Agincourt
Page 21
“What do you think?” Saint Crispin, the harsher brother, said in a mocking voice.
“It’s murder,” Hook said.
“I won’t kill you!” Perrill insisted.
“You think we saved the girl so she could be raped?” Saint Crispinian asked.
“Get me out of this muck,” Perrill said, “please!”
Instead Hook reached out and found one of the spent crossbow bolts. It was as long as his forearm, as thick as two thumbs, and fledged with stiff leather vanes. The point was rusted, but still sharp.
He killed Perrill the easiest way. He smacked him hard around the head, and while the archer was still recovering from the blow, drove the bolt down through one eye. It went in easily, glancing off the socket, and Hook kept driving the thick shaft into Perrill’s brain until the rusted point scraped against the back of Perrill’s skull. The archer twisted and jerked, choked and quivered, but he died quickly enough.
“Robert!” Tom Perrill shouted from the sow.
A springolt bolt struck a masonry chimney breast left standing in the scorched remains of a burned house. The bolt spun into the falling darkness, end over end, soaring over the English trenches to fall far beyond. Hook wiped his wounded right hand on Robert Perrill’s tunic, cleaning off the muck that had spurted from the dead man’s eye, then heaved himself free of the soil. It was very nearly night and the smoke of the gunshots still shrouded what little light remained. He stepped over Perrill and staggered toward the sow, his legs slow to find their strength again. Crossbow bolts flicked past him, but their aim was wild now and Hook reached the sow safely. He held on to its flank as he walked, then dropped into the safety of the trench. Lanterns lit his dirt-crusted face and men stared at him.
“How many others survived?” a man-at-arms asked.
“Don’t know,” Hook said.
“Here,” a priest brought him a pot and Hook drank. He had not realized how thirsty he was until he tasted the ale.
“My brother?” Thomas Perrill was among the men staring at Hook.
“Killed by a crossbow bolt,” Hook said curtly and stared up into Perrill’s long face. “Straight through the eye,” he added brutally. Perrill stared at him, and then Sir John Cornewaille pushed through the small crowd in the sow’s pit.
“Hook!”
“I’m alive, Sir John.”
“You don’t look it. Come.” Sir John grasped Hook’s arm and led him toward the camp. “What happened?”
“They came from above,” Hook said. “I was on my way out when the roof fell in.”
“It fell on you?”
“Yes, Sir John.”
“Someone loves you, Hook.”
“Saint Crispinian does,” Hook said, then he saw Melisande in the light of a campfire and went to her embrace.
And afterward, in the darkness, had nightmares.
Sir John’s men started dying next morning. A man-at-arms and two archers, all three of them struck by the sickness that turned bowels into sewers of filthy water. Alice Godewyne died. A dozen other men-at-arms were sick, as were at least twenty archers. The army was being ravaged by the plague and the stench of shit hung over the camp, and the French built their walls higher every night and in the dawn men struggled to the gun-pits and trenches where they vomited and voided their bowels.
Father Christopher caught the sickness. Melisande found him shivering in his tent, face pale, lying in his own filth and too weak to move. “I ate some nuts,” he told her.
“Nuts?”
“Les noix,” he explained in a voice that was like a breathless groan. “I didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know?”
“The doctors tell me now that you shouldn’t eat nuts or cabbage. Not with the sickness about. I ate nuts.”
Melisande washed him. “You’ll make me sicker,” he complained, but was too weak to prevent her from cleaning him. She found him a blanket, though Father Christopher threw it off when the day’s warmth became insufferable. Much of the low land in which Harfleur stood was still flooded and the heat seemed to shimmer off the shallow water and made the air thick as steam. The guns still fired, but less frequently because the Dutch gunners had also been struck by the murrain. No one was spared. Men in the king’s household fell ill, great lords were struck down, and the angels of death hovered on dark wings above the English camp.
Melisande found blackberries and begged some barley from Sir John’s cooks. She boiled the berries and barley to reduce the liquid that she then sweetened with honey and spooned into Father Christopher’s mouth. “I’m going to die,” he told her weakly.
