The English and the Flemings dug ditches and trenches around their army and across the dunes to the sea . . .
Chronique Normande
‘God’s arse and bollocks!’
Tebbe flung the snapped shovel down in a rage. The blade had hit a rock. The impact shattered the wooden shaft and jarred his hand. Tebbe danced in pain, while the useless handle lay in the ditch bed, the broken ends facing each other like jagged teeth. ‘Jesus shitting silver fucking nails,’ Tebbe cursed.
Up on the bank, Toussaint heard him and marched over. ‘Blaspheming in my ditch? You use that filthy mouth to give your fellow Christians the kiss of peace?’
Tebbe picked up the broken shovel blade and waved it at the knight in accusation. ‘Spade’s fucked.’ He spat pink-flecked phlegm. He had been coughing it up since Christmas.
Toussaint shrugged. ‘It looks fine to me. Keep digging, or when the bell rings we all stay and work another hour.’
Tebbe looked incredulous. ‘Looks fine? How do you make that out?’ He knelt down and scraped the earth with the spade end, like a mole. ‘You want me to scratch around like this for the rest of the fucking day?’
Toussaint nodded. ‘Just like that,’ he said. ‘Or argue with me and see where it gets you.’ He brushed a speck of dirt from the sleeve of his warm padded jacket, trimmed in soft fur. ‘Your decision.’
Tebbe fumed. But he bent down and started scraping with the remains of his shovel. Over the many weeks they had been in the ditch, the Dogs had learned better than to argue with Toussaint. It only made things worse.
When the knight had marched over to another point on the ditch-side to berate a different gang, Loveday moved next to Tebbe. He knelt down and handed him his own shovel. ‘Use this for a bit,’ he said. ‘We’ll take it in turns with the broken one.’
Tebbe briefly tried to refuse. But his desperation trumped his pride. ‘That’s good of you,’ he said, standing up. He coughed again, his eyes streaming as his chest heaved. When he had regained his breath, he said: ‘I don’t know how much more of this I can take.’
Tebbe thought he had spoken quietly, but somehow Toussaint, who had astonishingly good hearing and a strong dislike of his men complaining, came striding back over.
‘Don’t like the ditch? Don’t love my glorious ditch?’
Tebbe’s shoulders slumped. He shook his head, mute and meek, expecting a barrage of rebuke. But it did not come. ‘Well then,’ said Toussaint, ‘let me tell you something that’ll please you. Tomorrow you get to leave it alone for a while.’
The Dogs looked at one another in confusion. ‘Where? Why?’ said Thorp, leaning on his own shovel and wiping his brow, smearing freezing mud in a streak across his already filthy forehead. ‘We’re going home?’
Toussaint smiled, and Loveday saw menace in his eyes. ‘Not quite. We’re visiting another ditch,’ he said. ‘You’ll find out where in the morning.
‘All I’ll say for now is that this other ditch doesn’t need digging.
‘It needs filling in.’
The four Dogs had been labouring in the ditch for many weeks. Furious at Scotsman’s abduction of Sir Arnoul and Romford, Sir Hugh Hastings had thrown the rest of the Dogs out of the brothel and sent them to the digging crew. There, under Toussaint’s relentless gaze, they dug from sunrise until an hour before darkness, day after day. Most of their colleagues were archers and footsoldiers like themselves. Almost all were there for attempting to abscond from the army. Or, thought Loveday, for having had the ill luck to be caught. Loveday had wondered at first whether Scotsman and Romford would soon be returned in disgrace to join them there. But as the days and then weeks passed, he was not sure how to feel about the fact that they had not returned.
Either they were home and free. Or they were dead.
Meanwhile, for the four Dogs who remained, their sentence was apparently unlimited. They were more like prisoners than soldiers, and the work Toussaint put them to was dismal, uncomfortable and often pointless. When sections of the ditch fell in, they cleared them. When dead animals or men were dumped in it by night, they dragged them out and buried them in shallow graves a few feet below the frozen marsh. And when there was nothing else to do, they just dug: making the ditch wider or deeper, though it was already wide and deep enough by far.
They were all in poor health. The winter was hard on them. It was freezing every day, and firewood was strictly rationed across the whole camp, with timber mostly reserved for the king’s ever more elaborate fortifications near the walls of Calais itself. So even though the Dogs occasionally warmed up around a small nightly fire, their ever-damp clothes reeked and mouldered on their backs.
