ELEANOR HAD BEEN apprehensive about joining the English army. “They won’t like me because I’m French,” she said.

“The army’s full of Frenchmen,” Thomas had told her. “There are Gascons, Bretons, even some Normans, and half the women are French.”

“The archers’ women?” she asked, giving him a wry smile. “But they are not good women?”

“Some are good, some are bad,” Thomas said vaguely, “but you I shall make into a wife and everyone will know you’re special.”

If Eleanor was pleased she showed no sign, but they were now in the broken streets of Poissy, where a rearguard of English archers shouted at them to hurry. The makeshift bridge was about to be destroyed and the army’s laggards were being chivvied across its planks. The bridge had no parapets and had been hurriedly made from whatever timbers the army had found in the abandoned town, and the uneven planking swayed, creaked and bent as Thomas and Eleanor led their horses onto the roadway. Eleanor’s palfrey became so scared of the uncertain footing that it refused to move until Thomas put a blindfold over its eyes and then, still shaking, it trod slowly and steadily across the planks, which had gaps between them through which Thomas could see the river sliding. They were among the last to cross. Some of the army’s wagons had been abandoned in Poissy, their loads distributed onto the hundreds of horses that had been captured south of the Seine.

Once the last stragglers had crossed the bridge the archers began hurling the planks into the river, breaking down the fragile link that had let the English escape across the river. Now, King Edward hoped, they would find new land to waste in the wide plains that lay between the Seine and the Somme and the three battles spread into the twenty-mile-wide line of the chevauchée and advanced northward, camping that night just a short march from the river.

Thomas looked for the Prince of Wales’s troops while Eleanor tried to ignore the dirty, tattered and sun-browned archers, who looked more like outlaws than soldiers. They were supposed to be making their shelters for the coming night, but preferred to watch the women and call obscene invitations. “What are they saying?” Eleanor asked Thomas.

“That you are the most beautiful creature in all France,” he said.

“You lie,” she said, then flinched as a man shouted at her. “Have they never seen a woman before?”

“Not like you. They probably think you’re a princess.”

She scoffed at that, but was not displeased. There were, she saw, women everywhere. They gathered firewood while their men made the shelters and most, Eleanor noted, spoke French. “There will be many babies next year,” she said.

“True.”

“They will go back to England?” she asked.

“Some, perhaps.” Thomas was not really sure. “Or they’ll go to their garrisons in Gascony.”

“If I marry you,” she asked, “will I become English?”

“Yes,” Thomas said.

It was getting late and cooking fires were smoking across the stubble fields, though there was precious little to cook. Every pasture held a score of horses and Thomas knew they needed to rest, feed and water their own animals. He had asked many soldiers where the Prince of Wales’s men could be found, but one man said west, another east, so in the dusk Thomas simply turned their tired horses toward the nearest village for he did not know where else to go. The place was swarming with troops, but Thomas and Eleanor found a quiet enough spot in the corner of a field where Thomas made a fire while Eleanor, the black bow prominent on her shoulder to demonstrate that she belonged to the army, watered the horses in a stream. They cooked the last of their food and afterward sat under the hedge and watched the stars brighten above a dark wood. Voices sounded from the village where some women were singing a French song and Eleanor crooned the words softly.

“I remember my mother singing it to me,” she said, plucking strands of grass that she wove into a small bracelet. “I was not his only bastard,” she said ruefully. “There were two others I know of. One died when she was very small, and the other is now a soldier.”

“He’s your brother.”

“Half-brother.” She shrugged. “I don’t know him. He went away.” She put the bracelet on her thin wrist. “Why do you wear a dog’s paw?” she asked.

“Because I’m a fool,” he said, “and mock God.” That was the truth, he thought ruefully, and he pulled the dry paw hard to break its cord, then tossed it into the field. He did not really believe in St. Guinefort; it was an affectation. A dog would not help him recover the lance, and that duty made him grimace, for the penance weighed on his conscience and soul.

“Do you really mock God?” Eleanor asked, worried.

“No. But we jest about the things we fear.”

“And you fear God?”

“Of course,” Thomas said, then stiffened because there had been a rustle in the hedge behind him and a cold blade was suddenly pressed against the back of his neck. The metal felt very sharp.

“What we should do,” a voice said, “is hang the bastard properly and take his woman. She’s pretty.”

“She’s pretty,” another man agreed, “but he ain’t good for anything.”

“You bastards!” Thomas said, turning to stare into two grinning faces. It was Jake and Sam. He did not believe it at first, just gazed for a while. “It is you! What are you doing here?”

Jake slashed at the hedge with his billhook, pushed through and gave Eleanor what he thought was a reassuring grin, though with his scarred face and crossed eyes he looked like something from a nightmare. “Charlie Blois got his face smacked,” Jake said, “so Will brought us here to give the King of France a bloody nose. She your woman?”

“She’s the Queen of bloody Sheba,” Thomas said.

“And the Countess is humping the Prince, I hear,” Jake grinned. “Will saw you earlier, only you didn’t see us. Got your nose in the air. We heard you were dead.”

“I nearly was.”

“Will wants to see you.”

The thought of Will Skeat, of Jake and Sam, came as a vast relief to Thomas, for such men lived in a world far removed from dire prophecies, stolen lances and dark lords. He told Eleanor these men were his friends, his best friends, and that she could trust them, though she looked alarmed at the ironic cheer which greeted Thomas when they ducked into the village tavern. The archers put their hands at their throats and contorted their faces to imitate a hanged man while Will Skeat shook his head in mock despair.

