English Channel, June, 1340
Edward III, King of England, Lord of Ireland and pretender to the throne of France, was excited. Two of his knights, Sir John Chandos and Stephen Lambkin, had just walked into camp, bringing with them intelligence.
They were knelt before him now, relaying the results of their expedition.
“Your Majesty, they have barred the entrance to the roadstead. With a multitude of ships, all lashed together with chains. No ingress is possible.”
The king gave a savage grin in his seat.
“No ingress, but for smashing our way through, eh?”
The gathered noblemen, attendants and courtiers all paused.
John de Stratford, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of England leaned in.
“Your Grace, you do recall that King Philip’s Great Army of the Sea has our numbers twofold?”
The king waved the concern away.
“Bah! Is this the English spirit? Philip has taken my ancestral lands, akin to a common thief, and you intend to scurry away like a scolded child?”
The Archbishop grimaced.
“Of course not, Your Grace, I merely worry about the…possibility that the royal person may come to harm.”
The king snapped.
“I will worry about my person! From the moment we received word of the Conseil du Roi’s decision to mug me like a brigand, I could smell your reluctance, all of you. One chokes from the stink of your cowardice in the air. I have been robbed! Great injury has been done to the King of England, and when he puts upon the Englishmen to answer the call of their monarch, to right this injustice, all he gets are a gaggle of cravens? No. I will hear no more dissent. We sail at high tide.”
“Your Grace, if you cou-”
“WE SAIL AT HIGH TIDE!”
His tone making it clear that he would brook no disagreement, men ran off to relay instructions, telling everyone to prepare to embark.
Lurching into consciousness, Nicola found herself marching up a gangplank onto a wooden ship.
It was huge, designed like a floating fortress, with forecastles and aftercastles built on the bow and stern, and a fortified crow’s nest platform atop the trunk-like mast. It had one massive mainsail, furled across a crossbeam, with ropes stretched taut across the ship holding it up.
Nearly falling off as she looked around confused, someone from behind pushed her onto the ship and she sprawled forward on the deck. Laughter rang out from the men filing past her as someone helped her up off the smooth wooden deck.
“Yer gonna want to limit that, laddie. This here is the Thomas, the King’s flagship. Scratch up its floor too much and ye’ll be flogged ‘til ye can breathe through yer back."
Oh no. I'm a man.
Recovering quickly, she nodded and gave what she thought was a friendly grunt. At least, it seemed that way when she saw guys do it.
Satisfied, the hearty man chuckled, before walking off muttering about green boys wearing their father's armour.
She'd heard about this part of the Trial from Kavvy, so she wasn't caught completely off-guard, but she still had to brace herself against the railings as her sense of self readjusted.
She shuddered as awareness spread through her body.
Men are so… hairy.
She also felt denser in a way she couldn't explain, like her flesh and bones had more weight to them, especially on her back. Even her centre of gravity was higher, changing the way she walked.
Looking down at her clothes, she saw she was in a thick gambeson, red and blue underneath a chainmail shirt.
She had on an open-faced helmet, with a quiver at her side and a longbow slung across her back. A trusty rondel was sheathed at her side.
Squinting, she tried to remember why they were there.
I'm… a soldier. A longbowman with Baron Cobham's retinue.
Drawing on her body's background knowledge, she knew that she hailed from Surrey, specifically a small town called Lingfield, and was in the employ of Sir Reynold Cobham. When his son, also Reynold Cobham, became 1st Baron Cobham of Sterborough and was selected as one of the king's household knights, she came along with him. They were experienced, having crushed the Scots under the child king David de Bruce.
Now they were on a fleet headed to land an army at Sluys, a port town in Flanders, but had received word that the entire French navy was lying in wait at the entrance to the estuary, trying to spring a trap.
Why are we fighting?
The French king, Philip VI, had confiscated king Edward's lands on the continent, and in return, the enraged Edward had pressed his claim on the French throne. And it was a strong one. The previous king of France, Charles IV, had had no male heirs and as his nephew, king Edward was the closest male relative who could take the throne.
Instead, an upstart from the house of Valois, a minor cadet branch of the royal Capetian dynasty, was chosen over the direct male relation. Thus now, they were here. Of course, king Charles' daughter wasn't even considered.
Ugh, the past. At least I won't be a target for all the casual sexism.
"Oi, Bobby! Get yer arse up here then, eh? Blocking the way, ye are."
A voice called down to her from above. Looking up she saw men, archers just like her, climbing up a ladder on the mast to reach the crow's nest.
Oop, that's my position.
Focusing, she climbed up the set of wooden rungs towards her post, getting inside the elevated vantage point with nineteen other men.
They waited inside, occasionally getting delivered extra quivers and oil-soaked rags.