“No,” she said decisively, “you are not.”
The king’s own physician, Master Colnet, came to Father Christopher’s tent. He was a young, serious man with a pale face and a small nose with which he smelled Father Christopher’s feces. He offered no judgment on what he had determined from the odors, instead he briskly opened a vein in the priest’s arm and bled him copiously. “The girl’s ministrations will do no harm,” he said.
“God bless her,” Father Christopher said weakly.
“The king sent you wine,” Master Colnet said.
“Thank his majesty for me.”
“It’s excellent wine,” Colnet said, binding the cut arm with practiced skill, “though it didn’t help the bishop.”
“Bangor’s dead?”
“Not Bangor, Norwich. He died yesterday.”
“Dear God,” Father Christopher said.
“I bled him too,” Master Colnet said, “and thought he would live, but God decreed otherwise. I shall come back tomorrow.”
The Bishop of Norwich’s body was cut into quarters, then boiled in a giant cauldron to flense the flesh from the bones. The filthy steaming liquid was poured away and the bones were wrapped in linen and nailed in a coffin that was carried to the shore so the bishop could be taken home to be buried in the diocese he had taken such care to avoid in life. Most of the dead were simply dropped into pits dug wherever there was a patch of ground high enough to hold an unflooded grave, but as more men died the grave-pits were abandoned and the corpses were carried to the tidal flats and thrown into the shallow creeks where they were at the mercy of wild dogs, gulls, and eternity. The stench of the dead and the stink of shit and the reek of smoldering fires filled the encampment.
Two mornings after Hook had stumbled away from the fallen mine there was a sudden flurry of gunshots from the walls of Harfleur. The garrison had loaded their cannon and now fired them all at the same time so that the battered town was edged with smoke. Defenders cheered from the walls and waved derisive flags.
“A ship got through to them,” Sir John explained.
“A ship?” Hook asked.
“For Christ’s sake, you know what a ship is!”
“But how?”
“Our goddam fleet was asleep, that’s how! Now the goddam bastards have got food. God damn the bastards.” It seemed God had changed sides, for the defenses of Harfleur, though battered and broken, were constantly replenished and rebuilt. New walls backed the broken old, and every night the garrison deepened the defensive ditch and raised new obstacles in the shattered breaches. The intensity of the crossbow bolts did not let up, proof that the town had been well stocked, or else that the ship that had evaded the blockade had brought a new supply. The English, meanwhile, grew more ill. Sir John ducked into Father Christopher’s tent and stared at the priest. “How is he?” he asked Melisande.
She shrugged. As far as Hook could tell the priest was already dead, for he lay unmoving on his back, his mouth slackly open and his skin grayish pale.
“Is he breathing?” Sir John demanded.
Melisande nodded.
“God help us,” Sir John said and backed out of the tent, “God help us,” he said again, and stared at the town. It should have fallen two weeks ago, yet there it lay, defiant still, the wreckage of its wall and towers protecting the new barricades that had been built behind.
Ther
e was some good news. Sir Edward Derwent was a prisoner in Harfleur, as was Dafydd ap Traharn. The heralds, returning from another vain attempt to persuade the garrison to surrender, told how the men trapped in the mine’s far end had surrendered. The collapsed mine had been abandoned, though on Harfleur’s eastern side, where the king’s brother led the siege, other shafts were still being driven toward the walls. The best news was that the French were making no effort to relieve the town. English patrols were riding far into the countryside to find grain, and there was no sign of an enemy army coming to strike at the disease-weakened English. Harfleur, it seemed, had been left to rot, though it appeared now that the besiegers would be destroyed first.
“All that money,” Sir John said bleakly, “and all we’ve done is march a couple of miles to become lords of graves and shit-pits.”
“So why don’t we just leave it?” Hook asked. “Just march away?”
“A goddam stupid question,” Sir John said. “The place might surrender tomorrow! And all Christendom is watching. If we abandon the siege we look weak. And besides, even if we did march inland we won’t necessarily find the French. They’ve learned to fear English armies and they know the quickest way to get rid of us is to hide themselves in fortresses. So we might just abandon this siege to start another. No, we have to take this goddam town.”
