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to kill us.’
    ‘How many are there?’
    Thomas shrugged. ‘Sir Reginald thinks they have about ten thousand men? No one really knows. Maybe more, maybe fewer. A lot.’
    ‘And we have?’
    ‘Two thousand archers and four thousand men-at-arms.’
    Genevieve was silent and he supposed she was thinking about the disparity in numbers. ‘Bertille is praying,’ she said.
    ‘I suppose lots of people are praying.’
    ‘She’s kneeling by the cross,’ Genevieve said.
    ‘Cross?’
    ‘Beyond the cottage, at the crossroads, there’s a crucifix. She says she’ll stay all night and pray for her husband’s death. Do you think God listens to prayers like that?’
    ‘What do you think?’
    ‘I think God is weary of us.’
    ‘Labrouillade won’t fight in the front rank,’ Thomas said. ‘He’ll make sure other men are in front of him. And if things go badly he’ll just surrender. He’s too rich to kill.’ He stroked her face, feeling the leather patch she wore across her injured eye. She was blind in that eye, and it had gone milky white. He told her it did not disfigure her and he believed that, but she did not. He hugged her close.
    ‘I wish you were too rich to kill,’ she said.
    ‘I am,’ Thomas said with a smile. ‘They could ransom me for a fortune, but they won’t.’
    ‘The cardinal?’
    ‘He doesn’t forgive or forget. He wants to burn me alive.’
    Genevieve wanted to tell him to be careful, but that was as much a waste of words as Bertille’s prayers at the roadside cross. ‘What do you think will happen?’ she asked instead.
    ‘I think we’ll hear the trumpet sound seven times,’ Thomas said.
    And then he would ride south as if all the fiends of hell were at his heels.
     
    King Jean and his two sons knelt to receive the wafer that was Christ’s body. ‘
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti
,’ the Bishop of Châlons intoned. ‘And may Saint Denis guard you and keep you and bring you to the victory that God wills.’
    ‘Amen,’ the king grunted.
    Prince Charles, the dauphin, stood and went to a window. He pulled open a shutter. ‘It’s still dark,’ he said.
    ‘Not for long,’ the Earl of Douglas said, ‘I hear the first birds.’
    ‘Let me go back to the prince.’ Cardinal Talleyrand spoke from the room’s edge.
    ‘To what purpose?’ King Jean asked, annoyed that the cardinal had not called him ‘sire’ or ‘Your Majesty’.
    ‘To offer them a truce while the terms are clarified.’
    ‘The terms are clear,’ the king said, ‘and I am not inclined to accept them.’
    ‘You proposed the terms, sire,’ Talleyrand said respectfully.
    ‘And they accepted them too easily. That suggests they’re frightened. That they have cause to be frightened.’
    ‘With respect, sire,’ Marshal Arnoul d’Audrehem intervened. He was fifty, wise in war, and wary of the archers in the enemy army. ‘Every day they linger on that hilltop, sire, weakens them. Every day increases their fear.’
    ‘They’re frightened and weak now,’ Jean de Clermont, the second marshal of the French army, said. ‘They’re sheep to be slaughtered.’ He sneered at his fellow marshal. ‘You’re just afraid of them.’
    ‘If we fight,’ d’Audrehem said, ‘you’ll be staring at my horse’s arse.’
    ‘Enough!’ King Jean snapped. Men feared his notorious temper and fell silent. The king frowned at a servant who carried a pile of jupons over his arm. ‘How many?’
    ‘Seventeen, sire.’
    ‘Give them to men in the Order of the Star.’ He turned and looked at the window where the faintest light showed in the east. The king already wore a jupon of blue cloth decorated with golden fleurs-de-lys, and the seventeen coats the servant carried were identical. If there was to be a battle then let the enemy be confused as to who was the king, and the men in the Order of the Star were among the greatest fighters of France. It was King Jean’s own order of chivalry, an answer to England’s Order of the Garter, and today the Knights of the Star would protect their monarch. ‘If the English are stupid enough to accept a few days more on the hilltop, so be it,’ he told Talleyrand.
    ‘So I may extend the truce?’ the cardinal asked.
    ‘See what they say,’ the king said and waved Talleyrand away. ‘If they beg for time,’ he told the men remaining in the room, ‘it means they’re scared.’
    ‘Scared men are easily beaten,’ Marshal Clermont observed.
    ‘Oh, we’ll