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

SIX

The sow shuddered each time a gun-stone struck its sloping face. The logs that formed the face were battered, split, and bristling with springolt bolts, but the enemy’s missiles had failed to break the heavy shield or even weaken it, and beneath the layers of timber and earth the Welsh miners went to work.

Other shafts were being driven on Harfleur’s eastern side where the Duke of Clarence’s forces were camped, and from both east and west the guns roared and the stones clawed at the walls, the mangonels and trebuchets dropped boulders into the town, smoke and dust erupted and plumed from the narrow streets while the mines crept toward the ramparts. The eastern shafts were being driven under the walls where great caverns, shored with timber, would be clawed out of the chalk and, when the time came, the timber supports would be burned away so that the caverns would collapse and bring down the ramparts above. The western mine, its entrance guarded by the sow Hook had helped make, was intended to tunnel under the vast battered bastion that protected the Leure Gate. Bring that barbican down and the English army could attack the breach beside the gate without any danger of being assaulted on their flank by the barbican’s garrison. So the Welshmen dug and the archers guarded their sow and the town suffered.

The barbican had been made from great oak trunks that had been sunk into the earth and then hooped with iron. The trunks had formed the outline of two squat round towers joined by a brief curtain wall, and their interior had been rammed with earth and rubble, the whole protected by a flooded ditch facing the besiegers. The English guns had splintered the nearest timbers so that the earth had spilled out to make a steep unstable ramp that filled one part of the ditch, yet still the bastion resisted. Its ruin was manned by crossbowmen and men-at-arms, and its banners hung defiantly from what remained of its wooden ramparts. Each night, when the English guns ceased fire, the defenders made repairs and the dawn would reveal a new timber palisade and the guns would have to begin their slow work of demolition again. Other guns fired at the town itself.

When Hook had first seen Harfleur it had looked almost magical to him: a town of tight roofs and church steeples all girdled by a white, tower-studded wall that had glowed in the August sun. It had looked like the painted town in the picture of Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian in Soissons Cathedral, the picture he had stared at for so long as he said his prayers.

Now the painted town was a battered heap of stones, mud, smoke, and shattered houses. Long stretches of the walls still stood and still flaunted their derisive banners that displayed the badges of the garrison’s leaders, images of the saints and invocations to God, but eight of the towers had been collapsed into the town ditch, and one long length of rampart had been beaten into wreckage close to the Leure Gate. The great missiles lobbed into the town by the catapults smashed houses and started fires so that a pall of smoke hung constantly above the besieged town. A church steeple had fallen, taking its bells in a mighty cacophony, and still the boulders and gun-stones hammered at the already hammered town.

And still the defenders fought back. Each dawn Hook led men into the pits that defended the English guns and in every dawn he saw where the garrison had been working. They were making a new wall behind the broken rampart and they shored up the collapsing barbican with new timbers. English heralds, holding their white wands and gaudy in their colored coats, rode to the enemy walls to offer terms, but the enemy commanders rebuffed the heralds each time. “What they’re hoping,” Father Christopher told Hook one early September morning, “is that their king will lead an army to their rescue.”

“I thought the French king was mad?”

“Oh, so he is! He believes he is made of glass!” Father Christopher said mockingly. The priest visited the trenches every morning, offering blessings and jests to the archers. “It’s true! He thinks he’s made of glass and will shatter if he falls. He also chews rugs and tells his troubles to the moon.”

“So he won’t be leading any army here, father,” Hook said, smiling.

“But the mad king has sons, Hook, and they’re all blood-thirsty little scum. Any one of them would love to grind our bones to powder.”

“Will they try?”

“God knows, Hook, God alone knows and He isn’t telling me. But I do know there’s an army gathering at Rouen.”

“Is that far?”

“See that road?” The priest pointed to the faint remains of a road that had once led from the Leure Gate, but which was now only a scar in a muddy, missile-battered landscape. “Follow that,” Father Christopher said, “and turn right when it reaches the hill and keep going, and after fifty miles you’ll find a great bridge and a huge city. That’s Rouen, Hook. Fifty miles? An army can march that in three days!”

“So they come,” Hook said, “and we’ll kill them.”

“King Harold said much the same just before Hastings,” Father Christopher said gently.

“Did Harold have archers?” Hook asked.

“Just men-at-arms, I think.”

“Well, then,” Hook said and grinned.

The priest raised his head to peer at Harfleur. “We should have captured the place by now,” he said wistfully. “It’s taking much too long.” He turned because a passing man-at-arms had greeted him cheerfully. Father Christopher returned the greeting and made a sketchy sign of blessing toward the hurrying man. “You know who that was, Hook?”

Hook looked at the retreating figure who wore a bright surcoat of red and white. “No, father, no idea.”

“Geoffrey Chaucer’s son,” the priest said proudly.

“Who?”

“You’ve not heard of Geoffrey Chaucer?” Father Christopher asked. “The poet?”

“Oh, I thought he might be someone useful,” Hook said, then slammed a hand onto the priest’s shoulder and so forced him to crouch. A heartbeat later a crossbow bolt slapped into the muddy back of the trench where Father Christopher had been standing. “That’s Catface,” Hook explained, “he’s useful.”

“Catface?”

“A bastard on the barbican, father. He’s got a face like a polecat. I can see him raise his bow.”

“You can’t shoot him?”

“Twenty paces too far off, father,” Hook said, and peered between two battered wicker baskets filled with disintegrating earth that formed the parapet. He waved, and a figure on the bastion waved back. “I always let him know I’m still living.”

“Polecat,” Father Christopher said musingly. “You know Rob Pole is ill?”

