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

SEVEN

“Wake up, Nick!” It was Thomas Evelgold bellowing at him. The centenar slapped Hook’s shelter, shaking it so hard that scraps of dead leaves and pieces of turf fell onto Hook and Melisande. “God damn you, wake up!” Evelgold shouted again.

Hook opened his eyes to darkness. “Tom?” he called, but Evelgold had already moved on to wake other archers.

A second voice was shouting for the men to assemble. “Armor! Weapons! Hurry! Goddam now! I want you all here, now! Now!”

“What is it?” Melisande asked.

“Don’t know,” Hook said. He fumbled to find his mail coat. The stink of the leather lining was overpowering as pulled it over his head. He forced the unwieldy garment down his chest. “Sword belt?”

“Here,” Melisande was kneeling. The campfires were being revived and their flames reflected red from her wide open eyes.

Hook put on the short surcoat with its cross of Saint George, the badge that every man was required to wear in the siege-works. He pulled on his boots, the once good boots that he had bought in Soissons but which were now coming apart at the seams. He strapped on his belt, slid the bow from its cover, and snatched up an arrow bag. He had tied a long leather strap to the poleax and he slung that over his shoulder, then ducked into the night. “I’ll be back,” he called to Melisande.

“Casque!” she shouted after him. “Casque!” He reached back and took the helmet from her. He felt a sudden urge to tell her he loved her, but Melisande had disappeared back into the shelter and Hook said nothing. He sensed the night was ending. The stars were pale, which meant dawn would soon stain the sky above the obstinate city, but ahead of him there was tumult. The flames in the siege-works leaped higher, casting grotesque shadows across the broken ground.

“Come to me! Come to me!” Sir John was shouting beside the largest campfire. The archers were gathering quickly, but the men-at-arms, who needed more time to buckle on their plate armor, were slower to arrive. Sir John had chosen to forgo his expensive plate armor and was dressed like the archers in mail coat and jupon. “Evelgold! Hook! Magot! Candeler! Brutte!” Sir John called. Walter Magot, Piers Candeler, and Thomas Brutte were the other three ventenars.

“Here, Sir John!” Evelgold responded.

“Bastards have made a sally,” Sir John said urgently. That explained the shouting and the sound of steel clashing with steel that came from the forward trenches. Harfleur’s garrison had sallied out to attack the sow and gun-pits. “We have to kill the bastards,” Sir John said. “We’re going to attack straight down to the sow. Some of us are, but not you, Hook! You know the Savage?”

“Yes, Sir John,” Hook said, adjusting the buckle of his sword belt. The Savage was a catapult, a great wooden beast that hurled stones into Harfleur and, of all the siege engines, it lay closest to the sea at the right-hand end of the English lines.

“Take your men there,” Sir John said, “and work your way in toward the sow, got that?”

“Yes, Sir John,” Hook said again. He strung the bow by bracing one end on the ground and looping the cord over the upper nock.

“Then go! Go now!” Sir John snarled, “and kill the bastards!” He turned. “Where’s my banner! I want my banner! Bring me my goddamned banner!”

Hook led sixteen men now. It should have been twenty-three, but seven were either dead or ill. He wondered how seventeen men were supposed to fight their way along trenches and gun-pits swarming with an enemy who had sallied from the Leure Gate. It was evident the French had captured large stretches of the siege-works because, as Hook led his men down the southward track, he could see more fires springing up in the English gun-pits and the shapes of men scurrying in front of those flames. Groups of men-at-arms and archers crossed Hook’s path, all going toward the fighting. Hook could hear the clash of blades now.

“What do we do, Nick?” Will of the Dale asked.

“You heard Sir John. Start at the Savage, work our way in,” Hook said, and was surprised that he sounded confident. Sir John’s orders had been vague and given hurriedly, and Hook had simply obeyed by leading his men toward the Savage, but only now was he trying to work out what he was supposed to do. Sir John was assembling his men-at-arms and had kept most of the archers, presumably for an attack on the sow that seemed to have fallen into the enemy’s possession, but why detach Hook? Because, Hook decided, Sir John needed flank protection. Sir John and his men were the beaters and they would drive the game across Hook’s front where the archers could cut them down. Hook, recognizing the plan’s simplicity, felt a surge of pride. Sir John could have sent his centenar Tom Evelgold or any of the other ventenars, all of whom were older and more senior, but Sir John had chosen Hook.

Fires burned at the Savage, but they had not been set by the French. They were the campfires of the men who guarded the pit in which the catapult sat, and their flames lit the monstrously gaunt beams of the giant engine. A dozen archers, the sentries who guarded the machine through the night, waited with strung bows and, as they saw men coming down the slope, turned those bows toward Hook. “Saint George!” Hook bellowed, “Saint George!”

The bows dropped. The sentries were nervous. “What’s happening?” one of them demanded of Hook.

“French are out.”

“I know, but what’s happening?”

“I don’t know!” Hook snapped, then turned to count his men. He did it in the old way of the country, like a shepherd counting his flock, just as his father had taught him. Yain, tain, eddero, he counted and got to bumfit, which was fifteen, and looked for the extra man and saw two. Tain-o-bumfit? Then he saw that the seventeenth man was short and slight and carried a crossbow. “For God’s sake, girl, go back,” he called, and then he forgot Melisande because Tom Scarlet shouted a warning and Hook whipped around to see a band of men running toward the Savage down the wide trench that snaked to the catapult from the nearest gun-pit. Some of the approaching men carried torches that streamed sparks and the bright flames reflected from helmets, swords, and axes.

“No crosses!” Tom Scarlet warned, meaning that none of the men in the trench was wearing the cross of Saint George. They were French and, seeing the archers outlined by the fires burning in the Savage’s pit, they began shouting their challenge. “Saint Denis! Harfleur!”

“Bows!” Hook shouted, and his men instinctively spread out. “Kill them!” he shouted.

