The Maid Read online

  "My mother?" Jehanne asked. The words stopped her in her tracks. A wave of love and sorrow rose and crashed inside of her. It would not be correct to say that she'd forgotten she had a mother, but it had been a very long time since she had thought of herself as someone who had a mother. "She thought you should have a chaplain, so she sent me," the young monk explained, shrugging and smiling shyly. His eyes adoring.

  "Actually, she sent both of us," said a man, stepping out from behind the door. It was Bertrand, filthy as usual and grinning like a monkey.

  "Bertrand!" she shouted, running at him like a child, delighted to see a known face. "I thought you were in Blois."

  The man nodded. "Have been. Just went over to Le Puy for the holiday."

  Jehannne looked at him. "And Metz? Is he here too?"

  Bertrand shook his head. Said Metz had gone back to Vaucouleurs. "Couldn't stand the thought of watching you fight," he said quietly. "Said the worry would kill him."

  "Oh," said Jehanne, looking at the ground. Then she looked back at Bertrand. "Well, I'm glad you're here," she said.

  Bertrand fished something from his pocket and handed it to her. "Your mother sent this too."

  "My ring!" Jehanne cried, for it was the little gold ring her mother had given her on her thirteenth birthday—the year she became a woman. It had the words JESU MARIA engraved on the inside. She stared at it, pressed it against her heart, then slid it on her finger and kissed it. She grabbed Bertrand's hand and squeezed it very tightly. "It's so good to see you," she said, tears pouring down her face before she could stop them.

  They'd met up by coincidence, Bertrand and Jean Pasquerel and Jehanne's mother. All three had gone to Le Puy on Good Friday to see the famous Black Virgin, and afterward they'd got to talking on the shrine steps. "She's very proud of you," Bertrand said. "She was beaming."

  "You told her about—everything?"

  Bertrand nodded. "It made her famous in Le Puy, once it got around that she was the Maid's mother. You should have seen the crowds. People trying to touch her, asking for a lock of her hair, the whole thing."

  Jehanne blushed. Looked away. "And you told her I'm all right?"

  Bertrand nodded. "Of course she's terrified about this whole Orléans bit, the idea of her daughter going to war, but she's very proud too. She said they knew it was coming, she and your father. They dreamed it."

  "Right," Jehanne said stiffly, looking at the ground.

  Now, on this warm April day as they headed toward Blois, the young monk rode alongside Jehanne, gazing at her in her gleaming armor and shaking his head. "I can't believe this is really happening," he said.

  "That's two of us," said Aulon.

  "This is the day the Maid arrived to lead the King's army," the monk said in a dreamy voice, almost to himself.

  "Ach, enough of that," said Jehanne, throwing a hand in the air as if to push such foolishness away, and kicking her horse onward. Soon the city of Blois appeared before them, built atop a pair of steep hills that rose up out of the countryside like two great camel humps. Jehanne and her men first saw those two camel humps from a hilltop a mile away. And even from that distance they could see the enormous camp of Charles's army spreading out around the outer walls of the city—a great sea of canvas tents and huts and men, thousands and thousands of men, and their horses and livestock and flags and weapons spread out from the base of the two hills, and though her face remained a mask of bravery, though she had made light of the day's significance with the young monk, her heart went cold at the sight of it. Oh my God, it's real.

  PART III

  1

  Bertrand had been at Agincourt. The Slaughter he called it. He'd told them about it one night back in the wintertime, during their journey from Vaucouleurs to Chinon. It had been raining very hard outside, and they'd stopped to take shelter in a cave Colet had found. A lucky find, that cave. It was large enough that they could bring the horses inside with them, large enough that they could have a fire. After they'd fed the horses and shared the last dried sausage between them, they sat around, warming themselves and listening to the water drilling into the earth outside.

