There was nothing to be done until the fires had burned themselves out, and only then could the bodies be dragged from the ashes. The burned dead had been blackened and grotesquely shrunk by the heat so that even the tallest men looked like children. The dead villagers were taken to the graveyard for a proper burial, but the bodies of the four crossbowmen were dragged down to the beach and there stripped naked.
‘Did you do this?’ Sir Giles asked Thomas.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then I thank you.’
‘My first dead Frenchmen,’ Thomas said angrily.
‘No,’ Sir Giles said, and he lifted one of the men’s tunics to show Thomas the badge of a green chalice embroidered on its sleeve. ‘They’re from Genoa,’ Sir Giles said. ‘The French hire them as crossbowmen. I’ve killed a few in my time, but there are always more where they come from. You know what the badge is?’
‘A cup?’
Sir Giles shook his head. ‘The Holy Grail. They reckon they have it in their cathedral. I’m told it’s a great green thing, carved from an emerald and brought back from the crusades. I should like to see it one day.’
‘Then I shall bring it to you,’ Thomas said bitterly, ‘just as I shall bring back our lance.’
Sir Giles stared to sea. The raiders’ boats were long gone and there was nothing out there but the sun on the waves. ‘Why would they come here?’ he asked.
‘For the lance.’
‘I doubt it was even real,’ Sir Giles said. He was red-faced, white-haired and heavy now. ‘It was just an old spear, nothing more.’
‘It’s real,’ Thomas insisted, ‘and that’s why they came.’
Sir Giles did not argue. ‘Your father,’ he said instead, ‘would have wanted you to finish your studies.’
‘My studies are done,’ Thomas said flatly. ‘I’m going to France.’
Sir Giles nodded. He reckoned the boy was far better suited to be a soldier than a priest. ‘Will you go as an archer?’ he asked, looking at the great bow on Thomas’s shoulder, ‘or do you want to join my house and train to be a man-at-arms?’ He half smiled. ‘You’re gently born, you know?’
‘I’m bastard born,’ Thomas insisted.
‘Your father was of good birth.’
‘You know what family?’ Thomas asked.
Sir Giles shrugged. ‘He would never tell me, and if I pressed him he would just say that God was his father and his mother was the Church.’
‘And my mother,’ Thomas said, ‘was a priest’s housekeeper and the daughter of a bowyer. I shall go to France as an archer.’
‘There’s more honour as a man-at-arms,’ Sir Giles observed, but Thomas did not want honour. He wanted revenge.
Sir Giles let him choose what he wanted from the enemy’s dead and Thomas picked a mail coat, a pair of long boots, a knife, a sword, a belt and a helmet. It was all plain gear, but serviceable, and only the mail coat needed mending, for he had driven an arrow clean through its rings. Sir Giles said he owed Thomas’s father money, which may or may not have been true, but he paid it to Thomas with the gift of a four-year-old gelding. ‘You’ll need a horse,’ he said, ‘for nowadays all archers are mounted. Go to Dorchester,’ he advised Thomas, ‘and like as not you’ll find someone recruiting bowmen.’
The Genoese corpses were beheaded and their bodies left to rot while their four heads were impaled on stakes and planted along the Hook’s shingle ridge. The gulls fed on the dead men’s eyes and pecked at their flesh until the heads were flensed down to bare bones that stared vacantly to the sea.
But Thomas did not see the skulls. He had gone across the water, taken his black bow and joined the wars.
It was winter. A cold morning wind blew from the sea bringing a sour salt smell and a spitting rain that would inevitably sap the power of the bowstrings if it did not let up.
‘What it is,’ Jake said, ‘is a waste of goddamn time.’
No one took any notice of him.
‘Could have stayed in Brest,’ Jake grumbled, ‘been sitting by a fire. Drinking ale.’
Again he was ignored.
‘Funny name for a town,’ Sam said after a long while. ‘Brest. I like it, though.’ He looked at the archers. ‘Maybe we’ll see the Blackbird again?’ he suggested.
‘Maybe she’ll put a bolt through your tongue,’ Will Skeat growled, ‘and do us all a favour.’
The Blackbird was a woman who fought from the town walls every time the army made an assault. She was young, had black hair, wore a black cloak and shot a crossbow. In the first assault, when Will Skeat’s archers had been in the vanguard of the attack and had lost four men, they had been close enough to see the Blackbird clearly and they had all thought her beautiful, though after a winter campaign of failure, cold, mud and hunger, almost any woman looked beautiful. Still, there was something special about the Blackbird.
‘She doesn’t load that crossbow herself,’ Sam said, unmoved by Skeat’s surliness.
‘Of course she bloody doesn’t,’ Jake said. ‘There ain’t a woman born that can crank a crossbow.’
‘Dozy Mary could,’ another man said. ‘Got muscles like a bullock, she has.’
‘And she closes her eyes when she shoots,’ Sam said, still talking of the Blackbird. ‘I noticed.’
‘That’s because you weren’t doing your goddamn job,’ Will Skeat snarled, ‘so shut your mouth, Sam.’
Sam was the youngest of Skeat’s men. He claimed to be eighteen, though he was really not sure because he had lost count. He was a draper’s son, had a cherubic face, brown curls and a heart as dark as sin. He was a good archer though; no one could serve Will Skeat without being good.
‘Right, lads,’ Skeat said, ‘make ready.’
He had seen the stir in the encampment behind them. The enemy would notice it soon and the church bells would ring the alarm and the town walls would fill with defenders armed with crossbows. The crossbows would rip their bolts into the attackers and Skeat’s job today was to try to clear those crossbowmen off the wall with his arrows. Some chance, he thought sourly. The defenders would crouch behind their crenellations and so deny his men an opportunity to aim, and doubtless this assault would end as the five other attacks had finished, in failure.
It had been a whole campaign of failure. William Bohun, the Earl of Northampton, who led this small English army, had launched the winter expedition in hope of capturing a stronghold in northern Brittany, but the assault on Carhaix had been a humiliating failure, the defenders of Guingamp had laughed at the English, and the walls of Lannion had repulsed every attack. They had captured Tréguier, but as that town had no walls it was not much of an achievement and no place to make a fortress. Now, at the bitter end of the year, with nothing better to do, the Earl’s army had fetched up outside this small town, which was scarcely more than a walled village, but even this miserable place had defied the army. The Earl had launched attack after attack and all had been beaten back. The English had been met by a storm of crossbow bolts, the scaling ladders had been thrust from the ramparts and the defenders had exulted in each failure.
‘What