Free The Ill-Made Knight by Christian Cameron

leagues from Limoges. I won’t weary you with details, except to say that when we left Bordeaux I was a raw boy, and by Limoges I was a seasoned campaigner. I could find food and I could make a fire. I could help Abelard choose a campsite, based on local fresh water, wind protection, security and having a place to tether horses – there are a hundred factors that made one campsite better than another. Sometimes the pickings were slim and we all slept on rocks – 7,000 men is a great number, and if they have 15,000 horses, you have a fair number of bodies to feed, water and sleep.
    At the abbey, the Prince held a ceremony I had never seen before. He unfurled his banner. It was a formal, chivalric declaration of war, and Sir John Chandos, his standard bearer, held it forth, snapping like three angry leopards over his head. The Prince made a speech about his rights and how just our campaign was.
    I felt as if I was going to cry, I was so proud to be there, on horseback, with a sword at my side. Even as a cook’s boy. In an army that murdered and raped peasants.
    There was nothing chivalrous about what followed. We were now formally at war, in the domain of the King of France. We proceeded with banners unfurled, burning everything as we went. Abbeys, great houses and farms – all were sacked and burned.
    It was stunning. I was, to be frank, horrified at first. I watched a dozen archers rape a pair of sisters and leave them weeping – later one of the men told me they were lucky not to have been killed. I saw children cut down for screaming too loudly; older men butchered by laughing Gascon brigands, and nuns stripped naked and sold to a pimp as whores.
    Because that’s what war is, friends, and everyone here knows what I’m saying.
    It was an orgy. The land was rich and untouched, and old soldiers, archers who’d been at Crécy or Sluys, laughed and said they’d never seen the like. We took so much money as we went that when we were ordered to leave the farms and great houses of the Countess of Pembroke – an Englishwoman with holdings in France – we did. We went around them.
    We spread across the country like a swarm of locusts, and with us went fire and sword, cutting and burning like a farmer clearing land. We ate what we liked, drank free wine, and forced the women to our will, killing the men. This was the land of the King of France, and the message we left was that he was too weak to protect his own.
    Mind you, French peasants are no more foolish than English peasants, and most of them, when they had even a little warning, burned their crops, took their womenfolk and ran for the strong walled towns. But they left their sausages hanging from their roof beams, and we burned their cottages and made our meals from their hoarded savings of food, cooked on their carefully built homes.
    When we took them by surprise, with our horses and rapid marching, we got everything.
    I’d like to say that I neither stole nor burned, but the only sin from which I was free was rape, and that was only because of my sister.
    A boy of fifteen does what the men he’s with do. I took what I wanted, and that included Marie, a girl of my age or perhaps a little less. She’d been raped and hurt, and I took her in, carried her on my horse, cleaned her up and then used her myself.
    The only difference I can offer is that I fed and kept her.
    We were deep in the heart of France by this time. We were shadowed by French knights on horseback – in fact, several times the Earl of Oxford rode out to make them fight, but they slipped away like Turks. We were almost at the Loire – the famous Loire, a name even a boy like me knew – when we sacked a town for the first time.
    Here’s how we got in. I was far across the fields, looking for a spot to set up camp for the Earl, when I saw dust, which I knew signalled horsemen moving fast. By mid-morning, we learned from some of Warwick’s men moving from our right towards the town that the Prince