“God’s belly,” he said, “but they can’t even hang you properly.” He looked at Eleanor. “Another countess?”

“The daughter of Sir Guillaume d’Evecque, knight of the sea and of the land,” Thomas said, “and she’s called Eleanor.”

“Yours?” Skeat asked.

“We shall marry.”

“Bloody hellfire,” Skeat said, “you’re still daft as a carrot! You don’t marry them, Tom, that’s not what they’re for. Still, she ain’t a bad looker, is she?” He courteously made space for Eleanor on the bench. “There wasn’t much ale,” he went on, “so we drank it all.” He looked about the tavern. It was so bare there was not even a bunch of herbs hanging from the rafters. “Bastards cleaned up before they left,” he said sourly, “and there’s about as much plunder here as you’d get hairs off a bald man.”

“What happened in Brittany?” Thomas asked.

Will shrugged. “Nowt to do with us. Duke Charles led his men into our territory and trapped Tommy Dugdale on a hilltop. Three thousand of them and three hundred with Tommy, and at the end of the day Duke Charles was running like a scalded hare. Arrows, boy, arrows.”

Thomas Dugdale had taken over the Earl of Northampton’s responsibilities in Brittany and had been traveling between the English fortresses when the Duke’s army caught him, but his archers and men-at-arms, ensconced behind the thick hedge of a hilltop pasture, had cut the enemy into shreds.

“All day they fought,” Skeat said, “morning to night, and the bastards wouldn’t learn their lesson and kept sending men up the hill. They reckoned Tommy had to run out of arrows soon enough, but he was carrying carts of spares to the fortresses, see, so he had enough to last him till doomsday. So Duke Charles lost his best men, the fortresses are safe till he gets some more, and we’re up here. The Earl sent for us. Just bring fifty archers, he told me, so I did. And Father Hobbe, of course. We sailed to Caen and joined the army just as it marched out. So what the hell happened to you?”

Thomas told his tale. Skeat shook his head when he heard about the hanging. “Sir Simon’s gone,” he said. “Probably joined the French.”

“He’s done what?”

“Vanished. Your countess caught up with him and pissed all over him from what we hear.” Skeat grinned. “Luck of the devil, you’ve got. God knows why I saved you this.” He put a clay jar of ale on the table, then nodded at Thomas’s bow that Eleanor was carrying. “Can you still shoot that thing? I mean you’ve been bollocking about with the aristocracy for so long that you might have forgotten why God put you on the earth?”

“I can still use it.”

“Then you might as well ride with us,” Skeat said, but confessed he knew little of what the army was doing. “No one tells me,” he said scornfully, “but they say there’s another river up north and we’ve got to cross it. Sooner the better, I reckon, as the Frenchies have skimmed this land proper. Couldn’t feed a kitten up here.”

It was indeed a bare land. Thomas saw that for himself next day as Will Skeat’s men moved slowly north across harvested fields, but the grain, instead of lying in the barns, had already been taken for the French army, just as the livestock had all been driven away. South of the Seine the English had cut grain from abandoned fields and their advance guards had moved swiftly enough to capture thousands of cattle, pigs and goats, but here the land had been scraped bare by an even larger army and so the King ordered haste. He wanted his men to cross the next river, the Somme, to where the French army might not have stripped the land and where, at Le Crotoy, he hoped a fleet would be waiting with supplies, but despite the royal orders the army went painfully slowly. There were fortified towns that promised food and men insisted on trying to assault their walls. They captured some, were repulsed at others, but it all took time that the King did not have, and while he was trying to discipline an army more interested in plunder than progress, the King of France led his army back across the Seine, through Paris and north to the Somme.

A new trap was set, an even deadlier one, for the English were now penned in a land that had been stripped of food. Edward’s army at last reached the Somme, but found it was blocked just as the Seine had been barred. Bridges were destroyed or guarded by grim forts with heavy garrisons that would take weeks to dislodge, and the English did not have weeks. They were weakening daily. They had marched from Normandy to the edge of Paris, then they had crossed the Seine and left a path of destruction to the Somme’s southern bank and the long journey had abraded the army. Hundreds of men were now barefoot while others hobbled on disintegrating shoes. They had horses enough, but few spare horseshoes or nails, and so men led their animals to save their hooves.

There was grass to feed horses, but little grain for men, and so the foraging parties had to travel long distances to find villages where the peasants might have hidden some of the harvest. The French were becoming bolder now and there were frequent skirmishes at the edges of the army as the French sensed the English vulnerability. Men ate unripe fruit that soured their bellies and loosened their bowels. Some reckoned they had no choice but to march all the way back to Normandy, but others knew the army would fall apart long before they reached the safety of the Norman harbors. The only course was to cross the Somme and march to the English strongholds in Flanders, but the bridges were gone or garrisoned, and when the army crossed desolate marshlands to find fords they discovered the enemy ever waiting on the far bank. They twice tried to force a passage, but both times the French, secure on the higher dry land, were able to cut down the archers in the river by crowding the bank with Genoese crossbows. And so the English retreated and marched westward, getting ever nearer to the river’s mouth, and every step reduced the number of possible crossing places as the river grew wider and deeper. They marched for eight days between the rivers, eight days of increasing hunger and frustration.

“Save your arrows,” a worried Will Skeat warned his men late one afternoon. They were making their camp by a small, deserted village which was as bare as every other place they had found since crossing the Seine. “We’ll need every arrow we’ve got for a battle,” Skeat went on, “and Christ knows we’ve none to waste.”