The range was short, less than fifty paces, and the attackers made themselves into an easy target because they were constricted by the trench’s walls. The first arrows drilled into them and the thuds of the heads striking home instantly silenced the enemy’s shouting. The sound of the bows was sharp, each release of the string followed by the briefest fluttering rush as the feathers caught the air. In the darkness those feathers made small white flickers that stopped abruptly as the arrows slapped home. To Hook it seemed as if time had slowed. He was plucking arrows from his bag, laying them over the stave, bringing up the bow, hauling the cord, releasing, and he felt no excitement, no fear, and no exhilaration. He knew exactly where each arrow would go before he even pulled it from the bag. He aimed at the approaching men’s bellies and, in the flame-light, he saw those men doubling over as his arrows struck.

The enemy’s charge ended as surely as though they had run into a stone wall. The trench was wide enough for six men to walk abreast and all the leading Frenchmen were on the ground, spitted by arrows, and the men behind tripped on them and, in their turn, were hit by arrows. Some glanced off plate armor, but others sliced straight through the metal, and even an arrow that failed to pierce the plate had sufficient force to knock a man backward. If the enemy could have spread out they might have reached the Savage, but the trench walls constricted them and the feathered bodkins ripped in from the dark and so the attacking party turned and ran back, leaving a dark mass behind, not all of it motionless. “Denton! Furnays! Cobbold!” Hook called, “make sure those bastards are dead ’uns. The rest of you, after me!”

The three men jumped into the trench, drew their swords, and approached the wounded enemy. Hook meanwhile stayed above the trench, advancing beside it with an arrow on his cord. He could see men fighting around the distant sow and in the wide pit where the biggest gun, the great bombard called the King’s Daughter, was dug in. Fire burned bright there, but it was none of Hook’s business. His job was to be on Sir John’s flank.

The ground was rough, churned up by digging and by the strike of French missiles. The boulders slung by the big catapults in Harfleur littered the path, as did the remnants of the houses that had been burned when the siege began, but the dawn was now seeping a faint light in the east, just enough to cast shadows from the obstacles. A crossbow bolt whipped past Hook’s head and he sensed it had come from the nearest gun-pit where a cannon called the Redeemer was emplaced. “Will! Keep those bastards busy.”

“What bastards?”

“The ones who’ve captured the Redeemer!” Hook said, and grabbed Will of the Dale’s arm and turned him toward the gun-pit, which was a black shadow twenty paces beyond the trench. It had been protected from the springolts and guns of Harfleur by one of the ingenious wooden screens that loomed high in the darkness, but the tilting screen had not kept the enemy from capturing the cannon. “Put as many arrows into the pit as you can,” Hook told Will, “but stop shooting when we reach the gun.” Hook pushed six men toward Will. “You obey Will,” he told them, “and you look after Melisande,” he added to Will, for she was still with the group. “The rest of you, after me.”

Another crossbow bolt hissed close by, but Hook’s men were moving fast now. Will of the Dale and his half-dozen men were moving eastward to shoot their arrows through the opening at the back of the pit, while Hook was running to the Redeemer’s flank. He jumped down into the wide trench and waited for his six men to join him. “No bows from now on,” he told them.

“No bows? We’re archers!” Will Sclate grumbled. Will Sclate always grumbled. He was not a popular man, too morose to be easy company and too slow-witted to join in the incessant chatter among the archers, but he was big and hugely strong. He had grown up on one of Sir John’s estates, a laborer’s son who might have expected to work the fields his whole life, but Sir John had seen the boy’s strength and insisted he learn the longbow. Now, as an archer, he earned far more than any laborer, but he was as slow and stubborn as the clay fields he had once worked with hoe and beetle.

“You’re a soldier,” Hook snapped at him, “and you’re going to use hand weapons.”

“What are we doing?” Geoffrey Horrocks asked. He was the youngest of Sir John’s archers, just seventeen, the son of a falconer.

“We’re going to kill some bastards,” Hook said. He slung the bow across his body and hefted the poleax instead. “And we go fast! After me! Now!”

He scrambled up the face of the trench and over the wreckage of the soil-filled wicker baskets that formed the trench’s parapet. He could see flame-light in the Redeemer’s pit and he could hear the sharp thin noise of bowstrings being released from his left where Will of the Dale’s men were lined beside the stone stump of a wrecked chimney. A shout came from the pit, then another, then a screech as an arrowhead scraped against the cannon’s flank. Seven archers were shooting into the pit. In one minute they could easily loose sixty or seventy arrows, and those arrows were flickering through the half-light, filling the gun-pit with hissing death and forcing the French to crouch for protection.

Then Hook and his men came at them from the flank. The Frenchmen did not see him because the arrows were whistling and thumping around them, and they were crouching to find what little protection the pit offered. The massive wooden screen gave splendid protection on the face that looked toward Harfleur, but the pit had never been designed to protect men being attacked from the rear and Will’s arrows were streaking down the trench and through the wide gap. Then Hook leaped across the parapet at the pit’s side and he prayed the arrows would stop.

They must have stopped because none of his men was struck by an arrow. The archers were shouting a challenge as they followed Hook over the wicker baskets, and still shouting as they started the killing. Hook was swinging the poleax as he landed and its lead-weighted hammer head crashed into a crouching Frenchman’s helmet and Hook sensed rather than saw the metal crumpling under the massive blow that collapsed metal, skull, and brain. A man reared up to his right, but Sclate hurled him back with contemptuous ease as Hook sprawled on the far side of the cannon. He had leaped clean across the Redeemer’s barrel.

