Thornbury got to his feet. ‘Come back in a few days,’ he said. ‘Send Perkin or Robert to make sure of your welcome.’
We were all on our feet.
‘You mean to say,’ said Richard, ‘that the King of England, having made a treaty with the King of France based on his ransom, tipped you off to come and steal that ransom? So he could abrogate the treaty?’
‘And beggar France?’ I put in.
Thornbury spat. ‘You two children need to go to school. This is the world. We’re not knights of spotless renkown. We’re soldiers. We kill and maim. That’s what we do. If the King orders us to do something and it will make us all rich, who are we to question it? We should have picked up 400,000 florins when we took this town. Think of that, you two pious fucks — 400,000 florins. Your share would have been between 400 and 800 florins each. Enough to buy all the French girls in the world. Buy masses, if you want. Buy an indulgence from the Pope, if that’s what your pretty little conscience needs.’ He glared at Richard. ‘Don’t come back until you’ve mastered your tender soul, Monsieur. It’ll get you killed. Until you do, you are not welcome in this company.’
He pushed past me and left.
I stood there, breathing hard, then I looked at Richard. He was nearly red, he was so furious. ‘I will never come back,’ he shouted at John Thornbury. ‘Tell Sir John Hawkwood that I spit on him.
‘I doubt he cares,’ Thornbury shouted back.
I suppose we should have been worried that the Gascons would attack us, or that Hawkwood would take some revenge, but it didn’t happen like that. We collected our loot and summoned our people — Ned and John; Perkin and Robert; Arnaud and Belier; Amory and Jack and the other six. And the girl, whose name I didn’t know, who stared in stony silence. She’d eat and dress herself, but she hadn’t said one word since she came along with us.
‘Friends,’ I said, ‘Richard and I have been dismissed from Sir John’s company. We are not short on money and we can continue wages.’ My confident speech petered out — I had no idea where I was going or why, so I guess I frowned.
Richard nodded. ‘If you come with us, there could be some hard times,’ he said.
Arnaud laughed aloud. ‘Hard times?’ he asked. He shook his head. ‘I’ve eaten more in the last month than in the last five years.’
Belier said nothing, but I saw his eyes on the woman. Even stone-faced and silent, she was pretty. More than pretty.
‘Leave her alone,’ I said.
John Hughes nodded. ‘What do you reckon, gentles?’ he asked. ‘Take service with another lord? Petit Mechin has a company — and I hear he hates Camus like we do.’
In that moment, I loved John Hughes. The words ‘hates Camus like we do’, that moment of solidarity, rang like a clarion and was engraved on my heart.
‘Where’s Mechin?’ I asked. ‘Or Seguin de Badefol?’
Richard shook his head. ‘I think we should leave this life.’
Even in the circumstances, I remember being stunned. ‘And do what?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I only know that if I don’t walk away soon, this will be the sum of who I am.’
I heard Emile, then: But that need not be the sum of who we are.
They all came with us, and we rode out of the gates of Pont-Saint-Esprit on the first day of the new year, 1361.
You want to hear about Brignais, so I’ll spare you the whole tale of my next year. We rode with de Badefol, and we came in sight of the Mediterranean, and swept like a horde of locusts along the Cote d’Azur until, by August, we came to Narbonne. The woman we’d taken — did we save her? I’m still not sure — rode with us. She didn’t speak, and nor did she lie with any of us. When an archer tried, I hit him.
She also didn’t bathe or brush her hair or behave like a woman, and after a few weeks, her presence was a burden on every campfire. We didn’t even know her name, so we called her Milady.
We took some small towns, but in general, the Narbonnais and their cousins in the Rouergue were ready for us. Their towns were strong and well-garrisoned, and we were always short of food and fodder, so we could never sit down to lay siege to so much as a fortified house without feeling hunger. We moved fast, trying to repeat the victories of the fifties, when companies of English and Gascon freebooters had surprised towns all over France, but the easy pickings were gone, and by a process of elimination of the weakest, only the strong remained.
The knights and militia of Carcassonne and Toulouse knew their business — perhaps having Gascons as neighbours had made them hard. They shadowed us night and day, struck our camps, killed our sentries, stole our horses and murdered our sick and wounded. Not that they had it all their own way. When we caught a party of them, the tables were turned, and if a man of Carcassonne wasn’t worth a ransom and we took him in arms, we hung him from a tree.
One day in May — already hot, under a magnificent blue sky — we fought four Provencal knights at a ford. We’d found a dovecote in which to camp, and they’d seen our smoke and come at us — four mounted knights and a dozen of their own routiers with spears and helmets.
It was a bitter little fight, with no quarter asked or given. I dropped one of their knights in the ford with my lance, and Richard got another, then we were fighting for our lives. Ned and John made all the difference, and as we fought on, they stood on the bank and slowly killed their way through our opponents, unhorsing the mounted men and killing the unarmoured footmen.
Finally, the last knight and half a dozen footmen broke and ran.
We killed them.
I rode the knight down, caught him and beat him from the saddle with my sword. Richard put his sword through a gap in the man’s coat of plates while he writhed on the ground, but he never requested our mercy. Then we chased the footmen.
All of them.
It took us some time, and when we returned to the ford, John and Ned were stripping the corpses with Arnaud and Belier. A slim young man was just lacing his hose on the river bank. I didn’t know him, but Ned didn’t seem to pay him any heed.
Provencal’s were good fighters, but their equipment was antiquated — mail shirts and leather reinforcement. The smallest of them had a nice pair of steel greaves, which I admired, but my legs were about a foot too long for them. John Hughes took them and, as I watched, he gave them to the young man.
The fellow looked up at John and smiled.
I had never seen her smile, but I knew immediately that it was Milady. I was still mounted and I rode over.
She looked up at me. She didn’t appear afraid. She said, ‘I know how to fight.’ She said it as if we’d had a hundred conversations.
I was dumbfounded. ‘You washed your hair,’ I said.
‘It was filthy,’ she said. ‘I cut a lot of it off.’
‘Leave her be,’ said John in a low voice.
‘I’m going to be a man, now, if you don’t mind,’ she said.
Later, in Italy, we had twenty women in harness. We were famous for it, and the Italian men-at-arms shat themselves to think they were fighting women — and losing. But in the summer of 1361, there weren’t a lot of women fighting in armour in the world. I thought about it.
‘That’s fine,’ I said.
John Hughes gave me a small, approving nod.
Milady took a place in our little company as if born to it. She could fight and she could forage. She was small, but her riding was a far sight better than mine or even Richard’s, and her use of the lance was as pretty as. . as she might have been.
The next night, when Richard produced his dice box, she joined in.
I still have no idea what happened. It was as if she lost her soul, and then, one day, she found it — or another soul, the soul of a harder person. A man.
No. Not a man, as you’ll hear.
Her name was Janet. And in the complex cross-currents around us, as dangerous as the currents in a river when boys are swimming, the fact that she kept a woman’s name said something.