WALTER. We’ll see you soon though, eh? King Henry? See you soon?
The three brothers start to sing.
Song.
L’homme armé doibt on douter.
On a fait partout crier
Que chascun se viengne armer
D’un haubregon de fer
L’homme armé doibt on douter.
L’homme armé doibt on douter.
WALTER, ALISDAIR, BIG JAMES and BALVENIE are led off. The Stewart boys still singing.
JAMES is recovering.
HENRY has another coughing fit. Again he looks at what he’s coughed up.
HENRY. Bloody Scots. Every time you turn around there’s another one in your beard.
I’m not in the best of health today, James.
I would have thought… I would have imagined, you might have beaten me today.
But you’ve never beaten me. And you never will.
JAMES. Do you know why you lost the battle today?
HENRY. Do you?
JAMES. Yes. The enemy already knew all your battle positions, where you’d put the archers… where the horses were…
HENRY. What do you mean they already knew? Who told them?
JAMES. The ditch diggers. The farmers.
HENRY. Why?
JAMES. Because you rode down their ditches.
Do you know how long it takes to build a field-drainage system?
HENRY. No. Is it relevant?
JAMES. Days. Days and days. You have to excavate the ground. You have to line the base of your ditch with loose stone, not too big, not too small, you have to angle the sides so the wet earth can’t collapse…
HENRY (cutting him off). Why the fuck did the farmers talk to the enemy?
JAMES. Their enemy is the man who rides down their ditches. Your knights did that.
HENRY. You saw this!?
JAMES. You saw it.
HENRY. When!?
JAMES. Yesterday. When we rode out to study the ground? There was that man, the farmer who shouted up at you… showing you what your men had done… your knights had made a playground of the farmland, practising war… the ditches are ruined… all the fields are flooded… the whole crop spoiled… everyone here will starve this winter, King Henry… and then…
HENRY. Which farmer?
JAMES. The one you stabbed in the throat for shouting at you.
HENRY. I’ve no memory of that.
JAMES. Well, you did it.
HENRY. Go on.
JAMES. Your men struck down his wife…
HENRY. This is starting to ring a bell.
JAMES.…his sons were running away screaming curses at you… you had the archers fire…
HENRY. God yeah, I remember, useless fuckers missed, didn’t they?
JAMES. And I said… ‘Well, if I was them I’d go straight to the enemy now.’
HENRY. I didn’t hear that.
JAMES. No. I don’t think you were paying proper attention, Henry.
HENRY. You’re probably right. That’s probably what happened. Shouldn’t have let them run. Wasn’t fast enough cutting them down. Useless fucking archers.
JAMES. There’s a law against trampling a man’s crops, Henry. A law with your name on it. If you were the kind of king who cared about the law and the ditch diggers maybe…
HENRY has a knife at JAMES’s throat.