The three men jumped into the trench, drew their swords, and approached the wounded enemy. Hook meanwhile stayed above the trench, advancing beside it with an arrow on his cord. He could see men fighting around the distant sow and in the wide pit where the biggest gun, the great bombard called the King’s Daughter, was dug in. Fire burned bright there, but it was none of Hook’s business. His job was to be on Sir John’s flank.
The ground was rough, churned up by digging and by the strike of French missiles. The boulders slung by the big catapults in Harfleur littered the path, as did the remnants of the houses that had been burned when the siege began, but the dawn was now seeping a faint light in the east, just enough to cast shadows from the obstacles. A crossbow bolt whipped past Hook’s head and he sensed it had come from the nearest gun-pit where a cannon called the Redeemer was emplaced. “Will! Keep those bastards busy.”
“What bastards?”
“The ones who’ve captured the Redeemer!” Hook said, and grabbed Will of the Dale’s arm and turned him toward the gun-pit, which was a black shadow twenty paces beyond the trench. It had been protected from the springolts and guns of Harfleur by one of the ingenious wooden screens that loomed high in the darkness, but the tilting screen had not kept the enemy from capturing the cannon. “Put as many arrows into the pit as you can,” Hook told Will, “but stop shooting when we reach the gun.” Hook pushed six men toward Will. “You obey Will,” he told them, “and you look after Melisande,” he added to Will, for she was still with the group. “The rest of you, after me.”
Another crossbow bolt hissed close by, but Hook’s men were moving fast now. Will of the Dale and his half-dozen men were moving eastward to shoot their arrows through the opening at the back of the pit, while Hook was running to the Redeemer’s flank. He jumped down into the wide trench and waited for his six men to join him. “No bows from now on,” he told them.
“No bows? We’re archers!” Will Sclate grumbled. Will Sclate always grumbled. He was not a popular man, too morose to be easy company and too slow-witted to join in the incessant chatter among the archers, but he was big and hugely strong. He had grown up on one of Sir John’s estates, a laborer’s son who might have expected to work the fields his whole life, but Sir John had seen the boy’s strength and insisted he learn the longbow. Now, as an archer, he earned far more than any laborer, but he was as slow and stubborn as the clay fields he had once worked with hoe and beetle.
“You’re a soldier,” Hook snapped at him, “and you’re going to use hand weapons.”
“What are we doing?” Geoffrey Horrocks asked. He was the youngest of Sir John’s archers, just seventeen, the son of a falconer.
“We’re going to kill some bastards,” Hook said. He slung the bow across his body and hefted the poleax instead. “And we go fast! After me! Now!”
He scrambled up the face of the trench and over the wreckage of the soil-filled wicker baskets that formed the trench’s parapet. He could see flame-light in the Redeemer’s pit and he could hear the sharp thin noise of bowstrings being released from his left where Will of the Dale’s men were lined beside the stone stump of a wrecked chimney. A shout came from the pit, then another, then a screech as an arrowhead scraped against the cannon’s flank. Seven archers were shooting into the pit. In one minute they could easily loose sixty or seventy arrows, and those arrows were flickering through the half-light, filling the gun-pit with hissing death and forcing the French to crouch for protection.
Then Hook and his men came at them from the flank. The Frenchmen did not see him because the arrows were whistling and thumping around them, and they were crouching to find what little protection the pit offered. The massive wooden screen gave splendid protection on the face that looked toward Harfleur, but the pit had never been designed to protect men being attacked from the rear and Will’s arrows were streaking down the trench and through the wide gap. Then Hook leaped across the parapet at the pit’s side and he prayed the arrows would stop.
They must have stopped because none of his men was struck by an arrow. The archers were shouting a challenge as they followed Hook over the wicker baskets, and still shouting as they started the killing. Hook was swinging the poleax as he landed and its lead-weighted hammer head crashed into a crouching Frenchman’s helmet and Hook sensed rather than saw the metal crumpling under the massive blow that collapsed metal, skull, and brain. A man reared up to his right, but Sclate hurled him back with contemptuous ease as Hook sprawled on the far side of the cannon. He had leaped clean across the Redeemer’s barrel.
