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then to the other as the sword came back to smash the helmet again.
    ‘Take your helmet off,’ Roland said.
    ‘Go and piss in your mother’s arsehole, virgin.’
    The sword swiped him again, half dazing Langier, then the point of the sword was thrust between the visor’s upper edge and the helmet’s rim. The blade bit into the bridge of Langier’s nose, and stopped. ‘If you want to live,’ Roland said calmly, ‘take the helmet off.’ He pulled the sword free.
    Langier fumbled at the buckles that held the helmet in place. The other champions watched, but made no effort to help. They were there to fight man against man, not two men against one because that would be unchivalrous, and so they just watched as Langier at last lifted the helmet clear of his lank black hair. A trickle of blood ran down his face from where Durandal had cut him.
    ‘Go back to your army,’ Roland said, ‘and tell Labrouillade that the virgin is going to kill him.’
    It was Langier’s turn to say nothing.
    Roland turned his horse away, sheathed Durandal, and kicked back his heels. He had delivered his message. He heard cheers from the Englishmen who had seen the fight through the hedge’s gap, but it meant nothing to him.
    It was all for Bertille.
     
    The Lord of Douglas would kill no Englishmen this day. His leg had been broken when his horse fell, his arm was pierced to the bone by an arrow, and another had broken a rib and punctured a lung so that he was breathing bubbles of blood. He was in pain, horrible pain, and he was carried to the house where the king had spent the night, and there the barber-surgeons stripped him of his armour, cut the arrow flush with his skin, leaving the head embedded in his chest, and poured honey onto the wound. ‘Find a cart and take him to Poitiers,’ one of the surgeons ordered a retainer wearing the red heart. ‘The monks of Saint Jean will care for him. Take him slowly. Imagine you’re carrying milk and don’t want it turning to butter. Go. If you want him to see Scotland again, go!’
    ‘You can take him to the bloody monks,’ Sculley said to his companions, ‘I’m going to fight. I’m going to kill.’
    More men were being carried to the house. They had charged with Marshal Clermont, attacking the archers at the right of the English line, but there the enemy had dug trenches and the horses floundered, others had broken their legs in pits, and all the while the arrows had struck, and the charge had failed as miserably as the attack in the marsh.
    But now that the champions had flaunted their defiance and Langier had been unhorsed in full view of the French army, the main assault was closing on the English hill. The dauphin led the first French battle, though he was well protected by chosen knights from his father’s Order of the Star. The dauphin’s battle was over three thousand strong and they came on foot, kicking down the chestnut stakes of the vineyard and trampling the vines as they climbed the gentle slope towards the English hill. Banners flew above them, while behind them, on the western hill, the oriflamme flew proudly from the ranks the king commanded. That flag, the long, twin-tailed banner of scarlet silk, was France’s battle-flag and so long as it flew it meant that no prisoners were to be taken. Capturing rich men for ransom was the dream of every knight, but at a battle’s beginning, when all that mattered was to break the enemy and shatter him and kill him and terrify him, there was no time for the niceties of surrender. When the flag was furled, that was when the French could look to their purses, but till then there would be no prisoners, only killing. So the oriflamme flew, waved from side to side like a ripple of red in the morning sky, and behind the dauphin’s battle his uncle’s second battle was advancing towards the valley’s shallow bottom where the nakerers beat their vast drums in a marching rhythm to drive the dauphin’s men uphill to a famous victory.
    To the English and Gascons, at least to those who could see past the hedge, the far hill and the nearer valley were now filled with the panoply of war. With silk and steel, with plumes and blades. A mass of metal-clad men in bright surcoats of red and blue and white and green, marching beneath the proud banners of nobility. Drums hammered the morning air, trumpets seared the sky, and the advancing Frenchmen cheered, not because they had a victory yet, but to raise their spirits and frighten