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planned to capture the prince. He would hold the prince to ransom, a ransom equal to that of the King of Scotland. It could be done, he thought, if only the King of France would fight.
    ‘And you, Robbie? You’ll fight?’
    Robbie coloured. ‘I took an oath.’
    ‘Damn your bloody oath!’
    ‘I took an oath,’ Robbie persisted. He had been a prisoner of the English, but he had been released and his ransom paid on a promise not to fight the English ever again. The promise had been extracted and the ransom had been paid by his friend, Thomas of Hookton, and for eight years Robbie had kept the promise, but now his uncle was pushing him to break the oath.
    ‘What money do you have, boy?’
    ‘Your money, uncle.’
    ‘And do you have any left?’ Douglas waited, saw his nephew’s sheepishness. ‘So you’ve gambled it away?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘In debt?’
    Robbie nodded.
    ‘If you want more, boy, you fight. You strip off that whore’s jacket and put on mail. For Christ’s sake, Robbie, you’re a good fighter! I want you! Have you no pride?’
    ‘I took an oath,’ Robbie repeated stubbornly.
    ‘Then you can untake the bloody thing. Or become a pauper. See if I care. Now take that skinny bitch and prove you’re a man, and I’ll see you at supper.’
    When the Lord of Douglas would try to make the King of France into a man.
     
    The archers lined the woods. Their horses were picketed a hundred yards away, guarded by two men, but the bowmen hurried to the edge of the trees and, when the leading horsemen of the Count of Labrouillade’s straggling column were less than one hundred yards away, they loosed their arrows.
    The Hellequin had become rich on two things. The first was their leader, Thomas of Hookton, who was a good soldier, a supple thinker, and clever in battle, but there were plenty of men in southern France who could match
le Bâtard
’s cleverness. What they could not do was deploy the Hellequin’s second advantage, the English war bow, and it was that which had made Thomas and his men wealthy.
    It was a simple thing. A stave of yew, a little longer than the height of a man and preferably cut from one of the lands close to the Mediterranean. The bowyer would take the stave and shape it, keeping the dense heartwood on one side and the springy sapwood on the other, and he would paint it to keep the moisture trapped in the stave, then nock it with two tips of horn that held the cord, which was woven from fibres of hemp. Some archers liked to add strands of their woman’s hair to the cord, claiming that it stopped the strings from breaking, but Thomas, in twelve years of fighting, had found no difference. The cord was whipped where the arrow rested on the string, and that was the war bow. A peasant’s weapon of yew, hemp and horn, shooting an arrow made from ash, hornbeam or birch, tipped with a steel point and fledged with feathers taken from the wing of a goose, and always taken from the same wing so that the feathers curved in the same direction.
    The war bow was cheap and it was lethal. Brother Michael was not a weak man, but he could not draw a bow’s cord more than a hand’s breadth, but Thomas’s archers hauled the string back to their ears and did it sixteen or seventeen times a minute. They had muscles like steel, humps of muscle on their backs, broad chests, thick arms, and the bow was useless without the muscles. Any man could shoot a crossbow, and a good crossbow outranged the yew bow, but it cost a hundred times as much to manufacture and it took five times longer to reload, and, while the crossbowman was winding the ratchet to haul back his cord, the English archer would close the range and shoot a half-dozen points. It was the English and the Welsh archers who had the muscle, and they began training as children, just as Hugh, Thomas’s son, was training now. He had a small bow and his father expected him to shoot three hundred arrows a day. He must shoot and shoot and shoot until he no longer had to think about where the arrow would go, but would simply loose in the knowledge that the arrow would speed where he intended, and every day the muscle grew until, in ten years’ time, Hugh would be ready to stand in the archers’ line and loose goose-feathered death from a great war bow.
    Thomas had thirty archers at the edge of the wood and in the first half-minute they launched more than one hundred and fifty arrows, and it was not war, but massacre. An arrow could pierce chain