He hit the far side of the pit hard, lost his footing, and fell heavily. A surge of fear flared cold in his veins. The biggest fear was that he was on the ground and vulnerable, another that he might have damaged the bow slung on his back, but later, when he remembered the fight, he realized he had also felt elation. In memory it was all a blur of screaming men, bright blades, and ringing metal, but in that welter of impressions there was a cold hard center in which Nick Hook regained his feet and saw a man-at-arms at the front of the pit. The man was wearing plate armor half covered by a surcoat that displayed a red heart pierced by a burning lance. He was holding a sword. His visor was raised and his eyes reflected the small flames of the fallen torches and Hook saw fear in those eyes, and Hook felt no pity because of that fear. Kill or be killed, Sir John always said, and Hook ran at the man, poleax leveled, the haft held in both his hands, and he ignored the feeble defensive sword-swing the man offered and lunged the spear point at the Frenchman’s midriff. The blade scraped off the bottom rim of the breastplate and jarred on the faulds, the plate strips worn on a leather skirt designed to stop a sword thrust into the lower belly. But no fauld could resist a poleax thrust and Hook saw the man’s terrified eyes open wide, and saw his mouth make a great hole as the spear point ripped through steel, leather, mail undershirt, skin, muscle, and guts to ram against the Frenchman’s spine. The man made a mewing noise and Hook was bellowing a challenge as the thrust pushed his victim back against the gun-pit’s face. Hook hauled the poleax back, and the flailing man came with it, his flesh trapping the point, and Hook put his boot into the mess of blood and armor, braced his leg and tugged till the blade came free. He lunged it forward again, but checked the blow as the man fell to his knees. Hook whipped around, ready to defend himself, but the fight was already over. There had only been eight men in the pit. They must have been left there by the larger French party advancing toward the Savage and, when that party had been thrown back by arrows, these eight had been forgotten. Their job had been to wreck the cannon, a job they had been trying to do with a huge ax that lay abandoned beside the windlass that tilted the heavy protective screen on its massive axle. They had managed to chop the windlass into splinters, but now all but one of them was dead.
“Can’t hurt a cannon with an ax!” Tom Scarlet said derisively. The one living Frenchman moaned.
“Anyone hurt?” Hook demanded.
“I twisted my ankle,” Horrocks said. He was panting and his eyes were wide with astonishment or fear.
“You’ll mend,” Hook said abruptly. “Are we all here?” His men were all present, and Will of the Dale was running up the trench with Melisande and his six archers. The wounded Frenchman whimpered and drew his legs up. He had been wearing no armor except a padded haubergeon and Will Sclate had driven an ax deep into his chest so that the linen padding had spilled out and was now soaked with blood. Hook could see a mess of lungs and splintered ribs. Blood bubbled black from the man’s mouth as he moaned again. “Put him out of his misery,” Hook demanded, but his archers just stared at him. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Hook said. He stepped over a corpse, put the poleax’s spike at the man’s neck, lunged once, and so did the job himself.
Will of the Dale stared at the carnage in the pit. “Last time the silly bastards do that!” he said. He tried to speak lightly, imitating Sir John, but there was a squawk in his voice and horror in his eyes.
Melisande was close be
hind Will. She stared dumbly at the dead Frenchmen, next at the blood dripping thick from Hook’s poleax, then up into his eyes. “You shouldn’t be here,” he told her harshly.
“I can’t stay in the camp,” she said, “that priest might come.”
“We’ll look after her, Nick,” Will of the Dale said, his voice still strained. He took a step forward and lifted one of the fallen torches, though there was enough light in the east now to make the flames unnecessary. “Look what they did,” he said.
