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By Root 1286 0

him, then stepped forward again, hungry for more death. “Kill them!” he screamed. “Kill them!” He felt a burst of energy and used it to crash into the French line, opening it so his men could follow, stabbing and lunging with the speed of Christendom’s most feared tournament fighter. He crippled men with the spike, driving it through the faulds covering their groins, and as they doubled in screaming pain he would crash the hammer or ax onto their helmets and leave it to the men behind to give the fallen enemy the mercy of death. Sir John took blows on his armor, but they were feeble until a Frenchman managed a hard swing with a poleax and Sir John was only saved because the enemy’s shaft broke and Sir John screamed in challenge and swung his own ax at the man’s legs, driving the blade through a roundel to chop into a knee. The man went down and lunged with his weapon’s broken shaft, and Sir John smashed the hammerhead onto the enemy’s helmet with such force that the steel collapsed and bloody ooze spurted from the visor. Sir John and his men-at-arms were hacking a deep hole in the crammed French ranks, killing again to make new corpses to trip the enemy.

To his left, unseen by Sir John, the Duke of York died.

The French attack had struck the English vanguard first. A hundred men were dead in that fight before the oriflamme reached King Henry’s men, and in the front of the foremost men was Ghillebert, Seigneur de Lanferelle, and he was half aware that the English to his left had stepped back as the charge crashed home, but the Duke of York and his men had stayed put, thrusting with lances, and Lanferelle had twisted aside, letting a lance slide off his breastplate’s flank, then ramming his own lance into an unvisored face. “Lanferelle!” he shouted, “Lanferelle!” He wanted the English to know whom they faced, and he fended off a lance with his own then unslung his mace and started to hack. This was no place for the subtle graces of a tournament field, no place to show a swordsman’s skills, this was a place to hack and kill, chop and wound, to fill an enemy with fear, and Lanferelle drove the spiked mace down into a man wearing the duke’s livery and wrenched the bloody spikes out of the split helmet and skull and thumped it forward into another man, hurling him back and he could see the duke clearly now, just to his right, but first he had to kill a man to his left, which he did with the heavy mace in a blow that rang up his arm. “Yield!” he shouted at the duke who had dropped his visor, and the duke’s response was to swing his sword that clanged on Lanferelle’s plate and Lanferelle dropped the mace head over the duke’s shoulder and pulled so that the tall man stumbled forward, lost his footing, and fell full length. “He’s mine!” Lanferelle shouted, “the bastard’s mine,” and that was when the battle joy came to Lanferelle, the exultation of a fighter who dominated his foes.

He stood over the duke, one foot on the fallen man’s spine, and killed any man who tried a rescue. Four of his own men-at-arms flanked him with poleaxes and they shouted insults at the English before killing them. “I want the standard!” Lanferelle shouted. He thought the duke’s great flag would be a welcome decoration in his manor hall where it could hang from the smoke-darkened beams beneath the musicians’ gallery and the duke, a prisoner in Lanferelle’s keeping, would be forced to see that standard every day. “Come and die!” Lanferelle shouted at the standard-bearer, but English men-at-arms pushed the man back out of immediate danger and closed on Lanferelle and he parried their blows, thrusting back hard, depending on the weight of his mace to throw his opponents off balance, and all the while he shouted at his men in the second rank to defend his back. They had to keep the crush of Frenchmen from crowding him, and they did it by threatening their own ranks, giving Lanferelle room to slash the mace at any man who dared oppose him. His four men were using their poleaxes to hack at the English line that was so thin Lanferelle reckoned he could fight