The Earl of Warwick with many others rode to the market at Thérouanne, and they came upon many men-at-arms stationed there to protect the market, namely the bishop of Thérouanne with his retainers . . .
Chronicle of Henry Knighton
The company set out from the abbey towards Thérouanne divided into two groups, as Hugh Hastings had demanded in his speech at the refectory. The three archers went with Hastings and the prince. Loveday, Millstone and the Flemings joined a column led by the Earls of Northampton and Warwick. The archers set off on a looping march behind a set of small hills, to bring them out at the city from high ground. Everyone else marched cautiously in double file along the track that led down to the city’s suburbs. The earls and their knights led the way, their flags dancing in the light breeze and their horses dropping shit the men behind had to step over.
Loveday and Millstone tucked into the middle of the earls’ column, with Scotsman and the Flemings behind them. The three Dogs all wore old-fashioned kettle hats and heavy, tightly padded overshirts. Loveday had slung a sleeveless coat of mail over his. It was hot and heavy, but he was glad to have it. They were in unknown, hostile territory, with little patches of woodland on either side of the road. ‘Perfect cover for an ambush,’ muttered Millstone, and Loveday could not disagree.
The earls clearly felt likewise, as from time to time Northampton’s knights dropped back along the column, barking instructions for the group to watch their flanks. Loveday and Millstone nodded respectfully as they received their orders.
But when the knights passed the same word to the Flemings, Loveday heard them snigger and call jokes to one another in their own language. He heard Scotsman’s booming laugh too. The Scot was swigging from a wineskin, with Hircent patting him on the back and egging him on.
Loveday frowned at the Scot, who blinked guiltily, half looked at Hircent, and then back to Loveday. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said, his voice slurring, and handed the wineskin to the big woman. Loveday shook his head and turned back to the road. Behind him he could hear Jakke and Nicclaes laughing. He assumed they were making fun of him. But there was no time to take the matter up, for about half a mile ahead, Thérouanne was now coming into view.
It was a small city, run round with poorly maintained walls, missing whole sections of masonry in places. There were one or two guard towers with arrow slits in their sides. Outside the walls stood a few shabby suburbs – little more than thatched shacks and uneven outbuildings. There was no sign yet of the market. But within the walls soared a vast cathedral, built in the modern style, with several spires, a large central tower, buttresses supporting the walls from the outside and sweeping sheets of brightly coloured glass. ‘It really is a bishop’s city,’ said Millstone.
Loveday agreed. ‘And there’s the bishop.’ Ranked in two lines outside the main gates of the city was a force of men roughly the size of their own. At their head was a figure dressed in crimson. The Bishop of Thérouanne was passing a crozier to an attendant and being helped on to a large black horse by a pair of servants.
They had come to a place where the land opened out on either side of the track. Pasture rolled down towards where the bishop had mustered his force to defend the city. Northampton’s rough voice rang out along the line. ‘Form up and hold our position here.’ He sounded clipped and irritable.
The earl’s knights went around organising the men into ranks – the riders on the flanks, and those on foot, including the three Dogs and the Flemings, in lines between them. As the reality of battle crept closer, Loveday found his breath was coming quickly, and despite the cool of the morning, his back was damp.
‘Doesn’t matter how many times . . . ’ he started to say to Millstone. But before he could finish his thought, Hircent blundered into him, throwing one of her heavy, fleshy arms around his shoulders. She stank of sweat. Hircent put a flask of wine under Loveday’s nose. ‘Never charged a city before?’ she asked.
Loveday gave a thin smile, accepted the flask, took a small swig of the wine and handed it back. ‘Once or twice,’ he said. In truth, it was more times than he could remember.
‘Loosen up, then,’ boomed Hircent. She released her bind on his shoulder, but then wrapped her arm around Millstone instead. ‘What about you, Curly?’ And she ruffled Millstone’s tightly sprung hair. ‘You know how to handle yourself? Or you want me and my boys to show you how it’s done?’
Millstone stiffened slightly, but stared straight ahead, ignoring Hircent and fixing his gaze on the tower of the cathedral in the city ahead. Scotsman reached over and dragged a laughing Hircent away.
Ahead, the Earls of Warwick and Northampton had been conversing intensely with an envoy sent from the bishop’s men at the city gates. Their conversation came to an abrupt end. Loveday saw the envoy bow in the saddle and wheel his horse back towards Thérouanne. As he rode off, Northampton called after him, ‘ . . . and he can put that crozier away, by Christ, or I’ll stick it up his arse and snap it off!’