The Frenchmen had used their big ax to chop through the iron bands that hooped the Redeemer’s barrel. Hook had not noticed the damage before, but now he saw that two of the metal rings had been hacked clean through, which meant the gun was probably useless because, if it was fired, the barrel would expand, split, and kill every man in the pit. That was none of Hook’s business. “Search the bastards,” he ordered his men. The three archers who had plundered the bodies of the first French casualties had found silver chains, coins, brooches, and a dagger with a jeweled hilt. Those valuables were all in an arrow bag to which new riches were now added. “We’ll share it out later,” Hook decreed. “Now come on, get out of here! Bows!”
His bow had been undamaged by his fall. He took it in his left hand, slung the poleax on his shoulder, and laid an arrow on the cord. He climbed the pit’s side into a gray dawn streaked by dark smoke.
In front of him a battle raged around the sow and around the pit that held the King’s Daughter. The French had captured both, but the English had streamed from their camp and now outnumbered the raiding party, which was being forced inexorably back. Trumpets blew, the signal for the French to break off their fight and retreat to Harfleur. Flames licked at the sow’s heavy timbers and at the swinging screen sheltering the bombard. Men-at-arms were hacking at each other, blades flashing reflected light as they slashed and thrust. Hook looked for Sir John’s rampant lion banner and saw it to his left. He saw too that Sir John’s men were fighting across the main trench, driving back the large group of French who now formed the attackers’ left wing. “Bows!” Hook called.
He hauled the cord back, drawing it to his right ear. The French had been summoned back to the town, but they dared not turn and run for fear of the close English pursuit, and so they were fighting hard, trying to drive Sir John’s men back into the trench. They were half facing away from Hook and had no idea that he was on their flank. “Aim true,” Hook shouted, wanting none of his arrows to fall on Englishmen, then he released, took another bodkin and that new arrow was only half drawn as the first drove into an enemy’s back. Hook drew full again, saw a Frenchman turn toward the new threat, released, and the arrow slapped into the man’s face, and suddenly the enemy was running, defeated by the unexpected attack from their flank.
A crossbow bolt flashed in front of Hook. A springolt bolt, much larger, churned up a spout of earth as a gun fired from Harfleur’s wall. The stone banged into the ground just behind the archers as yet more bolts flickered through the smoke. The crossbow bolts made a fluttering noise and Hook reckoned their leather fledgings were twisted out of shape, perhaps because they had been badly stored. The bolts were not flying true, but they were still coming too close. Hook glanced at the barbican and saw the enemy crossbowmen taking aim from its summit. He turned and sped an arrow toward them, then called to his men. “Stop shooting! Get to the trench!”
The French were retreating fast now, but they had done what they had set out to do, which was to damage the siege-works. Three of the cannon, including the King’s Daughter, would never fire again, and all along the trenches parapets had been thrown down and men killed. And now, from the broken ramparts, the defenders jeered at the English as the returning raiding party negotiated the deep ditch in front of the broken barbican. Arrows still followed the French and some men were struck and slid into the ditch’s bottom, but the sally had been a success. The English works burned and the garrison’s insults stung.
“Bastards,” Sir John was saying repeatedly. “They caught us sleeping, the bastards!”
“The Savage isn’t touched,” Hook reported stoically, “but they broke the Redeemer.”
“We’ll break them, the goddam bastards!” Sir John said.
“And none of us was hurt,” Hook added.
“We’ll hurt them, by Christ,” Sir John vowed. His face was twisted by anger. The siege was already bogged down, but now the enemy had delivered another hard blow to the English hopes. Sir John shuddered as an enemy man-at-arms, taken prisoner, was ushered down the trench. For a heartbeat it looked as though Sir John would unleash his fury on the hapless man, but then he saw Melisande and released his frustration on her instead. “What in the name of suffering Christ is she doing here?” he demanded of Hook. “Jesus Christ on the cross, are you turd-witted? Can’t be without your woman for a goddamned minute?”
