Into The Fire (3 page)

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. They should have surrendered a week ago. Rustbeard knows: he spent five stinking winter months masquerading as a Frenchman in the heart of Orléans, speaking in dusty corners with men whose ears were open to gold and promises.

Listen to me. Your weak and mewling king does not love Orléans; he languishes in Chinon and will not send aid. Send word to the English that you’ll open the gates after Easter and we shall all be safe, our fortunes made. William Glasdale commands them and he’s a decent man. He will not sack a city that has opened its gates. Let it only get to Easter and you will have done your duty …

Gold makes men nod. Promises extract oaths and the gates would have swung smoothly back on Ascension Day, except that a letter came near the end of Lent,
To the citizens of Orléans, in God’s name, from the Maid …
and all his work undone.

And now this.

The smoke drifts and sways, a traitor-curtain hiding attackers and attacked alike. But in the mess below is order, and— Ladders?
Fuck!

‘Arms! God damn you! Arms to the south side!’

His sword is not sufficiently long, but there are arms here enough for the end of days: hammers, archers’ mauls, falchions, big two-handed bastard swords, daggers, pikes, all manner of polearms; dead men’s weapons.

A hammer lies to his left, three feet of ash haft, leaden head. Tod Rustbeard is not the tallest man in the English army, but his chest is broad and he can lift gun stones one in each hand and run with them; he has the power of a smith if not the skill.

The big two-handed hammer floats to his grip. He braces his feet, sweeps and sweeps and makes the sweep a swing, a full circle-spin, a whirl that lifts an ox-head’s worth of weight in a cartwheel of death, and when he has it up to speed he aims himself at the ladder that has come up over the stone lip and the face that is appearing there and he lurches one step, two, and the wheeling lead barely falters as he makes contact and the face dissolves in a bright, bright plash of blood.

More spit in his beard. More gore on his mail. And fragments of bone and tooth and eye.

He kills two more, still spinning, but there are more and ever more. He sets the head of the hammer on the ladder’s top rung, braces one foot on the wall and shoves. The ladder falls back, taking men screaming to their deaths.

Men with pike staffs come running at last to fend off this and other ladders, for there are more now, sprouting left and right, bringing Frenchmen into the fastness of their stone and wood rampart. Here to help are Walter Golder and Jack Kentishorn, John of Gayleford and Alfred Rake. And then Sir William Glasdale, commander of the heights, himself in full Italian plate which has not yet lost its lustre.

‘Push them back! Send them crashing! Will you be beaten by Frenchmen? Are you children? You! Rustbeard! Swing that hammer harder!’

Here is the best of English soldiery. Here is the reason England will prevail and France is doomed. Glasdale’s voice is the bellow of a bull, of a bear, of thunder, of God Himself. Men find strength who were losing it, and apply themselves anew to the job of sending ladders back to the earth.

The enemy have pikes, too. On a ladder? Are they insane? Mad or not, they are certainly ardent. A point skewers past his face and he ducks only by chance and instinct and slashes back and here’s a long sword, swinging, and an axe, striking overhand, seeking faces, bare hands, anything.

Jack Kentishorn goes down, gargling on his own blood. A new man takes his place. Oliver? Or maybe a Harry; there are many of those about these days. The hammer head is wedged now in the top of the ladder. A blade screams down by his elbow. Oliver-or-Harry thrusts a sword forward, and misses.

‘For God’s sake, man! Can you not strike a Frenchman at two paces? We’ll have to—’ But what they’ll have to do is lost, because he has seen what nobody else has seen and his stolen-borrowed hammer won’t do for this. He drops it and spins round, unarmed, frantic, looking for whatever he can find that—

A bow!

He leaps on it, fiercely. He is not an archer, to send a dozen arrows a minute with such accuracy that he can hit a wren’s head in a summer-leafed oak at three hundred paces, but it isn’t summer and there are no leaves and his target isn’t a wren’s head, or even an eagle’s.

He’s aiming for a slight figure in unadorned plate, standing in the press at the foot of a ladder. He knows this shape, has been trying to find it in the havoc all day.

And here, now … left hand to bow-belly, fingers to string, arrow to nock. A fine arrow, with a savage, bodkin blade to the head that will pierce plate, even good plate. Even plate commissioned by the weak-chinned, jug-eared idiot who calls himself King of France but never stirs himself to fight. What kind of king doesn’t fight?

