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

FOUR

Nick Hook could scarce believe the world held so many ships. He first saw the fleet when Sir John’s men mustered on the shore of Southampton Water so that the king’s officers could count the company. Sir John had contracted to supply ninety archers and thirty men-at-arms and the king had agreed to pay Sir John the balance of the money owed for those men when the army embarked, but first the numbers and condition of Sir John’s company had to be approved. Hook, standing in line with his companions, gazed in awe at the fleet. There were anchored ships as far as he could see; so many ships that their hulls hid the water. Peter Goddington, the centenar, had claimed there were fifteen hundred vessels waiting to transport the army, and Hook had not believed so many ships could exist, yet there they were.

The king’s inspector, an elderly and round-faced monk with ink-stained hands, walked down the line of soldiers to make sure that Sir John had hired no cripples, boys, or old men. He was accompanied by a grim-faced knight wearing the royal coat of arms, whose task was to inspect the company’s weapons. He found nothing amiss, but nor did he expect to discover any shortcomings in Sir John Cornewaille’s preparations. “Sir John’s indenture specifies ninety archers,” the monk said reprovingly when he reached the line’s end.

“It does indeed,” Father Christopher agreed cheerfully. Sir John was in London with the king, and Father Christopher was in charge of the company’s administration during Sir John’s absence.

“Yet there are ninety-two archers!” the monk spoke with mock severity.

“Sir John will throw the two weakest overboard,” Father Christopher said.

“That will serve! That will serve!” the monk said. He glanced at his grim-faced companion, who nodded approval of what he had seen. “The money will be brought to you this afternoon,” the monk assured Father Christopher. “God bless you one and all,” he added as he mounted his horse so he could ride to where other companies were waiting for inspection. His clerks, clutching linen bags filled with parchments, scurried after him.

Hook’s ship, the Heron, was a squat, round-bottomed merchant ship with a bluff bow, a square stern, and a thick mast from which Sir John Cornewaille’s lion banner flew. Close by, and looming above the Heron, was the king’s own ship, the Trinity Royal, which was the size of an abbey and made even bigger by the towering wooden castles added to her bows and stern. The castles, which were painted red, blue, and gold and hung with royal banners, made the Trinity Royal look top heavy, like a farm wagon piled too high with harvest sheaves. Her rails had been decorated with white shields on which red crosses were painted, while aloft she flew three vast flags. At her bows, on a short mast that sprang from her jaunty bowsprit, was a red banner decorated with four white circles joined by black-lettered strips. “That flag on the bow, Hook,” Father Christopher explained, making the sign of the cross, “is the flag of the Holy Trinity.”

Hook stared, said nothing.

“You might have thought,” Father Christopher went on slyly, “that the Holy Trinity would require three flags, but modesty reigns in heaven and one suffices. You know the significance of the flag, Hook?”

“No, father.”

“Then I shall repair your ignorance. The outer circles are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost and they’re joined by strips on which are written non est. You know what non est is, Hook?”

“Is not,” Melisande said quickly.

“Oh my God, she’s as clever as she’s beautiful,” Father Christopher said happily. He gave Melisande a slow and appreciative look that started at her face and finished at her feet. She was wearing a dress of thin linen decorated with Sir John’s crest of the red lion, though the priest was hardly examining the heraldry. “So,” he said slowly, looking back up her body, “the Father is not the Son, who is not the Holy Ghost, who is not the Father, yet all those outer circles connect to the inner, which is God, and on the strips connecting to God’s circle is the word est. So the Father is God, and the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God, but they’re not each other. It’s really very simple.”

Hook frowned. “I don’t think it’s simple.”

Father Christopher grinned. “Of course it’s not simple! I don’t think anyone understands the Holy Trinity, except maybe the pope, but which pope, eh? We’ve got two of them now, and we’re only supposed to have one! Gregory non est Benedict and Benedict non est Gregory, so let’s just hope God knows which one est which. God, you’re a pretty thing, Melisande. Wasted on Hook, you are.”

Melisande made a face at the priest who laughed, kissed his fingertips, and blew the kiss to her. “Look after her, Hook,” he said.

“I do, father.”

Father Christopher managed to tear his gaze from Melisande and stare across the water at the Trinity Royal, which was being nuzzled by a dozen small launches nosing into her flank like piglets suckling on a sow. Great bundles were being slung from those smaller boats into the larger. At the Trinity Royal’s stern, on another short mast, flew the flag of England, the red cross of Saint George on its white field. Every man in Henry’s army had been given two red linen crosses, which had to be sewn on the front and back of their jupons, defacing the badge of their lord. In battle, Sir John had explained, there were too many badges, too many beasts and birds and colors, but if all the English wore one badge, Saint George’s badge, then in the chaos of killing they might recognize their own compatriots.

The Trinity Royal’s tall mast carried the largest flag, the king’s flag, the great quartered banner that twice displayed the golden leopards of England and twice the golden lilies of France. Henry claimed to be king of both countries, which was why his banner showed both, and the great fleet that filled Southampton Water would carry an army to make the banner’s boast come true. It was an army, Sir John Cornewaille had told his men the night before he left for London, like no other army that had ever sailed from England. “Our king has done it right!” he had said proudly. “We’re good!” He had grinned wolfishly. “Our lord the king has spent money! He’s pawned his royal jewels! He’s bought the best army we’ve ever had, and we’re part of it. And we’re not just any part, we’re the best part of it! We will not let our king down! God is on our side, isn’t that right, Father?”

“Oh, God detests the French,” Father Christopher had put in confidently, as though he were intimate with God’s mind.

“That’s because God is no fool,” Sir John went on, “but the Almighty knows He made a mistake when He created the French! So He’s sending us to correct it! We’re God’s army, and we’re going to gut those devil-spawned bastards!”

Fifteen hundred ships would carry twelve thousand men and at least twice that many horses across the Channel. The men were mostly English, with some Welshmen and a few score who had come from Henry’s possessions in Aquitaine. Hook could hardly imagine twelve thousand men, the number was so vast, but Father Christopher, leaning on the Heron’s rail, had repeated the cautionary note he had sounded outside the tavern before the confrontation with Sir Martin. “The French can muster triple our numbers,” he said musingly, “and maybe even more. If it comes to a fight, Hook, we’ll need your arrows.”