“Then why don’t we attack?” Hook asked.
“Because we’ll lose too many men,” Sir John said. “Imagine it, Hook. Crossbows, springolts, guns, all tearing into us as we advance, killing us while we fill the ditch, and then we get over the wall’s rubble to find a new ditch, a new wall, and more crossbows, more guns, more catapults. We can’t afford to lose a hundred dead and four hundred crippled. We came here to conquer France, not die in this rancid shit-hole.” He kicked at the hard ground, then stared at the sea where six English ships lay at anchor off the harbor entrance. “If I commanded Harfleur’s garrison,” he said ruefully, “I know just what I’d do now.”
“What’s that?”
“Attack,” Sir John said. “Kick us while we’re half crippled. We speak of chivalry, Hook, and we are chivalrous. We fight so politely! Yet you know how to win a battle?”
“Fight dirty, Sir John.”
“Fight filthy, Hook. Fight like the devil and send chivalry to hell. He’s no fool.”
“The devil?”
Sir John shook his head. “No, Raoul de Gaucourt. He commands the garrison.” Sir John nodded toward Harfleur. “He’s a gentleman, Hook, but he’s also a fighter. And he’s no fool. And if I were Raoul de Gaucourt I’d kick the shit out of us right now.”
And next day Raoul de Gaucourt did.
SEVEN
“Wake up, Nick!” It was Thomas Evelgold bellowing at him. The centenar slapped Hook’s shelter, shaking it so hard that scraps of dead leaves and pieces of turf fell onto Hook and Melisande. “God damn you, wake up!” Evelgold shouted again.
Hook opened his eyes to darkness. “Tom?” he called, but Evelgold had already moved on to wake other archers.
A second voice was shouting for the men to assemble. “Armor! Weapons! Hurry! Goddam now! I want you all here, now! Now!”
“What is it?” Melisande asked.
“Don’t know,” Hook said. He fumbled to find his mail coat. The stink of the leather lining was overpowering as pulled it over his head. He forced the unwieldy garment down his chest. “Sword belt?”
“Here,” Melisande was kneeling. The campfires were being revived and their flames reflected red from her wide open eyes.
Hook put on the short surcoat with its cross of Saint George, the badge that every man was required to wear in the siege-works. He pulled on his boots, the once good boots that he had bought in Soissons but which were now coming apart at the seams. He strapped on his belt, slid the bow from its cover, and snatched up an arrow bag. He had tied a long leather strap to the poleax and he slung that over his shoulder, then ducked into the night. “I’ll be back,” he called to Melisande.
“Casque!” she shouted after him. “Casque!” He reached back and took the helmet from her. He felt a sudden urge to tell her he loved her, but Melisande had disappeared back into the shelter and Hook said nothing. He sensed the night was ending. The stars were pale, which meant dawn would soon stain the sky above the obstinate city, but ahead of him there was tumult. The flames in the siege-works leaped higher, casting grotesque shadows across the broken ground.
“Come to me! Come to me!” Sir John was shouting beside the largest campfire. The archers were gathering quickly, but the men-at-arms, who needed more time to buckle on their plate armor, were slower to arrive. Sir John had chosen to forgo his expensive plate armor and was dressed like the archers in mail coat and jupon. “Evelgold! Hook! Magot! Candeler! Brutte!” Sir John called. Walter Magot, Piers Candeler, and Thomas Brutte were the other three ventenars.
“Here, Sir John!” Evelgold responded.
“Bastards have made a sally,” Sir John said urgently. That explained the shouting and the sound of steel clashing with steel that came from the forward trenches. Harfleur’s garrison had sallied out to attack the sow and gun-pits. “We have to kill the bastards,” Sir John said. “We’re going to attack straight down to the sow. Some of us are, but not you, Hook! You know the Savage?”
“Yes, Sir John,” Hook said, adjusting the buckle of his sword belt. The Savage was a catapult, a great wooden beast that hurled stones into Harfleur and, of all the siege engines, it lay closest to the sea at the right-hand end of the English lines.