Tebbe coughed relentlessly. Thorp complained of pain that shot up and down his right leg and kept him awake every night. Millstone had lost weight and his hair was thinning. All their knees and backs ached. Their toes were black, and they had lost nails from the wet and cold. But they had no choice. Each morning, the Dogs were marched from the miserable huts where they were now billeted to the place they were to dig that day. At the end of the day, they were marched back like serfs. Bound to the land like beasts.
Their only consolation was that they had not been in the brothel at Christmas when Hircent had been murdered there.
Her throat had been slit expertly at the voice box. So that she could not scream when her breasts and eyes were removed and piled neatly beside her. When her belly was opened and her guts hung around the cell like mistletoe.
Her murder had sent fear and rumours around Villeneuve. Men looked over their shoulders constantly, and guards on the perimeter of the siege camp had been doubled. The grisly details of Hircent’s death were spoken of in quiet, sober tones. Some said it was an outrage that such a foul crime had been committed within Villeneuve; others that it was God’s judgement on the whole army for their loose living.
Loveday felt differently about it from day to day. He had been so angry with Hircent for what she had allowed Romford to suffer. Yet he could not find it in himself to celebrate the awful tortures she had herself endured in her last moments.
So what he mostly felt was relief.
Relief that Hircent’s murder was one thing the Dogs could not be blamed for.
When the four Dogs reported for work at dawn the next day, they found Toussaint in high spirits. ‘Praise God,’ he kept saying, partly to himself and partly to anyone who came close to him. ‘Praise God for choosing us to do this job.’ But he still did not tell them where they were going. He and a few of the Earl of Northampton’s men-at-arms simply marched the crew across the frozen ground of the marsh, between the sinking hovels of Villeneuve’s outer quarters and through the wooden town itself.
Eventually, they came to a place on the very far side of the town, close to the easternmost point of Calais’ rectangular walls. And at last Loveday understood what was happening. A crowd of several hundred men were already hard at work. They were taking rubble from carts and wheelbarrows and dumping it into the outer of Calais’ two moats, forming a wide dam-bridge across to the bank of the inner moat. Behind them, the king’s engineers had just finished work on a movable shelter, which resembled a long, open-sided shed with a thick roof covered in a patchwork of leather and raw animal skins.
Behind this was something even more extraordinary. Set back at a safe distance of around a hundred paces, a large viewing gallery had been erected facing Calais’ walls. Servants were scampering up and down two dozen banked stands of benches, sweeping and inspecting the seating.
‘Fuck is that?’ said Thorp.
Loveday was about to answer when Toussaint interrupted. The knight ignored the viewing gallery completely and pointed to the covered movable shed near the moat. ‘Ever seen one of those before?’
Millstone replied. ‘Aye. Plenty of times. It’s a cat. A sow. Some men call it a weasel.’
Through a coughing fit, Tebbe said, ‘What do you want us to do?’
The knight eyed him disdainfully. ‘You should see an apothecary about that cough. Or a barber. Get yourself bled.’ He looked back to the weasel. ‘That wonderful device is to protect you.’
Tebbe nodded slowly, wiping pinkish froth away from the corners of his mouth. ‘From what? The rain?’
At that moment, from the top of Calais’ walls, a lump of rough-hewn stone was heaved over the ramparts from some unseen defenders above. Behind it came a diatribe of abuse in coarse French. The Dogs watched the stone plummet downwards. It missed the ditches, the diggers and the engineers completely, and landed at the foot of the wall, where it shattered in a sharp spray of dust and grit.
‘From that,’ said Toussaint. He addressed the whole group. ‘Today we’re finishing that dam-bridge.
‘This evening, God willing, we’re going up those walls.’
‘Up the fucking walls?’ said Thorp. He looked at the vast defences in front of them. They soared as high as cliffs.
‘Yes, up the fucking walls.’ But this time it was not Toussaint who replied.
It was the Earl of Northampton.
‘Unless you think we’re going to take this city by sitting around growing our beards and getting frostbite on our balls for another five months, we’re hauling our arses up those walls,’ Northampton continued. ‘The king’s running out of patience with these stubborn bastards, and by God so am I.’
