Standard of Honor (29 page)

Richard's gaze focused again and he looked back at St. Clair. “Have you given any thought at all to how we should deploy these new forces you have dreamed up?”

“Aye, I have. The strategy is easily enough explained, but I have not yet worked out the precise tactical details. Now that I have your concurrence on the need to proceed, I will spend more time on that.”

“And this is what you meant by stability and consolidation?”

“Aye, it is. As I said, the small moves are still unclear—they have not yet crystallized in my mind— but I know that we must use the new weaponry in tactical blocks, mobile but capable of standing in place and repulsing an attack in strength, and we must use them in support of our chivalry.”

“And what of our infantry?”

“Again, to be used in blocks, in the manner of the ancients, where each man relied upon the support and strength of his neighbor.”

Richard nodded with slow deliberation. “The ancients … You mean the ancient Roman legions?”

“Aye, exactly. Solid, unyielding, hard hitting, selfreliant, tightly disciplined, and virtually indestructible.”

“I see. That is quite a list of attributes.”

“Aye, but it's achievable. And necessary, if we are to go against the legions Saladin will throw at us. We can do it, but we have no time to waste.”

“What about these hailstorms of arrows?”

St. Clair shrugged. “If needs must, we will reinvent the Roman tortoise and cover our soldiers with shells of solid steel shields.”

Richard contemplated the older man for long moments, then nodded. “Very well, do it. Is there anything more in your mind?”

“Aye, there is. The Saracen captured all the Frankish fortifications and cities in Outremer, and that means we will have to take them back by siege. I had thought to inform you of the need for siege engines for that, but we discussed that this morning and it seems well in hand.”

“Aye. What we really need is training and trainers, both for infantry and bowmen. So here is what we will do. You will spend this night with me—all night, if necessary—and we will work on the principles and the logistics of these new ideas of yours until I am familiar with all that we will need. After that, I will attend to the rest of it myself and ensure that the right men are chosen and charged as a cadre to put those principles into practice. You, in the meantime, will return home as soon as may be and start training a new, greatly expanded corps of men to use these crossbow weapons—all of them. Use volunteers at first, since they are most likely to learn quickly, but raise others as you need them, from whatever source you deem suitable. I will give you carte blanche on that. I suspect that our
French allies, and perhaps even several of the others, will wish to send some of their men to you for training, now that we can openly use these weapons against the Muslim. But what they should do first is send their best smiths to our armories in Anjou and Aquitaine, to learn the making of an arbalest.” He checked himself, noticing the expression on St. Clair's face. “What is it, man?”

Sir Henry looked puzzled. “Your pardon, but do you mean me to go home before your coronation, or after it?”

“Are you mad, Henry? Before it, of course. This new need is far too important to put off for an entire month, especially over religious mummery. I want to see you gone within the week. I'll tell you all about the coronation when next we meet, you and I. Now, let us be up and away, for we have several miles to go and I want to start work on these plans tonight.” He twisted his body to look at Baldwin of Bethune, who was sitting some distance aside from them, waiting to be summoned. “Baldwin, we are leaving now. Gather up what needs to be gathered and follow us, quickly as you can.”

As Baldwin rose smoothly to his feet, Richard did the same, then reached down his hand to Sir Henry and pulled him up. “You have done well, Henry … justified my faith in you. Don't ever stop thinking the way you do. Now, mount up.”

FIVE

S
ir Henry St. Clair sat spear-straight on his horse, looking down from a reviewing stand at the top of a high, sloping ramp. In front of him, stretching away on both sides, lay an enormous drilling field, its edges lost in distance. At his back, beyond the width of its protective moat, the high walls of the Castle of Baudelaire towered above him, cloaking him in a late-afternoon shadow that stretched far ahead of where he sat. The entire area to his right was given over to horses and horsemen, groups of knights and formations of mounted men-at-arms riding hither and yon, all of them deeply involved in their exercises. Henry was content to leave them to themselves. He was far more interested in what was happening in the left half of the field, where seemingly endless rows of crossbowmen, the closest of them almost directly below his reviewing stand, shot in aimed volleys at ranked targets far ahead of them. Farther away, beyond the concentrations of crossbowmen, he knew Richard's English yeomen were working with their deadly longbows, but they were so far distant that St. Clair could barely see them and could only guess at their activities. Like the horsemen that afternoon, they claimed but little of his attention, for his focus was
concentrated upon the crossbowmen, the sole reason for his unexpected return to Aquitaine in mid-August of the previous year. It was now the middle of June in the year of Our Lord 1190, and ten months had passed him by like a headlong, badly fractured dream.

