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bellowed, ‘I saw the bastard!’
    Thomas listened as the noise of the pursuit faded. Keane was taking them in entirely the wrong direction, yet even so Thomas was not out of danger. He had to find a way off the rooftops and so he decided to risk the small garden. He swung his legs over the parapet and sat there, hesitant because it was a long drop, then reckoned he had no choice. He jumped, thrashing through blossom and branches and wet leaves. He landed hard and was thrown forward onto his hands. There was a sharp pain in his right ankle so he stayed on all fours, listening to his pursuers, whose voices became fainter. Stay still, he thought. Stay still and let the hunters draw away. Wait.
    ‘This crossbow,’ the voice said very close behind him, ‘is aimed at your backside. It’s going to hurt you. So very much.’
     
    It had been a stroke of genius, Father Marchant thought, to choose the Abbey of Saint Denis as the place where the Order of the Fisherman would have their vigil and receive their solemn consecration. There, beneath the roof’s soaring stone vaults, under the evening light that glowed dust-rich through the glory of the stained-glass windows and before an altar heaped with golden vessels and lustrous with silver, the Knights of the Fisherman knelt to be blessed. A choir chanted, the melody seemed sad yet inspiring as the male voices rose and fell in the great abbey where the kings of France lay cold in their tombs and the oriflamme waited on the altar. The oriflamme was France’s war banner, the great red silken pennant that flew above the king when he went into battle. It was sacred. ‘It’s new,’ Arnoul d’Audrehem, a Marshal of France, growled to his companion, the Lord of Douglas. ‘The goddamned English captured the last one at Crécy. They’re probably wiping their arses with it now.’
    Douglas grunted for answer. He was watching his nephew kneeling at the altar with four other men, where Father Marchant, resplendent in robes of crimson and white, said a mass. ‘The Order of the bloody Fisherman,’ Douglas said sarcastically.
    ‘Rank nonsense, I agree,’ d’Audrehem said, ‘but a nonsense that might persuade the king to march south. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’
    ‘I came here to fight the English. I want to march south and thrash the goddamned bastards.’
    ‘The king is nervous,’ d’Audrehem said, ‘and he looks for a sign. Perhaps these Knights of the Fisherman will convince him?’
    ‘He’s nervous?’
    ‘Of English arrows.’
    ‘I’ve told you, they can be beaten.’
    ‘By fighting on foot?’ D’Audrehem sounded sceptical. He was in his fifties, old in war, a hard man with short grey hair and a jaw misshapen from the blow of a mace. He had known Douglas a long time, ever since, as a young man, d’Audrehem had campaigned in Scotland. He still shuddered at the memory of that cold, far land, at the thought of its food, its raw and comfortless castles, its bogs and crags and mists and moors, yet if he disliked the country he had nothing but admiration for its people. The Scots, he had told King Jean, were the finest fighters in Christendom, ‘If indeed they are in Christendom, sire.’
    ‘They’re pagan?’ the king had asked anxiously.
    ‘No, sire, it is just that they live on the world’s edge and they fight like demons to keep from falling off.’
    And now two hundred of the demons were here in France, desperate for a chance to fight against their old enemy. ‘We should be back in Scotland,’ Douglas grumbled to d’Audrehem. ‘I hear the truce is broken. We can kill the English there.’
    ‘King Edward,’ d’Audrehem said calmly, ‘recaptured Berwick, the war is over, the English won. The truce is reinstated.’
    ‘God damn Edward,’ Douglas said.
    ‘And you think the archers can be beaten by men on foot?’ d’Audrehem asked.
    ‘On foot,’ the Lord of Douglas said. ‘You can throw some mounted men at the bastards, but put good armour on their horses. It isn’t the archers, it’s the horses! Those damned arrows don’t pierce armour, not good armour, but they play hell with horses. They drive the beasts mad. So you have knights being thrown, being trampled, their horses running wild with pain, and all because the archers aim at the horses. Arrows turn a cavalry charge into a charnel house, so don’t give them horses to kill.’ That had been a long speech from the usually taciturn Lord of Douglas.
    ‘What you say makes