Agincourt

by Bernard Cornwell

  “You stupid little bastard,” Hook said, and he lifted off the boy’s helmet that was too big for him and looked down into the ruined face of Sir Philippe de Rouelles.

  “He’s just a boy,” Horrocks said in surprise.

  “A stupid little bastard is what he is,” Hook said.

  “What was he doing?”

  “He was being goddam brave,” Hook said. He pulled off the heavy golden chain and walked the few paces to where the boy had stared down at the heaped dead, and there, lying on top of two other men, was a corpse in a surcoat that was so soaked in blood that at first Hook had difficulty making out the badge, but then he saw the outline of two red axes in the redder cloth. The dead man’s helmet had come off and his throat had been cut to the spine. “He came to find his father,” Hook told Horrocks.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just know,” Hook said, “the poor little bastard. He was just looking for his father.” He thrust the pendant into the arrow bag, picked up another bodkin, and turned toward the English line.

  Where the king, wearing his scarred helmet and with his surcoat torn by enemy blades, had mounted his small white horse to see the enemy more clearly. He saw the survivors of the slaughter struggling north, and beyond them was the third battle with its raised lances and he knew his archers had few or no arrows.

  Then a messenger arrived to say the French were in the baggage camp, and the king twisted in the saddle to see that hundreds of his men were now guarding French prisoners. God knows how many prisoners there were, but they far outnumbered his men-at-arms. He glanced left and right. He had started with nine hundred men-at-arms and now the line was much thinner because so many men had taken prisoners and were guarding them. The archers had done the same. A few were out in the field, collecting arrows, and the king approved of that, but knew they could never collect enough arrows to kill the horses of the third battle. He watched some foolish Frenchman charge the archers and grimaced when his men cheered the brave fool’s death, then looked again at his army.

  It was disordered. Henry knew that the line would form again when the final French battle charged, but now there were hundreds of prisoners behind that line and those captured men could still fight. They had no helmets and their weapons had been taken, but they could still assault the rear of his line. Most had their hands tied, but not all, and the unpinioned men could free the others to throw themselves on the perilously thin English line. Then there was the threat of the Frenchmen pillaging his baggage, but that could wait. The vital thing now was to hold off the third French charge, and to do that he needed every blade in his small army. The advancing horses would be hampered by the hundreds of corpses, yet they would eventually get past those bodies and then the long lances would stab into his line. He needed men.

  And men stared up at the king. They saw him close his eyes and knew he was praying to his stern God, the God who had spared his army so far this day, and Henry prayed that God’s mercy would continue and, as his lips moved in the prayer, so the answer came to him. The answer was so astonishing that for a moment he did nothing, then he told himself God had spoken to him and so he opened his eyes.

  “Kill the prisoners,” he ordered.

  One of his household men-at-arms stared up at him. He was not sure he had heard right. “Sire?”

  “Kill the prisoners!”

  That way the prisoners could not fight again and the men guarding them would be forced back into the battle line.

  “Kill them all!” Henry shouted. He pointed a gauntleted hand at the captives. One of his men-at-arms had made a swift count and reckoned over two thousand Frenchmen had been taken and Henry’s gesture encompassed them all. “Kill them!” Henry commanded.

  The French had flaunted the oriflamme, promising no quarter, so now no quarter would be given.

  The prisoners would die.

  The Sire de Lanferelle wandered bleakly behind the English line. He saw the English king in a battle-scarred helmet sitting on horseback, then was shocked to see that the Duke of Orleans, the French king’s nephew, was a prisoner. He was just a young man, charming and witty, yet now, in a blood-spattered surcoat and with his arm gripped by an archer in English royal livery, he looked dazed, stricken and ill. “Sire,” Lanferelle said, dropping to one knee.

  “What happened?” Orleans asked.

  “Mud,” Lanferelle said, standing again.

  “My God,” the duke said. He flinched, not from pain for he was hardly wounded, but out of shame. “Alençon’s dead,” he went on, “and so are Bar and Brabant. Sens died too.”

  “The archbishop?” Lanferelle asked, somehow more shocked that a prince of the church was dead than that three of France’s noblest dukes should have been killed.