“Take your men there,” Sir John said, “and work your way in toward the sow, got that?”
“Yes, Sir John,” Hook said again. He strung the bow by bracing one end on the ground and looping the cord over the upper nock.
“Then go! Go now!” Sir John snarled, “and kill the bastards!” He turned. “Where’s my banner! I want my banner! Bring me my goddamned banner!”
Hook led sixteen men now. It should have been twenty-three, but seven were either dead or ill. He wondered how seventeen men were supposed to fight their way along trenches and gun-pits swarming with an enemy who had sallied from the Leure Gate. It was evident the French had captured large stretches of the siege-works because, as Hook led his men down the southward track, he could see more fires springing up in the English gun-pits and the shapes of men scurrying in front of those flames. Groups of men-at-arms and archers crossed Hook’s path, all going toward the fighting. Hook could hear the clash of blades now.
“What do we do, Nick?” Will of the Dale asked.
“You heard Sir John. Start at the Savage, work our way in,” Hook said, and was surprised that he sounded confident. Sir John’s orders had been vague and given hurriedly, and Hook had simply obeyed by leading his men toward the Savage, but only now was he trying to work out what he was supposed to do. Sir John was assembling his men-at-arms and had kept most of the archers, presumably for an attack on the sow that seemed to have fallen into the enemy’s possession, but why detach Hook? Because, Hook decided, Sir John needed flank protection. Sir John and his men were the beaters and they would drive the game across Hook’s front where the archers could cut them down. Hook, recognizing the plan’s simplicity, felt a surge of pride. Sir John could have sent his centenar Tom Evelgold or any of the other ventenars, all of whom were older and more senior, but Sir John had chosen Hook.
Fires burned at the Savage, but they had not been set by the French. They were the campfires of the men who guarded the pit in which the catapult sat, and their flames lit the monstrously gaunt beams of the giant engine. A dozen archers, the sentries who guarded the machine through the night, waited with strung bows and, as they saw men coming down the slope, turned those bows toward Hook. “Saint George!” Hook bellowed, “Saint George!”
The bows dropped. The sentries were nervous. “What’s happening?” one of them demanded of Hook.
“French are out.”
“I know, but what’s happening?”
“No crosses!” Tom Scarlet warned, meaning that none of the men in the trench was wearing the cross of Saint George. They were French and, seeing the archers outlined by the fires burning in the Savage’s pit, they began shouting their challenge. “Saint Denis! Harfleur!”
“Bows!” Hook shouted, and his men instinctively spread out. “Kill them!” he shouted.
The range was short, less than fifty paces, and the attackers made themselves into an easy target because they were constricted by the trench’s walls. The first arrows drilled into them and the thuds of the heads striking home instantly silenced the enemy’s shouting. The sound of the bows was sharp, each release of the string followed by the briefest fluttering rush as the feathers caught the air. In the darkness those feathers made small white flickers that stopped abruptly as the arrows slapped home. To Hook it seemed as if time had slowed. He was plucking arrows from his bag, laying them over the stave, bringing up the bow, hauling the cord, releasing, and he felt no excitement, no fear, and no exhilaration. He knew exactly where each arrow would go before he even pulled it from the bag. He aimed at the approaching men’s bellies and, in the flame-light, he saw those men doubling over as his arrows struck.
The enemy’s charge ended as surely as though they had run into a stone wall. The trench was wide enough for six men to walk abreast and all the leading Frenchmen were on the ground, spitted by arrows, and the men behind tripped on them and, in their turn, were hit by arrows. Some glanced off plate armor, but others sliced straight through the metal, and even an arrow that failed to pierce the plate had sufficient force to knock a man backward. If the enemy could have spread out they might have reached the Savage, but the trench walls constricted them and the feathered bodkins ripped in from the dark and so the attacking party turned and ran back, leaving a dark mass behind, not all of it motionless. “Denton! Furnays! Cobbold!” Hook called, “make sure those bastards are dead ’uns. The rest of you, after me!”