An hour later, when Thomas was searching a hedgerow for blackberries, a voice called from on high. “Thomas! Get your evil bones up here!”

Thomas turned to see Will Skeat on the small tower of the village church. He ran to the church, climbed the ladder, past a beam where a bell had hung till the villagers took it away to prevent the English from stealing it, then pulled himself through the hatch and onto the tower’s flat roof where a half-dozen men were crowded, among them the Earl of Northampton, who gave Thomas a very wry look.

“I heard you were hanged!”

“I lived, my lord,” Thomas said grimly.

The Earl hesitated, wondering whether to ask if Sir Simon Jekyll had been the hangman, but there was no point in continuing that feud. Sir Simon had fled and the Earl’s agreement with him was void. He grimaced instead. “No one can kill a devil’s whelp, eh?” he said, then pointed eastward, and Thomas stared through the twilight and saw an army on the march.

It was a long way off, on the far northern bank of the river that here flowed between vast reedbeds, but Thomas could still see that the lines of horsemen, wagons, infantry and crossbowmen were filling every lane and track of that distant bank. The army was approaching a walled town, Abbeville, the Earl said, where a bridge crossed the river, and Thomas, gazing at the black lines twisting toward the bridge, felt as though the gates of hell had opened and spewed out a vast horde of lances, swords and crossbows. Then he remembered Sir Guillaume was there and he made the sign of the cross and mouthed a silent prayer that Eleanor’s father would survive.

“Sweet Christ,” Will Skeat said, mistaking Thomas’s gesture for fear, “but they want our souls bad.”

“They know we’re tired,” the Earl said, “and they know the arrows must run out in the end, and they know they have more men than we do. Far more.” He turned westward. “And we can’t run much further.” He pointed again and Thomas saw the flat sheen of the sea. “They’ve caught us,” the Earl said. “They’ll cross at Abbeville and attack tomorrow.”

“So we fight,” Will Skeat growled.

“On this ground, Will?” the Earl asked. The land was flat, ideal for cavalry, and with few hedgerows or coppices to protect archers. “And against so many?” he added. He stared at the distant enemy. “They outnumber us. Will, they outnumber us. By God, they outnumber us.” He shrugged. “Time to move on.”

“Move on where?” Skeat asked. “Why not find our ground and stand?”

“South?” The Earl sounded unsure. “Maybe we can cross the Seine again and take ships home from Normandy? God knows we can’t cross the Somme.” He shaded his eyes as he stared at the river. “Christ,” he blasphemed, “but why the hell isn’t there a ford? We could have raced the bastards back to our fortresses in Flanders and left Philip stranded like the damned fool he is.”

“Not fight him?” Thomas asked, sounding shocked.

The Earl shook his head. “We’ve hurt him. We’ve robbed him blind. We’ve marched through his kingdom and left it smoldering, so why fight him? He’s spent a fortune on hiring knights and cross-bowmen, so why not let him waste that money? Then we come back next year and do it again.” He shrugged. “Unless we can’t escape him.” With those grim words he backed down through the hatch and his entourage followed, leaving Skeat and Thomas alone.

“The real reason they don’t want to fight,” Skeat said sourly when the Earl was safe out of earshot, “is that they’re scared of being taken prisoner. A ransom can wipe out a family’s fortune in the blink of an eye.” He spat over the tower parapet, then drew Thomas to its northern edge. “But the real reason I brought you up here, Tom, is because your eyes are better than mine. Can you see a village over there?” He pointed northward.

It took Thomas a while, but eventually he spotted a group of low roofs amidst the reeds. “Bloody poor village,” he said sourly.

“But it’s still a place we haven’t searched for food,” Skeat said, “and being on a marsh they might have some smoked eels. I like a smoked eel, I do. Better than sour apples and nettle soup. You can go and have a look.”

“Tonight?”

“Why not next week?” Skeat said, going to the roof hatch, “or next year? Of course I mean tonight, you toad. Hurry yourself.”

Thomas took twenty archers. None of them wanted to go, for it was late in the day and they feared that French patrols might be waiting on the track that twisted endlessly through the dunes and reedbeds that stretched towards the Somme. It was a desolate country. Birds flew from the reeds as the horses picked their way along a track that was so low-lying that in places there were battens of elm to give footing, and all about them the water gurgled and sucked between banks of green-scummed mud.

“Tide’s going out,” Jake commented.

Thomas could smell the salt water. They were near enough to the sea for the tides to flow and ebb through this tangle of reeds and marshgrass, though in places the road found a firmer footing on great drifted banks of sand where stiff pale grasses grew. In winter, Thomas thought, this would be a godforsaken place with the cold winds driving the spume across the frozen marsh.

It was very nearly dark when they reached the village, which proved to be a miserable settlement of just a dozen reed-thatched cottages, which were deserted. The folk must have left just before Thomas’s archers arrived, for there were still fires in the small rock hearths.

“Look for food,” Thomas said, “especially smoked eels.”

“Be quicker to catch the bloody eels and smoke them ourselves,” Jake said.

“Get on with it,” Thomas said, then took himself to the end of the village where there was a small wooden church which had been pushed by the wind into a permanently lopsided stance. The church was little more than a shed—maybe it was a shrine to some saint of this misbegotten marshland—but Thomas reckoned the wooden structure would just about bear his weight so he scrambled off the horse onto the moss-thick thatch and then crawled up to the ridge where he clung to the nailed cross that decorated one gable.

He saw no movement in the marshes, though he could see the smear of smoke coming from the French campfires that misted the fading light north of Abbeville. Tomorrow, he thought, the French would cross the bridge and file through the town’s gates to confront the English army whose fires burned to the south, and the size of the smoke plumes witnessed how much larger the French army was than the English.

