Bernard Cornwell - Harlequin

‘There’s more honour as a man-at-arms,’ Sir Giles observed, but Thomas did not want honour. He wanted revenge.

Sir Giles let him choose what he wanted from the enemy’s dead and Thomas picked a mail coat, a pair of long boots, a knife, a sword, a belt and a helmet. It was all plain gear, but serviceable, and only the mail coat needed mending, for he had driven an arrow clean through its rings. Sir Giles said he owed Thomas’s father money, which may or may not have been true, but he paid it to Thomas with the gift of a four-year-old gelding. ‘You’ll need a horse,’ he said, ‘for nowadays all archers are mounted. Go to Dorchester,’ he advised Thomas, ‘and like as not you’ll find someone recruiting bowmen.’

The Genoese corpses were beheaded and their bodies left to rot while their four heads were impaled on stakes and planted along the Hook’s shingle ridge. The gulls fed on the dead men’s eyes and pecked at their flesh until the heads were flensed down to bare bones that stared vacantly to the sea.

But Thomas did not see the skulls. He had gone across the water, taken his black bow and joined the wars.

It was winter. A cold morning wind blew from the sea bringing a sour salt smell and a spitting rain that would inevitably sap the power of the bowstrings if it did not let up.

‘What it is,’ Jake said, ‘is a waste of goddamn time.’

No one took any notice of him.

‘Could have stayed in Brest,’ Jake grumbled, ‘been sitting by a fire. Drinking ale.’

Again he was ignored.

‘Funny name for a town,’ Sam said after a long while. ‘Brest. I like it, though.’ He looked at the archers. ‘Maybe we’ll see the Blackbird again?’ he suggested.

‘Maybe she’ll put a bolt through your tongue,’ Will Skeat growled, ‘and do us all a favour.’

The Blackbird was a woman who fought from the town walls every time the army made an assault. She was young, had black hair, wore a black cloak and shot a crossbow. In the first assault, when Will Skeat’s archers had been in the vanguard of the attack and had lost four men, they had been close enough to see the Blackbird clearly and they had all thought her beautiful, though after a winter campaign of failure, cold, mud and hunger, almost any woman looked beautiful. Still, there was something special about the Blackbird.

‘She doesn’t load that crossbow herself,’ Sam said, unmoved by Skeat’s surliness.

‘Of course she bloody doesn’t,’ Jake said. ‘There ain’t a woman born that can crank a crossbow.’

‘Dozy Mary could,’ another man said. ‘Got muscles like a bullock, she has.’

‘And she closes her eyes when she shoots,’ Sam said, still talking of the Blackbird. ‘I noticed.’

‘That’s because you weren’t doing your goddamn job,’ Will Skeat snarled, ‘so shut your mouth, Sam.’

Sam was the youngest of Skeat’s men. He claimed to be eighteen, though he was really not sure because he had lost count. He was a draper’s son, had a cherubic face, brown curls and a heart as dark as sin. He was a good archer though; no one could serve Will Skeat without being good.

‘Right, lads,’ Skeat said, ‘make ready.’

He had seen the stir in the encampment behind them. The enemy would notice it soon and the church bells would ring the alarm and the town walls would fill with defenders armed with crossbows. The crossbows would rip their bolts into the attackers and Skeat’s job today was to try to clear those crossbowmen off the wall with his arrows. Some chance, he thought sourly. The defenders would crouch behind their crenellations and so deny his men an opportunity to aim, and doubtless this assault would end as the five other attacks had finished, in failure.

It had been a whole campaign of failure. William Bohun, the Earl of Northampton, who led this small English army, had launched the winter expedition in hope of capturing a stronghold in northern Brittany, but the assault on Carhaix had been a humiliating failure, the defenders of Guingamp had laughed at the English, and the walls of Lannion had repulsed every attack. They had captured Tréguier, but as that town had no walls it was not much of an achievement and no place to make a fortress. Now, at the bitter end of the year, with nothing better to do, the Earl’s army had fetched up outside this small town, which was scarcely more than a walled village, but even this miserable place had defied the army. The Earl had launched attack after attack and all had been beaten back. The English had been met by a storm of crossbow bolts, the scaling ladders had been thrust from the ramparts and the defenders had exulted in each failure.

‘What is this goddamn place called?’ Skeat asked.

‘La Roche-Derrien,’ a tall archer answered.

‘You would know, Tom,’ Skeat said, ‘you know everything.’

‘That is true, Will,’ Thomas said gravely, ‘quite literally true.’ The other archers laughed.

‘So if you know so bloody much,’ Skeat said, ‘tell me what this goddamn town is called again.’

‘La Roche-Derrien.’

‘Daft bloody name,’ Skeat said. He was grey-haired, thin-faced and had known nearly thirty years of fighting. He came from Yorkshire and had begun his career as an archer fighting against the Scots. He had been as lucky as he was skilled, and so he had taken plunder, survived battles and risen in the ranks until he was wealthy enough to raise his own band of soldiers. He now led seventy men-at-arms and as many archers, whom he had contracted to the Earl of Northampton’s service which was why he was crouching behind a wet hedge a hundred and fifty paces from the walls of a town whose name he still could not remember. His men-at-arms were in the camp, given a day’s rest after leading the last failed assault. Will Skeat hated failure.

‘La Roche what?’ he asked Thomas.

‘Derrien.’

‘What does that goddamn mean?’

‘That, I confess, I do not know.’

‘Sweet Christ,’ Skeat said in mock wonder, ‘he doesn’t know everything.’

‘It is, however, close to derrière , which means arse,’ Thomas added. ‘The rock of the arse is my best translation.’

Skeat opened his mouth to say something, but just then the first of La Roche-Derrien’s church bells sounded the alarm. It was the cracked bell, the one that sounded so harsh, and within seconds the other churches added their tolling so that the wet wind was filled with their clangour. The noise was greeted by a subdued English cheer as the assault troops came from the camp and pounded up the road towards the town’s southern gate. The leading men carried ladders, the rest had swords and axes. The Earl of Northampton led the assault, as he had led all the others, conspicuous in his plate armour half covered by a surcoat showing his badge of the lions and stars.

‘You know what to do!’ Skeat bellowed.

The archers stood, drew their bows and loosed. There were no targets on the walls, for the defenders were staying low, but the rattle of the steel-tipped arrows on the stones should keep them crouching. The white-feathered arrows hissed as they flew. Two other archer bands were adding their own shafts, many of them firing high into the sky so that their missiles dropped vertically onto the wall’s top, and to Skeat it seemed impossible that anyone could live under that hail of feather-tipped steel, yet as soon as the Earl’s attacking column came within a hundred paces the crossbow bolts began to spit from the walls.

There was a breach close to the gate. It had been made by a catapult, the only siege machine left in decent repair, and it was a poor breach, for only the top third of the wall had been dismantled by the big stones and the townsfolk had crammed timber and bundles of cloth into the gap, but it was still a weakness in the wall and the ladder men ran towards it, shouting, as the crossbow bolts whipped into them. Men stumbled, fell, crawled and died, but enough lived to throw two ladders against the breach and the first men-at-arms began to climb. The archers were loosing as fast as they could, overwhelming the top of the breach with arrows, but then a shield appeared there, a shield that was immediately stuck by a score of shafts, and from behind the shield a crossbowman shot straight down one of the ladders, killing the leading man. Another shield appeared, another crossbow was loosed. A pot was shoved onto the breach’s top, then toppled over, and a gush of steaming liquid spilled down to make a man scream in agony. Defenders were hurling boulders over the breach and their crossbows were snapping.