  After a while, Richard looked up from sharpening an arrowhead and said he could not wait to spill Goddon blood in Orléans. Both Honnecourt brothers perked up at this. "First Goddon I kill, I'm going to keep his ears. Wear them on a necklace," said Julian, whose father had been killed during the siege of Vaucouleurs. Jean thought about this for a minute, his eyes gleaming in the firelight. Then he said, "First one I kill, I'm going to take the whole head. Dry it out and bring it home to Mama for a Christmas present."

  Bertrand made a face. "Yeah. It all sounds grand and fun now," he said, "but you get out there on the field and there isn't one thing grand or fun about it." He said that he had been at the Battle of Agincourt. He said they had no idea what they were talking about.

  "You were there?" said Jehanne, staring.

  "Worst day of my life."

  "Tell us," said Jehanne, leaning forward.

  Bertrand shrugged. "It was supposed to be an easy victory. The Goddons had been pounding us for six months straight, and we knew they were worn out," he said. "Winter was coming, and they were marching back toward their ships in Calais, so we decided to go after them. Easy enough to find them, really. All you had to do was follow the burning farmhouses.

  "There were only seven or eight thousand of them, and they'd already marched two hundred and fifty miles in just over a fortnight. A crazy pace Henry had going, trying to get home before the snow flew. Something like fourteen miles a day. And we knew it was taking its toll. Dysentery was spreading like fire through the troops and they were out of food. Eating onion bulbs for supper. Four thousand of their men had died that week alone. The ones that were still standing were just desperate to get on their ships and go home."

  Bertrand smiled. "We thought, Well, now here finally is a chance to teach these bastards a lesson. And you should have seen the army Albret had assembled. Prettiest thing you've ever seen. Twenty thousand Frenchmen, all the great princes. Bourbon, the Old Duke of Alençon, Orléans, Brittany. More nobles than I've ever seen in one place. All with their gleaming armor and swords and their big Spanish horses. Just an amazing sight.

  "So we set up to head them off at a strip of land between two small woods. One was Agincourt, and the other was Tramecourt. It was the end of October and just awful weather, bitter cold and rainy, a lot like it is now. But we barely noticed it we were so riled up. I remember the night before we fought, we were all sitting up drinking by the fire, laughing about how much money we were going to make from all the Goddon ransoms. I was strutting around like an idiot, telling how my wife had said,'Bertrand, you don't bring me home a fur coat, we're through.' We were all of us like that that night, cocky as dogs."

  Bertrand shook his head and took a long sip of his wine. "It was the field itself that killed us. Just a sea of mud, so thick it took half an hour to walk ten feet. It was like trying to walk through tar. You stepped in and sank right up to your knees. That and the longbows. They were the other thing. As I said, we were set up north of the English, between these two small woods, so the field itself was very narrow, and here we were with our cavalry all ready out front, and our men-at-arms behind with their lances and axes and flails, and I don't know if you've ever seen what a rain of arrows looks like, but there is just no fighting it. At least we haven't figured out how to fight it yet. Those English—they may be pigs, but by God they're good archers. And their bows are so much bigger than ours. If you stood one of our archers next to one of theirs and told them both to shoot, you'd laugh at the result. Their arrows would go three or four times as far as ours. Just leave us in the dust.

  "At any rate, there we are, twenty thousand men—the best warriors in France—and we're all suited up in our armor, and charging out to fight on our beautiful horses, but suddenly, when we're about three hundred yards away from their front line, the sky goes black, and the next thing you know,
there's this sound, this kind of shum, shum, shum all around, and our horses start dropping left and right, horses just screaming and bolting and going down all over, their eyes rolled back white in their heads, the arrows taking them down by the dozens. And then, the animals that did make it as far as the Goddons' front line ended up running up on these huge six-foot stakes they'd planted out front. Bastards tore right through their hearts. Worst waste of horseflesh I've ever seen.

