to the edge of the trees and, when the leading horsemen of the Count of Labrouillade’s straggling column were less than one hundred yards away, they loosed their arrows.
The Hellequin had become rich on two things. The first was their leader, Thomas of Hookton, who was a good soldier, a supple thinker, and clever in battle, but there were plenty of men in southern France who could match le Bâtard’s cleverness. What they could not do was deploy the Hellequin’s second advantage, the English war bow, and it was that which had made Thomas and his men wealthy.
It was a simple thing. A stave of yew, a little longer than the height of a man and preferably cut from one of the lands close to the Mediterranean. The bowyer would take the stave and shape it, keeping the dense heartwood on one side and the springy sapwood on the other, and he would paint it to keep the moisture trapped in the stave, then nock it with two tips of horn that held the cord, which was woven from fibres of hemp. Some archers liked to add strands of their woman’s hair to the cord, claiming that it stopped the strings from breaking, but Thomas, in twelve years of fighting, had found no difference. The cord was whipped where the arrow rested on the string, and that was the war bow. A peasant’s weapon of yew, hemp and horn, shooting an arrow made from ash, hornbeam or birch, tipped with a steel point and fledged with feathers taken from the wing of a goose, and always taken from the same wing so that the feathers curved in the same direction.
The war bow was cheap and it was lethal. Brother Michael was not a weak man, but he could not draw a bow’s cord more than a hand’s breadth, but Thomas’s archers hauled the string back to their ears and did it sixteen or seventeen times a minute. They had muscles like steel, humps of muscle on their backs, broad chests, thick arms, and the bow was useless without the muscles. Any man could shoot a crossbow, and a good crossbow outranged the yew bow, but it cost a hundred times as much to manufacture and it took five times longer to reload, and, while the crossbowman was winding the ratchet to haul back his cord, the English archer would close the range and shoot a half-dozen points. It was the English and the Welsh archers who had the muscle, and they began training as children, just as Hugh, Thomas’s son, was training now. He had a small bow and his father expected him to shoot three hundred arrows a day. He must shoot and shoot and shoot until he no longer had to think about where the arrow would go, but would simply loose in the knowledge that the arrow would speed where he intended, and every day the muscle grew until, in ten years’ time, Hugh would be ready to stand in the archers’ line and loose goose-feathered death from a great war bow.
Thomas had thirty archers at the edge of the wood and in the first half-minute they launched more than one hundred and fifty arrows, and it was not war, but massacre. An arrow could pierce chain mail at two hundred paces, but none of the Count of Labrouillade’s men were wearing armour or carrying shields, all of which they had loaded onto packhorses. Some of the men had leather coats, but all had taken off their heavy plate or mail, and so the arrows slashed into them, wounding men and horses, driving them to instant chaos. The crossbowmen were on foot and a long way behind the count’s horsemen, and anyway they were cumbered with their sacks of plunder. It would take minutes for them to ready for battle, and Thomas did not give them the minutes. Instead, as the arrows plunged into the screaming horses and fallen riders, Thomas led his twenty-two men-at-arms out of the woods onto the count’s flank.
Thomas’s men were mounted on destriers, the great stallions that could carry the weight of man, armour and weapons. They had not brought lances, for those weapons were heavy and would have slowed their march; instead they drew their swords or wielded axes and maces. Many carried a shield on which the black-barred badge of le Bâtard was painted, and Thomas, once they were out of the trees, turned the line to face the enemy and swung his sword blade down as a signal to advance.
They trotted forward, knee to knee. Rocks studded the high grassland and the line would divide around them, then rejoin. The men were in mail. Some had added pieces of plate armour, a breastplate or perhaps an espalier to protect the shoulders, and all wore bascinets, the simple open-faced helmet that let a man see in battle. The arrows continued to fall. Some of the count’s horsemen were trying to escape, wrenching their reins to ride back northwards, but the thrashing of the wounded horses obstructed them and they could see the black line of Hellequin men-at-arms coming from the side, and some, in desperation, hauled out their swords. A handful broke clear and raced back towards the northern woods where the crossbowmen might be found, while another handful gathered around their lord, the count, who had one arrow in his thigh despite Thomas’s orders that the count was not to be killed. ‘A dead man can’t pay his debts,’ Thomas had said, ‘so shoot anyone else, but make certain Labrouillade lives.’ Now the count was trying to turn his horse, but his weight was too great and the horse was wounded, and he could not turn, and then the Hellequin spurred into the canter, the swords were lowered to the lunge position, and the arrows stopped.
The archers stopped for fear of hitting their own horsemen, then discarded their bows and pulled out swords and ran to join the killing as the men-at-arms struck.
The sound of the charge striking home was like butchers’ cleavers hitting carcasses. Men screamed. Some threw down swords and held their hands out in mute surrender. Thomas, not as comfortable on horseback as he was with a bow, had his lunge deflected by a sword. He crashed past the man, backswung his blade that hammered harmlessly against leather, then swept it forward into a man’s red hair. That man went down, spilling from his saddle, and the Hellequin were turning, coming back to finish the enemy. A rider wearing a black hat plumed with long white feathers lunged a sword at Thomas’s belly. The blade slid off his mail, and Thomas brought his sword back in a wild swing that sliced into the man’s face just as Arnaldus, one of the Gascons in the Hellequin, speared the man’s spine with another sword. The count’s rider was making a high-pitched keening sound, shaking uncontrollably, blood pouring from his shattered face. He let his sword drop, and Arnaldus speared him again. He fell slowly sideways. An archer seized the reins of the man’s horse. The dying man was the last to offer any resistance. The count’s men had been taken by surprise, they had fought an unequal skirmish against men in armour whose lives were spent fighting, and the struggle was over in seconds. A dozen of the count’s men escaped, the rest were dead or prisoners, and the count himself was captured. ‘Archers!’ Thomas shouted. ‘Bows!’ Their job would be to watch the northern woods in case the crossbowmen had fight in them, though Thomas doubted any would want to fight after their lord was captured. A dozen archers collected arrows, cutting them out of dead and wounded horses, picking them from the ground and filling their arrow bags. The prisoners were herded to one side and made to yield their weapons as Thomas walked his horse to where the wounded count lay on the turf. ‘My lord,’ he greeted him, ‘you owe me money.’
‘You were paid!’ the count blustered.
‘Sam,’ Thomas called to the archer, ‘if his lordship argues with me you can fill him with arrows.’ He spoke in French, which Sam understood, and the bowman put an arrow on his string and offered the count a happy grin.
‘My lord,’ Thomas said again, ‘you owe me money.’
‘You could have pleaded your case,’ Labrouillade said.
‘Pleaded? Argued? Wrangled? Delayed? Why should I let your lawyers weave spells?’ Thomas shook his head. ‘Where are the genoins you took from Paville?’
The count thought of claiming that the coins were still at Villon’s castle, but the archer had his string half drawn and le Bâtard’s face was implacable, and so the count reluctantly told the truth. ‘They are in Labrouillade.’
‘Then you will send one of your men-at-arms to Labrouillade,’ Thomas said courteously, ‘with orders that the money is to be brought here. And when it is, my lord, we shall let you go.’
‘Let me go?’ The count was surprised.
‘What use are you to me?’ Thomas asked. ‘It would take months to raise your ransom, my lord, and in those years you’d consume a greater value than the ransom in food. No, I shall let you go. And now, my lord, when you have sent for the coins you might permit my men to take that arrow from your thigh?’
A man-at-arms was summoned from the prisoners, given a