  “They gutted him, Lanferelle,” the duke said, “they just gutted him. And d’Albret’s dead too.”

  “The constable?”

  “Dead,” Orleans said, “and Bourbon’s captured.”

  “Dear sweet God,” Lanferelle said, not because the Constable of France was dead or because the Duke of Bourbon, the victor of Soissons, was a prisoner, but because Marshal Boucicault, reckoned the toughest man in France, was now being led to join the Duke of Orleans.

  Boucicault stared at Lanferelle, then at the royal duke, then shook his grizzled head. “It seems we’re all doomed to English hospitality,” he growled.

  “They treated me well enough when I was a prisoner,” Lanferelle said.

  “Jesus Christ, you have to find a second ransom?” Boucicault asked. His white surcoat with its red badge of a two-headed eagle was ripped and bloodstained. His armor, that had been polished through the night to a dazzling sheen, was scarred by blades and streaked with mud. He turned a bitter gaze on the other prisoners. “What’s it like over there?” he asked.

  “Sour wine and good ale,” Lanferelle said, “and rain, of course.”

  “Rain,” Boucicault said bitterly, “that was our undoing. Rain and mud.” He had advised against fighting Henry’s army at all, rain or no rain, fearing what the English archers could do. Better, he had said, to let them straggle dispiritedly into Calais and to concentrate France’s forces on the recapture of Harfleur, but the hot-headed royal dukes, like young Orleans, had insisted that the battle be fought. Boucicault felt a surge of bile, a temptation to spit an accusation at the duke, but he resisted it. “Damp England,” he said instead. “Tell me the women are damp too?”

  “Oh, they are,” Lanferelle said.

  “I’ll need women,” the Marshal of France said, staring up at the gray sky. “I doubt France can raise our ransoms, which means we’ll all probably die in England, and we’ll need something to pass the time.”

  Lanferelle wondered where Melisande was. He suddenly wanted to see her, to talk to her, but the only women in sight were a handful who brought water to wounded men. Priests were offering other men the final rites, while doctors knelt beside the injured. They cut armor buckles, pulled mangled steel from pulverized flesh, and held men down as they thrashed in agony. Lanferelle saw one of his own men and, leaving Orleans and the marshal to their guards, went to crouch beside the man and flinched at the mangled ruin of his left leg that had been half severed by ax blows. Someone had tied a bow cord around the man’s thigh, but blood still seeped in thick pulses from the ragged wound. “I’m sorry, Jules,” Lanferelle said.

  Jules could say nothing. He twisted his head from side to side. He had bitten his lower lip so hard that blood trickled down his chin.

  “You’ll live, Jules,” Lanferelle said, doubting he spoke the truth, and then he twisted as he heard a bellow of anger.

  He stared, incredulous. English archers were murdering the prisoners. For a moment Lanferelle thought the archers must be mad, then he saw that a man-at-arms in royal livery commanded them. French prisoners, their hands tied, tried to run away, but the archers caught them, turned them and slashed long knives across their throats. Blood was spraying from the cuts to soak the grinning
archers, and more bowmen were hurrying to the slaughter with drawn blades. Some English men-at-arms were dragging prisoners away, evidently intent on preserving their prospects of ransoms, while the noblest and most valuable captives, like Marshal Boucicault and the Dukes of Orleans and Bourbon, were being guarded against the massacre, but the rest were being ruthlessly killed. Lanferelle understood then. The King of England was frightened of the prisoners attacking the rear of his line when the last French battle made its assault and to prevent that he was killing the captives, and though that made sense it still astonished Lanferelle. Then he saw archers coming toward him and he patted Jules’s shoulder. “Pretend to be dead, Jules,” he said. He could think of no other way of preventing the man’s killing for he could not defend him without weapons, and so he hurried away in search of Sir John. Sir John, he was sure, would protect him, and if he could not find Sir John he would try to reach the Tramecourt woods and hide in its briar thickets.

