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

thoroughly nasty grey-white horse and she rides it the way Bedford rides his coursers, one hand on the reins, bending it round her leg into a fluid traverse, holding it steady or stepping it two paces forward when it so very clearly wants nothing more than to run and kill, kill and run, until its legs are bloody and its flanks run black with sweat.
    Tomas Rustbeard has met horses like this. Once, he has tried to ride one. He is not in a hurry to repeat the experience.
    Here and now, though, the French herald is either too stupid or too distracted by the destruction being visited on his town, to understand what he is up against. Luckily, he doesn’t have to. The Maid spells it out for him.
    ‘You will leave your horses, your weapons and your armour behind, or you will not leave.’
    The herald gapes. His eyes flit left and right, to La Hire, to d’Alençon, men whose colours he knows. He pleads with them, silently: you are men, you are knights; you know the rules of warfare. This is not how it is done.
    Except it is, of course. This is exactly how the late King Henry did it, and you can blame him for destroying the laws of chivalry if you like, but he’s dead. Do you want to be dead too?
    She says, ‘You have an hour. March out in linen, or stay and die.’ She spins her horse on its quarters and lifts it into a half rear.
    The herald evidently doesn’t know this move. Tomas himself has only seen it once, when a Portuguese riding master with far too great a sense of his own importance was invited to put on a display for the late king.
    He had a horse not unlike this one, come to think of it: milky white, half a hand taller than the average courser, with quarters like a bull and a head like a snake. Halfway through a performance of traverse and capriole and canter-on-the-spot it lifted in a half rear just like this and then the double kick with both hind feet straight back.
    By perhaps the width of a hand, the herald is not killed. There is a moment when he looks as if he might vomit or void his bladder or otherwise disgrace himself, but presently he turns, mounts his own horse, and rides back in through the gates, with the jeers of the French army hurrying him forward.
    Tomas stays in the middle of the mob, where it is safest.
    Patrick Ogilvy keeps to his side, grinning like an imbecile. ‘What will they do?’
    ‘If they have any sense, they’ll march out in their small clothes as she ordered.’
    ‘When did the English ever have sense?’
    Oh, I don’t know … At Agincourt? Verneuil? Crécy, even? Any of the dozen similar battlefields where a small force of massively outnumbered Englishmen trounced their French assailants?
    Tomas grins mindlessly back and makes another mark in the mental tally against Ogilvy.
    The defenders of Jargeau, it seems, have abandoned all sense. The hour’s grace passes and nobody marches out. At a given signal the gunners recommence their firing.
    A flash of silver moves to his left. Tomas tugs at Ogilvy’s sleeve again. ‘Look, the Maid’s heading for the battery. She’ll be telling the gunners how to fire next.’
    ‘That should be interesting. Let’s go up and watch.’
    That’s the great thing about Ogilvy, he’s pliant. Give him a lead, and he’ll think it was his own idea. They hike up over towards the guns, after the Maid, Tomas and Ogilvy and a mass of knights and squires and pages and anyone else who has nothing better to do.
    There, a man in his element, is Jean-Pierre, Claudine’s friend, with a row of smoking guns. The Maid asks, ‘Can you bring down the south tower by the gate?’
    He grins. He has not many teeth left, and those powder black. Claudine kissed this? Really? He bows. ‘Ask and it shall be given.’
    This might be blasphemy but the Maid does not shout him down, only nods a salute. ‘Do it.’ She backs her horse a safe distance.
    Jean d’Alençon is with her; he can’t keep away.
    The priests say she’s a maid, that no man has touched her, which