Into The Fire (6 page)

The army wants her, but the army’s view is not the one that counts. The campaign to free France of the English, therefore, stalled temporarily, while the French, yet again, squabbled amongst themselves.

As far as Tomas is concerned, any delay is good. He spent this time in the taverns and back rooms of a celebratory Orléans, seeking out all the possible variations of the warrior-Maid’s story. There are not many; it has a remarkable uniformity, which is in itself suspicious, but he has listened to the telling and the retelling, and he has found that Glasdale was right: there is the legend, and there is the truth, and in the gap between these two lie the seeds of her destruction.

Thus does he find himself part of the Maid’s waiting army, roving to and fro along the banks of the Loire, identifying the good men, and undermining their strengths, finding the weaklings and bolstering a false bravado.

He also speaks with the women who cluster round the camp. The ever-pious Maid has driven out the whores, but these are mothers, sisters, wives. They cook and bind wounds, sing psalms and wash linens, spin and weave and sew.

And they talk. Tomas has become known for his ready ear and so they talk to him: Jeannette, Marie, Violette of the sad, red eyes, who is friends with Claudine, whose brother, Matthieu, it seems, met a violent death on the night the Maid first met the king at Chinon.

‘Claudine says Matthieu greeted the Maid on the bridge as she was walking into the chateau. He was not respectful as he should have been.’

Violette stands near a fire, beyond the tent lines, stirring a boiling pot of small clothes with a stick. Tomas takes over and stirs for her. He feels like a hound that has caught a ten-day-old scent. Claudine is the one, he can feel it in his marrow: his key to destroying the Maid. ‘Did she know what her brother said that gave offence?’

‘That the Maid should come and meet him later and he’d see she wasn’t a maid by morning. Can you imagine it?’ Violette is young and skinny, with straggling black hair and eye teeth that grow out like the tushes on a small boar. ‘He was dead by the morning. Claudine found him floating face down in the river. Marie-Paul said he’d been struck by God, but Claudine said he had a big mashed place on the back of his head. Somebody hit him and pushed him into the river to drown.’

‘You think the Maid did it?’

‘No!’ Violette recoils, covers her face with chapped pink hands, peers at him between her fingers. ‘Why would she do that?’

Because he knew who she really was and had threatened to tell the king?

Tomas shakes his head, gently says, ‘You’re right, of course. A footpad, a thief, an unfortunate accident. But if we could find Claudine, it may be that the Maid would want to help her. With Matthieu gone, she must be …’ Prostituting herself? Sewing winding sheets? Stirring laundry in a barely boiling pot? Whatever girls do who are unmarried and destitute in the Loire valley.

He waits, but Violette doesn’t help him out, only stares into the rolling water. ‘She’s gone and I don’t know where. I haven’t seen her since the army gathered.’

Claudine may be dead, but Tomas’s instinct tells him not. With practised care, he finds out what she looks like: straw-blond hair, a fine nose, freckles, a scar on her left hand from a spill of hot oil in her youth. It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing. He gives Violette back her stirring-stick.

He may not have been as delicate as he thought, because she gives him a sideways glance. ‘Jean-Pierre might know more. They were … friendly …’

Friendly? In an army where the Maid has banned the whores? I’m sure they were. ‘How might I find Jean-Pierre?’

‘He’s the gunner. The one the Maid says is blessed by God.’

Oh, yes. Today is a good day. Newly cheered, he heads back to the army, to the men preparing for battle, and to the guns, which are already firing.

The French love their guns the way the English love their longbows. The Rifflard may be able to hurl shot the weight of half a horse, but it’s the smaller, more manoeuvrable, culverins that are wearing Jargeau down. The French gunners are good, and Jean-Pierre is the best. He can fire one single ranging shot and the one after will hit whatever he chooses: a wall, a tower, a man on that tower.

The little gunner is constantly moving, shifting gun placements, the better to harass the ramparts of Jargeau. Once in a while he’ll pretend he’s been hit, clutch at his chest or his side and fall back and lie like a broken puppet and a great cheer will go up from the English side – until he bounces to his feet and leaps on to his gun and makes the pumping motion with his fist that drives the English wild. Wild men are reckless and reckless men die. And die.