He hit the far side of the pit hard, lost his footing, and fell heavily. A surge of fear flared cold in his veins. The biggest fear was that he was on the ground and vulnerable, another that he might have damaged the bow slung on his back, but later, when he remembered the fight, he realized he had also felt elation. In memory it was all a blur of screaming men, bright blades, and ringing metal, but in that welter of impressions there was a cold hard center in which Nick Hook regained his feet and saw a man-at-arms at the front of the pit. The man was wearing plate armor half covered by a surcoat that displayed a red heart pierced by a burning lance. He was holding a sword. His visor was raised and his eyes reflected the small flames of the fallen torches and Hook saw fear in those eyes, and Hook felt no pity because of that fear. Kill or be killed, Sir John always said, and Hook ran at the man, poleax leveled, the haft held in both his hands, and he ignored the feeble defensive sword-swing the man offered and lunged the spear point at the Frenchman’s midriff. The blade scraped off the bottom rim of the breastplate and jarred on the faulds, the plate strips worn on a leather skirt designed to stop a sword thrust into the lower belly. But no fauld could resist a poleax thrust and Hook saw the man’s terrified eyes open wide, and saw his mouth make a great hole as the spear point ripped through steel, leather, mail undershirt, skin, muscle, and guts to ram against the Frenchman’s spine. The man made a mewing noise and Hook was bellowing a challenge as the thrust pushed his victim back against the gun-pit’s face. Hook hauled the poleax back, and the flailing man came with it, his flesh trapping the point, and Hook put his boot into the mess of blood and armor, braced his leg and tugged till the blade came free. He lunged it forward again, but checked the blow as the man fell to his knees. Hook whipped around, ready to defend himself, but the fight was already over. There had only been eight men in the pit. They must have been left there by the larger French party advancing toward the Savage and, when that party had been thrown back by arrows, these eight had been forgotten. Their job had been to wreck the cannon, a job they had been trying to do with a huge ax that lay abandoned beside the windlass that tilted the heavy protective screen on its massive axle. They had managed to chop the windlass into splinters, but now all but one of them was dead.

“Can’t hurt a cannon with an ax!” Tom Scarlet said derisively. The one living Frenchman moaned.

“Anyone hurt?” Hook demanded.

“I twisted my ankle,” Horrocks said. He was panting and his eyes were wide with astonishment or fear.

“You’ll mend,” Hook said abruptly. “Are we all here?” His men were all present, and Will of the Dale was running up the trench with Melisande and his six archers. The wounded Frenchman whimpered and drew his legs up. He had been wearing no armor except a padded haubergeon and Will Sclate had driven an ax deep into his chest so that the linen padding had spilled out and was now soaked with blood. Hook could see a mess of lungs and splintered ribs. Blood bubbled black from the man’s mouth as he moaned again. “Put him out of his misery,” Hook demanded, but his archers just stared at him. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Hook said. He stepped over a corpse, put the poleax’s spike at the man’s neck, lunged once, and so did the job himself.

Will of the Dale stared at the carnage in the pit. “Last time the silly bastards do that!” he said. He tried to speak lightly, imitating Sir John, but there was a squawk in his voice and horror in his eyes.

Melisande was close behind Will. She stared dumbly at the dead Frenchmen, next at the blood dripping thick from Hook’s poleax, then up into his eyes. “You shouldn’t be here,” he told her harshly.

“I can’t stay in the camp,” she said, “that priest might come.”

“We’ll look after her, Nick,” Will of the Dale said, his voice still strained. He took a step forward and lifted one of the fallen torches, though there was enough light in the east now to make the flames unnecessary. “Look what they did,” he said.

The Frenchmen had used their big ax to chop through the iron bands that hooped the Redeemer’s barrel. Hook had not noticed the damage before, but now he saw that two of the metal rings had been hacked clean through, which meant the gun was probably useless because, if it was fired, the barrel would expand, split, and kill every man in the pit. That was none of Hook’s business. “Search the bastards,” he ordered his men. The three archers who had plundered the bodies of the first French casualties had found silver chains, coins, brooches, and a dagger with a jeweled hilt. Those valuables were all in an arrow bag to which new riches were now added. “We’ll share it out later,” Hook decreed. “Now come on, get out of here! Bows!”

His bow had been undamaged by his fall. He took it in his left hand, slung the poleax on his shoulder, and laid an arrow on the cord. He climbed the pit’s side into a gray dawn streaked by dark smoke.

In front of him a battle raged around the sow and around the pit that held the King’s Daughter. The French had captured both, but the English had streamed from their camp and now outnumbered the raiding party, which was being forced inexorably back. Trumpets blew, the signal for the French to break off their fight and retreat to Harfleur. Flames licked at the sow’s heavy timbers and at the swinging screen sheltering the bombard. Men-at-arms were hacking at each other, blades flashing reflected light as they slashed and thrust. Hook looked for Sir John’s rampant lion banner and saw it to his left. He saw too that Sir John’s men were fighting across the main trench, driving back the large group of French who now formed the attackers’ left wing. “Bows!” Hook called.

He hauled the cord back, drawing it to his right ear. The French had been summoned back to the town, but they dared not turn and run for fear of the close English pursuit, and so they were fighting hard, trying to drive Sir John’s men back into the trench. They were half facing away from Hook and had no idea that he was on their flank. “Aim true,” Hook shouted, wanting none of his arrows to fall on Englishmen, then he released, took another bodkin and that new arrow was only half drawn as the first drove into an enemy’s back. Hook drew full again, saw a Frenchman turn toward the new threat, released, and the arrow slapped into the man’s face, and suddenly the enemy was running, defeated by the unexpected attack from their flank.

A crossbow bolt flashed in front of Hook. A springolt bolt, much larger, churned up a spout of earth as a gun fired from Harfleur’s wall. The stone banged into the ground just behind the archers as yet more bolts flickered through the smoke. The crossbow bolts made a fluttering noise and Hook reckoned their leather fledgings were twisted out of shape, perhaps because they had been badly stored. The bolts were not flying true, but they were still coming too close. Hook glanced at the barbican and saw the enemy crossbowmen taking aim from its summit. He turned and sped an arrow toward them, then called to his men. “Stop shooting! Get to the trench!”