“They won’t fight us, though,” one of Sir John’s men-at-arms said. He had overheard the priest’s comment.

“They don’t like fighting us,” Father Christopher agreed. The priest was wearing a haubergeon and had a sword hanging at his waist. “It’s not like the good old days.”

The man-at-arms, young and round-faced, grinned. “Cr#233;cy and Poitiers?”

“That would have been grand!” Father Christopher said wistfully. “Can you imagine being at Poitiers? Capturing the French king! It won’t happen this time.”

“It won’t, father?” Hook asked.

“They’ve learned about our archers, Hook. They stay away from us. They lock themselves up in their towns and castles and wait till we get bored. We can march around France a dozen times and they won’t come out to fight, but if we can’t get into their castles, what use is marching around France?”

“Then why don’t they have archers?” Hook asked, but he already knew the answer because he was the answer himself. It had taken ten years to turn Nicholas Hook into an archer. He had started at seven years old with a small bow which his father had insisted he practice every day, and every year until his father died the bows got bigger and were strung more tightly, and the young Hook had learned to draw the bow with his full body, not just his arms. “Lay into the bow, you little bastard,” his father would say again and again, and each time strike him across the back with his big bowstave, and so Hook learned to lay into the bow and thus grew stronger and stronger. On his father’s death he had taken the big bow and practiced with that, shooting arrow after arrow at the butts in the church field. The arrowheads were sharpened on a post of the lych gate and the constant scraping had worn deep grooves in the stone. Nick Hook had poured his anger into those arrows, sometimes shooting till it was almost too dark to see. “Don’t snatch at the string,” Pearce the blacksmith had told him again and again, and Hook had learned the whispering release that let the string slip through his fingers, which hardened to thick leather pads. And as he drew and released, drew and released, year after year, the muscles of his back, his chest, and his arms grew massive. That was one requirement, the huge muscles needed to draw the bow, while the other, which was harder to acquire, was to forget the eye.

When he first started as a boy Hook would draw the cord to his cheek and look down the arrow’s length to aim, but that cheated the bow of its full power. If a bodkin was to shear through plate armor it needed all the power of the yew, and that meant drawing the cord to the ear, and then the arrow slanted across the eye, and it had taken Hook years to learn how to think his arrow to the target. He could not explain it, but no archer could. He only knew that when he drew the cord he looked at the target and the arrow flew there because he wanted it to, not because he had lined eye, arrow, and target. That was why the French had no archers other than a few huntsmen, because they had no men who had spent years learning to make a length of yew and a cord of hemp into a part of themselves.

North of the Heron, somewhere among the tangle of moored ships, a vessel burned, sending a thick plume of smoke across the summer sky. Rumor said there had been a rebellion against the king and that the rebels had planned to burn the fleet. Father Christopher had curtly acknowledged that there had indeed been some rebels, lords all of them, but they were now dead. “Beheaded,” he said. The burning ship, he thought, was probably an accident. “No one will burn the Heron,” he had reassured the archers, and no one did. Also north of the Heron was the Lady of Falmouth and she was being loaded with horses that were swum out to the ship’s side and then hoisted aboard in great leather slings. The horses rose dripping, legs dangling limp and eyes rolling white with fear, then were slowly lowered into padded stalls in the Lady of Falmouth’s hold. Hook saw his black gelding, Raker, lifted dripping from the sea, then Melisande’s small piebald mare, Dell. Men swam among the horses, deftly fixing the slings. Sir John’s great destrier, a black stallion called Lucifer, glared about him as he was lifted from the sea.

Next day Sir John Cornewaille arrived from London with the king. The French, it seemed, had sent a last embassy, but their terms had been rejected and so the fleet would sail. Sir John was rowed to the Heron in a small boat and he bellowed orders and greetings as he clambered over the side. A moment later trumpets sounded from the Trinity Royal as a barge, painted blue and gold, and with white-shafted oars, carried the king to the great ship’s side. Henry was in full plate armor, burnished and polished and scoured until it reflected the sun in white flashes of dazzling light, yet he climbed the ladder as nimbly as a ship’s cabin boy as the trumpeters in the stern castle raised their instruments and blew another fanfare. Cheers sounded from the Trinity Royal, then other ships took up the acclaim, which spread through the fleet of fifteen hundred vessels.

That afternoon, as the wind blew steady from the west, a pair of swans flew through the fleet, their wingbeats loud in the warm air. The swans flew south and Sir John, seeing them, thumped the ship’s rail and gave a cheer.

“The swan,” Father Christopher announced to the bemused archers, “is our king’s private badge! The swans are leading us to victory!”

And the king must have seen the omen for himself, because, just after the swans had beaten their way past his ship, the sail of the Trinity Royal was hauled up the mast. The sail was painted with the royal arms; red, gold, and blue. It reached halfway and the wind billowed it from its long yard, and the sound of its thrashing reached the Heron before, suddenly, it dropped again. It was the signal to leave and, one by one the ships hauled their anchors and set their sails. The wind was fair for France.

A wind to carry England to war.

No one knew where in France they were going to war. Some men suggested the fleet would go south to Aquitaine, others thought it would be Calais, and most had no idea at all. A few did not care, but just leaned over the side and retched.

The fleet sailed for two days and two nights beneath skies of small white clouds that scurried eastward and beneath stars as bright as jewels. Father Christopher told stories on board the Heron and Hook was enthralled by the tale of Jonah and the whale, and he searched the sun-glinting sea for a sight of another such monster, but he saw none. He saw only the endless ships scattered across the heaving waters like a flock released to summer pastures.

On the second dawn Hook was standing as far forward as the ship’s cramped bows permitted and he was watching the sea, hoping to find a man-swallowing fish, when Sir John silently joined him. Hook hastily knuckled his forehead and Sir John nodded companionably. Melisande was sleeping on deck, sheltered by stacks of barrels and wrapped in Hook’s cloak, and Sir John smiled toward her. “A good girl, Hook,” he said.

“Yes, Sir John.”

“And doubtless we’ll bring a score of other good French girls home! New wives. See those clouds?” Sir John was staring straight ahead to where a cloud bank lay across the horizon. “That’s Normandy, Hook.”

Hook gazed, but could see nothing beneath the clouds except the foremost ships of the fleet. “Sir John?” he asked tentatively and received an encouraging look. “What do you know about,” he paused, “the Seigneur d’Enfer,” he struggled with the French words.

