Agincourt

by Bernard Cornwell

  “He was a…”

  “Heretic, I know. You said. But every martyr was killed because someone stronger disagreed with what he believed. Or what she believed. Christ on His cross, boy, Jesus Himself was crucified for heresy! Why the hell else do you think they nailed Him up? Did you kill women too?”

  “I didn’t,” Hook said uncomfortably.

  “But there were women?” Wilkinson asked, looking at Hook. He saw the answer in Hook’s face and grimaced. “Oh, I’m sure God was delighted with that day’s work!” The old man shook his head in disgust before reaching into a purse hanging from his belt. He took out a handful of what Hook presumed were coins and dropped them into the huge copper jar that stood by the altar to receive the tribute of pilgrims. A priest had been watching the two English archers suspiciously, but visibly relaxed when he heard the sound of metal falling onto metal in the big jar. “Arrowheads,” Wilkinson explained with a grin. “Old rusted broadheads that are no good any more. Now why don’t you kneel and say a prayer to Crispin and Crispinian?”

  Hook hesitated. God, he was sure, would have seen Wilkinson drop valueless arrowheads into the jar instead of coins, and the threat of hell’s fires suddenly seemed very close and so Hook hurriedly took a coin from his own pouch and dropped it into the copper jar. “Good lad,” Wilkinson said, “the bishop will be right glad of that. It’ll pay for a sup of his ale, won’t it?”

  “Why pray to Crispin and Crispinian?” Hook asked Wilkinson.

  “Because they’re the local saints, boy. That’s their job, to listen to prayers from Soissons, so they’re the best saints to pray to here.”

  So Hook went to his knees and prayed to Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian that they would beg forgiveness for his sin in London, and he prayed that they would keep him safe in this their town of martyrdom and send him home unscathed to England. The prayer did not feel as powerful as those he had addressed to the mother of Christ, but it made sense, he decided, to pray to the two saints because this was their town and they would surely keep a special watch on those who prayed to them in Soissons.

  “I’m done, lad,” Wilkinson announced briskly. He was pushing something into his pocket and Hook, moving to the altar’s flank, saw that the frontal’s end, where it hung down to the floor, was frayed and ragged because a great square had been crudely cut away. The old man grinned. “Silk, lad, silk. I need silk thread for arrows, so I just stole it.”

  “From God?”

  “If God can’t afford a few threads of silk, boy, then He’s in dire trouble. And you should be glad. You want to kill Frenchmen, young Hook? Pray that I have enough silk thread to tie up your arrows.”

  But Hook had no chance to pray because, next day, under the rising sun, the French came.

  The garrison had known they were coming. News had reached Soissons of the surrender of Compiègne, another town that had been captured by the Burgundians, and Soissons was now the only fortress that barred the French advance into Flanders where the main Burgundian army lay, and the French army was reported to be coming east along the Aisne.

  And then, suddenly, on a bright summer morning, they were there.

  Hook watched their arrival from the western ramparts. Horsemen came first. They wore armor and had bright surcoats, and some galloped close to the town as if daring the bowmen on the walls to shoot. Some crossbowmen loosed bolts, but no horseman or horse was hit. “Save your arrows,” Smithson, the centenar, ordered his English archers. He flicked a careless finger at Hook’s strung bow. “Don’t use it, lad,” he said. “Don’t waste an arrow.” The centenar had come from his tavern, the Goose, and now blinked at the cavorting horsemen, who were shouting inaudibly at the ramparts where men were hanging the Burgundian standard alongside the personal standard of the garrison’s commander, the Sire de Bournonville. Some townsfolk had also come to the walls and they too gazed at the newly arrived horsemen. “Look at the bastards,” Smithson grumbled, gesturing at the townsfolk, “they’d like to betray us. We should have killed every last one of them. We should have slit their goddam French throats.” He spat. “Nothing will happen for a day. Might as well drink ale while it’s still available.” He stumped away, leaving Hook and a half-dozen other English archers on the wall.

