It was Saint Crispin’s Day in Picardy.
For an instant there was silence.
Then the arrows struck.
It was the sound of steel on steel. A clatter, like Satan’s hailstorm.
And the day’s noise of pain began. It was a scream from a horse that reared with a broadhead deep in its rump. The horse bolted forward, jerking its steel-clad rider in his high saddle, and the motion of the wounded horse served as a signal so that more horses followed, then all the riders spurred and the whole French line gave a great shout as their cavalry began their charge. “Saint Denis! Montjoie!”
“Saint George!” someone shouted in the English line, and the shout was taken up by the small army. “Saint George!” The men-at-arms taunted the French with hunting calls, and the noise grew to a clamor as the trumpets screamed at the sky.
Where Hook’s second broadhead was on its way.
Ghillebert, Seigneur de Lanferelle, was in the front rank of the French army. He was one of over eight thousand dismounted men-at-arms who formed the first of the three French battles. He wore polished plate armor beneath his surcoat of the sun and falcon, though the armor’s leg pieces were now spattered with mud. At his side hung a long battle-sword, across his shoulder was a lead-weighted mace studded with spikes, while in his hands was an ash-shafted lance shortened to seven feet and tipped with a steel spike. His head was enclosed in a leather hood that was laced beneath his chin and beneath which his long hair was coiled. Over the hood he wore a chain-mail aventail that covered his head and shoulders, and above the aventail, completely encasing his skull, was an Italian battle-helm. The helm’s visor was pushed up so he could see the English and see, too, that their army was risibly small.
The French were ebullient. Henry of England had dared to march his pathetic army from Normandy to Picardy, thinking he could shame his enemy by parading his insolent banners across French territory, and now he was trapped. Lanferelle, watching the enemy since dawn, had reckoned that there were only a thousand men-at-arms in their line, and that figure had seemed so ridiculously small that he had checked again and again by dividing the line into quarters, counting heads and multiplying by four, and each time he arrived at the same total. Maybe one thousand men-at-arms who were faced by three successive French battles, each with at least eight thousand men-at-arms, but there were also the two wings of the English.
Archers.
Thousands of archers, too many to count, though the French scouts had reported figures as various as four thousand to eight thousand. And those archers, Lanferelle knew, carried the long yew bows and had bags of steel-tipped arrows that, at close range, could slash through the best armor in Christendom. That was why all Lanferelle’s armor was shaped and curved so that the arrows would be deflected, yet even so he knew an unlucky hit could find lodgment. And so Ghillebert, the Lord of Hell, Sire of Lanferelle, did not share his compatriots’ ebullience. He did not doubt for a second that the French men-at-arms could slaughter the English men-at-arms, but to reach that paltry battle-line they would have to endure the arrows.
In the night, as other men drank, the Sire of Lanferelle had gone to an astrologer, a famous man from Paris who was reputed to see the future, and Lanferelle had joined the long line waiting to consult the seer. The man, bearded, grave, and swathed in a fur-edged black cloak, had taken Lanferelle’s gold and then, after much groaning and sighing, had declared he saw nothing but glory in the future. “You will kill, my lord,” the astrologer had said, “you will kill and kill, and gain both glory and riches.” Afterward, standing outside the astrologer’s tent in the seething rain, Lanferelle had felt hollow.
He would kill and kill, of that he was certain, but the ambition was not to slaughter the English, but to capture them, and at the very center of the enemy line, beneath the tallest banners, was the King of England. Take Henry captive and the English nation would spend years raising the ransom. Frenchmen were relishing that prospect. There were also royal dukes in the English line, and great lords, and any one of them could make a man rich beyond his wildest dream.
But between the dream and the reality were the archers.
And Ghillebert, Seigneur de Lanferelle, understood the power of the yew bow.
