Time: August 9, 1429 Location: The plains of Mailly, Champagne
The midday sun beat down on the rolling chalk plains of Champagne, turning the air thick and stifling inside the heavy plate armor.
At the crest of a low ridge, Ambroise de Loré pulled back on the reins of his destrier. The veteran cavalry commander lifted his visor, wiping sweat from his scarred brow. Beside him rode Joan of Arc, her white armor covered in a fine layer of white summer dust. Behind them, the six hundred men of the 2nd Compagnie d'ordonnance waited in perfect, disciplined silence.
"We are clear, Joan," Loré said, his voice relaxed, gesturing toward the vast, empty expanse of the Mailly plains stretching out below them. "Not a single Burgundian banner or English scout in four days of riding. The truce holds, it seems."
He unhooked a waterskin from his saddle. "Let the men pitch camp on the other side of this ridge. They have drilled hard enough. I wager Duke Philip's men are sitting in their tents, counting their silver, entirely unwilling to die before the fifteen days are up."
Joan frowned slightly. The silence of the plains made her uneasy, not relieved. "We must not let our guard down, Ambroise. The King warned us that peace on parchment does not always mean peace on the roads."
"You worry too much, Maid," Loré chuckled, taking a long drink. "What could possibly happen on an open plain where we can see for miles?"
As if summoned by the sheer arrogance of his words, a lone horseman crested the far side of the ridge, riding at a frantic gallop. It was one of their advance scouts.
The scout pulled his horse to a sliding halt before them, saluting sharply. "Commanders! Smoke on the horizon, three miles west near the crossroads! A supply convoy is under heavy attack."
Loré's relaxed demeanor vanished instantly. "Brigands?"
"No, sir," the scout breathed heavily. "At least two hundred Écorcheurs—Burgundian raiders. They have the wagons surrounded in the mud. I could not see if it was a royal convoy or private merchants, but the wagons are heavy, and the escort is breaking."
Joan and Loré exchanged a single, electrified glance. The boredom of the patrol evaporated, replaced by the cold adrenaline of war.
Joan snapped her visor shut, her voice ringing out like a clarion bell. "Draw your weapons! Sound the advance! At the double!"
Down on the plains of Mailly, it was a slaughter.
A dozen heavy transport wagons, bogged down in the deep ruts of the chalky soil, were surrounded. The Burgundian Écorcheurs—the notorious "flayers"—fought exactly as their name suggested. They had no formation and no discipline. They were a swarm of lightly armored predators on fast horses, circling the trapped wagons, whooping and screaming obscenities as they fired arrows and threw torches.
The small merchant escort had already broken. Men were scattering into the fields, cut down one by one by the laughing raiders who treated the pursuit like a boar hunt.
A Burgundian captain, a massive brute with a spiked mace, laughed as he watched a guard fall under his horse's hooves. He raised his mace to signal his men to stop chasing and start looting the wagons.
Then, the ground began to tremble.
It was not the chaotic, uneven rumble of a cavalry skirmish. It was a deep, rhythmic vibration that seemed to travel through the very bedrock of the earth.
The Burgundian captain turned his horse toward the eastern ridge. His laughter died in his throat.
On the horizon, silhouetted against the midday sun, a black line had appeared. It was not a swarm of men. It was a wall.
There was no battle cry. No screaming of insults. No chaotic rush for personal glory. There was only the terrifying, synchronized sound of hundreds of horses moving in perfect unison, guided by the sharp, metallic blasts of brass bugles.
In the center of the formation, a white banner snapped in the wind, held by a knight in shining white armor.
"La Sorcière!" someone screamed among the raiders. Panic immediately rippled through the Burgundian swarm.
But it was not just La Sorcière! that terrified them; it was the monster she commanded.
Before the Burgundians could even attempt to organize a counter-charge, a brass bugle sounded two short, high notes.
The flanks of the French formation abruptly halted. A hundred dismounted archers and coutiliers stepped forward in three rigid lines. They did not aim independently. At the sound of the next bugle blast, they loosed their weapons simultaneously.