The French were retreating fast now, but they had done what they had set out to do, which was to damage the siege-works. Three of the cannon, including the King’s Daughter, would never fire again, and all along the trenches parapets had been thrown down and men killed. And now, from the broken ramparts, the defenders jeered at the English as the returning raiding party negotiated the deep ditch in front of the broken barbican. Arrows still followed the French and some men were struck and slid into the ditch’s bottom, but the sally had been a success. The English works burned and the garrison’s insults stung.

“Bastards,” Sir John was saying repeatedly. “They caught us sleeping, the bastards!”

“The Savage isn’t touched,” Hook reported stoically, “but they broke the Redeemer.”

“We’ll break them, the goddam bastards!” Sir John said.

“And none of us was hurt,” Hook added.

“We’ll hurt them, by Christ,” Sir John vowed. His face was twisted by anger. The siege was already bogged down, but now the enemy had delivered another hard blow to the English hopes. Sir John shuddered as an enemy man-at-arms, taken prisoner, was ushered down the trench. For a heartbeat it looked as though Sir John would unleash his fury on the hapless man, but then he saw Melisande and released his frustration on her instead. “What in the name of suffering Christ is she doing here?” he demanded of Hook. “Jesus Christ on the cross, are you turd-witted? Can’t be without your woman for a goddamned minute?”

“It was not Nick!” Melisande called defiantly. She was holding the crossbow, though she had not shot with it. “It was not Nick,” she said again, “and he did tell me to go away.”

Sir John’s courtesy toward women overcame his anger. He grunted what might have been an apology, and then Melisande was explaining herself, talking in fast French, gesturing toward the camp, and as she spoke Sir John’s face showed a renewed anger. He turned on Hook. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what, Sir John?”

“That a bastard priest has threatened her?”

“I fight my own battles,” Hook said sullenly.

“No!” Sir John thrust a gauntleted hand to strike Hook’s shoulder. “You fight my battles, Hook,” he punched Hook’s shoulder again, “that’s what I pay you for. But if you fight mine, then I fight yours, you understand? We are a company!” Sir John shouted the last four words so loudly that men fifty yards down the trench turned to watch him. “We are a company! No one threatens any one of us without threatening all of us! Your girl should be able to walk naked through the whole army and not a man will dare touch her because she belongs to us! She belongs to our company! By Christ I’ll kill the holy bastard for this! I’ll rip the spine out of his goddam throat and feed his shriveled prick to the dogs! No one threatens us, no one!”

Sir John, with his real enemies safely back behind their smoke-rimmed ramparts, was looking for a fight. And Hook had just given him one.

Hook watched as Melisande spooned honey into Father Christopher’s mouth. The priest was sitting, his back supported by a barrel that had come from England filled with smoked herrings. He was skeletally thin, his face was pale and tired and he was plainly as weak as a fledgling, but he was alive.

“Cobbett’s dead,” Hook said, “and Robert Fletcher.”

“Poor Robert,” Father Christopher said, “how’s his brother?”

“Still alive,” Hook said, “but he’s sick.”

“Who else?”

“Pearson’s dead, Hull is, Borrow and John Taylor.”

“God have mercy on them all,” the priest said and made the sign of the cross. “The men-at-arms?”

“John Gaffney, Peter Dance, Sir Thomas Peters,” Hook said, “all dead.”

“God has turned His face from us,” Father Christopher said bleakly. “Does your saint still speak to you?”

“Not now,” Hook admitted.

Father Christopher sighed. He closed his eyes momentarily. “We have sinned,” he said grimly.

“We were told God was on our side,” Hook said stubbornly.

“We believed that,” the priest said, “we surely believed that, and we came here with that assurance in our hearts, but the French will believe the same thing. And now God is revealing Himself. We should not have come here.”

“You should not,” Melisande said firmly.

“Harfleur will fall,” Hook insisted.

“It probably will,” Father Christopher allowed, then paused as Melisande wiped a trickle of honey from his chin. “If the French don’t march to its relief? Yes, it will fall eventually, but what then? How much of the army is left?”

“Enough,” Hook said.

Father Christopher offered a tired smile. “Enough to do what? To march on Rouen and make another siege? To capture Paris? We’ll scarce be able to defend ourselves if the French do come here! So what will we do? We’ll go into Harfleur and remake its walls, and then sail home. We’ve failed, Hook. We’ve failed.”

Hook sat in silence. One of the remaining English cannons fired, the sound flat and lingering in the warm air. Somewhere in the camp a man sang. “We can’t just go home,” he said after a while.

“We can,” Father Christopher said, “and we most certainly will. All this money for nothing! For Harfleur, maybe. And what will it cost to rebuild those walls?” He shrugged.

“Maybe we should abandon the siege,” Hook suggested morosely.

The priest shook his head. “Henry will never do that. He has to win! That way he proves God’s favor, and besides, abandoning the siege makes him look weak.” He was silent for a while, then frowned. “His father took the throne by force, and Henry fears others might do the same if he shows weakness.”

“Eat, don’t talk,” Melisande said briskly.

“I’ve eaten enough, my dear,” Father Christopher said.

“You should eat more.”

“I will. This evening. Merci.”

“God’s sparing you, father,” Hook said.

“Perhaps He doesn’t want me in heaven?” Father Christopher suggested with a wan smile, “or perhaps He is giving me time to become a better priest.”

“You are a good priest,” Hook said warmly.

“I shall tell Saint Peter that when he asks if I deserve to be in heaven. Ask Nick Hook, I shall say. And Saint Peter will ask me, who is Nick Hook? Oh, I shall say, he’s a thief, a rogue, and probably a murderer, but ask him anyway.”

Hook grinned. “I’m honest now, father.”

“Thou art not far from the kingdom of heaven, young Hook, but let us hope it’s many a long day before we meet there. And at least we’ll be spared Sir Martin’s company.”

Melisande sneered. “He is a coward. Un poltron!”

“Most men are cowards when they meet Sir John,” Father Christopher said mildly.

“He had nothing to say!” Melisande said.