“So’s Fletch. And Dick Godewyne’s wife.”

“Alice? Is she sick too?”

“Horrible, I hear.”

“Rob Pole can’t stop shitting,” the priest said, “and nothing but blood and mucky water comes out.”

“God help us,” Hook said, “Fletch is the same.”

“I’d better start praying,” Father Christopher said earnestly, “we can’t lose men to sickness. Are you feeling well?”

“I am.”

“God be praised for that. And your hand? How’s your hand?”

“It throbs, father,” Hook said, holding up his right hand, which was still bandaged. Melisande had covered the wound with honey, then wrapped it.

“Throbbing is a good sign,” the priest said. He leaned forward and sniffed at the bandage, “and it smells good! Well, it stinks of mud, sweat, and shit, but so do we all. It doesn’t smell rotten, and that’s the important thing. How’s your piss? Is it cloudy? Strong-colored? Feeble?”

“Just normal, father.”

“That’s grand, Hook. We can’t lose you!”

And strange to tell, Hook thought, but he reckoned the priest was telling the truth because he knew he was doing his ventenar’s job well. He had expected to be embarrassed by the small authority, and had feared that some of the older men would deliberately ignore his orders, but if there was any resentment it was muted and his commands were obeyed readily enough. He wore the silver chain with pride.

The weather had turned hot again, baking the mud into a crust that crumbled into fine dust with every footstep. Harfleur crumbled too, yet still the garrison defied the besiegers. The king would come to the archers’ pits four or five times a day and stare at the ramparts. At the beginning of the siege he had chatted with the archers, but now his face was drawn and his lips thin and the archers gave him and his small entourage space. They watched him stare and they could read from his scarred face that he did not think an assault could break through the new inner walls. Any such attack would have to stumble over the ruins of the burned houses, suffer the bolts spitting from the barbican, then cross the great town ditch before climbing the wreckage of the gun-shattered wall and all the time the crossbow bolts would slash in from the flanks, and once across the wall’s ruins the attackers would be faced with the new inner wall that was made from thick baskets of earth, and from balks of timber and stones fetched from the fallen buildings inside the town. “We need another length of wall down,” Hook overheard the king say, “and then we attack instantly into the new breach.”

“Can’t be done, sire,” Sir John Cornewaille said grimly. “This is the only dry approach we’ve got.” The flood waters had receded, but they still ringed much of the town, restricting the English attacks to the two places where the mine shafts were being hacked toward the town.

“Then bring down the barbican,” the king insisted, “and beat the gate beyond into splinters.” He stared, long-nosed and grim-faced, at the stubborn barbican, then suddenly became aware of the anxious archers and men-at-arms watching him. “God didn’t bring us this far to fail!” he shouted confidently. “The town will be ours, fellows, and soon! There will be ale and good food! It will all be ours soon!”

All day the chalk and soil was dragged from the mine shaft while the timbers, cut to a bowstave’s length, were carried inside to support the tunnel. The guns kept up their fire, shrouding the besiegers’ lines with smoke, punching their eardrums with noise, and pounding the already pounded defenses.

“How are your ears?” Sir John greeted Hook on an early September morning.

“My ears, Sir John?”

“Those ugly things on the sides of your head.”

“Nothing wrong with them, Sir John.”

“Then come with me.”

Sir John, his fine armor and surcoat covered in dust, led Hook back through a trench and so to the mine’s entrance beneath the sow. The shaft sloped sharply down for fifteen paces, then the tunnel leveled. It was two paces wide and as high as a bowstave. Rushlights burned from small brackets nailed to the timber supports, but as Hook followed Sir John he noted how the small flames grew feebler the deeper they went. Every few paces Sir John stopped and flattened himself against the tunnel’s side and Hook did the same to let some miner pass with a load of excavated chalk. Dust hung in the air, while the floor was a slurry of water and chalk dust. “All right, boys,” Sir John said when he reached the tunnel’s end, “time to rest. Everyone stay still and silent!”

The far end of the tunnel was lit by horn-shielded lanterns hanging from the last beam to be propped into place. Two miners had been using pick-axes on the tunnel’s face and they gratefully put down their tools and sank to the floor as Dafydd ap Traharn, supervising the work, nodded a greeting to Hook. Sir John crouched near the gray-haired Welshman and motioned for Hook to squat. “Listen,” Sir John hissed.

Hook listened. A miner coughed. “Shh,” Sir John said.

Sometimes, in the long woods that fell from Lord Slayton’s pastures to the river, Hook would stand quite motionless, just listening. He knew every sound of those trees, whether it was a deer’s hoof-fall, a boar snuffling, a woodpecker drumming, the clack of a raven’s bill as it preened its feathers or just the wind in the leaves, and from those sounds his ear would find the discordant note, the signal that told him a trespasser was prowling the undergrowth. Now he listened in just the same way, ignoring the breathing of the half-dozen men, letting his mind wander, just allowing the silence to fill his head and so alert him to the smallest disturbance. He listened a long time.

“My ears ring all the time,” Sir John whispered, “I think because I’ve got beaten on the helmet with blades too much and…” Hook held up an impatient hand, unaware that he was ordering a Knight of the Garter to silence. Sir John obeyed anyway. Hook listened, heard something and then heard it again. “Someone’s digging,” he said.

“Oh, the bastards,” Sir John said quietly. “Are you sure?”

Now that he had identified the sound Hook was surprised no one else could hear the rhythmic thunk of picks striking chalk. The garrison was making a counter-mine, driving their own tunnel toward the besiegers in hope of intercepting the English tunnel before it could be finished. “Maybe two tunnels,” Hook said. The sound was slightly irregular, as if two mismatched rhythms were mixing.