Which was why, when the English had begun their long, laborious advance across the plow-ruined field between Tramecourt and Agincourt, Lanferelle had called to the constable that it was time to attack. The English, as they struggled forward, had lost their cohesion. Instead of being an army in battle formation they were suddenly a mud-spattered rabble trudging across the treacherous furrows, and Lanferelle had seen the archers in disarray and had called again to Marshal Boucicault and to the constable, d’Albret. “Let the horsemen go now!”
The horsemen were on either French wing, big men on big horses, the stallions with armored faces and thick padding covering their chests, and their job was to charge into the archers on the wings and slaughter them mercilessly, but many of the horsemen had ridden away to exercise their destriers on the grassy meadows beyond the woods to keep the animals warm and the remaining horsemen merely watched the English.
“The decision isn’t mine,” Marshal Boucicault answered Lanferelle.
“Then whose is it?”
“Not mine,” Boucicault said curtly and grimly, and Lanferelle understood that Boucicault shared his fear of the archers’ abilities.
“For the love of Christ!” Lanferelle said when still no order was given for the horsemen to charge. Instead they stood their big destriers and watched as the English struggled ever closer.
“Who leads us? For Christ’s sake, who leads us?” Lanferelle asked loudly. No one had given the French a rousing speech before the battle, though Lanferelle had seen the English king ride and pause along the enemy line and he had guessed Henry was rousing his men to slaughter.
Yet who spoke for France? Neither the constable nor the marshal commanded the vast army. That honor seemed to lie with the Duke of Brabant, or perhaps it was the young Duke of Orleans who had only just arrived on the field and was now watching the English advance and doubtless counting the ransoms to be made. The duke seemed content to let the enemy struggle toward their slaughter and so no order was given to the horsemen on either French wing.
Lanferelle watched, incredulous, as the English were allowed to come within long bowshot. The French had crossbowmen, they even had a handful of men who could shoot the yew bow, and they possessed some small cannons that were ready and loaded, but the waiting horsemen masked both the guns and the bowmen. The crossbow had a longer range than the yew bow, but the crossbowmen could not shoot and so the enemy archers pounded in their stakes unmolested. Dear God, Lanferelle thought, but this was madness. The archers should have been scattered and slaughtered by now, but instead they had been allowed to come within their bows’ range and to pound their stakes into the soft ground as a deterrent to horsemen. He watched as they strung their bows, doing it all within crossbow range yet staying entirely undisturbed. “Jesus,” he said to no one in particular, “she comes in, takes off her clothes, lies on the bed, spreads her legs, and we do nothing.”
“Sire?” his squire asked.
Lanferelle ignored the question. “Visors!” he shouted at his men. He led sixteen men-at-arms and he turned to make certain they had closed their visors before pulling down his own with a metallic thud.
He was instantly engulfed in darkness. A moment before he had been able to see the enemy clearly. He had even seen the glitter of gold circling Henry of England’s helmet, but now there was a steel shutter in front of his eyes and the shutter was pierced by twenty small holes, none wide enough to admit even a bodkin arrow’s narrow point, and to see anything through those holes Lanferelle had to move his head from side to side, and even then he could make out little of what happened.
Yet he did see the lone horseman ride from the center of the English line.
And he saw the baton thrown into the air.
And he heard th
e words. “Now, strike!”
He lowered his head as if he struggled into a fierce wind and he heard the rising rush of arrows and he flinched, teeth grinding together, and then the missiles struck.
There was a terrible noise as thousands of steel arrowheads plunged onto steel armor, and a man called out in sudden pain, and Lanferelle felt a thumping blow on his right shoulder, and even though the arrow was deflected it lurched him to one side with the sheer force of its blow. A second arrow quivered in his lance, though he could not see it. Some fool in the rear rank had left his visor open and was making a gargling noise around an arrow that had fallen from the sky to pierce his mouth and drive down into his windpipe. The man slowly sank to his knees and coughed a stream of thick blood. Other arrows plunged into the soil, or else glanced off armor. A horse whinnied and reared to Lanferelle’s left.
“Saint Denis! Montjoie!” the French shouted and Lanferelle, jerking his head so that he could make some sense of what the small holes in his visor revealed, saw the horsemen at last start forward. Then another shout to advance came from the center of the French line, where the oriflamme flew, and all the first battle lurched toward the enemy.