Jake appeared from a nearby cottage with a sack in his hand. “What is it?” Thomas called.

“Grain!” Jake hefted the sack. “Bloody damp. Sprouting.”

“No eels?”

“Of course there are no bloody eels,” Jake grumbled. “Bloody eels got more sense than to live in a hovel like this.”

Thomas grinned and looked off to the sea that lay like a blood-reddened swordblade to the west. There was one distant sail, a speck of white, on the clouded horizon. Gulls wheeled and soared above the river that here was a great wide channel, broken by reeds and banks, sliding toward the sea. It was hard to distinguish between river and marsh, so tangled was the landscape. Then Thomas wondered why the gulls were screaming and diving. He stared at them and saw what at first looked like a dozen cattle on the river-bank. He opened his mouth to call that news to Jake, then he saw that there were men with the cattle. Men and women, perhaps a score of them? He frowned, staring, realizing that the folk must have come from this village. They had presumably seen the English archers approaching and they had fled with their livestock, but to where? The marsh? That was sensible, for the wetlands probably had a score of secret paths where folk could hide, but why had they risked going onto the sand ridge where Thomas could see them? Then he saw that they were not trying to hide, but to escape, for the villagers were now wading across the wide waters toward the northern bank.

Sweet Jesus, he thought, but there was a ford! He stared, not daring to believe his own eyes, but the folk were forging steadily across the river and dragging their cows with them. It was a deep ford, and he guessed it could only be crossed at low tide, but it was there. “Jake!” he shouted. “Jake!”

Jake ran across to the church and Thomas leaned far down and hauled him onto the rotting thatch. The building swayed perilously under their weight as Jake scrambled to the ridge, took hold of the sun-bleached wooden cross and looked where Thomas was pointing.

“God’s arse,” he said, “there’s a bloody ford!”

“And there are bloody Frenchmen,” Thomas said, for on the river’s far bank where firmer land rose from the tangle of marsh and water there were now men in gray mail. They were newly arrived, or else Thomas would have seen them earlier, and their first cooking fires pricked the dark stand of trees where they camped. Their presence showed that the French knew of the ford’s existence and wanted to stop the English crossing, but that was none of Thomas’s business. His only duty was to let the army know that there was a ford; a possible way out of the trap.

Thomas slid down the church’s thatch and jumped to the ground. “You go back to Will,” he told Jake, “and tell him there’s a ford. And tell him I’ll burn the cottages one at a time to serve as a beacon.” It would be dark soon and without a light to guide them no one would be able to find the village.

Jake took six men and rode back to the south. Thomas waited. Every now and then he climbed back to the church roof and stared across the ford and each time he thought he saw more fires among the trees. The French, he reckoned, had placed a formidable force there, and no wonder, for it was the last escape route and they were blocking it. But Thomas still fired the cottages one by one to show the English where that escape might lie.

The flames roared into the night, scattering sparks across the marshes. The archers had found some dried fish concealed in a hut wall and that, with brackish water, was their supper. They were disconsolate, and no wonder.

“We should have stayed in Brittany,” one man said.

“They’re going to corner us,” another suggested. He had made a flute from a dried reed and had been playing a melancholy air.

“We’ve got arrows,” a third man said.

“Enough to kill all those bastards?”

“Have to be enough.”

The flute player blew some faint notes, then became bored and tossed the instrument into the closest fire. Thomas, the night dragging hard on his patience, strolled back to the church, but instead of climbing onto the roof he pushed open the ramshackle door and then opened the one window’s shutters to let in the firelight. Then he saw it was not a proper church, but a fishermen’s shrine. There was an altar made from sea-whitened planks balanced on two broken barrels, and on the altar was a crude doll-like figure draped with strips of white cloth and crowned with a band of dried seaweed. The fishermen at Hookton had sometimes made such places, especially if a boat was lost at sea, and Thomas’s father had always hated them. He had burned one to the ground, calling it a place of idols, but Thomas reckoned fishermen needed the shrines. The sea was a cruel place and the doll, he thought it was female, perhaps represented some saint of the area. Women whose men were long gone to sea could come to pray to the saint, begging that the ship would come home.

The shrine’s roof was low and it was more comfortable to kneel. Thomas said a prayer. Let me live, he prayed, let me live, and he found himself thinking of the lance, thinking of Brother Germain and Sir Guillaume and of their fears that a new evil, born of the dark lords, was brewing in the south. It is none of your business, he told himself. It is superstition. The Cathars are dead, burned in the church’s fires and gone to hell. Beware of madmen, his father had told him, and who better than his father to know that truth? But was he a Vexille? He bowed his head and prayed that God would keep him from the madness.

“And what are you praying for now?” a voice suddenly asked, startling Thomas, who turned to see Father Hobbe grinning from the low doorway. He had chatted with the priest during the last few days, but he had never been alone with him. Thomas was not even sure he wanted to be, for Father Hobbe’s presence was a reminder of his conscience.

“I’m praying for more arrows, father.”

“Please God the prayer’s answered,” Father Hobbe said, then settled on the church’s earthen floor. “I had the devil’s own task finding my way across the swamp, but I had a mind to talk with you. I have this feeling you’ve been avoiding me.”

“Father!” Thomas said chidingly.

“So here you are, and with a beautiful girl as well! I tell you, Thomas, if they forced you to lick a leper’s arse you’d taste nothing but sweetness. Charmed, you are. They can’t even hang you!”

