm, but he saw the arrows rise like a swarm of flies and then come down. He had no visor. Many of those who had them didn’t push them down in time. The arrows fell hard with a noise like hail on tiles, but also sick and wet where one slammed through chain mail or into horseflesh. Men gasped and swore and screamed, but the horses’ screams were worse. They bucked and reared and bit at the arrows sticking in them. Some turned their haunches and ran, while others lay down and refused to move again. Many fell and pitched their riders. The French line was dissolving, and they weren’t halfway to their enemy. Thomas saw that his lord was riding crooked in his saddle, and then he saw two shafts sticking out of the older man, both in the chest; the older man would have fallen but for the deep saddle and high pommel made expressly to keep knights cinched in place. Thomas raised his lance and couched the butt in its fewter, reaching out to grab the reins of the comte’s horse; and then an arrow went whung on his lord’s conical helm, and he felt a hard slap on his face, like from his mother’s spoon in the kitchen. Suddenly he was leaning back, almost out of the saddle, looking up at the clouds. But his eyes weren’t focused right because there was something white in the sky.

Fletching.

He had an arrow in the face.

He sat up and the pain hit him so hard he dropped his lance and almost passed out, but he didn’t. The horses had both stopped. His seigneur was slumped to one side, in danger of falling. Thomas tried to speak, but only blood came out of his mouth—the point was in his tongue. What was left of the French line, maybe four dozen knights and the Comte d’Alençon, was bulling toward the English, their backs receding as they rode to die.

As the remnants of the French vanguard closed, the English began to touch off crude cannons, sending brass and stone balls whizzing into men, sending limbs and scraps of armor and fabric in all directions, sending gouts of smoke skyward. The banging cracks, like near thunder, further terrified the injured horses. One knight to Thomas’s left, whose surcoat blazed with three crescent moons argent, tried to regain control of his mount, which was kicking madly with a half dozen shafts in him. The horse kicked Thomas’s leg and broke it even through the greave, then, his eyes as wide as goose eggs, threw his rider off and stamped the man’s helmeted head into the mud again and again with his front hooves, destroying it utterly. Then he lay down and died on what remained of his master. He was not alone; one Englishman would later say the dead horses were lined up like piglets to suckle.