Joan, as always, drew more than her share of enemy attack. With Marcel and Hermeland fighting fiercely on either side of her, the odds were just barely fair. Cutting at would-be assassins, Hermeland found his arm muscles aching with familiar soreness. Sweat rolled inside his armor; breath steamed out of his visor in gusts.
A sudden pocket of quiet fell on the three of them as the fighting moved elsewhere on the line. Joan drew herself up instantly, scanning the enemy's rear. "There!" She shouted so loudly her voice rasped. Heads turned to see where she was pointing, a spot about twenty feet away. The faithful, knowing her keen eye for cannon placements, scrambled away.
Moments later an explosion ruptured the runaway grapevines. Hermeland's horse staggered, perhaps struck by a clod of dirt from the blast. He dropped his shield, fighting for balance… and a knight with a shortsword came straight at him, weapon high, screaming a prayer.
Marcel shouted a useless warning. Hermeland bellowed too, as if his voice alone could block the fatal blow.
But a single swipe of the Maid's sword saved him, knocking the attacker onto his back. His helmet fell loose, showing a young face gored with a mortal wound.
Now she'll start to weep, Hermeland thought, heart skipping at the close call as he gathered himself at last.
As the battle wore on, soldiers from the camp fell into companies, swelling and strengthening the line. They showed a discipline they had lacked in their early months together, and though the Churchmen tried twice to push past them, Joan had the numbers now, and she turned back the charges easily.
Their herald was one of the last to find his place, pushing to the fore nearly an hour into the battle. He bore up the Listener pennant, a white banner ornamented with an unlit torch and a lark. Cheers broke out among the army as they saw it, and the enemy faltered.
"Marcel, gather up a company and get behind them," Joan ordered. "Take their supplies."
By now the Listener army was fully deployed, their would-be destroyers routed, but the assurance of victory did no more than it ever did to quicken the end. The battle played itself out to a bloody conclusion. When it was finally over the Jehannistes had captured two couleuvrines, along with some cannonballs and a few hundred pounds of gunpowder. Only fifty or so of the enemy had escaped.
"Too many," Hermeland told Joan as they left the field. "They must have been going to meet up with His Majesty. Now he'll know to expect us."
"I'm sure he has spies in Burgundy, just like you. He must already have known."
"Better that it be probable than a certainty."
"Cheer up, friend." She squeezed his arm. "If they'd caught us at Mass, we'd be at Judgment now. One whole army, praying forever." Her eyes sparkled, teasing him.
Hermeland was nodding when he spotted Dulice. She sat exposed on a hill, too near the fighting. Imagining herself unseen, she drew furiously. His face reddened, and he snapped at Joan. "I suppose this victory means God wants you to fight the king?"
Joan's face tightened, and the color raised by the battle drained away. "We drove the English out of France, and now we'll drive out the Church. This is our mission."
Which was no answer, but he reined his temper with difficulty. "And do we march through the afternoon, or rest?"
"We consecrate the graves in the village," she said, striding away. She left Hermeland to strip the prisoners of their arms and regret that she wouldn't order them hanged.
Conversion at Orleans: In 1429 Joan led the troops that relieved the English siege of Orleans. Now, in 1450, the city's gates stand open to her and her converts. Joan is upright on a black stallion, brandishing an unlit torch. Behind her, the Listener troops straggle, bleeding and in apparent despair. The townspeople are rapturous: girls dressed as men beckon Joan, holding up the pieces of a full set of armor. Larks fill the sky, soaring on the town's high spirits. At the gate, four priests and the Bishop of Orleans clutch at their throats.
Folklore has it that the Catholic clergymen were struck dumb as they tried to convince the city fathers to close the gates to the Jehannistes. The Testament of Hermeland states unequivocally that they were merely shouted down and turned out of the town. Historians do agree that the Listener movement would have died out without the support of Orleans at this critical juncture-their army was ill equipped and half starved.
The bourgeoisie of Orleans were mad for Dulice's illustrations of Joan. So wrote Marcel's papa, anyway, in his monthly lament about the restrictions their dear Maid was putting on the process of producing the paintings in quantity: the insistence on Latin for the inscriptions, the hard condition that the illustrators refrain from adding to Dulice's simple scenes, and the insulting requirement that he send each completed illustration back to be checked for inaccuracies.
Meanwhile Papa's competitors translated the Roman texts back to proper French and threw in as many angels and ghouls as they chose…
"Yes, Papa, yes, Papa." Marcel grinned, murmuring the words as if he was home receiving the sermon personally. "Is it my fault the Maid is mad to keep her every stroke of fortune from being counted a miracle?"
A dozen copyists Papa had in his shop, filling vellum and imported paper with portraits of the Maid and her deeds. Their paintings might not be as lurid as their paymaster would wish, but they were bringing in plenty of gold. From Dulice's dirty and bloodstained originals, they made gloriously colored pictures, bordered with silver flowers and bright stars.
Their images of the Maid were never old or plain enough to please a Joan who had come forth from prison shorn of her pride and legendary boastfulness. That was a pity, in Marcel's opinion-it had given her a much-needed flair.
If only she had lost her stubbornness instead!
He winked at the wagon driver who'd brought in the supplies. It was Jean d'Arc, who was slipping back into his sister's penumbra after an exile stemming from a scheme so old neither of them remembered its details. Grinning furtively, Jean hefted a long, heavy satchel from underneath the sacks of grain.
"The sword?" Marcel whispered, though the cool iron inside the fabric made the answer obvious.
"Sword and flag," Jean murmured, pulling his hat low over his eyes. "Nobody's seen them."
"Dear Papa. He turns paper to gold and gold to food." Jean nodded, looking at the other wagons and the hard-driven horses that had caught them up to the army. "And this time…"
"Yes, this time?"
Caught in his reverie, Marcel was unpleasantly surprised to find Dulice at his side. "Ahh, the alchemist herself."
"Alchemy is witchcraft," she said.
He bore her displeasure happily, since it gave Jean time to slouch away. "Shall I call you our little Latin tutor, then? The one who somehow never teaches our Maid any Latin? Most unfair, since we have to mouth it psalm by onerous psalm."
"She learns when she may," Dulice said.
"She prefers to study war. Who will she drive from France next, do you think, if we win?"
"What do you study, Marcel, besides nonsense?"
"Only the provisioning of our company." He pointed at the supplies. "The finished pictures are in that wagon. If they portray the true doings of our Maid, perhaps you would write to my father so he can spread our message?"
"What's this?" She poked his bundle, discerning, no doubt, the shape of the weapon within.
Marcel did not blush. "Gifts from home."
Dulice had only been in a convent two years, but she had the penetrating gaze of a mother superior. It had quite marred her-despite the round body, cornflower eyes, and golden hair, she could never be a woman with whom a sane man would lie comfortably.