The pressure of his fingers was gentle, and loving. The demons will never— can never— destroy that casket and its contents. It exists to be found, and to be used by the forces of God and goodness. It is a tabernacle, Thomas. They may hide it, but it cannot be destroyed by the many-fingered hates of the demons.
Yet again tears welled in Thomas’ eyes. This time they slipped past his eyelids, and slid down his cheeks.
Fight for me, Thomas, the archangel whispered, and then turned his face toward Jeannette.
Ah, most beautiful girl. You have such an unusual path before you, and you will see many unusual things. Walk in God’s lave always.
Remember—now the archangel addressed them both— your paths will appear strange to you, and sometimes hateful, but do not hesitate. I, as God in all His Majesty, and as the saints and angels, and as the entire Hosts of Heaven, depend on you. Be true. Trust, however strange the way ahead.
He leaned forward, and touched his lips to each of their brows in benediction. Go in peace and the love of God.
Then he was gone, and there was nothing left in that barn but the peaceful breathing of Jeannette and Thomas.
THOMAS LAY sleepless long after Jeanette had left him. He was troubled by a
niggling irritation that St. Michael had also chosen Jeanette to work his will, but Thomas could clearly see that he had the larger and most important part to play. And to play it from within the English camp. Everything was driving him back to England: the casket, St. Michael’s assertion that the demons had infiltrated the English court.
Who? Thomas wondered.
Then he relaxed as sleepiness and a sense of deep well-being overcame him. St.
Michael had not forgotten him, he was watching, and he cared.
No, Thomas thought as he finally slid toward sleep, there could be no way he would ever betray St. Michael or God by handing his soul over to a woman, a whore.
Never…
CHAPTER TWO
Octave of the Nativity of the Virgin
In the fifty-first year of the reign of Edward III
(Wednesday 15th September 1378)
THE ENGLISH AND FRENCH armies had been skirmishing for days with relatively few casualties and no result. On the eighth day after the Nativity of the Virgin, Edward, Prince of Wales, known as the Black Prince, led his army of some four thousand knights and men-at-arms, one thousand armed sergeants and two thousand archers (both longbowmen and cross-bowmen) into the fields outside the town of Poitiers.
The French army, led by King John II, numbered some fifty thousand.
Before the battle commenced, the French Cardinal Perigord approached King John and pleaded that he might be allowed to go to the Black Prince with a proposition.
“What is it?” asked King John.
“My very dear lord,” said the cardinal, “you have here the cream of your kingdom’s nobility pitted against a mere handful of the English. If you could overcome them without a fight by accepting their surrender, it would redound to your honor more than if you risked this large and splendid army in battle. I therefore beg you humbly, in the name of God, to let me ride over to the Prince and persuade him of the great peril he is in.”
“I agree,” said King John, shifting slightly to ease the cursed pressure of his bladder, “but do not be too long about it,”
The cardinal was not too long about it at all, for the Black Prince merely laughed in his face and said that the only surrender he was interested in was King John’s.
Perigord bowed his head, accepting the Prince’s bravado, and rode to inform his king of the Black Prince’s response.
King John smiled, anticipating the triumph when he would put the tip of his sword to the English ass-prince’s throat. And the comfort when he could finally divest himself of his piss-stained suit of armor. At his age he couldn’t go longer than an hour without needing to relieve his bladder, and he’d been so long in plate already he’d had to let the cursed urine trickle down his left leg on several occasions.
His skin itched damnably.
Piss-stained armor notwithstanding, within two hours John led his army of fifty thousand into blood-drenched horror.
LATE THAT evening, even as the victors were wearily cutting the throats of the injured, and screaming, enemy trapped in the bloodied mud of the battlefield, an English clerk and frustrated poet called Geoffrey le Baker sat down and composed an entry for the campaign diary he would eventually turn into a chronicle. After describing the initial maneuvering of the respective sides, le Baker continued: As King John moved his forces forward, Prince Edward looked about him and surveyed his position. He saw that a hill near his army was completely encircled by fences and ditches, and its slopes almost entirely covered by pasture land thick with shrubbery, vineyards and fields of growing crops.
Edward decided to make his stand in the hillside fields, but to reach the hill his army had to cross a river in a deep marshy valley. His troops found a narrow ford and crossed the river with their carts. Then they moved through the fences and ditches and seized the hill, their movements hidden by the undergrowth.
On realizing that Prince Edward’s standard had disappeared, King John assumed the prince had fled. The French advanced toward the hill, believing they were chasing retreating Englishmen. Suddenly the leading French pikemen were attacked by well-equipped English knights, who successfully parried the thrusts of their enemy’s pikes.
As more French advanced on the hill the battle raged in a fearful conflict of lances, swords and axes. High on the mound of the hill, the English archers and crossbowmen rained down their arrows and bolts on the French, who had reached, or were approaching, the ditches.
All did not go well for the prince’s forces, however, for many of his archers had lagged behind his mam force, and were trapped in the marshes.
These men the French cavalry trampled beneath their horses’ hooves.
The fury of the carnage wore on. Both French and English sounded their fanfares, the wail of trumpets, horns and pipes echoing from the stony valley wall through the forests of Poitou until it seemed the very moutains moaned and the clouds shrieked.
To the accompaniment of this horrible music, golden armor glittered and twisted, and burnished steel spears thrust like lightning bolts, shattering anything that lay in their path. The English crossbowmen made a night of the day, showering the French with a thick cloud of bolts, and this fatal downpour was further thickened with the
arrows of the archers.
Madly the prince’s forces hurtled on
Against the dense-packed shields, to seek a way
To pierce their enemies’ armor and to strike
The hearts beneath the breastplate’s firm protection.
Now Edward, Prince of Wales, strode into battle, hacking his way through the enemy lines and leaving ruin and death in his path:
Savagely circling
His sword on all sides
Strikes his foes
Crushes them down.
Thus drops each man
On whom its blow falls.
The French lines faltered and grew ragged, and Edward turned his fearsome advance upon King John and his retinue. The French standard bearers faltered, and then fell. Some were trampled beneath the feet of man and horses, their bowels ruptured and spurting their contents upon the earth; others were impaled to the ground by English spears; still others had their arms struck from their bodies. Of those who fell, some
drowned in the soaking blood about them, while others
screamed and wailed as they were crushed beneath the weight of those who fell atop them.
The shrieks of the dying joined the fearful clatter of the battle, and the blood of peasant and noble alike mingled in a single flow that fed the now scarlet fish of nearby streams.
And so the Black Prince, the wild boar of Cornwall, he who loves only the paths that flow with blood, hacked his joyous way toward King John’s position. He and his forces broke through the French defenses and, with the noble savageness of the lion, crushed the proud, spared the humble, and accepted King John’s surrender.
GEOFFREY PUT down his quill, carefully set his pages to one side, then rested his face on his arms on the desk and wept. It was the first battle he had seen, and such was the horror and the bloodshed, the stench of ruptured bowels and the screams of the dying, that Geoffrey did not think his soul would ever recover.
MARGARET WAITED long into the night, pacing back and forth before her lover’s tent, pale with fear and sickened by the shrieks that still floated above the battlefield.
The Black Prince had won, she knew that, but at what cost? Who among his knights had fallen?
Who had fallen? What if one of the screams she had heard had been to?