Into The Fire by Manda Scott Read Free Book Online Page A

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,