  "So then the men-at-arms come up and we try to go at them on foot, but as I said, the damned armor was a disaster in all that mud. We might as well have been trying to walk around in coffins. So there we are lurching about in the mud and rain, trying to just make it to the front lines, and already the English have us surrounded on both sides and are forcing us so tightly together we can barely move, much less swing our axes, and all the while these arrows are raining down, shum, shum, shum, and everyone around me is dying, only we're packed so tight that the bodies can't even fall, so when I look around, all I see are these dead eyes, these terrible frozen faces, staring into nowhere. Worst feeling I ever had. Like waking up inside a nightmare.

  "From there, it just got worse. When we finally hit the front lines, we knocked them back at first—just plowed some of them straight off their feet, we were so furious. But it didn't last. As soon as Henry saw how slow we were, he halted his archers and sent his whole army charging at us on foot, which was smart because his men had realized it would be death to wear armor in all that mud. Most of them didn't even have helmets on. They just came at us running, mostly barefoot, all painted up with mud and blood and their hose rolled up to their knees, swinging their hatchets and axes and mallets and flails, taking off heads left and right. I remember first seeing Henry out there running around in his gold helmet with rubies all over it, swinging his claymore and howling and knocking all these poor armored-up men over, and you know, once you get tipped in one of those things, you're like a crab flipped on its back. It's over. So here's Henry and his men knocking them over and then pulling up mens' helmets and popping their eyeballs out with their knives, and then leaving them there to drown or suffocate. A lot of men died just because they couldn't get out from under the ones who'd fallen on top of them.

  "But those of our men who could fight fought so well. The Old Duke of Alençon was like the Devil himself out there, whipping his ax into a duke's head, splitting it open like a pumpkin. At one point, he had the King himself down on his knees. I saw that happen. He was standing over Henry, and he'd even managed to swipe a floret off his crown, but then out of nowhere came this monstrous black-haired knight, all grinning and blood-drunk, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he swings his flail into the Old Duke's mouth and when he takes it out, there's this big, wet, red mess where Alençon's face had been, and the monster's howling and laughing, and he's in such a frenzy that when his Goddon friend comes up to him, he grabs a knife and cuts his throat, thinking he's French.

  "Anyway, it didn't take long after that. Within an hour, maybe even half an hour, our two front lines were destroyed. The bodies were piled up higher than my head. Those of us who were left ran into the forest and watched the Goddons go through the field, kicking over the bodies and taking weapons and digging around under their armor for gold and rings and knives. A terrible mess of screaming coming from the fallen men. The bastards.

  "Eventually our reinforcements arrived. We were just about to go back out on the field when Ysembart d'Azincourt came roaring out of the forest with about a thousand peasants behind him and attacked Henry's camp, started running off with all kinds of loot. They were awful-looking wretches—looked like they hadn't eaten in years. I remember seeing one beggar, filthiest animal you ever saw, all decked out in Henry's velvet and ermine cloak and gold chains and whatnot, dancing around the campground with a ham in his hand, swishing his coat this way and that, singing,'Hee hee, I'm King Henry come to murder the French.' Another one came running out of Henry's tent with a pug dog under each arm, poor things howling like babies. Well, at some point Henry must have seen what was going on because the next thing he did was order his men to kill all of the French prisoners they'd already taken in battle. Princes, dukes, counts, all of them. The archers went around running them through with lances, splitting their heads open with poleaxes so their brains spilled out on the ground. Then all of the unarmed nobles surrendered, and they rounded them up and corralled them into this straw house in their camp, barred the door, and set the thing on fire. There were at least forty men in there, screaming. Screams like I never heard before. I remember, once the thing had caught fire, some of them managed to break through the wall, so there were these poor flaming bastards stumbling out into the open and running around in circles, staggering, pleading for someone to help them. The English just laughing.

  "No one had the stomach to fight after that. All the French who were still alive just rode off the battlefield. The English came back and rounded up the few nobles that were still alive—the ones they could get big ransoms for. Anyone else who was still breathing on the battlefield got their throat cut. Ten thousand Frenchmen they killed that day. Some of the best warriors you've ever seen. Something like three dukes, five counts, ninety barons and the constable himself—all dead. Fifteen hundred knights too. They say that Henry made the nobles he'd taken prisoner wait on his dinner table that night. They say the heads of the rest of our nobles were set up on stakes around Henry's table, as if the Goddons hadn't done enough.