He turned towards the men ranked behind him, at last with a grin on his face. ‘Men! Who’s ready to raise hell again?’
A roar went up. Somewhere a trumpet blasted and drums began to beat. Northampton called over the din, ‘We go as one! On my call! Riders charge, the rest of you fuckers catch us up or go to hell!’
Loveday had seen the earl in this mood before, and felt a familiar shudder as the grey-haired nobleman stirred dozens of men by the sheer force of his voice.
He turned to Millstone. ‘How many towns is it now?’ he said softly.
Millstone shook his head very slightly. His face was set as hard as granite. ‘Too many,’ he said. ‘But still we keep coming back for more.’
The first time Loveday ever charged a city had been nearly twenty summers ago. A little before he met the Captain. He was fighting one of his first campaigns during the early years of King Edward’s reign: part of the chaotic border skirmishing in the last days of the war with the bloody-minded rebel-king Robert the Bruce. It had been thrilling. Loveday remembered the sense of being part of a great war beast with thousands of legs, and many sharp spines, rumbling and roaring towards its prey.
He remembered feeling then as though his body were made of iron, that no sword or lance or axe could pierce him. That he was the fastest, fittest and fleetest man alive. With that confidence surging in him, he had fought well, hacking and slashing and dodging blows. The English had been held at bay that day, and retreated without taking the town; the war was turning the way of Bruce and the Scots. But it had seemed to Loveday for a time afterwards that he had found what it was God had put him on Earth to do, which was to bear down on towns with other groups of hard young men, screaming bloody threats and brandishing his short sword above his head, sincerely ready to carry them out.
Now as he set out at a run with the rest of the footsoldiers, he felt that same flush of excitement: a fluttering in his stomach, and sharp prickling in his fingers as his feet pounded across the greasy grassland.
Yet as he tried to keep pace with the rest of the group, he also realised that his legs were no longer as strong and fast as they had been twenty years ago. Or even two years ago. The men had barely run fifty paces before his lungs were heaving and he felt bile rising in his throat. The blood pounded in the veins at his temples and his belly flopped around. His kettle hat fell over his eyes and he had to keep pushing it back. On either side, men were passing him, some elbowing him in their eagerness to get by. Scotsman and Hircent went past him, then the rest of the Flemings, hooting and waving their spiked goedendags above their heads. Millstone gestured back at him, urging him to keep up. But the harder Loveday pushed himself, the heavier his coat and his weapon seemed to weigh. The older and bulkier he felt.
Ahead came a great crash as the knights and men-at-arms who had kicked their horses the hardest clattered into the first ranks of the bishop’s defenders. Loveday heard whinnying and men’s yells of effort and pain. Still he ran, but he was now slowing, and stumbling on the grass. He tried to let out his old war cry,
‘Desperta ferro!’
Awake, iron!
But he could barely get the words out over his panting. He was among the last of the group to reach the melee – and when he arrived, he was at the back of a crowd of bodies heaving and swaying together.
He stood there for a moment, braced and holding his sword up before him, but saw no one to fight. Before him were only men of his own company. He felt as awkward as he had at village dances when he was a boy, looking for a partner and finding no one to take his hand.
Then he spotted Millstone. The stonemason was to the right of the press of men, barging his way through the melee. He was already well stuck into the fight, as unyielding as he had been throughout the eight years Loveday had known him. Millstone moved with brutal force and speed. He seemed to have an uncanny sense for where the next attack was coming from. As Loveday stood casting around for anyone to fight, Millstone was slamming his elbow into the nose of an armoured man who made a lunge for him with his visor raised. Next he whirled around and crunched his hammer into the chest of a young Frenchman who stood holding a spear as if he had only picked it up for the first time that morning. The hammer shattered the young man’s ribcage. He crumpled to the grass.
Millstone wiped his brow and waved Loveday over. Exhilarated and relieved to see his friend fighting so fiercely, and relishing the chance to work together, Loveday started towards him.
As he did, a short man-at-arms came striding out of the press, with a long sword raised high. The man was protected from his head to his feet with plates of metal armour and sheets of mail links. From within the pointed, visored bascinet covering his head, the man-at-arms shouted something. What emerged was a metallic jumble of words Loveday could not make out. But it was clear what they meant. He had spotted Loveday and was intent on doing him harm.
He had been looking for someone to fight. Now someone had stepped up.
