"Agincourt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cornwell Bernard)

FIVE

It seemed to Hook that he never stopped digging in the first few days of the siege. It was midden trenches first. “Our ma fell into a shit-pit once,” Tom Scarlet said, “she was drunk. She dropped some beads in it and then tried to fish them out with a rake.”

“They were nice beads,” Matthew Scarlet put in, “bits of old silver, weren’t they?”

“Coins,” his twin said, “which our dad found in a buried jar. He bored them through and hung them on a scrap of bowstring.”

“Which broke,” Matt said.

“So ma tried to fish them out with a rake,” Tom picked up the tale, “and fell right in, head first!”

“She got the beads back,” Matt said.

“She sobered up quick enough,” Tom Scarlet went on, “but she couldn’t stop laughing. Our dad took her down the duck pond and pushed her in. He made her take all her clothes off and then the ducks all flew away. They would, wouldn’t they? A naked woman splashing about and laughing. Whole village was laughing!”

The first thing the king had ordered was the burning of the houses outside the town’s walls so that nothing would stand between the ramparts and his guns. The job was done at night, so that the flames burst into the darkness to light the defiant banners on Harfleur’s pale walls, and all next day the smoke of the smoldering buildings lingered in the flooded bowl of hills that cradled the port and reminded Hook of the smoke that had veiled the land around Soissons.

“Of course the priest wasn’t happy,” Matthew Scarlet continued his brother’s story, “but our parish priest always was a rank piece of piss. He had our mother up in front of the manor court! Breaking the peace, he said, but his lordship gave her three shillings to buy cloth for new clothes and a kiss for being happy. He said she could go swimming in his shit any time she wanted.”

“Did she ever?” Peter Scoyle asked. Scoyle was a rarity, a bowman born and bred in London. He had been a combmaker’s apprentice and had been convicted of causing a murderous affray, but had been pardoned on condition that he served in the king’s army.

“She never did,” Tom Scarlet said, “she always said that one bath in shit was enough for a lifetime.”

“One bath is enough for any lifetime!” Father Christopher had evidently heard the twins telling their tale. “Beware of cleanliness, boys! The blessed Saint Jerome warns us that a clean body means an unclean soul, and the holy Saint Agnes was proud of never having washed in her life.”

“Melisande won’t approve,” Hook said, “she likes being clean.”

“Warn her!” Father Christopher said seriously, “the physicians all agree, Hook, that washing weakens the skin. It lets in disease!”

Then, when the pits were dug, Hook and a hundred other archers rode north up the valley of the River L#233;zarde and dug again, this time making a great dam across the valley. They demolished a dozen half-timbered houses in a village and used the beams to strengthen the huge earthen bank that stopped up the river. The L#233;zarde was small and the summer had been dry, but it still took four days of hard digging to make a barrier high enough to divert most of the river water westward. By the time Hook and his companions went back to Harfleur the flood waters had partly subsided, though the ground about the town was still waterlogged and the river itself still spilled over its banks to make a wide lake north of the town.

Next they dug pits for guns. Two cannon, one called Londoner because the citizens of London had paid for it, were already in place and their gun-stones were biting at the huge bastion the defenders had built outside the Leure Gate. The Duke of Clarence, who was the king’s brother, had marched clear around the town and his forces, which were a third of the English army, were attacking Harfleur’s eastern side. They had their own guns that had been fortuitously captured from a supply convoy making for Harfleur. The Dutch gunners, hired to defend Harfleur from its English enemies, happily took English coin and turned their cannon against the town’s defenders. Harfleur was surrounded now. No more reinforcements could reach the town unless they fought their way past the English army or sailed past the fleet of royal warships that guarded the harbor entrance.

On the day that the gun-pits were finished Hook and forty other archers climbed the hill to the west of the encampment, following the road by which the army had approached Harfleur. Huge oaks lined the nearest crest, and they were ordered to fell those trees and lop off the straightest limbs, which were to be sawn to the length of a bowstave and loaded onto wagons. The day was hot. A half-dozen archers stayed by the road with the huge two-handled saws while the rest spread along the crest. Peter Goddington marked the trees he wanted felled, and assigned a pair of archers to each. Hook and Will of the Dale were almost the farthest south, with only the Scarlet twins closer to the sea. Melisande was with Hook. Her hands were raw from washing clothes and there were still more clothes to be boiled and scrubbed back in the encampment, but Sir John’s steward had let her accompany Hook. She carried the small crossbow on her back and never left Sir John’s company without the weapon. “I will shoot that priest if he touches me,” she had told Hook, “and I’ll shoot his friends.” Hook had nodded, but said nothing. She might, he thought, shoot one of them, but the weapon took so long to reload that she had no chance of defending herself against more than one man.

The trees muffled the occasional sound of a cannon firing and dulled the crash of the gun-stones striking home on Harfleur’s walls. The axes were loud. “Why did we come so far from the camp?” Melisande asked.

“Because we’ve chopped down all the big trees that are closer,” Hook said. He was stripped to the waist, his huge muscles driving the ax deep into an oak’s trunk so that the chips flew.

“And we’re not that far away from the camp,” Will of the Dale added. He was standing back, letting Hook do the work and Hook did not mind. He was used to wielding a forester’s ax.