Rustbeard draws with the best smoothness he can muster, feels his shoulders bunch and sigh. He is a mess of contrary levers, and yet the bow is drawn, his lips kiss the string, his better eye sights along the arrow head and she is there, the demon in white plate, or the witch, or the heretic, or the boy, pretending womanhood because that kind of thing boils French blood and makes them go back on their winter promises of surrender.

Eye. Bodkin. Armour. All in line. Others might send a prayer with the loose, but he’s not that kind of man. He sends hatred instead. Die, God damn you. Die.

And … loose.

A hit! He hears a curse in French, sees the white armour topple, hears a name shouted, feels horror ripple through the mess of men below.

‘She’s hit. The Maid, she’s hit. The Maid! The Maid! The Maid!’

‘Nicely done!’ Glasdale’s plated fist fetches him such a blow between the shoulders that he thinks he’s been shot. He staggers forward. Glasdale catches him in his other hand, lifts his bow arm and the bow in it so everyone must stop and turn and see him.

Glasdale’s bull-voice bellows out across the barbican. ‘See? Rustbeard is more a man than the rest of you put together. It’s not a demon if it bleeds. It’s not a demon if an arrow can send it back off a ladder. We’ll beat the fuckers now. Get to the walls and build up the breaches and we’ll have the bastards and their shitty little town by sundown. Tomorrow, we’ll have their bastard king’s head on a dish.’

A sword cut to his head slices open the red-gold light and nearly blinds him. Rustbeard ducks sideways, stabs forward clumsily, puts his shoulder behind the thrust and a Frenchman falls. He is too tired to feel the surge of satisfaction that fired him through the day, but at least there is space around him, here on top of the boulevard, and he can take another step back and chop with his axe to the left and slash-skitter his sword off someone else’s mail and another step back and Glasdale is off to his left somewhere, in the gloaming, and the sun is leaching the life from the sky and all he can hear is the surf of his own blood in his ears in the echo of his helm, and the ring of iron, as it has rung all afternoon, for the French saw the swing of the witch’s standard and found their courage again.

French. Courage. Tod Rustbeard never thought to stitch those two words together in the same hour, never mind the same breath. He squeezes his eyes tight, takes another step back. There is stone in front of him now, which is something. He is nearly free of the rampart and back on to the Tower proper: les Tourelles. Only a temporary wooden bridge to cross and he’ll have real stone walls between him and the oncoming French.

Someone passes him water. He drinks and tips back his face and splashes it on and feels it trickle back behind his ears, over his jugular, and the hot, hard pulse. He is not going to die here. He has orders, and they require that he remain alive. He has a plan, except that he has not yet worked out how to make it happen.

‘Watch out!’ A shout from his right. He snaps upright. The French are coming again, damn their black souls, armed with hammers and pikestaffs, culverins and petit culverins and someone with too good an eye for a shot has already hit Stephen of Dulwich and Gereint the Sheep who came from Powys and should have been on the French side, hating the English, but for the small matter of an ewe smuggled to the wrong side of a ditch, or maybe a whole flock, and a warrant out to stretch his neck on the border marches, so he must come to France and fight for England. And die.

‘Back!’ Glasdale is close now, standing on what’s left of the wall, dull in dented plate. ‘Back into the Tower!’

His commander’s voice is gone; he can’t shout over the guns any more, but word passes man to man: get back into the Tower. Back to stone walls too high for a ladder, and arrow slits, and maybe a fire and food and wine … Safety. Nobody will look anyone else in the eye now. This is the way of men facing defeat, who have known nothing but victory for years.

Tod Rustbeard takes a breath, strikes out again. Again. Again. He is an automaton, made for fighting. The sun has abandoned them, the evening is a tepid grey, until suddenly it isn’t. Brilliant gold light spumes off a helm to his left, slices wide on a blade to his right, lights his feet. He looks down. The sun is below him and it is not a sun, but a fire. The fucking French have lit a fire on a barge, floated it down the river and moored it directly beneath the bridge.
Damn
them.

‘They’re firing the bridge! Back!’