“Lanferelle? Melisande’s father?” Sir John asked.

“She told you about him?” Hook asked, surprised.

“Oh, she did,” Sir John said, smiling, “indeed she did. Why do you want to know?”

“I’m curious,” Hook said.

“Worried because she’s a lord’s daughter?” Sir John asked shrewdly.

“Yes,” Hook admitted.

Sir John smiled, then pointed over the Heron’s bows. “See those small sails?” Far ahead of the English fleet was another spread of ships, far fewer and all much smaller, nothing but a scatter of tiny brown sails. “French fishermen,” Sir John said grimly, “taking news of us to their home ports. Let’s pray the bastards won’t guess where we’re coming ashore, because that’s their chance to kill us, Hook! As we go ashore. They know we’re coming! And all they need do is have two hundred men-at-arms waiting on the beach and we’ll never manage a landing.”

Hook watched the tiny sails that did not appear to be moving against the sea’s immensity. The western sky was still dark, the east was glowing. He wondered how the sailors of the English fleet knew where they were going. He wondered whether Saint Crispinian would ever speak to him again.

“There,” Sir John said softly. It seemed he had decided to ignore Hook’s question about the Sire of Lanferelle and was instead pointing straight ahead.

And there it was. The coast of Normandy. It was nothing but a shadowed speck for now, a scrap of dark solidity where the clouds and the sea met.

“I talked to Lord Slayton,” Sir John said. Hook stayed silent. “He can’t travel to France, of course, not crippled as he is, but he was in London to wish the king well. He says you’re a good man in a fight.”

Hook said nothing. The only fights that Lord Slayton would have known about were tavern brawls. They could be murderous, but it was not the same as battle.

“Lord Slayton was a good fighter too,” Sir John said, “before he got wounded in the back. He was a bit slow on the down-stroke parry, I remember. It’s always dangerous to raise a sword above your shoulder, Hook.”

“Yes, Sir John,” Hook said dutifully.

“And he did declare you outlawed,” Sir John went on, “but that doesn’t matter now. You’re going to France, Hook, and you’re no outlaw there. Whatever crimes you’re accused of in England don’t count in France, and even that doesn’t matter because you’re my man now.”

“Yes, Sir John,” Hook said again.

“You’re my man,” Sir John said firmly, “and Lord Slayton agreed that you are. But you’ve still got a quarrel. That priest wants you dead, and Lord Slayton said there were others who’d happily fillet you.”

Hook thought of the Perrill brothers. “There are,” he admitted.

“And Lord Slayton told me other things about you,” Sir John went on. “He said you’re a murderer, a thief, and a liar.”

Hook felt the old flare of anger, but it died instantly like the spume of the waves. “I was those things,” he said defensively.

“And that you’re competent,” Sir John said, “and what you are, Hook, is what le Seigneur d’Enfer is. Ghillebert, Lord of Lanferelle, is competent. He’s a rogue, and he’s also charming, clever and sly. He speaks English!” He said the last three words as though that were a very strange accomplishment. “He was taken prisoner in Aquitaine,” he explained, “and held in Suffolk till his ransom was paid. That took three years. He was released ten years ago and I dare say there are plenty of small children with his long nose growing up in Suffolk. He’s the only man I never beat in a tournament.”

“They say you never lost!” Hook said fiercely.

“He didn’t beat me either,” Sir John said, smiling. “We fought till we had no strength to fight more. I told you, he’s good. I did put him down, though.”

“You did?” Hook asked, intrigued.

“I think he slipped. So I stepped back and gave him time to get up.”

“Why?” Hook asked.

Sir John laughed. “In a tournament, Hook, you must display chivalry. Good manners are as important as fighting in a tournament, but not in battle. So if you see Lanferelle in battle, leave him to me.”

“Or to an arrow,” Hook said.

“He can afford the best armor, Hook. He’ll have Milanese plate and your arrow will like as not get blunted. Then he’ll kill you without even knowing he fought you. Leave him to me.”

Hook heard something close to admiration in Sir John’s tone. “You like him?”

Sir John nodded. “I like him, but that won’t stop me killing him. And as for him being Melisande’s father, so what? He must have littered half France with his bastards. My bastards aren’t lords, Hook, and nor are his.”

Hook nodded, frowning. “At Soissons,” he began, and paused.

“Go on.”

“He just watched as archers were tortured!” Hook said indignantly.

Sir John leaned on the rail. “We talk about chivalry, Hook, we’re even chivalrous! We salute our enemies, we take their surrenders gallantly, we dress our hostility in silks and fine linen, we are the chivalry of Christendom.” He spoke wryly, then turned his extraordinarily bright blue eyes on Hook. “But in battle, Hook, it’s blood and anger and savagery and killing. God hides His face in battle.”

“This was after the battle,” Hook said.

“Battle anger is like being drunk. It doesn’t go away quickly. Your girl’s father is an enemy, an enemy of charm, but he’s as dangerous as I am.” Sir John grinned and lightly punched Hook’s shoulder. “Leave him to me, Hook. I’ll kill him. I’ll hang his skull in my hall.”

The sun rose in splendor and the shadows fled and the coast of Normandy grew to reveal a line of white cliffs topped with green. All day the fleet beat southward, helped by a shift of wind that flicked the tops of the waves white and filled the sails. Sir John was impatient. He spent the day staring at the distant coast and insisting that the shipmaster get closer.

“Rocks, my lord,” the shipmaster said laconically.

“No rocks here! Get closer! Get closer!” He was looking for some evidence that the enemy was tracking the fleet from the clifftops, but there was no sign of horsemen riding south to keep pace with the fleet’s slow progress. Fishing boats still scattered ahead of the English ships that, one by one, rounded a vast headland of white chalk and entered a bay where they turned into the wind and anchored.

The bay was wide and not well sheltered. The big waves heaved from the west to roll the Heron and make her snub at her anchor. The shore was close here, scarce two bowshots distant, but there was little to be seen other than a beach where the waves broke white, a stretch of marsh and a steep thick-wooded hill behind. Someone said they were in the mouth of the Seine, a river that ran deep into France, but Hook could see no sign of any river. Far off to the south was another shore, too distant to be seen clearly. More ships, the laggards, rounded the great headland and gradually the bay became thick with the anchored vessels.