Melisande spanned the crossbow. She found it hard work, but she would not let Hook or Will help her crank the twin handles. She was sweating by the time the pawl clicked to hold the cord under its full tension. She laid a bolt in the groove, then aimed at a tree no more than ten paces away. She frowned, bit her lower lip, then pulled the trigger and watched as the bolt flew a yard wide to skitter through the undergrowth beyond. “Don’t laugh,” she said before either man had any chance to laugh.

“I’m not laughing,” Hook said, grinning at Will.

“I wouldn’t dare,” Will said.

“I will learn,” Melisande said.

“You’ll learn better if you keep your eyes open,” Hook said.

“It’s hard,” she said.

“Look down the arrow,” Will advised her, “hold the bow firm and pull the trigger nice and slowly. And may God bless you when you shoot,” he added the last words in Father Christopher’s sly voice.

She nodded, then cranked the bow again. It took a long time before it clicked, then instead of shooting it she laid the weapon on the leaf mold and just watched Hook and she thought how he made felling a great oak look easy, just as he made shooting a bow seem simple.

“I’ll see if the twins need help,” Will of the Dale said, “because you don’t, Nick.”

“I don’t,” Hook agreed, “so go and help them. They’re fuller’s sons which means they’ve never done a proper day’s work in their lives.”

Will picked up his ax, his arrow bag, and his cased bow and disappeared among the southern trees. Melisande watched him go, then looked down at the cocked crossbow as though she had never seen such a thing before. “Father Christopher was talking to me,” she said quietly.

“Was he?” Hook asked. He looked up at the tree, then back to the cut he had made. “This great thing will fall in a minute,” he warned her. He went to the back side of the trunk and buried the ax in the wood. He wrenched the blade free. “So what did Father Christopher want?”

“He wanted to know if we would marry.”

“Us? Marry?” The ax chopped again and a wedge of wood came away when Hook pulled the blade back. Any moment now, he thought. He could sense the tension in the oak, the silent tearing of the timber that preceded the tree’s death. He stepped away to stand beside Melisande who was well clear of the trunk. He noticed the crossbow was still cocked and almost told her that she would weaken the weapon by leaving the shank stressed, but then decided that might not be a bad thing. A weakened shank would make it easier for her to span. “Marry?” he asked again.

“That’s what he said.”

“What did you say?”

“I didn’t know,” she said, staring at the ground, “maybe?”

“Maybe,” Hook echoed her, and just then the timber cracked and ripped and the huge oak fell, slowly at first, then faster as it crashed through leaves and branches to shudder down. Birds shrieked. For a moment the woods were full of alarm, then all that was left was the ringing sound of the other axes along the ridge. “I think, maybe,” Hook said slowly, “that it’s a good idea.”

“You do?”

He nodded. “I do.”

She looked at him, said nothing for a while, then picked up the crossbow. “I look down the arrow,” she said, “and hold the bow tight?”

“And you squeeze gently,” he said. “Hold your breath while you squeeze, and don’t look at the bolt, just look at the place where you want the bolt to go.”

She nodded, laid a bolt in the groove, and aimed at the same tree she had missed before. It was a couple of paces closer now. Hook watched her, saw the concentration on her face and saw her flinch in anticipation of the weapon’s kick. She held her breath, closed her eyes and pulled the trigger and the bolt flashed past the tree’s edge and vanished down the gentle farther slope. Melisande stared forlorn at where it had gone.

“You haven’t got that many bolts,” Hook said, “and those are special.”

“Special?”

“They’re smaller than most,” he said, “they’re made specially to fit that bow.”

“I should find the ones I shot?”

He grinned. “I’ll chop off a couple of these boughs, and you should find those two bolts.”

“I have nine left.”

“Eleven would be better.”

She laid the crossbow on the ground and picked her way down the slope to vanish in the sunlit green of the undergrowth. Hook cocked the crossbow, winding the cord back easily, hoping that the continual stress would weaken the stave and so help Melisande, then he went back to lopping branches. He wondered why the king had demanded so many pieces of straight timber the height of a bowstave. Not his business, he decided. He made short work of a second branch, then a third. The great trunk would be sawn eventually, but for the moment he would leave it where it had fallen. He lopped off more of the smaller branches, and heard the long collapse of another tree somewhere along the ridge. Pigeons clattered through the leaves. He thought he might have to go and help Melisande find the bolts because she had been gone far too long, but just as he had that thought she came running back, her face alarmed and her eyes wide. She pointed down the westward slope. “There are men!” she said.

“Course there are men,” Hook said, and sliced off a limb the size of a man’s arm with a one-handed stroke of the ax. “We’re all over the place.”

“Men-at-arms,” Melisande hissed, “chevaliers!”

“Probably our fellows,” Hook said. Mounted men-at-arms patrolled the surrounding countryside every day, looking for supplies and watching for the French army that everyone expected would come to Harfleur’s relief.

“They are French!” Melisande hissed.

Hook doubted it, but he swung the ax to bury its blade in the fallen trunk, then jumped down and took her arm. “Let’s have a look.”

There were indeed men. There were horsemen in a fern-thick gully that twisted through the high wood. Hook could see a dozen of them in single file, following a track through the trees, but he sensed there were more riders behind them. And he saw, too, that Melisande was right. The horsemen were not wearing the cross of Saint George. They had surcoats, but none of the badges was familiar, and the riders were armored in plate and all wore helmets. They had their visors raised and Hook could see the leading horseman’s eyes glitter in the steel’s shadow. The man held up his hand to check the column, then stared intently up the slope, trying to discover exactly where the sound of ax blows came from, and as he stared, so more horsemen appeared from the far trees.