Loveday swallowed hard. Fear suddenly coursed through him. He let it. Long experience told him that fear was no bad thing.
It’s a sign of your body trying to stay alive.
Readying himself for the attack, Loveday set up in the stance he had adopted so many times before. Left foot forward, his right planted with knee bent, and his weight loaded over his right knee. He gripped his short sword tight in both hands, his fists tight around the hilt, knuckle of his right thumb brushing his cheek, and the blade levelled straight out in front of him.
Sweat rolled into his eyes. He blinked it out. As he did, the weak sunlight of the grey early morning caught the burnished cuirass that covered the man-at-arms’ chest. And Loveday saw what he needed to see.
Protecting the man-at-arms’ neck at the top of his breastplate was a wide mail collar of tiny round links.
Perhaps it was borrowed. Perhaps he had won it in a tournament. Perhaps it was an heirloom from some grandfather who had fought one of Loveday’s ancestors in another age of endless war.
Loveday did not know. Nor did he care. What he did know was that the mail was much too large. As the man-at-arms brandished his sword, twisting and setting it towards Loveday, small gaps opened at the neckline, exposing skin that was covered only by cloth to stop the armour chafing.
Hit him there, and he’s dead.
The fear that washed Loveday’s body changed to something just as familiar. It was a sense of awful certainty. The clear understanding that if he did what he knew he could do, he could take another man’s life. And save his own.
The man-at-arms shouted something else. Again, Loveday did not understand it. But he nodded grimly. Then he stood up straight and made a prod with his short sword towards the knight’s bascinet.
It was a weak, inexpert, pointless prod made from a deliberately vulnerable stance. No skilled fighter should ever have made such a useless thrust. But Loveday did not want to look like a skilled fighter. He wanted to look like a peasant. A yokel. A bumpkin. He wanted to goad the man-at-arms into doing something stupid.
And he did. Through the tiny eye slits in the bascinet, the man-at-arms looked at Loveday. Though he could make out nothing of the man’s face, Loveday knew what the man thought he saw: an out-of-shape, panting, ground-down, older opponent, whose skill in combat had long since deserted him. A beaten-up veteran. An easy kill.
He was almost right.
But not quite.
Sniffing easy prey, the man-at-arms swung his sword as hard as he could in a flashing arc aimed at Loveday’s upright chest. It was a lazy stroke. Too hard, too eager. Too certain of success.
Loveday was certainly old and fat and out of breath. But he had been in many more battles than this man-at-arms. He had invited the sword stroke. He saw it coming even before the man-at-arms knew he was going to deliver it. And in the time it took the man to wind up his wild slash, Loveday was able to duck, crouch, then dive forward, throwing all his weight into the man’s metal-plated legs.
There was nothing elegant in the way he hurled himself. In truth, Loveday knew he must look like he was flopping belly first into a fish pond on a hot day. But Loveday had never cared how he looked when he fought. And he knew one thing for certain. Whatever he looked like, the bundling forward of his considerable weight, combined with the momentum of the man-at-arms’ sword stroke, was all it took to knock him clean off his feet.
Now Loveday worked on pure instinct.
The man-at-arms hit the ground on his side. Loveday scrambled to his hands and knees. He clambered so he was sitting on the man-at-arms’ chest. One of the man’s arms was pinned to the ground by his own body. Loveday had the other arm squeezed between his legs.
From inside the bascinet, the man’s muffled shouts became frightened, disoriented squeals. Loveday knew he had him.
But then the man-at-arms gave a huge thrash of his legs and bucked Loveday off.
Suddenly, Loveday felt fear shoot through him. He thought he had pinned the man. Now he had lost him.
They both scrambled to their knees. Loveday still had his short sword. He brought the hilt of it down as hard as he could on the man-at-arms’ helmet. The man yelped inside. He flailed at Loveday with a gauntleted hand and managed to hit him in the throat. Loveday retched, slipped on his side and rolled away. Then he pushed himself to his feet.
The man-at-arms had done the same. They were back to where they started.
Loveday was breathing hard. The man-at-arms’ mail collar was now hanging at an even worse angle than before. His weak spot was wide open. But Loveday had missed it, and now he would have to work his way towards it all over again. He cursed and set himself, trying to summon energy from somewhere within him.
As he and the man-at-arms circled one another, each preparing to lunge, Loveday tried to cast desperately for anyone he knew who might come and help him.
