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it.
    The morningstar swung. Thomas, looking up, saw drops of blood being flicked from its spikes as it seared through the sky. He himself had no weapon now, so he just stepped forward, inside the swing, and put his archer’s arms around the tall man and squeezed as he lifted.
    Arnaldus had taken the flail’s blow on his shield. Now, with his right hand, he chopped the axe down on his assailant’s leg. Karyl had followed Thomas’s example and stepped inside the poleaxe’s long swing and rammed his mace into his enemy’s groin. He rammed it again. Thomas heard a squeal. He was holding onto his enemy. The flail scraped down his back, tearing mail and leather. More Frenchmen were coming, but so were more Hellequin. The man with the poleaxe was bent double, and that was an invitation to Karyl, who took it gratefully. He held his mace close to its head, shortening the swing, and slammed it onto the nape of the Frenchman’s neck. Once, twice, and the man went down in silence, and Karyl drew a dagger and prised up the lower rim of the breastplate worn by the huge man clasped in Thomas’s arms. Karyl slid the dagger up under the man’s ribs.
    ‘Jesus! Jesus!’ the man screamed. Thomas tightened the embrace. The big man should have let go of the morningstar and tried to break Thomas’s neck, but he stubbornly held the weapon as Karyl wriggled his long, thin blade, and the man screamed louder. Thomas smelt shit. He was squeezing as hard as he could and Karyl thrust the dagger again, ramming it up under the breastplate’s edge so that his bloodied gauntlet vanished under the steel and into the mangled mail and wool.
    ‘You can drop him now,’ Karyl said.
    The man fell heavily. He was jerking, gasping.
    ‘Poor bastard,’ Karyl said. ‘Should have known better.’ He picked up his mace, put a foot on the squirming man’s chest and slammed the mace down hard onto his helmet. ‘Good luck in hell,’ Karyl said. ‘Say hello to the devil for us.’
    The French were pulling back. Step by step, watching their enemy, but going back along the hedge or else trying to force a way through the tangling brambles. The English and Gascons did not follow. Men on horseback behind the line were bellowing at them. ‘Keep the line! No pursuit! Let them go!’
    The temptation was to pursue the French and capture rich prisoners, but such a pursuit would break the line open, and if the French had failed to do that with steel then the English would not do it to themselves with greed. They stayed in line.
    ‘You should try fighting with a weapon,’ Karyl said to Thomas, amused.
    Thomas was dry-mouthed. He could hardly speak, but as the French went, so the women from the English baggage came with wineskins filled with river-water. There was not enough for everyone to slake their thirst, but men drank what they could.
    And trumpets sounded in the valley.
    The enemy was coming again.
     
    The first messenger to reach the king was dusty. Sweat had made channels through the dust on his face. His horse was white with sweat. He dismounted and knelt. ‘My liege,’ he said, ‘the prince your son requests reinforcements.’
    The king was gazing at the far hill. He could see the English banners through the widest gap in the hedge. ‘What happened?’ he asked.
    ‘The enemy is weakened, sire. Very weakened.’
    ‘But not broken.’
    ‘No, sire.’
    Two more messengers came and the king pieced together an account of what had happened so far that morning. The messengers heaped praise on his eldest son, saying the dauphin had fought magnificently, stories that the king disbelieved but pretended to accept. What did seem true was that the English had indeed been weakened, but had kept their discipline and held their line intact. ‘They are stubborn, sire,’ one of the messengers said.
    ‘Ah yes, stubborn,’ the king said vaguely. He watched his eldest son’s troops come back down the far hill. They came slowly. They must have been weary because it had been a long fight. Most clashes of men-at-arms were over in minutes, but the two armies must have fought for at least an hour.
    The king watched a wounded man limp up the hill, using a sword as a stave to support his weight. ‘My son is unwounded?’ he asked the messenger.
    ‘Yes, sire, thank God, sire.’
    ‘Thank God indeed,’ the king said, then beckoned to the Count of Ventadour. ‘Go to the dauphin,’ he ordered him, ‘and tell him he is to leave the field.’
    ‘Leave the