Two more French knights joined the fight. Every one of them was going for the Earl, who was now obvious in his bright Italian plate armour and his red and yellow arms and coronet. Remember that he’d come across the marsh with his standard bearer and a few picked men, as well as his archers.
Sir Edward, my cousin, appeared by his side.
The French knights circled for the kill. They were close.
I levered myself to my feet. I won’t say it was the bravest moment of my life. I’ll only say that I didn’t have to.
But I did.
I got to my feet and the world changed, and after that point I can only tell you what I remember.
First, about the time I got to my feet, the French knight the Earl had put down bounced to his. Christ, he was eager. Or angry.
And, once again, I was in his way.
This time, I didn’t have an old gelding between my knees. I had my buckler off my hip and on my hand, and when he swung his sword, I didn’t flinch, even though it was the longest sword I’d ever faced.
Fighting in mud is horrible, because everything is wrong. I wanted to close with him and get inside his absurdly long blade, but my legs were literally trapped. It was worse for him, though, in sabatons and leg armour, the mud just sort of ate you. I had on good high boots, and although one was full of water — the things you remember — I got one foot clear of the mud. He hit my buckler hard enough to dent the steel boss, and I lost my balance and was back where I started. We must have looked like antics.
I wasn’t even afraid.
I finally got my left leg out of the mud and forward, and I cut. His blow cut the rim of my buckler and lightly cut my arm, while my blow rang on his helmet. A perfect cut.
Unfortunately, my blade snapped and he was unhurt, because he was wearing a fine helmet. The bastard.
Now I had a four-inch sword stump and a buckler against an armoured knight.
I’d love to tell you how I wrestled him to the ground and took him, but the truth is that one of the archers put a quarter-pounder arrow into his arse, and down he went.
I just stood there.
Alive.
He was trying to get up.
Then I took his sword. It was a magical thing — long, curiously heavy and yet marvellously light. He was face down in mud, and I stepped, hard, on the back of his helmet, and pushed his face down. His thigh and groin were pouring blood. I sat on his backplate, drew my dagger, and thrust it deep. Up. From the bottom, so to speak.
He died.
I took his steel gauntlets. Right there. With another man coming for me.
I got the right one on, and then I was using the longsword to parry, again and again, as a mounted Frenchmen — three bars gules on a field d’or — cut at me over and over as his horse pushed against me. The horse was desperate, locked in the mud’s embrace. The French were churning it into the foam, and the horses were sinking further and further, but the first French knights had ridden in, and the sight of them encouraged more and more of them to try.
The blows rained down from over my head.
I can’t remember what happened to three bars gules. That fight seemed to go on for ever, but it can’t have been that long, because then I was standing by the Earl, thrusting my new longsword up at an eagle argent on a field azure, who had a war hammer and had just put John Hawkwood down with a blow to the helmet. After three failed thrusts, I changed tactics and thrust my sword into the horse, up from under the jaw, right into the brain, and the monster died instantly and fell.
The Earl’s poleaxe cured the eagle knight of his attempt to get to his feet.
I bent over and sucked humid air. The world smelled of swamp and blood.
I straightened up, painfully aware that my cousin Edward and the Earl were only an arm’s length away. My heroes. It took me three breaths to realize there was no one to fight.
No one.
In ten heartbeats, we went from desperate melee that might have won the battle for the King of France, to complete victory in our corner of the swamp. I’ve heard men say we won because the French couldn’t get at the archers. Crap. We won because the French knights didn’t want to kill archers; they wanted ransoms and chivalrous contests, so they all went for the Earl’s banner. Had just three or four of those monsters gone off to kill archers. .
But they didn’t. And Sir Edward and John Hawkwood, Sir Gareth Crawford, William Rose and I stopped them.
Heh.
The Earl started issuing orders. I did something absolutely brilliant for a raw soldier: I went and looked in the mud for the other steel gauntlet. They were a fine fit, and I knew what I wanted.
I wanted armour. I wanted to be able to go toe-to-toe with the French. I had learned a lot in one fight. I had learned that if you want to fight mounted, you need a good horse, and that if you want to fight on foot, you have to wear gauntlets.
See?
I got the second gauntlet out of the mud. It had a fancy engraved brass cuff, and that was just above the muck. I spent three or four very long minutes cleaning the muck out, and when I put it on my hand, the leather glove, a nice German chamois, was like slime, or the inside of a dead man’s entrails.
I didn’t care.
All over the edge of the marsh, archers were looting the dead or taking the wounded for ransoms. We’d cut down sixty of the richest men in France — just sixty, of 12,000 — but we broke the back of the French Marshal Audreham’s attack. The great man himself was taken prisoner a few horse lengths from where I was cleaning a dead man’s gauntlets, and brought to the Earl.
Again, being green, I thought we’d won.
But being halfway to canny, I looked around and saw that everyone older than me was either combing the ground for arrows or looting, and all of them looked like we weren’t done.
I drew the right conclusion.
A page boy emerged from the mud and now-trampled reeds and handed me the reins of my gelding, who didn’t even have the grace to look sorry. I thanked the boy — even then thinking that might have been me, holding the horses — and walked my horse to the edge of the marsh, where Oxford was drinking water from a cup and looking up the ridge to where the rest of the English Army was straightening itself out. The bulk of the French knights had fallen on Warwick and the old Earl of Salisbury. They’d all failed, although they’d probably come closest against us.
But by our saviour, the plain — from the top of the next ridge, where Cardinal Talleyrand had held his peace conference, all the way to the place where the Noailles Road crossed the Poitiers Road — was full of French soldiers.
For a moment I couldn’t breathe, and I’m pretty sure every Englishman there felt the same.
How could there be so much armour in one place?
It was as if the fields of Noailles had grown a crop of iron and steel.
The French chivalry had dismounted.
And now they were coming.
They were in six great divisions, with banners prominently displayed. I knew a few. In the centre of the rear was the great red blot that was the Oriflamme, the sacred banner of St Denis and France. Under it would be Geoffrey de Charny, the best knight in the world, and the King of France.
I could see the Dauphin’s banner in the front. I was too green to know who the others were, but every great lord in France was present — I hadn’t known there were that many knights in the world — and they started up the valley at the Prince and Salisbury.
The Earl of Oxford ordered his archers forward to the edge of the firm ground. We wouldn’t be taken by surprise again — armoured men on foot can be fast, but not as fast as horsemen. Our archers formed neater ranks, and boys and camp servants brought up more sheaves of arrows as we began to loose them into the flank of the French advance.
The French flinched away.
The Earl turned to me. ‘Judas!’ he said. ‘Go to the Prince and tell me what he desires. Tell him how we fare here.’