“Matt!” Hook bellowed, cupping his hands.
There was no answer. The warm wind sighed in the branches and chaffinches made a busy noise somewhere down the eastern slope. A gun sounded from the siege lines, the echo rumbling in the bowl of the hills and melding with the crash of the stone’s impact. Hook could not hear the clink of bridles or the thump of hooves and he wondered if he had imagined the horsemen. The shouting on the crest had ended, suggesting that the bemused archers must have assembled back at the wagons.
“We’d never seen the sea before,” Tom Scarlet said nervously, “not before we sailed here. Matt wanted to look again.”
“Matt!” Hook shouted again, but again there was no answer.
Peter Goddington had vanished over the crest’s lip. Hook gave the crossbow to Melisande and then uncased his bow, strung it, and put an arrow across the stave. He walked to the gully’s lip and gazed down into the ferns. Peter Goddington was alone in the gully. There was not a horseman in sight and the centenar looked up and gave Hook a glance of pure disgust. “Nothing here, you fool,” he shouted, and just then Hook saw the two horsemen come from the trees on the right.
“Behind you!” he shouted, and Goddington began to run up the slope as Hook raised the bow, hauled the cord back and loosed just as the man-at-arms nearest the centenar swerved left. The arrow, a bodkin, glanced off the espalier that armored the man’s shoulder. The sword chopped down and Hook, as he pulled another arrow from the bag, saw blood bright and sudden in the glowing green woodland, he saw Peter Goddington’s head turn red, saw him stumble as the second Frenchman, his sword held rigid as a lance, took the centenar in the back. Goddington fell.
Hook loosed again. The white feathers streaked through shadow and sunlight and the bodkin head, shafted with oak, slammed through the second man’s breastplate and hurled him back in his tall saddle. More horsemen were coming now, spurring from the thick trees to put their horses at the slope, and Tom Scarlet was tugging at Hook’s arm. “Nick! Nick!”
And suddenly it was panic because there were more riders to their left, between them and the sea, and Hook seized Melisande’s sleeve and dragged her back. He had not seen that southernmost column, and Hook realized the French had come in at least two parties and he had seen only one, and he ran desperately, hearing the hooves loud and getting louder, and he dragged Melisande fast to one side, dodging like a hare pursued by hounds, but then a horseman galloped in front of him and slewed about in a slithering flurry of leaf mold. Hook twisted to his left to find refuge by the bole of a great hollow oak. It was really no refuge at all, because he was cornered now, and still more horsemen came and a rider laughed from his saddle as the men-at-arms surrounded Melisande and the two archers.
“Matt!” Tom said, and Hook saw that Matthew Scarlet was already a prisoner. A Frenchman in blue and green livery had him by his jacket’s collar, dragging him alongside his horse.
“Archers,” a horseman said. The word was the same in French and English, and there was no mistaking the pleasure with which the man spoke.
“Père!” Melisande gasped. “Père?”
And that was when Hook saw the falcon stooping against the sun. The livery was newly embroidered and bright, almost as bright as the sword blade that reached toward him. The blade came within a hand’s breadth of his throat, then suddenly stopped. The rider, sitting straight-legged in his destrier’s saddle, stared down at Hook. The haunch of a roe deer, newly killed, hung from his saddle’s pommel and its blood had dripped onto the scale-armored foot of the horseman, who was Ghillebert, Seigneur de Lanferelle, the lord of hell.
He was a lord in splendor, mounted on a magnificent stallion and wearing plate armor that shone like the sun. He alone among the horsemen was bareheaded so that his long black hair hung sleek almost to his waist. His face was like polished metal, hard edged, bronze dark, with a hawk’s nose and hooded eyes that showed amusement as he stared first at Hook who was trapped by the sword blade, then at Melisande who had raised the cocked crossbow. If Lanferelle was astonished at discovering his daughter in a high Norman wood he did not show it. He offered her a flicker of a wry smile, then said something in French and the girl fumbled in the pouch and took out a bolt that she laid in the weapon’s groove. Ghillebert, Lord of Lanferelle, could easily have stopped her, but he merely smiled again as the now loaded weapon was raised once more to point at his face. He spoke, much too fast for Hook to understand, and Melisande answered just as fast, but passionately.