“That’s what I thought,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “but I wasn’t sure. The ears play tricks underground, they do.”

“Busy little bastards, aren’t they?” Sir John said vengefully. He looked at Dafydd ap Traharn. “How far to go?”

“Twenty paces, Sir John, say two days. Another two to make the chamber. One to fill it with incendiaries.”

“They’re still a long way off,” Sir John said. “Maybe they won’t find this tunnel?”

“They’ll be listening too, Sir John. And the closer they get the clearer they hear us.”

“Putrid stinking prickless rancid bastards,” Sir John said to no one in particular. He nodded at Hook. “I still can’t hear them.”

“They’re there,” Hook said confidently. They spoke in whispers, shrouded by a darkness scarce relieved by the rushlight lanterns flickering in the foul air.

One of the miners spoke in Welsh. Dafydd ap Traharn silenced him with a cautionary hand. “He’s worried what happens if the enemy breaks into the tunnel, Sir John.”

“Make a chamber here,” Sir John said, “big enough for six or seven men. We’ll have archers and men-at-arms standing guard here. Have your own weapons at hand, but for the moment, keep digging. Let’s bring that bastard barbican down.” The mine shaft was aiming for the northernmost tower of the obstinate bastion in hope of tumbling it to fill the flooded ditch. A cavern would be made beneath the tower, a cavern supported by timber balks that would be burned away so that the roof would collapse and, with it, the tower. Sir John slapped the miners on their shoulders. “Well done, boys,” he said, “God is with you.” He beckoned to Hook and the two of them went back toward the sow. “I hope to God He is with us,” Sir John grumbled, then stopped and frowned as he contemplated the tunnel’s entrance. “We’ll have to put some defenses here,” he said.

“In the sow?”

“If the bastards break into our tunnel, Hook, they’ll come swarming out of that hole like rats smelling a free breakfast. We’ll put a wall here and garrison it with archers.”

Hook watched two men carry pit supports into the tunnel. “A wall here will slow the work, Sir John,” he said.

“God damn you, Hook, I know that!” Sir John snapped, then gazed at the tunnel’s mouth. “We need to end this siege! It’s gone on too long. Men are getting sick. We need to be away from this stinking place.”

“Barrels?” Hook suggested.

“Barrels?” Sir John echoed with another snarl.

“Fill three or four barrels with stones and soil,” Hook said patiently, “and if the French come, just roll the barrels into the entrance and stand them upright. Half a dozen archers can take care of any bastard that tries to get past them.”

Sir John stared at the entrance for a few heartbeats, then nodded. “Your mother wasn’t wasting her time when she spread her thighs, Hook. Good man. I want the barrels in place by sundown.”

The barrels were in place by dusk. Hook, waiting to be relieved, went to the trench beside the sow and watched the broken walls that were lit red by the sun sinking beyond the tree-stripped hills. Behind him, in the English camp, a man played a flute plaintively, repeating the same phrase over and over as though trying to get it right. Hook was tired. He wanted to eat and sleep, nothing more, and he paid small attention as a man-at-arms came to stand beside him at the parapet. The man was wearing a close-fitting helmet that half shadowed his face, but otherwise had no armor, just a leather jerkin, but his muddied boots were well made and a golden chain at his neck denoted his high status. “Is that a dead dog?” the man asked, nodding toward a furry corpse lying halfway between the English forward trench and the French barbican. Three ravens were pecking at the dead beast.

“The French shoot them,” Hook said. “The dogs run out of our lines and the crossbowmen shoot them. Then they vanish in the night.”

“The dogs?”

“They’re food for the French,” Hook explained curtly. “Fresh meat.”

“Ah, of course,” the man said. He watched the ravens for a while. “I’ve never eaten dog.”

“Tastes a bit like hare,” Hook said, “but stringier.” Then he glanced at the man and saw the deep-pitted scar beside the long nose. “Sire,” he added hastily, and dropped to one knee.

“Stand up, stand up,” the king said. He stared at the barbican, which now resembled little more than a heap of earth with a wall of battered tree trunks rammed into its crumbling forward slope. “We must take that barbican,” he said absently, speaking to himself. Hook was watching the bastion, looking for the telltale flicker of movement that would warn him of a crossbowman taking aim, but he reckoned the king was safe enough because the French usually went quiet as the sun sank beneath the western horizon, and this evening was no different. The guns and catapults of both sides were silent. “I remember the first day of the siege,” the king said, sounding almost puzzled, “and the church bells were always ringing in the town. I thought they were being defiant, then I realized they were burying their dead. But they don’t ring any more.”

“Too many dead, sire,” Hook said awkwardly, “or maybe there’s no bells left.” There was something about talking to a king that made his thoughts stumble.

“It must be ended quickly,” the king said earnestly, then stepped back from the parapet. “Does the saint still speak to you?” he asked, and Hook was so astonished that the king remembered him that he said nothing, just nodded hastily. “That’s good,” Henry said, “because if God is on our side then nothing can prevail against us. Remember that!” He gave Hook a half smile. “And we will prevail,” Henry added softly, almost as though he spoke to himself. Then he walked down the trench leading back to the sow where a dozen men waited for him.

Hook went to bed.

Next morning, when a gun fired, the earth trembled.

Hook was in the mine, down at the lowest level where Sir John had led him to listen again, and suddenly the earth shuddered and the rushlights flickered dark.

Everyone crouched in the half dark, listening. A miner began coughing wetly and Hook waited until the echo of the cough had died away. Listening. Listening for death, listening.