At noon, those inside grow tired of dying and send out a herald to sue for surrender.

Seeing the gates open, and the single rider squeeze through with a feather in his cap for parley, Tomas seeks out Patrick Ogilvy and tugs at his sleeve. ‘Look.’ And when he turns: ‘Come on, we can’t miss this.’

Alone, he might be noticed. With the big Strathclyde man at his side, it’s easier to weave through the pack of French men at arms, until they are close enough to the Maid and her small entourage to hear most of whatever transpires.

The herald is a white-haired Frenchman who eases off his horse stiffly, as if his hips are carved in poor stone.

Three French knights ride up to stand their horses before him: d’Alençon on the right, then the Maid, then La Hire; each has a squire and a page just behind. None of the three dismounts. The herald should, perhaps, take notice of this, but he’s too busy following what he thinks is protocol. He bows to the right to La Hire, left to d’Alençon, ignores the Maid.

‘Jesu. The man’s a fool.’ Patrick Ogilvy says what everyone is thinking, but he says it quietly.

In the shocked silence, the herald raises his head. ‘The garrison offers the keys to the gates if they can march out with their weapons and their horses.’

‘No.’

‘We will cease firing and march out in good order, and … What do you mean, no?’

Body of Christ, how stupid can you be? And how stupid the men inside who picked this numbskull and sent him out to negotiate?

Patrick Ogilvy and his companions cannot conceal their mirth. Oh, Holy Mother. Did you see her face? She’ll have him skinned alive.

Tomas Rustbeard grins along with them, but he is not laughing inside. His attention is all on the Maid. She is not laughing either.

It’s not that she doesn’t ever laugh. Over the past month he has watched her with all the intensity of a new lover. He knows the swings of her mood and they are many and swift and only rarely concealed. She is impetuous, forthright. Without care for the opinions of others, by turns she laughs, rages, grieves.

This is the first time he has seen her school herself to stillness. She is, he thinks, very, very angry, but she’s keeping it under cover; a hot vat, sealed.

She moves her horse two paces ahead of the others and halts it, which does not sound much, but you have to understand that her horse is not one for whom stillness comes naturally.

This is her courser, the one Duc Jean d’Alençon, the king’s cousin, is supposed to have given her back in February, when she was newly come to Chinon.

As the story goes, d’Alençon saw her running up and down in a meadow with a lance, the way the squires do, and was so impressed with her knightly conduct that he offered her a full-trained war horse, the worth of a prince’s ransom. That evening, watching her riding, the king was so impressed with her skill that he ordered a suit of armour made for her.

It’s not clear whether this is true, but certainly somebody has given her two thousand marks’ worth of hot-blooded, thoroughly nasty grey-white horse and she rides it the way Bedford rides his coursers, one hand on the reins, bending it round her leg into a fluid traverse, holding it steady or stepping it two paces forward when it so very clearly wants nothing more than to run and kill, kill and run, until its legs are bloody and its flanks run black with sweat.

Tomas Rustbeard has met horses like this. Once, he has tried to ride one. He is not in a hurry to repeat the experience.

Here and now, though, the French herald is either too stupid or too distracted by the destruction being visited on his town, to understand what he is up against. Luckily, he doesn’t have to. The Maid spells it out for him.

‘You will leave your horses, your weapons and your armour behind, or you will not leave.’

The herald gapes. His eyes flit left and right, to La Hire, to d’Alençon, men whose colours he knows. He pleads with them, silently: you are men, you are knights; you know the rules of warfare. This is not how it is done.

Except it is, of course. This is exactly how the late King Henry did it, and you can blame him for destroying the laws of chivalry if you like, but he’s dead. Do you want to be dead too?

She says, ‘You have an hour. March out in linen, or stay and die.’ She spins her horse on its quarters and lifts it into a half rear.

The herald evidently doesn’t know this move. Tomas himself has only seen it once, when a Portuguese riding master with far too great a sense of his own importance was invited to put on a display for the late king.

He had a horse not unlike this one, come to think of it: milky white, half a hand taller than the average courser, with quarters like a bull and a head like a snake. Halfway through a performance of traverse and capriole and canter-on-the-spot it lifted in a half rear just like this and then the double kick with both hind feet straight back.

