him to the church’s torture, Thomas and his company left Avignon.
The warm weather came. It was campaigning weather, and all across France men sharpened weapons, exercised horses and waited for the summons to serve the king. The English were sending reinforcements to Brittany and to Gascony and men thought that surely King Jean would raise a great army to crush them, but instead he took a smaller army to the edges of Navarre, to the castle of Breteuil, and there, facing the stronghold’s gaunt walls, his men constructed a siege tower.
It was a monstrous thing, taller than a church’s spire, a scaffold of three floors perched on two iron axles joined to four massive wheels of solid elm. The front and sides of the tower were sheathed in oak planks to prevent the castle’s garrison from riddling the platforms with crossbow bolts, and now, in a cold dawn, men were nailing stiff leather hides to that wooden armour. They worked a mere four hundred paces from the castle and once in a while a defender would shoot a crossbow bolt, but the range was too long and the bolts always fell short. Four flags flew from the tower’s summit, two with the French fleur-de-lys and two showing an axe, the symbol of France’s patron saint, the martyred Saint Denis. The flags stretched and twisted in the wind. There had been a gale in the night and the wind still blew strong from the west.
‘One shower of rain,’ the Lord of Douglas said, ‘and this damn thing will be useless. They’ll never move it! It’ll bog down in mud.’
‘God is on our side,’ his young companion said placidly.
‘God,’ the Lord of Douglas said disgustedly.
‘Watches over us,’ the young man said. He was tall and slender, scarce more than twenty or twenty-one years old, with a strikingly handsome face. He had fair hair that was brushed back from a high forehead, blue eyes that were calm, and a mouth that seemed constantly hovering on the edge of a smile. He was from Gascony, where he owned a fief that had been sequestered by the English, leaving him without the income of his lands, which loss should have rendered him poor, but the Sire Roland de Verrec was renowned as the greatest of France’s tournament fighters. Some had claimed that Joscelyn of Berat was the better man, but at Auxerre, Roland had defeated Joscelyn three times, then tormented the brutal champion, Walther of Siegenthaler, with quicksilver swordplay. At Limoges he had been the only man standing at the end of a vicious melee, while in Paris the women had sighed as he destroyed two hardened knights who had twice his years and many times his experience. Roland de Verrec earned the fees of a champion because he was lethal.
And a virgin.
His black shield bore the symbol of the white rose, the rose without thorns, the flower of the Virgin Mary and a proud display of his own purity. The men he so constantly defeated in the lists thought he was mad, the women who watched him thought he was wasted, but Roland de Verrec had devoted his life to chivalry, to sanctity and to goodness. He was famous for his virginity; he was also mocked for it, though never to his face and never within reach of his quick sword. He was also admired for his purity, even envied, because it was said that he had been commanded to a life of sanctity by a vision of the Virgin Mary herself. She had appeared to him when he was just fourteen, she had touched him and she had told him he would be blessed above all men if he kept himself chaste as she was chaste. ‘You will marry,’ she had told him, ‘but till then you are mine.’ And so he was.
Men might mock Roland, but women sighed over him. One woman had been driven to tell Roland de Verrec that he was beautiful. She had reached out and touched his cheek, ‘All that fighting and not one scar!’ she had said, and he had drawn back from her as if her finger burned, then said that all beauty was but a reflection of God’s grace. ‘If I believed otherwise,’ he had told her, ‘I would be tempted to vanity,’ and perhaps he did suffer from that temptation because he dressed with inordinate care and always wore his armour blanched: scrubbed with sand, vinegar and wire until it reflected the sun with dazzling brilliance. Though not on this day because the sky above Breteuil was low, grey and dark.
‘It’s going to rain,’ the Lord of Douglas growled, ‘and this damned tower will go nowhere.’
‘It will bring us victory,’ Roland de Verrec said, sounding quietly confident. ‘The Bishop of Châlons blessed it last night; it will not fail.’
‘It shouldn’t even be here,’ Douglas snarled. The Scottish knights had been summoned by King Jean to join this attack on Breteuil, but the defenders were not Englishmen, they were other Frenchmen. ‘I didn’t come here to kill Frenchmen,’ Douglas said, ‘I came here to kill the English.’
‘They’re Navarrese,’ Roland de Verrec said, ‘the enemies of France, and our king wants them defeated.’
‘Breteuil is a goddamned pimple!’ the Lord of Douglas protested. ‘For Christ’s sake, what importance does it have? There are no bloody Englishmen inside!’
Roland smiled. ‘Whoever is inside, my lord,’ he said quietly, ‘I do my king’s bidding.’
The King of France, ignoring the Englishmen in Calais, in Gascony and in Brittany, had instead chosen to march against the Kingdom of Navarre on the edge of Normandy. The quarrel was obscure and the campaign a waste of scarce resources, for Navarre could not threaten France, yet King Jean had chosen to fight. It was evidently a family quarrel, one the Lord of Douglas did not comprehend. ‘Let them rot here,’ he said, ‘while we march against England. We should be chasing the boy Edward and instead we’re pissing on a spark at the edge of Normandy.’
‘The king wants Breteuil,’ Roland said.
‘He doesn’t want to face Englishmen,’ the Lord of Douglas said, and he knew he was right. Ever since the Scottish knights had come to France, the king had hesitated. Jean had chosen to go south one day, west the next, and to stay put on the third. Now, finally, he had marched against Navarre. Navarre! And the English had erupted from their strongholds in Gascony and were ravaging inland again. Another army was gathered on England’s south coast, doubtless to be landed in Normandy or Brittany, and King Jean was at Breteuil! The Lord of Douglas could weep at the thought. Go south, he had urged the French king, go south and crush the puppy Edward, capture the bastard, trample his men’s guts into the mud, and then imprison the prince as a bargaining piece for Scotland’s captured king. Instead they were besieging Breteuil.
The two men were standing on the topmost platform of the tower. Roland de Verrec had volunteered to lead the attack. The siege tower would be trundled forward, pushed by dozens of men, some of whom must fall to crossbow bolts, but others would replace them, and eventually the whole tower would crash against the castle wall and Roland’s men would slash through the ropes holding the drawbridge that protected the front of the upper platform. The drawbridge would fall, making a wide bridge to Breteuil’s battlements, and then the attackers would stream across, screaming their war cry, and those first men, the men most likely to die, must hold the captured battlement long enough to let hundreds of the King of France’s troops climb the tower’s ladders. They had to climb those ladders while cumbered by mail, by plate armour, by shields, and by weapons. It would take time, and the first men across the drawbridge had to buy that time with their lives. There was great honour in being among those first attackers, honour earned by the risk of death, and Roland de Verrec had gone on his knees to the King of France and begged to be granted that privilege.
‘Why?’ the king had asked Roland, and Roland had explained that he loved France and would serve his king, and that he had never been in battle, he had only fought in tournaments, and that it was time his talents as a fighter were put to a noble cause, and all that had been true. Yet the real reason Roland de Verrec wished to lead the assault was because he yearned for a great deed, for a quest, for some challenge that would be worthy of his purity. The king had graciously given Roland permission to lead the attack, and then granted