A second gun fired and the earth seemed to quiver as the tiny flames spluttered again and dust jarred from the roof and gobbets of earth spattered down to splash in the tunnel’s slurry. The rumble of the gun’s noise seemed to last forever, then there was a moaning sound, a creaking, as though the oaken supports were bending under the weight of the earth they carried.

“Hook?” Sir John asked.

There was a scratching noise, so faint that Hook wondered if he imagined it, but then there was a muffled crack followed by silence. After a while the scratching started again, and this time Hook was sure he heard it. The men in the tunnel watched him anxiously. He crossed to the farther wall and pressed an ear against the chalk.

Scratching. Hook looked at Dafydd ap Traharn. “How are you digging now, sir?” he asked.

“The way we always do,” the Welshman said, puzzled.

“Show me, sir?”

The Welshman took a pick and went to the tunnel’s face where, instead of swinging the pick to bury its blade in the soft rock, he dragged it down a natural cleft. He dragged it again, deepening the cleft, and then pushed the blade into the hole and tried to lever out a chunk of stone, but the hole was not deep enough and so he scratched the steel point down the groove again. He scratched it. He was working quietly, trying not to alert the French as the tunnel went closer to the ravaged walls, and Hook realized that was the sound he was hearing. Both teams of tunnelers were trying to work silently.

“They’re very close,” Hook said.

“Cymorth ni, O Arglwydd,” a miner muttered and crossed himself.

“How close?” Sir John demanded, ignoring the plea for God’s help.

“Can’t tell, Sir John.”

“God damn the goddam bastards,” Sir John spat.

“They may be above us,” Dafydd ap Traharn suggested, “or below.”

“You’ll know when they’re really close,” Hook said, “you’ll hear the scratching loud.”

“Scratching?” the Welshman asked.

“It’s what I hear, sir.”

“They’ll hack their way through the last few feet,” Dafydd ap Traharn said grimly, “and come on us like demons.”

“We have our own demons waiting for them,” Sir John said. “We’re not abandoning this tunnel! We need it! We’ll fight the bastards underground. It will save us digging them graves, won’t it?”

The war bows were too long to use in the tunnel and so at midday Sir John brought a half-dozen crossbows. “If they break in,” he told Hook, “greet them with these. Then use your poleaxes.”

The scratching was louder, so loud that Dafydd ap Traharn decided there was no longer any purpose in trying to be silent and so his men began to swing their pickaxes, filling the tunnel’s end with noise and a fine choking dust. Every now and then a blade struck flint and a spark would fly fierce and bright across the gloomy shaft. The sparks looked like shooting stars and Hook remembered his grandmother crossing herself whenever she saw such a star, then she would say a prayer and she claimed such prayers, carried by the hurrying stars, were more effective. He closed his eyes when the sparks flew and prayed for Melisande and for Father Christopher and for his brother, Michael. Michael, at least, was in England, far from the Perrill brothers and their mad priest father. “Another day’s work,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, interrupting Hook’s thoughts of home, “and we can start making the cavern. Then we’ll bring down their tower like the walls of Jericho!”

The men-at-arms and the archers sat at the tunnel’s edge, drawing in their feet to let the laborers carry out the excavated spoil and bring in the new timbers to support the roof. They listened to the sounds of the French miners. Those noises were louder, inescapable and ominous. They came from the north where the enemy had to be driving a counter-mine to intercept the English work and, in the dust-shrouded light of the small flames, Hook constantly watched the far wall, expecting to see a great hole appear through which an armored enemy would erupt. Sir John spent much of the afternoon in the tunnel, his sword drawn and face shadowed. “We have to fight them back into their hole,” he said, “and then collapse their work. Jesus, it smells like a midden down here!”

“It is a midden,” Dafydd ap Traharn said. Some of the laborers had fallen ill and constantly fouled the wet slurry underfoot.

Sir John left late in the day and, an hour later, sent other men to relieve the mine’s guards. Those new men came stooping down the tunnel, their shadows flickering monstrously in the half darkness. “Christ on his cross,” a voice grumbled, “can’t breathe this air.”

“You have crossbows for us?” another voice demanded.

“We’ve got them,” Hook acknowledged, “and they’re cocked.”

“Leave them for us,” the man said, then peered at the archers he was relieving. “Hook? Is that you?”

“Sir Edward!” Hook said. He laid the crossbow on the floor and stood, smiling.

“It is you!” Sir Edward Derwent, Lord Slayton’s man who, in London, had saved Hook from the manor court and its inevitable punishment, was smiling back in the dirty light. “I heard you were here,” he said, “how are you?”

“Still alive, Sir Edward,” Hook said, grinning.

“God be praised for that, though God knows how anyone survives down here.” Sir Edward, his scar-ravaged face half hidden by his helmet, listened to the ominous noises. “They sound close!”

“We think they are,” Hook said.

“It’s deceptive,” Dafydd ap Traharn put in. “They could be ten paces away still. It’s hard to tell with sounds underground.”

“So they could be a hand’s breadth away?” Sir Edward inquired sourly.

“Oh, they could be!” the Welshman said dourly.

Sir Edward looked at the drawn crossbows. “And the idea is to welcome them with bolts?” he asked, “then kill the bastards?”

“The idea is to keep me alive,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “and you’re blocking the tunnel, you are! There are too many of you! There’s work to be done.”

Sir John’s men-at-arms had already gone, and now Hook sent his archers after them. He lingered a moment. “I wish you a quiet night,” he said to Sir Edward.

