And Geoffrey de Charny.
Sir Thomas plunged in like a young knight bent on errantry, and he led the squires forward to the man who held the Oriflamme. De Charny was so deadly, and so renowned, that there was empty space around him.
Men were curiously hesitant to strike the King of France or his young son. The fighting had an odd flavour, almost a tournament air, except that they were beyond desperation and we were very, very tired.
Sir Thomas put himself at our head and led us forward.
De Charny was not a small man, but nor was he one of the giants who tower over a battlefield, a head taller than other men. He wore a plain steel harness and a red wool cote over it, and he wore a single star on his helmet for the Order of the Star. When he saw Sir Thomas, he raised his spear, saluted Sir Edward, and stepped out of the huddle of men protecting the King-
And Sir Edward was dead.
He took the French knight’s spear just under his aventail, through the neck. De Charny was so fast that I don’t think Sir Edward ever knew to parry.
De Charny pulled the blade free of my knight’s neck like the tongue of an adder wagging and reversed his grip, then he struck down, hard, through Richard Beauchamp’s guard as if his heavy spear were a sword, and then the spear point glided into Beauchamp’s eye and out again as the great knight turned his cut into a thrust in mid-motion. As Beauchamp fell off his spear, he reversed it again and felled Diccon with a simple staff-blow to the temple, delivered with crushing force.
The next squire to face him was Harry Dearpoint, and he was already panicked, and didn’t set himself to fight before he had the point in under his arm to the lung.
We were saved by the Bourc Camus. He threw himself on de Charny, pinning the man’s arms. But de Charny flipped the Gascon right over his body and slammed him — in armour — to earth. Camus leaped to his feet, apparently unhurt, and faced the lion, but a blow from the staff broke his nose and he was down.
The Bourc gave me time to gather myself. I was standing like a fool with only a heavy dagger, and de Charny stepped over the Bourc Camus.
I tackled him. It had worked on my last opponent, but my last opponent hadn’t been Geoffrey de Charny. I got my arms around him, but he kneed me in the gut with a steel-clad knee, turned me and raked my arms with his spurs. I was trying to hold on, trying to dig my rondel into his side, but he was wearing a complex and very expensive coat of plates and my dagger wouldn’t bite. Then other men were by me. I had his waist with one arm — something had gone wrong with my left — as I slid down into a well of pain. Then I was on the ground, but luck — fortune? The will of God? — put his ankle in my hand. I got his spur and pulled as hard as I could, and somewhere miles above me, a Gascon pushed at him with a poleaxe. .
. . and he fell.
I’m told that when we brought him down, there were eight of us on him. One — Tancreville, one of the Prince’s squires — was dying from de Charny’s dagger in his bowels, but he had the French knight’s other leg.
I still had my dagger. I was being pushed into the mud, and another man was standing on my hip. The pain was nothing to the pressure. I got the tip of my dagger in behind his leg armour and pushed.
To be honest, I think I gave him his death wound, but Seguin de Badefol and John Hawkwood both claim the same thing. Or they did until they died.
I’ll tell you this, though.
He faced at least fifteen men-at-arms at once, and killed six, wounded five more and died fighting. I never saw his like.
But even while I lay in the mud — dry dust mixed with blood — with a broken left arm, two punctures in my left leg, and a bump on my scalp the side of a goose’s egg, I said to myself that that was the knight I wanted to be.
Christ, he was good.
God have mercy on his soul, for he lived the life of which we dream, and died better than any man I’ve ever seen.
I went in and out of consciousness. Thank God, I wasn’t badly wounded, but I had an accumulation of cuts, scrapes, breaks and bruises that lasted me for weeks. I lay by de Charny for over an hour. A few paces away, King John of France was captured. I lay there while the very flower of French chivalry were cut down, killed or taken prisoner by a few hundred Englishmen and Gascons. The archers were loose now, killing or taking men prisoner, and many a tavern and inn house from London to Durham was built on the proceeds of that hour.
The Prince received the King of France as his prisoner, and treated him as a chivalrous man would treat a King, bowing low and giving him the best of everything. And the Prince knighted a dozen men at the top of the hill. He knighted John Hawkwood, although there are some who dispute it. He might have knighted me, but I was lying in the mud, and no one was collecting the English wounded yet, because everyone was so tired.
It was thirst, of all things, that drove me to my feet. But I was in some sort of fever dream, and I stumbled about a few paces. Men were looting de Charny’s corpse, and suddenly that seemed unseemly to me. I drove them off, like a lion clearing vultures off a corpse, and they — Gascon brigands, every one — reviled me, but fled.
Fuck them. He deserved better than to be stripped naked and left to rot.
In the end, I sat down hard, and I was looking into his face. Was he still alive, even then? I don’t think so.
But he told me things anyway.
You laugh.
A battlefield is the strangest place, friends. So many men have died that the ties that bind this world and the next are frayed, and the other world is close. God send you never lie all night with a desperate wound and no water, listening to the four-footed wolves feed on bodies while the two-footed kind take gold and slit throats.
He told me, ‘He is worth most who does the most.’
Eventually, I took his sabatons, his spurs and his dagger, which was clutched in his right hand.
That’s how it was.
And then John Hawkwood found me. I was halfway from de Charny’s cooling corpse to the river, lying face down in the dust. Sir John never told me why he found me — I assume he was looting. There’s something there, like a passion play: that Sir John Hawkwood was knighted by the Prince on the battlefield, and went straight back to picking corpses for gold.
Of course, I had, too.
He gave me water and helped me to camp. Water restored me to a dramatic degree, and the other world fell away, although as we crossed the field, me supported on his mail-clad arm, I thought that Sir Edward was leaning on one elbow waving to me, while Richard Beauchamp cursed me, and I wept.
The Earl of Oxford came and sat with me later. He congratulated me on my courage, and told me that my prisoner was still safe and was still mine.
‘Sir Edward is dead,’ I blurted.
A shadow crossed his face. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘De Charny killed him.’ I must have sounded strange. ‘With one blow.’
Oxford met my eyes and put a hand on my arm. ‘Yes,’ he agreed.
‘One blow!’ I said, my voice rising. ‘He never even got his guard up!’
Oxford leaned forward. ‘Yes,’ he said sadly. ‘Sometimes it is like that.’
‘He was a fine knight!’ I said. I remember that I said that, because then I burst into tears.
Oxford sat with me for a long time. He was a good lord.
Later, about dark, Hawkwood came back. ‘If you got yourself a full harness, I’m sure the Earl would have you as a man-at-arms,’ he said. Ever the businessman, Sir John.
‘I can’t afford a harness,’ I said, or something equally foolish.
He laughed. His hands were brown with dried blood, and I saw that he had a small pile of iron gauntlets — the most saleable item of armour — on the ground by his tent. ‘It’s free,’ he said, waving at the field. ‘I confess that the process of trying pieces on can be. . wearing. Come on, Judas. I’ll see you right.’