Richard paused.
‘We found one of his camps deserted. His whole area is deserted. Even the castle he holds for Knolles is empty. He’s after the convoy.’
Richard looked at me.
Richard Musard and I have fought over most of the things men fight over — women, loyalty, even money — but in some ways, we were two men with but a single will. He looked at the fog.
‘The Bourc will hit the convoy whatever we do,’ I said.
He smiled, and his smile spread until it covered his whole face.
‘And then — we save them.’ Richard shook his head. ‘Kill the Bourc, save the bishop-’
‘Sam says it is a cardinal,’ I put in.
Richard laughed aloud. ‘By God. By God. We’ll be knights in a week!’
I agreed. It all seemed like God’s will.
We had sixty men. We put all of them behind the ridge that lines the edge of the Seine, above the road, and we moved fast — at a canter — along the ridge top to our new position, which depended on my sense of the ground. I sent Sam and half a dozen of our Gascon bidets down into the valley to watch for John Hughes, while keeping a weather eye on Camus and the convoy.
As I’ve said before, waiting in ambush is one of the hardest things a soldier does. The waiting always seems to go on for ever. There’s lots of room for doubt — in fact, it’s a rare ambush where I don’t decide I’ve made an awful error.
But the two cardinals and their convoy moved across Auxerre with the reckless assurance of a drunken soldier who has just been paid. They were as brazen as an old whore, and just as well-defended.
John Hughes appeared out of the mist before we heard the convoy. He laid it all out for us — twenty men-at-arms, the number of mules, where the two great men were — in some detail. He added that there were seventy mules, ten horses and six wagons.
‘Have you seen Sam?’ I asked.
‘He’s watching the Bourc,’ Hughes said. ‘Bastard is moving along the valley.’
Tricky.
‘He wants you to let the Bourc hit the cardinals first,’ Hughes added.
Richard grunted. ‘We couldn’t stop him anyway.’ Richard looked at me. ‘Two cardinals? This will make us famous,’ he said.
I suppose I shrugged.
He shook his head. ‘I don’t like fighting for the church.’
‘Sit here if you don’t want to come,’ I said. ‘But I mean to have a piece of the Bourc.’
‘For that, I’ll join you,’ he said.
We moved along the ridge top, out of the mist and with good visibility for leagues. We moved carefully, watching and listening for the cardinal’s train at the bottom of the valley.
The mist burned off about an hour after a working man would have gone to his fields, if there had been anyone left to till the fields of the Auxerre, which there was not. As soon as the mist became transparent, the Bourc struck, his men-at-arms crashing through the riverside brush, panicking the pack animals and killing several of the papal men-at-arms in their first charge.
I brought my men up to the ridgeline and formed them. Men were still coming up and I needed every straggler. We sent our Gascon javelin men down the gullies. They moved like the cattlethieves they were, silent and almost invisible.
I saw the Bourc’s banner advance, and advance again. His men ripped into the pack animals, killing many of them outright. They opened every load, destroying manuscripts and textiles, chopping things like chalices and icons into pieces for the precious metal.
A month before, I might have done the same. But watching it was — different. And I hated the Bourc.
As the sun rose toward nones, my men reached their positions. The looters were like vultures and raven on a kill — gorging, with no notion of danger.
I looked at Richard, and he smiled and slammed down his visor.
We both raised our hands.
Our men-at-arms came forward at a canter. The bidets rose as one from their ambush and threw their darts at the horses of the Bourc’s men-at-arms, and my four English archers — all four of them at widely different points, standing in good cover with their arrows laid out before them — began to rain shafts on Camus’ troopers.
I hadn’t made a detailed plan of attack, but Richard and I knew our business; the archers were veterans of a hundred fights and as many hunts, and the Gascons, as far as I could tell, made war for sport.
Which meant, unfortunately, that the enemy Gascons knew what to do when ambushed.
The Bourc didn’t hesitate. His banner dipped once, and his men dropped the loot in their hands or scooped one more chalice into the leather bags they all carried, then they were charging down the road, low on their horses, with the lesser armed men behind. There were three or four horses down, and the javelin men were gathering in clumps to finish the dismounted riders or take them for ransom. The longbow arrows continued to reap horses. At least one shaft — probably one of Sam’s — caught a poorer man-at-arms in the unarmoured back and plucked him from the saddle.
Richard led our men-at-arms at his men-at-arms. I was already half a league off to the right, behind the fight as it developed below me, but I pressed my brute of a horse to a heavy gallop and rumbled along through a meadow of drying flowers that had recently been a monastery’s largest ploughed field. The Bourc was an evil bastard and I suspected he’d have another force. Perkin and I were all the reserve I had.
Camus saw Richard and turned towards him and his men followed. The two bands of men-at-arms were nearly equal in size, but Richard had the hill behind him. I thought it was all going well until a troop of horsemen in armour emerged from the road to the south. They were as far behind me as I was behind the fight. I stood in my stirrups, annoying my horse by trying to gallop while looking back over my cantle.
There they were, confirming my fears.
Gascons or Navaresse. A reserve — a blocking force behind the convoy, in case any of the rich priests tried to run.
It’s quite hard to count from the back of a galloping horse, but my impression was that there were as many armoured men coming up behind me as were ahead of me.
Gascons. They have no compunction about killing each other.
I knew where one of the archers was and I was going to pass his lair, so I rode down the meadow to the low stone wall and put my horse at it — not out of any desire to show my riding, but because I had no time to find a gate.
He tried to baulk.
I pricked him with both spurs. I wasn’t losing the Bourc this time.
He rose like an old cat and his hooves struck the wall — a wall no higher than my knees. We were over, and I was on the road. I knew arrows had come from here. I pulled on my reins and saw an apiary — abandoned, of course. ‘John!’ I roared.
It wasn’t John it was Sam. He appeared from the trees.
‘More men — behind me on the road. Slow them!’ I called. I had a moment’s hesitation — it was Sam’s last fight and I was ordering him to cover our rear.
He waved and went back to the trees.
I got my horse back to a massive canter and headed north along the riverbank.
The fight on the hillside was about 200 heartbeats old by the time I rode around the woods — a melee that was already spreading across the hillside. The Bourc’s men were holding — I assumed they were so bold because they knew they had reinforcements coming.
And a fortune in gold hanging in bags from their saddles.
I put my horse’s head at the Bourc’s banner and lowered my lance. Getting the lance into the rest was no longer the struggle it had been for me in the early days. Nobly born boys did this from age eight or nine, and I hadn’t started until fifteen or sixteen, but I was improving. I got my lance down, flipped my visor down with my left hand and tried to line my lance point up with the Bourc’s banner-bearer. I couldn’t find the bastard himself.
It is hard to see from inside a basinet. Until I closed my visor, I had some appreciation of the battlefield. Once I closed it, I could see one opponent. There’s a lesson there somewhere.