“Dear God, I echo that prayer,” Sir Edward said. He grinned. “It’s good to see you, Hook.”

“A pleasure to see you, sir,” Hook said, “and thank you.”

“Go and rest, man,” Sir Edward said.

Hook nodded. He hefted his poleax and, with a farewell nod to Dafydd ap Traharn, edged past Sir Edward’s men, one of whom tried to trip him and Hook saw the lantern jaw and sunken eyes and, for a moment, in the half darkness, he thought it was Sir Martin, then realized it was the priest’s elder son, Tom Perrill. Both brothers were there, stooping under the beams, but Hook ignored them, knowing that neither would attack him while Sir Edward was present.

He trudged up the tunnel toward the fading daylight far ahead. He was thinking of Melisande, of the stew she would have ready, and of songs around the campfire when the world shattered.

Noise thudded about his ears. It started as a thunderous growl that billowed just behind him, then there was a rending noise as though the earth itself was splitting apart, and he turned to see dust boiling toward him, a dark cloud of dust rolling in the shaft’s dark light, and men like monstrous shadows were lumbering in that darkness. There was shouting, the sound of steel on armor, and a scream. The first scream.

The French had broken through.

Hook instinctively started back toward the fighting, then remembered the barrels and wondered if he should block the tunnel’s entrance. He hesitated. A man was screeching from the dark, a horrible noise, like the sound of a clumsily gelded beast. There was another rumbling and Hook had a glimpse of more men dropping from the tunnel’s roof, then more dust surged toward him, obliterating his sight, but in the dust a figure lurched toward him. It was a man-at-arms, sword drawn. His visor was closed, he held his sword two-handed, and somehow the dust and half-light made him look like some enormous earth-giant come from nightmare’s bowels. His plate armor was coated in chalk and earth, and Hook stared, petrified by the unnatural vision, but then the man bellowed and that sound startled Hook to reality just as the man-at-arms lunged the sword at his belly. Hook twisted to one side and rammed the poleax straight at the steel-shrouded face. The spear point slid off the pig-snouted visor, but the top edge of the heavy hammer cracked into the helmet, crushing the metal. Hook had used all his archer’s strength in that blow and the earth-giant reeled backward, blood welling from his visor’s holes, and Hook remembered all those lessons in Sir John’s meadows and closed on the man fast, getting inside the sword’s reach so the enemy could not swing the blade, and he rammed the poleax like a quarterstaff, driving the man down onto the floor. Hook had no room to swing the poleax, but strength made up for that and he slammed the ax blade onto the man’s sword elbow, breaking it, then slid the spear point into the gap between the enemy’s helmet and breastplate. The Frenchman wore an aventail, a mail hood, to protect that gap, but the steel spike ripped easily through the links and gouged into the man’s throat, and then more men were coming toward Hook as the earth-giant, shrunken to normal size now, writhed on the mine floor where his blood spilled into the chalk, black draining into white.

The men coming up the tunnel were fighting each other. Hook dragged the blade free of the dying earth-giant and rammed the spear point at a man in a strange surcoat. The blade glanced off plate armor, ripping the coat and the man turned, beast-faced visor pointing at Hook, and brought his sword around, but it caught on one of the mine’s timber supports and Hook lunged again with the poleax, this time hooking the ax blade around the man’s ankle and then pulling hard so that the Frenchman lost his balance. A Welsh miner staggered toward Hook, guts spilling from an opened belly. Hook shouldered him aside and pushed the spear point under the fallen man’s breastplate, the gap just visible through the torn linen. He pushed and twisted the long haft, trying to drive the blade up into the man’s stomach and chest, but something blocked the blade, and then another rush of men pushed him backward. They were Lord Slayton’s men, retreating from the French, though a handful of the enemy was among them. Men wrestled in the dark, tripped over the dead and the dying, and slipped in sewage. Two men-at-arms forced Hook back against the side of the tunnel and he again thrust the poleax like a quarterstaff, two-handed, but a rush of men pushed his enemies aside as archers and miners fled to the sow.

“Hold them!” Sir Edward’s voice bellowed from farther down the mine.

The barrels. Hook, momentarily free of enemies, turned and ran toward the mine entrance. He made it to where the shaft sloped gently up toward the surface, but there a foot tripped him and he sprawled heavily onto the chalk. He twisted aside and tried to climb to his feet, but a boot kicked him in the belly. Hook twisted again to see Tom and Robert Perrill standing over him.

“Quick,” Tom Perrill shouted at his brother.

Robert lifted a sword, point downward, aimed at Hook’s throat.

“I’ll have your woman,” Tom Perrill said, though Hook could scarcely hear him over the shouts and screams echoing up the tunnel. More shouts sounded from the sow where attackers fought a bitter sudden battle against startled defenders. Then Robert Perrill’s sword came down and Hook rolled again, throwing himself against his enemies’ feet and he heaved up so that Robert Perrill tumbled against the far wall and the poleax was still in Hook’s hand as he scrambled to his feet and turned on Thomas Perrill, who simply ran away.

“Coward!” Hook shouted, and looked down to Robert who was flailing the sword uselessly and screaming, screaming, and Hook suddenly understood why. The earth was quivering as another scream, thin as a blade, sounded in Hook’s ears.

“Down!” Saint Crispinian said.

And the earth was shaking now, and the thin scream was lost in thunder, only the thunder was not from the sky, but from the earth, and Hook obeyed the saint, crouching down beside Robert Perrill as the tunnel roof collapsed.

It seemed to last forever. Timbers cracked, the noise groaned and boomed, and the earth fell.

