Agincourt

by Bernard Cornwell

  And so the twin assaults streamed across the filled-in ditches and the arrows rained from the sky and the trumpets blared a challenge to the uncaring sun and the killing began again. And again it was Sir John Holland who led, which meant that Sir John Cornewaille’s men were in the front of the attack that swiftly captured the ruins of the Leure Gate and there, abruptly, were stopped.

  The gate had once led into a closely-packed street of overhanging houses, but the garrison had pulled those buildings down to clear a killing space, behind which they had made a new barricade that had been mostly protected from the English gun-stones by the remnants of the old wall and gate. The Messenger, mounted on the barbican’s summit, had managed to shoot some stones at the fresh work, but it could only manage three shots a day and the French repaired the damage between each shot. The new wall was built from masonry blocks, roof timbers, and rubble-filled baskets, and behind it were crossbowmen, and as soon as the English men-at-arms appeared across the ruin of the Leure Gate the bolts began to fly.

  Archers shot back, but the French had been cunning. The new wall had been made with chinks and holes through which the crossbowmen could shoot, and which were small enough to defeat the aim of most arrows. Hook, crouching in the rubble of the old gate, reckoned that for every crossbowman shooting there were another three or four men spanning spare bows so that the bolts never stopped. Most crossbowmen were lucky to shoot two bolts a minute, but the bolts were coming from the loopholes far more frequently and still more missiles spat from the high windows of the half-ruined houses behind the wall. This, Hook knew, was how Soissons should have been defended.

  “We’ll have to bring up a gun,” Sir John snarled from another place in the ruined wall, but instead led a charge against the barricade, shouting at his archers to smother it in arrows. They did, but the crossbow bolts kept coming and even if the bolts failed to pierce armor they threw a man back by sheer force and when, at last, a half-dozen men managed to reach the wall and tried to pull down its timbers and stones, a cauldron was tipped over its coping and a stream of boiling fish oil spilled down onto the attackers. They ran and limped back, some gasping from the pain of the scalding, and Sir John, his armor slick with the oil, came back with them and dropped into the gate’s rubble and let loose a stream of impotent curses. The French were cheering. They waved taunting flags above their new low wall. A smoky haze shimmered behind the new rampart, promising that more heated oil would greet any new attack. The English catapults were trying to drop stones on the new wall, but most of the missiles flew long to crash down among the already shattered houses.

  The sun climbed. The late summer’s heat had returned and both attackers and defenders roasted in their armor. Boys brought water and ale. Men-at-arms, resting in the shelter of the Leure Gate’s ruins, took off their helmets. Their hair was matted flat and their faces running with sweat. The archers crouched in the stones, sometimes shooting if a man showed himself, but for long periods neither side would loose an arrow or a bolt, but just wait for a target.

  “Bastards,” Sir John spat at the enemy.

  Hook saw two defenders struggling to remove an earth-filled basket from a section of the new wall. He half stood and loosed an arrow, just as a dozen other archers did the same. The two men fell back, each struck by arrows, but the basket fell with them and Hook saw a cannon barrel, squat and low, and he flattened himself in the gate’s ruins just as the cannon fired. The air whistled and screamed, stone chips were whipping in smoke, and a man gave a terrible long cry that turned to a whimper as the space in front of the wall was obscured by the thick smoke. “Oh, my God,” Will of the Dale said.

  “You hurt, Will?”

  “No. Just tired of this place.”

  The French had loaded their cannon with a mass of small stones that had flayed the attackers. A man-at-arms was dead, a small hole punched clean through the top of his helmet. An archer staggered back toward the barbican, one hand clamped over an empty, bloody eye socket.

  “We’re all going to die here,” Will said.

  “No,” Hook said fiercely, though he did not believe his protest. The gun smoke cleared slowly and Hook saw that the earth-filled basket was back in its embrasure.

  “Bastards,” Sir John spat again.

  “We’re not giving up!” the king was shouting. He wanted to assemble a mass of men-at-arms and attempt to overwhelm the wall with numbers and his men were carrying orders to the Englishmen scattered in the old wall’s ruins. “Archers to the flanks!” a man shouted, “to the flanks!”