“French,” Melisande whispered.

“They are,” Hook said softly. Most of the horsemen carried drawn swords.

“What do you do?” Melisande asked, still whispering, “hide?”

“No,” Hook said, because he knew what he must do. The knowledge was instinctive and he did not doubt it, nor did he hesitate. He led her back to the felled tree, snatched up the cocked crossbow, then ran along the ridge. “The French!” he shouted. “They’re coming! Get back to the wagons! Fast!” He shouted it over and over. “Back to the wagons!” He first ran to his right, away from the wagons, to find Tom Scarlet and Will of the Dale standing and staring. “Will,” Hook said, “use Sir John’s voice. Tell them the French are here, and get everyone back to the wagons.”

Will of the Dale just gaped at him.

“Use Sir John’s voice!” Hook said harshly, shaking the carpenter by the shoulders. “The goddam French are coming! Now go! Where’s Matt?” he asked the last question of Tom Scarlet, who mutely pointed southward.

Will of the Dale was obeying Hook. He was hurrying back along the crest and using his imitation of Sir John’s harsh voice to pull the archers back to where the big wagons waited on the road. Peter Goddington, confused by the mimicry, searched for Sir John and found Hook, Melisande, and Tom Scarlet instead. “What in God’s name is happening?” Goddington demanded angrily.

“French, sergeant,” Hook said, pointing down the western slope.

“Don’t be daft, Hook,” Goddington said, “there are no goddam French here.”

“I saw them,” Hook said. “Men-at-arms. They’re in armor and carrying swords.”

“They were our men, you fool,” Goddington insisted. “Probably a forage party.”

The centenar was so sure of himself that Hook was beginning to doubt what he had seen, and his uncertainty was increased because the horsemen, though they must have heard the shouting on the crest, had not reacted. He had expected the men-at-arms to spur up the slope and burst through the trees, but none had appeared. Yet he stuck to his story. “There were about twenty of them,” he told Goddington, “armored, and with strange livery. Melisande saw them too.”

The sergeant glanced at Melisande and decided her opinion was worthless. “I’ll have a look,” he said grudgingly. “Where did you say they were?”

“In the trees down that slope,” Hook said, pointing. “They’re not on the road. They’re in the trees, like they didn’t want to be seen.”

“You’d better not be dreaming,” the centenar grumbled and went down the slope.

“Where’s Matt?” Hook asked Tom Scarlet again.

“He went to look at the sea,” Tom Scarlet answered.

“Matt!” Hook bellowed, cupping his hands.

There was no answer. The warm wind sighed in the branches and chaffinches made a busy noise somewhere down the eastern slope. A gun sounded from the siege lines, the echo rumbling in the bowl of the hills and melding with the crash of the stone’s impact. Hook could not hear the clink of bridles or the thump of hooves and he wondered if he had imagined the horsemen. The shouting on the crest had ended, suggesting that the bemused archers must have assembled back at the wagons.

“We’d never seen the sea before,” Tom Scarlet said nervously, “not before we sailed here. Matt wanted to look again.”

“Matt!” Hook shouted again, but again there was no answer.

Peter Goddington had vanished over the crest’s lip. Hook gave the crossbow to Melisande and then uncased his bow, strung it, and put an arrow across the stave. He walked to the gully’s lip and gazed down into the ferns. Peter Goddington was alone in the gully. There was not a horseman in sight and the centenar looked up and gave Hook a glance of pure disgust. “Nothing here, you fool,” he shouted, and just then Hook saw the two horsemen come from the trees on the right.

“Behind you!” he shouted, and Goddington began to run up the slope as Hook raised the bow, hauled the cord back and loosed just as the man-at-arms nearest the centenar swerved left. The arrow, a bodkin, glanced off the espalier that armored the man’s shoulder. The sword chopped down and Hook, as he pulled another arrow from the bag, saw blood bright and sudden in the glowing green woodland, he saw Peter Goddington’s head turn red, saw him stumble as the second Frenchman, his sword held rigid as a lance, took the centenar in the back. Goddington fell.

Hook loosed again. The white feathers streaked through shadow and sunlight and the bodkin head, shafted with oak, slammed through the second man’s breastplate and hurled him back in his tall saddle. More horsemen were coming now, spurring from the thick trees to put their horses at the slope, and Tom Scarlet was tugging at Hook’s arm. “Nick! Nick!”

And suddenly it was panic because there were more riders to their left, between them and the sea, and Hook seized Melisande’s sleeve and dragged her back. He had not seen that southernmost column, and Hook realized the French had come in at least two parties and he had seen only one, and he ran desperately, hearing the hooves loud and getting louder, and he dragged Melisande fast to one side, dodging like a hare pursued by hounds, but then a horseman galloped in front of him and slewed about in a slithering flurry of leaf mold. Hook twisted to his left to find refuge by the bole of a great hollow oak. It was really no refuge at all, because he was cornered now, and still more horsemen came and a rider laughed from his saddle as the men-at-arms surrounded Melisande and the two archers.