Sir John had gone to the shelters where Lord Slayton’s men were camped. He had taken Hook and Melisande with him, and he had bellowed that any man who wished to kill Hook could do so right there and then. “Come and take his woman,” Sir John had shouted. “Who wants her?”

Lord Slayton’s archers, his men-at-arms, and his camp followers had been cleaning armor, preparing food, or just resting, but all had turned to watch the show. They watched in silence.

“Come and take her!” Sir John shouted. “She’s yours! You can take turns like dogs rutting a bitch! Come on! She’s a pretty thing! You want to hump her? She’s yours!” He waited, but not one of Lord Slayton’s men moved. Then Sir John had pointed at Hook. “You can all have her! But first you have to kill my ventenar!”

Still no one moved. No one even met Sir John’s eyes.

“Which man is being paid to kill you?” Sir John had asked Hook.

“That one,” Hook said, pointing at Tom Perrill.

“Then come here,” Sir John had invited Perrill, “come and kill him. I’ll give you his woman if you do.” Perrill had not moved. He was half hiding behind William Snoball who, as Lord Slayton’s steward, had some small authority, but Snoball dared not confront Sir John Cornewaille. “There is just one thing,” Sir John had added, “which is that you have to kill both Hook and me before you get the woman. So come on! Fight me first!” He had drawn his sword and waited.

No one had moved, no one had spoken. Sir Martin had been watching from behind some men-at-arms. “Is that the priest?” Sir John had demanded of Hook.

“That’s him.”

“My name is John Cornewaille,” Sir John had shouted, “and some of you know who I am. And Hook is my man. He is my man! He is under my protection, as is this girl!” He had put his free arm around Melisande’s shoulders, then pointed his sword blade at Sir Martin. “You, priest, come here.”

Sir Martin had not moved.

“You can come here,” Sir John said, “or I can come and fetch you.”

Sir Martin, long face twitching, had sidled away from the protective men-at-arms. He looked around as if seeking a place to run, but Sir John had snarled at him to come closer and he had obeyed. “He’s a priest!” Sir John had called, “so he’s a witness to this oath. I swear by this sword and by the bones of Saint Credan, that if a hair of Hook’s head is touched, if he is attacked, if he is wounded, if he is killed, then I shall find you and I shall kill you.”

Sir Martin had been peering at Sir John as though he were a curious specimen in a fairground display; a five-legged cow, perhaps, or a woman with a beard. Now, still with a puzzled expression, the priest raised both hands to heaven. “Forgive him, Lord, forgive him!” he called.

“Priest,” Sir John began.

“Knight!” Sir Martin had retorted with surprising force. “The devil rides one horse and Christ the other. You know what that means?”

“I know what this means,” Sir John had held his sword blade toward the priest’s throat, “it means that if one of you cabbage-shitting rat-humping turds touches Hook or his woman then he will have to reckon with me. And I will tear your farting bowels out of your putrid arses with my bare hands, I will make you die screaming, I will send your shit-ridden souls to hell, I will kill you!”

Silence. Sir John had sheathed his sword, the hilt thumping loud onto the scabbard’s throat. He stared at Sir Martin, daring the priest to challenge him, but Sir Martin had drifted away into one of his reveries. “Let’s go,” Sir John had said and, when they were out of earshot of the shelters, he had laughed. “That’s settled that.”

“Thank you,” Melisande had said, her relief obvious.

“Thank me? I enjoyed that, lass.”

“He probably did enjoy it,” Father Christopher said when the tale was told to him, “but he’d have enjoyed it more if one of them had offered a fight. He does love a fight.”

“Who’s Saint Credan?” Hook asked.

“He was a Saxon,” Father Christopher said, “and when the Normans came they reckoned he shouldn’t be a saint at all because he was a Saxon peasant like you, Hook, so they burned his bones, but the bones turned to gold. Sir John likes him, I have no idea why.” He frowned. “He’s not as simple as he likes to pretend.”

“He’s a good man,” Hook said.

“He probably is,” Father Christopher agreed, “but don’t let him hear you say that.”

“And you’re recovering, father.”

“Thanks to God and to your woman, Hook, yes, I am.” The priest reached out and took Melisande’s hand. “And it’s time you made an honest woman of her, Hook.”

“I am honest,” Melisande said.

“Then it’s time you tamed Master Hook,” Father Christopher said. Melisande looked at Hook and for a moment her face betrayed nothing, then she nodded. “Maybe that’s why God spared me,” Father Christopher said, “to marry the two of you. We shall do the deed, young Hook, before we leave France.”

And it seemed that must be soon because Harfleur stood undefeated, the army of England was dying of disease, and the year was inexorably passing. It was already September. In a few weeks the autumn rains would come, and the cold would come, and the harvest would be safely gathered behind fortress walls, and so the campaign season would end. Time was running out.

England had gone to war. And she was losing.

That evening Thomas Evelgold tossed a big sack to Hook. Hook jerked aside, thinking the sack would flatten him, but it was surprisingly light and merely rolled off his shoulder. “Tow,” Evelgold said in explanation.

“Tow?”

“Tow,” Evelgold said, “for fire arrows. One sheaf of arrows for each archer. Sir John wants it done by midnight, and we’re to be down in the trench before dawn. Belly’s boiling pitch for us.” Belly was Andrew Belcher, Sir John’s steward who supervised the kitchen servants and sumpters. “Have you ever made a fire arrow?” Evelgold asked.

“Never,” Hook confessed.

“Use the broadheads, tie a fistful of tow up by the head, dip it in pitch and aim high. We need two dozen apiece.” Evelgold carried more sacks to the other groups while Hook pulled out handfuls of the greasy tow, which was simply clumps of unwashed fleece straight off the sheep’s back. A flea jumped from the wool and vanished up his sleeve.

