1356

God, he thought, there was nothing like this feeling. A good horse, a tight high saddle, a lance, and an enemy taken by surprise. The thunder of hooves filled the afternoon, clods of earth hurled high by heavy feet as three hundred and seventeen horsemen erupted from the trees and hurled themselves down the slope. The captal’s banner, its silver scallop shells bright on the black cross against the yellow field, flapped as the standard bearer raised it high. Men were shouting now, ‘Saint Quiteira and Gascony!’
    The captal laughed. Saint Quiteira? She had been a Christian virgin who, refusing to marry a pagan lord, had been beheaded, but her headless trunk had picked up its own severed, bloody head and carried it uphill to a place where, to this day, miracles were said to happen. She was Gascony’s saint. A damned virgin! But maybe she would bring the miracle they needed. Eighty-seven enemy banners might need a miracle? ‘Saint Quiteira and Saint George!’ he shouted, and he saw a Frenchman turn a horse to meet the charge, and the man had neither lance nor shield, just a drawn sword, and the captal pressed his left knee against his destrier’s flank and the horse turned obediently. It seemed to sense where the captal wanted to go, and the destrier was at the full gallop as it crossed the road, and the captal let the lance slide into the enemy’s belly, just a slight jar as it went through mail and struck a lower rib and he let go of the lance and held out his right hand so that his squire could give him the axe. He preferred an axe to a sword. An axe would smash through mail, even plate, and he touched the horse with his knee again and pursued a fleeing man, swung the axe and felt the blade crunch through the skull. He wrenched the blade free, raised his shield to parry a feeble sword stroke from his left, and glimpsed that man vanish in a welter of misting blood as Guillaume’s morningstar obliterated a white-feathered hat, skull and brain together.
    The Gascon horsemen drove into the enemy. It was not a fair fight. The French rearguard had been relaxing, confident that if anyone in their army saw the enemy it would be their vanguard, but instead that enemy was among them and killing them. The captal killed and spurred forward, not letting the Frenchmen form in any kind of order. They were thickest about the ford where there was a crowd of men and horses beneath some willows, and the captal swerved towards them. ‘Follow me!’ he shouted. ‘Follow me! Saint Quiteira!’
    His men turned their destriers to follow, men in mail carrying bright steel on heavy horses. The destriers were white-eyed, teeth bared and hung with blood-spattered trappers. The captal plunged into the disorganised mass of Frenchmen and swung the axe, hearing the screams, panicking the enemy horses, driving into the crowd, and shouting all the while. The French were already running. Men were scrambling into saddles and spurring away. Other men were shouting that they yielded, and all across the water meadow the Gascons were galloping, killing, wheeling, and spurring back to kill again. The captal had thought he would need to fight through the crowd of men, but instead the crowd was falling apart, it was fleeing, and he was in pursuit and there was no easier way to kill than when a man was in pursuit. His destrier would line itself on a fugitive’s horse, speed up, wait for the pressure of a knee to say the axe had done its work, and then look for another victim, and to the captal’s left and right other Gascons were doing the same. They left a trail of bleeding, wounded, twitching men, of riderless horses, of dead men, and still they spurred on, pursuing and killing, all the frustrations of days of retreat being salved by this orgy of death. A Frenchman panicked and turned his horse hard to the left and the beast lost its footing. The bloodied bodies of two plundered geese were tied to the saddle’s cantle, and feathers flew as the horse collapsed. The man screamed as his leg was trapped and broken by the falling horse, then tried to twist away as the captal’s axe swung. The screaming stopped. A woman was calling for help, but her man had fled and she was left surrounded by Gascons in a bloodied field.
    The captal shouted for his trumpeter. ‘Sound the disengage,’ he ordered.
    His men had killed, they had triumphed, they had taken at least three great lords captive, they had left scores of dead with hardly a scratch to