  A French trumpeter began playing a short sharp melody. It was three notes, rising and falling, repeated over and over. There was something taunting in the sound.

  “Kill that bastard!” Sir John shouted, but the bastard was hidden behind the wall.

  “Move!” the king shouted.

  Hook took a deep breath, then scrambled to his right. No crossbow bolts spat from the defenses. The garrison was waiting, he thought. Perhaps they were running short of bolts and so they were keeping what they had to greet the next assault. He sheltered by a stub of broken wall and just then the French trumpeter stood on the new rampart and raised his instrument to his lips, and Hook stood too, and the cord came back to his right ear, he loosed, and the string whipped his bracer and the goose-fledged arrow flew true and the bodkin point took the trumpeter in the throat and drove clean through his neck so that it stood proud at his nape. The braying trumpet screeched horribly and then ended abruptly as the man fell backward. More English arrows flitted above him as he disappeared behind the wall, leaving a fading spray of misted blood and the dying echo of the trumpet’s truncated call.

  “Well done, that archer!” Sir John shouted.

  Hook waited. The day became still hotter under a sun that was a great furnace in a sky clouded only by the shreds of smoke from the beleaguered city. The French had stopped shooting altogether, which only convinced Hook that they were saving their missiles for the assault they knew was coming. Priests picked their way among the ruins of the old wall, shriving the dead and the dying, while behind the wall, in the space between the ruined Leure Gate and the shattered barbican, the men-at-arms assembled under their lords’ banners. That force, at least four hundred strong, was easily visible to the defenders, but still they did not shoot.

  One of Sir John’s pages, a boy of ten or eleven with a shock of bright blond hair and wide blue eyes, brought two skins of water to the archers. “We need arrows, boy,” Hook told him.

  “I’ll bring some,” the boy said.

  Hook tipped the skin to his mouth. “Why aren’t the men-at-arms moving?” he asked no one in particular. The king had assembled his assault force and the archers were in place, but a curious lassitude had settled over the attackers.

  “A messenger came,” the page said nervously. He was a high-born lad, sent to Sir John’s household to learn a warrior’s ways, and in time he would doubtless be a great lord in shining armor mounted on a caparisoned horse, but for now he was nervous of the hard-faced archers who would one day be under his command.

  “A messenger?”

  “From the Duke of Clarence,” the page said, taking back the water-skin.

  The duke, camped on the far side of Harfleur, was also attacking the city, though no sounds betrayed any fighting from that far-off gate. “So what did the messenger tell us?” Hook asked the page.

  “That the attack failed,” the boy said.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Hook said in disgust. So now, he reckoned, the king was waiting until his brother could mount another assault, and then the English would make one last effort, from both east and west, to overwhelm the stubborn defenders. And so Hook and his archers waited. If the king had sent new orders to his brother then they would take at least two hours to reach him, for the messenger had to ride far around the city’s north side and cross the flooded river by boat.

  “What’s happening?” Sclate, the slow-witted laborer with a giant’s strength, asked.

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nbsp; “I don’t know,” Hook confessed. Sweat trickled down his face and stung his eyes. The air seemed to be filled with dust that coated his throat and made him thirsty again. The light, reflecting from the shattered chalk of the broken walls, was dazzling. He was tired. He unstrung the bow to take the tension from the stave.

  “Are we attacking again?” Sclate asked.

  “I reckon we attack when the duke assaults the far side,” Hook suggested. “Be a couple of hours yet.”

  “They’ll be ready for us,” Sclate said gloomily.

  The garrison would be ready. Ready with cannons and crossbows and springolts and boiling oil. That was what waited for the men wearing the red cross. The men-at-arms were sitting now, resting before they were ordered into the killing ground. The bright banners hung slack from their poles and a strange silence wrapped Harfleur. Waiting. Waiting.

