1356

horrible thing.’
    ‘Horrible,’ Thomas agreed.
    ‘You think he’ll make it to the French army?’
    ‘I think Sculley could ride through hell untouched,’ Thomas said.
    ‘Is that a Scottish name? Sculley?’
    ‘He told me his mother was English,’ Thomas said, ‘and he took her name because she didn’t know who his father was. She was captured from Northumberland by a Scottish raiding party and they evidently took turns on her.’
    ‘So he’s really an Englishman?’
    ‘Not according to him. I just hope I don’t have to fight the bastard.’
    Then there were two days of preparation, days of rubbing bows with lanolin, of trimming the fledging on hundreds of arrows, of mending harness, of sharpening swords and axes, of looking at the future and wondering what it held. Thomas could not get the fight at Crécy out of his mind. Not that he remembered much outside the chaos of battle, the screams of horses and the screams of men, the whimpering of the dying and the stink of shit across a field of slaughtered soldiers. He did remember the noise of a thousand arrows leaping off their strings, and the Frenchman in a pig-snouted helmet that had been decorated with long red ribbons, and how those ribbons had swirled around so prettily as the man fell from his horse and died. He remembered the heavy thunder of the French drums driving their horsemen onto murderous blades, and the destriers breaking their legs in the pits dug to trap them; he remembered the proud banners in the mud, the weeping women, the dogs feasting on eviscerated soldiers, and the peasants creeping in the dark to plunder the corpses. He remembered all the glory of battle: the red ribbons of a dying man, the blood-laced corpses, and the lost child weeping inconsolably for his dead father.
    And he knew the French were gathering an army.
    And he was ordered to join the prince.
    And so, as the first leaves turned yellow, he led the Hellequin north.
     
    Jean de Grailly, Captal de Buch, sat his horse in the shadow of oak trees. Every time the courser moved its hooves there was the crunch of acorns. It was autumn already, but at least the driving rain that had defeated the army’s attempt to capture Tours had ended, and the ground had been dried by days of warm weather.
    The captal was not wearing his bold colours this morning. The striped yellow and black made him conspicuous and so, like the thirty-two men he led today, he was wearing a plain brown cloak. The courser was brown too. In battle the captal would ride a great destrier, trained to fight, but for this kind of combat the courser was better. It was faster and had more stamina.
    ‘I see sixteen,’ a man said softly.
    ‘There are more of them in the trees,’ another said.
    The captal said nothing. He was watching the French horsemen who had appeared at a tree line beyond a stretch of pasture. Beneath the brown cloak, the captal wore a sleeveless haubergeon of leather covered with mail. He wore a bascinet with no visor, and other than that he had no protection except the plain shield on his left arm. A sword hung at his left hip, while in his right hand was a lance. It had been shortened. A heavy lance, such as a man would carry in a tournament, was too clumsy for this work. The lance’s tip, which rested in the leaf mould, had a small triangular pennant showing the captal’s silver scallop shell on a field of black and yellow stripes. It was his one concession to the vanity of nobility.
    The prince’s army was a mile or more behind him, travelling south on roads leading through apparently endless forests, and all around the army were small bands of horsemen like this one that the captal led. They were the army’s scouts, and beyond the scouts were the enemy’s scouts. There was an enemy army somewhere too, but the prince’s scouts just saw bands of horsemen.
    Those horsemen had tracked the army from the day it had left the safety of Gascony, but now there were far more. At least a dozen groups of French horsemen were keeping track of the English. They rode as close as they dared and sheered away if they were opposed by a larger force, and the captal knew they were sending their messages back to the French king. But where was he?
    The prince, having been turned away from the river at Tours and thwarted of his ambition to join the Earl of Lancaster, was going back southwards. He was riding for the safety of Gascony and taking his plunder with him. The whole army was mounted, even