Agincourt

by Bernard Cornwell

  “She will.”

  “Thought you were getting married?”

  “I think we are.”

  “Do it in England, Hook.”

  “Why England?”

  “Because it’s God’s country, not like this goddam place.”

  Centenars and men-at-arms had come to the quay to discover if any of the newcomers belonged to their companies. Lord Slayton’s centenar, William Snoball, was one of them, and he greeted Hook civilly. “I’m surprised to see you here, Master Snoball,” Hook said.

  “Why?”

  “Who’s stewarding while you’re here?”

  “John Willetts. He can manage well enough without me. And his lordship wanted me to come.”

  “Because you’ve got experience,” Evelgold put in.

  “Aye there’s that,” Snoball agreed, “and his lordship wanted me to keep an eye on,” he hesitated, “well, you know.”

  “Sir Martin?” Hook asked. “And why in God’s name did he send him?”

  “Why do you think?” Snoball answered harshly.

  Hook mimed drawing a knife across his throat. “Is that what he hopes?”

  “He hopes Sir Martin will minister to our souls,” Snoball said distantly and then, perhaps thinking he had betrayed too much, walked some distance down the wharf.

  Hook watched the Holy Ghost creep closer. “Are we expecting any new men?” he asked.

  “None that I know of, Sir John hasn’t said anything.”

  “He’s not happy,” Hook said.

  “Because he’s crazy, moon-touched. Daft as a hare.” Thomas Evelgold brooded for a moment. “He wants to march into France! Man’s daft! He wants us all dead! But it’s all right for him, isn’t it?”

  “All right?”

  “He won’t be killed, will he? What happens if we march into France to find a battle? The gentry don’t get killed, Hook, they get taken prisoner! But no one will ransom you and me. We get slaughtered, Hook, while their lordships go off to some comfortable castle and get fed and given whores. Sir John don’t care. He just wants a fight! But he knows he’ll like as not live through a battle. He should give a thought to us.” Evelgold drained his ale. “Still, won’t happen. We’ll all be home by Saint Martin’s feast day.”

  “The king wants to march,” Hook said.

  “The king can count as well as you and me,” Evelgold said dismissively, “and he won’t march.”

  Lines were hurled from the Holy Ghost to be caught by men ashore, and slowly, laboriously, the great ship was hauled in to the quay. Gangplanks were lowered and then the newcomers, looking unnaturally clean, were chivvied ashore. There were around sixty archers, all carrying cased bows, arrow bags, and bundles. The red crosses of Saint George on their jupons looked very bright. A priest came down the nearer gangplank, fell to his knees on the wharf, and made the sign of the cross. Behind him were four archers wearing the Slayton moon and stars and one of them had springy gold hair sticking wildly from beneath his helmet’s brim. For a heartbeat Hook did not believe what he saw, then he stood and shouted. “Michael! Michael!”

  It was his younger brother. Michael saw him and grinned. “My brother,” Hook explained to Evelgold, then strode to meet Michael. They embraced. “My God, it is you,” Hook said.

  William Snoball called Michael’s name, but Hook turned on the steward. “He’ll come when he’s ready, Master Snoball. Where are you quartered?”

  Snoball grudgingly told him and Hook promised to bring his brother, then took Michael to the table and poured a pot of ale. Thomas Evelgold left them alone. “What in God’s name are you doing here?” Hook demanded.

  “Lord Slayton sent his last archers,” Michael said, grinning, “he reckoned you all needed help. I didn’t even know you were here!”

  Then there was a catching up of news. Hook said that Robert Perrill had been killed in the siege, though he did not say how, and Michael told how their grandmother had died, a fact that did not trouble Hook in the least. “She was a bitter old bitch,” he said.

  “She looked after us, though,” Michael said.

  “She looked after you, not me.”

  Then Melisande came from the tavern and she was introduced, and Hook felt a sudden, wild and unfamiliar happiness. The two people he loved most were with him, and he had money in his pockets, and all seemed well with the world. The campaign in France might be over, and over before it had gained any great victory, but he was still happy. “I’ll ask Sir John if you can join us,” he told Michael.

