Englishmen saw the second attack closing and they straightened and hoisted weapons. The second French battle had reached the first and the newcomers gave a huge shout. “Saint Denis! Montjoie! Montjoie!”
“Saint George!” the English responded, and the hunting howls started again, the mocking sound of men inviting their quarry to come and die.
But the second battle could not reach the English because the survivors of the first were in their way, and they could only push those survivors forward, and so they churned through the mud, lances leveled, driving tired men onto the heaps of dead and onto the English blades beyond. The noise rose, the clash of steel and the screams of the dying and the desperate blare of trumpets as eight thousand new French men-at-arms went to the killing ground.
And Lanferelle went for the archers.
The women and servants fled from the English baggage, running uphill toward the embattled army while behind them serfs and peasants scrambled over the English wagons in search of easy plunder.
Melisande was in the stream that ran fast, full, cold and muddy, fed by the torrential rain of the last few days. She floundered in the water, pushing past low-growing branches until she saw the jupon snagged on a willow bough. She unhooked it, then forced her way through the briars and nettles that grew on the stream’s bank. She pulled the jupon over her head. The wet linen clung cold and clammy, but it covered her and she crept slowly northward through brambles and hazel scrub until she saw the horsemen.
There were fifty or sixty riders who were standing their horses to the west of the village and just watching the English encampment. They had no banner, and even if they had flown a flag Melisande doubted she would have recognized its badge, but she was certain that the small English army could never have spared so many horsemen to linger behind their line. That meant these riders were French, and Melisande, though she was French herself, now thought of the horsemen as her enemy and so she crouched in the bushes, hiding her bright surcoat behind a thornbush.
Then a new anxiety struck her. The surcoat covered her, but it also gnawed at her soul. “Forgive me,” she prayed to the Virgin, “for wearing the jupon. Let Nick live.”
She sensed no answer. There was just silence in her head.
She had sworn not to wear the jupon, believing that wearing her father’s badge would doom Nick to death in the high plowland, but now she was wearing the badge of the sun and the falcon, and the Virgin had given her no answer, and she knew she was breaking her bargain with heaven. She shivered, cold and wet, and suddenly trembled.
Nick would die, she was sure of it.
So she took the jupon off so that Nick might live.
And she crouched. She was praying, naked, cold and frightened. And from the north, beyond the horsemen and beyond the village and beyond the skyline, the sound of battle rose again.
“We killed them before,” Thomas Evelgold yelled, “and we can kill them again! Kill for England!”
“For Wales!” a man shouted.
“For Saint George!” another man called.
“For Saint David!” the Welshman responded and on that battle cry the archers surged forward to attack the new enemy. They had already savaged the first French battle, and some men reckoned they would become rich from the prisoners they had taken. Those prisoners, without helmets and with their hands tied with spare bow cords, were behind the stakes, guarded there by a handful of wounded archers. Now the bowmen went to make new corpses and take new prisoners.
They went in a rush, and by now they knew how to take down men-at-arms who could not move in the thick mud, and so the archers crashed into the flank of the French and they hammered their enemy to make a new line of dead men, most stabbed through an eye by an archer’s knife after they had been felled by a hammer blow. The screams were unending. The plateau seethed with mud-spattered steel-clad men who lumbered toward the archers, pushed onto them by the thick ranks of men behind, and the clumsy men tripped on bodies, were smashed on their helmets, were murdered with knives, and still they came. Some wore gold or silver chains around their necks, or wore armor that, by its magnificence, proclaimed the wearer’s wealth or position, and those men the archers tried to capture. They would kill the rich man’s companions and, like deerhounds about a bayed stag, would taunt and threaten the man until he pulled off his gauntlet.
“Come on, you bastard!” Tom Scarlet jeered at a man whose white surcoat bore the badge of a red swan. “Come on!” The Frenchman was watching him, blue eyes visible through a raised visor. His helmet was chased with silver swirls and his red velvet sword belt was studded with golden lozenges. He picked his way among the corpses, lunged with his lance at Scarlet’s belly, and Scarlet swatted the lance away with his poleax. A second Frenchman, wearing the same swan insignia, slashed a broad-bladed sword at the poleax, but the steel bounced off the iron-sheathed staff. Scarlet drove the ax hard forward, cracking its spike against the swan-badged belly armor and the man staggered back. The swordsman struck again and Scarlet just managed to block the cut with the ax shaft, then Will Sclate was beside him and grunted as he swung his poleax, which crushed the swordsman’s helmet as though it were made of parchment. The helmet collapsed, bursting at its seams in a spray of blood and brains, and Sclate, huge and vicious, drew the hammerhead back.
“We want him, Will! Bastard’s rich!” Tom Scarlet shouted and he slammed the poleax into the rich man again, and the lord, Scarlet was sure he opposed a nobleman, struck with his lance and this time Scarlet seized the lance one-handed and tugged hard. The man stumbled forward, tripping, and Scarlet gripped the bottom rim of the man’s helmet and dragged him out of the killing line. Will Sclate was hammering down more men, helped by a dozen of Sir John’s archers, as Scarlet turned his prisoner over. He crouched and grinned into the man’s face. “Rich, are you?”
The man stared back with hatred, so Scarlet drew his knife. He held the point just over the man’s left eyeball. “If you’re rich,” he said, “you live, and if you’re poor, you die.”
“Je suis le comte de Pavilly,” the man said, “je me rends! Je me rends!”
“Does that mean you’re rich?” Scarlet asked.
“Behind you, Tom!” Hook’s voice bellowed, and Tom Scarlet turned to see Frenchmen coming toward him, and at that moment the Count of Pavilly drove his own knife up into Tom Scarlet’s groin. Scarlet screeched, the count heaved up from the mud, and stabbed again, this time into Tom Scarlet’s belly, ripping and cutting, and then Will Sclate’s poleax swung in a hay-cutting slash and the ax blade tore into the Count of Pavilly’s face, breaking his remaining teeth and driving their fragments to the back of his skull. His blood mingled with Tom Scarlet’s. The two bodies, rich man and poor man, were lying together as Sclate ripped his blade from the snagging tangle of steel and bone before being driven back by the sudden rush of Frenchmen.
And Hook was also being driven back.
A wedge of Frenchmen was crashing into the archers. So far the archers had been winning because they attacked and because they were more mobile than their enemy, but at last the French had found a way to carry the fight back to the bowmen. They came shoulder to shoulder and they let the archers waste their blows by parrying instead of cutting back, and if an archer slipped, or swung too hard and was slow to recover his balance, a blade would flicker and an Englishman would sink into the mud to be hammered with a mace. “Just kill them!” the Sire de Lanferelle shouted as he led the wedge. “One at a time! God will give us time to kill them all! Saint Denis! Montjoie!” He sensed victory now. Up to this moment the French had panicked and had allowed themselves to be driven like cattle to the winter slaughter, but Lanferelle was calm, he was deadly and he was confident, and more and more Frenchmen came to follow him, sensing at last that someone had taken command of their destiny.