“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 épaule,” 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.