  “When we attack!” Sir John’s voice broke the silence. He was striding along the front of the sheltering archers, careless that he was fully exposed to the enemy, but the French crossbowmen, doubtless under orders to conserve their bolts, ignored him. “When we attack,” he called again, “you advance! You keep shooting! But you keep going forward! When we go over the wall I want archers with us! We’re going to have to hunt these bastards through their goddam streets! I want you all there! And good hunting! This is a day to kill our king’s enemies, so kill them!”

  And when the killing was done, Hook wondered, how many English would be left? The army that had sailed from Southampton Water had been small enough, but now? Now, he reckoned, there would just be half an army, many of them sick men, crammed into the ruins of Harfleur as the French army at last stirred itself to fight. Rumors said that enemy army was vast, a horde of men eager to wipe out the impudent English invaders, though God seemed to be doing that already by sickness.

  “Let’s get it over with,” Will of the Dale grumbled.

  “Or let them keep the goddam town,” Tom Scarlet suggested, “it’s a shit-heap now.”

  And what if the assault failed? Hook wondered. What if Harfleur did not fall? Then the remnants of Henry’s army would sail back to England, defeated. The campaign had begun so well, with all the panoply of banners and hope, and now it was blood and feces and despair.

  Another trumpeter began playing the same mocking notes from the city. Sir John, stalking back past his archers, turned and snarled toward the defenders. “I want that prick-sucking bastard killed! I want him killed!” The last four words were screamed at the wall, loud enough for any Frenchmen to hear.

  Then, unexpectedly, a man clambered onto the wall’s top. He was not the trumpeter, who still blew from his place behind the wall. The man on the wall was unarmed, and he stood and waved both hands at the English.

  Archers stood, began to draw.

  “No!” Sir John bellowed. “No! No! No! Bows down! Bows down! Bows down!”

  The trumpet note wavered, faded and stopped.

  The man on the wall held his empty hands high above his head.

  And, miraculously, suddenly, astonishingly, it was all over.

  The soldiers of Harfleur’s garrison did not want to surrender, but the townspeople had suffered enough. They were hungry. Their houses had been crushed and burned by English missiles, disease was spreading, they saw an inevitable defeat and knew that vengeful enemies would rape their daughters. The town council insisted that the city yield and, without the support of the men of Harfleur who shot crossbows from the walls and without the food prepared by the women, the garrison could not prolong the fight.

  The Sire de Gaucourt, who had led the defense, asked for a three-day truce in which he could send a messenger to the French king to discover whether or not a relief force was coming to the city’s help. If not, then he would surrender on condition that the English army did not sack and rape the town. Henry agreed, and so priests and nobles gathered at the breach by the Leure Gate, and the leading men came from the town, and they all swore solemn oaths to abide by the terms of the truce. Afterward, and after Henry had taken hostages to ensure that the garrison kept its word, a herald rode close under the walls and shouted up at the townsfolk who had watched the ceremony. He called in French. “You have nothing to fear! The King of England has not come to destroy you! We are good Christians and Harfleur is not Soissons! You have nothing to fear!”

  Smoke drifted from the city to haze the late summer sky. It seemed strange that no guns fired, that no trebuchets thumped as they launched their missiles, and that the fighting had stopped. The dying did not stop. The corpses were still carried to the creeks and thrown to the gulls, and it seemed there would be no end to the sickness.

  And there was no French relief force.

  The French army was gathering to the east, but the message came back that it would not march to relieve Harfleur and so, on the next Sunday, the feast of Saint Vincent, the city surrendered.

  A pavilion was erected on the hillside behind the English encampment and a throne was placed under the canopy and draped with cloth of gold. English banners flanked the pavilion, which was filled with the high nobility in their finest clothes. A man held aloft the king’s great helm, which was ringed with a golden crown, while archers lined a long path that led across the rubble of the siege-works to the ruined gate that had resisted so many attacks. Behind the archers were the rest of Henry’s army, spectators to the day’s drama.

  The King of England, crowned with a simple circlet of gold and wearing a surcoat blazoned with the French royal coat of arms, sat enthroned in silence. He was watching and waiting, and perhaps wondering what he must do next. He had come to Normandy and won this surrender, but that victory had cost him half his army.