Then he almost yelled in happiness. Over the man’s shoulder he saw Millstone striding towards them, hammer raised, and eyes fixed on the man-at-arms’ unsuspecting back.
He nodded at Millstone – old code between them.
I’ll keep him busy. You hit him.
But as he did, he saw something that made his blood freeze.
For an instant the crowd behind the marching Millstone seemed to part, and through the clear air, away in the distance, Loveday caught a glimpse of something strange.
Something he knew.
A face.
The sight knocked all the air from his lungs. It made him gasp and loosen his grip on the sword.
The gap in the crowd behind Millstone closed up as quickly as it had opened, so that all Loveday could see now was the swaying press of fighting bodies.
The face was gone. Yet he knew he had seen it.
Millstone was no more than ten paces away. But Loveday couldn’t wait for him. In the space of a heartbeat, Loveday made a decision. It was the easiest decision he had made since they arrived in France.
He looked at the circling man-at-arms, whose confidence was returning. Heard him muttering threats once more, instead of scared squeals. He looked at Millstone preparing to deliver a death blow to his back.
He looked at the rest of the melee around him.
Then he broke and ran.
Loveday ran past Millstone. He dodged knights lashing at one another from their saddles, axes and maces and swords splintering shields and crushing armour. He passed footsoldiers grappling – some swiping with clubs or blades, others rolling on the damp turf, growling and cursing as they tried to beat each other into submission. He ran past loose horses snapping and rearing and whinnying, their eyes wide in panic as they struggled between their instinct to flee and a lifetime of training in which treats and beatings had created in them a duty to fight.
Though he was still out of breath, and his legs were agonisingly stiff from gripping the man-at-arms, the bright urgency of what he had seen gave him a new burst of energy.
And with every heavy thud of his feet, he became more certain of what he had seen.
Who he had seen.
It had been the face of the man who had taught him everything he knew. Who had been a friend and guide, leader and teacher. Who had saved his life on more than one occasion. Who had led him and the Dogs into many dark and dangerous spots, telling them always that they should leave no man behind.
The man who had one day in the winter of 1344 announced to them that everything they thought about war was wrong, that a new world was coming in, and that he was leaving them behind to find it on his own.
The Captain.
When Loveday finally stopped running, he was more than two hundred paces from the battle outside the city, standing by the side of what seemed to be a small granary, propped on low wooden stilts, not far from the main gatehouse in Thérouanne’s walls.
This was where he was sure he had seen him: leaning against the granary wall, his piercing eyes scanning the action from the half-shadows. Doing what he always did best.
Watching. Thinking. Calculating.
Now, though, there was no one there. The granary was deserted. Loveday turned around in a full circle. He walked the length of the building and back. He dropped to his knees and peered under it. There was no sign of anyone at all.
Suddenly feeling frustrated and exhausted, Loveday leaned against the long wooden planks of the granary’s side wall. His chest was still heaving from running, and sweat was dripping down his face like tears, pooling in his whiskers and dripping from his chin. He was bleeding from somewhere, though he did not know where.
Loveday sank for a moment to his knees, threw down his kettle hat and wrestled his way out of the heavy mail vest. Once he had it off, he pushed his kettle hat back on his head and rested the point of his short sword on the ground. He unstoppered his flask and took a huge gulp of the thin ale inside, then he looked back towards the battle, which seemed to be reaching its fiercest point.
He wondered if this was what the Captain had seen. Wondered what he had been looking for. What he had made of it all.
He found himself hoping, pathetically, that the Captain had seen him overpower the man-at-arms. Had been urging him to plunge his short sword into the man’s neck. He hoped he had been proud to see him, still fighting, despite the heaviness of age and time that rested on his back.
He hoped. He could not know.
For a few seconds, Loveday closed his eyes and leaned against the granary. He let his breath slow. He let his pulse calm. He tried to think.
A hand clapped him on the shoulder.
A voice said: ‘You’re dead.’
When Loveday opened his eyes in fright, Sir Denis was standing in front of him, the visor of his helmet pushed up. He looked clean and relaxed. His sword was sheathed at his side.
‘Didn’t fancy it, did you?’ said the big knight.
Loveday’s shock was replaced by confusion. ‘Fancy it?’
Sir Denis’ eyes flashed dangerously. ‘Nerve failed you,’ he said. ‘I know. It happens. One day you’ve just had enough. You can’t take another moment of it. So you run. Or was it pride? Come all this way, you think. See everything we’ve seen, and end up run through the guts here, outside the gates of some nothing town in the middle of nowhere?’
