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master, and how Sam and the archers had beaten them down, and Thomas had confronted Father Marchant, who had loudly declared that he was a priest and not a combatant, and Thomas had used
la Malice
to disembowel him so that his guts slid out from his robe and spilt onto the saddle and then down to the ground, and Thomas had laughed at him. ‘That’s payment for my wife’s eye, you bastard.’ He had been tempted to let the priest die in agony, but then killed him with another swing of
la Malice
.
    Cardinal Bessières had been begging for mercy.
    ‘You are a combatant,’ Thomas had said.
    ‘No! I am a cardinal! I will pay you!’
    ‘I see no red hat,’ Thomas said, ‘only a helmet,’ and the cardinal had tried to pull the bascinet off his head, then screamed as he saw
la Malice
coming, and the scream only stopped when Saint Peter’s blade had ripped open his throat. Only then had Thomas turned back towards the battlefield where the dead now lay beneath the stars.
    Roland was with his Bertille. ‘I should have shouted at you,’ he told Thomas, ‘I didn’t realise you had been deafened.’
    ‘It was a terrible mistake,’ Thomas lied gravely, ‘and I apologise.’
    ‘It was not dishonourable,’ Roland said, ‘because you were not to know he had surrendered. He was still holding a sword, and you were deafened.’
    ‘It was God’s will,’ Bertille said. She looked radiant.
    Roland nodded. ‘It was God’s will,’ he agreed, then, after a pause. ‘And
la Malice
?’
    ‘She’s gone,’ Thomas said.
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Where she cannot be found,’ Thomas said.
    He had taken
la Malice
to the largest gap in the hedge where men were piling weapons discarded on the battlefield. The good weapons were put into one pile, the cheap and worthless weapons onto another. There were broken swords, shattered crossbows, an axe with a bent blade, and a score of rusted falchions. ‘What happens to them?’ Thomas had asked a man wearing the Prince of Wales’s three-feathered badge.
    ‘Melted down, like as not. That looks like a piece of shit.’
    ‘It is,’ Thomas had said, and he had tossed the Sword of the Fisherman onto the pile of worthless junk. It looked no different to all the other cheap falchions. A shattered spear had landed on top of it, then a broken sword had clattered onto the heap. When he had looked back Thomas could not even tell which sword was the relic and which was not. It would be put into the fire, melted, and then reforged. Perhaps a ploughshare?
    ‘Now we go home,’ he said. ‘Castillon first, then back to England.’
    ‘Home,’ Genevieve said happily.
    The Sword of Saint Peter had come. It had gone. It was over. It was time to go home.

 

 
     
    Edward, Prince of Wales, eldest son of King Edward III, is best known as the Black Prince, though that name was not coined until long after his death. No one is quite sure why he was to be called the Black Prince, but even in France he was remembered as
le Prince Noir
, and I have come across references as late as the nineteenth century to French mothers threatening their disobedient children with a ghostly visit from this long-dead enemy. Some say the name arose from the colour of his armour, but there is little evidence to support that explanation, nor does it seem to be a reference to his character, which, so far as we can tell from the little information that remains, was anything but dark. He was generous, probably headstrong, probably romantic (he made an impractical marriage to the beautiful Joan, Maid of Kent), loyal to his father, but otherwise little is known of his personality. He is most famous as a soldier, though much of his life was spent in inefficient administration of his father’s French possessions. He fought at Crécy, and shortly before his death won a victory at Najera in Spain, but Poitiers is his most significant military achievement, and, despite his fame, the battle has receded from common memory while his father’s great victory at Crécy, and Henry V’s triumph at Agincourt remain celebrated.
    Yet Poitiers deserves a place among England’s most significant military achievements. It was an extraordinary battle. The prince was outnumbered, his army was thirsty, hungry, and travel-worn, yet it fought, by medieval standards, a very long battle and ended it as outright victors and with the King of France as their prisoner. King Jean II was taken back to London where he joined another royal prisoner, King