“Get close,” Saint Crispin shouted at Hook.
“I can’t,” Hook said.
Tom Evelgold shuddered. A French man-at-arms slid a sword point into his gullet and there was a thick gush of blood and then the centenar was still. More and more Frenchmen were following Lanferelle, thickening his wedge, and though archers fought them, the enemy was at last driving forward. The stakes helped by giving them something firm to lean on in the treacherous ground and the archers were being outfought. Hook tried to rally them, but they did not have the armor to stand against trained men-at-arms and so they retreated. They had not broken, not yet, but they were being pushed farther and farther back.
Hook tried to stand. He traded blows with Lanferelle, but knew he could not beat the Frenchman. Lanferelle was too fast. He did not have Hook’s strength, but he was much quicker with his weapons. “I am sorry for Melisande,” Lanferelle said, “because she will grieve for you.”
“Bastard,” Hook said, and rammed the poleax forward, had the lunge deflected, and he pulled the weapon back and this time the ax head caught on Lanferelle’s ax head, and Hook hauled back hard and for the first time saw a look of surprise on the Frenchman’s face, but Lanferelle simply let go of the shaft and Hook almost tumbled backward.
“But women recover from grief,” Lanferelle said, “by finding another man.” He stooped and picked up a fallen poleax, and did it so quickly that Hook had no chance to attack while he was down, and by the time Hook saw his chance it was too late. “Or perhaps I will put her back in a nunnery,” Lanferelle said, “and make her a proper bride of Christ.” Lanferelle grinned at Hook, then the new poleax started its relentless stabbing.
“Get out of the way,” Saint Crispin snapped.
“I’ll fight him,” Hook shouted back. He wanted to kill Lanferelle. He suddenly hated him. “I’ll kill him!” he shouted, and tried to step forward, but was checked by the Frenchman’s whip-fast blade.
“Get out of the goddamned way!” the voice roared, but this was not Saint Crispin shouting, and Hook felt himself thrust unceremoniously away as Sir John Cornewaille threw him to one side. Sir John brought men-at-arms who crashed their lances into the French, steel points against plate armor, and Hook staggered to where Will Sclate was hacking at Lanferelle’s followers. Lanferelle responded with a bellowed challenge and a charge at Sir John, and the other Frenchmen surged forward through the clay-thick mud. A poleax slammed onto Hook’s helmet and, because he was already unbalanced, he fell. The ax blow had not been given with full force, but it still rang in Hook’s head and the blade glanced off the helmet to cut through his haubergeon and almost slashed the mail on his shoulder open. He saw the Frenchman draw back the pole, ready to slide the spike into his belly or chest and Hook desperately slashed up with his own blade, a wild blow that drove the ax head into the man-at-arms’s groin. Like the blow that had felled him, it was not given with full force, but it was hard enough to make the Frenchman double over in sudden, body-crippling pain, and then Will of the Dale hauled Hook upright and Hook found his feet and slammed his spike forward, shouting as he thrust, and the spike rammed into the enemy’s upper chest, piercing the aventail and sliding over the breastplate’s top edge. Hook rammed and shook the pole, grinding the blade deep into the enemy’s ribcage, and he watched the lower part of the man’s helmet fill with blood that spilled from the visor opening. A sword smacked Hook from his right, but his mail stopped it, and he swept his weapon that way, dragging his victim with it to throw the swordsman off balance, and then Hook charged.
He used the dying man as a battering ram. He thrust him into the French ranks and Sclate and Will of the Dale followed, and both of them were shouting. “Saint George!”
“Saint Crispin!” Hook bellowed. He was pushing the dying man into the French ranks, thrusting his body against other men. The wounded man splattered blood from his mouth as Hook tried to disengage the spike. Another man stabbed a pike at Hook, but Geoffrey Horrocks had followed Hook and hit the man’s helmet with a mallet, and the strike of the lead-weighted iron thumped dully as the man’s head snapped back. He dropped into the mud. The wounded man at last fell from the poleax and Hook, the weight released, began to scream wildly and swing the weapon from side to side as he thrust into the Frenchmen. “Just kill the bastards, just kill the bastards!” he was shouting. Archers were following him, their anger released by the relief of Sir John’s arrival.