He divided the tow into seventeen equal sections and each of his archers divided their share into twenty-four, one lump of fleece for each arrow. Hook cut up some spare bowstrings and his men used the lengths of cord to bind the bouquets of dirty wool to the arrowheads, then they lined up by Belly’s cauldron to dip the tow into the boiling pitch. They propped the arrows upright against tree stumps or barrels to let the sticky pitch solidify. “What’s happening in the dawn?” Hook asked Evelgold.

“The French kicked our arses this morning,” Evelgold said grimly, “so we have to kick theirs tomorrow morning.” He shrugged as if he did not expect to achieve much. “You lose any more men today?”

“Cobbett and Fletch. Matson can’t last long.”

Evelgold swore. “Good men,” he said grimly, “and dying, for what?” He spat toward a campfire. “When the pitch is dry,” he went on, “tease it out a bit. It lets it catch the fire easier.”

The camp was restless all night. Men were carrying faggots to the forward trench nearest to the enemy’s barbican. The faggots were great bundles of wood, bound with rope, and the sight of them made it clear enough what was intended at dawn. A flooded ditch protected the barbican and it would need to be filled if men were to cross and assault the battered fortress.

Sir John’s men-at-arms were ordered to put on full armor. Thirty men-at-arms had sailed from Southampton Water on the day the swans had flown low through the fleet to signify good fortune, but only nineteen were now fit to serve. Six had died, the other five were vomiting and shitting and shivering. The fit men-at-arms were being helped by squires and pages who buckled plates of armor over padded leather jerkins that had been wiped with grease so the shrouding metal would move easily. Sword belts were strapped over jupons, though most men-at-arms chose to carry poleaxes or shortened lances. A priest from Sir William Porter’s household heard confessions and gave blessings. Sir William was Sir John’s closest friend and also his brother-in-arms, which meant they fought side by side and had sworn to protect each other, to ransom each other if, by misfortune, either were taken prisoner, and to protect the other man’s widow if either were to die. Sir William was a studious-looking man, thin-faced and pale-eyed. His hair, before he hid it with a snout-visored helm, was thinning. He seemed out of place in armor, as though his natural home was a library or perhaps a courtroom, but he was Sir John’s chosen battle companion and that spoke volumes about his courage. He adjusted his helmet and pushed up the visor before nodding a nervous greeting to Sir John’s archers.

Those archers were armored and armed. Most men, like Hook, wore a padded haubergeon sewn with metal plates over a mail coat. They had helmets and a few had aventails, the hood of mail that was worn beneath the helmet and fell across the shoulders. Their bow arms were protected by bracers, they wore swords and carried three arrow bags, two of which contained the tow-headed fire arrows. Some chose to carry an ax as well as a bow, but most, like Hook, preferred the poleax. All the men, whether lords, knights, men-at-arms, or archers, wore the red cross of Saint George on their jupons.

“God be with you,” Sir William saluted the archers, who murmured a dutiful response.

“And the devil take the French!” Sir John called as he strode from his tent. He was in a high mood, the prospect of action giving his eyes a gleam. “It’s a simple enough job this morning!” he said dismissively. “We just have to take the barbican away from the bastards! Let’s do it before breakfast!”

Melisande had given Hook a lump cut from a flitch of bacon and a piece of bread, which he ate as Sir John’s company filed downhill toward the siege-works. It was still dark. The wind was brisk and cool from the east, bringing the scent of the salt marshes to cut the cloying smell of the dead. The arrows clattered in their bags as the archers followed the winding paths. Fires glowed in the siege lines, and on the defenses of Harfleur where, Hook knew, the garrison would be repairing the damage done during the previous day. “God bless you,” a priest called as the bowmen filed past, “God be with you! God preserve you!”

The French must have sensed something evil was brewing for they used a pair of catapults to lob two light carcasses across the ramparts. The carcasses were great balls of cloth and tinder soaked in pitch and sulfur and they wheeled and sparked as they arced through the night sky, then fell in a great gout of flame that burst bright when the wicker-strapped balls landed. The firelight reflected off helmets in the English trenches and those gleams provoked the crossbowmen on the walls to start shooting. The bolts whispered overhead or thumped into the parapets. Insults were shouted from the walls, but the shouts were half-hearted, as though the garrison was tired and uncertain.

The English trench was crowded. The archers with the fire arrows were ordered to the front, and behind them more archers waited with bundles of faggots. Sir John Holland, the king’s nephew, was in charge of the attack, though again, as when he had led the scouting party ashore before the invasion, he was accompanied by his stepfather, Sir John Cornewaille. “When I give the command,” the younger Sir John said, “the archers will loose fire arrows at the barbican. We want to set it alight!”

Iron braziers had been placed every few yards along the trench. They were heaped with burning sea-coal that gave off pungent fumes.

“Drown them with fire!” Sir John Holland urged the archers, “smoke them out like rats! And when they’re blinded by smoke we fill in the ditch and take the barbican by assault!” He made it sound easy.

The remaining English guns had been loaded with stones coated with pitch. The Dutch gunners waited, their linstocks glowing. Dawn seemed to take forever. The defenders got tired of shooting crossbow bolts and their insults, with their bolts, faded away. Both sides waited. A cockerel crowed in the camp and soon a score of birds was calling. Pageboys carrying spare sheaves of arrows waited in the saps behind the trench where priests were saying mass and hearing confessions. Men took it in turns to kneel and receive the wafers along with God’s blessing. “Your sins are forgiven,” a priest murmured to Hook, who hoped it was true. He had not confessed to Robert Perrill’s murder and, as he took the host, he wondered if that deception would condemn him. He almost blurted out his guilt, but the priest was already gesturing the next man forward so Hook stood and moved away. The wafer stuck to his palate and he said a sudden, silent prayer to Saint Crispinian. Did Harfleur have a guardian saint, he wondered, and was that saint beseeching God to kill the English?