“It was not Nick!” Melisande called defiantly. She was holding the crossbow, though she had not shot with it. “It was not Nick,” she said again, “and he did tell me to go away.”
Sir John’s courtesy toward women overcame his anger. He grunted what might have been an apology, and then Melisande was explaining herself, talking in fast French, gesturing toward the camp, and as she spoke Sir John’s face showed a renewed anger. He turned on Hook. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what, Sir John?”
“That a bastard priest has threatened her?”
“I fight my own battles,” Hook said sullenly.
“No!” Sir John thrust a gauntleted hand to strike Hook’s shoulder. “You fight my battles, Hook,” he punched Hook’s shoulder again, “that’s what I pay you for. But if you fight mine, then I fight yours, you understand? We are a company!” Sir John shouted the last four words so loudly that men fifty yards down the trench turned to watch him. “We are a company! No one threatens any one of us without threatening all of us! Your girl should be able to walk naked through the whole army and not a man will dare touch her because she belongs to us! She belongs to our company! By Christ I’ll kill the holy bastard for this! I’ll rip the spine out of his goddam throat and feed his shriveled prick to the dogs! No one threatens us, no one!”
Sir John, with his real enemies safely back behind their smoke-rimmed ramparts, was looking for a fight. And Hook had just given him one.
Hook watched as Melisande spooned honey into Father Christopher’s mouth. The priest was sitting, his back supported by a barrel that had come from England filled with smoked herrings. He was skeletally thin, his face was pale and tired and he was plainly as weak as a fledgling, but he was alive.
“Cobbett’s dead,” Hook said, “and Robert Fletcher.”
“Poor Robert,” Father Christopher said, “how’s his brother?”
“Still alive,” Hook said, “but he’s sick.”
“Who else?”
“Pearson’s dead, Hull is, Borrow and John Taylor.”
“God have mercy on them all,” the priest said and made the sign of the cross. “The men-at-arms?”
“John Gaffney, Peter Dance, Sir Thomas Peters,” Hook said, “all dead.”
“God has turned His face from us,” Father Christopher said bleakly. “Does your saint still speak to you?”
“Not now,” Hook admitted.
Father Christopher sighed. He closed his eyes momentarily. “We have sinned,” he said grimly.
“We were told God was on our side,” Hook said stubbornly.
“We believed that,” the priest said, “we surely believed that, and we came here with that assurance in our hearts, but the French will believe the same thing. And now God is revealing Himself. We should not have come here.”
“You should not,” Melisande said firmly.
“Harfleur will fall,” Hook insisted.
“It probably will,” Father Christopher allowed, then paused as Melisande wiped a trickle of honey from his chin. “If the French don’t march to its relief? Yes, it will fall eventually, but what then? How much o
f the army is left?”
“Enough,” Hook said.
Father Christopher offered a tired smile. “Enough to do what? To march on Rouen and make another siege? To capture Paris? We’ll scarce be able to defend ourselves if the French do come here! So what will we do? We’ll go into Harfleur and remake its walls, and then sail home. We’ve failed, Hook. We’ve failed.”
Hook sat in silence. One of the remaining English cannons fired, the sound flat and lingering in the warm air. Somewhere in the camp a man sang. “We can’t just go home,” he said after a while.
“We can,” Father Christopher said, “and we most certainly will. All this money for nothing! For Harfleur, maybe. And what will it cost to rebuild those walls?” He shrugged.
“Maybe we should abandon the siege,” Hook suggested morosely.
The priest shook his head. “Henry will never do that. He has to win! That way he proves God’s favor, and besides, abandoning the siege makes him look weak.” He was silent for a while, then frowned. “His father took the throne by force, and Henry fears others might do the same if he shows weakness.”
“Eat, don’t talk,” Melisande said briskly.
“I’ve eaten enough, my dear,” Father Christopher said.
“You should eat more.”
“I will. This evening. Merci.”