Over the centuries that blade mark had become synonymous with the finest swords forged in the Bavarian town of Passau. Two hundred years earlier the swordmakers’ ancestors had gone to the Holy Land during the Crusades to learn the secrets of the Saracen swordmakers from Damascus. Thereafter German temperers and grinders, polishers and swordsmiths crafted the finest blades in Europe. The knight’s father had commissioned the sword three years earlier to commemorate his firstborn’s ennoblement and sent him to serve in the court of King John of Bohemia. Its razor-sharp edge could cut through chain mail. Now the twenty-three-year-old Franz von Lienhard pushed his destrier through the jumbled bodies of fallen horses and men. The horse’s massive strength had carried him across the ford’s current at Blanchetaque when he gave chase to a dirt-poor English archer but had been stopped by the curtain of arrows that fell before him. He had not been prepared to risk injury to such a magnificent horse, but now for the greatest prize of all he was prepared to risk everything.