  Hook was at the Leure Gate where Sir John commanded a force of ten men-at-arms and forty archers. Sir John, clad in plate armor that had been scoured to a shine, was mounted on his great destrier, Lucifer, who had been draped in a dazzling linen trapper resplendent with Sir John’s crest, and the same lion was modeled in painted wood to rear savagely from the crest of Sir John’s helmet. The men-at-arms were also in armor, but the archers were in leather jerkins and stained breeches. All the bowmen carried halters of rough rope, the kind that a peasant might use to lead a cow to market. “Treat them courteously,” Sir John told his bowmen, “they fought well! They’re men!”

  “I thought they were all scum-sucking cabbage shitters,” Will of the Dale said quietly, but not quietly enough.

  Sir John turned Lucifer. “They are that!” he said, “but they fought like Englishmen! So treat them like Englishmen!”

  A section of the new wall had been demolished and, just after Sir John spoke, some three dozen men emerged from the gap. They had been ordered to approach the King of England barefoot and in plain linen shirts and hose. Now, nervous and apprehensive, they walked slowly and cautiously toward the waiting archers.

  “Nooses!” Sir John ordered.

  Hook and the other archers tied nooses in the ropes. Sir John beckoned a squire and handed his reins to the man, then slid out of his tall saddle. He patted Lucifer on the nose, then walked toward the approaching Frenchmen.

  He singled out one man, a tall man with a hooked nose and a short black beard. The man was pale, and Hook guessed he was sick, but he was forcing himself to lead the Frenchmen out of the town and to keep what small dignity he had left. The bearded man beckoned to his companions to pause while he approached Sir John alone. The two men stopped a pace apart, the Englishman glorious in armor and heraldry, his sword hilt polished, his armor gleaming, while the Frenchman was in the common, ill-fitting clothes decreed by King Henry. Sir John, his visor raised, said something that Hook did not catch, then the two men embraced.

  Sir John left his right arm about the Frenchman’s shoulders as he led him toward the archers. “This is the Sire de Gaucourt,” he announced, “the leader of our enemies these last five weeks, and he has fought bravely! He deserves better than this, but our king commands and we must obey. Hook, give me the
noose!”

  Hook held out the halter. The Frenchman gave him an appraising look and Hook felt compelled to nod his head in respectful acknowledgment.

  “I am sorry,” Sir John said in French.

  “It is necessary,” Raoul de Gaucourt said harshly.

  “Is it?” Sir John asked.

  “We must be humiliated so that the rest of France knows what fate waits for them if they resist your king,” de Gaucourt said. He gave a wan smile then cast an appraising eye over the English army that waited to watch his humiliating walk to the king’s throne. “Though I doubt your king has the power to frighten France any more,” he went on. “You call this a victory, Sir John?” he asked, beckoning at the battered walls he had defended so bravely. Sir John did not answer. Instead he lifted the noose to place it about de Gaucourt’s head, but the Frenchman took it from him. “Allow me,” he said, and put the rope about his own neck.

  The other Frenchmen had ropes placed about their necks, and then Sir John, satisfied, pulled himself back into Lucifer’s saddle. He nodded to de Gaucourt, then spurred his horse along the path made between the watching English soldiers.

  The Frenchmen walked the path in silence. Some, the merchants, were old men, while others, mostly soldiers, were young and strong. They were the knights and burgesses, the men who had defied the King of England, and the nooses about their necks proclaimed that their lives were now at Henry’s mercy. They climbed the hillside, then knelt humbly before the throne canopied in cloth of gold. Henry gazed at them a long time. The wind lifted the silk banners and drifted smoke from the city’s ruins. The assembled English nobles waited, expecting the king to announce the death sentence on the kneeling men. “I am the rightful king of this realm,” Henry said, “and your resistance was treason.”

  A look of pain showed briefly on de Gaucourt’s face. He ignored the accusation of treason and instead held out a thick bunch of heavy keys. “The keys of Harfleur, sire,” he said, “which are yours.”