Blood Royal. Vanora Bennett
despair lift from his own flesh like the damp evaporating from his skin. The earth smelled fresh and full of life underfoot. His subaltern was already supervising the first batch of men who were cleaning and greasing and sharpening blades for the morning. There would be time for everything: time to prepare; to rest; to eat; and to pray, just as there always was with Henry. The smell of sizzling rabbits and game birds rose through the smoke. Priests were passing from encampment to encampment, blessing men in batches. The air was alive with expectant talk and the neighing of horses scenting battle; and everywhere you looked men were singing and stamping their feet to the music. There was no reason to lose hope.
Owain reached into his bag for his box – with pens and ink inside; with pieces of parchment cut small for this life on the move. His other love. The finished poems lay under a cloth; the untouched sheets lay above. He couldn’t write here. It was too muddy, too uncertain. But he’d be comforted, at least, by reading some of the thousands of words he’d penned, in quieter times, about the Rose. He leafed through the sheets.
‘The Lover rides through the darkness,’ he read, ‘in wind, and rain, and pain. But wherever he goes he carries the memory of the Rose in his heart.’
‘We beat them at Crecy, we beat them at Poitiers,’ his subaltern was carolling from the weapons tent; and the men greasing his saddle bawled back, ‘We’ll beat them todaaaay!’ Owain crossed himself at that. But there was a smile on his face. Even that brief glimpse of the inexpert words he’d struggled so hard to compose – and so often got into trouble for wasting his time on – reminded him of the true purpose of his life, even beyond this. ‘Amen,’ he murmured, and, putting the box away, strode into the tent to join in the singing.
Charles, Duke of Orleans, walking into the blackness outside the French commander’s tent to consider the order he’d just been given, wondered how the English managed to make so much noise. They were thundering away over there, singing, eating, drinking, belching, farting, shouting. As far as his eye could guess at shapes, there were French horses tethered by French tents stretched out all the way to the horizon. He knew there must be many, many more French soldiers in these fields than the English could possibly have mustered. But the men he could make out closest at hand – silhouettes gathered round their smoking mounds of embers – were hunched and miserable. There were no musical instruments playing here. (Perhaps the Constable should have let the six thousand men offered by the burghers of Paris come; they might not have known how to fight but they’d probably have been a dab hand at picking out a tune on a pipe. Then again, you couldn’t have city people in a battle; what did commoners know of war?) The French cavalry horses were all but silent. So were the men; though in two or three groups he passed as he wondered what to do he heard gruff voices muttering, ‘bygones be bygones’ and ‘water under the bridge’, and saw stiff, awkward embraces, and understood that old enemies, right across this black field, must be making peace among themselves, before facing death together at daylight.
Although he knew with utter certainty that the flower of French chivalry, assembled here, must beat the English, the Duke of Orleans was surprised, when he looked at his own long, thin fingers – a poet’s hands, his wife called them; war wasn’t his calling – to see they were trembling.
Right is on our side, he reminded himself, reaching for the rosary around his neck. Right is on our side. The flower of French chivalry has assembled to do God’s will.
The Duke of Orleans was a man of simple, straightforward beliefs, or he wanted to be, if his treacherous hands would not betray him. A usurper had come to French shores with a wrongful claim to French lands. God, and the French nobility, under the Oriflamme, would smite him down.
But as his fingers touched the beads, and his lips danced through Ave Marias and Pater Nosters, he found himself trying not to remember all those long-ago battles when the French nobility had been destroyed by a cruel God’s favour for the English armies of earlier kings.
And when he thought of his order for tomorrow – the order just given him by the Constable of Albret, who was to be commander for the day, because the King himself couldn’t be on this battlefield – he couldn’t help the prickling of his scalp that he couldn’t believe was fear.
He wasn’t going to obey that order, of course. No one but a king had the right to order a prince of the blood royal to do anything less than heroic in battle.
He wasn’t going to stay at the back with his men.
He was going to join the charge.
Charles of Orleans had allowed two grooms into his tent at dawn to put on his armour. Once mounted, he’d cantered down from the royal enclosure to the encampment where his own troop had spent the night. No fires; it was too far from the woods; the men’s faces were as grey as the skies. Their leather sallets were soaking and looked as heavy as his glittering breastplate. He thought: The subaltern’s not up to it. He should have found them better shelter. But he contained his irritation and politely told the subaltern to take charge of the men on his behalf during the battle. ‘I will be in the charge,’ he said impassively; choosing not to see the man’s look of fear.
Now, with a gauntleted hand over his eyes to keep the day’s early drizzle out, he was standing in the shelter of an outcrop of trees on a slight swell of land, watching the other army rouse itself below. His spirits were higher than they’d been all night. The English force moving around like ants in the mud was much smaller than all that noise in the night had suggested. He could hardly see any horses. The English were encircled; in visible danger; they must be discouraged at the sea of French soldiery facing them. And their tents were grey and brown with mud; none of the magnificence there of the French equipment. He doubted their weapons and their tired campaign horses were much good either.
Owain was part of the group of knights called to the King’s tent at break of day to hear Mass. Owain had dozed a little by the dying fire – he half-remembered being happy in the dream, and feeling the butterfly kiss of eyelashes on his skin and yielding female flesh in his arms – but the damp streaks of colourless light that he’d seen on the horizon as he startled back into wakefulness, signalling time running out before it all began, filled him with dread. He was grateful for the armour that hid his pale face and racing heart. But, standing in front of the King’s stained tent, he was heartened by the sight of Henry, looking far younger than his twenty-eight years, with every sinew of him hard and ready, pulling on his metal plates, cursing ruefully – ‘bloody hands shaking; it’s the excitement, always like this’ – then devoutly bowing his head in prayer and taking the Sacrament in his mouth.
We’re all afraid, Owain thought, reassured. He knows that. Even he is. Fear is natural. Nothing to reproach myself with.
Yet Henry showed no more signs of fear. He got up calmly on his grey charger and gave orders to each of the knights. Owain’s troop was to be in the rear of the charge. Infantry to take the lead; follow up the arrows. Archers in flanks to left and right.
Then the King rode off among the men saddling horses or strapping quivers and axes on themselves, stretching bowstrings taut, restringing them, testing the blades of weapons wrapped in old rags to keep out the damp, binding up their feet. Every few minutes he stopped to talk, leaning down over his horse’s great thick powerful neck, and what he said, in that brisk, no-nonsense, calm voice, with a hint of a laugh in it, was the same for every group of soldiers he addressed. You can see the danger we’re in; the only way out is to win. Owain, back with his own men, making sure they were properly armed and ready before mounting his own dappled horse, strained to hear that beloved voice as hard as every other knight and footsoldier. And, in his heart, he joined their nervous cheers at that first mention of victory. The cheers got louder and more confident when Henry said, in a rhythmic, swinging echo of the song they’d been singing in the night: ‘Don’t forget – we beat them at Crecy! We beat them at Poitiers!’ Every now and again, some bright spark would yell back, ‘We’ll beat them todaaaay!’ And the King would clap him appreciatively on the back, and move on.
But Owain’s heart, like that of every other English soldier, almost burst with devotion and breathless pride when Henry, having reached the front of the camp, first pointed out the jostling mass of French horsemen,