Bernard Cornwell - 1356 (Special Edition)

‘The dye will run, sire.’

‘Damn the dye, they must see me. The red one! They need to recognise my pretty face. Give me that hat, the small one. Is a horse ready?’

‘Always, sire,’ a servant said.

‘Which horse is it?’

‘Foudre, sire.’

The prince laughed. ‘That’s bloody apt, eh? Foudre!’ Foudre was the French for lightning, and the prince, like his entourage, preferred to speak in French. It was only when he needed to speak with the common soldiers that he used English. He ran into the rain, cursing as he slipped on the wet grass. He steadied himself by grabbing the groom holding Foudre. ‘Help me up!’ He was already soaked through. ‘I’ll want dry clothes when I get back!’ he called to a servant inside the tent, then tugged on the reins.

‘Wait!’ someone shouted, but the prince was already spurring away, squinting because the rain was lashing into his eyes. The wind had risen, thrashing wet branches, and Foudre shied away from a low, heavy-leaved oak bough that shook in the gale. Lightning ripped across the sky, revealing the limestone bluffs beyond the river with a sudden brilliant white light and was followed a few seconds later by a crash of thunder that sounded as if the towers of heaven were collapsing.

‘You’re an idiot, sire!’ Another horseman had caught up with the prince, who was laughing.

‘I’m a wet idiot!’

‘We can’t attack in this!’

‘Maybe that’s what the bloody enemy thinks?’

The prince’s horse pounded across a waterlogged meadow towards a stand of willows where a mass of mailed men looked dark in the day’s gloom. The river was just beyond them, its wide surface made turbulent by the incessant rain. To the prince’s left, closest to the feeble defences of the bourg , but separated from them by a wide stretch of half-flooded marsh, were archers. They were wading north towards the town, but the prince noted none of them was drawing bows and loosing arrows. ‘Sir Bartholomew!’ he called as he ducked under a willow branch.

‘Bloody strings are wet,’ Sir Bartholomew Burghersh said without looking at him. He was a stocky, dark-faced man a little older than the prince, and a man noted for his violent hatred of all things French, except possibly for their wine, gold, and women. ‘Bloody strings are sopping wet. Might as well spit at the bastards rather than loose arrows. Let’s go!’

The mass of mailed men-at-arms trudged north behind the archers, who, because their bowstrings were soaked, could not shoot at anything near to their usual range. ‘Why are the bowmen out there?’ the prince called.

‘A fellow slipped into our lines and said the bastards had pulled back into the Cité,’ Burghersh said. His men-at-arms, all on foot and carrying shields, swords and axes, were struggling through the soggy ground and into the face of the rain-drenched gale. The wind was so strong that it was making waves on the flood water; there were even whitecaps. The prince spurred behind the men-at-arms, staring into the tempest and wondering if it could be true that the enemy had abandoned the bourg . He hoped so. His army was bivouacked on what higher ground they could find. A few lucky men had cottages or hovels for shelter, a handful possessed tents, but most had to put together a shelter from branches, leaves, and turf. The bourg could shelter all his men till this wretched weather relented.

Sir Bartholomew, mounted on a fine destrier, rode alongside the prince. ‘Some of the bows will shoot, sire,’ he said, somewhat nervously.

‘Are you sure of your fellow? The one who said the bastards had fled?’

‘He seemed very certain, sire. He claimed the Count of Poitou ordered every defender into the Cité.’

‘So the puppy Charles is here, is he?’ the prince said. Charles was the eighteen-year-old dauphin, heir to King Jean of France. ‘The boy made a quick march from Bourges, didn’t he? And he’s just going to let us take the town?’ The prince peered through the rain. ‘His banners are still on the wall,’ he added dubiously. The feeble defences of the bourg were hung with banners, though it was hard to distinguish what they displayed because the rain had smeared the dyes in the cloth, but there were saints and fleurs-de-lys, and the presence of the flags suggested the defenders were still behind their palisade.

‘They want us to think they’re still in the bourg , sire,’ Burghersh said.

‘And I want this town,’ the prince said.

He had led six thousand men out of Gascony, and they had burned towns, captured castles, razed farms, and slaughtered livestock. They had captured noble prisoners whose ransoms would defray half the cost of the war, indeed they had taken so much plunder that the men could not carry all they had stolen. From the treasury at Saint-Benoît-du-Sault alone they had taken no less than fourteen thousand golden écus, each worth three English silver shillings. Over two thousand pounds in good French gold! They had met almost no resistance. The great castle at Romorantin had held out for a couple of days, but when the fire arrows of the prince’s archers had succeeded in setting fire to the roof of the great keep, the garrison had stumbled out, escaping the falling rafters that were collapsing in spectacular gouts of flame. A priest in the prince’s household reckoned the army had covered two hundred and fifty miles so far, and it had been two hundred and fifty miles of plunder and destruction and pillage and killing, two hundred and fifty miles of impoverishing the French and showing that England could march with impunity throughout the enemy’s land.

Yet the prince knew his army was small. He had led six thousand men for two hundred and fifty miles, and now he was in the very centre of France, and France could assemble thousands of men to oppose him. Rumour said the King of France was gathering an army, but where, and how large, the prince did not know. But of one thing he could be certain: the army of King Jean would be larger than his army, and the reason he wanted Tours so badly was that this was the route by which he could join the smaller force of the Earl of Lancaster. Lancaster had marched out of Brittany to lay waste a swathe of land in northern France, and was now said to be coming south, hoping to join the prince, while the prince was working his way northwards, but to join Lancaster he needed to cross the Loire, and to cross the Loire he needed the bridge, and to take the bridge he needed to capture Tours. If the prince could join Lancaster he would command enough men to keep going north towards Paris, to ravage the enemy’s heartland and take on the French royal army, but if he could not cross the river then he would have no choice but to retreat.

The archers edged their way through the swamp. The rain seethed and the wind drove the water in quick wavelets. One man drew his bow and loosed an arrow at the bourg ’s wooden palisade, but the bow’s string had been weakened by the rain and the arrow fell well short. ‘Don’t waste your bloody sticks!’ a ventenar, a man who led a score of archers, called angrily. ‘Wait till you can kill a bloody Frenchman.’

‘If there are any to kill,’ Burghersh said. No enemy showed on the bourg ’s feeble defences. ‘Maybe the bastards really have gone?’ he added hopefully.

‘But why would he abandon the bourg ?’ the prince asked.

‘Because he’s an idiot, sire?’ Burghersh suggested.

‘I’ve heard the dauphin’s ugly,’ the Prince said, ‘but no fool.’

‘Whereas you, sire?’ his other companion suggested, and Burghersh looked astonished at such insolence, but the prince laughed, enjoying the jest.

Some of the archers were using their bows as staffs, probing for firmer ground or else just balancing themselves. And still no enemy showed. One group of archers, closest to the river, found a strip of higher land that gave firm footing and they ran towards the pathetic wall beyond which were the rich houses and fat churches of Tours’s bourg . Other archers moved towards the same drier ground, and the men-at-arms, struggling through the floods and mud, followed them till there was a crowd of men on the slightly higher and drier land.