Agincourt

by Bernard Cornwell

  “I just warned our fellows,” Hook said.

  “No, you didn’t. You told them to get back to the wagons, is that right?”

  “Yes, Sir John.”

  “Why?” Sir John asked belligerently.

  Hook frowned as he remembered. At the time it had seemed an obvious precaution, but he had not thought why it was so obvious. “Our bows were no good in the trees,” he now said slowly, “but if they were back at the wagons they could shoot. They needed space to shoot.”

  “Which is just what happened,” Sir John said. The archers, gathering at the wagons, had driven the raiders away with two volleys. “So you did the right thing, Hook. The bastards only came to make mischief. They wanted to kill a few men and have a look at what progress we were making, and you saw them off!”

  “I wasn’t there, Sir John,” Hook said, “it was the other archers what drove them off.”

  “You were with the Sire of Lanferelle, I know. And he let you live.” Sir John gave Hook an appraising look. “Why?”

  “He wants to kill me later,” Hook said, not sure that was the right answer, “or maybe it’s because of Melisande?”

  “He’s a cat,” Sir John said, “and you’re his mouse. A wounded mouse,” he glanced at Hook’s right hand, which was still bandaged. “You can still shoot?”

  “Good as ever, Sir John.”

  “So I’m making you a ventenar. Which means I’m doubling your pay.”

  “Me!” Hook stared at Sir John.

  Sir John did not answer straightaway. He had turned a critical eye on his men-at-arms, who were practicing sword strokes against tree trunks. Practice, practice, practice was one of Sir John’s constant refrains. He claimed to strike a thousand blows a day in never-ending practice and he demanded the same of his men. “Put some muscle into it, Ralph,” he shouted at one man, then turned back to Hook. “Did you think about what to do when you saw the French?”

  “No.”

  “That’s why I’m making you a sergeant. I don’t want men who have to think about what to do, but just do it. Tom Evelgold’s now your centenar, so you can take his company. I tell him what to do, he tells you what to do, and you tell your archers what to do. If they don’t do it, you thump the bastards, and if they still don’t do it, I thump you.”

  “Yes, Sir John.”

  Sir John’s battered face grinned. “You’re good, young Hook, and you’re something else.” He pointed at Hook’s bandaged hand. “You’re lucky. Here,” he took a thin silver chain from a pouch and dropped it into Hook’s hand. “Your badge of office. And tomorrow you build a sow.”

  “What’s a sow, Sir John?”

  “It’s a pig to build, I’ll tell you that much,” Sir John said, “a goddam pig!”

  It began to rain that night. The rain came from the sea, carried on a cold west wind. It began softly, pattering on the besiegers’ tents, and then the wind rose to tear at the banners on their makeshift poles and the rain hardened and came at an angle and drenched the ground into a morass of mud. The flood waters, which had largely subsided, began to rise again and the midden overflowed. The gunners cursed and raised awnings over their weapons, while every archer carefully hid his bowstrings from the soaking rain.

  There was no need for Hook to carry a bow. His job was to raise the sow and it was, as Sir John had promised, a pig of a job. It was not intricate work, not even skilled, but it needed strength and it had to be done in full view of the defenders and within range of their cannons, springolts, catapults, and crossbows.

  The sow was a giant shield, shaped like the toe of a shoe, behind and beneath which men could work safe from enemy missiles, and it would have to be built strong enough to withstand the repeated strike of gun-stones.

  A white-haired Welshman, Dafydd ap Traharn, supervised the work. “I come from Pontygwaith,” he told the archers, “and in Pontygwaith we know more about building things than all you miserable English bastards put together!” He had planned to run two wagons loaded with earth and stones to the place where the sow would be built and use the wagons to protect the archers from enemy missiles, but the rain had softened the ground and the wagons had become bogged down. “We’ll have to dig,” he said with the relish of a man who knew he would not have to wield a spade himself. “We know about digging in Pontygwaith, know more than all you English fart-makers put together!”