Hook closed his eyes. The thin scream was back, but it was inside his head. It was fear, his own scream, his terror of death. He was breathing dust. At the last day, he knew, the dead would rise from the earth. They would come from their graves, the earth making way for their flesh and bones, and they would face east toward the shining holy city of Jerusalem, and the sky in the east would be brighter than the sun and a great terror would swamp the newly resurrected dead as they stood in their winding sheets. There would be screaming and crying, folk flinching from the sudden dazzle of new light, but all the dead priests of the parish would have been buried with their feet toward the west so that when they rose from their tombs they would face their frightened congregations and could call out reassurance. And for some reason, as the earth collapsed to make Hook’s grave, he thought of Sir Martin, and wondered whether that twisted, sour, long-jawed face would be the first he would see on the last day when trumpets filled the heavens and God came in glory to take His people.

A roof timber slammed down, and the earth fell and Hook was crouched and the thunder was all around him and the scream in his head died to a whimper.

And then there was silence.

Sudden, utter, black silence.

Hook breathed.

“Oh, God,” Robert Perrill moaned.

Something pressed on Hook’s back. It was heavy, and seemed immovable, but it was not crushing him. The darkness was absolute.

“Oh, God, please,” Perrill said.

The earth shuddered again and there was a muffled bang. A gun, Hook thought, and now he could even hear voices, but they were very far off. His mouth was full of grit. He spat.

The poleax was still in Hook’s right hand, but he could not move it. The weapon was trapped by something. He let go of it and felt around him, conscious that he was in a small, tight space. His fingers groped across Perrill’s head. “Help me,” Perrill said.

Hook said nothing.

He felt behind him and realized a roof timber had half fallen and somehow left this small space where he crouched and breathed. The timber slanted down and it was that rough oak that was pressing into his spine. “What do I do?” he asked aloud.

“You’re not far from the surface,” Saint Crispinian said.

“You must help me,” Perrill said.

If I move I die, Hook thought.

“Nick! Help me,” Perrill said, “please!”

“Just push up,” Saint Crispinian said.

“Show some courage,” Saint Crispin said in his harsher voice.

“For God’s sake, help me,” Perrill moaned.

“Move to your right,” Saint Crispinian said, “and don’t be frightened.”

Hook moved slowly. Earth fell.

“Now dig your way out,” Saint Crispinian said, “like a mole.”

“Moles die,” Hook said, and he wanted to explain how they trapped moles by blocking their tunnels and then digging out the frightened animals, but the saint did not want to listen.

“You’re not going to die,” the saint said impatiently, “not if you dig.”

So Hook pushed upward, scrabbling at the earth with both hands, and the soil caved in, filling his mouth and he wanted to scream, but he could not scream, and he pushed with his legs, using all the strength in his body, and the earth collapsed around him and he was certain he would die here, except that suddenly, quite suddenly, he was breathing clean air. His grave had been very shallow, nothing but a shroud of fallen soil and he was half standing in open air and was astonished to discover that full night had not yet fallen. It seemed to be raining, except the sky was clear, and then he realized the French were shooting crossbow bolts from the barbican and from the half-wrecked walls. They were not shooting at him, but at men peering from the English trenches and around the edges of the sow.

Hook was up to his waist in earth. He reached down beside his right leg and took hold of Robert Perrill’s leather jerkin. He pulled, and the earth was loose enough to let him drag the choking archer up into the last of the daylight. A crossbow bolt thumped into the soil a few inches from Hook and he went very still.

He was in what looked like a crude trench and the high sides of the trench gave him some protection from the French bolts. The town’s defenders were cheering. They had seen the tunnel’s collapse and they saw the English trying to rescue anyone who might have survived the catastrophe and so they were filling the twilight with crossbow bolts to drive those rescuers back.

“Oh, God,” Robert Perrill sighed.

“You’re alive,” Hook said.

“Nick?”

“We have to wait,” Hook said.

Robert Perrill choked and spat out earth. “Wait?”

“Can’t move till dark,” Hook said, “they’re shooting at us.”

“My brother!”

“He ran away,” Hook said. He wondered what had happened to Sir Edward. Had that deeper part of the mine collapsed? Or had the French killed all the men in the tunnel? The enemy had driven their own shaft above the English excavation and then dropped into the tunnel and Hook imagined the sudden fight, the death in the darkness, and the pain of dying in the ready-made grave. “You were going to kill me,” he said to Robert Perrill.

Perrill said nothing. He was half lying on the trench floor, but his legs were still buried. He had lost his sword.

“You were going to kill me,” Hook said again.

“My brother was.”

“You held the sword,” Hook said.

Perrill wiped dirt from his face. “I’m sorry, Nick,” he said.

Hook snorted, said nothing.

“Sir Martin said he’d pay us,” Perrill admitted.

“Your father?” Hook sneered.

Perrill hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.”

“Because he hates me?”

“Your mother rejected him,” Perrill said.

Hook laughed. “And your mother whored herself,” he said flatly.

“He told her she’d go to heaven,” Perrill said, “that if you do it with a priest you go to heaven. That’s what he said.”

“He’s mad,” Hook said flatly, “moon-touched mad.”

Perrill ignored that. “He gave her money, he still does, and he’ll give us money.”

“To kill me?” Hook asked, though the French were trying hard enough to save Sir Martin the trouble. The crossbow bolts were thudding and spitting, some tumbling end over end down the crude trench made by the collapsed tunnel.

“He wants your woman,” Robert Perrill said.

“How much is he paying you?”

“A mark each,” Perrill said, eager to help Hook now.