  All day the French came. Most were on foot, and those men surrounded Soissons and chopped down trees on the low hills to the south. Tents were erected on the cleared land, and beside the tents were the bright standards of the French nobility, a riot of red, blue, gold, and silver flags. Barges came up the river, propelled by giant sweeps, and the barges carried four mangonels, huge machines that could hurl rocks at the city walls. Only one of the massive catapults was brought ashore that day, and Enguerrand de Bournonville, thinking to tip it back into the river, led two hundred mounted men-at-arms on a sally from the western gate, but the French had expected the attack and sent twice as many horsemen to oppose the Burgundians. The two sides reined in, lances upright, and after a while the Burgundians wheeled back, pursued by French jeers. That afternoon smoke began to thicken as the besieging French burned the houses just outside Soissons’s walls. Hook watched the redheaded girl carry a bundle toward the new French encampment. None of the fugitives asked to be admitted to the city, instead they went toward the enemy lines. The girl turned in the thickening smoke to wave farewell to the archers. The first enemy crossbowmen appeared in that smoke, each archer protected by a companion holding a thick pavise, a shield large enough to hide a man as he laboriously re-cranked the crossbow after each bolt was loosed. The heavy bolts thumped into the walls or whistled overhead to fall somewhere in the city.

  Then, as the sun began to sink toward the monstrous catapult on the river’s bank, a trumpet sounded. It called three times, its notes clear and sharp in the smoke-hazed air, and as the last blast faded, so the crossbowmen ceased shooting. There was a sudden surge of sparks as a thatched roof collapsed into a burning house and the smoke whirled thick along the Compiègne road where Hook saw two horsemen appear.

  Neither horseman was in armor. Both men, instead, wore bright colored surcoats, and their only weapons were slender white wands that they held aloft as their horses high-stepped delicately on the rutted road. The Sire de Bournonville must have expected them because the west gate opened and the town’s commander rode out with a single companion to meet the approaching riders.

  “Heralds,” Jack Dancy said. Dancy was from Herefordshire and was a few years older than Hook. He had volunteered for service under the Burgundian flag because he had been caught stealing at home. “It was either be hanged there or be killed here,” he had told Hook one night. “What those heralds are doing,” he said now, “is telling us to surrender, and let’s hope we do.”

  “And be captured by the French?” Hook asked.

  “No, no. He’s a good fellow,” Dancy nodded at de Bournonville, “he’ll make sure we’re safe. If we surrender they’ll let us march away.”

  “Where to?”

  “Wherever they want us to be,” Dancy said vaguely.

  The heralds, who had been followed at a distance by two standard-bearers and a trumpeter, had met de Bournonville not far from the gate. Hook watched as the men bowed to each other from their saddles. This was the first time he had seen heralds, but he knew they were never to be attacked. A herald was an observer, a man who watched for his lord and reported what he saw, and an enemy’s herald was to be treated with respect. Heralds also spoke for their lords, and these men must have spoken for the King of France for one of their flags was the French royal banner, a great square of blue silk on which three gold lilies were emblazoned. The other flag was purple with a white cross and Dancy told him that was the banner of Saint Denis who was France’s patron saint, and Hook wondered whether Denis had more influence in heaven than Crispin and Crispinian. Did they argue their cases before God, he wondered, like two pleaders in a manor court? He touched the wooden cross hanging about his neck.

  The men spoke for a brief while, then bowe
d to each other again before the two royal heralds turned their gray horses and rode away. The Sire de Bournonville watched them for a moment, then wheeled his own horse. He galloped back to the city, curbing beside the dyer’s burning house from where he shouted up at the wall. He spoke French, of which Hook had learned little, but then added some words in English. “We fight! We do not give France this citadel! We fight and we will defeat them!”

  That ringing announcement was greeted by silence as Burgundian and English alike let the words die away without echoing their commander’s defiance. Dancy sighed, but said nothing, and then a crossbow bolt whirred overhead to clatter into a nearby street. De Bournonville had waited for a response from his men on the walls, but, receiving none, spurred through the gate and Hook heard the squeal of its huge hinges, the crash as the timbers closed and the heavy thump as the locking bar was dropped into its brackets.