Sir John was fighting Lanferelle, both men so fast with weapons that it was difficult to see thrust, cut or parry, while the other English men-at-arms attacked on either side with such sudden savagery that Lanferelle’s followers instinctively stepped back, intent on defending themselves against the newly arrived men, and as they went back so some tripped on the bodies lying on the ground behind them. They fell and the English came at them, pole-spikes stabbing, axes splitting armor, faces grimacing with the effort of killing, and the sudden slaughter took the spirit from the remaining French who tried to back away and found archers on their flanks. Men began to shout that they yielded. They dragged off gauntlets and shouted their surrenders in desperate panic. “Too late,” Will of the Dale sneered at one man and chopped down with his ax to split an espalier and slice the blade down through shoulder blade and upper ribs. Another Frenchman in a ripped surcoat crawled on hands and knees, blood drooling from his mouth, weeping from sightless eyes, blundering through mud till an archer kicked him down and casually killed him with a knife thrust in the mouth. Young Horrocks was beating a count to death, slamming a poleax again and again into the fallen man’s backplate and screaming insults as the blade tore into steel and spine.
Lanferelle was left, still fighting Sir John, and by some unspoken agreement the other English men-at-arms did not intervene. Neither man spoke. They had their feet planted in the mud and they cut, lunged, and feinted, yet both were so skilled and so quick that neither could find an advantage. They were the tournament champions of Christendom, one French, one English, and they were accustomed to the silken glories of the lists; the admiring women, the bright flags, the courtesy of chivalry, yet now they fought among corpses, amidst the moans and whimpers of the dying, on a field reeking of blood and shit.
The end came by accident. Lanferelle feinted a lunge to Sir John’s left, recovered with astonishing speed, cut, and so forced Sir John to step to his right and his foot landed on the hoof of a dead destrier and the hoof rolled under the weight and Sir John slipped and fell onto one knee and Lanferelle, fast as a snake, whipped the poleax around and struck Sir John’s helmet a ringing blow and Sir John fell full length onto the horse’s bloody belly where he floundered, trying to find his balance and so get to his feet, and Lanferelle raised the poleax for the killing blow.
And thrust.
The French second battle had forced the survivors of the first back to the killing ground where the English waited behind a rampart of dead and dying Frenchmen. So many of the high nobility of France were already dead or bleeding; their bones shattered, their guts torn, their brains spilling from mangled helmets, their eyes gouged and bellies ripped. Men were weeping, some calling for God or for their wives or for their mothers, but neither God nor any woman was there to offer comfort.
The King of England was going forward now. He had pulled one corpse from atop two others to make a passage through the heaped dead and he carried his sword to an enemy who had dared defy God’s choice for France’s throne. His men-at-arms advanced with him, cutting their axes and grinding their maces and chopping their sharp-curved falcon-beaks into a demoralized and mud-wearied enemy. They made new piles of dead, new blood-laced corpses, and more cripples whose cries for help went unanswered. Henry led them, despite the shouts of men who wanted him to protect himself. His helmet was dented and scarred, a fleuret of gold had been severed from the bright crown, but England’s king was replete with a righteous and holy joy because he saw in the enemy’s suffering the proof of divine providence. Underfoot the plowland’s ridges and furrows
had been trampled into a flat morass that was the color of blood. Men waded in a slurry of mud, blood, and shit, they struggled and died, and Henry’s soul soared. God was with him and, in that assurance, he found new strength and went on killing.
Lanferelle thrust hard and vicious just as a poleax blade hooked about his left espalier and hauled him back hard and fast. The Frenchman’s blow fell short of Sir John, but Lanferelle, miraculously keeping his footing, turned on his new enemy and then stopped.