“Normandie,” Melisande said, staring at the land.

“France,” Hook said.

“Normandie,” Melisande insisted, as though the distinction were important.

Hook was watching the trees, wondering when a French force would appear there. It seemed clear that the English army was going to land in this bay, which was little more than a shingled cove, so why were the French not trying to stop the invasion on the beach? Yet no men or horses showed at the treeline. A hawk spiraled up the face of the hill and gulls wheeled over the breaking waves. Hook saw Sir John being rowed in a small boat to the Trinity Royal where sailors were busy decorating the rails with the white shields painted with the cross of Saint George. Other boats were converging on the king’s ship, carrying the great lords to a council of war.

“What will happen to us?” Melisande asked.

“I don’t know,” Hook admitted, but nor did he care much. He was going to war in a company he had come to love, and he had Melisande, whom he loved, though he wondered if she would leave him now she was back in her own country. “You’re going home,” he said, wanting her to deny it.

For a long time she said nothing, just gazed at the trees and beach and marsh. “Maman was home,” she said finally. “I do not know where home is now.”

“With me,” Hook said awkwardly.

“Home is where you feel safe,” Melisande said. Her eyes were gray as the heron that glided above the shingle to land in the low ground beyond. Pages were kneeling on the Heron’s deck where they scoured the men-at-arms’ plate armor. Each piece was scrubbed with sand and vinegar to burnish the steel to a rustless shine, then wiped with lanolin. Peter Goddington ordered a pot of beeswax opened and the archers smeared woolen cloths with the wax and rubbed it into their bowstaves.

“Was your mother cruel to you?” Hook asked Melisande as he waxed the huge bow.

“Cruel?” she seemed puzzled. “Why would she be cruel?”

“Some mothers are,” Hook said, thinking of his grandmother.

“She was lovely,” Melisande said.

“My father was cruel,” he said.

“Then you must not be,” Melisande said. She frowned, evidently thinking.

“What?”

She shrugged. “When I went to the nunnery? Before?” She stopped.

“Go on,” Hook said.

“My father? He called me to him. I was thirteen? Perhaps fourteen?” She had lowered her voice. “He made me take off all my clothes,” she stared at Hook as she spoke, “and I stood there for him, nue. He walked around me and he said no man could have me.” She paused. “I thought he was going to…”

“But he didn’t?”

“No,” she said quickly. “He stroked my #233;paule,” she hesitated, finding the English word, “shoulder. He was, how do you say? Frissonnant?” she held out her hands and shook them.

“Shivering?” Hook suggested.

She nodded abruptly. “Then he sent me away to the nuns. I begged him not to. I said I hated the sisters, but he said I must pray for him. That was my duty, to work hard and to pray for him.”

“And did you?”

“Every day,” she said, “and I prayed he would come for me, but he never did.”

The sun was sinking when Sir John returned to the Heron. There was still no sign of any French soldiers on the shore, but the trees beyond the beach could have hidden an army. Smoke rose from the hill to the east of the cove, evidence that someone was on that height, but who or how many was impossible to say. Sir John clambered aboard and walked around the deck, sometimes thrusting a finger at a man-at-arms or archer. He pointed at Hook. “You,” he said, then walked on. “Everyone I pointed to,” he turned and shouted, “will be going ashore with me. We go tonight! After dark. The rest of you? Be ready at dawn. If we’re still alive you’ll join us. And those of you going ashore? Armor! Weapons! We’re not going to dance with the bastards! We’re going to kill them!”

That night there was a three-quarters moon silvering the sea. The shadows on land were black and stark as Hook dressed for war. He had his long boots, leather breeches, a leather jerkin, a mail coat, and a helmet. He wore his archer’s horn bracer on his left forearm, not so much to protect his arm against the string’s lash because the mail would do that, but rather to stop the string fraying on the armor’s links. He had a short sword hanging from his belt, a poleax slung on his back, and a linen arrow bag at his right side with the feathers of twenty-four arrows poking from the opening. Five men-at-arms and twelve archers were going ashore with Sir John and they all climbed down into an open boat that sailors rowed toward the surf. Other boats from other ships were also heading for the shore. No one spoke, though now and then a voice called soft from an anchored ship, wishing them luck. If the French were in the trees, Hook thought, then they would see the boats coming. Maybe even now the French were drawing swords and winding the thick strings of their steel-shafted crossbows.

The boat began to heave in short sharp lurches as the waves steepened near the shore. The sound of the surf became louder and more ominous. The sailors were digging their blades deep in the water, trying to outrace the curling, breaking waves, but suddenly the boat seemed to surge ahead and the sea was moonlit white, shattered and violent all about them, and then the boat dropped like a stone and there was a scraping sound as its keel dragged on the shingle. The boat slewed around and the water seethed about the hull before being sucked back to sea. “Out!” Sir John hissed, “out!”

Other boats slammed into the beach and men leaped out and trudged up the shingle bank with drawn swords. They gathered above the thick line of weed and driftwood that marked the high tide line. Huge boulders littered the beach, their moon-shadowed sides black. Hook had expected Sir John to be in charge of this first landing, but instead it was a much younger man who waited till all the boats had discharged their passengers. The sailors shoved their launches off the beach and held them just beyond the breaking waves. If the French were waiting and awake then the boats could come to pick up the landing party, but Hook doubted many would escape. There would be blood in the sucking shingle instead. “We stay together,” the young man said in a low voice, “archers to the right!”

“You heard Sir John!” Sir John Cornewaille hissed. The young man was Sir John Holland, nephew to the king and Sir John Cornewaille’s stepson. “Goddington?”

“Sir John?”

“Take your archers far enough out to give us flanking cover!”

It seemed the older Sir John was really in charge, merely yielding the appearance of command to his stepson. “Forward!” the younger Sir John called, and the line of men, forty men-at-arms on the left and forty archers on the right, advanced farther up the beach.

To find defenses.

At first Hook thought he was approaching a great ridge of earth at the top of the shingle, but as he drew closer he saw that the ridge was man-made and had a ditch in front of it. It was a bank thrown up to serve as a rampart, and not only was it ditched, but there were bastions jutting out onto the shingle from which crossbowmen could shoot into the flanks of any attacker advancing up the beach. The ramparts, which had hardly been eroded by wind or rain, stretched the width of the cove and Hook imagined how hard it would be to fight up their front with men-at-arms hacking down from the summit and crossbow bolts slashing from the sides, but all he could do was imagine, because the rampart, that must have taken days to make, was entirely deserted.

