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was to the west, using roads in the valley, but the main part of the army, the mounted archers and men-at-arms, were following tracks through the high trees.
    It had become a race, though to what conclusion no one yet knew. The prince’s advisers, those wise and experienced warriors sent by his father to keep Edward out of trouble, believed that if they could get ahead of the French king and find a suitable place to make a stand, then they could fight a battle and win it. If they could force the French to climb a steep hill into the face of the lethal English archers, then there was the chance of a great victory, but those same advisers feared what would happen if King Jean turned the tables and managed to put his army across the path of the retreating English. ‘I’d rather not attack,’ the Earl of Suffolk told the prince.
    ‘God, it’s hot,’ the prince said.
    ‘It is always better to defend,’ the earl, who was riding on the prince’s right, said.
    ‘Where in God’s name are we?’ the prince asked.
    ‘Poitiers is over there,’ the Earl of Oxford, on Edward’s left, pointed vaguely eastwards.
    ‘Your grandfather, forgive me, made that mistake at Bannockburn,’ Suffolk said.
    ‘Mistake?’
    ‘He attacked, sire. There was no need, and he lost.’
    ‘He was an idiot,’ the prince said cheerfully. ‘I’m not an idiot, am I?’
    ‘Indeed not, sire,’ Suffolk said, ‘and you will remember your father’s great victory at Crécy. Yours too, sire. We defended.’
    ‘We did! My father’s no idiot!’
    ‘God forbid, sire.’
    ‘But grandfather was. No need to apologise! Had the brains of a squirrel, that’s what my father says.’ The prince ducked under the low branch of an elm. ‘But what if we see the bastards on the road? We should attack then, yes?’
    ‘If the circumstances are propitious,’ the Earl of Oxford said cautiously.
    ‘And what if we don’t find that convenient hill?’ the prince asked.
    ‘We keep going south, sire, till we do find one,’ Suffolk said, ‘or till we reach one of our fortresses.’
    The prince grimaced. ‘I don’t like running away.’
    ‘You’ll find it preferable to imprisonment in Paris, sire,’ Oxford said drily.
    ‘I hear they have very pretty girls in Paris?’
    ‘There are pretty girls everywhere, sire,’ Suffolk said, ‘as you know better than most men.’
    ‘God is good,’ the prince said.
    ‘Amen,’ Oxford added.
    ‘And pray God he’s slowing the French,’ Suffolk said grimly. The last reliable information he had heard said that the French king was only some ten or twelve miles away, and his army, which, like the prince’s, was all mounted, was travelling faster. King Jean, having dallied all summer, was now suddenly full of energy and, Suffolk assumed, confidence. He was looking for a battle, though he was not so foolish as to risk fighting on disadvantageous ground. The French wanted to trap the prince, force him to fight in a place they chose, and Suffolk was apprehensive. A prisoner taken by the Captal de Buch had confirmed that King Jean had sent all his foot soldiers away because they would slow his army, yet even without that infantry he still outnumbered the prince, though by how many no one knew, and he was not being forced to travel over this damned wooded ridge. He was using good roads. He was racing south. He was looking to close the trap.
    Yet the damned wooded ridge was the prince’s best hope. It was a short cut. It might gain a day’s march, and a day’s march was worth gold. And perhaps, at the end of the ridge, there would be a place to ambush the French. Or perhaps not. And Suffolk worried about the baggage. So long as it was separated from the army it was vulnerable, and even if the day’s march was gained they would need to wait half a day for the baggage to catch up. And he worried about the horses. There was no water in this high land, the animals were thirsty, and the men riding them were hungry. The army’s food supplies were desperately low. They needed to reach low, fertile land where the granaries were full, they needed water, they needed rest, they needed respite.
    Four miles ahead of where the prince and the two earls rode through the trees, the Captal de Buch sat in his saddle at the ridge’s end. Ahead of him a long slope dropped to a road and the glint of a river, while to his right, beyond some low wooded hills, was a smudge of smoke dirtying the sky that he knew must mark the cooking