A stir in the trench made Hook turn to see the king edging through the crowded ranks. He wore full battle armor, though he had yet to pull on his helmet. His breast and back plates were covered with a surcoat on which the royal arms were blazoned bright, crossed by the red of Saint George. The king carried a broad-bladed war-ax as well as his sheathed sword. He had no shield, but nor did any other knight or man-at-arms. Their plate armor was protection enough and iron-bound shields were a relic of olden days. The king nodded companionably to the archers. “Take the barbican,” he said as he walked along the trench, “and the city must surely fall. God be with you.” He repeated the phrases as he worked his way along the trench, followed by a squire and two men-at-arms. “I shall go with you,” he said as he neared Hook. “If God wants me to rule France then He will protect us! God be with you! And keep me company, fellows, as we take back what is rightfully ours!”

“String your bows,” Sir John Holland said when the king had gone past. “Won’t be long now!” Hook braced one end of his big bow against his right foot and bent it so that he could loop the string about the upper nock.

“Shoot high with the fire arrows!” Thomas Evelgold growled. “You can’t do a full draw or you’ll scorch your hand! So shoot high! And make sure the pitch is well alight before you loose!”

The gray light seeped brighter. Hook, gazing between two gabions of the battered parapet, could see that the barbican was a wreck. Its great iron-bound timbers that had once formed such a formidable wall had been broken and driven in by gunfire, yet the enemy had patched the gaps with more timbers so that the whole outlying fort now resembled an ugly hill studded with wooden balks. The summit, which had once stood close to forty feet high, was half that now, yet it was still a formidable obstacle. The face was steep, the ditch deep, and there was room at the top for forty or fifty crossbowmen and men-at-arms. Banners hung down the ruined face, displaying saints and coats of arms. Once in a while a helmeted face would peer past a timber as the men on the ragged top watched for the expected assault.

“You start shooting your fire arrows when the guns fire!” Sir John Cornewaille reminded his men. “That’s the signal!

Shoot steadily! If you see a man trying to extinguish the fires, kill the bastard!”

The coals in the nearest brazier shifted, provoking a spurt of light and a galaxy of sparks. A page crouched beside the iron basket with a handful of kindling that he would pile on the coals to make the flames to light the pitch-soaked arrows. Gulls wheeled and flocked above the salt marsh where the bodies of the dead were thrown into the tidal creeks. The gulls of Normandy were getting fat on English dead. The wafer was still stuck in Hook’s dry mouth.

“Any moment now,” Sir William Porter said as though that would be a comfort to the waiting men.

There was a creaking sound and Hook looked to his left to see men turning the windlass that lifted the tilting screen in front of the nearest gun. The French saw it too and a springolt bolt whipped from the ramparts to thump into the lifting screen. A gunner pulled a gabion away from the cannon’s black mouth.

And the gun fired.

The pitch that coated the stone had caught fire from the powder’s explosion so that the gun-stone looked like a sear of dull light as it whipped from the smoke to flash across the broken ground and crash into the barbican.

“Now!” Sir John Holland called and the page piled the kindling onto the coals so that bright flames burst from the brazier. “Don’t let the arrows touch each other,” Evelgold advised as the archers held the first missiles in the newly roused fire. More guns fired. A timber on the barbican shattered and a spill of earth scumbled down the steep face. Hook waited till his pitch bouquet was well alight, then placed the arrow on the string. He feared the ash shaft would burn through, so he hauled fast, winced as the flames burned his left hand, aimed high and released quickly. Other fire arrows were already arcing toward the barbican, their flight slow and awkward. His own arrow leaped off the string and trailed sparks as it fluttered. It fell short. Other arrows were thumping into the splintered timbers of the barbican. The cannon smoke drifted like a screen between the archers and their target.

“Keep shooting,” Sir John Holland called.

Hook took the rag he used to wax his bow from a pouch and wrapped it about his left hand to protect himself from the flames. His second arrow flew true, striking one of the broken balks of wood. The burning missiles curved through the early light in showers of fire, and the barbican was already dotted with small flames as more and more arrows fell. Hook saw defenders moving on the makeshift rampart and guessed they were pouring water or earth down the barbican’s face and so he took a broadhead and shot it fast and true. Then he loosed his last fire arrow and saw that the flames were spreading and smoke was writhing from the broken barbican in a hundred places. One of the banners was alight, its linen flaring sudden and bright. He loosed three more broadheads at the ramparts, and just then a trumpet called from a few yards down the trench and the men carrying the bundled faggots pushed past him, climbed the parapet, and ran forward.

“After them!” Sir John Holland shouted, “give them arrows!”

The archers and men-at-arms scrambled from the trench. Now Hook could shoot over the heads of the men in front, aiming at the crossbowmen who suddenly crowded the barbican’s smoke-wreathed parapet. “Arrows,” he bellowed, and a page brought him a fresh bag. He was shooting instinctively now, sending bodkin after bodkin at the defenders who were little more than shadows in the thickening smoke. There were shouts from the ditch’s edge. Men were dying there, but their faggots were filling the deep hole.

“For Harry and Saint George!” Sir John Cornewaille bellowed. “Standard-bearer!”

“I’m here!” a squire, given the task of carrying Sir John’s banner, called back.

“Forward!”

The men-at-arms went with Sir John, shouting as they advanced over the uneven, broken and scorched ground. The archers came behind. The trumpet still sounded. Other men were advancing to the left and right. The bowmen who had filled the ditch had run to either side and were now shooting arrows up at the rampart. Crossbow bolts smacked into men. One of Sir John’s men opened his mouth suddenly, clutched his belly and, without a sound, doubled over and fell. Another man-at-arms, the son of an earl, had blood dripping from his helmet and a bolt sticking from his open visor. He staggered, then fell to his knees. He shook off Hook’s helping hand and, with the bolt still in his shattered face, managed to stand and run forward again.

“Shout louder, you bastards!” Sir John called, and the attackers gave a ragged cry of Saint George. “Louder!”