He moves back. Flames dance and dart at his feet. The planks linking rampart to Tower are new, still full of resin and the French have laced their fire boat with pitch; the smoke is treacle-thick and strong. The French stop coming. They’re happy to stand at the edge and watch Englishmen burn.

On the far side, Rustbeard stands in shadow; a habit that has kept him alive this far. If he had a bow … but he doesn’t, not any more. He has an axe and a sword and neither can reach the men who have gathered to watch the bridge burn, and any English foolish enough to stand on it.

In time, the fire-sun beneath him begins to set. Down in the river, the barge is moving, towed by an iron hawser; it has done its job. Opposite, the French call back to summon up planks, ready to throw them across. They didn’t want to destroy the bridge, just drive the English back into the Tower. Someone on their side has a brain and is using it. This in itself is a wonder. Nobody on the French side has had a brain to speak of since they lost all their decent fighting men at Agincourt in ’15.

Half of their army now is made up of Scotsmen: small, swarthy lowlanders with cudgels or big red-haired Strathclyde men wielding bastard swords and small, wicked spikes in the off hand. Did not the pope in Rome say that the Scots are a sure and certain antidote to the English? Maybe one of these is doing the thinking.

‘Rustbeard?’ Glasdale appears at his left hand. Inside his armour, the English commander is a shrunken man. He is not used to defeat. Red-eyed, he stares out across the charred bridge to the mass of French beyond. ‘Is she there?’

‘The witch?’ He peers into the dusk. In all the fighting, he’d forgotten she existed. ‘I can’t see her. She might be dead.’

‘No, she’s alive. I heard them shout it halfway through the afternoon. She had them pull out the arrow and pack the wound and she’s back leading the assault.’

The distress in Glasdale’s voice, the shame … They have lost to a woman. Or a boy dressed as a woman. It doesn’t really matter which; the dishonour is visceral and deadly. Glasdale has traded insults with her these past few days. She sent them a young herald with a letter telling them to surrender. When the lad was arrested and chained to a post and threatened with burning, she shot arrows at them with messages attached. And the French allowed it.

Tod Rustbeard spits. His mouth tastes of bile and filth; the taste of defeat. The Tower is holding, but it won’t for long. He has his own plan, growing by the moment.

He says, ‘My lord, you’ll be ransomed.’

Lords don’t die, except by accident or at Agincourt, when things got out of hand. Things often did when Henry was leading, but he’s dead and William Glasdale is a gentleman. The French will know him from the quality of his armour and they’ll have him inside the walls drinking wine by moonrise; knights always cleave together when the mess of killing is done.

‘No.’ Glasdale, too, is looking down at the river. ‘Tell the king …’ He shakes his head, starts again; the king is six years old. Woe to thee, O land … Everything bad can be charted back to the king’s death, the late king, Henry, fifth of the name, victor of every battle he fought, more or less. He may have been a hard bastard, but he was
their
hard bastard and he won for them. Oh, my king. Why did you have to die when we were winning?

Glasdale fixes his mournful gaze on Tod Rustbeard. ‘You are Bedford’s man?’

‘My lord?’ That’s like saying ‘You are English?’ Which of course he is, or at least half English, and that’s the half that counts. John of Lancaster, first Duke of Bedford, was brother to the late King Henry. He is now, therefore, uncle to the infant King Henry, sixth of the name, and now regent of England, which post he will hold until his nephew comes of age. Or dies. True-born kings have reigned for less time and transformed the fortunes of their nations. Sickly princelings have died in fewer years. ‘I serve my lord of Bedford with all my heart.’

‘Of course you do.’ A scowl creases Glasdale’s much-creased face. ‘I mean, you are his
man
. His …’ A wave of his fist says what words cannot. Bedford’s agent, his spy, his knife in the dark, his hammer in sunlight, his to order, his to command, his in heart and soul. His to send into the dark places where decent men do not venture, to do the things that decent men cannot do.

Glasdale is not supposed to know this, but Glasdale is a lord and the workings of almost-royalty are not the same as those of other men.

Tod Rustbeard bows. ‘I am, my lord, and at your service.’

‘You have to go back to the French side.’

‘Lord?’

‘Stop playing with me, Rustbeard. I have my own spies. You were in there through the winter.’

Ah. Now, that is interesting.

‘Lord.’ A nod. A tacit agreement. Nothing said aloud, not even here.

‘So now you have to go back.’