Whoosh.
A localized storm of steel descended upon the disorganized Burgundians. The volley fire tore through the front ranks of the raiders with mathematical precision. Horses screamed, men fell, and the swarm was instantly paralyzed by the sudden, concentrated wall of death.
Before the raiders could recover from the shock of the volley, a long, sustained blast from the bugles pierced the air.
The center of the French line—one hundred heavy lancers—surged forward. But they did not fan out. They rode knee-to-knee, their massive destriers pressed tight against one another, forming an unbreakable, solid wall of armor and leveled ash lances.
It was the charge en muraille. The mechanized hammer of the new world.
The Burgundian captain raised his mace, screaming for his men to hold, but it was useless. A swarm of light cavalry cannot stop a moving fortress on an open plain.
The impact was catastrophic.
The French heavy cavalry hit the disorganized raiders like a tidal wave hitting a loose pile of timber. The wall of lances shattered the Burgundian front instantly. The sheer physical weight of the tight formation trampled everything in its path, grinding men and horses into the mud of Champagne without breaking stride or breaking silence.
Joan rode at the tip of the spear. She had her sword drawn, her blood pounding with the heat of battle. But to her profound shock, she found almost no one to fight. The enemy simply dissolved beneath the terrifying efficiency of the military machine surrounding her.
It was not a battle. It was an extermination. Within fifteen minutes, the plains were silent again, save for the groans of the dying and the snorting of horses.
Ambroise de Loré wiped the blood from his gauntlet as he kicked away a broken shield. Kneeling in the mud before him, bleeding heavily from a lance wound to his thigh, was the Burgundian captain.
"A long way from Flanders for a simple raid, aren't you?" Loré demanded, pressing the tip of his longsword against the captain's throat. "Who ordered you to strike these roads during a truce?"
The brute spat blood, his eyes wide with the lingering terror of the charge he had just witnessed. "To hell with the truce... we weren't here for the wagons. We just saw them and got greedy."
Joan stepped forward, her white armor towering over the wounded man. "If you were not here for the wagons, what is your mission?"
The captain looked at the Maid, his defiance crumbling under her piercing gaze. "We... we were sent to secure the perimeter around the northern roads," he gasped. "We are the rearguard. We were supposed to keep the roads clear for a special convoy heading toward Paris."
Loré frowned. "What convoy? Artillery?"
"No," the man wheezed, coughing up blood. "Flemish wool merchants... hundreds of them... heading for the northern gates of Paris."
Joan and Loré froze. The silence on the plains suddenly felt suffocating.
"Flemish wool merchants... Hundreds of them," Loré muttered, his blood running cold. "Bales of raw wool are heavy enough to hide armor and steel."
"It's a lie," Joan whispered, her eyes wide with horrifying clarity. "The truce. The peaceful surrender. It is all a lie. They are sending hidden men-at-arms to fortify the city."
Loré swore violently, sheathing his sword. "They are using the fifteen days to build a slaughterhouse for the King."
Joan spun around, the urgency returning to her voice tenfold. "Ambroise! Take the main force. Clean up this mess and escort the surviving wagons back to Reims. Keep the roads open!"
"And you?" Loré asked.
"Give me fifty of our fastest light cavalry," Joan commanded, swinging back into her saddle. "I am riding for the King's camp. He must know that the parchment he signed is laced with poison. We must march before the gates of Paris are sealed forever!"
As Joan of Arc and her fifty riders tore across the plains of Champagne, racing the setting sun to warn the Emperor, the great wheel of history turned its gaze southward.
The next day, far away in the Loire Valley, another royal convoy found itself trapped in the mud.
At the ford of Azay-le-Brûlé, the wagons burned, and men screamed as English arrows pierced their armor. The royal guards looked desperately toward the horizon, praying for a miracle. They prayed for the sound of bugles. They prayed for a wall of white armor and unbroken lances to descend from the hills and sweep the English wolves away.
But the horizon remained empty.
Some battlefields give birth to legends. Others merely consume them in silence.