They formed, four deep, across the front of the Occitan camp, where sleepy sentries watched.

One of the sentries blew his horn.

The “Alban” army charged the camp.

It should have been a massacre. The Galles were in full harness, and so were the men of the Royal Guard. Most of the Occitan knights, stumbling from their decorative pavilions, should have been unarmed and unprepared.

They were not. They were fully armed, cap-à-pied.

There were also surprisingly few of them—only a hundred or so, led by a knight in the blue and gold chequey of the royal house. There were no squires and no pages.

The Occitans gathered together in the tight wedge and charged the “Alban Army” that outnumbered it ten to one.

The fighting was brutal. And very skilled. The Galles suffered because their horses were not yet recovered from the sea voyage. The Occitan horses were superb.

But no knight can triumph at odds of ten to one.

Du Corse eventually unhorsed the blue and gold knight, after they had gone lance to lance and sword to sword. And finally, dagger to dagger. Du Corse got his arm in front of the other man’s neck and his dagger pommel past his head, hooked him and threw him to the ground.

Even then, the blue and gold knight would not relent. He found a sword on the ground and fought back—even as a dozen Gallish and Alban knights cut at him. He killed a horse, dismounting an Alban midlands knight named Ser Gilles. He cut the Conte Du Corse’s reins.

He was like a madman, and the other Occitan knights were as bad. Each one seemed to require a siege. The sun rose, and they were still fighting. The surviving Occitans drew into a ring in the middle of their camp—about twenty of them. They were surrounded by tent stakes and ropes and fallen tents, and the Galles and Albans had to dismount to face them. The blue and gold knight was still on his feet, although blood was seeping through some of the joints in his harness.

Du Corse, bleeding from a smart thrust to the inside of his left elbow, sent them a herald.

He came back. “They call us all cowards and caitiffs. They say there is no parley with evil.”

“Christ, what fools,” muttered Du Corse. “Bring up crossbowmen and shoot them down, then.”

Forty feet away, de Vrailly led a fourth charge at the tight circle of Occitan knights. Again, as in his first three attacks, he put one down with a great blow of his poleaxe—his almost inhuman speed at the moment of contact, his size and his deceptively long reach made him lethal. His axe slammed, almost unimpeded, into an Occitan knight’s faceplate—the visor crumpled backwards, destroying the man’s face.