There was a shout from behind Hook, far behind, from where the road dropped to the English camp. The Lord of Lanferelle gestured to his men, gave an order, and they rode toward the shout. Half of the men, who numbered eighteen, wore the livery of the hawk and sun, the rest had the same blue and green livery as the man holding Matt Scarlet prisoner, and that man, together with a squire wearing Lanferelle’s badge were the only ones who stayed with le Seigneur d’Enfer.
“Three English archers,” Lanferelle spoke in English suddenly, and Hook remembered how this Frenchman had learned English when he was a prisoner waiting for his ransom to be collected, “three goddam archers, and I give gold to my men for bringing me the fingers of goddam archers.” Lanferelle grinned suddenly, his teeth very white against his sun-darkened skin. “There are fingerless peasants all across Normandy and Picardy because my men cheat.” He seemed proud of that, because he gave a sudden braying laugh. “You know she is my daughter?”
“I know,” Hook said.
“She’s the prettiest of them! I have nine that I know of, but only one from my wife. But this one,” he looked at Melisande who still held the crossbow on him, “this one I thought to protect from the world.”
“I know,” Hook said again.
“She was supposed to pray for my soul,” Lanferelle said, “but it seems I must breed other daughters if my soul is to be saved.”
Melisande spat some fast words that only made Lanferelle smile more. “I put you in the convent,” he said, still speaking English, “because you were too pretty to be humped by some sweaty peasant and too ill-born to be married to a gentleman. But now it seems you found the peasant anyway,” he gave Hook a derisive glance, “and the fruit is picked, eh? But picked or not,” he said, “you are still my possession.”
“She’s mine,” Hook said, and was ignored.
“So what shall I do? Take you back to the nunnery?” Lanferelle asked, then grinned delightedly when Melisande raised the crossbow an inch higher. “You won’t shoot,” he said.
“I will,” Hook said, but it was a barren threat for he had no arrow on his string and knew he would be given no time to pull one from the bag.
“Who do you serve?” Lanferelle asked.
“Sir John Cornewaille,” Hook said proudly.
Lanferelle was pleased. “Sir John! Ah, there’s a man. His mother must have slept with a Frenchman! Sir John! I like Sir John,” he smiled. “But what of Melisande, eh? What of my little novice?”
“I hated the convent,” she spat at him, using English.
Lanferelle frowned as though her sudden outburst puzzled him. “You were safe there,” he said, “and your soul was safe.”
“Safe!” Melisande protested, “in Soissons? Every nun was raped or killed!”
“You were raped?” Lanferelle asked, his voice dangerous.
“Nicholas stopped him,” she said, gesturing at Hook, “he killed him first.”
The dark eyes brooded on Hook for an instant, then returned to Melisande. “So what do you want?” he asked, almost angrily. “You want a husband? Someone to look after you? How about him?” Lanferelle jerked his head toward his squire. “Maybe you should marry him? He’s gently born, but not too gently. His mother was a saddler’s daughter.” The squire, who plainly did not understand a word that was being said, stared dumbly at Melisande. He wore no helmet, but had an aventail instead, a hood of chain mail that framed a sweaty face scarred by childhood pox. His nose had been flattened in some fight and he ha
d thick, wet-looking lips. Melisande grimaced and spoke urgently in French, so urgently that Hook only understood part of what she said. She was scornful and tearful at the same time, and her words appeared to amuse her father. “She says she will stay with you,” Lanferelle translated for Hook, “but that depends upon my wishes. It depends on whether I let you live.”
Hook was thinking that he could lunge upward with the bowstave and drive the horn-nocked tip into Lanferelle’s throat, or else into the soft tissue under his chin and keep driving the shaft so that it pierced the Frenchman’s brain.
“No,” the voice spoke in his head. It was almost a whisper, but unmistakably the voice of Saint Crispinian who had been silent for so long. “No,” the saint said again.
Hook almost fell to his knees in gratitude. His saint had returned. Lanferelle was smiling. “Were you thinking to attack me, Englishman?”
“Yes,” Hook admitted.
“And I would have killed you,” Lanferelle said, “and maybe I will anyway?” He stared toward the place where the wagons waited beside the road. Those wagons were hidden by the thick summer foliage, but shouts were loud and Hook could hear the sharp sound of bowstrings being loosed. “How many of you are there?” Lanferelle asked.
