1356

‘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