  “That’s because you were digging graves for all the Welshmen we killed,” Will of the Dale retorted.

  “Burying you sais, we were,” Dafydd ap Traharn replied happily. Later, as he chatted with Hook, he cheerfully admitted he had been a rebel against the English king just fifteen years before. “Now that Owain Glyn Dwr,” he said warmly, “what a man!”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He’s still alive, boy!” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “still alive!” Glyn Dwr’s rebellion had burned for over a decade, giving young Henry, Prince of Wales and now King of England, a long education in warfare. The revolt had been defeated and some of the Welsh leaders had been dragged on hurdles through London to their executions, but Owain Glyn Dwr himself had never been captured. “We have magicians in Wales,” Dafydd ap Traharn lowered his voice and leaned close to Hook as he spoke, “and they can turn a man invisible!”

  “I’d like to see that,” Hook said wistfully.

  “Well, you can’t, can you? That’s the whole thing about being invisible, you can’t see them! Why, Owain Glyn Dwr could be here right now and you couldn’t see him! And that’s what has happened to him, see? He’s living in luxury, boy, with women and apples, but if an Englishman gets within a mile of him, he turns invisible!”

  “So what’s a rebel Welshman doing with this army?” Hook asked.

  “A man has to live,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “and eating an enemy’s loaf of bread is better than staring into an empty oven. There’s dozens of Glyn Dwr’s men in this army, boy, and we’ll fight as hard for Henry as we ever did for Owain.” He grinned. “Mind you, there are a few of Owain Glyn Dwr’s men in France as well, and they’ll fight against us.”

  “Archers?”

  “God be praised, no. Archers can’t afford to run away to France, can they now? No, it’s the gentry who lost their land who went to France, not the archers. Have you ever faced an archer in battle?”

  “God be praised, no,” Hook said.

  “It is not what I would call a happy experience,” Dafydd ap Traharn said grimly. “My God, boy, but we Welsh don’t take fright easily, but when Henry’s archers shot at Shrewsbury it was death from the sky. Like hail, it was, only hail with steel points, and hail that never stopped, and men were dying all around me and their screams were like tortured gulls on a black shore. An archer is a terrible thing.”

  “I’m an archer.”

  “You’re a digger now, boy,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, grinning, “so dig.”

  They dug a trench away from a gun-pit, digging it toward the walls of Harfleur, and the defenders saw the trench being made and rained crossbow bolts and gun-stones on the work. The defenders’ catapults tried to lob stones onto the new trench, but the missiles went wide, landing in showers of splattering mud. After thirty paces of new trench had been made Dafydd ap Traharn declared himself satisfied and ordered a new pit to be excavated. It had to be big, square and deep, and so the archers hacked and shoveled till they reached a layer of chalk. The new pit’s side seeped water so that they slopped about in muck as they raised a parapet of tree trunks on three sides of the pit, only leaving the rear that led to the English camp unprotected. They laid the trunks flat, four abreast, and piled more on top, so that a man could stand upright in the pit and be invisible to the enemy on Harfleur’s walls. “Tonight,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “we’ll make a roof and our lovely sow will be finished.”

  They made the roof at night because the pit was close enough to the walls to be within easy range of a crossbow, but the enemy must have guessed what was happening and they shot blind through the rain-soak
ed darkness and three men were wounded by the short, sharp bolts that spat from the night. It took all that night to lay long trunks over the pit and then to cover those timbers with a thick layer of earth and chalk rubble before adding a final covering of more tree trunks. “And now the real work begins,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “which means we have to use Welshmen.”

  “The real work?” Hook asked.

  “We’re going to make a mine, lad. We’re going to dig deep.”

  The rain ended at dawn. A chill wind came from the west and the rain slid away across France and the sun fought against cloud as the enemy gunners hammered the newly made sow with gun-stones that wasted their power on the thick log parapet. Hook and his archers slept, sheltering under the crude cabins they had made from tree boughs, earth, and ferns. When Hook woke he found Melisande scrubbing his mail coat with sand and vinegar. “Rouille,” she said in explanation.