  "I've never seen anything like it. It was like Henry took all the rules we'd agreed to live by and threw them in the mud. All the old rules of war and fair conduct, he acted like none of them had ever existed. Like we'd all been born savages, and anyone who didn't fight like a savage was a bloody fool. I remember thanking God my father wasn't there to see that fight because if he had been, I think it would have killed him where he stood.

  "The war that Henry fought, it turned everyone, all of us into animals. Blood-drunk monsters. That's what fighting without rules does to you. You become creatures who will do anything to win. Creatures who run on spilled blood. And the trouble is, once the fighting's over, you come to find there's no man left inside you anymore. You're just an old hollowed-out shell, no sense of right or wrong, fair or unfair. You're just cleaned out, lost, wondering what happened to you."

  "That or you're a murderer," said Colet, his slim face gleaming whitely in the firelight. "Get so used to killing you can't do anything else."

  "True enough," said Bertrand.

  Jehanne was sitting on the ground beside Metz, wrapped in a half-wet blanket. Thinking. She thought that what Bertrand said was true and good, but lower down, some reptilian part of her said, We'll have to fight like they do. This chivalry stuff will be the end of us. The rules have changed. We change with them, or we die. Realizing that she was thinking this, she folded up the thought. No, she told herself. It isn't true.

  But she did not throw the thought away. She simply folded it up and buried it in a room of her soul that she did not like to visit.

  ***

  Now, as she rode toward the camp in Blois, she thought again of Agincourt. But this time she did not think about how she would fight. She thought only that she would fight. That she could not wait to fight. Oh God, I am your vessel. Oh God, I am your holy wrath.

  2

  She loved the camp. The moment she rode into it, she knew: This is where I belong. I am a warrior. I belong in war. Exhilaration roaring through her as she rode through the muddy sea of tents and men and flags. Smell of saltpeter and gunpowder firing her blood.

  Sunlight glinting on pointed metal boots.

  She loved the corrals of the tall warhorses and the armories with their black mountains of cannonballs out front. Loved the young squires squatting on their haunches down by the broad green river, singing as they washed their masters' swords and shields. Loved the archers out in the clover fields, shooting their arrows into yellow straw men, the archers suddenly dropping their bows and staring
as she rode past them in her bright silver armor with the JESU MARIA banner held high, running toward her now, all of them running to get a better look, running and then shouting, The Maid! The Maid! The Maid is come!

  She knew almost nothing of their protocols and strategies, their tactics of war. Nor did she care. She was their fire, the fire that had gone out during all the decades of defeat, the roar and fury they'd lost. The single-minded will to win.

  Take command immediately, Michael whispered as she continued alongside Alençon through the camp. If you don't lay down the rules right now, they will never follow you. And so Jehanne heard her own voice become deep and calm as she greeted her new generals, and so it was that she became another self then, a warrior self. No more pleading peasant girl. She was the Maid, born to lead her men to triumph.

  Two men approached on horses. "Ah, La Hire," Alençon said, pointing toward the man's black-and-white flag.

  "La Hire?" asked Jehanne, who had grown up hearing stories about him. La Hire, the great, fearless general. La Hire, the Fury. "That's La Hire?"

  "The one in the red cloak," Alençon said, nodding at a small bald man sitting atop a splendid gray horse. He was dressed in a red velvet cloak that glittered oddly in the sunlight and made a merry, tinkling sound as he rode. As he came closer, Jehanne could see the little silver bells on it.

  "I've seen him before," she said, remembering him from one of Yolande's meetings at Chinon. He was the one who'd winked at her, as if to say Screw plans. Let's do the hard push.

  La Hire, Jehanne knew, had fought in all the great battles, Agincourt, Rouvray. A legendary mercenary, famous for his arrogance, his rages, his fearlessness in the field.