  The sun was hazed now, shining red gold and bright through the diffusing smoke beneath which a party of enemy horsemen rode parallel to the city wall. They were men-at-arms, armored and helmeted, and one of them, mounted on a great black horse, carried a strange banner that streamed behind him. The banner bore no badge, it was simply a long pennon of the brightest red cloth, a rippling streak of silken blood made almost transparent by the vapor-wrapped sun behind, but the sight of it caused men on the wall to make the sign of the cross.

  “The oriflamme,” Dancy said quietly.

  “Oriflamme?”

  “The French war-banner,” Dancy said. He touched his middle finger to his tongue, then crossed himself again. “It means no prisoners,” he said bleakly. “It means they want to kill us all.” He fell backward.

  For a heartbeat Hook did not know what had happened, then he thought Dancy must have tripped and he instinctively held out a hand to pull him up, and it was then he saw the leather-fledged crossbow bolt jutting from Dancy’s forehead. There was very little blood. A few droplets had spattered Dancy’s face, which otherwise looked peaceful, and Hook went to one knee and stared at the thick-shafted bolt. Less than a hand’s breadth protruded, the rest was deep in the Herefordshire man’s brain and Dancy had died without a sound, except for the meat-axe noise of the bolt striking home. “Jack?” Hook asked.

  “No good talking to him, Nick,” one of the other archers said, “he’s chatting to the devil now.”

  Hook stood and turned. Later he had little memory of what happened or even why it happened. It was not as though Jack Dancy had been a close friend, for Hook had no such friends in Soissons except, perhaps, John Wilkinson. Yet there was a sudden anger in Hook. Dancy was an Englishman, and in Soissons the English felt beleaguered as much by their own side as by the enemy, and now Dancy was dead and so Hook took a varnished arrow from his white linen arrow bag that hung on his right side.

  He turned and lowered his bow so that it lay horizontally in front of him and he laid the arrow across the stave and trapped the shaft with his left thumb as he engaged the cord. He swung the long bow upright as his right hand took the arrow’s fledged end and drew it back with the cord.

  “We’re not to shoot,” one of the archers said.

  “Don’t waste an arrow!” another put in.

  The cord was at Hook’s right ear. His eyes searched the smoke-shrouded ground outside the town and he saw a crossbowman step from behind a pavise decorated with the symbol of crossed axes.

  “You can’t shoot as far as they can,” the first archer warned him.

  But Hook had learned the bow from childhood. He had strengthened himself until he could pull the cord of the largest war bows, and he had taught himself that a man did not aim with the eye, but with the mind. You saw, and then you willed the arrow, and the hands instinctively twitched to point the bow, and the crossbowman was bringing up his heavy weapon as two bolts seared the evening air close to Hook’s head.

  He was oblivious. It was like the moment in the greenwood when the deer showed for an instant between the leaves, and the arrow would fly without the archer knowing he had even loosed the string. “The skill is all between your ears, boy,” a villager had told him years before, “all between your ears. You don’t aim a bow. You think where the arrow will go, and it goes.” Hook released.

  “You goddam fool,” an archer said, and Hook watched the white goose feathers flicker in the white-hazed air and saw the arrow fall faster than a stooping hawk. Steel-tipped, silk-bound, ash-shafted, feathered death flying in the evening’s quiet.

  “Good God,” the first archer said quietly.

  The crossbowman did not die as easily as Dancy. Hook’s arrow pierced his throat and the man twisted around and the crossbow released itself so that the bolt spun crazily into the sky as the man fell backward, still twisting as he fell, then he thrashed on the ground, hands scrabbling at his throat where the pain was like liquid fire, and above him the sky was red now, a smoke-hazed blood-red sky lit by fires and glowing with the sun’s daily death.

  That, Hook, thought, had been a good arrow. Straight-shafted and properly fledged with its feathers all plucked from the same goose-wing. It had flown true. It had gone where he willed it, and he had killed a man in battle. He could, at last, call himself an archer.

  On the evening of the siege’s second day Hook thought the world had ended.

  It was an evening of warm and limpid light. The air was pale-bright and the river slid gently between its flowery banks where willows and alders grew. The French banners hung motionless above their tents. Some smoke still sifted from the burned houses to rise soft into the evening air until it faded high in the cloudless sky. Martins and swallows hunted beside the city’s wall, swooping and twisting.