  Some prisoners tried to fight back, but they were unarmed and the archers felled them with poleaxes. The bowmen moved deftly in the mud, killing with a horrible efficiency. The English destriers, almost a thousand saddled stallions, were at the southern end of the field and a handful of prisoners tried to reach them, but some of the pageboys who guarded the horses mounted and drove the fugitives back to where the archers killed. There was panic and blood and screams as men died and as others were herded toward the slaughter-men. More archers came to the killing, and the prisoners blundered through the thick plow in search of an escape that did not exist. It did not exist for Lanferelle either. He reached the right flank of the English line where a small forester’s cottage stood at the treeline. It was burning, and he heard the screams of dying men coming from the flames and thick smoke. The archers who had set the cottage ablaze saw Lanferelle and headed toward him and he swerved northward, but only to see more archers between him and the English line where Sir John’s standard flew. Then, to his relief, he recognized the tall figure and dark face of Nicholas Hook.

  “Hook!” he shouted, but Hook did not hear him. “Melisande!” He called his daughter’s name in hope that it would pierce the turmoil of screaming. Trumpets were playing again, summoning Englishmen to their standards. “Hook!” he bellowed in desperation.

  “What do you want with Hook?” a man asked, and Lanferelle turned to see four archers facing him. The man who had spoken was tall and gaunt with a lantern jaw and held a bloodied poleax. “You know Hook?” the man asked.

  Lanferelle backed away.

  “I asked you a question,” the man said, following Lanferelle. He was grinning, enjoying the fear on the Frenchman’s face. “Rich, are you? Cos if you’re rich then we might let you live. But you’ve got to be very rich.” He slashed the poleax at Lanferelle’s legs, hoping to cut into a knee and topple the Frenchman, but Lanferelle managed to step back without tripping and so avoided the blow. He staggered for balance in the mud.

  “I’m rich,” he said desperately, “very rich.”

  “He speaks English,” the archer said to his companions, “he’s rich and he speaks English.” He lunged with the poleax and the spike rammed against Lanferelle’s left cuisse, but the armor held and the point slid off Lanferelle’s thigh. “So why were you shouting for Hook?” the man asked, drawing the poleax back for another thrust.

  Lanferelle raised his hands in a placatory gesture. “I am his prisoner,” he said.

  The tall man laughed. “Our Nick? Got a rich prisoner, has he? That will never do.” He lunged with the poleax, striking the point onto Lanferelle’s breastplate and Lanferelle staggered backward, but again was not tripped. He glanced around desperately, hoping to see a fallen weapon and the tall English archer grinned at the fear on the Frenchman’s bloodied face. The archer was wearing a haubergeon over a mail coat, and the padded jacket had been slashed so that the wool stuffing hung in tattered blood-crusted clumps. His red cross of Saint George had run in the rain so that his short surcoat, patterned with moon and stars, looked blood red. “We can’t have Nick Hook being rich,” the man said, and raised the poleax ready to bring it down on Lanferelle’s unprotected head.

  And just then Lanferelle saw the sword. It was a short and clumsy sword, a cheap sword, and it was turning in the air and for a heartbeat he thought it had been thrown at him, then realized it was being thrown to him. The blade circled, came over the tall archer’s shoulder, and Lanferelle snatched at it and somehow caught the hilt, but the ax was already falling, driven with an archer’s huge strength and Lanferelle had no time to parry, only to throw himself forward, inside the blade’s swing, and he drove his armored weight into the archer’s chest to throw him backward. The ax shaft struck his left arm and Lanferelle brought up the sword, but with no strength in the cut that wasted itself on the man’s arrow bag. One of the other archers struck with a poleax, but Lanferelle had recovered now and threw the lunge off with his blade that he flicked back with his extraordinary speed to slash across the second man’s face. That man reeled away, blood flowing from a shattered nose and split cheek as Lanferelle stepped back again, sword ready for the tall man.

  Three archers faced Lanferelle now, but two had no stomach for the fight, which left the tall man alone. He glanced around to see Hook approaching. “Bastard,” he spat at Hook, “you gave him that sword!”

  “He’s my prisoner,” Hook said.

  “And the king said to kill the prisoners!”

  “Then kill him, Tom,” Hook said, amused. “Kill him!”

  Tom Perrill looked back to the Frenchman. He saw the feral look in Lanferelle’s eyes, remembered the speed with which the man had evaded and parried and so he lowered the poleax. “You kill him, Hook,” he sneered.

  “My lord,” Hook spoke to Lanferelle now, “this man was offered money to rape your daughter. He failed, but so long as he lives your Melisande is in danger.”

