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shouted.
    Most of the Frenchmen were fleeing and the captal was content to let them go. He and his men had killed five of the enemy, wounded another seven, and they had their prisoners as well as the valuable horses.
    He took them all back to the woodland where the ambush had been sprung and there he questioned the captives whose horses all bore the brand of the Count of Eu. That brand, a stylised lion burned into the horses’ flanks, told the captal that these men were Normans. They were talkative Normans too. They told how the Count of Poitou’s men, drawn from the southern counties of France, had joined the French king’s army. So now the enemy was reinforced. They said, too, that they had ridden less than five miles from their overnight encampment to the meadow where the captal’s men had torn into their flank.
    So the French were nearby. They had been reinforced, they were marching hard, they were trying their best to cut the prince off from safety. They wanted a battle.
    The captal went to find the prince to tell him the hunters had become the hunted.
    And the retreat went on.

Eleven
     
    It was a strange journey.
    Thomas could feel the nervousness in the land. Towns kept their gates closed. Villagers hid when they saw horsemen coming; they either fled to nearby woods or, if taken by surprise, sheltered in their churches. Harvesters dropped their sickles and ran. Twice the Hellequin found cows lowing in pain because they needed to be milked after their owners had fled. Thomas’s archers, nearly all of them countrymen, milked the animals instead.
    The weather was uncertain. It did not rain, yet it always seemed about to rain. The clouds were low and the incessant north wind unseasonably cold. Thomas led thirty-four men-at-arms, which, except for those left to guard Castillon d’Arbizon, was every man fit enough to travel, and each of those men had two horses, and some had three or four. They had squires and servants and women who, like Thomas’s sixty-four archers, were all mounted, and horses inevitably cast shoes or went lame, and each incident took time to remedy.
    There was little news, and what there was could not be trusted. On the third day of the journey they heard church bells clanging. It was too noisy and discordant to be the tolling for a funeral and so Thomas left his men hidden safe in a wood and rode with Robbie to discover what caused the commotion. They found a village large enough to boast two churches, and both were ringing their bells, while in the market square a Franciscan friar in a stained robe was standing on the steps of a stone cross proclaiming a great French victory. ‘Our king,’ the friar shouted, ‘is rightly called Jean le Bon! He is indeed Jean the Good! John the Triumphant! He has scattered his enemies, taken noble prisoners, and filled the graves with Englishmen!’ He saw Robbie and Thomas and, assuming them to be French, pointed at them. ‘Here are the heroes! The men who have given us victory!’
    The crowd, which seemed more curious than jubilant, turned to look at the two horsemen.
    ‘I wasn’t at the battle,’ Thomas called, ‘do you know where it was fought?’
    ‘To the north!’ the friar declared vaguely. ‘And it was a great victory! The King of England is slain!’
    ‘The King of England!’
    ‘Glory be to God,’ the friar said. ‘I saw it myself! I saw the pride of England slaughtered by Frenchmen!’
    ‘The last I heard,’ Thomas said to Robbie, ‘the king was still in England.’
    ‘Or fighting Scotland,’ Robbie said bitterly.
    ‘There’s a truce, Robbie, a truce.’
    ‘The Lord of Douglas doesn’t recognise a truce,’ Robbie said bleakly. ‘That’s why I’m here, because I told him I couldn’t fight against the English.’
    ‘You can now. You’re bound by no oaths.’
    ‘By gratitude, then?’ Robbie asked. Thomas gave a brief smile, but said nothing. He was watching a small boy, probably no older than Hugh, who was annoying an equally small girl by trying to lift her skirts with a nuthook. The boy saw Thomas’s gaze and pretended to be interested in what the friar was saying. ‘You think he’s right?’ Robbie asked. ‘There’s been a battle?’
    ‘No, it’s rumour.’
    The friar was now haranguing the crowd to donate coins to two younger men, both in friar’s robes, who were carrying small barrels about the crowd. ‘Our brave men have suffered wounds!’ the friar shouted. ‘They have suffered for France! For