“They can,” Thomas said, “but not properly.”

“Thank God for that,” the priest said, then smiled. “So how is the penance going?”

“I haven’t found the lance,” Thomas answered curtly.

“But have you even looked for it?” Father Hobbe asked, then drew a piece of bread from his pouch. He broke the small loaf and tossed half to Thomas. “Don’t ask where I got it, but I didn’t steal it. Remember, Thomas, you can fail in a penance and still have absolution if you have made a sincere effort.”

Thomas grimaced, not at Father Hobbe’s words, but because he had bitten down on a scrap of millstone grit caught in the bread. He spat it out. “My soul isn’t so black as you make it sound, Father.”

“How would you know? All our souls are black.”

“I’ve made an effort,” Thomas said, then found himself telling the whole tale of how he had gone to Caen and sought out Sir Guillaume’s house, and how he had been a guest there, and about Brother Germain and the Cathar Vexilles, and about the prophecy from Daniel and the advice of Mordecai.

Father Hobbe made the sign of the cross when Thomas talked of Mordecai. “You can’t take the word of such a man,” the priest said sternly. “He may or may not be a good doctor, but the Jews have ever been Christ’s enemy. If he is on anyone’s side it must be the devil’s.”

“He’s a good man,” Thomas insisted.

“Thomas! Thomas!” Father Hobbe said sadly, then frowned for a few heartbeats. “I have heard,” he said after a while, “that the Cathar heresy still lives.”

“But it can’t challenge France and the Church!”

“You would know?” Father Hobbe asked. “It reached out across the sea to steal the lance from your father, and you say it reached across France to kill Sir Guillaume’s wife. The devil works his business in the dark, Thomas.”

“There’s more,” Thomas said, and told the priest the story that the Cathars had the Grail. The light of the burning cottages flickered on the walls and gave the seaweed-crowned image on the altar a sinister cast. “I don’t think I believe any of it,” Thomas concluded.

“And why not?”

“Because if the story is true,” Thomas said, “then I am not Thomas of Hookton, but Thomas Vexille. I’m not English, but some half-breed Frenchman. I’m not an archer, but noble born.”

“It gets worse,” Father Hobbe said with a smile. “It means that you have been given a task.”

“They’re just stories,” Thomas said scornfully. “Give me another penance, Father. I’ll make a pilgrimage for you, I’ll go to Canterbury on my knees if that’s what you want.”

“I want nothing of you, Thomas, but God wants a lot from you.”

“Then tell God to choose someone else.”

“I’m not in the habit of giving advice to the Almighty,” Father Hobbe said, “though I do listen to His. You think there is no Grail?”

“Men have sought it for a thousand years,” Thomas said, “and no one has found it. Unless the thing in Genoa is real.”

Father Hobbe leaned his head against the wattle wall. “I have heard,” he said quietly, “that the real Grail is made of common clay. A simple peasant dish like the one my mother treasured, God rest her soul, for she could only afford the one good dish and then, clumsy fool that I am, I broke it one day. But the Grail, I am told, cannot be broken. You could put it in one of those guns that amused everyone at Caen and it would not break even if you dashed it against a castle wall. And when you place the bread and wine, the blood and flesh, of the Mass in that common piece of clay, Thomas, it turns to gold. Pure, shining gold. That is the Grail and, God help me, it does exist.”

“So you would have me wander the earth looking for a peasant’s dish?” Thomas asked.

“God would,” Father Hobbe said, “and for good reason.” He looked saddened. “There is heresy everywhere, Thomas. The Church is besieged. The bishops and the cardinals and the abbots are corrupted by wealth, the village priests stew in ignorance and the devil is brewing his evil. Yet there are some of us, a few, who believe that the Church can be refreshed, that it can glow with God’s glory again. I think the Grail could do that. I think God has chosen you.”

“Father!”

“And perhaps me,” Father Hobbe said, ignoring Thomas’s protest. “When this is all over,” he waved a hand to encompass the army and its plight, “I think I may join you. We shall seek your family together.”

“You?” Thomas asked. “Why?”

“Because God calls,” Father Hobbe said simply, then jerked his head. “You must go, Thomas, you must go. I shall pray for you.”

Thomas had to go because the night had been disturbed by the sound of horses’ hooves and the strident voices of men. Thomas seized his bow and ducked out of the church to find that a score of men-at-arms were now in the village. Their shields carried the lions and stars of the Earl of Northumberland and their commander was demanding to know who was in charge of the archers.

“I am,” Thomas said.

“Where’s this ford?”

Thomas made himself a torch from a sheaf of thatch lashed to a pole and, while its flame lasted, he led them across the marsh toward the distant ford. The flames flickered out after a while, but he was close enough to find his way to where he had seen the cattle. The tide had risen again and black water seeped and flooded all about the horsemen, who huddled on a shrinking ridge of sand.

“You can see where the other side is,” Thomas told the men-at-arms, pointing to the fires of the French, which looked to be about a mile away.

“Bastards are waiting for us?”

“Plenty of them too.”

“We’re crossing anyway,” the leading man-at-arms said. “The King’s decided it, and we’re doing it when the tide falls.” He turned to his men. “Off your horses. Find the path. Mark it.” He pointed to some pollarded willows. “Cut staves off them, use them as markers.”

Thomas groped his way back to the village, sometimes wading through water up to his waist. A thin mist was seeping from the flooding tide, and had it not been for the blazing huts in the village he could easily have got lost.

The village, built on the highest piece of land in all the marsh, had attracted a crowd of horsemen by the time Thomas returned. Archers and men-at-arms gathered there and some had already pulled down the shrine to make fires from its timbers.

