I had a borrowed lance, and I blessed du Guesclin for his patient hours of training me. I’d have been terrified of using a lance in a crowd this dense, but now I felt confident. Indeed, riding in a cavalry charge is the closest a mere man can feel to God’s angels. The power is immense. The feeling of power is. . like what priests prate of.
And riding through badly armed, poorly disciplined peasants is a special, evil pleasure. They stood in arms against us. They were our enemies, I had no doubt of that. I owed them for Peter.
But they were poor devils, for all that. The better armed men stayed together in clumps, and we ignored them and smashed through the men who turned to flee. It’s always that way when cavalry rides down infantry.
I’ve heard men brag about how many Jacques they killed that day. I’ll save my bragging for more worthy foes. I killed my share.
We rode over them, and up their long hill — diagonally to save our horses. Two hundred good spearmen could have held us all day on that slope, but after smashing the front line — if you can call it a line — we rode unopposed up the ridge and fell upon their camp, and the whole peasant army broke and ran for their lives.
And died.
Down on the plain, the better armed men reformed in our wake and met the whole of the King’s battle, all the dismounted knights, English and French, who went through them like the scythe cuts the wheat.
The lucky ones died there.
The unlucky ones were taken.
Their camp was full of women, and they died hard. None of them surrendered, that I remember. They knew what was in store for them.
Every child in that camp was spitted on a sword.
I have seen every horror war can offer, but here was something I didn’t expect: the worst atrocities weren’t done by us. The English did their part in the battle, and most of them rode or walked back to camp.
It was the local French knights who killed the children.
The worst was Camus. He tried to coral a group of women and coax them to surrender, and when they fought, he promised them horrible deaths and made sure his promises were carried out. I was dismounted — Goldie had taken a spear point in his breast and I was seeing to my horse — when he ordered his men to kill them all.
I didn’t want to hear any more, so I got my armoured leg over my saddle.
‘Leave one!’ he shouted. ‘Flay her face and leave her alive to tell others not to defy me!’
Sam Bibbo grabbed my reins from me and rode down the hill — I couldn’t stop him.
At the base of the hill, Sam put a hand on my shoulder. ‘You’re a nice lad,’ he said. ‘Soft, in some ways. That’s what happens — yon. Worse when a town is stormed.’
I gritted my teeth. ‘Camus is a worm. A serpent. A demon from hell.’ I thought of the man with half his face flayed away, and I knew who had massacred that town.
Sam shrugged. ‘That’s as maybe. You may do as thee list — after I take you to camp. You cannot rescue them.’ He waved at a dozen wounded men — our whole tale of casualties. ‘Poor John took an arrow in the leg — bad luck. I’ll see him well bedded.’
I followed him.
I felt like scum.
It wasn’t that I could have done anything.
It was only that, like the French lord in Hawkwood’s story, I could have died.
The pursuit of the Jacques went on for a day and a night, and whole villages were wiped out — every human creature killed — for ten miles around our camp. The celebrations started immediately, with terrified, peasant-born servants offering us wine and bread made by men and women whose blood was now fertilizing the earth.
I didn’t sleep well. John Hawkwood did, though. I know, as he shared his tent with me.
Thanks to his good offices, my safe conducts were signed by King Charles. Since we were less than a day’s ride from the Dauphin’s castle at Meaux, I collected my goods, thanked Sir John and made to leave.
Sir John rode with me until we were a mile or so from camp. He pointed to a group of riders shadowing us.
‘Bertucat means to kill you,’ he said.
‘I’d be pleased to meet him any time,’ I said. ‘When it is one to one, and not twenty of his against three of mine.’
Hawkwood nodded. ‘Twenty to three is more the Bourc’s speed. Can you take him?’
I nodded.
Hawkwood nodded back. ‘I think so, too. If I can arrange it, I’ll send word. It would do great things for your renown. And I’d like to see him wiped away, like a stain on the earth.’
‘I should be back in a day or two,’ I said.
Hawkwood embraced me and we were away.
Meaux is a mighty town, with the fortress of Marche on the opposite bank, and walls as high as ten men. It rises straight out of an island in the river, and has two bridges with wicket gates on each.
I thought — indeed, we all thought — that the rebellion was broken. So Sam and I rode along roads peopled only by the dead — mostly men cut down from behind as they fled, by the flower of French chivalry.
We passed south of Clermont, and the bodies dwindled away to none, then we came across a party of tired knights. They were all local men, knights of the Beauvais, and they saluted us as we passed.
‘We had a sharp fight this morning, messires,’ one called out. ‘The curs are not yet beaten.’
I wanted no part of them, so I rode on.
But as we saw Meaux rising out of the valley in the distance — you can see it from eight miles away — we began to see the size of the army laying siege to it.
An army the size of the one we’d just faced, or larger.
I had the wildest notion — what if every peasant in the world had risen against their lords? What if this was the end of the world? I’ve heard that in monasteries during the Plague, men died believing the whole of the human race had been destroyed, and looking at the host gathered against the walls of Meaux, I wondered the same.
We turned our weary horses north. I changed from my riding horse to Goldie and loosened my sword in its scabbard.
‘We should go back,’ Sam said.
That meant riding half the night, in the dark, on narrow, unmarked French lanes.
‘No,’ I said. We rode on down to the river Marne.
‘We’ll be killed,’ Sam said. ‘I’ll offer odds on it.’
‘I’ll take that wager,’ I said.
The ferry was open.
I’ll not belabour the point, but imagine what the ferryman was like. He cared nothing for death or rebellion. He’d never heard of Guillaulme Cale. He demanded an exorbitant fee, then he took us over the river to the north bank. The peasant army was on the south.
I felt vindicated and Sam laughed. ‘I’ll be happy to pay,’ he said.
At nightfall, we approached the royal castle of Marche from the north. We were challenged by a party of horsemen in sight of the gate, and when I said I was a messenger for the Lieutenant of Gascony, one of the men-at-arms approached.
‘What’s your name, sir?’ he asked. I knew him immediately.
He was Jean de Grailly, the Captal de Buch. I’d seen him lead the charge at Poitiers.
I raised my visor. ‘William Gold,’ I said. ‘I was at Poitiers, my lord.’
I was embraced and taken home to the castle, to dinner.
The Dauphin wasn’t at Marche. He was away in Burgundy, raising an army to fight Charles of Navarre. As it proved, he needn’t have bothered, but when he went, he had no way of knowing.
In the meantime, Etienne Marcel had sent an army of Parisian militia to snatch the Dauphin at his headquarters, at Meaux. And the Mayor of the town opened the gates to the Parisians.
The Parisians joined hands with the Jacques.
Wait, lads. I know you want to hear about the battles, but there’s a delicious irony to all this. Charles of Navarre was making himself a hero to the nobility of France in crushing the Jacques. The Dauphin was ruining his standing as the ‘first noble’ by ignoring the rising.
But — at least wherever I was — the Jacques were allied with Marcel’s communal troops, and they were acting for the King of Navarre. God knows, the attempt to seize the Dauphin at Meaux was all for King Charles.