Into The Fire Read Free

of someone else’s life.
    T HOMAS H OUSTON , E DWARD OF L ENNOX ,
    M ICHAEL N ORWILL …
    ‘Papa, why did they come?’ She is six years old, perhaps, or seven. Old enough to know that dying is not good; young enough not yet to know that sometimes it is better than living.
    ‘Because the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ Her father’s laughter is dry. In retrospect, it perhaps harbours layers of inference she does not understand at the time. ‘The Scots hated the English with a passion and when a whole succession of English kings tried to claim France as their own, generations of Scots came here to fight them off. They were more loyal to our king than was his own cousin, the Duke of Burgundy. The Burgundians fought on the English side then, to their eternal shame.
    ‘But it was the Maid who broke the siege. She led the army out against the English.’ This she has known from her earliest years.
    ‘She did indeed. The Scots may have helped to hold the walls, but it was the Maid who turned the tide. Close your eyes. Can you see her? There she is, astride the king’s great, white war horse, clad in unmarked plate, lance in one hand, small-axe in the other, riding out of the gate at the head of the army.
    ‘Think of that! In a world where women were chattels, she was passion incarnate. France had lost so many battles then, many they should have won when they had superior numbers, superior arms; still, they lost. Our knights were demoralized, our armies shrunk to nothing: who wants to fight when they’re guaranteed to lose?
    ‘Then the Maid arrived. She took the war-weary, war-feart, war-lazy men of France, and she shamed them all into action, until even those who didn’t want to fight found themselves winning, and once they were winning, they found that they liked it.’
    He scoops her up, her father, whirls her round, sends the stars spinning. ‘But the old goats who surround me, even now, in the twenty-first century, are so afraid of the idea of a girl who can fight that they clothe her in magical myth …’
    And he is off again, staring out into the place only he can see, where past and future come together and a wrong is put right and the frayed fabric of history is made whole again.
    Except, of course, that it is not. He is ruined, his reputation shredded by the old goats who had no qualms about assaulting anyone with the temerity to question the sanctity of their beliefs.
    And he is dead.
    He is dead and his obsession is dead with him, and if there is grief there is also an overwhelming relief, and one day she will come to terms with the uneven balance of these.
    In the meantime, she has a fire to contend with, and a whole new set of enemies, far less evident than the English, who would make of her city a battleground in a war for which she does not yet understand the reason.
    She salutes the plaque in the way she has done for most of her life and retraces her steps round one corner and another and then round a third and back to the smouldering wreck of the hotel, which is now the site of a murder.

CHAPTER TWO
T HE S IEGE OF O RLÉANS ,
The final day, 7 May 1429
    IN THE LATE afternoon, a lance of naked sunlight spears the gunsmoke and strikes Tod Rustbeard square on the chest. Looking down from the stone and timber rampart on which he stands, he thinks a shot must strike after it, or a bodkin, or a French axe hurled up from below. He will die filthy, his beard a clot of spittle, his mail a mess of crusted gore, brown as cow dung, rough as a ploughed field, textured with other men’s deaths.
    But not his own. From somewhere behind his left shoulder, an English gun vomits another round into the ranks of the enemy. Smoke lurches skyward to kill the sunlight and he is still alive, unshot, unstruck, undead. He peers through the haze to the waves of Gallic fury heaving at the foot of the ramparts.
    Fuck them and fuck their mothers. They don’t know when to give up. They, too, are filthy now, who were crimson and