He swept a hand through his grey hair, now so long that it skirted his shoulders. ‘So get under that weasel and start filling the fucking ditch in, or I’ll have the court surgeon come over and turn you into a new choir of eunuchs for the queen’s chamber.’
The engineers finished moving the weasel into place and Toussaint directed his digging gang towards the carts full of rubble. As the Dogs moved off to join them, Loveday felt a hand on his shoulder.
He turned around. Northampton was still there. ‘Christ, FitzTalbot, you look worse than my horse,’ he said. ‘And my horse is fucking dead. How many weeks have you been in that godforsaken ditch?’
Loveday shuffled his feet awkwardly. The earl had not spoken to him in months, since Sir Denis’s death in the forest and the Dogs’ subsequent recruitment by Hastings to run the brothel. But now he seemed to have reconciled himself to those things. He was looking at Loveday with something between affection and pity.
‘I don’t know, my lord. Several,’ Loveday replied. He really had lost count. ‘It was not quite Christmas when Sir Hugh . . . and now it’s nearly Lent.’
Northampton grimaced at the mention of Hastings’ name. ‘Aye, well. It sounds like you’ve done your fucking penance.’
Loveday took a deep breath. ‘We’ve only ever tried to do our best,’ he said. ‘But the war has been hard on us.’ He felt his voice crack. ‘And if I may, my lord, I’m sorry. About Sir Denis. He was good to us. I swear we didn’t see what happened to him, but he deserved . . . ’
Northampton placed his hands on Loveday’s shoulders to quieten him. Even through his thick leather gloves, Loveday was reminded how heavy and strong the earl’s hands were. His grey eyes were the hardest Loveday had ever seen. ‘He’s with God now. He’ll be fine. He’s probably charmed his way into heaven already and has a pair of pretty saint-girls kneeling beside him with their heads in his lap. Smooth bastard that he was.’
He puffed his cheeks. ‘Listen, FitzTalbot. War’s hard on all of us. It’s fucking war. We all have to find a reason to stay here and keep doing what we do. The people I’m forced to spend my time with do that by telling each other it’s a noble enterprise. Virtue, glory, chivalry – all that shit. The tragedy is, a lot of them fucking believe it. Then they get their throats cut while they’re draining their cocks.’
The earl looked around the crowd of men clattering tools and shouting to one another around the weasel and the ditch. ‘Where’s the big ginger one?’
‘Gone, my lord.’
‘Gone as in dead? Or gone as in fucked off until he gets caught, whipped, fined and sent back?’
‘I’m not sure. I’ve been trying to think which would be worse.’
Northampton almost laughed. ‘Well, God bless the big bastard either way. I told him at the start of this thing to try and have some fucking fun. Did he take my advice? Did any of you?’
Loveday thought of Romford staggering in to the Wolvenhuis with gunpowder residue all over his face. Of Tebbe eating his Michaelmas goose, with Margie on his knee.
He heard Tebbe coughing under the weasel.
‘We did our best.’
‘And you fucked that up as well?’
‘It seems so.’
‘Can I ask you something, FitzTalbot?’
Loveday nodded.
‘Why haven’t you tried to run away too? Every day I get a list of men just like you who’ve fucked off. Granted, most of them have probably drowned in the sea or will be back here within a month to help you in that ditch. But at least they tried. What’s the fucking matter with you?’
‘I brought my men. And I’m responsible for them. It’s the honourable thing to do.’
‘Fucking honour? You sound like Sir Denis now. Tell me the real reason.’
Something in the earl’s grey eyes made Loveday want to tell the truth. ‘Everyone thinks I ran away from the fight at Thérouanne. I expect you do too. But I’m no coward. I may be old and nearing the end. But I don’t run. Not from that. And not from this. In any case . . . ’ He took a deep breath. ‘I’ve nothing to go home to, my lord. My men do. But I don’t. I have nothing left but my men and my job.’ He paused. ‘And I keep thinking I’m going to find someone. Someone I’ve heard is in there.’
‘In there?’ Northampton pointed to Calais.
‘Aye.’
‘What kind of someone?’
‘An old friend. Or someone I thought was a friend. I still think he could be.’
Northampton closed his eyes briefly and shook his head. ‘FitzTalbot, you’re a good man. But Christ knows you’re a daft cunt. Would you like my advice?’
