Son of the Morning (92 page)

‘Your God won’t let us cross.’ Greatbelly was at his side.

‘Not my God any more.’

‘I think he is. You are not happy here among us. You despise low men.’

‘I despise quite a lot,’ said Montagu. ‘That doesn’t mark them out as particularly noteworthy.’

Montagu fought his inclination to look down on this common woman. Had he not given up all right to rank and station to follow Lucifer, a being he hated with all his heart? God forgave, the priests said. Well, Montagu would test that theory, commit offence after offence against the Almighty and secure his damnation.

He had seen his wife once since his fall from grace, his children too. He had kissed them and told them that he was effectively dead now, and to enact his will. Catherine had tried to hold him but he had repelled her.

‘I am become a serpent and must crawl in the dust.’

Then he had returned. Something in the filth and degradation of the Southwark hovels suited his temper. He was not welcome at first, but the little demon Know-Much had argued that he should be allowed to stay. He had told the creature his aim – to kill the old king – and it had agreed he might be useful.

After two works, by the chalk cliffs of the Isle of Wight, the angels disappeared – Edward had won his argument with them in the short term – and the fleet of seven hundred and fifty ships, some great, some small, sailed out of Portsmouth on a bright blue day, the sun on the water, the wind at their backs, devils in the half shapes of lions, leopards, wolves and men, plunging through the white surf behind them. Above them great wasp men hung in the air in swarms, their four human arms clutching darts, their legs kicking as they flew under buzzing wings. There were other flying things too – gargoyles – stoneskins as the men called them – and bat-winged men, monstrous red birds whose plumage trailed smoke across the sky, fat droning flies with the faces of women hovering low above the sails. And there was the English angel too – like a man, but six winged and burning in flame.

‘Holy! Holy! Holy!’ it called continually as the fleet went forward. Montagu was glad when it ascended on a cloud and he could hear it no more. He found it irritating.

‘Why do you fight?’ said Greatbelly as the ship sailed. The Luciferians had brought their women and children with them – they had no intention of going back to England under the yoke of kings and masters.

‘Why do you?’

‘For my freedom.’

Montagu brushed the patch that covered his ruined eye, a gesture somewhere between a scratch and a stroke. He did not reply, so she asked again.

‘So why do you? You really have no love of our cause.’

‘I was raised to fight.’

‘But now you serve no one.’

‘I still serve Lucifer, as I vowed. And I serve the king.’

‘The man who is Lucifer’s enemy. The man who would kill you.’

Montagu smiled. ‘Loyalties aren’t thrown away over such trifles. I am still an Englishman and Edward is still my friend. I would see him prosper. Your aims are not exclusive, from what I hear.’

‘Aims are not exclusive …’ Greatbelly repeated the words in a mocking voice. ‘You do talk lovely don’t you, for a murderer?’ Greatbelly was less whorish now. She had abandoned the yellow hood that marked her for a prostitute and wore just an apron like any goodwife. Her daughter, a pretty girl of nine, huddled against her for warmth.

‘Whom have I murdered?’

‘Plenty, I should say.’

‘If you don’t believe I am in earnest, then why do you not tell your fellows to cast me from their ranks?’

Greatbelly stroked her child’s hair, planted a kiss on the girl’s head. ‘Someone needs to see my lads through this battle and I should say of all the people I’ve ever met, you’re the man to do it.’

‘So you need leaders, after all.’

‘No. Sometimes we need leading. That’s different from needing a leader, a man to call lord. We need a marshal in the field as we need a mason to cut stone. But the mason is not above his fellows when the stone is cut, nor the marshal when the war is done. When we set up Eden in France, there’ll be days and weeks for talk, for debate. With a bunch of French knights trying to stick their spears up your arse, I should say now is not the time for discussion.’

‘You’d be right,’ said Montagu.

The woman’s company was increasingly pleasant to him. Of course he’d been raised with farm boys and girls – all nobles took their playmates from every degree of man – but he’d never had a proper conversation with anyone of that rank since he was twelve years old. He’d talked more to his dogs than his servants. She was rude and rough and hideous to behold. Her education was non-existent but Montagu did recognise some native intelligence. And she was honest. She said what she meant directly. Only the very highest men in the land had done that in front of Montagu since he’d been old enough to attend court.