The task facing him on his return to Poitiers had been formidable, and he had barely known where to begin. But in the first week after his arrival, he had sent out teams of recruiters from Poitiers to visit every one of Richard's vassals in Aquitaine, Poitou, and Anjou and to stage demonstrations of their weapons' potency. These recruiters performed in Tours, Angers, Nantes, Nevers, Bourges, Angoulême, and Limoges, along with another hundred villages and hamlets scattered between and among those, and they announced after every demonstration that Duke Richard was looking for volunteers to fill the ranks of his new, elite artillery corps. More than a thousand men came forward to Poitiers within the first month of that campaign, and Henry set his trained Angevin arbalesters to work immediately, teaching the newcomers. By that time, too, the first new weapons had begun to arrive from the manufactories in Poitiers and Tours, the former supplying arbalests and the latter more simple, light, and versatile crossbows, and once the production had begun, the capacity rose steadily.

Now, after ten months of hard, grinding work, Henry had twelve hundred new crossbowmen fully trained—three hundred of them on arbalests—and more than two thousand new men under arms in
various stages of training. More than four hundred of the latter group had been sent to him by the King of France, Philip Augustus, who requested with great civility that Sir Henry consent to train, on Philip's behalf, a cadre of men who could, in turn, return to teach more of their own in France.

All things considered, Henry felt the efforts he had expended had been more than worthwhile. Word had reached him that morning of Richard's arrival in France the previous week, and the same missive had warned him that the Duke, now crowned King of England, could be expected to arrive in Baudelaire sometime in the afternoon of that same day. That knowledge had prompted Henry to arrange this mass gathering of his new troops.

It was this magnificent training field, Sir Henry knew, that had prompted the Duke to impose his entire army, a mere two weeks earlier, upon the hospitality and duty of the castle's owner, Edouard de Balieul, Count of the surrounding lands of Baudelaire. St. Clair, who had delivered the tidings to Balieul, along with the King's army at the same time, was wryly convinced that the Count must feel that he had little to be thankful for. But there was no place comparable to Baudelaire within a hundred miles and it was perfectly suited to Richard's needs, lush with sweet drinking water for his troops and ample grazing for all the cattle and horses that the army required. Situated on the banks of the river Loire, close to the small town of Pouilly in Burgundy that supplied Sir Henry annually with his beloved golden wine, it also
lay within forty miles—a three-day march—of Vézelay, the mustering point for all the various contingents assembling for the voyage to the Holy Land.

Satisfied that everything was as it ought to be, Sir Henry nudged his horse forward, starting it down the ramp to field level, then angling it left, to where a small, densely spaced group of grim-faced men were practicing with the heaviest arbalests, concentrating fiercely on the efforts required to arm the cumbersome weapons. They each held the body of the device firmly upright, one foot through the stirrup on the front end while they worked to turn the two-handed winch at the rear that pulled the heavy bowstring, against the enormous pressure of the steel bow, to its full lock. St. Clair sat watching them until the frowning instructor drilling them looked up, saw him sitting there, and slowly made his way to stand beside him.

“Master-at-Arms,” he said, his voice low, deep, and far different from the abusive howl he used to chivy and upbraid his students. “I hope you are pleased with all you have seen today.”

Sir Henry nodded back. “Well enough, Roger. What about you? Are your French students making progress?”