Loveday nodded.
‘Forget about hunting for the past. It’s gone. Think about the world that’s coming in.’
Loveday nodded. The earl sounded like the Captain. But before he could tell him so, Northampton pointed to the viewing stands behind them, where people were beginning to take their seats, as if to watch a staged joust or mystery play. ‘Put on a good show for that lot, and you’ll see your fortunes turn. Do you understand?’
Loveday shook his head. ‘Not really, my lord.’
Northampton nodded thoughtfully. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Fair enough. In that case, just put on a good show and I’ll get you out of the ditch.’
Loveday nodded. ‘I think we can do that.’
Northampton looked a little rueful as he clapped Loveday on the back one more time.
‘I’ve heard that before,’ he said.
It did not take long for the large crew working behind and beneath the weasel to finish the rubble bridge across the moat. The Dogs joined one of the lines of men that snaked between the carts and the weasel, the men passing stones from hand to hand then dropping them into the murky green saltwater.
The work, although hard, was at least a change from digging. Yet as the Dogs heaved and hurled rocks, they became aware that the work was only the prelude to something much bigger, which they could not yet see in its entirety.
Behind them, more engineers had appeared. So too had a huge crowd of archers and men-at-arms: tough, weather-beaten men holding pikes and others bearing axes, knives and short swords.
Further back again, the wooden stands that were built at a safe distance from the walls had begun to fill with well-dressed noblewomen and courtiers.
The Dogs crouched on their haunches, drinking ale from their flasks as steam rose from their sweaty faces into the chilly late-winter air. ‘What in the name of Jesus are they doing?’ said Tebbe, pointing to the spectator stands.
Toussaint appeared and heard him. ‘Watching,’ he said. ‘So we need to give them something to watch.’ He showed them a wagon where a burly royal armourer in a greasy leather apron was handing out weapons to those who lacked them. ‘Go and take what you need,’ he said. ‘Pick something light that you can use one-handed. Unless you can climb a ladder with your teeth.’
Tebbe and Thorp glanced at one another. ‘You know we’re handiest with our bows?’ Thorp said. ‘And Millstone has a hammer—’
‘We’ve got archers,’ said Toussaint brusquely. ‘And we don’t need hammers. We just need brave men with weapons they can carry. So get over there and choose from whatever’s left. And hurry up. Here come the barges.’
The ladder-barges were some of the most unusual war engines Loveday could remember seeing. There were around a dozen of them, which had been winched into Calais’ inner moat somewhere on the other side of the city perimeter. Flat-bottomed, long and wide, they took up almost the entire width of the moat. At the back and front of each was a stoutly defended wooden booth from which men with bargepoles guided the boats along the brackish moat-water. Between the booths were long open spaces with wooden fixtures on them. Otherwise, they were empty – just floating platforms with fixtures to hold the base of ladders.
‘Christ,’ said Tebbe. ‘They don’t exactly look steady.’ He was turning over the small axe he had taken from the armourer, which had a dull and partly rusted blade on one side of its head and a spike, slightly bent, on the other. He looked disgusted with it. He had a battered iron cap on his head, the buckle missing from its strap. The other Dogs were similarly poorly armoured: Loveday with a short sword much inferior to his own, Millstone with a small, spiked mace whose loose head he was trying to fasten properly to the shaft, and Thorp with a pair of daggers whose leather-wrapped handles badly needed repairing. ‘Do we not even have crossbows?’ asked Thorp.
Toussaint ignored him. The barges were already being eased into position. From somewhere within Villeneuve jogged men-at-arms, metal armour covering their shoulders and torsos, carrying long wooden ladders in sections, each wide enough to take two or even three climbers abreast. They laid them down on the bank of the moat, near the entrance to the weasel and the rubble bridge, and began screwing them together.
A cheer went up from the spectator stands. Loveday squinted in their direction. The weak winter sun was starting to slink away to their left, dipping fast towards the high ground at Sangatte. But he could make out the figure sitting in the centre of the stands, with the densest crowd of young women and men around her. ‘That’s the queen,’ he said.
The Earl of Northampton now clambered on to the platform the carpenters had made for him. He was shouting something, but over the hubbub of the men, Loveday could not hear what. All he knew was that the crowd liked it. Raucous cheers went up in the stands, and the archers and men-at-arms by the moat-side started shifting eagerly.