“Been busy little farts, haven’t they?” Sir John Cornewaille remarked caustically. He kicked the rampart’s summit. “What’s the point of making defenses and then abandoning them?”

“They knew we’d land here?” Sir John Holland suggested cautiously.

“Then why aren’t they here to greet us?” Sir John asked. “They probably built ramparts like these on every beach in Normandy! Bastards are pissing in their breeches and digging walls. Archers! You can all whistle, can’t you?”

The archers said nothing. Most were too surprised by the question to make any response.

“You can all whistle?” Sir John asked again. “Good! And you all know the tune of ‘Robin Hood’s Lament’?”

Every archer knew that tune. It would have been astonishing had they not, for Robin Hood was the archers’ hero, the bowman who had stood up against the lords and princes and sheriffs of England. “Right!” Sir John announced. “We’re going up the hill! Men-at-arms on the track and archers into the woods! Explore to the top of the hill! If you hear or see someone then come and find me! But whistle ‘Robin Hood’s Lament’ so I know it’s an Englishman coming and not some prick-sucking Frenchman! Let’s go!”

Before they could climb the hill they needed to cross a sullen stretch of moon-glossed marsh that lay behind the beach’s thick bank of earth and shingle. There was a path of sorts that doglegged its way over the swampy ground, but Sir John Cornewaille insisted the archers spread either side of the track so that, if an ambush was sprung, they could shoot their arrows in from the flanks. Peter Goddington cursed as he waded between the tussocks. “He’ll have us killed,” he grumbled as newly woken birds screeched up from the marsh, their sudden wingbeats loud in the night. The surf fell and sucked on the beach.

The marsh was a bowshot wide, a little more than two hundred paces. Hook could shoot further, but so could every crossbowman in France and, as he splashed toward the dark woods that grew almost to the marsh’s edge, he watched the black shadows in fear of a sudden noise that would betray the release of a bolt. The French had known the English were coming. They would have had spies counting the shipping in Southampton Water and the fishermen would have brought news that the great fleet was off the coast. And the French had taken the trouble to defend even this small cove with an elaborate earthwork, so why were they not manning it? Because, Hook thought, they were waiting in the woods. Because they wanted to kill this advance party as it crossed the marsh.

“Hook! Tom and Matt! Dale! Go right!” Goddington waved the four men toward the eastern side of the marsh. “Head on up the hill!”

Hook splashed off to his right, followed by the twins and by William of the Dale. Behind them the men-at-arms were grouped on the track. Every man, whether lord or archer, was wearing the badge of Saint George on his surcoat. The legs of the men-at-arms were cased in plate armor that reflected the moon white and bright, while their drawn swords looked like streaks of purest silver. No crossbow bolts flew from the woods. If the French were waiting then they must be higher up the slope.

Hook climbed a short bank of crumbling earth at the marsh’s northern edge. He turned to see the fleet on the moon-glittered sea, its few lanterns dull red and its masts a forest. The stars were brilliant. He turned back to the wood’s edge that was black as the pit. “Bows are no good in the trees,” he told his companions. He unstrung the stave and slipped it into the horsehide case that had been folded and tucked in his belt. Leave a bow strung too long and it followed the cord to become permanently curved and so lost its power. It was better to store the stave straight and so he slung the case’s leather loop over his shoulder and drew his short sword. His three companions did the same and then followed Hook into the trees.

No Frenchman waited. No sudden sword blow greeted Hook, no crossbow bolt whipped from the dark. There was nothing but the sound of the sea and the blackness under the leaves and the small sounds of a wood at night.

Hook was at home in the trees, even among these foreign trees. Thomas and Matthew Scarlet were fuller’s sons, reared to a mill where great water-driven beams thumped clay into cloth to release the wool’s grease. William of the Dale was a carpenter, but Hook was a forester and a huntsman and he instinctively took the lead. He could hear men off to his left and, not wanting them to mistake him for a Frenchman, headed further to his right. He could smell a boar, and remembered a winter dawn when he had put five man-killing arrows into a great tusked male that had still charged him, arrows clattering in its side, anger fierce in its small eyes, and Hook had only escaped by scrambling up an oak. The boar had died eventually, its hooves stirring the blood-soaked leaf mold as its life drained away.

“Where are we going?” Thomas Scarlet asked.

“Top of the hill,” Hook answered curtly.

“What do we do there?”

“We wait,” Hook said. He did not know the answer. He could smell woodsmoke now, the pungent scent betraying that folk were nearby. He wondered if there was a charcoal-making camp in the woods because that would explain the smell, or perhaps the unseen fire warmed crossbowmen who waited for their targets to appear on the hilltop.

“We’re going to kill the turd-sucking bastards,” William of the Dale said in his uncanny imitation of Sir John. Matt Scarlet laughed.

“Quiet,” Hook said sharply, “and go faster!” If crossbowmen were waiting then it was better to move quickly rather than present an easy target, but his instincts were telling him that there was no enemy in these trees. The wood felt deserted. When he had hunted deer-poachers on Lord Slayton’s land he had always felt their presence, a knowledge that came from beyond sight, smell, or hearing; an instinct. Hook reckoned these woods were empty, yet there was still that smell of woodsmoke. Instinct could be wrong.

The slope flattened and the trees became sparser. Hook was still leading his companions to the east, anxious to stay well away from a nervous English archer. Then, suddenly, he had reached the summit and the trees ended to reveal a sunken road running along the ridge. “Bows,” he told his companions, though he did not unsheathe his own stave. He had heard something off to his left, some noise that could not have been made by any of Sir John’s men. It was the thump of a hoof.

The four archers crouched in the trees above the road. The hoofbeats sounded louder, but nothing could be seen. It was one horse, Hook thought, judging from the sound, and then, suddenly, the horse and its rider were visible, riding eastward. The rider was swathed in darkness as if he wore a cloak, but Hook could see no weapons. “Don’t shoot,” he told his companions, “he’s mine.”

Hook waited till the horseman was nearly opposite his hiding place, then leaped down the bank and snatched at the bridle. The horse slewed and reared. Hook reached up with his free hand, grasped a handful of the rider’s cloak and hauled downward. The horse whinnied, but obeyed Hook’s touch, while the rider gasped as he thumped hard onto the road. The man tried to scramble away, but Hook kicked him hard in the belly, and then Thomas, Matthew, and William were at his side, hauling the prisoner to his feet.