“Montjoie!” they shouted, the sound of their voices huge and deafening inside their helmets, and Lanferelle could hardly move because his armored feet were stuck in the mud, but he jerked his right leg free and so began the advance. Men of mud and steel, no flesh in sight, lumbering toward the waiting English. And the English were howling hunting cries like rabid devils pursuing Christian souls.
And the second arrow-storm fell.
And the devil’s hail rattled and more men screamed.
As the French, at last, attacked.
The horsemen came first. Hook saw one horse rearing, saw the rider topple backward as his pennanted lance scraped a circle against the sky, and then that horse was swallowed by the charge. Knights roweled back their spurs, lowered their lances and called their battle cry, and Hook saw great clods of earth being thrown up behind the monstrous hooves. The stallions tossed their armor-weighted heads, hating the uneven ground, and the spurs struck back again and the charge took shape as the horses gained speed.
The skill of a mounted charge was to start slow, the riders knee to knee, and to advance in that close formation so that the whole line of heavy horses struck the enemy together. Only at the last minute should a man kick his destrier into a gallop, but the plowland was so soft and the arrow fall so sudden that men spurred impulsively forward to escape both. No one had ordered the charge, rather it was the sting of the first arrow-storm that prompted it, and now, on both flanks, the horsemen charged as fast as their big horses could carry them. Three hundred horsemen attacked the English right wing, and even fewer assaulted the left. There were supposed to be a thousand horsemen on either flank, but the other riders were missing, still exercising their destriers.
And the archers drew and loosed.
Hook used broadheads. They were useless against armor, but they could pierce the padded cloths protecting the horses’ chests and, as the range shortened, so the arrows flew at a lower and lower trajectory, none wasting their force on the upper air, but searing straight into the charging animals, and for a moment Hook thought the arrows were having no effect, but then a horse stumbled and went down in a great flurry of mud, man, lance, and harness. The horse screamed and its rider, trapped by the rolling body, screamed with it and the horse behind struck the rolling beast in front and Hook saw the second rider being pitched forward over his horse’s head. He drew again, picking a big horse with shaggy fetlocks and drove an arrow into its side, just in front of the saddle’s girth and the horse swerved away, colliding with another, and Hook’s next arrow thumped into a padded chest to bury itself to the fledging and the world was hoofbeats and screams and the sound of bow cords and at least a dozen horses were on the ground, some struggling to get up, others splashing mud with frantic hooves as their lives drained away through sliced arteries. Will of the Dale put a bodkin into a rider’s throat and the man jerked back under the arrow’s strike, then rebounded forward from his saddle’s high cantle and his lance buried its point in a furrow and so lifted the man out of his saddle as his horse galloped on, eyes white and visible through the holes in its face armor, and the man was dragged along by the stirrup as the horse took an arrow in the eye and veered to one side and so brought down two more horses.
The archers were shooting fast. The horsemen did not have far to charge, but the ground slowed them and in the minute it took the three hundred to reach the archers on the English right they were the target of over four thousand arrows. Only the bowmen in the front two ranks were shooting at the horses, the other archers, their view of the charge obscured by those front ranks, were still hoisting arrows high so that they fell among the dismounted French.
A maddened horse, blood spurting from a ripped belly, twisted away and charged at the French men-at-arms in the field’s center. Others followed it. Some horsemen, balked by the corpses and by the dying horses to their front, pulled up, and then they were easy targets and the arrows whipped into them, each one striking a horse with the sound of a butcher’s cleaver, and the horses were screaming and men were trying to control them.
Yet still some horses reached the English line.
“Back!” centenars shouted, “back!”
The front ranks of archers stepped backward to leave their stakes facing the enemy. They still shot. Hook had taken a handful of bodkin arrows and he let one fly at less than twenty paces and saw the heavy, oak-weighted point glance off a manat-arm’s armor. He drew again, this time plunging the arrow into the horse’s chest.