  “I don’t think Lord Slayton will allow that,” Michael said.

  “Aye, well, we can only ask.”

  “So what’s going to happen here?” Michael wanted to know.

  “I reckon some poor bastards will be left here to defend this town,” Hook said, “and the rest of us will go home.”

  “Go home?” Michael frowned. “But we just got here!”

  “That’s what folk are saying. The lords are trying to make the decision now, but it’s too late in the year to go marching inland and, besides, the French army’s too big. We’ll be going home.”

  “I hope not,” Michael said. He grinned. “I didn’t come this far to go home again. I want to fight.”

  “No, you don’t,” Hook said, and surprised himself by saying it. Melisande was also surprised, looking at him curiously.

  “I don’t?”

  “It’s blood,” Hook said, “and men crying for their mothers, and too much screaming, and pain and bastards in metal trying to kill you.”

  Michael was taken aback. “They say we just shoot arrows at them,” he said falteringly.

  “Aye, you do, but in the end, brother, you have to get close. Close enough to see their eyes. Close enough to kill them.”

  “And Nicholas is good at that,” Melisande said flatly.

  “Not every man is,” Hook said, suspecting that Michael, with his generous and trusting nature, lacked the ruthlessness to get close and commit slaughter.

  “Maybe just one battle,” Michael said wistfully, “not a very big one.”

  Hook took Michael through the town at sundown. Lord Slayton’s men had found houses close to the Montivilliers Gate and Hook led his brother there and so into the yard of a merchant’s house where the archers were quartered. His old companions went silent as the Hook brothers appeared. There was no sign of Sir Martin, but Tom Perrill, dark and brooding, was sitting against a wall, and he stared expressionless at the two Hooks. William Snoball sensed trouble and stood up.

  “Michael’s joining you,” Hook announced loudly, “and Sir John Cornewaille wants you to know that my brother is under his protection.” Sir John had said no such thing, but none of Lord Slayton’s men would know that.

  Tom Perrill gave a mocking laugh, but said nothing. William Snoball confronted Hook. “There’ll be no trouble,” he agreed.

  “There will indeed be no trouble!” A voice echoed the statement and Hook turned to see Sir Edward Derwent, Lord Slayton’s captain who had been captured in the mine, standing in the courtyard entrance. Sir Edward had been freed when the town surrendered, and Hook reckoned he must have been at the council of war because he was dressed in his finest clothes. Sir Edward now strode to the courtyard’s center. “There will be no trouble!” he said again. “None of you will fight each other, because your job is to fight the French!”

  “I thought we were going home,” Snoball said, puzzled.

  “Well, you’re not,” Sir Edward said. “The king wants more, and what the king wants, he gets.”

  “We’re staying here?” Hook asked, incredulous. “In Harfleur?”

  “No, Hook,” Sir Edward said, “we’re marching.” He sounded grim, as though he disapproved of the decision. But Henry was king and, as Sir Edward had said, what the king wanted the king got.

  And what Henry wanted was more war.

  And so the army would march into France.

  PART THREE

  To the River of Swords

  NINE


  There were to be no heavy wagons taken on the march. Instead the baggage would be carried by men, packhorses, and light carts. “We have to travel fast,” Sir John explained.

  “It’s pride,” Father Christopher told Hook later, “nothing but pride.”

  “Pride?”

  “The king can’t just crawl back to England with nothing but Harfleur to show for his money! He has to do more than merely kick the French dog, he feels a need to pull its tail as well.”

  The French dog did appear to be sleeping. Reports said the enemy army grew ever larger, but it showed no sign of stirring from around Rouen, and so the King of England had decided he would show Christendom that he could march from Harfleur to Calais with impunity. “It isn’t that far,” Sir John told his men, “maybe a week’s march.”

  “And what do we gain from a week’s march through France?” Hook asked Father Christopher.

  “Nothing,” the priest said bluntly.

  “So why do it?”