With a large contingent of fully armoured knights, the king boarded the ship finally, and a red-faced man shouted orders for them to set off. A sailor untied a rope fastened to the railing and as it whipped across the deck, the massive mainsail unfurled, red and blue in the king’s colours, catching the wind. With a creak of the mast, the ship started moving.
Ding!
Objective: Disable one French knight.
Does this mean disable, or “disable”? No matter, I can try both.
From her vantage in the crow’s nest, she saw the entire army arrayed below as they set sail. What looked like around a hundred cogs, merchant ships retrofitted with forecastles and other martial upgrades, were sailing in tandem along the coast of Flanders, flying the lions of England and the fleur-de-lis of France, signifying Edward’s authority over both territories.
Mainsails billowing in the wind, the fleet travelled up the Flemish coast, sailing past cliffs and beaches, expecting to encounter the formidable French navy at any moment blocking off the roadstead into the port of Sluys. King Edward paced the deck below.
As the fleet rounded a final cliff, they saw a jaw-dropping view. Calls sounded across the fleet, all saying the same thing.
“Enemy sighted! Enemy sighted!”
A forest of masts rose up above the water as the full might of the French fleet became visible. The plethora of ships were mostly shallow-hulled galleys, their decks bristling with the weapons of the armed sailors. The galleys were built for manoeuvrability, and excelled at evading larger, slower ships like the cogs the English were using. It was immediately clear that the Archbishop had accurate information, this navy arrayed against them was easily twice their size, more than two hundred ships strong, each one sitting low in the water, weighed down with thousands of armed men.
The French ships were organised into three grand lines, one behind another, and stretched across the length of the inlet, anchoring on the two cliffs, blocking off access to Sluys’ port. In the first line, on the far left, sat the English warships the king had personally commissioned, the Edward and the Christopher, captured by the French two years earlier at the battle of Arnemuiden. She heard the king start shouting in rage below as he saw his beloved warships.
He’d spent colossal amounts of silver on the two, the Christopher had even been outfitted with four cannons, a nightmare to design if you actually wanted to fire them. The two large ships dwarfed the galleys that made up the rest of the French navy. Nicola remembered being in court when they’d received news of the defeat and loss of the king’s favourite ships. Edward had nearly beaten the messenger to death, and had to be talked out of consigning the poor man to the gallows. Now, here they were, bobbing lazily in the water, being used by the French against Edward. Mocking him.
As the sun shone directly overhead and seagulls squawked obliviously, the English fleet slowly sailed into position, arrayed directly against the French fleet. Edward had organised his forces to emphasise the Englishmen’s greatest advantage. Their longbowmen.
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There were about four thousand of them, spread out between the foremost ships. If their intelligence was correct, the French had only been able to hire about five hundred Genoese crossbowmen to complement their nearly twenty thousand-man strong navy, thanks to some well-placed English bribes. Longbows were better in almost every way, they had greater range, greater power, shorter reload time, better accuracy, really the only advantage of the crossbow was that you could put one in the hands of any old conscript and turn them into a decent crossbowman in two weeks, whereas the longbow required a lifetime of use to approach anything near mediocrity, let alone mastery.
It was much easier to field a thousand crossbowmen than a thousand longbowmen, as crossbowmen were easier to find and cheaper to replace, but each longbowman was a skilled professional whose death would hurt the army long-term. Even now, Nicola could feel a pronounced hunch in her overdeveloped back, no doubt the result of countless hours spent drawing and releasing on the powerful bow.
Because of this, Edward had organised his ships in quads. Two ships, packed to the brim with longbowmen, would flank either side of a third ship filled with men-at-arms, that is, knights and their retinues. A final ship would hang back as a reserve, with more men-at-arms on board. The idea was that the longbows would be able to outrange the crossbows and give the knights covering fire, allowing the third ship to get close and release the boarding hooks, at which point knights would storm the ship, while the longbowmen fended other ships off from providing reinforcements, safe from the thickest of the action.
At least, that was the plan before they got close enough to see the true state of the French fleet.
Incredibly, they were still chained together, even staring down the face of the English like this.
Is this a trick?
Bobby, the man Nicola was inhabiting, was the favourite nephew of a sailor, and thanks to all he’d absorbed, his instincts were flashing. It seemed like an obvious trap of some sort. Keeping them chained together removed the one advantage the galleys had over the cogs, that is, their manoeuvrability. It seemed like this would make it easy for the English archers to fire down on the ships and they wouldn’t be able to escape, being trapped by the ships they were bound to.
Everyone on board the Thomas shared the same sentiment, as Nicola looked around to see incredulous faces, including the king’s, who was leaning over the railing staring hard at the fleet, trying to discern the trickery.