The poleax had pulled him away from Sir John and denied him his kill, and now its spike was in his face, its point mashing his lip against his teeth and Lanferelle found himself staring into Hook’s face.
“When you fought him before,” Hook said, “he let you stand up. You wouldn’t do the same for him?”
“This is battle,” Lanferelle said, his voice distorted by the spike’s pressure, “and that was a tournament.”
“Then if this is battle,” Hook asked, “why shouldn’t I kill you?”
Sir John stood, but did not intervene. He just watched.
“Because Melisande would never forgive you,” Lanferelle said, and he saw the hesitation on Hook’s face and he tensed, ready to bring up his own poleax, but then the steel spike ground into his mouth, ripping his upper gum.
“Go on,” Hook said, “try.”
Sir John still watched.
“Just try,” Hook begged. He kept his eyes on Lanferelle’s face. “You want him, Sir John?”
“He’s yours, Hook.”
“You’re mine,” Hook said to Lanferelle.
“Je me rends,” Lanferelle said, and he released his poleax shaft so the weapon thumped into the mud.
“Take your helmet off,” Hook ordered, drawing back the blood-tipped poleax.
Lanferelle took off his helmet, then his aventail and the leather hood beneath, so releasing his long black hair. He gave Hook his right gauntlet and Hook, triumphant, took his prisoner back to where the other French captives were under guard. The Sire de Lanferelle looked tired suddenly, tired and distraught. “Don’t tie my hands,” he begged.
“Why not?”
“Because I have honor, Nicholas Hook. I have surrendered and I give you my word I will not try to fight again, nor will I try to escape.”
“Then wait here,” Hook said.
“I will wait,” Lanferelle promised.
Hook shouted at a pageboy to bring the Frenchman some water and then went back to the battle that was once again dying. The second French battle had done no better than the first. They had added more bodies to the heaps of the dead, and now the survivors struggled back through the mud, leaving corpses, injured men, and prisoners behind. Hundreds of prisoners. Dukes and counts and lords and men-at-arms, all in surcoats streaked with mud and sodden with blood, all now standing behind the English line and watching, in disbelief, as the remnants of the two French battles limped away.
The third French battle remained. Its flags flew and all along that line men were climbing into saddles and calling on their squires to bring their long lances. “Arrows,” Saint Crispinian spoke in Hook’s head, “you need arrows.”
The day’s work was not over.
Melisande watched.
The English baggage was in the village of Maisoncelles and in the wet pastures around it, and some was halfway up the hill as pages and servants led packhorses toward the protection of the English army beyond the skyline, if indeed there was an English army anymore. Melisande did not know. She had watched men spill over that horizon into the valley where Maisoncelles lay, but those men were few and, by their movements, she guessed they were wounded soldiers, and after a while other men had come, but slowly, not in panicked flight, and she had not understood that they were prisoners being taken toward the village. The lack of panic suggested the English army still held their line on the plateau, but she half expected and half feared to see it come spilling over the edge pursued by the vengeful French.
Instead the French horsemen had come from the west, and now they spurred into the village and Melisande watched as they cut down pages and then dismounted to start pillaging the English baggage.
The horsemen drove away the peasants who had arrived first. A handful of English men-at-arms and wounded archers had been left to guard the encampment, but they only numbered thirty and they had spent their arrows on the serfs and those men now retreated uphill. The women of the army went with them as the horsemen found the English king’s quarters. A priest and two pages had stayed with the king’s treasures, and those three were quickly slaughtered and the plunder began.
Melisande watched. She saw a man parade in a fur-trimmed red robe and with a crown on his head, making his companions laugh. She did not understand what was happening. She could only pray that Nick lived, and so she shut her eyes, crouched low, and prayed.
Hook lived.
The two French battles had retreated, struggling back over the plowland and leaving the space in front of the English thick with bodies in mud-smeared armor. The third French battle was mounted now. It was the smallest of the three French battles, yet it still outnumbered the English. The riders’ lances were upright, some flaunted pennants. Trumpets sounded. The third battle could not charge yet for so many dismounted Frenchmen were in front of them, but they moved their horses a few paces forward before stopping again.
