Bernard Cornwell - 1356 (Special Edition)

‘I trust you will, sire,’ Douglas said. ‘If the bastards stay on that hill we’ll have a rare chance to crush them.’

‘It seems, though,’ the king said mildly, ‘that the bastards are on the top of the hill and we are not. Does that not seem pertinent?’

‘The slopes to the north and west are easy,’ Douglas said dismissively, ‘long, gentle, easy slopes, sire. In Scotland we wouldn’t even call that a hill. Nothing but a stroll. A crippled cow could walk up there without losing a breath.’

‘That is reassuring,’ the king said. He paused as the servant brought a great leather pot of ale, which the Scotsman gulped down. The gulping sound was horrible, as was the sight of ale trickling from the edges of Douglas’s mouth and soaking into his beard. A brute, King Jean thought, a brute from the edge of the world. ‘You were thirsty, my lord,’ he said.

‘As are the English, sire,’ Douglas said, then casually tossed the leather pot back towards Luc. The king sighed inwardly. Did the man have no manners? ‘I talked with a farmer,’ Douglas went on, ‘and he tells me there’s no damned water on that hill.’

‘A river flows past it, I think?’

‘And how do you carry enough water for thousands of men and horses uphill? They’ll carry a little, sire, but not enough.’

‘Then perhaps we should allow them to expire of thirst?’ the king suggested.

‘They’ll break away south first, sire.’

‘So you want me to attack,’ Jean said wearily.

‘I want you to see this, sire,’ Douglas said, and handed the king the arrow.

‘An English arrow,’ Jean said.

‘I have a man,’ Douglas said, ‘who has been helping the Cardinal Bessières these last few weeks. I’m not sure he is a man, sire, because he’s more of an animal and he fights like a demented fiend. Christ’s bowels, he frightens me, so God knows what he does to the enemy. And earlier this evening, sire, an English archer shot that arrow at my animal. It hit him plumb on the breastplate. The bastard shot the thing from no more than thirty or forty paces away, and my creature is still alive. He’s more than alive, the lucky animal is making babies with some girl in the village right now. And if a man is shot by an English arrow at forty paces and survives to make the two-backed beast a couple of hours later, then there’s a message for us all.’

The king fingered the arrowhead. It had once been four inches long, smooth and sharp, but was now bent and squashed. So the arrow had not penetrated a breastplate. ‘We have a saying, my lord,’ the king said, ‘that one swallow does not make a summer.’

‘We have the same saying, sire. But look at it!’

The Scotsman’s peremptory tone irritated the king who was notoriously short-tempered, but he managed to control his anger. He ran his finger over the crumpled arrowhead. ‘You’re telling me it’s badly made?’ he asked. ‘One arrow? Your beast was simply lucky.’

‘They make arrows by the thousands, sire,’ Douglas said. He was talking in a low voice now, earnest rather than hectoring. ‘Every shire in England has a duty to make so many thousands of arrows. Some men cut the wood, some men trim the shafts, others collect goose feathers, some men boil the glue, and smiths make the arrowheads. Hundreds of blacksmiths, all across the land, forging heads by the thousand, and all those things, the shafts, the feathers and the heads are collected, assembled, and sent to London. Now one thing I know, sire, is that when you make things in the hundreds of thousands then they’re not as well made as a single object fashioned by a craftsman. You eat from gold plates, sire, and so you should, but your subjects eat off cheap clay. Their platters are made by the thousand, and they break easily. And arrows are harder to make than bowls and plates! The blacksmith has to judge how much bone to add to the furnace, and who is going to make certain he even did that in the first place?’

‘Bones?’ the king asked. He was fascinated by what Douglas was saying. Was that really how the English made their arrows? Yet how else? They shot hundreds of thousands in a single battle and so they had to be made in vast numbers, and clearly that demanded organisation. He tried to imagine arranging such a thing in France, and sighed at the impossibility of the thought. ‘Bones?’ he asked again, then made the sign of the cross. ‘It sounds like witchcraft.’

‘If you smelt iron ore in a furnace, sire, you get iron, but if you add bones to the fire you get steel.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘They say the bones of a virgin make the best steel.’

‘That would make sense, I suppose.’

‘And virgins are in short supply,’ Douglas said, ‘but your armourers, sire, take care over their steel. They make good breastplates, good helmets, good greaves. So good that they’ll stop a cheap English arrow.’

The king nodded. He had to admit that the Scotsman was making sense. ‘You think we’re too frightened of English archers?’

‘I think, sire, that if you charge the English on horseback then they’ll rip you to shreds. Even cheap arrows will kill a horse. But fight on foot, lord, and the arrows will bounce off well-made steel. They might pierce a shield, but they won’t pierce armour. They might as well throw rocks at us.’

The king stared at the arrow. At Crécy, he knew, the French had charged on horseback and the horses had been killed in their hundreds, and in the chaos that followed the men-at-arms had died in their hundreds too. And the English had fought on foot. They always fought on foot. They were famous for it. They had been beaten in Scotland, cut down in their hundreds by Scottish pikemen, and that was the last time they had charged on horseback, and the king reflected that his enemies had learned their lesson. So must he, then. French knights believed there was only one way to fight, on horseback. That was the noble way to fight: the magnificent, frightening way, men and metal and horse together; but common sense said that Douglas was right. The horses would be slaughtered by the arrow storm. He fingered the bent arrowhead. So fight on foot? Do what the English did? And then the arrows would fail? ‘I shall think on what you’ve said, my lord,’ he told Douglas, offering the arrow back to the Scotsman, ‘and I thank you for your counsel.’

‘Keep the arrow, sire,’ Douglas said, ‘and win this great victory tomorrow.’

The king abruptly shook his head. ‘Not tomorrow, no! Tomorrow is Sunday. The Truce of God. The cardinals have promised to talk to the prince and persuade him to yield to our demands.’ He glanced north. ‘If the English are still there, of course.’

The Lord of Douglas restrained himself from ridiculing the idea of keeping a holy truce on a Sunday. So far as he was concerned one day was as good as any other for killing Englishmen, but he sensed he had persuaded the king that the enemy was vulnerable so there was no point in antagonising the man. ‘But when you do win this great victory, sire,’ he said, ‘and take your prisoners back to Paris, then take that arrow too and keep it as a reminder of how the English put their faith in a weapon that doesn’t work.’ He paused, then bowed. ‘I bid you good night, sire.’

The king said nothing. He was turning the bent arrow over and over in his hands.

And dreaming of Paris echoing with cheers.

At dawn there was a mist in the trees. Everything was grey. Smoke from a thousand fires thickened the mist through which men in mail coats walked like ghosts. A horse broke from its tether and stamped through the oaks, then down the slope

towards the distant river. The hoofbeats faded in the mist. Archers kept their strings dry by coiling them inside their helmets or in pouches. Men drew stones along the edges of grey blades. No one spoke much. Two servants kicked acorns out of reach of picketed horses. ‘It’s strange,’ Keane said, ‘you can feed acorns to ponies, but not to horses.’