“Matt!” Tom said, and Hook saw that Matthew Scarlet was already a prisoner. A Frenchman in blue and green livery had him by his jacket’s collar, dragging him alongside his horse.

“Archers,” a horseman said. The word was the same in French and English, and there was no mistaking the pleasure with which the man spoke.

“P#232;re!” Melisande gasped. “P#232;re?”

And that was when Hook saw the falcon stooping against the sun. The livery was newly embroidered and bright, almost as bright as the sword blade that reached toward him. The blade came within a hand’s breadth of his throat, then suddenly stopped. The rider, sitting straight-legged in his destrier’s saddle, stared down at Hook. The haunch of a roe deer, newly killed, hung from his saddle’s pommel and its blood had dripped onto the scale-armored foot of the horseman, who was Ghillebert, Seigneur de Lanferelle, the lord of hell.

He was a lord in splendor, mounted on a magnificent stallion and wearing plate armor that shone like the sun. He alone among the horsemen was bareheaded so that his long black hair hung sleek almost to his waist. His face was like polished metal, hard edged, bronze dark, with a hawk’s nose and hooded eyes that showed amusement as he stared first at Hook who was trapped by the sword blade, then at Melisande who had raised the cocked crossbow. If Lanferelle was astonished at discovering his daughter in a high Norman wood he did not show it. He offered her a flicker of a wry smile, then said something in French and the girl fumbled in the pouch and took out a bolt that she laid in the weapon’s groove. Ghillebert, Lord of Lanferelle, could easily have stopped her, but he merely smiled again as the now loaded weapon was raised once more to point at his face. He spoke, much too fast for Hook to understand, and Melisande answered just as fast, but passionately.

There was a shout from behind Hook, far behind, from where the road dropped to the English camp. The Lord of Lanferelle gestured to his men, gave an order, and they rode toward the shout. Half of the men, who numbered eighteen, wore the livery of the hawk and sun, the rest had the same blue and green livery as the man holding Matt Scarlet prisoner, and that man, together with a squire wearing Lanferelle’s badge were the only ones who stayed with le Seigneur d’Enfer.

“Three English archers,” Lanferelle spoke in English suddenly, and Hook remembered how this Frenchman had learned English when he was a prisoner waiting for his ransom to be collected, “three goddam archers, and I give gold to my men for bringing me the fingers of goddam archers.” Lanferelle grinned suddenly, his teeth very white against his sun-darkened skin. “There are fingerless peasants all across Normandy and Picardy because my men cheat.” He seemed proud of that, because he gave a sudden braying laugh. “You know she is my daughter?”

“I know,” Hook said.

“She’s the prettiest of them! I have nine that I know of, but only one from my wife. But this one,” he looked at Melisande who still held the crossbow on him, “this one I thought to protect from the world.”

“I know,” Hook said again.

“She was supposed to pray for my soul,” Lanferelle said, “but it seems I must breed other daughters if my soul is to be saved.”

Melisande spat some fast words that only made Lanferelle smile more. “I put you in the convent,” he said, still speaking English, “because you were too pretty to be humped by some sweaty peasant and too ill-born to be married to a gentleman. But now it seems you found the peasant anyway,” he gave Hook a derisive glance, “and the fruit is picked, eh? But picked or not,” he said, “you are still my possession.”

“She’s mine,” Hook said, and was ignored.

“So what shall I do? Take you back to the nunnery?” Lanferelle asked, then grinned delightedly when Melisande raised the crossbow an inch higher. “You won’t shoot,” he said.

“I will,” Hook said, but it was a barren threat for he had no arrow on his string and knew he would be given no time to pull one from the bag.

“Who do you serve?” Lanferelle asked.

“Sir John Cornewaille,” Hook said proudly.

Lanferelle was pleased. “Sir John! Ah, there’s a man. His mother must have slept with a Frenchman! Sir John! I like Sir John,” he smiled. “But what of Melisande, eh? What of my little novice?”

“I hated the convent,” she spat at him, using English.

Lanferelle frowned as though her sudden outburst puzzled him. “You were safe there,” he said, “and your soul was safe.”

“Safe!” Melisande protested, “in Soissons? Every nun was raped or killed!”

“You were raped?” Lanferelle asked, his voice dangerous.

“Nicholas stopped him,” she said, gesturing at Hook, “he killed him first.”

The dark eyes brooded on Hook for an instant, then returned to Melisande. “So what do you want?” he asked, almost angrily. “You want a husband? Someone to look after you? How about him?” Lanferelle jerked his head toward his squire. “Maybe you should marry him? He’s gently born, but not too gently. His mother was a saddler’s daughter.” The squire, who plainly did not understand a word that was being said, stared dumbly at Melisande. He wore no helmet, but had an aventail instead, a hood of chain mail that framed a sweaty face scarred by childhood pox. His nose had been flattened in some fight and he had thick, wet-looking lips. Melisande grimaced and spoke urgently in French, so urgently that Hook only understood part of what she said. She was scornful and tearful at the same time, and her words appeared to amuse her father. “She says she will stay with you,” Lanferelle translated for Hook, “but that depends upon my wishes. It depends on whether I let you live.”

Hook was thinking that he could lunge upward with the bowstave and drive the horn-nocked tip into Lanferelle’s throat, or else into the soft tissue under his chin and keep driving the shaft so that it pierced the Frenchman’s brain.