“Arrows!” Hook shouted at his men.
“We don’t have any!” Will of the Dale called back.
“Yes we do,” Hook said. He found his bow, slung it on his shoulder and led his men out into the field where the French bodies lay, and all around those fallen men were spent arrows. Some, because they had struck good armor head on, were now useless because their bodkin points had bent or crumpled, but many were in fine condition. Hook found some undamaged points on arrows that had splintered shafts and he pulled those bodkins free and married them to good shafts. He also pillaged the French bodies. He found a silver chain about one man’s neck and he thrust that into his arrow bag. Men-at-arms were also searching among the heaped French casualties, hauling the corpses away from the living, killing men too injured to survive or too poor to be worth ransoming, and rescuing the wealthy. Hook picked up a gray-fledged arrow trapped in the surcoat of a man lying on his back, and the man suddenly moved. Hook had thought he was dead, but the man groaned and turned his visored face toward the archer. Hook lifted the visor and saw scared eyes. “Aidez moi,” the man said, half choking. Hook could see no wound, no puncture in the armor, but the man screamed when Hook tried to lift him. The Frenchman was in such pain that he lost consciousness and Hook let him fall again. He took the arrow and moved on. A dog barked at him. It was standing over a corpse in a blood-soaked surcoat. Hook left the dog alone, skirting it to pick up a dozen more arrows that he thrust into his arrow bag.
“Nick!” Will of the Dale called, and Hook looked up to see a lone French horseman had ridden through the retreating fugitives of the first two battles. The rider was short and slightly built, and the only weapon he carried was a scabbarded sword. He wore plate armor, but he was not mounted on an armored destrier, instead he rode a small piebald mare. His white linen jupon was decorated with two red axes above which was the glimmer of gold from a heavy chain that hung around his neck. His helmet’s visor was raised and he seemed to be searching among the bodies, but checked his horse when he realized the archers were staring at him.
“Bastard wants trouble,” Will said.
“No, he’s just looking at us,” Hook said, “and he’s only a little fellow. Let him be.” He picked up a broadhead, then another bodkin, and glanced again at the horseman who had suddenly drawn his sword and kicked his horse forward. “Maybe he does want trouble,” Hook said and he took the bow off his shoulder, braced it on a corpse’s breastplate, and looped its string about the upper nock.
The horseman stopped again, this time to gaze down into a tangle of armor and bodies. The dead lay on top of each other and the man seemed fascinated by the sight.
He stared for a long time, now no more than twenty paces from the archers and then, abruptly, he screamed a high-pitched challenge and kicked his piebald horse straight at Hook. The mare responded, flailing its hooves in the mud to throw up great clods of earth.
“Stupid bastard,” Hook said angrily. He laid a bodkin over the string and raised the bow, just as a dozen other archers did the same. Hook thought the man must swerve away, but instead the rider lowered his sword to spear the blade at Hook who drew the cord to his right ear and did not even think about what he did. It was all instinctive. The cord came back, he watched the horseman rise and fall with the piebald’s motion, saw the open visor and the unnaturally bright eyes, and loosed.
His arrow went clean through the rider’s right eye and the force of it snapped the man’s head hard back. The sword dropped and the mare slowed and then, puzzled, stopped a short lance’s length away from Hook. No other archer had loosed.
A cheer went up from the English line as the dead rider fell slowly from the saddle. He took a long time to fall, slipping gently sideways and then suddenly collapsing in a clatter of armor. “Get his horse,” Hook told Horrocks.
Hook went to the corpse. He tugged the arrow free from the ruined eye so he could pull the thick golden chain over the dead man’s head, and then his hand stopped because there was a pendant hanging from the chain. It was a thick pendant, carved from white ivory, and mounted on that silver-rimmed disc was an antelope cut from jet.
Agincourt Page 40