  “To show that we can. To show that the French are helpless.”

  “And we travel without the big wagons?”

  Father Christopher grinned. “We don’t want the helpless French to catch us, do we? That would be a disaster, young Hook! So we can’t take two hundred heavy wains with us, that would slow us down far too much, so it will be horses, spurs and the devil take the hindmost.”

  “This is important!” Sir John had told his men. He had stormed into the Paon’s taproom and hammered one of the barrels with the hilt of his sword. “Are you awake? Are you listening? You take food for eight days! And all the arrows you can carry! You take weapons, armor, arrows, and food, and nothing else! If I see any man carrying anything other than weapons, armor, arrows, and food I’ll shove that useless baggage down his goddam gullet and pull it out of his goddam arse! We have to travel fast!”

  “It all happened before,” Father Christopher told Hook next morning.

  “Before?”

  “You don’t know your history, Hook?”

  “I know my grandfather was murdered, and my father too.”

  “I do so love a happy family,” the priest said, “but think back to your great-grandfather’s time, when Edward was king. The third Edward. He was here in Normandy and decided to make a quick march to Calais, only he got trapped halfway.”

  “And died?”

  “Oh, good God, no, he beat the French! You’ve surely heard of Crécy?”

  “Oh, I’ve heard of Crécy!” Hook said. Every archer knew of Crécy, the battle where the bowmen of England had cut down the nobility of France.

  “So you know it was a glorious battle, Hook, in which God favored the English, but God’s favor is a fickle thing.”

  “Are you telling me He’s not on our side?”

  “I’m telling you that God is on the side of whoever wins, Hook.”

  Hook considered that for a moment. He was sharpening arrowheads, slithering the bodkins and broadheads against a stone. He thought of all the tales he had heard as a child when old men had spoken of the arrow-storms of Crécy and Poitiers, then flourished a bodkin at Father Christopher. “If we meet the French,” he said stoutly, “we’ll win. We’ll punch these through their armor, father.”

  “I have a grievous suspicion that the king agrees with you,” the priest said gently. “He really does believe God is on his side, but his brother evidently does not.”

  “Which brother?” Hook asked. The Duke of Clarence and the Duke of Gloucester were both with the army.

  “Clarence,” Father Christopher said. “He’s sailing home.”

  Hook frowned at that news. The duke, according to some men, was an even better soldier than his older brother. Hook inspected a bodkin. Most of the long narrow head was dark with rust, but the point was now shining metal and wickedly sharp. He tested it by pricking the ball of his hand, then wet his fingers and smoothed out the fledging. “Why’s he going?”

  “I suspect he disapproves of his brother’s decision,” Father Christopher said blandly. “Officially, of course, the duke is ill, but he looked remarkably well for an ailing man. And, of course, if Henry is killed, God forbid, Clarence will become King Thomas.”

  “Our Harry won’t die,” Hook said fiercely.

  “He very well might if the French catch us,” the priest said tartly, “but even our Henry has listened to advice. He was told to go home, he wanted to march to Paris, but he’s settled for Calais instead. And with God’s help, Hook, we should reach Calais long before the French can reach us.”

  “You make it sound as if we’re running away.”

  “Not quite,” the priest said, “but almost. Think of your lovely Melisande.”

  Hook frowned, puzzled. “Melisande?”

  “The French are gathered at her bellybutton, Hook, and we are perched on her right nipple. What we plan to do is run to her left nipple and hope to God the French don’t make it to her cleavage before us.”

  “And if they do?”

  “Then the cleavage will become the valley of the shadow of death,” Father Christopher said, “so pray that we march fast and that the French go on sleeping.”

  “You can’t be fussy!” Sir John had told his archers in the taproom. “We can’t pack arrows in barrels, we don’t have the carts to carry barrels! And you can’t use discs! So bundle them, bundle them tight!”