“No,” the voice spoke in his head. It was almost a whisper, but unmistakably the voice of Saint Crispinian who had been silent for so long. “No,” the saint said again.

Hook almost fell to his knees in gratitude. His saint had returned. Lanferelle was smiling. “Were you thinking to attack me, Englishman?”

“Yes,” Hook admitted.

“And I would have killed you,” Lanferelle said, “and maybe I will anyway?” He stared toward the place where the wagons waited beside the road. Those wagons were hidden by the thick summer foliage, but shouts were loud and Hook could hear the sharp sound of bowstrings being loosed. “How many of you are there?” Lanferelle asked.

Hook thought about lying, but decided Lanferelle would discover the truth soon enough. “Forty archers,” he admitted.

“No men-at-arms?”

“None,” Hook said.

Lanferelle shrugged as if the information were not that important. “So, you capture Harfleur, and what then? Do you march on Paris? On Rouen? You don’t know. But I know. You will march somewhere. Your Henry has not spent all that money to capture one little harbor! He wants more. And when you march, Englishman, we shall be around you and in front of you and behind you, and you will die in ones and twos until there are only a few of you left, and then we shall close on you like wolves on a flock. And will my daughter die because you will be too weak to protect her?”

“I protected her in Soissons,” Hook said, “you didn’t.”

A tremor of anger showed on Lanferelle’s face. The sword tip quivered, but there was also an uncertainty in the Frenchman’s eyes. “I looked for her,” he said. He sounded defensive.

“Not well enough,” Hook responded fiercely, “and I found her.”

“God led him to me,” Melisande spoke in English for the first time.

“Oh! God?” Lanferelle had recovered his poise and sounded amused. “You think God is on your side, Englishman?”

“I know He is,” Hook said stoutly.

“And you know what they call me?”

“The Lord of Hell,” Hook said.

Lanferelle nodded. “It is a name, Englishman, just a name to frighten the ignorant. But despite that name I want my soul in heaven when I die, and for that I need people to pray for me. I need masses said, I need prayers chanted, and I need nuns and priests on their knees.” He nodded at Melisande. “Why should she not pray for me?”

“I do,” Melisande said.

“But will God listen to her prayers?” Lanferelle asked. “She deserted God for you, and that is her choice, but let us see what God wants, Englishman. Hold up your hand.” He paused and Hook did not move. “You want to live?” Lanferelle snarled. “Hold up your hand! Not that one!” He wanted Hook’s right hand, the hand with the fingertips hardened to calluses by the friction of the bow’s cord.

Hook held up his right hand.

“Spread your fingers,” Lanferelle ordered and moved his sword slowly so that the blade’s tip just touched Hook’s palm. “I could kill you,” Lanferelle said, “but my daughter likes you and I have an affection for her. But you took her blood without my permission, and blood demands blood.” He moved his wrist, only his wrist, but so deftly and so strongly that the blade’s tip moved an arrow’s length in the air, and moved so fast that Hook had no chance to evade before the blade sliced off his smallest finger. The blood welled and ran. Melisande screamed, but did not pull the crossbow’s trigger. Hook felt no pain for a heartbeat, then the agony streaked through his arm.

“There,” Lanferelle said, amused, “I leave you the fingers for the string, yes? For her sake. But when the wolves close on you, Englishman, you and I shall play our game. If you win, you keep her, but if you lose, she goes to his marriage bed,” he jerked his head at his slack-mouthed squire. “It’s a stinking bed and he ruts like a boar. He grunts. Do you agree to our game?”

“God will give us victory,” Hook said. His hand was all pain, but he had kept the hurt from showing on his face.

“Let me tell you something,” Lanferelle said, leaning from his saddle. “God does not give a cow’s wet turd about your king or mine. Do you agree to our game? We fight for Melisande, yes?”

“Yes,” Hook said.

“Then put your arrows down,” Lanferelle said, “and throw your bows away.”

Hook understood that the Frenchman did not want an arrow in his back as he rode away, and so he and Tom Scarlet threw their bowstaves into the tangled leaves of the felled oak, then dropped their arrow bags.

Lanferelle smiled. “We have an agreement, Englishman! The prize is Melisande, but we must seal it with blood, yes?”

“It is sealed,” Hook said, holding up his blood-soaked hand.

“We are playing for a life,” Lanferelle said, “not for blood,” and with that he touched a knee to his stallion, which turned obediently and the Lord of Hell swept his sword with the swiveling horse and the blade’s tip ripped through Matt Scarlet’s throat to fill the greenwood with a spray of red and a jet of blood, and Tom Scarlet cried aloud and Lanferelle laughed as he spurred eastward followed by his two men.

“Matt!” Tom Scarlet dropped to his knees beside his twin brother, but Matthew Scarlet was dying as fast as the blood that pumped from his torn and bubbling throat.

The hoofbeats faded. There was no more shouting from where the wagons were parked. Melisande was crying.

Hook fetched the bows. The French had gone. He used an ax to make a grave under an oak tree, a wide grave, wide enough for Matt Scarlet and Peter Goddington to lie together on the ridge above the sea.

Above Harfleur, where the guns tore the walls into rubble.