At the top of the section of Calais’ wall, defenders were showing their faces. A few waved swords and clubs defiantly.
Thorp was jiggling his leg. ‘Hardly a fucking surprise attack, is it?’
Millstone set his jaw. ‘It’s a performance.’
The men-at-arms who had put together the huge ladders now picked them up and prepared to run them across the dam-bridge and on to the barges waiting for them in the inner moat. For the time that it took to position them on the barges, so that they were leaning against the walls, they were going to be terribly exposed to attack from above. They would rely on cover from two ranks of longbowmen, who stood on either side of the main body of men, taking aim at the top of Calais’ walls.
One of these wings was all bowmen dressed in the prince’s green-and-white livery. ‘Should have been us over there,’ said Thorp. ‘If Scotsman hadn’t fucked everything up.’
Millstone grunted. ‘Should have been you and Tebbe,’ he said. ‘Loveday and I would have been standing here regardless.’
As he spoke, the archers nocked their bows and sent up their first swarm of arrows towards the top of the walls. Then the first of the men-at-arms sprinted forward with their ladder, stepped on to one of the waiting line of barges, and heaved the ladder upright, securing it to the fixtures in the base of the barge. It came to a couple of feet below the top of the wall.
The archers kept up their volleys of arrows. Some bounced off the walls and clattered down on to the barges themselves. Others flew over the walls entirely. And a few found their target. Screams came from defenders invisible behind the crenellations. Sporadic crossbow shot was returned from arrow slits along the walls and tower. Loveday saw an archer hit in the shoulder. The impact of the crossbow bolt spun him around. He cursed in what sounded like Welsh.
The crowd in the stands cheered.
With the exchange of arrows and bolts going on above them, men-at-arms with ladders scampered forward on to the next barge. They ran low and kept their faces turned away from the tops of the walls.
Defenders heaved rocks over the sides.
More and more men were pushing on to the bankside, and the Dogs were now crammed tightly together with Toussaint and the rest of their crew. Loveday could smell a light wax on Toussaint’s well-made shoulder plates, and the mail vest they covered.
Thorp, pressed on the other side of Toussaint, turned his head as best he could. ‘How many times have you stormed a wall with ladders, sir?’ he shouted to the knight.
Loveday noticed a bead of sweat slide down Toussaint’s temple. His jaw was tense – a knot of muscle bulged and pulsed below his ear.
‘A dozen or more,’ he said. Then he added: ‘In tournaments.’
Ahead of them, the last of the ladders was sliding into place at the wall. The spectators in the stands were drumming their feet. Then, on the stage where Northampton stood, drums began beating and trumpeters gave a long blast.
The signal was like a trigger pulled on a crossbow. The energy and the crush of the crowd was suddenly released, and Loveday was swept forward with them as men raced towards the weasel and the dam-bridge over the first moat.
Whoops and screams swirled. Men elbowed each other to be first towards the point of the attack. Somewhere, something was on fire. Loveday lost sight of the other Dogs as the powerful tide of the crowd drove them in different directions. Only a hacking cough told him Tebbe was close.
He was already drenched in sweat when the crowd shoved him into the mouth of the weasel. Then he was across the uneven dam-bridge and on the land between the moats.
All around on the thin strip of solid ground, men jostled to get on to the moored barges. The men-at-arms who had raised the ladders on their decks were shouting at them to stay back, for fear of sinking the barges or tearing them from their moorings. Others were trying to stop any more men from coming through the weasel. All the while, the deadly whispers of arrows and bolts continued overhead, joined by the thuds of rocks being catapulted over the walls.
Loveday was sprayed with water as one of the men waiting to board a barge lost his footing and fell in the moat with a splash.
He looked around frantically for the Dogs, to try and take a head count. Sweat stung his eyes and he swept it away with his forearm.
Then someone leapt at him.
He saw the shadow from the corner of his eye. But the man was on him before he could turn.
He hit Loveday hard in the ribs, knocking all the air out of him. Shoving him so hard that he lost his footing and hit the ground with a thud. His short sword flew out of his hand.
His head smacked the hard ground.
The huge man smothered him, pinning him to the ground, as heavy as a house.
Loveday couldn’t breathe. He could not even yell.
All he knew for certain was that he was about to die.