Then the charge struck home.
But the riders had their visors down and could see nothing through the small slits or holes, while the horses, wearing their steel chamfrons, were almost as blinkered as the men. The charge struck home, but struck onto the stakes and a horse whimpered pitifully, a stake deep in its rib-shattered chest and blood bubbling from its open mouth. The stallion’s rider flailed his lance at empty air. Arrows drove into him and both man and horse were twisting and screaming. Another destrier made it past the first stakes and somehow saw the second row and veered aside to lose its footing in the slick mud. Horse and rider fell in a crash of steel and ash lance. “Mine!” Thomas Evelgold shouted and ran the few paces forward with his poleax. He swung it once, thumping the lead-weighted hammer onto the man-at-arms’s helmet, then he knelt, hauled up the stunned man’s visor, and ran a knife through an exposed eye. The man-at-arms quivered and was still. The horse tried to struggle to its feet, but Evelgold stunned it with his poleax, then struck again with the ax blade that pierced the chamfron and cracked open the beast’s skull.
“See them off!” Evelgold shouted.
The charge had ended at the stakes and the first French attack had ended in failure. The horsemen had been supposed to scatter the archers, but the arrows had done their wicked work and the stakes had stopped the survivors from getting among the bowmen. Some men-at-arms were already riding away, pursued by arrows, while riderless horses, crazed with pain, charged back at their own lines. One man, braver than brave, had dropped his lance to draw his sword and now tried to steer his destrier between the stakes, but the arrows whipped into his horse, which went to its knees, and a bodkin, shot at less than ten paces, drove through the rider’s breastplate, killing him, and he sat there, a head-drooping corpse on a dying horse, and the English archers jeered him.
It was strange, Hook thought, that the fear had gone. Now, instead, an excitement sang in his veins and a thin shrill voice keened in his head. He went back to his stake and plucked up a bodkin. The horsemen were gone, defeated by arrows, but the main French attack still advanced. They came on foot, because armored men on foot were less vulnerable to arrows than horses, and they came beneath bright banners, but their ranks had been churned to chaos by the wounded, riderless horses that had fled in blind panic to charge through the advancing French. Men
went down under the heavy hooves, and other men tried to straighten the ragged line that stumbled across the deep furrows toward the English king and his men-at-arms. Hook picked his targets. He drew, the cord flowing back with deceptive ease, and he loosed arrow after arrow. Other archers crowded him, all jostling forward to pour their shafts at the French.
Who still came on. Their ranks had been broken by the panicked horses, and men were falling as arrows found their marks, but still they advanced. All France’s high aristocracy was in the leading battle and they came beneath proud banners. Eight thousand dismounted men-at-arms attacking nine hundred.
Then a French gun fired.
Melisande was praying. It was not a conscious prayer, more a desperate and silent and unending cry for help aimed at a gray sky, which offered her no comfort.
The baggage had been supposed to follow the army up onto the plateau, but most had stayed around the village of Maisoncelles where the king had spent much of the night. The royal baggage wagons were parked there, guarded by ten men-at-arms and twenty archers, all of them reckoned too sick or lame to stand in the main line of battle. Father Christopher had led Melisande there, saying she would be safer than with the few packhorses that had been led up onto the high plowland where the two armies met. The priest had written his mysterious letters on her forehead. IHC Nazar. “It will preserve your life,” he had promised her.
“Write it on your own face,” Melisande had told him.
Father Christopher had smiled. “God has me in the palm of His hand, my dear,” he said, then made the sign of the cross, “and He will preserve you. But you must stay here. You will be safer here.” He had placed her with the other archers’ wives between two empty wagons that had brought arrows to Agincourt, made sure that her horse was nearby and that the mare was saddled, and then Father Christopher had taken one of Sir John’s horses and ridden up the slope toward the place where the armies waited. Melisande had watched him until he vanished over the crest of the hill, and that was when she had begun to pray. The other wives of Sir John’s archers prayed too.
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