Bernard Cornwell - 1356 (Special Edition)

The archers stopped for fear of hitting their own horsemen, then discarded their bows and pulled out swords and ran to join the killing as the men-at-arms struck.

The sound of the charge striking home was like butchers’ cleavers hitting carcasses. Men screamed. Some threw down swords and held their hands out in mute surrender. Thomas, not as comfortable on horseback as he was with a bow, had his lunge deflected by a sword. He crashed past the man, backswung his blade that hammered harmlessly against leather, then swept it forward into a man’s red hair. That man went down, spilling from his saddle, and the Hellequin were turning, coming back to finish the enemy. A rider wearing a black hat plumed with long white feathers lunged a sword at Thomas’s belly. The blade slid off his mail, and Thomas brought his sword back in a wild swing that sliced into the man’s face just as Arnaldus, one of the Gascons in the Hellequin, speared the man’s spine with another sword. The count’s rider was making a high-pitched keening sound, shaking uncontrollably, blood pouring from his shattered face. He let his sword drop, and Arnaldus speared him again. He fell slowly sideways. An archer seized the reins of the man’s horse. The dying man was the last to offer any resistance. The count’s men had been taken by surprise, they had fought an unequal skirmish against men in armour whose lives were spent fighting, and the struggle was over in seconds. A dozen of the count’s men escaped, the rest were dead or prisoners, and the count himself was captured. ‘Archers!’ Thomas shouted. ‘Bows!’ Their job would be to watch the northern woods in case the crossbowmen had fight in them, though Thomas doubted any would want to fight after their lord was captured. A dozen archers collected arrows, cutting them out of dead and wounded horses, picking them from the ground and filling their arrow bags. The prisoners were herded to one side and made to yield their weapons as Thomas walked his horse to where the wounded count lay on the turf. ‘My lord,’ he greeted him, ‘you owe me money.’

‘You were paid!’ the count blustered.

‘Sam,’ Thomas called to the archer, ‘if his lordship argues with me you can fill him with arrows.’ He spoke in French, which Sam understood, and the bowman put an arrow on his string and offered the count a happy grin.

‘My lord,’ Thomas said again, ‘you owe me money.’

‘You could have pleaded your case,’ Labrouillade said.

‘Pleaded? Argued? Wrangled? Delayed? Why should I let your lawyers weave spells?’ Thomas shook his head. ‘Where are the genoins you took from Paville?’

The count thought of claiming that the coins were still at Villon’s castle, but the archer had his string half drawn and le Bâtard ’s face was implacable, and so the count reluctantly told the truth. ‘They are in Labrouillade.’

‘Then you will send one of your men-at-arms to Labrouillade,’ Thomas said courteously, ‘with orders that the money is to be brought here. And when it is, my lord, we shall let you go.’

‘Let me go?’ The count was surprised.

‘What use are you to me?’ Thomas asked. ‘It would take months to raise your ransom, my lord, and in those years you’d consume a greater value than the ransom in food. No, I shall let you go. And now, my lord, when you have sent for the coins you might permit my men to take that arrow from your thigh?’

A man-at-arms was summoned from the prisoners, given a captured horse and sent south with his message. Thomas then called Brother Michael. ‘You know how to take arrows out of flesh?’

The young monk looked alarmed. ‘No, sir.’

‘Then watch as Sam does it. You can learn.’

‘I don’t want to learn,’ Brother Michael blurted out, then looked abashed.

‘You don’t want to learn?’

‘I don’t like medicine,’ the monk confessed, ‘but my abbot insisted.’

‘What do you want?’ Thomas asked.

Michael looked confused. ‘To serve God?’ he suggested.

‘Then serve him by learning how to extract arrows,’ Thomas said.

‘You’d better hope it’s a bodkin,’ Sam told the count cheerfully. ‘It’s going to hurt either way, but I can get a bodkin out in an eyeblink. If it’s a flesh arrow I’ll have to cut the bastard out. Are you ready?’

‘Bodkin?’ the count asked faintly. Sam had spoken in English, but the count had half understood.

Sam produced two arrows from his bag. One had a long slender head without barbs. ‘A bodkin, my lord, made for slipping through armour.’ He tapped it with the second arrow that had a barbed triangular head. ‘A flesh arrow,’ he said. He drew a short knife from his belt. ‘Won’t take a moment. Are you ready?’

‘My own physician will treat me!’ the count shouted at Thomas.

‘If you wish, my lord,’ Thomas said. ‘Sam? Cut the shaft off, bind him up.’

The count yelped as the arrow was cut. Thomas rode away, going to where the Lord of Villon lay in his cart. The man was curled up, naked and bloody. Thomas dismounted, tied his horse to the shafts and called Villon’s name. The count did not move and Thomas clambered into the wagon, turned the man over, and saw he had died. There was enough congealed blood in the cart to fill a pair of buckets, and Thomas grimaced as he jumped down, then wiped his boots on the pale grass before going to the caged cart where the Countess Bertille watched him with wide eyes. ‘The Lord of Villon is dead,’ Thomas said.

‘Why didn’t you kill the Lord of Labrouillade?’ she asked, jerking her head towards her husband.

‘I don’t kill a man for owing me money,’ Thomas said, ‘but only for refusing to pay it.’ He drew his sword and used it to snap the feeble lock of the cage door, then held out his hand to help the countess down to the grass. ‘Your husband,’ he said, ‘will be free to go soon. You also, my lady.’

‘I’m not going with him!’ she said defiantly. She stalked to where the count lay on the grass. ‘He can sleep with the pigs,’ she said, pointing to the two carcasses on top of the cage, ‘he won’t know the difference.’

The count tried to get to his feet to slap his wife, but Sam was binding his wound with a strip of linen torn from a corpse’s shirt and he yanked the linen tightly so that the count yelped with pain again. ‘Sorry, my lord,’ Sam said. ‘Just stay still, sire, won’t be but a moment.’

The countess spat at him and walked away.

‘Bring the bitch here!’ the count shouted.

The countess kept walking, clutching her torn dress to her breasts. Genevieve touched her shoulder, said something, then approached Thomas. ‘What will you do with her?’

‘She’s not mine to do anything with,’ Thomas said, ‘but she can’t come with us.’

‘Why not?’ Genevieve asked.

‘When we leave here,’ Thomas said, ‘we have to go to Mouthoumet. We might have to fight our way there. We can’t take useless mouths that will slow us down.’

Genevieve smiled briefly, then gazed at the crossbowmen who were sitting at the edge of the northern woods. None of them had a weapon, instead they just watched their lord’s humiliation. ‘Your soul has hardened, Thomas,’ she said softly.

‘I’m a soldier.’

‘You were a soldier when I met you,’ Genevieve said, ‘and I was a prisoner, accused of heresy, excommunicated, condemned to death, but you took me away. What was I but a useless mouth?’

‘She’s trouble,’ Thomas said irritably.

‘And I wasn’t?’

‘But what will we do with her?’ he asked.

‘Take her away.’

‘From what?’

‘From that hog of a husband,’ Genevieve said, ‘from a future in a convent? From being clawed by dried-up nuns who hate her beauty? She must do what I did. Find her future.’