This plan would stop the English from just ramming through, yes, but the downsides greatly outweighed the benefits. At least, to any mildly experienced seaman. A tailwind picked up, prickling the back of Nicola’s neck with the salty sea spray, doing its best to blow the English ships into the French’s first battle line.
Edward had his fleet furl sails and maintain position, but then, unbelievably, started howling with laughter from below as calamity struck the French.
The wind was blowing the bound ships into each other, tangling them together on their chains as each individual ship lacked the ability to course correct. They hadn’t even started fighting and it was already looking like a disaster for the French.
Who’s organising this clusterfuck? I’ve never seen a naval battle in my life, but even I know your ships aren’t meant to be tangled together.
Realising the opportunity, Edward gave the go ahead for a full-scale attack. With the wind on their side, it was simply a matter of unfurling the sails and letting nature take the wheel.
The fleet, organised into its squads of three plus one hanger-on, rolled up menacingly on the still struggling French. It was a strange feeling, approaching a naval engagement. You couldn’t make the ship move any faster or slower, so the two sides just stood, staring at each other until they came into each other’s ranges.
Seeing a possible advantage to be had, Edward ordered a pincer manoeuvre. His fleet would start at each end of the French’s first battle line and work their way inwards. Because of the French’s idiotic naval strategy, none of their ships would be able to reinforce each other. Half the English ships split off, under the command of William de Clinton, Earl of Huntingdon, to approach the right as the Thomas steered to the left. Towards the Christopher and the Edward. The king was planning on taking his ships back himself.
The chatter in the crow’s nest stilled to near-silence as they got closer and closer. Each archer here was a veteran, chosen specifically to man the king’s flagship because of their skill. Nicola nodded to herself. The French would definitely try to target the king. Plenty of opportunity to find a knight.
From below, they heard the king’s lieutenant, William de Bohun, the Earl of Northampton, ordering them to raise bows. They were nearly in range. With another shouted order, they all nocked their longbows. Nicola idly noticed they were all broadheads.
Right. Bodkins are for knights.
She whispered at the man next to her.
“Hey.”
“What?”
“Do you know how many knights the French have?”
“Won’t know until we see, ya dunce. But Baron Cobham’s been talkin’, rumour ‘as it a lot o’ the French nobles think this ‘uge navy is a waste o’ money. Only about six hundred of ‘em supported even makin’ this ‘Great Army o’ the Sea’, so we’re expectin’ about a hundred fifty knights.”
A hundred and fifty knights?? In an army of twenty thousand?
The English had brought nearly ten times that number but with the addition of the armed sailors, their entire force numbered around eight thousand, less than half that of the French, despite their lack of knights.
It seemed her task would be harder than it first appeared. She’d have to find a proverbial needle in a haystack, and do it before anyone cut them down.
Arrow nocked, the sea itself seemed to still, afraid to shatter the silent trance. The two sides stared at each other, neither willing to commence the battle.
The tension in the air reached a breaking point as finally the earl gave the order.
“Draw!”
She strained, drawing the string back past her cheek.
“Aim!...”
She pointed her bow to the sky, roughly matching the angle the other experienced archers used. She inhaled a breath.
“Loose!”
With a cacophony of twangs going off beside her, Nicola loosed her arrow as part of an initial volley, all twenty archers in unspoken harmony. From below and around them, the sea air became inundated with arrows as the massed archers in the forecastles, aftercastles and crow’s nests on each ship, two thousand of them in this arm of the pincer, all fired simultaneously.
Following the volley’s trajectory, Nicola saw the storm of arrows fall upon some of the low galleys to devastating effect.
These guys are barely wearing any armour.
Everything she’d heard about longbowmen suggested they were knight-killers, England’s answer to the fully armour-clad chevaliers France had developed. But as they fell among the sailors, Nicola realised just how all-round effective they could be.
There was nowhere to hide on the low, flat galleys. The shower of arrows tore them apart.
Men were jerked around like puppets, their bodies filling up with arrow shafts as their flimsy boiled leather or mail shirts failed to protect them. The crossbowmen could only watch impotently as their comrades died, hundreds in this first test volley, their bolts unable to reach the English ships just yet.
As the Frenchmen soaked up the arrows, the earl below gave the order to commence volley fire, as they’d confirmed they were in range.
Once more, the sky darkened as thousands of English bolts rained down on the waiting sailors, this time the carnage not stopping as they followed the earl’s order, keeping up a constant rate of projectile fire.
Within the crow’s nest, one of the archers took up the role of calling the motions.
“Nock! Draw! Aim!... Loose!”
Like a well-oiled machine, the longbowmen shot volley after volley into the air to fall on the massed French sailors. As the English fleet approached, they finally entered within range of the crossbowmen.
With a mighty response, the crossbows of the French released their own volley, shooting directly up into forecastles and crow’s nests, drawing screams from the English side. On the Thomas, most were safe however, as everyone around the king, including the monarch himself, were in strong enough armour that bolts just plinked off at this distance.