They made Normandy and put a blight on the land, pillaging St Vaast, Barfleur and burning the abbey of Notre Dame du Voeu. Montagu watched the flames with a soldier’s approval. God had to see that the French were not defending his houses. Montagu saw little of the action – the Luciferians could not be persuaded to kill and burn their French ‘brothers and sisters’ as they called the poor, but the godly men and the devils set to it with zest and the flames rose for a day’s march all around the landing site and for a strip two hours inland all along the coast.

The French had been fooled – their fleet and the majority of their troops were all down in Gascony and Edward made the most of their absence. Montagu left the Luciferians for a while and tagged along with the Prince of Wales’s division, chasing Marschall Robert Bertrand and the few defenders he could scramble together across the countryside.

All the time, Montagu watched the skies. Angels could stop the invasion dead. But he understood their nature now, from listening to the Luciferians and from the evidence of his eyes. The angels loved beauty but, like God, they loved suffering too. They would come when the French had suffered enough. Then there would be a reckoning.

The pillaging and the burning went on too long – evidently the devils enjoyed it too much. This was not the work the English army needed to be doing. It needed to take some strategic objectives and quickly – some place that could be captured and then defended. Caen was burned – the devils streaming over the walls of the new town. Montagu ran at their backs, watching as Robert Bertrand and the Count D’Eu staged a magnificent charge through the diabolic horde to reach the protection of the castle, hacking and slashing at a regiment of goat-headed devils who fell screaming beneath their blessed swords. My God, those French could fight. Montagu felt himself itching to face them, as a lord, not skulking in his pauper’s rags, trailing behind a pack of devils. The castle fell, hideous beetle devils swarming over the walls to overwhelm the few defenders. A priest was torn from the battlements and hurled to the moat as he blessed the defenders’ arrows. The devils were targeting the holy men, he realised. Once they were gone, the arrows were no more bothersome to the devils than summer midges. The townspeople were slaughtered – five hundred tipped into a mass grave, for fear of infection.

The massacres were a luxury the army could not allow itself because time was running out, Montagu knew. Where was the strategy? Where the plan? The army veered across the countryside and all the while, Philip and his angels would be coming. And then the English would be running. Edward abandoned Caen and struck north. The Flemings would be in the north and Edward needed to meet up with their army before facing the French. Paris was within Edward’s grasp, but he pulled back. There could only be one reason – his flying devils had told him Philip was near. Edward the Fox had played havoc in the henhouse but now Farmer Philip was coming with his dogs. It was a race to the Somme now, but the army could not be focused. Men were drunk on pillage, the devils too. He saw a great goat-headed devil sitting on a burning farmhouse, chewing on a man’s head as a boy chews on an apple. He had to remember his station, that he was only a churl now, though he wanted to scream at them to rally, to move. Time was running out, running out badly. News came in from the south. Carnentan, St Vaast and the other towns of the Cotentin peninsular so recently captured had been regained by the French and this wasn’t even Philip’s main army. The way back was being cut off, the landing points on the Norman coast lost.

The Prince of Wales knew the need for urgency, moving among the troops cajoling and shouting. The boy even shook Montagu by the shoulder. ‘Get moving, man, or I’ll cut you down myself.’

Prince Edward – now a thumb taller than Montagu – was full of the thrill of command and the fight. He didn’t see Montagu as anything more than another wayward commoner to be kicked and whipped into line. ‘Very good, lord,’ Montagu acquiesced and began calling to his fellows.

Columns were formed ready to march but seeing a monastery on the hill the troops and devils went whooping to sack it. A light in the south wasn’t the sun. Angels. Would they act? Would they need to? The English were fifteen thousand strong, the French greatly outnumbering them.