Hook thought about lying, but decided Lanferelle would discover the truth soon enough. “Forty archers,” he admitted.
“No men-at-arms?”
“None,” Hook said.
Lanferelle shrugged as if the information were not that important. “So, you capture Harfleur, and what then? Do you march on Paris? On Rouen? You don’t know. But I know. You will march somewhere. Your Henry has not spent all that money to capture one little harbor! He wants more. And when you march, Englishman, we shall be around you and in front of you and behind you, and you will die in ones and twos until there are only a few of you left, and then we shall close on you like wolves on a flock. And will my daughter die because you will be too weak to protect her?”
“I protected her in Soissons,” Hook said, “you didn’t.”
A tremor of anger showed on Lanferelle’s face. The sword tip quivered, but there was also an uncertainty in the Frenchman’s eyes. “I looked for her,” he said. He sounded defensive.
“Not well enough,” Hook responded fiercely, “and I found her.”
“God led him to me,” Melisande spoke in English for the first time.
“Oh! God?” Lanferelle had recovered his poise and sounded amused. “You think God is on your side, Englishman?”
“I know He is,” Hook said stoutly.
“And you know what they call me?”
“The Lord of Hell,” Hook said.
Lanferelle nodded. “It is a name, Englishman, just a name to frighten the ignorant. But despite that name I want my soul in heaven when I die, and for that I need people to pray for me. I need masses said, I need prayers chanted, and I need nuns and priests on their knees.” He nodded at Melisande. “Why should she not pray for me?”
“I do,” Melisande said.
“But will God listen to her prayers?” Lanferelle asked. “She deserted God for you, and that is her choice, but let us see what God wants, Englishman. Hold up your hand.” He paused and Hook did not move. “You want to live?” Lanferelle snarled. “Hold up your hand! Not that one!” He wanted Hook’s right hand, the hand with the fingertips hardened to calluses by the friction of the bow’s cord.
Hook held up his right hand.
“Spread your fingers,” Lanferelle ordered and moved his sword slowly so that the blade’s tip just touched Hook’s palm. “I could kill you,” Lanferelle said, “but my daughter likes you and I have an affection for her. But you took her blood without my permission, and blood demands blood.” He moved his wrist, only his wrist, but so deftly and so strongly that the blade’s tip moved an arrow’s length in the air, and moved so fast that Hook had no chance to evade before the blade sliced off his smallest finger. The blood welled and ran. Melisande screamed, but did not pull the crossbow’s trigger. Hook felt no pain for a heartbeat, then the agony streaked through his arm.
“There,” Lanferelle said, amused, “I leave you the fingers for the string, yes? For her sake. But when the wolves close on you, Englishman, you and I shall play our game. If you win, you keep her, but if you lose, she goes to his marriage bed,” he jerked his head at his slack-mouthed squire. “It’s a stinking bed and he ruts like a boar. He grunts. Do you agree to our game?”
“God will give us victory,” Hook said. His hand was all pain, but he had kept the hurt from showing on his face.
“Let me tell you something,” Lanferelle said, leaning from his saddle. “God does not give a cow’s wet turd about your king or mine. Do you agree to our game? We fight for Melisande, yes?”
“Yes,” Hook said.
“Then put your arrows down,” Lanferelle said, “and throw your bows away.”
Hook understood that the Frenchman did not want an arrow in his back as he rode away, and so he and Tom Scarlet threw their bowstaves into the tangled leaves of the felled oak, then dropped their arrow bags.
Lanferelle smiled. “We have an agreement, Englishman! The prize is Melisande, but we must seal it with blood, yes?”
“It is sealed,” Hook said, holding up his blood-soaked hand.
“We are playing for a life,” Lanferelle said, “not for blood,” and with that he touched a knee to his stallion, which turned obediently and the Lord of Hell swept his sword with the swiveling horse and the blade’s tip ripped through Matt Scarlet’s throat to fill the greenwood with a spray of red and a jet of blood, and Tom Scarlet cried aloud and Lanferelle laughed as he spurred eastward followed by his two men.