Still, visors had to be lowered shut. They were about to make contact.
The earl gave the order to switch from volley fire. They were sailing up to the Christopher now, and their first task was to clear its deck. The stolen English warships had become turret towers for the French as crossbowmen filled the crows nests above decks that bristled with hard-bitten sailors.
One of the archers with them told them now was to time to pick out targets. Nicola focused on an older looking man, wielding a crossbow and yelling as he tried to shoot at the king. She drew her bow.
It was almost surreal.
The perspective provided by the crow’s nest gave Nicola a sense of distance from the impending clash. As the unlucky crossbowman took several arrows to the chest, she barely felt anything. She watched him gasp, grab at the shafts in his torso, then slump over the side of the crow’s nest, dead.
Part of it was the knowledge that she wasn’t really here and these weren’t real people, but part of it was a simple disregard, born of growing up in a place where life was cheap. He had to die in order for her to complete her objective. Nothing personal.
Getting into the flow of it, Nicola nocked, drew, loosed, nocked, drew, loosed, falling into a pattern with the other archers. By now, the two arrow ships flanking them had poured enough arrows into the Christopher that what part of the deck was visible looked more like the back of a porcupine than a warship. The mainsail had been torn up and the mast was riddled with arrows. The crossbowmen on the ship were either all hiding or dead.
It was only then that, with a mighty crack, the Thomas rammed into the stolen ship, raking against its side as grappling hooks were thrown across the railing to pull the two ships together. Massing in a crowd underneath her, the king and his knights prepared to board.
Just as the two English ships slammed together, fighting men boiled up out of the Christopher’s hold to contest the king’s boarding attempt. Seeing her cue, Nicola nocked one of the bodkins at her feet and drew, aiming for the open door that men were streaming up out of.
Come on, come on.
There! A knight had rushed out of the door and Nicola loosed immediately but the man caught her arrow on his shield. She nocked and drew again, but as she zeroed in on him, the knight fell back against the wall, someone else’s armour piercing bolt sticking through his chest.
Fuck!
Of course. They would be targets for every other archer as well. She was too used to her bodkins speeding like bullets.
Ships now secured together, the king roared, leading a charge that swarmed over the railing. He and his knights got down to their grisly work, cutting down the sailors they came across. Swarming against them in turn, the sailors on the ship fell upon the king’s party screaming defiance.
It was a charnel house.
Being on the main ship in their squad, Nicola was closest to the action as the Christopher’s deck grew slick with the blood of hacking, slashing and grunting men. She shot targets from close-range, her arrows punching into chests, guts and faces.
Without her Ascendant body, she could feel herself growing tired. An almost alien sensation.
Her fingers, thickly callused, nonetheless stung with the repeated friction of the string.
All too suddenly, there were no more enemies on the Christopher. This wasn’t cause for celebration however, as the king immediately ordered the nights to pull the Edward in using the chains.
Jumping over the railing again, King Edward and his knights engaged in a brutal ship-to-ship campaign, his heavily armoured men turning hundreds of Frenchmen to corpses as missiles flew overhead, thudding into the hapless French sailors.
An utter massacre.
Chaining the ships together had turned the French navy into one massive fighting platform. And while the sailors were masters of ship combat, on anything approximating land, knights dominated.
Watching the slaughter below, Nicola could only agree. Looking over to the other side of the inlet, things were going just as badly for the French there. The water was getting tinged red as bodies accumulated, shoved unceremoniously off decks or limply sliding in. She saw men willingly leap off their ships, most of them drowning as they lost their nerve in the face of the bladed juggernaut that was the English advance.
Like a hailstorm in the dead of winter, the English archers’ assault was uncaring, uncompromising and unrelenting. Nock, draw, loose, nock, draw, loose, Nicola picked off Frenchmen like she was shooting fish in a barrel.
There was a thrill in this, a blossoming confidence that came with being a merciless reaper. Wherever her eye fell, death soon followed.
Still, she needed to tag a knight. The other archers were just too quick with it and whenever she saw one, she could never shoot him fast enough. She really missed her Ascendant body.
I need to think differently, this isn’t working. I need a way to get a bunch of them at once. But I can’t sink a ship with this.
Gazing around the French fleet, she saw a single knight standing on the deck of a ship behind the one the king was currently attacking. He couldn’t do anything but watch as the English slowly hopped from ship to ship along the first line, grinding bloodily away at the French forces. She glanced above him. He was standing right underneath one of the mainsails.
Looking around her own crow’s nest, all she saw were the other archers tirelessly firing arrow after arrow. She saw the extra quivers stacked on the ground. She saw the oil-soaked rags next to a set of flint and steel.
She grinned.
When in doubt…