“He’s a monk!” William of the Dale said.

“He was riding to fetch help,” Hook said. That was a guess, but hardly a difficult surmise.

The monk began to protest, speaking too quickly for Hook to understand any of his words. He spoke loudly too. “Shut your face,” Hook said, and the monk, as if in response, began to shout his protests, so Hook hit him once and the monk’s head snapped back and blood sprang from his nose, and he went instantly quiet. He was a young man who now looked very scared.

“I told you to shut your face,” Hook said. “You three, whistle! Whistle loud!”

William, Matthew, and Thomas whistled “Robin Hood’s Lament” as Hook led the prisoner and horse back along the road that lay sunken between two tree-shrouded banks. The track curved to the left to reveal a great stone building with a tower. It looked like a church. “Une #233;glise?” he asked the monk.

“Un monast#232;re,” the monk said sullenly.

“Keep whistling,” Hook said.

“What did he say?” Tom Scarlet asked.

“He said it’s a monastery. Now whistle!”

Smoke came from a chimney of the monastery, explaining the smell that had haunted Hook as they climbed the hill. No one else from the landing party was in sight yet, but as Hook led his small party toward the building a gate opened and a wash of lantern light revealed a group of monks standing in the gateway. “Arrows on strings,” Hook said, “and keep goddam whistling, for God’s sake.”

A tall, thin, gray-haired man, robed in black, advanced down the track. “Je suis le prieur,” he announced himself.

“What did he say?” Tom Scarlet asked.

“He says he’s the prior,” Hook said, “just keep whistling.”

The prior reached out a hand as if to take the bloodied monk, but Hook turned on him and the tall man stepped hastily back. The other monks began to protest, but then more archers came from the woods and Sir John Holland and his stepfather appeared around the priory’s edge with the men-at-arms.

“Well done, Hook!” Sir John Cornewaille shouted, “got yourself a horse!”

“And a monk, Sir John,” Hook said. “He was riding for help, leastways I think he was.”

Sir John strode to Hook’s side. The prior made the sign of the cross as the men-at-arms filled the road in front of the monastery, then stepped toward Sir John and made a voluble complaint that involved frequent gestures at Hook and at the bleeding monk. Sir John tipped up the wounded man’s face to inspect the broken nose by moonlight. “They must have sent a warning of our arrival yesterday,” he said, “so this man was plainly sent to tell someone we were landing. Did you hit him, Hook?”

“Hit him, Sir John?” Hook asked, playing dumb while he thought what answer would serve him best.

“The prior says you hit him,” Sir John said accusingly.

Hook’s instinct was to lie, just as he had always lied when faced with such accusations, but he did not want to sour his service to Sir John with untruths so he nodded. “I did, Sir John,” he said.

Sir John’s face showed a hint of a smile. “That’s a pity, Hook. Our king has said he’ll hang any man who hurts a priest, a nun, or a monk. He’s very pious is our Henry, so I want you to think very carefully about your answer. Did you hit him, Hook?”

“Oh no, Sir John,” Hook said. “I wouldn’t dream of doing that.”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Sir John said, “he just tumbled out of his saddle, didn’t he? And he fell right onto his nose.” He blandly offered that explanation to the prior before pushing the bloody-nosed monk toward his brethren. “Archers,” Sir John said, turning to his men, “I want you all on the skyline, there,” he pointed eastward, “and stay on the road. I’ll take the horse, Hook.”

The archers waited on the road, which fell away in front of them before rising to another tree-covered crest. The stars were fading as the dawn smeared the east. Peter Goddington gave permission for some men to sleep as others kept watch and Hook made a bed on a mossy bank and must have slept an hour before more hoofbeats woke him. It was full light now and the sun was streaming through green leaves. A dozen horsemen were on the road, one of them Sir John Cornewaille. The horses were shivering and skittish and Hook guessed they had just been swum ashore and were still uncertain of their footing. “On to the next ridge!” Sir John shouted at the archers and Hook hastily picked up his arrow bag and cased bow. He followed the archers eastward, and the men-at-arms, in no apparent hurry, walked their horses behind.

The view from the farther ridge was astonishing. To Hook’s right the sea narrowed toward the Seine’s mouth. The river’s southern bank was all low wooded hills. To the north were more hills, but in front of Hook, glinting under the morning sun, the road fell away through woods and fields to a town and its harbor. The harbor was small, crammed with ships, and protected by the town walls that were built clear around the port, leaving only a narrow entrance leading to a slender channel that twisted to the sea. Behind the port was the town itself, all roofs and churches ringed by a great stone wall that was obscured in places by houses that had been built outside its perimeter. The houses, which spread out on all sides of the town, could not hide the great towers that studded the wall. Hook counted the towers. Twenty-four. Banners hung from the towers and from the walls in between. The archers were much too far away to see the flags, but the message of the banners was obvious: the town knew the English had landed and was proclaiming its defiance.

“Harfleur,” Sir John Cornewaille announced to the archers. “A nest of goddamned pirates! They’re villains who live there, boys! They raid our shipping, raid our coast, and we’re going to scour them out of that town like rats out of a granary!”

Hook could see more now. He could see a river looping through fields to Harfleur’s north. The river evidently ran clear through the town, entering under a great arch and flowing through the houses to empty itself in the walled harbor. But the citizens of Harfleur, warned the previous day of the coming of the English, must have dammed the archway so that the river was now flooding to spread a great lake about the town’s northern and western sides. Harfleur, under that morning sun, looked like a walled island.

A crossbow bolt seared overhead. Hook had seen the flicker of its first appearance, down and to his left, meaning that whoever had shot the bolt was in the woods north of the road. The bolt landed somewhere in the trees behind.

“Someone doesn’t like us,” one of the mounted men-at-arms said lightly.

“Anyone see where it came from?” another rider demanded sharply.

Hook and a half-dozen other archers all pointed to the same patch of dense trees and undergrowth. The road dropped in front of them, then ran level for a hundred paces to the lip of a shelf before falling again toward the flood-besieged town, and the crossbowman was somewhere on that wide wooded ledge.

