Harfleur
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. “Crécy 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.”