It was hard and ceaseless work. Hook and the archers cut timber and split timber and sawed timber to shore up the gun-pits and trenches. New gun-pits were made, closer to the town, but the precious weapons had to be protected from Harfleur’s defenders and so the archers constructed thick screens of wooden balks that stood in front of the cannons’ mouths. Each screen was made from oak trunks thick as a girl’s waist, and they were sloped backward so that they would deflect the enemy’s missiles skyward. The cleverest thing about the screens, Hook thought, was how they were mounted on frames so that they could swivel. An order was given when a gun was at last ready to fire and men would turn a great windlass that hauled down the top of the screen and so raised the lower edge to expose the cannon’s blackened muzzle. The gun would fire and the world would vanish in a sickening, stinking, thick cloud of smoke that smelled exactly like rotted eggs, and the sound of the gun-stone striking the wall would be lost in the echo of the great cannon’s bellow, and then the windlass would be released and the screen would thump down to protect the gun and its Dutch gunners again.

The enemy had learned to watch for the opening screens and would wait for that moment before shooting their own guns and springolts, so the English guns were also protected by enormous wicker baskets filled with earth and by more timber balks, and sometimes a screen would be raised even though a gun was not ready to be fired, just to trick the enemy into loosing their missiles, which would thump harmlessly into the baskets and oak trunks. Then, when the gun was ready, the wicker basket immediately in front of the barrel was rolled clear, the screen was raised, and the noise could be heard far up the L#233;zarde’s flooded valley.

The enemy also possessed cannon, but their guns were much smaller, firing a stone no bigger than an apple and lacking the weight to smash through the heavy screens. Their springolts, giant crossbows that shot thick bolts, had even less power. Hook, delivering a wagon of timber to reinforce the trenches, had a springolt bolt hit one of his horses plumb on the chest. The missile buried itself in the horse’s body, ripping through lungs, heart, and belly so that the beast simply collapsed, feet spreading in a sudden pool of blood. The heat shimmered off the blood and off the flooded land and off the marshes beside the wide glittering sea.

Trenches defended the besiegers from the enemy’s guns and springolts, though there was small defense against the ballista that hurled stones high in the air so that they fell almost vertically. The English had their own catapults, made from the timber cut on the slopes above the port, and those machines rained both stones and festering animal corpses into Harfleur. From the hill Hook could see shattered roofs and two broken church towers. He could see the wall broken open so that the rubble spilled into the ditch, and he could see the giant bastion defending the gate being ripped and frayed and broken and battered. That bastion had been constructed from earth and timber, and the English gun-stones chopped and gnawed at its two towers, which flanked a short, thick curtain wall.

“We’ll be making a sow next,” Sir John told his archers, “our lord the king is in a hurry!”

“There’s a great hole in their town wall, Sir John,” Thomas Evelgold remarked. He had replaced Peter Goddington as the centenar.

“And behind that gap is a new wall,” Sir John said, “and to attack it we’d have to get past their barbican.” The barbican was the twin-towered bastion protecting the Leure Gate. “You want their bastard crossbowmen shooting at you from the side? That barbican has to go, so we’ll be making a sow. We’ll have to fell more trees! Hook, I want you.”

The other archers watched as Sir John took Hook aside. “There’ll be no more French men-at-arms in the hills,” Sir John said, “we’ve got our own men out there now, and we’ve got more men watching for a relief force, but they’re seeing nothing.” That was a puzzle. August was ending and still the French had sent no army to relieve the besieged town. English horsemen rode every day to scout the roads from the north and the east, but the country stayed empty. Sometimes a small force of French men-at-arms challenged the patrols, but there was no cloud of dust to betray a marching army. “So tell me what you did on the ridge,” Sir John said, “the day poor Peter Goddington died.”

“I just warned our fellows,” Hook said.

“No, you didn’t. You told them to get back to the wagons, is that right?”

“Yes, Sir John.”

“Why?” Sir John asked belligerently.

Hook frowned as he remembered. At the time it had seemed an obvious precaution, but he had not thought why it was so obvious. “Our bows were no good in the trees,” he now said slowly, “but if they were back at the wagons they could shoot. They needed space to shoot.”

“Which is just what happened,” Sir John said. The archers, gathering at the wagons, had driven the raiders away with two volleys. “So you did the right thing, Hook. The bastards only came to make mischief. They wanted to kill a few men and have a look at what progress we were making, and you saw them off!”

“I wasn’t there, Sir John,” Hook said, “it was the other archers what drove them off.”

“You were with the Sire of Lanferelle, I know. And he let you live.” Sir John gave Hook an appraising look. “Why?”

“He wants to kill me later,” Hook said, not sure that was the right answer, “or maybe it’s because of Melisande?”

“He’s a cat,” Sir John said, “and you’re his mouse. A wounded mouse,” he glanced at Hook’s right hand, which was still bandaged. “You can still shoot?”

“Good as ever, Sir John.”

“So I’m making you a ventenar. Which means I’m doubling your pay.”

“Me!” Hook stared at Sir John.

Sir John did not answer straightaway. He had turned a critical eye on his men-at-arms, who were practicing sword strokes against tree trunks. Practice, practice, practice was one of Sir John’s constant refrains. He claimed to strike a thousand blows a day in never-ending practice and he demanded the same of his men. “Put some muscle into it, Ralph,” he shouted at one man, then turned back to Hook. “Did you think about what to do when you saw the French?”

“No.”