“I don’t suppose he’ll go away,” Sir John Cornewaille remarked mildly.

“There may be more than one?” someone else suggested.

“Just one, I think,” Sir John said. “Hook? You want to fetch the wretched man for me?”

Hook ran to his left, plunged into the trees, then turned down the short slope. He reached the wide ledge and there went more slowly, picking his way carefully to keep from making a noise. He had strung his bow. In thick trees the bow was a dubious weapon, but he did not want to encounter a crossbowman without having an arrow on the string.

The wood was oak, ash, and a few maples. The undergrowth was hawthorn and holly, and there was mistletoe growing high in the oaks, something Hook noted for he rarely saw it sprouting from oak in England. His grandmother had valued oak mistletoe, using it in a score of medicines she had made for the villagers, and even for Lord Slayton when the ague struck him. Her chief use for the mistletoe had been the treatment of barren women for which she had pounded the small berries with mangrove root, the whole moistened with the urine of a mother. There had been a fecund woman in the village, Mary Carter, who had given birth to fifteen healthy children, and Hook had often been sent with a pot to request her urine, and once he had been beaten by his grandmother for coming back with the pot empty because she had refused to believe that Mary Carter was away from home. The next time Hook had pissed in the pot himself and his grandmother had never noticed the difference.

He was thinking about that, and wondering whether Melisande would become pregnant, when he heard the fierce, quick sound of a crossbow being shot. The noise was close. He crouched, crept forward, and suddenly saw the shooter. It was a boy, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, who was grunting slightly as he worked the crank to span his weapon. The head of the bow had a stirrup in which the boy had placed his foot, and at its butt was the socket where he had fitted the two handles that turned to wind back the cord. It was hard work and the boy was grimacing with the effort of inching the thick cord up the weapon’s stock. He was concentrating so hard that he did not notice Hook until the archer picked him up by the scruff of his coat. The boy beat at Hook, then yelped as he was slapped around the head.

“You’re a rich one, aren’t you?” Hook said. The boy’s coat, which Hook was holding by the collar, was of finely woven woolen cloth. His breeches and shoes were expensive, and his crossbow, which Hook scooped up with his right hand, looked as though it had been made specially for the boy because it was much smaller than a man’s bow. The stock was walnut and beautifully inlaid with silver and ivory chasings that depicted a deer hunt in a forest. “They’ll probably hang you, boy,” Hook said cheerfully, and walked out to the road with the boy tucked under his left arm and his own bow and the valuable crossbow held in his right. He climbed back up the hill to where grinning archers lined the ridge and mounted men-at-arms blocked the road. “Here’s the enemy, Sir John!” Hook said cheerfully, dropping the boy beside Sir John’s horse.

“A brave enemy,” a horseman said admiringly and Hook looked up to see the king. Henry was in plate armor and wore a surcoat showing his royal arms. He wore a helmet ringed with a golden crown, though his visor was lifted to reveal his long-nosed face with its deep dark pit of a scar. Hook dropped to his knees and dragged the boy down with him.

“Votre nom?” the king demanded of the boy, who did not answer, but just glared up at Henry. Hook cuffed him around the head again.

“Philippe,” the boy said sullenly.

“Philippe?” Henry asked, “just Philippe?”

“Philippe de Rouelles,” the boy answered, defiant now.

“It seems that Master Philippe is the only man in France who dares face us!” the king said loudly enough for everyone on the hilltop to hear. “He shoots two crossbow bolts at us! You try to kill your own king, boy,” Henry went on, speaking French again, “and I am king here. I am King of Normandy, King of Aquitaine, King of Picardy, and King of France. I am your king.” He swung his leg over the saddle and dropped to the grass. A squire spurred forward to take the reins of the king’s horse as Henry took two steps to stand above Philippe de Rouelles. “You tried to kill your king,” he said, and drew his sword. The blade made a hissing noise as it scraped through the scabbard’s throat. “What do you do with a boy who tries to kill a king?” Henry demanded loudly.

“You kill him, sire,” a horseman growled.

The king’s blade rose. Philippe was shaking and his eyes were tear-bright, but his face was still stubbornly defiant. Then he flinched as the blade flashed down.

It stopped an inch above his shoulder. Henry smiled. He tapped the blade once, then tapped it again on the boy’s other shoulder. “You’re a brave subject,” he said lightly. “Rise, Sir Philippe.” The horsemen laughed as Hook hauled the wide-eyed boy to his feet.

Henry was wearing a golden chain about his neck from which hung a thick ivory pendant decorated with an antelope made of jet. The antelope was another of his personal badges, though Hook, seeing the badge, neither knew what the beast was nor that it was the king’s private insignia. Henry now lifted the chain from his neck and draped it over Philippe’s head. “A keepsake of a day on which you should have died, boy,” Henry said. Philippe said nothing, but just looked from the rich gift to the man who had given it to him. “Your father is the Sire of Rouelles?” the king asked.

“Yes, lord,” Philippe said in a voice scarce more than a whisper.

“Then tell your father his rightful king has come and that his king is merciful. Now go, Sir Philippe.” Henry dropped his sword back into its black scabbard. The boy glanced at the crossbow in Hook’s hand. “No, no,” the king said, “we keep your bow. Your punishment will be whatever your father deems appropriate for its loss. Let him go,” the king ordered Hook. He appeared not to recognize the archer with whom he had spoken in the Tower.

Henry watched the boy run down the slope, then climbed back into his saddle. “The French send a lad to do their work,” he said sourly.

“And when he grows, sire,” Sir John said equally sourly, “we’ll have to kill him.”

“He is our subject,” the king said loudly, “and this is our land! These people are ours!” He stared at Harfleur for a long time. The town might be his by right, but the folk inside had a different opinion. Their gates were shut, their walls were hung with defiant banners, and their valley was flooded. Harfleur, it seemed, was determined to fight.

“Let’s get the army ashore,” Henry said.

And the fight for France had begun.

The army began to come ashore on Thursday, August fifteenth, the feast of Saint Alipius, and it took till Saturday, the feast of Saint Agapetus, until the last man, horse, gun, and cargo had been brought to the boulder-strewn beach. The horses staggered when they were swum ashore. They whinnied and cavorted, eyes white, until grooms calmed them. Archers cut a wider road up from the beach to the monastery where the king had his quarters. Henry spent hours on the beach, encouraging and chivvying the work, or else he rode to the crest where Philippe de Rouelles had tried to kill him and from there he stared eastward at Harfleur. Sir John Cornewaille’s men guarded the ridge, but no French came to drive the English back into the sea. A few horsemen rode from the town, but they stayed well out of bowshot, content to gaze at the enemy on the skyline.