  “Then kill him,” Lanferelle said.

  “I promised God I wouldn’t.”

  “But I made no promise to God,” Lanferelle said and flicked the cheap sword at Tom Perrill’s face, forcing the archer back. Perrill glanced wide-eyed at Hook, unable to hide his fear and astonishment, then turned back to Lanferelle, who was smiling. The Frenchman’s weapon was puny and cheap, far outranged by the poleax, but Lanferelle showed a blithe confidence as he stepped forward.

  “Kill him!” Perrill shouted at his companions, but neither of them moved, and Perrill thrust the ax forward in a desperate stab at Lanferelle’s midriff and the Frenchman swept the blade aside with contemptuous ease, then simply raised the sword and gave one lunge.

  The blade sliced into Perrill’s gullet, starting a gush of blood. The archer stared at his killer, his tongue slowly pushed out and blood ran from it to pour thick and silent down the sword to soak Lanferelle’s ungauntleted hand. For a heartbeat the two men were motionless, then Perrill dropped and Lanferelle wrenched the blade loose and tossed it to Hook.

  “Enough! Enough!” A man-at-arms in royal livery was riding behind the line and shouting at the archers. “Enough! Stop the killing! Hold! Enough!”

  Hook walked back to the English line.

  He saw gray clouds covering the plowland of Agincourt.

  And he saw, in front of the English army, a field of dead and dying men. More dead, Hook thought, than the number of men the king had led to this wet slaughteryard. They lay tangled and bloody, countless dead, sprawled and bloodstained, armored corpses, ripped and stabbed and crushed. There were men and horses. There were abandoned weapons, fallen flags, and dead hopes. A field sown with winter wheat had yielded a harvest of blood.

  And at the end of that field, beyond the dead, beyond the dying and the weeping, the third French battle was turning away.

  The might of France was turning away and men were heading north, leaving Agincourt, riding to escape the risibly small army that had turned their world to horror.

  It was over.

  Epilogue

  It was a November d
ay, sky-bright and cold, filled with the sounds of church bells, cheers, and singing.

  Hook had never seen such crowds. London was celebrating its king and his victory. The water towers had been filled with wine, mock castles erected at street corners, and choirs of boys costumed as angels, old men disguised as prophets, and girls masquerading as virgins sang paeans of praise, and through it all the king rode in modest dress, without crown or scepter. The noblest of the French and Burgundian prisoners followed the king; Charles, Duke of Orleans, the Duke of Bourbon, the Marshal of France, still more dukes and countless counts, all exposed to the crowd’s good-natured jeers. Small boys ran alongside the horses of the mounted archers who guarded the prisoners and reached up to touch cased bows and scabbarded swords. “Were you there?” they asked. “Were you there?”

  “I was there,” Hook answered, though he had left the procession and the cheers and the singing and the white doves circling.

  He had ridden with four companions into the little streets that lay north of Cheapside. Father Christopher led them, taking the group into smaller and smaller alleys, alleys so tight that they had to ride single-file and constantly duck so their heads would not strike the overhanging stories of the timber-framed houses. Hook wore a mail coat, two pairs of breeches to keep out the cold, a padded haubergeon for warmth, boots taken from a dead count at Agincourt, and over it all a new surcoat blazoned with Sir John’s proud lion. Around his neck was a chain of gold, the symbol of his rank; centenar to Sir John Cornewaille. His helmet, of Milanese steel and only slightly scarred from an ax strike, hung from his saddle’s pommel. His sword had been made in Bordeaux and its hilt was decorated with a carved horse, the badge of the Frenchman who had once owned both sword and helmet. “I was there,” he told a small ragged boy, “we were all there,” he added, then he followed Father Christopher around a corner, ducked beneath a hanging bush, the sign of a wineshop, and entered a small square that stank of the sewage flowing through its open gutters. A church stood on the square’s northern side. It was a miserable church, its walls made of wattle and daub and its sorry excuse for a tower built from wood. A single bell hung in the tower. The bell was being tolled so that its cracked note could join the cacophony of noise that rejoiced in England’s victory. “That’s it,” Father Christopher said, gesturing at the little church.