Bernard Cornwell - 1356 (Special Edition)

‘You haven’t met the Countess of Labrouillade,’ Thomas said. ‘My lady, this is the Sire Roland de Verrec …’ He paused, then added pointedly, ‘who swore an oath to return you to your husband.’

But it seemed Bertille did not hear Thomas’s words any more than Roland heard them, because she was just gazing at Roland. They each stared at the other and for both the world had ceased to exist. Time had stopped, heaven was holding its breath, and the virgin knight was in love.

PART THREE

Poitiers

Ten

The two dice rolled across the table.

It was a very fine table, made from dark walnut and inlaid with a pattern of unicorns made from silver and ivory, but it was now covered with a cloth of darkest blue velvet fringed with golden tassels. The velvet muffled the sound of the dice, which were being watched by five men.

‘God’s bowels,’ the youngest one said when the dice stopped.

‘Have emptied upon you, sire,’ another man said as he stooped over the table, ‘thrice!’ He needed to stoop because the dice, though made of the finest and whitest ivory, were marked with gold, which made them hard to read, and the difficulty was compounded by the strange light inside the vast tent, which was sewn from canvas dyed in red and yellow stripes. Not that there was much light to be coloured by the canvas for, although it was mid-morning, the sky was thick with dense cloud. The man looked quizzically at the prince, seeking permission to scoop up the dice. The prince nodded. ‘A two and a one,’ the man said, grinning, ‘which I believe, sire, make three, and increases your debt to me by three hundred.’

‘Your enjoyment is unseemly,’ the prince said, though without any anger.

‘It is indeed, sire, but it is enjoyment all the same.’

‘Oh God, no.’ The prince looked up because the tent was suddenly loud with the sound of a hard rain falling. It had been pattering on the canvas all morning, but now drummed, then cascaded so fast that the men needed to raise their voices to be heard. ‘God doesn’t love me today!’

‘He adores you, sire, but loves my purse more.’

The prince was twenty-six years old, a fine-looking man with thick fair hair darkened by the tent’s peculiar light. His face was bony with deep-set eyes as dark as the jet buttons that decorated the high collar of his tunic, which was fashionably short, tight-waisted, and dyed royal blue. The skirt was stiffened with bone and tailored into points that were edged with pearls, lined with yellow silk and finished with tassels woven from cloth of gold. His sword belt was made from the same cloth, though embroidered with his badge of three feathers made from ivory-coloured silk. The scabbarded sword itself was leaning against a chair that stood at the tent’s entrance, and the prince crossed to it so he could peer up at the rain-drenched sky. ‘Good God, will it never stop?’

‘Build an ark, sire.’

‘And fill it with what? Women? Two by two? Now that is a beguiling notion! Two girls with golden hair, two with black, and a pair of redheads for variety?’

‘They’ll prove better company than animals, sire.’

‘You know that from experience?’

The men laughed. Men always laugh at the jests of princes, but this laughter was genuine enough because Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, Earl of Chester and lord of Lord knew how many other territories, was a genial, easygoing and generous young man. He was tall and would have attracted the eyes of women even if he had not been heir to the throne of England and, according to the lawyers and lords who served his father, heir to the throne of France too. King Jean II disputed that, naturally enough, but the pursuit of that claim was why the English army was in France. The prince’s coat-of-arms was the royal coat, showing the three golden lions of England quartered with the fleur-de-lys of France, above which was a silver bar with three pendant labels indicating that he was the eldest son of the king, though the prince himself preferred to carry a shield painted black on which his three feathers glowed alabaster white.

The prince looked moodily at the sky. ‘Goddamned rain,’ he said.

‘It must stop soon, sire.’

The prince made no answer to that comment, but stared between the twin oak trees that stood like sentinels at the tent’s entrance. The city of Tours was barely visible because of the heavy rain. The place did not look formidable. True, the Cité was well enough protected with towers and heavy stone walls, but the bourg , which was surely where much of the city’s wealth lay, was low-lying and ringed only by a shallow ditch and by a wooden wall that was broken in many places. The prince’s troops, hardened by war,

could cross that barrier in their sleep, except that the River Loire had overflowed its banks, and Tours was now protected by flooded fields, by farmland turned to marsh, and by thick mud. ‘Goddamned rain,’ the prince said again, and God answered with a peal of thunder so sudden and loud that every man in the tent flinched. A jagged sky-splitting lance of lightning slid down to the low hill on which the tent stood, making everything stark white and black for an instant, then a second crash of thunder echoed across the sky and, though it had seemed that it could not rain any harder, the intensity of the downpour was doubled. Rain bounced off the muddy ground, poured off the tent and made streams on the hill. ‘Jesus,’ the prince said, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!’

‘Saint Martin has his ear, sire,’ one of his companions remarked.

‘Saint Martin?’

‘Patron saint of Tours, sire.’

‘Did he drown to death?’

‘I believe he died in his bed, sire, but I’m not sure.’

‘The bloody man bloody deserved to bloody drown if he sent this bloody rain.’

A horseman appeared at the foot of the hill. His horse was draped in a cloth showing a badge, but the cloth was so wet that the device could not be distinguished. The horse’s mane lay flat on its neck, dripping water. Its hooves slopped through the mud while the rider, who was wearing a mail hood beneath a bascinet, slumped in the saddle. He kicked the reluctant beast up the shallow slope and squinted towards the tent. ‘Is His Majesty there?’

‘That’s me!’ Edward called. ‘No, no, don’t dismount!’ The man had been about to get out of the saddle to kneel to the prince, but instead he just bowed. Rain bounced off his helmet.

‘I was sent to tell Your Majesty that we’re going to try again,’ the messenger shouted. He was only five paces away, but the rain was too loud for a normal voice.

‘You’re going to swim to the damned place?’ the prince called and waved to show he wanted no answer. ‘Tell him I’ll come!’ he shouted, then turned back into the tent and snapped his fingers towards a servant who waited in the shadows. ‘A cloak! A hat! Horse!’

Another crash of thunder deafened the world. Lightning stabbed onto the ruined church of Saint Lidoire, the remnants of which had been pulled apart to provide stone to repair the Cité’s walls. ‘Sire,’ one of the men at the gaming table called, ‘you needn’t go!’

‘If they’re attacking then they need to see me!’

‘You’ve no armour, sire!’

The prince ignored that, lifting his arms so a servant could attach the sword scabbard to the silver chains hanging from the belt. Another servant swathed Edward in a thick black cloak. ‘Not that one,’ the prince said, pushing the cloak away, ‘the red one! The one with gold fringes!’