The flood waters spread about Harfleur. Some of the houses built outside the walls were flooded so that only their rooftops showed above the water, but two wide stretches of dry ground remained in the base of the bowl where the town sat. The nearer stretch led to one of Harfleur’s three gates and, from his aerie high on the hill, Hook could see the enemy making the finishing touches to a huge bastion that protected that gate. The bastion was like a small castle blocking the road, so that any attack on the gate would first have to take that new and massive fortification.

On the Friday afternoon, the feast of Saint Hyacinth, Hook and a dozen men were sent to retrieve Sir John’s last horses, which were swum ashore from the Lady of Falmouth. The animals floundered on the shingle and the archers ran ropes through their bridles to keep them together. Melisande had come with Hook and she stroked the nose of Dell, her small piebald mare that had been a gift from Sir John’s wife. She murmured soothing words to the mare. “That horse don’t speak French, Melisande!” Matthew Scarlet said, “she’s an English mare!”

“She’s learning French,” Melisande said.

“Language of the devil,” William of the Dale said in his imitation of Sir John, and the other archers laughed. Matthew Scarlet, one of the twins, was leading Lucifer, Sir John’s big battle-charger, who now lunged away from him. One of Sir John’s grooms ran to help. Hook had a leading rein with eight horses attached and he pulled them toward Melisande, intending to add Dell to his string. He called her name, but Melisande was staring up the beach, frowning, and Hook looked to see where she was gazing.

A group of men-at-arms was kneeling on the stones as a priest prayed and for a moment he thought that was what had caught her eye, then he saw a second priest just beyond one of the great boulders. It was Sir Martin, and with him were the Perrill brothers, and the three men were looking at Melisande, and Hook had the impression, no more, that they had made obscene gestures. “Melisande,” he said, and she turned to him.

Sir Martin grinned. He was gazing at Hook now and he slowly lifted his right hand and folded back his fingers so that only the longest finger protruded, and then, still slowly, he slipped his left fist over that one finger and, holding his hands together, made the sign of the cross toward Hook and Melisande. “Bastard,” Hook said softly.

“Who is it?” Melisande asked.

“They’re enemies,” Hook said. The Perrill brothers were laughing.

Tom and Matthew Scarlet came to stand with Hook. “You know them?” Tom Scarlet asked.

“I know them.”

Sir Martin again made the sign of the cross before turning away in response to a shout. “He’s a priest?” Tom Scarlet asked in a tone of disbelief.

“A priest,” Hook said, “a rapist and gentry born. But he was bitten by the devil’s dog and he’s dangerous.”

“And you know him?”

“I know him,” Hook said, then turned on the twins. “You all look after Melisande,” he said fiercely.

“We do,” Matthew Scarlet said, “you know that.”

“What did he want?” Melisande asked.

“You,” Hook said, and that night he gave her the small crossbow and its bag of bolts. “Practice with it,” he said.

Next day, on the feast of Saint Agapetus, the eight great guns were hauled up from the beach. One gun, which was named the King’s Daughter, needed two wagons for its massive hooped barrel which was longer than three bowstaves and had a gaping mouth large enough to take a barrel of ale. The other cannon were smaller, but all needed teams of over twenty horses to drag them to the hilltop.

Patrols rode north, bringing back supplies and commandeering farm wagons that would carry the provisions and tents and arrows and newly felled oaks, which would be trimmed and shaped to make the catapults that would add their missiles to the shaped gun-stones that all had to be carried up the hill by yet more wagons. But, at last, the whole army and all its horses and all its supplies was ashore, and under a bright afternoon sun the cumbersome wagons were lined on the road beside the monastery and the army of England, banners flying, assembled around them. There were nine thousand archers and three thousand men-at-arms, all of them mounted, and there were pages and squires and women and servants and priests and yet more spare horses, and the flags snapped bright in the midday wind as the king, mounted on a snow-white gelding, rode along his red-crossed army. The sun glinted from the crown that surmounted his helmet. He reached the skyline above the town and he stared for a few minutes, then nodded to Sir John Holland who would have the honor of leading the vanguard. “With God’s blessing, Sir John!” the king called, “on to Harfleur!”

Trumpets sounded, drums beat, and the horsemen of England spilled over the edge of the hill. They wore the cross of Saint George and above their helmeted heads their lords’ banners were gold and red and blue and yellow and green and to anyone watching from Harfleur’s walls it must have seemed as though the hills were pouring an armored mass toward their town.

“How many people live in the town?” Melisande asked Hook. She rode beside him, and hanging by her saddle was the ivory and silver inlaid crossbow Hook had given her.

“Sir John reckons they’ve only got about a hundred soldiers in the town,” Hook said.

“Is that all?”

“But they have the townsfolk as well,” Hook said, “and there must be two thousand of them? Maybe three thousand!”

“But all these men!” Melisande said and twisted in her saddle to look at the long lines of horsemen who filled the space on either side of the road. Mounted drummers beat on their instruments, making a noise to warn the citizens of Harfleur that their rightful king was coming in wrath.

Yet Henry of England was not the only person approaching the town. Even as the English spilled down the slope toward the dry ground to Harfleur’s west, another cavalcade was riding from the east. They were a long way off, but clearly visible: a column of men-at-arms and wagons, a long line of reinforcements riding toward the ramparts. “That,” Sir John Cornewaille said, watching the distant men, “is a pity.”

“They’re bringing guns,” Peter Goddington remarked.

“As I said,” Sir John said with surprising mildness, “it is a pity.” He spurred Lucifer to the head of the column and other lords, all wanting the honor of being the first to face the defiant town, raced after him. Hook watched the riders gallop down the hill and onto the flat ground, then saw the great blossom of black smoke billow and grow from Harfleur’s wall. A few seconds later the sound of the gun punched the summer air, a flat crack that seemed to linger in the bowl of the hills in which the port was built. The gun-stone struck the meadows where the horsemen rode, ricocheted upward in a flurry of turf, then plunged harmlessly into the trees beyond.

And Harfleur was under siege.