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.
FIVE
It seemed to Hook that he never stopped digging in the first few days of the siege. It was midden trenches first. “Our ma fell into a shit-pit once,” Tom Scarlet said, “she was drunk. She dropped some beads in it and then tried to fish them out with a rake.”
“They were nice beads,” Matthew Scarlet put in, “bits of old silver, weren’t they?”
“Coins,” his twin said, “which our dad found in a buried jar. He bored them through and hung them on a scrap of bowstring.”
“Which broke,” Matt said.
“So ma tried to fish them out with a rake,” Tom picked up the tale, “and fell right in, head first!”
“She got the beads back,” Matt said.
“She sobered up quick enough,” Tom Scarlet went on, “but she couldn’t stop laughing. Our dad took her down the duck pond and pushed her in. He made her take all her clothes off and then the ducks all flew away. They would, wouldn’t they? A naked woman splashing about and laughing. Whole village was laughing!”
The first thing the king had ordered was the burning of the houses outside the town’s walls so that nothing would stand between the ramparts and his guns. The job was done at night, so that the flames burst into the darkness to light the defiant banners on Harfleur’s pale walls, and all next day the smoke of the smoldering buildings lingered in the flooded bowl of hills that cradled the port and reminded Hook of the smoke that had veiled the land around Soissons.
“Of course the priest wasn’t happy,” Matthew Scarlet continued his brother’s story, “but our parish priest always was a rank piece of piss. He had our mother up in front of the manor court! Breaking the peace, he said, but his lordship gave her three shillings to buy cloth for new clothes and a kiss for being happy. He said she could go swimming in his shit any time she wanted.”
“Did she ever?” Peter Scoyle asked. Scoyle was a rarity, a bowman born and bred in London. He had been a combmaker’s apprentice and had been convicted of causing a murderous affray, but had been pardoned on condition that he served in the king’s army.
“She never did,” Tom Scarlet said, “she always said that one bath in shit was enough for a lifetime.”
“One bath is enough for any lifetime!” Father Christopher had evidently heard the twins telling their tale. “Beware of cleanliness, boys! The blessed Saint Jerome warns us that a clean body means an unclean soul, and the holy Saint Agnes was proud of never having washed in her life.”
“Melisande won’t approve,” Hook said, “she likes being clean.”
“Warn her!” Father Christopher said seriously, “the physicians all agree, Hook, that washing weakens the skin. It lets in disease!”
Then, when the pits were dug, Hook and a hundred other archers rode north up the valley of the River Lézarde and dug again, this time making a great dam across the valley. They demolished a dozen half-timbered houses in a village and used the beams to strengthen the huge earthen bank that stopped up the river. The Lézarde was small and the summer had been dry, but it still took four days of hard digging to make a barrier high enough to divert most of the river water westward. By the time Hook and his companions went back to Harfleur the flood waters had partly subsided, though the ground about the town was still waterlogged and the river itself still spilled over its banks to make a wide lake north of the town.
Next they dug pits for guns. Two cannon, one called Londoner because the citizens of London had paid for it, were already in place and their gun-stones were biting at the huge bastion the defenders had built outside the Leure Gate. The Duke of Clarence, who was the king’s brother, had marched clear around the town and his forces, which were a third of the English army, were attacking Harfleur’s eastern side. They had their own guns that had been fortuitously captured from a supply convoy making for Harfleur. The Dutch gunners, hired to defend Harfleur from its English enemies, happily took English coin and turned their cannon against the town’s defenders. Harfleur was surrounded now. No more reinforcements could reach the town unless they fought their way past the English army or sailed past the fleet of royal warships that guarded the harbor entrance.
On the day that the gun-pits were finished Hook and forty other archers climbed the hill to the west of the encampment, following the road by which the army had approached Harfleur. Huge oaks lined the nearest crest, and they were ordered to fell those trees and lop off the straightest limbs, which were to be sawn to the length of a bowstave and loaded onto wagons. The day was hot. A half-dozen archers stayed by the road with the huge two-handled saws while the rest spread along the crest. Peter Goddington marked the trees he wanted felled, and assigned a pair of archers to each. Hook and Will of the Dale were almost the farthest south, with only the Scarlet twins closer to the sea. Melisande was with Hook. Her hands were raw from washing clothes and there were still more clothes to be boiled and scrubbed back in the encampment, but Sir John’s steward had let her accompany Hook. She carried the small crossbow on her back and never left Sir John’s company without the weapon. “I will shoot that priest if he touches me,” she had told Hook, “and I’ll shoot his friends.” Hook had nodded, but said nothing. She might, he thought, shoot one of them, but the weapon took so long to reload that she had no chance of defending herself against more than one man.