  Nicholas Hook leaned on the ramparts. His unstrung bow was propped beside him as his thoughts drifted back to England, to the manor, to the fields behind the long barn where the hay would be almost ready for cutting. There would be hares in the long grass, trout in the stream, and larks in the twilight. He thought about the decaying cattle byre in the field called Shortmead, the byre with rotting thatch and a screen of honeysuckle behind which William Snoball’s young wife Nell would meet him and make silent, desperate love. He wondered who was coppicing the Three Button wood and, for the thousandth time, how the wood had got its name. The tavern in the village was called the Three Buttons and no one knew why, not even Lord Slayton, who sometimes limped on crutches beneath the tavern’s lintel and put silver on the serving hatch to buy all present an ale. Then Hook thought of the Perrills, malevolent and ever-present. He could not go home now, not ever, because he was an outlaw. The Perrills could kill him and it would not be murder, not even manslaughter, because an outlaw was beyond the law’s help. He remembered the window in the London stable, and knew God had told him to take the Lollard girl through that window, but he had failed and he thought he must be cut off from the heavenly light beyond that window forever. Sarah. He often murmured her name aloud as though the repetition could bring forgiveness.

  The evening peace vanished in noise.

  But first there was light. Dark light, Hook thought later, a stab of dark light, flame-black red light that licked like a hell-serpent’s tongue from an earthwork the French had dug close to one of their gaunt catapults. That tongue of wicked fire was visible for an instant before it was obliterated in a thunder-cloud of dense black smoke that billowed sudden, and then the noise came, an ear-punching blow of sound that shook the heavens to be followed by another crack, almost as loud, as something struck the city wall.

  The wall shook. Hook’s bow toppled and clattered onto the stones. Birds were screaming as they flew from the flame, smoke and lingering noise. The sun was gone, hidden by the black cloud, and Hook stared and was convinced, at least for a moment, that a crack had opened in the earth and that the fires of hell had vomited their way to the surface.

  “Sweet bloody Christ!” an archer said in awe.

  “Was wondering when that would happen,” another archer said in disgust. “A gun,” he explained to the
first man, “have you never seen a gun?”

  “Never.”

  “You’ll see them now,” the second man said grimly.

  Hook had never seen a gun either, and he flinched when a second one fired to add its filthy smoke to the summer sky. Next day another four cannons added their fire and the six French guns did far more damage than the four big wooden machines. The catapults were inaccurate and their jagged boulders often missed the ramparts and dropped into the city to crush houses that started burning as their kitchen fires were scattered, but the gun-stones ate steadily at the city wall, which was already in bad repair. It took only two days for the outer face of the wall to crumble into the wide fetid ditch, and then the gunners systematically widened the breach as the Burgundians countered by making a semicircular barricade behind the disintegrating wall.

  Each gun fired three times a day, their shots as regular as the bells of a monastery calling men to prayer. The Burgundians had their own gun, which had been mounted on a southern bastion in the expectation that the French would attack from the Paris road, and it took two days to drag the weapon to the western ramparts where it was slung up onto the roof of the gate-tower. Hook was fascinated by its tube, which was twice as long as his bowstave and hooped like an ale-pot. The tube and its bindings were made of dark pitted iron and rested on a squat wooden carriage. The gunners were Dutchmen who spent a long time watching the enemy guns and finally aimed their tube at one of those French cannon and then set about the laborious task of loading their machine. Gunpowder was put into the barrel with a long-handled ladle, then tamped tight with a cloth-wrapped rammer. Soft loam was added next. The loam was puddled in a wide wooden pail, rammed onto the powder, then left to dry as the gunners sat in a circle and played dice. The gun-stone, a boulder chipped into a crude ball, waited beside the tube until the chief gunner, a portly man with a forked beard, decided the loam was dry enough, and only then was the stone pushed down the long hooped barrel. A wooden wedge was shoved after it and hammered into place to keep the shaped boulder tight against the loam and powder. A priest sprinkled holy water on the gun and said a prayer as the Dutchmen used long levers to make a final small adjustment to the tube’s aim.