Martin said to Caris: “I don’t know why my master is so intemperate.”
Caris said thoughtfully: “I suppose he has to prove that he’s brave enough to rule, even though by an accident of birth he’s not the king.”
Martin shot her a sharp look. “You’re very wise, for a mere boy.”
Caris avoided his eye, and vowed to remember her false identity. There was no hostility in Martin’s voice, but he was suspicious. As a surgeon, he would be familiar with the subtle differences in bone structure between men and women, and he might have noticed that Christophe and Michel de Longchamp were abnormal. Fortunately, he did not press the matter.
The sky began to cloud over, but the air was still warm and humid. Woodland appeared on the left, and Martin told Caris this was the Forest of Crécy. They could not be far from the English – but now Caris wondered how she was going to detach herself from the French and join the English without being killed by one side or the other.
The effect of the forest was to crowd the left flank of the marching army, so that the road on which Caris was riding became jam-packed with troops, the different divisions getting hopelessly mixed up.
Couriers came down the line with new orders from the king: the army was instructed to halt and make camp. Caris’s hopes rose: now she would have a chance to get ahead of the French army. There was an altercation between Charles and a courier, and Martin went to Charles’s side to listen. He came back looking incredulous. “Count Charles is refusing to obey the orders!” he said.
“Why?” Caris asked in dismay.
“He thinks his brother is over-cautious. He, Charles, will not be so lily-livered as to halt before such a weak enemy.”
“I thought everyone had to obey the king in battle.”
“They should. But nothing is more important to French noblemen than their code of chivalry. They would die rather than do something cowardly.”
The army marched on in defiance of its orders. “I’m glad you two are here,” Martin said. “I’m going to need your help again. Win or lose, there will be a lot of wounded men by sundown.”
Caris realized she could not escape. But somehow she no longer wanted to get away. In fact she felt a strange eagerness. If these men were mad enough to maim one another with swords and arrows, she could at least come to the aid of the wounded.
Soon the crossbowmen’s leader, Ottone Doria, came riding back through the crowd – not without difficulty, given the crush – to speak to Charles of Alençon. “Halt your men!” he shouted at the count.
Charles took offence. “How dare you give orders to me?”
“The orders come from the king! We are to halt – but my men can’t stop, because of yours pushing from behind!”
“Then let them march on.”
“We are within sight of the enemy. If we go any farther we’ll have to do battle.”
“So be it.”
“But the men have been marching all day. They’re hungry and thirsty and tired. And my crossbowmen don’t have their pavises.”
“Are they too cowardly to fight without shields?”
“Are you calling my men cowards?”
“If they won’t fight, yes.”
Ottone was quiet for a moment. Then he spoke in a low voice, and Caris could only just hear his words. “You’re a fool, Alençon. And you’ll be in hell by nightfall.” Then he turned his horse and rode away.
Caris felt water on her face, and looked up at the sky. It was beginning to rain.
49
The shower was heavy but brief and, when it cleared, Ralph looked down over the valley and saw, with a thrill of fear, that the enemy had arrived.
The English occupied a ridge that ran from south-west to north-east. At their backs, to the north-west, was a wood. In front and on both sides the hill sloped down. Their right flank looked over the town of Crécy-en-Ponthieu, which nestled in the valley of the river Maye.
The French were approaching from the south.
Ralph was on the right flank, with Earl Roland’s men, commanded by the young prince of Wales. They were drawn up in the harrow formation that had proved so effective against the Scots. To the left and right, triangular formations of archers stood, like the two teeth of a harrow. Between the teeth, set well back, were dismounted knights and men-at-arms. This was a radical innovation, and one which many knights still resisted: they liked their horses and felt vulnerable on foot. But the king was implacable: everyone on foot. In the ground in front of the knights, the men had dug pitfalls – holes in the ground a foot deep and a foot square – to trip the French horses.
On Ralph’s right, at the end of the ridge, was a novelty: three new machines called bombards, or cannons, that used explosive powder to shoot round stones. They had been dragged all the way across Normandy but so far had never been fired, and no one was sure whether they would work. Today King Edward needed to use every means at his disposal, for the enemy’s superiority was somewhere between four-to-one and seven-to-one.
On the English left flank, the earl of Northampton’s men were drawn up in the same harrow formation. Behind the front lines, a third battalion led by the king stood in reserve. Behind the king were two fall-back positions. The baggage wagons formed the first, drawn up in a circle, with non-combatants – cooks, engineers and ostlers – inside the circle with the horses. The second was the wood itself where, in the event of a rout, the remnants of the English army could flee, and the mounted French knights would find it difficult to follow.
They had been here since early morning, with nothing to eat but pea soup with onions. Ralph was wearing his armour and had been sweltering in the heat, so the rainstorm had been welcome. It had also muddied the slope up which the French would have to charge, making their approach treacherously slippery.
Ralph could guess what the French tactics would be. The Genoese crossbowmen would shoot from behind their shields, to soften up the English line. Then, when they had done enough damage, they would step aside, and the French knights would charge on their warhorses.
There was nothing so terrifying as that charge. Called the furor fransiscus, it was the ultimate weapon of the French nobility. Their code made them disregard their own safety. Those huge horses, with riders so completely armoured that they looked like iron men, simply rolled over archers, shields, swords and men-at-arms.
Of course, it did not always work. The charge could be repulsed, especially where the terrain favoured the defenders, as it did here. However, the French were not easily discouraged: they would charge again. And they had such enormous superiority in numbers that Ralph could not see how the English could hold them off indefinitely.
He was scared, but all the same he did not regret being with the army. For seven years he had lived the life of action he had always wanted, in which strong men were kings and the weak counted for nothing. He was twenty-nine, and men of action rarely lived to be old. He had committed foul sins, but had been absolved of them all, most recently this morning, by the bishop of Shiring, who was now standing next to his father the earl, armed with a vicious-looking mace – priests were not supposed to shed blood, a rule they acknowledged cursorily by using blunt weapons on the battlefield.
The crossbowmen in their white coats reached the foot of the slope. The English archers, who had been sitting down, their arrows stuck point-first into the ground in front of them, now began to stand up and string their bows. Ralph guessed that most of them felt what he did, a mixture of relief that the long wait was over and fear at the thought of the odds against them.
Ralph thought there was plenty of time. He could see that the Genoese did not have the heavy wooden pavises that were an essential element of their tactics. The battle would not start until the shields were brought, he felt sure.