Will Skeat had come with the rest of his archers. “The women are with the baggage,” he told Thomas. “Bloody chaos back there, it is. They’re hoping to cross everyone in the morning.”

“Be a fight first,” Thomas said.

“Either that or fight their whole damn army later in the day. Did you find any eels?”

“We ate them.”

Skeat grinned, then turned as a voice hailed him. It was the Earl of Northampton, his horse’s trapper spattered with mud almost to the saddle.

“Well done, Will!”

“Weren’t me, my lord, it was this clever bastard.” Skeat jerked a thumb at Thomas.

“Hanging did you good, eh?” the Earl said, then watched as a file of men-of-arms climbed onto the village’s sand ridge. “Be ready to move at dawn, Will, and we’ll be crossing when the tide falls. I want your boys in front. Leave your horses here; I’ll have good men watch them.”

There was small sleep that night, though Thomas did doze as he lay on the sand and waited for the dawn, which brought a pale, misty light. Willow trees loomed in the vapor, while men-at-arms crouched at the tide’s edge and stared north to where the mist was thickened by smoke from the enemy’s fires. The river ran deceptively quick, hastened by the ebbing tide, but it was still too high to cross.

The sandbank by the ford held Skeat’s fifty archers and another fifty under John Armstrong. There were the same number of men-at-arms, all on foot, led by the Earl of Northampton, who had been given the job of leading the crossing. The Prince of Wales had wanted to lead the fight himself, but his father had forbidden it. The Earl, far more experienced, had the responsibility and he was not happy. He would have liked many more men, but the sandbank would hold no more and the paths through the marshland were narrow and treacherous, making it difficult to bring reinforcements.

“You know what to do,” the Earl told Skeat and Armstrong.

“We know.”

“Maybe another two hours?” The Earl was judging the fall of the tide. The two hours crept by and the English could only stare through the thinning mist at the enemy, who formed their battle-line at the ford’s further side. The receding water let more men come to the sandbank, but the Earl’s force was still pitifully small—perhaps two hundred men at most—while the French had double that number of men-at-arms alone. Thomas counted them as best he could, using the method Will Skeat had taught him: to divide the enemy in two, divide again, then count the small unit and multiply it by four, and he wished he had not done it for there were so many, and as well as the men-at-arms there had to be five or six hundred infantry, probably a levy from the country north of Abbeville. They were not a serious threat for, like most infantry, they would be ill-trained and badly armed with ancient weapons and farming tools, but they could still cause trouble if the Earl’s men got into difficulties. The only blessing Thomas could find in the misty dawn was that the French seemed to have very few cross-bowmen, but why would they need them when they had so many men-at-arms? And the formidable force that now gathered on the river’s northern bank would be fighting in the knowledge that if they repelled the English attack then they would have their enemy pinned by the sea where the greater French army could crush them.

Two packhorses brought sheaves of precious arrows that were distributed among the archers. “Ignore the goddamn peasants,” Skeat told his men. “Kill the men-at-arms. I want the bastards crying for the goats they call their mothers.”

“There’s food on the far side,” John Armstrong told his hungry men. “Those goddamn bastards will have meat, bread and beer, and it’ll be yours if you get through them.”

“And don’t waste your arrows,” Skeat growled. “Shoot proper! Aim, boys, aim. I want to see the bastards bleeding.”

“Watch the wind!” John Armstrong shouted. “It’ll carry arrows to the right.”

Two hundred of the French men-at-arms were on foot at the river’s edge, while the other two hundred were mounted and waiting a hundred paces behind. The rabble of infantry was split into two vast lumps, one on each flank. The dismounted men-at-arms were there to stop the English at the water’s edge and the mounted men would charge if any did break through, while the infantry was present to give the appearance of numbers and to help in the massacre that would follow the French victory. The French must have been confident for they had stopped every other attempt to ford the Somme.

Except at the other fords the enemy had possessed crossbowmen who had been able to keep the archers in deep water where they could not use their bows properly for fear of soaking the strings and here there were no crossbows.

The Earl of Northampton, on foot like his men, spat toward the river. “He should have left his foot soldiers behind and brought a thousand Genoese,” he remarked to Will Skeat. “We’d be in trouble then.”

“They’ll have some crossbows,” Skeat said.

“Not enough, Will, not enough.” The Earl was wearing an old helmet, one without any face plate. He was accompanied by a gray-bearded man-at-arms with a deeply lined face, who wore a much-mended coat of mail. “You know Reginald Cobham, Will?” the Earl asked.

“I’ve heard of you, Master Cobham,” Will said respectfully.

“And I of you, Master Skeat,” Cobham answered. A whisper went through Skeat’s archers that Reginald Cobham was at the ford and men turned to look at the graybeard whose name was celebrated in the army. A common man, like themselves, but old in war and feared by England’s enemies.

The Earl looked at a pole which marked one edge of the ford. “Reckon the water’s low enough,” he said, then patted Skeat’s shoulder. “Go and kill some, Will.”

Thomas took one glance behind and saw that every dry spot of the marsh was now crowded with soldiers, horses and women. The English army had come into the lowlands, depending on the Earl to force the crossing.

Off to the east, though none at the ford knew it, the main French army was filing across the bridge at Abbeville, ready to fall on the English rear.