The trees muffled the occasional sound of a cannon firing and dulled the crash of the gun-stones striking home on Harfleur’s walls. The axes were loud. “Why did we come so far from the camp?” Melisande asked.
“Because we’ve chopped down all the big trees that are closer,” Hook said. He was stripped to the waist, his huge muscles driving the ax deep into an oak’s trunk so that the chips flew.
“And we’re not that far away from the camp,” Will of the Dale added. He was standing back, letting Hook do the work and Hook did not
mind. He was used to wielding a forester’s ax.
Melisande spanned the crossbow. She found it hard work, but she would not let Hook or Will help her crank the twin handles. She was sweating by the time the pawl clicked to hold the cord under its full tension. She laid a bolt in the groove, then aimed at a tree no more than ten paces away. She frowned, bit her lower lip, then pulled the trigger and watched as the bolt flew a yard wide to skitter through the undergrowth beyond. “Don’t laugh,” she said before either man had any chance to laugh.
“I’m not laughing,” Hook said, grinning at Will.
“I wouldn’t dare,” Will said.
“I will learn,” Melisande said.
“You’ll learn better if you keep your eyes open,” Hook said.
“It’s hard,” she said.
“Look down the arrow,” Will advised her, “hold the bow firm and pull the trigger nice and slowly. And may God bless you when you shoot,” he added the last words in Father Christopher’s sly voice.
She nodded, then cranked the bow again. It took a long time before it clicked, then instead of shooting it she laid the weapon on the leaf mold and just watched Hook and she thought how he made felling a great oak look easy, just as he made shooting a bow seem simple.
“I’ll see if the twins need help,” Will of the Dale said, “because you don’t, Nick.”
“I don’t,” Hook agreed, “so go and help them. They’re fuller’s sons which means they’ve never done a proper day’s work in their lives.”
Will picked up his ax, his arrow bag, and his cased bow and disappeared among the southern trees. Melisande watched him go, then looked down at the cocked crossbow as though she had never seen such a thing before. “Father Christopher was talking to me,” she said quietly.
“Was he?” Hook asked. He looked up at the tree, then back to the cut he had made. “This great thing will fall in a minute,” he warned her. He went to the back side of the trunk and buried the ax in the wood. He wrenched the blade free. “So what did Father Christopher want?”
“He wanted to know if we would marry.”
“Us? Marry?” The ax chopped again and a wedge of wood came away when Hook pulled the blade back. Any moment now, he thought. He could sense the tension in the oak, the silent tearing of the timber that preceded the tree’s death. He stepped away to stand beside Melisande who was well clear of the trunk. He noticed the crossbow was still cocked and almost told her that she would weaken the weapon by leaving the shank stressed, but then decided that might not be a bad thing. A weakened shank would make it easier for her to span. “Marry?” he asked again.
“That’s what he said.”
“What did you say?”
“I didn’t know,” she said, staring at the ground, “maybe?”
“Maybe,” Hook echoed her, and just then the timber cracked and ripped and the huge oak fell, slowly at first, then faster as it crashed through leaves and branches to shudder down. Birds shrieked. For a moment the woods were full of alarm, then all that was left was the ringing sound of the other axes along the ridge. “I think, maybe,” Hook said slowly, “that it’s a good idea.”
“You do?”
He nodded. “I do.”
She looked at him, said nothing for a while, then picked up the crossbow. “I look down the arrow,” she said, “and hold the bow tight?”
“And you squeeze gently,” he said. “Hold your breath while you squeeze, and don’t look at the bolt, just look at the place where you want the bolt to go.”
She nodded, laid a bolt in the groove, and aimed at the same tree she had missed before. It was a couple of paces closer now. Hook watched her, saw the concentration on her face and saw her flinch in anticipation of the weapon’s kick. She held her breath, closed her eyes and pulled the trigger and the bolt flashed past the tree’s edge and vanished down the gentle farther slope. Melisande stared forlorn at where it had gone.
“You haven’t got that many bolts,” Hook said, “and those are special.”
“Special?”
“They’re smaller than most,” he said, “they’re made specially to fit that bow.”
“I should find the ones I shot?”
He grinned. “I’ll chop off a couple of these boughs, and you should find those two bolts.”