“That’s why I’m making you a sergeant. I don’t want men who have to think about what to do, but just do it. Tom Evelgold’s now your centenar, so you can take his company. I tell him what to do, he tells you what to do, and you tell your archers what to do. If they don’t do it, you thump the bastards, and if they still don’t do it, I thump you.”

“Yes, Sir John.”

Sir John’s battered face grinned. “You’re good, young Hook, and you’re something else.” He pointed at Hook’s bandaged hand. “You’re lucky. Here,” he took a thin silver chain from a pouch and dropped it into Hook’s hand. “Your badge of office. And tomorrow you build a sow.”

“What’s a sow, Sir John?”

“It’s a pig to build, I’ll tell you that much,” Sir John said, “a goddam pig!”

It began to rain that night. The rain came from the sea, carried on a cold west wind. It began softly, pattering on the besiegers’ tents, and then the wind rose to tear at the banners on their makeshift poles and the rain hardened and came at an angle and drenched the ground into a morass of mud. The flood waters, which had largely subsided, began to rise again and the midden overflowed. The gunners cursed and raised awnings over their weapons, while every archer carefully hid his bowstrings from the soaking rain.

There was no need for Hook to carry a bow. His job was to raise the sow and it was, as Sir John had promised, a pig of a job. It was not intricate work, not even skilled, but it needed strength and it had to be done in full view of the defenders and within range of their cannons, springolts, catapults, and crossbows.

The sow was a giant shield, shaped like the toe of a shoe, behind and beneath which men could work safe from enemy missiles, and it would have to be built strong enough to withstand the repeated strike of gun-stones.

A white-haired Welshman, Dafydd ap Traharn, supervised the work. “I come from Pontygwaith,” he told the archers, “and in Pontygwaith we know more about building things than all you miserable English bastards put together!” He had planned to run two wagons loaded with earth and stones to the place where the sow would be built and use the wagons to protect the archers from enemy missiles, but the rain had softened the ground and the wagons had become bogged down. “We’ll have to dig,” he said with the relish of a man who knew he would not have to wield a spade himself. “We know about digging in Pontygwaith, know more than all you English fart-makers put together!”

“That’s because you were digging graves for all the Welshmen we killed,” Will of the Dale retorted.

“Burying you sais, we were,” Dafydd ap Traharn replied happily. Later, as he chatted with Hook, he cheerfully admitted he had been a rebel against the English king just fifteen years before. “Now that Owain Glyn Dwr,” he said warmly, “what a man!”

“What happened to him?”

“He’s still alive, boy!” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “still alive!” Glyn Dwr’s rebellion had burned for over a decade, giving young Henry, Prince of Wales and now King of England, a long education in warfare. The revolt had been defeated and some of the Welsh leaders had been dragged on hurdles through London to their executions, but Owain Glyn Dwr himself had never been captured. “We have magicians in Wales,” Dafydd ap Traharn lowered his voice and leaned close to Hook as he spoke, “and they can turn a man invisible!”

“I’d like to see that,” Hook said wistfully.

“Well, you can’t, can you? That’s the whole thing about being invisible, you can’t see them! Why, Owain Glyn Dwr could be here right now and you couldn’t see him! And that’s what has happened to him, see? He’s living in luxury, boy, with women and apples, but if an Englishman gets within a mile of him, he turns invisible!”

“So what’s a rebel Welshman doing with this army?” Hook asked.

“A man has to live,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “and eating an enemy’s loaf of bread is better than staring into an empty oven. There’s dozens of Glyn Dwr’s men in this army, boy, and we’ll fight as hard for Henry as we ever did for Owain.” He grinned. “Mind you, there are a few of Owain Glyn Dwr’s men in France as well, and they’ll fight against us.”

“Archers?”

“God be praised, no. Archers can’t afford to run away to France, can they now? No, it’s the gentry who lost their land who went to France, not the archers. Have you ever faced an archer in battle?”

“God be praised, no,” Hook said.

“It is not what I would call a happy experience,” Dafydd ap Traharn said grimly. “My God, boy, but we Welsh don’t take fright easily, but when Henry’s archers shot at Shrewsbury it was death from the sky. Like hail, it was, only hail with steel points, and hail that never stopped, and men were dying all around me and their screams were like tortured gulls on a black shore. An archer is a terrible thing.”

“I’m an archer.”

“You’re a digger now, boy,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, grinning, “so dig.”

They dug a trench away from a gun-pit, digging it toward the walls of Harfleur, and the defenders saw the trench being made and rained crossbow bolts and gun-stones on the work. The defenders’ catapults tried to lob stones onto the new trench, but the missiles went wide, landing in showers of splattering mud. After thirty paces of new trench had been made Dafydd ap Traharn declared himself satisfied and ordered a new pit to be excavated. It had to be big, square and deep, and so the archers hacked and shoveled till they reached a layer of chalk. The new pit’s side seeped water so that they slopped about in muck as they raised a parapet of tree trunks on three sides of the pit, only leaving the rear that led to the English camp unprotected. They laid the trunks flat, four abreast, and piled more on top, so that a man could stand upright in the pit and be invisible to the enemy on Harfleur’s walls. “Tonight,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “we’ll make a roof and our lovely sow will be finished.”