There was a brisk wind coming from the sea, bringing a morning chill and the smell of salt. Gulls called forlorn above the pale reeds. The river’s main channel was a half-mile wide and the hundred archers looked a puny force as they spread into a line and waded into the tide. Armstrong’s men were on the left, Skeat’s on the right, while behind them came the first of the earl’s men-at-arms. Those men-at-arms were all on foot and their job was to wait till the arrows had weakened the enemy, then charge into the French with swords, axes and falchions. The enemy had two drummers, who began thumping their goatskins, then a trumpeter startled birds from the trees where the French had camped.

“Note the wind,” Skeat shouted at his men. “Gusting hard, she is, gusting hard.”

The wind was blowing against the ebbing tide, forcing the river into small waves that whipped white at their tops. The French infantry were shouting. Grey clouds scudded above the green land. The drummers kept up a threatening rhythm. Banners flew above the waiting men-at-arms and Thomas was relieved that none of them showed yellow hawks on a blue field. The water was cold and came to his thighs. He held his bow high, watching the enemy, waiting for the first crossbow bolts to whip across the water.

No bolts came. The archers were within long bowshot range now, but Will Skeat wanted them closer. A French knight on a black horse caparisoned with a green and blue trapper rode to where his comrades were on foot, then swerved off to one side and splashed into the river.

“Silly bastard wants to make a name,” Skeat said. “Jake! Dan! Peter! Settle the bastard for me.” The three bows were drawn back and three arrows flew.

The French knight was hurled back in his saddle and his fall provoked the French to fury. They gave their war shout, “Montjoie St. Denis!” and the men-at-arms came splashing into the river, ready to challenge the archers, who drew back their bows.

“Hold hard!” Skeat shouted. “Hold hard! Closer, get closer!” The drumbeats were louder. The dead knight was being carried away by his horse as the other French edged back to the dry land. The water only reached to Thomas’s knees now and the range was shortening. A hundred paces, no more, and Will Skeat was at last satisfied. “Start putting them down!” he shouted.

The bowcords were drawn back to men’s ears, then loosed. The arrows flew, and while the first flight was still whispering over the wind-flecked water the second flight was released, and as the men put their third arrows on the strings the first whipped home. The sound was of metal striking metal, like a hundred light hammers tapping, and the French ranks were suddenly crouching with shields held high.

“Pick your men!” Skeat shouted. “Pick your men!” He was using his own bow, shooting it infrequently, always waiting for an enemy to lower a shield before loosing an arrow. Thomas was watching the rabble of infantry to his right. They looked as though they were ready to make a wild charge and he wanted to plant some arrows in their bellies before they reached the water.

A score of French men-at-arms were dead or wounded and their leader was shouting at the others to lock their shields. A dozen of the rearward men-at-arms had dismounted and were hurrying forward to reinforce the riverbank.

“Steady, boys, steady,” John Armstrong called. “Make the arrows count.”

The enemy shields were quilled with arrows. The French were relying on those shields that were thick enough to slow an arrow, and they were staying low, waiting for the arrows to run out or for the English men-at-arms to come close. Thomas reckoned some of the arrows would have driven clean through the shields to inflict wounds, but they were mostly wasted. He glanced back to the infantry and saw they were not moving yet. The English bows were firing less frequently, waiting for their targets, and the Earl of Northampton must have tired of the delay, or else he feared the turn of the tide for he shouted his men forward. “St. George! St. George!”

“Spread wide!” Will Skeat shouted, wanting his men to be on the flanks of the Earl’s attack so they could use their arrows when the French stood to receive the charge, but the water rapidly grew deeper as Thomas moved upstream and he could not go as far as he wanted.

“Kill them! Kill them!” The Earl was wading up to the bank now.

“Keep ranks!” Reginald Cobham shouted.

The French men-at-arms gave a cheer, for the proximity of the English charge meant the archers’ aim would be blocked, though Thomas did manage to loose two arrows as the defenders stood and before the two groups of men-at-arms met at the river’s edge with a clash of steel and shield. Men roared their war cries, St. Denis contending with St. George.

“Watch right! Watch right!” Thomas shouted, for the peasant infantrymen had started forward and he sent two arrows whistling at them. He was plucking shafts from the arrow bag as fast as he could.

“Take the horsemen!” Will Skeat bellowed, and Thomas changed his aim to send an arrow over the heads of the fighting men at the French horsemen who were advancing down the bank to help their comrades. Some English horsemen had entered the ford now, but they could not ride to meet their French counterparts because the ford’s northern exit was blocked by the wild mêlée of men-at-arms.

Men slashed and hacked. Swords met axes, falchions split helmets and skulls. The noise was like the devil’s blacksmith shop and blood was swirling down tide in the shallows. An Englishman screamed as he was cut down into the water, then screamed again as two Frenchmen drove axes into his legs and trunk. The Earl was thrusting his sword in short hard lunges, ignoring the hammer blows on his shield.

“Close up! Close up!” Reginald Cobham shouted. A man tripped on a body, opening a gap in the English line, and three howling Frenchmen tried to exploit it, but were met by a man with a double-headed axe who struck down so hard that the heavy blade split a helmet and skull from crown to neck.

“Flank them! Flank them!” Skeat bellowed, and his archers waded closer to the shore to drive their arrows into the sides of the French formation. Two hundred French knights were fighting eighty or ninety English men-at-arms, a brawl of swords and shields and monstrous clangor. Men grunted as they swung. The two front ranks were locked together now, shields against shields, and it was the men behind who did the killing, swinging their blades over the front rank to kill the men beyond. Most of the archers were pouring arrows into the French flanks while a few, led by John Armstrong, had closed up behind the men-at-arms to shoot into the enemy’s faces.