“That all depends on how you would define progress—” He raised a hand to hold Sir Henry's attention, then raised his voice to its usual hectoring pitch. “You there, Bermond! Put your back into it, man. There's no time to waste with those things. Too slow and you'll be dead before you can pick it up again. You're
supposed to fire two shots each minute, not one shot every two!” The man he had shouted at now began working twice as hard, his arms churning at the winch handles. Sir Roger de Bohen turned back to his interrupted conversation. “That's part of what I have to deal with. They think they're being demeaned because they're French, and they're always muttering that our Angevins have an unfair advantage in having used these things for years, even though these particular fellows are just as raw and new to their weapons as the Frenchmen are.”

St. Clair smiled. “Come, Roger, that is not quite the whole truth. The Angevins have grown up seeing the weapons used all around them. They have at least a degree of familiarity with them. The French, on the other hand, have never laid eyes on a crossbow, much less the biggest crossbow of them all.”

Roger de Bohen and Henry St. Clair had known and respected each other for two decades, and spoke as friends. “You're splitting hairs, Henry, and you're wrong,” de Bohen said now, keeping his voice low to avoid being overheard. “These Frenchmen are feeling put upon because, even starting from scratch with no advantage on either side, they are nowhere
close
to being as good as the Angevins are, and at this rate it will take months to whip them into any kind of battle readiness.”

“But they will learn, will they not?”

“Aye, they'll learn … Of course they will.” De Bohen shrugged and swung away, speaking back over his shoulder as he returned to his charges. “The question is, will they learn quickly enough?”

St. Clair watched him as the other returned to his task, and then he kneed his horse and pulled its head around until he was heading directly towards the far left side of the field, where the block formations of Richard's English archers were firing massed volleys of arrows that fell on their target area like sheets of windblown rain. But even as he rode towards the English ranks, his mind was still with the crossbowmen behind him, and with the potential they offered of being able to lay down a heavy, defensive screen of missiles against the kind of attack that had destroyed the Christians at Hattin.

The English longbows could lay down amazing volleys from great distances, shooting in high arcs over hundreds of paces, but what St. Clair needed from his crossbowmen was an intermediate killing power to augment the longbows: shorter, but no less lethal, volleys fired straight out and kept on low trajectories. He had been working for months now on training solid, coordinated formations of short- and intermediaterange crossbows that would work in conjunction with smaller but much harder-hitting teams of arbalesters. These troops would be capable of generating sufficiently lethal interference to discourage any sustained attack by the vaunted Saracen light archers, and would therefore increase the odds in favor of the Christian infantry and knights in any confrontation. That, at least, was his theory, and Henry was well aware that he had pinned his reputation to its success.

The sound of distant cheering, far off to his left, attracted St. Clair's attention, and as he turned to look
for the cause, he heard one of the nearby English yeomen shouting the King's name, so he nudged his horse forward to where he could watch Richard approach, and he wondered, as he had many times in recent months, at the sheer confidence and regal ability that radiated from the so-called
English
monarch who, despite having spent much of his boyhood in the country, had always disdained it, barely spoke the language of the people he now ruled, yet had captivated all the fighting men of that warlike land, inspiring spontaneous cheers whenever he rode by.

Today, as was his habit when mixing with his own soldiers, the King rode almost alone, refusing a formal escort and accompanied this time only by two knights, one on each side, and two squires riding behind them. One squire carried the royal sword, with its hilt of gold and its scabbard glinting with precious stones, while the other bore the King's flat steel pot-helmet with the narrow golden coronet worked around its burnished rim. Richard was bare headed, his mailed cowl pushed off his head to hang down his back, leaving his long, red-golden hair to blow free in the breeze of his passage. He wore a magnificent cloak of crimson silk worked with gold thread, its sides thrown back over his shoulders on this occasion to reveal the white surcoat with the red cross of the Holy Warrior and not the standard of Saint George that he normally wore on the breast of his tunic—three elongated golden lions passant on a field of brilliant scarlet. Beneath the surcoat, he was armored in a full suit of gleaming mail, and his battle
shield covered his left arm, its single black lion rampant facing left against a bright red field.