A mark. One hundred and sixty pennies, or three hundred and twenty pence if both brothers were paid. Fifty-three days’ pay for an archer. The price of Hook’s life and Melisande’s misery. “So you have to kill me?” Hook asked, “then take my girl?”

“He wants that.”

“He’s an evil mad bastard,” Hook said.

“He can be kind,” Perrill said pathetically. “Do you remember John Luttock’s daughter?”

“Of course I remember her.”

“He took her away, but he paid John in the end, gave him the girl’s dowry.”

“A hundred and sixty pennies for raping her?”

“No!” Perrill was puzzled by the question. “I think it was two pounds, might have been more. John was happy.”

The light was fading fast now. The French had saved their loaded guns for the moment when their counter-mine pierced the English tunnel and now they fired shot after shot from Harfleur’s walls. The smoke billowed like thunderclouds to darken the already dark sky as the gun-stones bounced and thudded off the sow’s stout flanks.

“Robert!” a voice shouted from the sow.

“That’s Tom!” Robert Perrill said, recognizing his brother’s voice. He took a breath to call back, but Hook stopped his mouth with a hand.

“Keep quiet,” Hook snarled. A crossbow bolt tumbled down the trench and smacked into Hook’s mail. It had lost its force and bounced away as another bolt struck sparks from a lump of flint nearby. “What happens now?” Hook asked, taking his hand away from Robert Perrill’s mouth.

“What do you mean?”

“I take you back and you try and kill me again.”

“No!” Perrill said. “Get me out of here, Nick! I can’t move!”

“So what happens now?” Hook asked again. Crossbow bolts were cracking into the sow so frequently that it sounded like hail on a timber roof.

“I won’t kill you,” Perrill said.

“What should I do?” Hook asked.

“Pull me out, Nick, please,” Perrill said.

“I wasn’t talking to you. What should I do?”

“What do you think?” Saint Crispin, the harsher brother, said in a mocking voice.

“It’s murder,” Hook said.

“I won’t kill you!” Perrill insisted.

“You think we saved the girl so she could be raped?” Saint Crispinian asked.

“Get me out of this muck,” Perrill said, “please!”

Instead Hook reached out and found one of the spent crossbow bolts. It was as long as his forearm, as thick as two thumbs, and fledged with stiff leather vanes. The point was rusted, but still sharp.

He killed Perrill the easiest way. He smacked him hard around the head, and while the archer was still recovering from the blow, drove the bolt down through one eye. It went in easily, glancing off the socket, and Hook kept driving the thick shaft into Perrill’s brain until the rusted point scraped against the back of Perrill’s skull. The archer twisted and jerked, choked and quivered, but he died quickly enough.

“Robert!” Tom Perrill shouted from the sow.

A springolt bolt struck a masonry chimney breast left standing in the scorched remains of a burned house. The bolt spun into the falling darkness, end over end, soaring over the English trenches to fall far beyond. Hook wiped his wounded right hand on Robert Perrill’s tunic, cleaning off the muck that had spurted from the dead man’s eye, then heaved himself free of the soil. It was very nearly night and the smoke of the gunshots still shrouded what little light remained. He stepped over Perrill and staggered toward the sow, his legs slow to find their strength again. Crossbow bolts flicked past him, but their aim was wild now and Hook reached the sow safely. He held on to its flank as he walked, then dropped into the safety of the trench. Lanterns lit his dirt-crusted face and men stared at him.

“How many others survived?” a man-at-arms asked.

“Don’t know,” Hook said.

“Here,” a priest brought him a pot and Hook drank. He had not realized how thirsty he was until he tasted the ale.

“My brother?” Thomas Perrill was among the men staring at Hook.

“Killed by a crossbow bolt,” Hook said curtly and stared up into Perrill’s long face. “Straight through the eye,” he added brutally. Perrill stared at him, and then Sir John Cornewaille pushed through the small crowd in the sow’s pit.

“Hook!”

“I’m alive, Sir John.”

“You don’t look it. Come.” Sir John grasped Hook’s arm and led him toward the camp. “What happened?”

“They came from above,” Hook said. “I was on my way out when the roof fell in.”

“It fell on you?”

“Yes, Sir John.”

“Someone loves you, Hook.”

“Saint Crispinian does,” Hook said, then he saw Melisande in the light of a campfire and went to her embrace.

And afterward, in the darkness, had nightmares.

Sir John’s men started dying next morning. A man-at-arms and two archers, all three of them struck by the sickness that turned bowels into sewers of filthy water. Alice Godewyne died. A dozen other men-at-arms were sick, as were at least twenty archers. The army was being ravaged by the plague and the stench of shit hung over the camp, and the French built their walls higher every night and in the dawn men struggled to the gun-pits and trenches where they vomited and voided their bowels.

Father Christopher caught the sickness. Melisande found him shivering in his tent, face pale, lying in his own filth and too weak to move. “I ate some nuts,” he told her.

“Nuts?”

“Les noix,” he explained in a voice that was like a breathless groan. “I didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know?”

“The doctors tell me now that you shouldn’t eat nuts or cabbage. Not with the sickness about. I ate nuts.”

Melisande washed him. “You’ll make me sicker,” he complained, but was too weak to prevent her from cleaning him. She found him a blanket, though Father Christopher threw it off when the day’s warmth became insufferable. Much of the low land in which Harfleur stood was still flooded and the heat seemed to shimmer off the shallow water and made the air thick as steam. The guns still fired, but less frequently because the Dutch gunners had also been struck by the murrain. No one was spared. Men in the king’s household fell ill, great lords were struck down, and the angels of death hovered on dark wings above the English camp.