The French infantry, thinking the English charge stalled, gave a cheer and began to advance. “Kill them! Kill them!” Thomas shouted. He had used a whole sheaf of arrows, twenty-four shafts, and had only one sheaf more. He drew the bow back, released, drew again. Some of the French infantry had padded jackets, but they were no protection against the arrows. Sheer numbers was their best defense and they screamed a wild war cry as they pounded down the bank. But then a score of English horsemen came from behind the archers, pushing through them to meet the mad charge. The mailed riders chopped hard into the infantry’s front ranks, swords flailing left and right as the peasants hacked back. The horses bit at the enemy, and always kept moving so that no one could slash their hamstrings. A man-at-arms was hauled from his saddle and screamed terribly as he was chopped to death in the shallows. Thomas and his archers drove their arrows into the mob, more horsemen rode to help slaughter them, but still the wild rabble crowded the bank and suddenly Thomas had no arrows left and so he hung the bow round his neck, drew his sword and ran to the river’s edge.

A Frenchman lunged at Thomas with a spear. He knocked it aside and brought the sword’s tip flashing round to rip the man’s gullet. Blood spilled bright as dawn, vanishing into the river. He hacked at a second man. Sam, baby-faced Sam, was beside him with a billhook that he sliced into a skull. It stuck there and Sam kicked the man in frustration, then took an axe from the dying enemy and, leaving his billhook in its victim, swung his new weapon in a great arc to drive the enemy back. Jake still had arrows and was shooting them fast.

A splashing and a cheer announced the arrival of more mounted men-at-arms, who drove into the infantry with heavy lances. The big horses, trained to this carnage, rode over the living and dead while the men-at-arms discarded the spears and started hacking with swords. More archers had come with fresh arrows and were shooting from the river’s center.

Thomas was on the bank now. The front of his mail coat was red with blood, none of it his, and the infantry was retreating. Then Will Skeat gave a great shout that more arrows had come, and Thomas and his archers ran back into the river to find Father Hobbe with a pack mule loaded with two panniers of arrow sheaves.

“Do the Lord’s work,” Father Hobbe said, tossing a sheaf to Thomas, who undid its binding and spilled the arrows into his bag. A trumpet sounded from the northern bank and he whirled round to see that the French horsemen were riding to join the fight.

“Put them down!” Skeat shouted. “Put those bastards down!”

Arrows slashed and sliced at horses. More English men-at-arms were wading the river to thicken the Earl’s force and, inch by inch, yard by yard, they were making progress up the bank, but then the enemy horsemen drove into the mêlée with lances and swords. Thomas put an arrow through the mail covering a Frenchman’s throat, drove another through a leather chanfron so that the horse reared and screamed and spilled its rider.

“Kill! Kill! Kill!” The Earl of Northampton, bloodied from his helmet to his mailed boots, rammed the sword again and again. He was bone tired and deafened by the crack of steel, but he was climbing the bank and his men were pressed close about him. Cobham was killing with a calm certainty, years of experience behind every blow. English horsemen were in the mêlée now, using their lances over the heads of their compatriots to drive the enemy horses back, but they were also blocking the aim of the archers and Thomas again hung his bow round his neck and drew his sword. “St. George! St. George!” The Earl was standing on grass now, out of the reeds, above the high-water mark and behind him the river’s edge was a charnel house of dead men, wounded men, blood and screaming.

Father Hobbe, his cassock skirts hitched up to his waist, was fighting with a quarterstaff, ramming the pole into French faces. “In the name of the Father,” he shouted, and a Frenchman reeled back with a pulped eye, “and of the Son,” Father Hobbe snarled as he broke a man’s nose, “and of the Holy Ghost!”

A French knight broke through the English ranks, but a dozen archers swarmed over the horse, hamstrung it and hauled its rider down to the mud where they hacked at him with axe, billhook and sword.

“Archers!” the Earl shouted. “Archers!” The last of the French horsemen had formed into a charge that threatened to sweep the whole ragged mess of brawling men, both English and French, into the river, but a score of archers, the only ones with arrows now, drove their missiles up the bank to bring the leading rank of horsemen down in a tangle of horses’ legs and tumbling weapons.

Another trumpet sounded, this one from the English side, and reinforcements were suddenly streaming over the ford and spurring up onto the higher ground.

“They’re breaking! They’re breaking.” Thomas did not know who shouted that news, but it was true. The French were shuffling backward. The infantry, their stomach for battle slaked by the deaths they had suffered, had already retreated, but now the French knights, the men-at-arms, were backing away from the fury of the English assault.

“Just kill them! Kill them! No prisoners! No prisoners!” the Earl of Northampton shouted in French, and his men-at-arms, bloody and wet and tired and angry, shoved up the bank and hacked again at the French, who stepped another pace back.

And then the enemy did break. It was sudden. One moment the two forces were locked in grunting, shoving, hacking battle, and then the French were running and the ford was streaming with mounted men-at-arms who crossed from the southern bank to pursue the broken enemy.

“Jesus,” Will Skeat said, and dropped to his knees and made the sign of the cross. A dying Frenchman groaned nearby, but Skeat ignored him. “Jesus,” he said again. “You got any arrows, Tom?”

“Two left.”

“Jesus.” Skeat looked up. There was blood on his cheeks. “Those bastards,” he said vengefully. He was speaking of the newly arrived English men-at-arms who crashed past the remnants of the battle to harry the fleeing enemy. “Those bastards! They get into their camp first, don’t they? They’ll take all the bloody food!”

But the ford was taken, the trap was broken and the English were across the Somme.