  “Rust?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “You can polish my coat, darling,” Will of the Dale said as he crawled from his shelter.

  “Do your own, William,” Melisande said. “I cleaned Tom’s, though.”

  “Well done,” Hook said. All the archers were worried about Thomas Scarlet whose customary cheerfulness had been buried with his twin brother. Scarlet scowled these days, or else sat by himself, brooding. “All he wants,” Hook said quietly, “is to meet your father again.”

  “Then Thomas will die,” Melisande said bleakly.

  “He loves you,” Hook said.

  “My father?”

  “He let you live. He let you stay with me.”

  “He let you live too,” she said, almost resentfully.

  “I know.”

  She paused. Her gray eyes watched Harfleur, which was ringed with gunsmoke like a sea fog shrouding a cliff. Hook put his wet boots to dry beside the campfire. The burning wood spat and shot sparks. It was willow, and willow always protested against burning. “He loved my mother, I think,” Melisande said wistfully.

  “Did he?”

  “She was beautiful,” Melisande said, “and she loved him. She said he was so beautiful too. A beautiful man.”

  “Handsome,” Hook allowed.

  “Beautiful,” Melisande insisted.

  “When you met him in the trees,” Hook asked, “did you want him to take you away?”

  She gave an abrupt shake of her head. “No,” she said, “I think he is a bad angel. And I think he is in my head like the saint is in yours,” she turned to look at him, “and I wish he would go away.”

  “You think about him? Is that it?”

  “I always wanted him to love me,” she said harshly, and started scouring the mail again.

  “As he loved your mother?”

  “No! Non!” She was angry, and for a while she said nothing, then relented. “Life is hard, Nicholas, you know that. It is work and work and work and worry where the food will come from and it is more work, and a lord, any lord, can stop all that. They can wave their hand and there is no more work, no more worry, just facile.”

  “Easy?”

  “And I wanted that.”

  “Tell him you want that.”

  “He is beautiful,” Melisande said, “but he is not kind. I know that. And I love you. Je t’aime.” She said the last words decidedly, without apparent affection, but Hook was struck dumb by them. He watched archers bringing firewood to the camp. Melisande grimaced with the effort of scrubbing the sand on the mail coat. “You know of Sir Robert Knolles?” she asked suddenly.

  “Of course I do,” Hook said. Every archer knew of Sir Robert, who had died rich not many years before.

  “He was an archer once,” Melisande said.

  “That’s how he started,” Hook agreed, wondering how Melisande knew of the legendary Sir Robert.

  “And he became a knight,” Melisande said, “he led armies! And now Sir John has made you a ventenar.”

  “A ventenar isn’t a knight,” Hook said, smiling.

  “But Sir Robert was a ventenar once!” Melisande said fiercely, “and then he became a centenar, and then a man-at-arms, and after that a knight! Alice told me. And if he could do it, why not you?”

  That vision was so astonishing that Hook could only stare at her for a moment. “Me? A man-at-arms?” he finally said.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not born to that!”

  “Nor was Sir Robert.”

  “Well, it does happen,” Hook said dubiously. He knew of other archers who had led companies and become rich. Sir Robert was the most famous, but archers also remembered Thomas of Hookton who had died as lord of a thousand acres. “But it doesn’t happen often,” Hook went on, “and it takes money.”

  “And what is war to you men but money? They talk without end of prisoners? Of ransoms?” Melisande pointed her brush at him and grinned mischievously. “Capture my father. We’ll ransom him. We’ll take his money.”

  “You’d like that, would you?” Hook asked.

  “Yes,” she said vengefully, “I would like that.”