Loveday shook his head as he realised what the knight was suggesting. ‘No, Sir Denis. I wasn’t – I didn’t run—’
‘Didn’t run? So what was it? Angels pick you up and drop you here to pray for salvation?’
As usual, it was hard to tell whether Sir Denis was being quite serious. Loveday could feel his own face reddening. ‘I saw someone,’ he said lamely.
‘Good for you. Nice girl? Big tits?’
Loveday frowned. ‘It was an old friend. Well. Someone I used to know. I was fighting a man-at-arms. He had a hole in his armour. And then—’
Sir Denis raised a finger and put it to Loveday’s lips, as though he were a babbling child. ‘You don’t need to make excuses,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen it happen more times than you could imagine. How old are you now?’
Loveday bridled at the knight’s patronising tone. ‘Old enough to know I’m no coward.’ He puffed out his cheeks. ‘Sir Denis – have you seen a man here? With one leg, maybe? Watching the battle. Observing, I mean . . . ’
‘Have I seen a man with one leg . . . maybe?’
‘Aye.’
‘I have not. But you have?’
‘Aye. No. Well, I did – and now . . . ’
Loveday tailed off. Embarrassment and hopelessness now vied for position in his heart. Sir Denis held his gaze, smiling his usual inscrutable smile. By the city gates, screeches and war cries mingled with the clang of metal.
A squire of no more than twelve summers ran up to Sir Denis with a bundle of straw pulled from a thatched roof in his arms. He stared impudently at Loveday.
‘Where now, sir?’ the squire asked Sir Denis, still eyeing Loveday.
‘Here seems as fine a place as any,’ Sir Denis answered. The squire nodded. Sir Denis introduced Loveday. ‘This is FitzTalbot. He ran from the battle, but not away. He’s looking for a man with one leg. Have you seen any?’
The squire smirked. ‘There’ll be one or two with legs missing over there by the time the day’s out,’ he said, pointing back towards the fighting.
Sir Denis laughed. The squire grinned and set to work packing the dry tinder under the floor of the granary. Several more boys around his own age came and joined in.
Satisfied that they were well occupied, Sir Denis folded his arms and looked back towards Thérouanne’s gates. The fighting appeared to be coming to its end. ‘Bishop’s off,’ Sir Denis said. He pointed and Loveday saw the crimson robes of the prelate billowing behind him as he and a few attendants galloped away from the melee and over the open countryside. ‘Perhaps he saw a one-legged man too.’
From under the granary, one of the squires sniggered. Loveday felt suddenly annoyed. Sir Denis caught him before he snapped. ‘I’m jesting you, FitzTalbot,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you’re really doing here, and I won’t ask any more. But I’ll tell you two things I do know.
‘First, my men are about to burn these suburbs to the ground, so unless you want to be roasted like a hog, you should find somewhere else to be.
‘Second, I think I observe your mate with the hammer coming looking for you. So you’d better get your story straight for him.’
Just as the knight said, Millstone was approaching the granary. There was a fresh graze on his face. A clump of skin and blond hair clung to the head of his hammer.
‘Loveday,’ he said. ‘What—?’
Sir Denis raised a hand to both greet and quiet Millstone. ‘FitzTalbot here has seen an old friend of yours – or so he says.’
‘What happened?’ said Millstone.
‘The Captain,’ said Loveday. ‘I saw him.’
Millstone pursed his lips. Several times he looked from the gates of Thérouanne to Loveday’s imploring face and back again.
‘Here?’
‘Aye.’
Sir Denis drummed his fingers on his thigh. ‘I hesitate to be discourteous,’ he said. ‘But I truly do need you both to fuck off.’
‘You really want to find him?’ asked Millstone.
Loveday nodded.
Sir Denis sighed. ‘Look. I don’t know what or who you’re looking for, but my bet is that if he’s not here, he’s gone over there.’ He pointed out one of the patches of woodland the Dogs had marched past earlier that day. ‘Clear of danger. Lots of cover. Nice and private. There’s a fine beech tree in there that I’ve been pissing against all morning.’
‘Let’s go,’ said Loveday.
‘I don’t know,’ said Millstone.
‘Go on, get out of here,’ said Sir Denis. ‘Before I tire of this.’
The two Dogs set out walking towards the woods, an awkward silence hanging between them. Behind them, dry timber crackled, then roared, as Sir Denis’s boys put the suburbs of Thérouanne to the flame.