It is over soon enough after that. It reaches that point when unannounced everybody knows what will happen next. The attackers take the first easy step forward; the defenders break and run. And now the rout can begin.

When it is over Thomas sits on a broken barrel with his head in his hands. His temples throb and his fingers are bleeding from the bowstring. He unties the leather strap of his helmet and studies its previously smooth surface. There is a star-shaped depression and a long gouge on the back where the arrow has hit and glanced away. He feels the puffy welt on the side of his head, his fingertips coming away damp. He puts the helmet back on again and ties the straps under his chin.

Smoke drifts across from a burning cottage roof, and the smell of it is mixed with blood and shit and saltpetre. The men-at-arms have pressed on into the town, after their slice of glory, but all around him, the archers and the billmen have broken off and most have fallen to looting. Corpses are scattered across the quayside as if they’d been flung away, piled the one on the other, some pinned by arrows, others bearing the marks of war hammers, glaives, daggers, axes. Some have been blown clean apart by the guns. Already there are noisy flies in the air and blood glistens between the cobbles, an oily slickness, viscid as phlegm. It is splashed on the cob walls of the houses and there are scraps of cloth ripped from banners and clothes; peelings of broken armour; discarded weapons; broken arrows; a dead horse. There is an arm lying alone on the cobbles, neatly dismembered through the elbow.

Thomas watches as two archers in murrey and blue begin picking through a pile of bodies thrown against the church wall, three or four deep. They haul them off as if they are grain sacks until they find a man alive. One archer shouts a warning to his mate. The man on the ground bellows something and throws up his hands in supplication. The second archer falls on him and stabs him in the face. The screaming is horrible. Men look up from what they are doing, and then look away again. The dead man stops thrashing, but the archer keeps on stabbing him, too terrified to stop. He has a short black dagger, and his arm goes up and down, up and down, as if he is pounding walnuts in a pestle. Thomas puts his hands over his ears.