  Bundled arrows suffered from crushed fledgings, and crushed fledgings made arrows inaccurate, but there was no choice but to bind the arrows in tight sheaves that could be hung from a saddle or across a packhorse’s back. It took two days to tie the sheaves, for the king was demanding that every available arrow be carried on the journey and that meant carrying hundreds of thousands of arrows. As many as possible were heaped on the light farm carts that would accompany the army, but there were not enough such vehicles, so even men-at-arms were ordered to tie the bundles behind their saddles. There were just five thousand archers marching to Calais and in one minute those men were capable of shooting sixty or seventy thousand arrows, and no battle was ever won in a minute. “If we take every arrow we’ve got, there still won’t be enough,” Thomas Evelgold grumbled, “and then we’ll be throwing rocks at the bastards.”

  A garrison was left at Harfleur. It was a strong force of over three hundred men-at-arms and almost a thousand archers, though it was short of horses because the king demanded that the garrison give up every beast except the knights’ war-trained destriers. The horses were needed to carry arrows. The new defenders of Harfleur were left perilously short of arrows themselves, but new ones were expected to arrive any day from England where foresters cut ash shafts, blacksmiths forged bodkins and broadheads, and fledgers bound on the goose feathers.

  “We will march swiftly!” a priest with a booming voice shouted. It was the day before the army marched and the priest was visiting every street in Harfleur with a parchment on which the king’s orders had been written. The priest’s job was to make certain every man understood the king’s commands. “There will be no straggling! Above all, the property of the church is sacred! Any man who plunders church property will be hanged! God is with us, and we march to show that by His grace we are the masters of France!”

  “You heard him!” Sir John shouted as the priest walked on. “Keep your thieving hands off church property! Don’t rape nuns! God doesn’t like it, and nor do I!”

  That night, in the church of Saint Martin, Father Christopher made Hook and Melisande man and wife. Melisande cried and Hook, as he knelt and gazed at the candles guttering on the altar, wished Saint Crispinian would speak to him, but the saint said nothing. He wished he had thought to summon his brother to the church, but there had been no opportunity. Father Christopher had simply insisted that it was time Hook made Melisande his wife and so had taken them to the broken-spired church. “God be with you,” the priest said when the brief ceremony was done.

  “He has been,” Melisande said.

  “Then pray that He stays with y
ou, because we need God’s help now.” The priest turned and bowed to the altar. “By God we need it,” he added ominously, “the Burgundians have marched.”

  “To help us?” Hook asked. It seemed so long ago that he had worn the ragged red cross of Burgundy and watched as the troops of France had massacred a city.

  “No,” Father Christopher said, “to help France.”

  “But…” Hook began, then his voice trailed away.

  “They have made up their family quarrel,” Father Christopher said, “and so turned against us.”

  “And we’re still going to march?” Hook asked.

  “The king insists,” Father Christopher said bleakly. “We are a small army at the edge of a great land,” he went on, “but at least you two are joined now for all time. Even death cannot separate you.”

  “Thanks be to God,” Melisande said, and made the sign of the cross.

  Next day, the eighth day of October, a Tuesday, the feast day of Saint Benedicta, under a clear sky, the army marched.

  They went north, following the coastline, and Hook felt the army’s spirits rise as they rode away from the smell of shit and death. Men grinned for no apparent reason, friends teased each other cheerfully, and some put spurs to horses and just galloped for the sheer joy of being in open country again.

  Sir John Cornewaille commanded the army’s vanguard, and his own men were in the van of the van and so rode at the very front of the column. Sir John’s banner flew between the cross of Saint George and the flag of the Holy Trinity, the three standards guarded by Sir John’s men-at-arms and followed by four mounted drummers who beat incessantly. The archers rode ahead, scouting the path, and watching for an enemy whose first appearance was an ambush, though none of Sir John’s men was involved. The French had waited until the well-armed and vigilant vanguard had gone by, then had sallied from Montivilliers, a walled town close to the road. Crossbowmen shot from the woods and a group of men-at-arms charged the column and there was a flurry of fighting before the attackers, who numbered fewer than fifty men, were beaten off, though not before they had managed to take a half-dozen prisoners and leave two English dead.