By perhaps the width of a hand, the herald is not killed. There is a moment when he looks as if he might vomit or void his bladder or otherwise disgrace himself, but presently he turns, mounts his own horse, and rides back in through the gates, with the jeers of the French army hurrying him forward.

Tomas stays in the middle of the mob, where it is safest.

Patrick Ogilvy keeps to his side, grinning like an imbecile. ‘What will they do?’

‘If they have any sense, they’ll march out in their small clothes as she ordered.’

‘When did the English ever have sense?’

Oh, I don’t know … At Agincourt? Verneuil? Crécy, even? Any of the dozen similar battlefields where a small force of massively outnumbered Englishmen trounced their French assailants?

Tomas grins mindlessly back and makes another mark in the mental tally against Ogilvy.

The defenders of Jargeau, it seems, have abandoned all sense. The hour’s grace passes and nobody marches out. At a given signal the gunners recommence their firing.

A flash of silver moves to his left. Tomas tugs at Ogilvy’s sleeve again. ‘Look, the Maid’s heading for the battery. She’ll be telling the gunners how to fire next.’

‘That should be interesting. Let’s go up and watch.’

That’s the great thing about Ogilvy, he’s pliant. Give him a lead, and he’ll think it was his own idea. They hike up over towards the guns, after the Maid, Tomas and Ogilvy and a mass of knights and squires and pages and anyone else who has nothing better to do.

There, a man in his element, is Jean-Pierre, Claudine’s friend, with a row of smoking guns. The Maid asks, ‘Can you bring down the south tower by the gate?’

He grins. He has not many teeth left, and those powder black. Claudine kissed this? Really? He bows. ‘Ask and it shall be given.’

This might be blasphemy but the Maid does not shout him down, only nods a salute. ‘Do it.’ She backs her horse a safe distance.

Jean d’Alençon is with her; he can’t keep away.

The priests say she’s a maid, that no man has touched her, which they cite as their proof that she can’t be consorting with the devil. Tomas thinks that if she’s consorting with anyone, it’s d’Alençon, whose pretty wife beggared herself – and him – for his ransom only two months ago.

The Maid’s attention appears to be entirely on the damage being done to Jargeau, but she says, ‘Good my lord, don’t stand there. You will be hit by the enemy’s next shot. Move back.’

He looks at her queerly, but grasps his horse and does as she says.

And the next shot kills the gunner’s boy, who might be a little deaf, or just doesn’t listen to the conversations of his betters and, accordingly, has taken three steps sideways and is moving through the spot d’Alençon just vacated.

The guns pause in their havoc. All around, men are crossing themselves. Tomas finds his own hands moving in sympathy, brow to heart, shoulder to shoulder. Of course, it was a lucky guess. Or she knows more about artillery than anyone except Jean-Pierre. Possibly more than Jean-Pierre. He does not believe it to have been magic.

D’Alençon is grey-green from chin to his receding brow line. ‘My lady …’

She looks unmoved, but Tomas is coming to think that there is little of which she is not aware.

She nods. ‘The English are not coming out. We can attack. Call the men into order. Three columns. One to each gate on my signal.’

Here is his chance. Tomas feels it in the pit of his stomach, in the sweat soaking the back of his tunic. With Ogilvy as his shadow, he follows her into the thick fighting at the walls, pressing for the gates.

Here are ladders, men with pikes, others with crossbows trying to pick defenders off the top of the walls. Truly, this is just like Orléans. The Maid and her vicious horse are in the midst of it, her knights in a ring around her. Tomas is one step further away, just beyond kicking range, watching her, close as any guardian.

He sees the moment when she decides to go forward on foot and calls for help to dismount and he’s there ahead of anyone else, holding her reins, keeping his fingers out of the way of the grey’s snapping teeth, offering his knee for her to step down on to, handing her to the ground.

He did this once for Bedford and he thought he’d never walk again after the crush of an armoured man on his leg. The plate alone weighs sixty pounds, and what does Bedford weigh? It doesn’t bear thinking.

The Maid is more lightly made, or she takes more care. She grasps his outstretched hand and swings down.

Now!
But his good, one-handed hammer that he brought from Orléans is in his belt and he has one hand on the horse and the other … she grips it, squeezes, just a little.