Melisande found blackberries and begged some barley from Sir John’s cooks. She boiled the berries and barley to reduce the liquid that she then sweetened with honey and spooned into Father Christopher’s mouth. “I’m going to die,” he told her weakly.

“No,” she said decisively, “you are not.”

The king’s own physician, Master Colnet, came to Father Christopher’s tent. He was a young, serious man with a pale face and a small nose with which he smelled Father Christopher’s feces. He offered no judgment on what he had determined from the odors, instead he briskly opened a vein in the priest’s arm and bled him copiously. “The girl’s ministrations will do no harm,” he said.

“God bless her,” Father Christopher said weakly.

“The king sent you wine,” Master Colnet said.

“Thank his majesty for me.”

“It’s excellent wine,” Colnet said, binding the cut arm with practiced skill, “though it didn’t help the bishop.”

“Bangor’s dead?”

“Not Bangor, Norwich. He died yesterday.”

“Dear God,” Father Christopher said.

“I bled him too,” Master Colnet said, “and thought he would live, but God decreed otherwise. I shall come back tomorrow.”

The Bishop of Norwich’s body was cut into quarters, then boiled in a giant cauldron to flense the flesh from the bones. The filthy steaming liquid was poured away and the bones were wrapped in linen and nailed in a coffin that was carried to the shore so the bishop could be taken home to be buried in the diocese he had taken such care to avoid in life. Most of the dead were simply dropped into pits dug wherever there was a patch of ground high enough to hold an unflooded grave, but as more men died the grave-pits were abandoned and the corpses were carried to the tidal flats and thrown into the shallow creeks where they were at the mercy of wild dogs, gulls, and eternity. The stench of the dead and the stink of shit and the reek of smoldering fires filled the encampment.

Two mornings after Hook had stumbled away from the fallen mine there was a sudden flurry of gunshots from the walls of Harfleur. The garrison had loaded their cannon and now fired them all at the same time so that the battered town was edged with smoke. Defenders cheered from the walls and waved derisive flags.

“A ship got through to them,” Sir John explained.

“A ship?” Hook asked.

“For Christ’s sake, you know what a ship is!”

“But how?”

“Our goddam fleet was asleep, that’s how! Now the goddam bastards have got food. God damn the bastards.” It seemed God had changed sides, for the defenses of Harfleur, though battered and broken, were constantly replenished and rebuilt. New walls backed the broken old, and every night the garrison deepened the defensive ditch and raised new obstacles in the shattered breaches. The intensity of the crossbow bolts did not let up, proof that the town had been well stocked, or else that the ship that had evaded the blockade had brought a new supply. The English, meanwhile, grew more ill. Sir John ducked into Father Christopher’s tent and stared at the priest. “How is he?” he asked Melisande.

She shrugged. As far as Hook could tell the priest was already dead, for he lay unmoving on his back, his mouth slackly open and his skin grayish pale.

“Is he breathing?” Sir John demanded.

Melisande nodded.

“God help us,” Sir John said and backed out of the tent, “God help us,” he said again, and stared at the town. It should have fallen two weeks ago, yet there it lay, defiant still, the wreckage of its wall and towers protecting the new barricades that had been built behind.

There was some good news. Sir Edward Derwent was a prisoner in Harfleur, as was Dafydd ap Traharn. The heralds, returning from another vain attempt to persuade the garrison to surrender, told how the men trapped in the mine’s far end had surrendered. The collapsed mine had been abandoned, though on Harfleur’s eastern side, where the king’s brother led the siege, other shafts were still being driven toward the walls. The best news was that the French were making no effort to relieve the town. English patrols were riding far into the countryside to find grain, and there was no sign of an enemy army coming to strike at the disease-weakened English. Harfleur, it seemed, had been left to rot, though it appeared now that the besiegers would be destroyed first.

“All that money,” Sir John said bleakly, “and all we’ve done is march a couple of miles to become lords of graves and shit-pits.”

“So why don’t we just leave it?” Hook asked. “Just march away?”

“A goddam stupid question,” Sir John said. “The place might surrender tomorrow! And all Christendom is watching. If we abandon the siege we look weak. And besides, even if we did march inland we won’t necessarily find the French. They’ve learned to fear English armies and they know the quickest way to get rid of us is to hide themselves in fortresses. So we might just abandon this siege to start another. No, we have to take this goddam town.”

“Then why don’t we attack?” Hook asked.

“Because we’ll lose too many men,” Sir John said. “Imagine it, Hook. Crossbows, springolts, guns, all tearing into us as we advance, killing us while we fill the ditch, and then we get over the wall’s rubble to find a new ditch, a new wall, and more crossbows, more guns, more catapults. We can’t afford to lose a hundred dead and four hundred crippled. We came here to conquer France, not die in this rancid shit-hole.” He kicked at the hard ground, then stared at the sea where six English ships lay at anchor off the harbor entrance. “If I commanded Harfleur’s garrison,” he said ruefully, “I know just what I’d do now.”

“What’s that?”

“Attack,” Sir John said. “Kick us while we’re half crippled. We speak of chivalry, Hook, and we are chivalrous. We fight so politely! Yet you know how to win a battle?”

“Fight dirty, Sir John.”

“Fight filthy, Hook. Fight like the devil and send chivalry to hell. He’s no fool.”

“The devil?”

Sir John shook his head. “No, Raoul de Gaucourt. He commands the garrison.” Sir John nodded toward Harfleur. “He’s a gentleman, Hook, but he’s also a fighter. And he’s no fool. And if I were Raoul de Gaucourt I’d kick the shit out of us right now.”

And next day Raoul de Gaucourt did.