Tonight the air is thick as a butcher’s apron—smoke, sour wine, the copper stink of men who have not washed since Easter. I crouch in the ruined cloister, helm dented so the nasal kisses the bridge of my nose every breath, bill-hook shaft cracked like an old wife’s loom. My gambeson still carries another man’s dried bowel from Meung; it flakes off in brown snow whenever I shift. Jean de la Motte, vintner’s runt—nobody’s son—pressed into mail two sizes too large for me.
Jeanne comes walking between the sleepers, torchlight licking her white harness. She stops, small, chin lifted, eyes bright enough to read scripture by.
—Soldier, she says, voice low, country-plain, —thy heart beats louder than the wardrum. Fear?
I nod.
She smiles—sad, fierce—and presses a strip of linen into my palm: the hem of her banner, browned with her own blood from yesterday’s arrow-graze. —Tie it tight, she says. —When the ladder sways let this keep thee from swaying.
Behind her a veuglaire speaks; stone dust drifts like unholy incense. Somewhere a man whimpers, calling for his mother in no tongue God claims.
Jeanne kneels so our eyes are level. —Name thy sin, she murmurs, so tomorrow thou fightest for something dearer than wine or plunder.
The words crawl out, raw as new cheese: —At Patay I fled. Left my brother Guillaume with a belly wound. Still hear him call.
She closes her eyes one heartbeat—long enough for the river battery to answer again—then lays her gauntleted hand against my cheek. Steel is ice, the palm inside it fire.
—Demain tu cours vers eux, she whispers, then instantly, —Tomorrow thou runnest toward them. Fetch him back. She kisses the cold iron by my ear, brief as sealing wax. —God loves a frightened man who keeps climbing.
She moves on. I knot the linen round my wrist; it is warm from her skin. I sleep kneeling, forehead to stone, every dream a ladder whose rungs are slick with somebody else’s life.
Dawn bleeds across the Loire. Mist hangs thick as curdled milk; the breach gapes—stone fangs round a smoking wound. We form the forlorn hope, sixth ladder. Jeanne mounts first, sword only shoulder-high. Her voice carries calm:
—Forward, for the King of Heaven. The gate is iron and oak; faith is sharper.
We climb.
Third breath: arrows clatter like hail. Fourth rung: Pierre the baker’s son gurgles, slumps; I step on his back and keep rising. My cracked ash shaft groans, fibres peeling like sinew. Sixth rung: a cloth-yard punches through the man below me—he keeps climbing anyway, spear dragging from his thigh like a tail.
Jeanne gains the parapet. An English axes-man hooks her banner, snaps the pole; the sacred silk flutters down inside the wall. She hesitates one heartbeat—only that. I vault the last stride, bill-hook useless; I swing the splintered haft into the Englishman’s face-plate. Bone caves with a wet crunch. We crash onto the wall-walk. I roll atop him, snatch a loose coping stone, bring it down twice. He stops moving.
Jeanne is already up, ragged banner reclaimed. She plants it between us. —The wall is ours—hold!
More French spill over. I feel a punch beneath my ribs—hot, cold, hot. An English dagger has found the gap where coat-of-plates meets belt. I do not see the hand; Jeanne does. Her sword flicks, farmer’s scythe, and the hand drops away still gripping the blade. She catches me as knees soften.
—Stay, she orders, pressing the linen relic against the wound. Blood soaks it at once; her fingers come away shining. Below, the drawbridge drops; our men pour across like water through a broken dam.
I try to laugh; blood bubbles instead. —Told thee I was frightened.
—Et quand même tu as gravi. And still thou climbed’st. She wipes her gauntlet across my cheek, leaving a scarlet streak like war-paint. —God will remember.
She grips my shoulder. —Hold the banner. Even if thy hands slacken, let it not touch the ground.
The fight rolls past, boots drumming. Sounds blur—steel on steel, shouting, hollow thump of gates giving way. Through the crenel I see her white armour bobbing down the stair into the melee, soon swallowed.
I nod, taste iron, cold creeping from boots upward. I slide against the merlon until I sit, banner pole between breast and stone. Blood cools, tacky, fusing linen to wood, wrist to pole—coward, saint, and relic soldered by one slow heartbeat.
The sky narrows to a slit. I count rosary heartbeats, whispering my brother’s name. When the chroniclers come they will find me seated, standard upright, strip of her blood glued to mine, flag and coward become one splintered saint the soldiers swear they saw stand back up.
