More drums and horns and they turn off the road, dropping down into a broad ditch with water up to their knees, then scrambling up and out on to the slope where cows have stripped the lower branches of the few trees. The grass under their feet is soft and tussocky and as they file across the fields that dip gently down towards the town on their right, men begin cursing.

Then Thomas sees why.

Across the meadows, no more than a thousand paces away, down in the crook of a bend in the river, the King’s men have excavated a broad ditch that is now filled with river water. The earth they’ve removed has been piled up and compacted behind the ditch to make a long wall as high as a man’s head. It is bristling with sharpened stakes and at regular intervals along its length it is punctured by embrasures from which stick the unmistakable snouts of guns.

‘Suicide,’ someone mutters. ‘That’s what this is. Suicide.’

‘Bloody Burgundians,’ Walter murmurs. ‘Just like Castillon. Worse, even.’

‘How many have they got?’ Geoffrey asks. He too has lost some of his colour.

Walter counts.

‘Twenty bombards,’ he says. ‘Lots more small ones. A whole bloody armoury. And look at all them.’

Behind the bombards stand thousands of men in rank: men-at-arms at the front, so that they may defend the dyke, archers behind, so that they may shoot over their fellows’ heads into any onrushing army.

‘Haven’t got many archers,’ Geoffrey says.

‘Don’t need archers if you’ve got all those guns, do you?’ Walter mutters. ‘We’ll be dead before we ever come in range.’

Behind the thin line of archers is the camp, a hundred tents, like a village, including a huge two-poled tent above which flies the royal standard. It is the King’s tent. Above the troops there must be fifty banners of all sorts, including those long fishtailed battle standards carried by the lords’ retainers. After all the rain, even those droop so as to be unrecognisable from any distance, but Thomas is only looking for one: Riven’s white flag with its checked edge and rising triangle of crows.

He wishes Katherine was there. She has better eyes than anyone. She might even have been able to see the giant.

‘Can you make out any of the banners?’ he asks, turning to Geoffrey. Something has caught his eye in the rain. A pale square, towards the back on the left flank, marked with black symbols.

‘The King’s, I suppose,’ Geoffrey says. ‘And Buckingham’s. And there’s Ruthyn’s on the left there. Beaumont is there, and Egremont, too, and that one is the Earl of Shrewsbury. Christ, there are a lot of them. Must be scarcely a man left to fight for all those holding flags.’