A gun punched rancid smoke from the town’s walls and its stone slashed diagonally across the rough ground where the attackers advanced. A man-at-arms was struck on the thigh and he spun around, blood splashing high on his jupon, and the gun-stone kept going, disemboweling a page and still it flew, blood drops trailing, to vanish somewhere over the marshes. An archer’s bow snapped at the full draw and he cursed. “Don’t give the bastards time! Kill them!” Sir John Cornewaille bellowed as he jumped down onto the faggots that filled the ditch.

And now the shouting was constant as the first attackers staggered on the uneven faggots that did not entirely fill the moat. Crossbow bolts hissed down, and the defenders added stones and lengths of timber that they hurled from the barbican’s high rampart. Two more guns fired from the town walls, belching smoke, their stones slashing harmlessly behind the attackers. Trumpets were calling in Harfleur and the crossbows were shooting from the walls. So long as the attackers were close to the barbican they were safe from the missiles loosed from the town, but some men were trying to clamber up the bastion’s eroded flanks and there they were in full sight of Harfleur’s defenders.

Hook emptied his arrow bag at the men on the barbican’s summit, then looked around for a page with more arrows, but could see none. “Horrocks,” he shouted at his youngest archer, “go and find arrows!” He saw a wounded archer, not one of his men, sitting a few paces away and he took a handful of arrows from the man’s bag and trapped one between his thumb and the bowstave. The English banners were at the foot of the barbican and most of the men-at-arms were on its lower slopes, trying to climb between the flames that burned fiercely to blind the defenders with smoke. It was like trying to scramble up the face of a crumbling bluff, but a bluff in which fires burned and smoke writhed. The French were bellowing defiance. Their best weapons now were the stones they hurled down the face and Hook saw a man-at-arms tumble back, his helmet half crushed by a boulder. The king was there, or at least his standard was bright against the smoke and Hook wondered if the king had been the man he saw falling with a crushed helmet. What would happen if the king died? But at least he was there, in the fight, and Hook felt a surge of pride that England had a fighting king and not some half-mad monarch who circled his body with straps because he believed he was made of glass.

Sir John’s banner was on the right now, joined there by the three bells on Sir William Porter’s flag. Hook shouted at his men to follow as he ran to the ditch’s edge. He jumped in, landing on the corpse of a man in plate armor. A crossbow bolt had pierced the man’s aventail, spreading blood from his ravaged throat. Someone had already stripped the body of sword and helmet. Hook negotiated the uncertain faggots and hauled himself up the far side where the smoke was thick. He loosed three arrows, then put his last one across the bowstave. The flames were growing stronger as they fed on the barbican’s broken timbers and those fires, designed to blind the defenders, were now a barrier to the attackers. Arrows hissed overhead, evidence that the pages had found more and brought them to the archers, but Hook was too committed to the attack now to go back and replenish his arrow bag. He ran to his right, dodging bodies, unaware of the crossbow bolts that struck around him. He saw Sir John precariously perched on top of some iron-bound timbers from where he stared upward at the men who taunted the attackers. One of those defenders appeared briefly and hoisted a boulder over his head, ready to hurl it down at Sir John, and Hook paused, drew, released, and his arrow caught the man in his armpit so that he turned slowly and fell back out of sight.

A gust of the east wind swirled the smoke away from the barbican’s right-hand flank and Hook saw an opening there, a cave in the half-collapsed tower that had defended the seaward side. He slung the bow and took the poleax off his shoulder. He shouted incoherently as he ran, then as he jumped up the barbican’s face and scrabbled for a foothold in the steep rubble slope. He was at the right-hand edge of the broken fort and he could see down the southern face of Harfleur where the harbor lay. Defenders on the walls could also see him, and their crossbow bolts thumped into the barbican, but Hook had rolled into the cave that was a ledge of rubble sheltered by collapsed timbers. There was scarce room to move in the space that was little more than a wild dog’s den. Now what? Hook wondered. The crossbow bolts were hissing just beyond his shallow refuge. He could hear men shouting and it seemed to Hook that the French shouted louder, evidence they believed they were winning. He leaned slightly outward trying to get a glimpse of Sir John, but just then an eddy of wind blew a great gout of smoke to shroud Hook’s aerie.

Yet just to his right, toward the face of the barbican, he saw the metal hoops that strapped three great tree trunks together, and the hoops, he thought, made a ladder upward and the smoke was hiding him and so he leaped across and clung to the timbers with his left hand while his boots found a small foothold on another of the iron rings. He reached up with the poleax and hooked it over the top ring and hauled himself up, up, and he was nearly at the top and the French had not seen him because of the smoke and because they were watching the howling mass of Englishmen who were trying to clamber up the barbican’s center where the slope was the least precipitous. Bolts, stones, and broken timbers rained down on them, while the English arrows flitted through the smoke in answer.

“Hook!” a voice roared beneath him. “Hook, you bastard! Pull me up!”

It was Sir John Cornewaille. Hook lowered the poleax, let Sir John grip the hammer head, and then hauled him across to the timbers.

“You don’t get ahead of me, Hook,” Sir John growled, “and what in Christ’s name are you doing here? You’re meant to be shooting arrows.”

“I wanted to see what was on the other side of this ruin,” Hook said. Flames crept up the timbers, getting closer to Sir John’s feet.

“You wanted to see…” Sir John began, then gave a bark of laughter. “I’m getting goddam roasted. Pull me up more.” Hook again used the poleax to lift Sir John, this time to the top of the timbers. The two of them were like flies on a broken, burning pillar, perched just below the makeshift parapet, but still unseen by the defenders. “Sweet Jesus Christ and all his piss-drinking saints, but this seems a good enough place to die,” Sir John said, and slipped the sling of his battle-ax off his shoulder. “Are you going to die with me, Hook?”

“Looks like it, Sir John.”

“Good man. Push me up first, then join me, and let’s die well, Hook, let’s die very well.”

Hook took hold of the back of Sir John’s sword belt and, when he got the nod, heaved. Sir John vanished upward, tumbled over the wall, and gave his war-shout. “Harry and Saint George!” And for Harry, Saint George, and Saint Crispinian, Hook followed.

And screamed.