They made the roof at night because the pit was close enough to the walls to be within easy range of a crossbow, but the enemy must have guessed what was happening and they shot blind through the rain-soaked darkness and three men were wounded by the short, sharp bolts that spat from the night. It took all that night to lay long trunks over the pit and then to cover those timbers with a thick layer of earth and chalk rubble before adding a final covering of more tree trunks. “And now the real work begins,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “which means we have to use Welshmen.”

“The real work?” Hook asked.

“We’re going to make a mine, lad. We’re going to dig deep.”

The rain ended at dawn. A chill wind came from the west and the rain slid away across France and the sun fought against cloud as the enemy gunners hammered the newly made sow with gun-stones that wasted their power on the thick log parapet. Hook and his archers slept, sheltering under the crude cabins they had made from tree boughs, earth, and ferns. When Hook woke he found Melisande scrubbing his mail coat with sand and vinegar. “Rouille,” she said in explanation.

“Rust?”

“That’s what I said.”

“You can polish my coat, darling,” Will of the Dale said as he crawled from his shelter.

“Do your own, William,” Melisande said. “I cleaned Tom’s, though.”

“Well done,” Hook said. All the archers were worried about Thomas Scarlet whose customary cheerfulness had been buried with his twin brother. Scarlet scowled these days, or else sat by himself, brooding. “All he wants,” Hook said quietly, “is to meet your father again.”

“Then Thomas will die,” Melisande said bleakly.

“He loves you,” Hook said.

“My father?”

“He let you live. He let you stay with me.”

“He let you live too,” she said, almost resentfully.

“I know.”

She paused. Her gray eyes watched Harfleur, which was ringed with gunsmoke like a sea fog shrouding a cliff. Hook put his wet boots to dry beside the campfire. The burning wood spat and shot sparks. It was willow, and willow always protested against burning. “He loved my mother, I think,” Melisande said wistfully.

“Did he?”

“She was beautiful,” Melisande said, “and she loved him. She said he was so beautiful too. A beautiful man.”

“Handsome,” Hook allowed.

“Beautiful,” Melisande insisted.

“When you met him in the trees,” Hook asked, “did you want him to take you away?”

She gave an abrupt shake of her head. “No,” she said, “I think he is a bad angel. And I think he is in my head like the saint is in yours,” she turned to look at him, “and I wish he would go away.”

“You think about him? Is that it?”

“I always wanted him to love me,” she said harshly, and started scouring the mail again.

“As he loved your mother?”

“No! Non!” She was angry, and for a while she said nothing, then relented. “Life is hard, Nicholas, you know that. It is work and work and work and worry where the food will come from and it is more work, and a lord, any lord, can stop all that. They can wave their hand and there is no more work, no more worry, just facile.”

“Easy?”

“And I wanted that.”

“Tell him you want that.”

“He is beautiful,” Melisande said, “but he is not kind. I know that. And I love you. Je t’aime.” She said the last words decidedly, without apparent affection, but Hook was struck dumb by them. He watched archers bringing firewood to the camp. Melisande grimaced with the effort of scrubbing the sand on the mail coat. “You know of Sir Robert Knolles?” she asked suddenly.

“Of course I do,” Hook said. Every archer knew of Sir Robert, who had died rich not many years before.

“He was an archer once,” Melisande said.

“That’s how he started,” Hook agreed, wondering how Melisande knew of the legendary Sir Robert.

“And he became a knight,” Melisande said, “he led armies! And now Sir John has made you a ventenar.”

“A ventenar isn’t a knight,” Hook said, smiling.

“But Sir Robert was a ventenar once!” Melisande said fiercely, “and then he became a centenar, and then a man-at-arms, and after that a knight! Alice told me. And if he could do it, why not you?”

That vision was so astonishing that Hook could only stare at her for a moment. “Me? A man-at-arms?” he finally said.

“Why not?”

“I’m not born to that!”

“Nor was Sir Robert.”

“Well, it does happen,” Hook said dubiously. He knew of other archers who had led companies and become rich. Sir Robert was the most famous, but archers also remembered Thomas of Hookton who had died as lord of a thousand acres. “But it doesn’t happen often,” Hook went on, “and it takes money.”

“And what is war to you men but money? They talk without end of prisoners? Of ransoms?” Melisande pointed her brush at him and grinned mischievously. “Capture my father. We’ll ransom him. We’ll take his money.”

“You’d like that, would you?” Hook asked.

“Yes,” she said vengefully, “I would like that.”

Hook tried to imagine being rich. Of receiving a ransom that would be more than most men could earn in a lifetime, and then he forgot that dream as John Fletcher, who was one of the older archers and a man who had shown some resentment at Hook’s promotion, suddenly flinched and ran toward the midden trench. Fletcher’s face looked pale. “Fletch is ill,” Hook said.

“And poor Alice was horribly sick this morning,” Melisande said, wrinkling her nose in distaste, “la diarrh#233;e!”

Hook decided he did not want to know more about Alice Godewyne’s sickness, and he was saved from further details by Sir John Cornewaille’s arrival. “Are we awake?” the knight bellowed, “are we awake and breathing?”

“We are now, Sir John,” Hook answered for the archers.

“Then down to the trenches! Down to the trenches! Let’s get this goddam siege done!”

Hook donned his damp boots and half-scrubbed mail, pulled on his helmet and surcoat, then went to the trenches. The siege went on.