Montagu saw a flight of gargoyles streaking in from the south on clattering wings, tearing into the wasp men with stony claws, the insect bodies slamming into the fields until Edward’s angel began to shine and they peeled back towards the light on the horizon. Good, good, the men needed the hurry up. The attack focused English minds and the troops were easier to control. They had to reach one of the bridges on the Somme before Philip. Squadrons of fly devils were dispatched to secure it, but when attacked by the men of Poix the army could not be controlled until it had attempted to burn the town in revenge. King Edward himself went in to stop them, but the delay was fatal. The English abandoned their baggage train and went on at the trot but the troops became hungry and stopped to pillage and forage what they could. Too late now; the light in the south was brighter.

The earl crossed himself as he saw the black horde wheeling away from the pursuing army to fly to meet them – hundreds of gargoyles clattering, night-born men with silver skins and the heads and wings of flies, smoke devils, all darkening the skies. They outnumbered Edward’s devils three to one. There would be no crossing of the Somme, no meeting with the Flemings.

Blanchetaque! Edward must make for the ford at Blanchetaque. His angel might drive off the devils there and a ford was not like a bridge – it could not be demolished. Montagu, longing to counsel him saw there was no need: the army began to head that way, skirting the Somme. On the other bank he saw the galloping black horse banner of Godemar Du Fay and the wagons of the Genoese – their great shields protruding from the open carts. How many? Five hundred men of quality and three thousand foot soldiers behind, many of them trained crossbowmen. Beside them loped a pack of dog-headed devils, their bald skin pied, their tongues lolling. They bayed as they ran. It would be a costly crossing.

Montagu gripped Arondight. He owed Du Fay and wanted to pay him.

The light in the south was strong now, the French with their angels couldn’t be more than two hours away. Pushing through the ranks to find Greatbelly’s Luciferians, he cajoled them to run as quickly as they could.

His old squire, George Despenser, made the water first. So he had lived. Now George had his own red banner to announce his leader’s status, Cobham and Northampton with him, their retinues at their side – twenty or so men each. The horses charged into the ford as a volley of crossbows struck. Three horses went down, another two unseating their riders. Immediately another volley came in, and a third. The crossbowmen were well drilled, three to a shield, two loading while one shot, giving a near continuous rate of fire. Montagu saw George take two quarrels – one in the arm, another in the chest. The young knight kicked his horse on. His mail and caparison had done their job.

‘Get some fire down on those crossbows!’ he shouted to the bowmen.

‘They’ve got knights coming up!’ A Cornish boy of fourteen spoke, his eyes full of terror.

‘Let our men-at-arms worry about them. Hit the crossbows.’

‘They’ve got shields!’

‘Yes, and they won’t much fancy coming out from behind them while you’re pouring arrows into them.’

The first volley went off, going largely long but the second flight of arrows found its mark, immediately making the crossbowmen wheel their shields and look for the source of the fire.

The English men-at-arms were massively outnumbered – only ten had made the bank – but they charged the French, lances levelled. Some crossbowmen panicked and fled, unable to deal with two sources of attack at the same time, though they stumbled into the oncoming charge of Du Fay’s knights, forcing it to falter. The vanguard of the English foot soldiers stood uncertainly on the bank. Their lords had gone over on impulse and now there was no one to command them.

Well, William, if you’re looking to die, this could be the time.
He plunged forward into the ford. ‘England! England!’ The men hesitated as a huge dogman jumped in to oppose Montagu. It was a head taller than him, with deep black fur and teeth the size of spearheads. It carried a shield and spear and wore a great helmet that left its fierce muzzle exposed.

‘God demands you fall back,’ said the devil.

‘Lucifer and my damnation demand I go on!’

The dog devil struck at Montagu with its spear, too sure of its speed and size. Montagu seized Arondight, one hand on the hilt, the other two spans from its end, using the sword like a quarterstaff to brush the spear aside before punching the sword’s tip through the devil’s chest. The dogman fell back, spurting blood and Montagu called again. ‘England! England!’

Now the footmen took courage and poured across the river on a great front. The crossbow fire was savage but so was the retaliation. More archers had joined on the English bank and it was a sharp hail indeed that fell on the French.

The dogmen came pouring in but English devils were arriving – the pig-faced devils Montagu had seen in Edward’s camp and more knights too – plunging their horses through the water to strike home with lances blessed by archbishops or looped with the hair of saints.