  Hook tried to imagine being rich. Of receiving a ransom that would be more than most men could earn in a lifetime, and then he forgot that dream as John Fletcher, who was one of the older archers and a man who had shown some resentment at Hook’s promotion, suddenly flinched and ran toward the midden trench. Fletcher’s face looked pale. “Fletch is ill,” Hook said.

  “And poor Alice was horribly sick this morning,” Melisande said, wrinkling her nose in distaste, “la diarrhée!”

  Hook decided he did not want to know more about Alice Godewyne’s sickness, and he was saved from further details by Sir John Cornewaille’s arrival. “Are we awake?” the knight bellowed, “are we awake and breathing?”

  “We are now, Sir John,” Hook answered for the archers.

  “Then down to the trenches! Down to the trenches! Let’s get this goddam siege done!”

  Hook donned his damp boots and half-scrubbed mail, pulled on his helmet and surcoat, then went to the trenches. The siege went on.

  SIX

  The sow shuddered each time a gun-stone struck its sloping face. The logs that formed the face were battered, split, and bristling with springolt bolts, but the enemy’s missiles had failed to break the heavy shield or even weaken it, and beneath the layers of timber and earth the Welsh miners went to work.

  Other shafts were being driven on Harfleur’s eastern side where the Duke of Clarence’s forces were camped, and from both east and west the guns roared and the stones clawed at the walls, the mangonels and trebuchets dropped boulders into the town, smoke and dust erupted and plumed from the narrow streets while the mines crept toward the ramparts. The eastern shafts were being driven under the walls where great caverns, shored with timber, would be clawed out of the chalk and, when the time came, the timber supports would be burned away so that the caverns would collapse and bring down the ramparts above. The western mine, its entrance guarded by the sow Hook had helped make, was intended to tunnel under the vast battered bastion that protected the Leure Gate. Bring that barbican down and the English army could attack the breach beside the gate without any danger of being assaulted on their flank by the barbican’s garrison. So the Welshmen dug and the archers guarded their sow and the town suffered.

  The barbican had been made from great oak trunks that had been sunk into the earth and then hooped with iron. The trunks had formed the outline of two squat round towers joined by a brief curtain wall, and their interior had been rammed with earth and rubble, the whole protected by a flooded ditch facing the besiegers. The English guns had splintered the nearest timbers so that the earth had spilled out to make a steep unstable ramp that filled one part of the ditch, yet still the bastion resisted. Its ruin was manned by crossbowmen and men-at-arms, and its banners hung defiantly from what remained of its wooden ramparts. Each night, when the English guns ceased fire, the defenders made repairs and the dawn would reveal a new timber palisade and the guns woul
d have to begin their slow work of demolition again. Other guns fired at the town itself.

  When Hook had first seen Harfleur it had looked almost magical to him: a town of tight roofs and church steeples all girdled by a white, tower-studded wall that had glowed in the August sun. It had looked like the painted town in the picture of Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian in Soissons Cathedral, the picture he had stared at for so long as he said his prayers.

  Now the painted town was a battered heap of stones, mud, smoke, and shattered houses. Long stretches of the walls still stood and still flaunted their derisive banners that displayed the badges of the garrison’s leaders, images of the saints and invocations to God, but eight of the towers had been collapsed into the town ditch, and one long length of rampart had been beaten into wreckage close to the Leure Gate. The great missiles lobbed into the town by the catapults smashed houses and started fires so that a pall of smoke hung constantly above the besieged town. A church steeple had fallen, taking its bells in a mighty cacophony, and still the boulders and gun-stones hammered at the already hammered town.

  And still the defenders fought back. Each dawn Hook led men into the pits that defended the English guns and in every dawn he saw where the garrison had been working. They were making a new wall behind the broken rampart and they shored up the collapsing barbican with new timbers. English heralds, holding their white wands and gaudy in their colored coats, rode to the enemy walls to offer terms, but the enemy commanders rebuffed the heralds each time. “What they’re hoping,” Father Christopher told Hook one early September morning, “is that their king will lead an army to their rescue.”

  “I thought the French king was mad?”