“Matt!” Tom Scarlet dropped to his knees beside his twin brother, but Matthew Scarlet was dying as fast as the blood that pumped from his torn and bubbling throat.
The hoofbeats faded. There was no more shouting from where the wagons were parked. Melisande was crying.
Hook fetched the bows. The French had gone. He used an ax to make a grave under an oak tree, a wide grave, wide enough for Matt Scarlet and Peter Goddington to lie together on the ridge above the sea.
Above Harfleur, where the guns tore the walls into rubble.
It was hard and ceaseless work. Hook and the archers cut timber and split timber and sawed timber to shore up the gun-pits and trenches. New gun-pits were made, closer to the town, but the precious weapons had to be protected from Harfleur’s defenders and so the archers constructed thick screens of wooden balks that stood in front of the cannons’ mouths. Each screen was made from oak trunks thick as a girl’s waist, and they were sloped backward so that they would deflect the enemy’s missiles skyward. The cleverest thing about the screens, Hook thought, was how they were mounted on frames so that they could swivel. An order was given when a gun was at last ready to fire and men would turn a great windlass that hauled down the top of the screen and so raised the lower edge to expose the cannon’s blackened muzzle. The gun would fire and the world would vanish in a sickening, stinking, thick cloud of smoke that smelled exactly like rotted eggs, and the sound of the gun-stone striking the wall would be lost in the echo of the great cannon’s bellow, and then the windlass would be released and the screen would thump down to protect the gun and its Dutch gunners again.
The enemy had learned to watch for the opening screens and would wait for that moment before shooting their own guns and springolts, so the English guns were also protected by enormous wicker baskets filled with earth and by more timber balks, and sometimes a screen would be raised even though a gun was not ready to be fired, just to trick the enemy into loosing their missiles, which would thump harmlessly into the baskets and oak trunks. Then, when the gun was ready, the wicker basket immediately in front of the barrel was rolled clear, the screen was raised, and the noise could be heard far up the Lézarde’s flooded valley.
The enemy also possessed cannon, but their guns were much smaller, firing a stone no bigger than an apple and
lacking the weight to smash through the heavy screens. Their springolts, giant crossbows that shot thick bolts, had even less power. Hook, delivering a wagon of timber to reinforce the trenches, had a springolt bolt hit one of his horses plumb on the chest. The missile buried itself in the horse’s body, ripping through lungs, heart, and belly so that the beast simply collapsed, feet spreading in a sudden pool of blood. The heat shimmered off the blood and off the flooded land and off the marshes beside the wide glittering sea.
Trenches defended the besiegers from the enemy’s guns and springolts, though there was small defense against the ballista that hurled stones high in the air so that they fell almost vertically. The English had their own catapults, made from the timber cut on the slopes above the port, and those machines rained both stones and festering animal corpses into Harfleur. From the hill Hook could see shattered roofs and two broken church towers. He could see the wall broken open so that the rubble spilled into the ditch, and he could see the giant bastion defending the gate being ripped and frayed and broken and battered. That bastion had been constructed from earth and timber, and the English gun-stones chopped and gnawed at its two towers, which flanked a short, thick curtain wall.
“We’ll be making a sow next,” Sir John told his archers, “our lord the king is in a hurry!”
“There’s a great hole in their town wall, Sir John,” Thomas Evelgold remarked. He had replaced Peter Goddington as the centenar.
“And behind that gap is a new wall,” Sir John said, “and to attack it we’d have to get past their barbican.” The barbican was the twin-towered bastion protecting the Leure Gate. “You want their bastard crossbowmen shooting at you from the side? That barbican has to go, so we’ll be making a sow. We’ll have to fell more trees! Hook, I want you.”
The other archers watched as Sir John took Hook aside. “There’ll be no more French men-at-arms in the hills,” Sir John said, “we’ve got our own men out there now, and we’ve got more men watching for a relief force, but they’re seeing nothing.” That was a puzzle. August was ending and still the French had sent no army to relieve the besieged town. English horsemen rode every day to scout the roads from the north and the east, but the country stayed empty. Sometimes a small force of French men-at-arms challenged the patrols, but there was no cloud of dust to betray a marching army. “So tell me what you did on the ridge,” Sir John said, “the day poor Peter Goddington died.”