“I have nine left.”
“Eleven would be better.”
She laid the crossbow on the ground and picked her way down the slope to vanish in the sunlit green of the undergrowth. Hook cocked the crossbow, winding the cord back easily, hoping that the continual stress would weaken the stave and so help Melisande, then he went back to lopping branches. He wondered why the king had demanded so many pieces of straight timber the height of a bowstave. Not his business, he decided. He made short work of a second branch, then a third. The great trunk would be sawn eventually, but for the moment he would leave it where it had fallen. He lopped off more of the smaller branches, and heard the long collapse of another tree somewhere along the ridge. Pigeons clattered through the leaves. He thought he might have to go and help Melisande find the bolts because she had been gone far too long, but just as he had that thought she came running back, her face alarmed and her eyes wide. She pointed down the westward slope. “There are men!” she said.
“Course there are men,” Hook said, and sliced off a limb the size of a man’s arm with a one-handed stroke of the ax. “We’re all over the place.”
“Men-at-arms,” Melisande hissed, “chevaliers!”
“Probably our fellows,” Hook said. Mounted men-at-arms patrolled the surrounding countryside every day, looking for supplies and watching for the French army that everyone expected would come to Harfleur’s relief.
“They are French!” Melisande hissed.
Hook doubted it, but he swung the ax to bury its blade in the fallen trunk, then jumped down and took her arm. “Let’s have a look.”
There were indeed men. There were horsemen in a fern-thick gully that twisted through the high wood. Hook could see a dozen of them in single file, following a track through the trees, but he sensed there were more riders behind them. And he saw, too, that Melisande was right. The horsemen were not wearing the cross of Saint George. They had surcoats, but none of the badges was familiar, and the riders were armored in plate and all wore helmets. They had their visors raised and Hook could see the leading horseman’s eyes glitter in the steel’s shadow. The man held up his hand to check the column, then stared intently up the slope, trying to discover exactly where the sound of ax blows came from, and as he stared, so more horsemen appeared from the far trees.
“French,” Melisande whispered.
“They are,” Hook said softly. Most of the horsemen carried drawn swords.
“What do you do?” Melisande asked, still whispering, “hide?”
“No,” Hook said, because he knew what he must do. The knowledge was instinctive and he did not doubt it, nor did he hesitate. He led her back to the felled tree, snatched up the cocked crossbow, then ran along the ridge. “The French!” he shouted. “They’re coming! Get back to the wagons! Fast!” He shouted it over and over. “Back to the wagons!” He first ran to his right, away from the wagons, to find Tom Scarlet and Will of the Dale standing and staring. “Will,” Hook said, “use Sir John’s voice. Tell them the French are here, and get everyone back to the wagons.”
Will of the Dale just gaped at him.
“Use Sir John’s voice!” Hook said harshly, shaking the carpenter by the shoulders. “The goddam French are coming! Now go! Where’s Matt?” he asked the last question of Tom Scarlet, who mutely pointed southward.
Will of the Dale was obeying Hook. He was hurrying back along the crest and using his imitation of Sir John’s harsh voice to pull the archers back to where the big wagons waited on the road. Peter Goddington, confused by the mimicry, searched for Sir John and found Hook, Melisande, and Tom Scarlet instead. “What in God’s name is happening?” Goddington demanded angrily.
“Frenc
h, sergeant,” Hook said, pointing down the western slope.
“Don’t be daft, Hook,” Goddington said, “there are no goddam French here.”
“I saw them,” Hook said. “Men-at-arms. They’re in armor and carrying swords.”
“They were our men, you fool,” Goddington insisted. “Probably a forage party.”
The centenar was so sure of himself that Hook was beginning to doubt what he had seen, and his uncertainty was increased because the horsemen, though they must have heard the shouting on the crest, had not reacted. He had expected the men-at-arms to spur up the slope and burst through the trees, but none had appeared. Yet he stuck to his story. “There were about twenty of them,” he told Goddington, “armored, and with strange livery. Melisande saw them too.”
The sergeant glanced at Melisande and decided her opinion was worthless. “I’ll have a look,” he said grudgingly. “Where did you say they were?”
“In the trees down that slope,” Hook said, pointing. “They’re not on the road. They’re in the trees, like they didn’t want to be seen.”
“You’d better not be dreaming,” the centenar grumbled and went down the slope.
“Where’s Matt?” Hook asked Tom Scarlet again.
“He went to look at the sea,” Tom Scarlet answered.