To his left, unseen by Sir John, the Duke of York died.
The French attack had struck the English vanguard first. A hundred men were dead in that fight before the oriflamme reached King Henry’s men, and in the front of the foremost men was Ghillebert, Seigneur de Lanferelle, and he was half aware that the English to his left had stepped back as the charge crashed home, but the Duke of York and his men had stayed put, thrusting with lances, and Lanferelle had twisted aside, letting a lance slide off his breastplate’s flank, then ramming his own lance into an unvisored face. “Lanferelle!” he shouted, “Lanferelle!” He wanted the English to know whom they faced, and he fended off a lance with his own then unslung his mace and started to hack. This was no place for the subtle graces of a tournament field, no place to show a swordsman’s skills, this was a place to hack and kill, chop and wound, to fill an enemy with fear, and Lanferelle drove the spiked mace down into a man wearing the duke’s livery and wrenched the bloody spikes out of the split helmet and skull and thumped it forward into another man, hurling him back and he could see the duke clearly now, just to his right, but first he had to kill a man to his left, which he did with the heavy mace in a blow that rang up his arm. “Yield!” he shouted at the duke who had dropped his visor, and the duke’s response was to swing his sword that clanged on Lanferelle’s plate and Lanferelle dropped the mace head over the duke’s shoulder and pulled so that the tall man stumbled forward, lost his footing, and fell full length. “He’s mine!” Lanferelle shouted, “the bastard’s mine,” and that was when the battle joy came to Lanferelle, the exultation of a fighter who dominated his foes.
He stood over the duke, one foot on the fallen man’s spine, and killed any man who tried a rescue. Four of his own men-at-arms flanked him with poleaxes and they shouted insults at the English before killing them. “I want the standard!” Lanferelle shouted. He thought the duke’s great flag would be a welcome decoration in his manor hall where it could hang from the smoke-darkened beams beneath the musicians’ gallery and the duke, a prisoner in Lanferelle’s keeping, would be forced to see that standard every day. “Come and die!” Lanferelle shouted at the standard-bearer, but English men-at-arms pushed the man back out of immediate danger and closed on Lanferelle and he parried their blows, thrusting back hard, depending on the weight of his mace to throw his opponents off balance, and all the while he shouted at his men in the second rank to defend his back. They had to keep the crush of Frenchmen from crowding him, and they did it by threatening their own ranks, giving Lanferelle room to slash the mace at any man who dared oppose him. His four men were using their poleaxes to hack at the English line that was so thin Lanferelle reckoned he could fight through it and lead a mass of Frenchmen to the rear of the English center. Why not capture a king as well as a duke? “Forward!” he bellowed.’ Forward!” but when he tried to go forward he half tripped on the bodies that had fallen across the Duke of York’s legs. Lanferelle tried to kick the dead men out of his path, but a lance thrust from an Englishman hammered his breastplate and threw him back. “Bastard!” Lanferelle shouted, driving the mace’s bloody spikes toward the snarling face, then a shout of warning made him glance to his left and he saw that the English were driving into the French ranks and threatening to fight around to his rear. He reckoned there was still time to break the enemy line and he tried to go forward again and once more was checked by the dead men, and a sudden rush of Englishmen came to oppose him, their lances, poleaxes, and maces battering his armor and he had no choice but to step back. His chance to cleave the line was gone for the moment.
He backed away, leaving the Duke of York face down in the mud. The duke, stunned and trampled, had drowned in a blood-drenched puddle and now the English advanced across his corpse, coming for Lanferelle and for his standard of the sun and falcon, and Lanferelle held them at bay with swift hard strokes. He did not know the duke was dead, only regretted that he had temporarily lost him, but then he saw another standard to his left, a standard deep in the French ranks that showed a rearing lion blazoned with a crown and he reckoned Sir John Cornewaille’s ransom would make him rich enough. “With me!” he bellowed, and he rammed and shoved and fought his way toward Sir John.
Away to Lanferelle’s right a furious battle raged around the king’s four standards. Scores of Frenchmen wanted the honor of capturing England’s king, but they faced the same horrors that dogged the rest of the French attackers. Their front rank had gone down fast, its men exhausted by the mud and wounded by the arrow-storm, and the king’s bodyguard had killed them with axes, maces, and mauls. Now the attackers tripped on bodies and were met by ax strokes, yet still they pushed forward and a French lance pierced the faulds of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the king’s younger brother, and the blow to the groin drove him down into the furrows. Frenchmen surged to take the fallen man prisoner, but Henry stood over his injured brother and used his sword two-handed to hack at the enemy. He fought with a sword because he regarded that as a royal weapon, and if it put him at a disadvantage against men armed with poleaxes and maces, then Henry did not acknowledge it, because he knew God was with him. He could feel God in his heart, he sensed God giving him strength, and even when a French poleax rang on his crowned helmet with a sudden blinding force, God protected him. A golden fleuret was chopped from the crown and his helmet was dented, but the steel was not broken and the leather liner soaked some of the blow’s force and Henry stayed conscious as he lunged the sword into the axman’s armpit and screamed his war cry. “Saint George!”
Henry of England was filled by a God-given joy. Never, in all his life, had he felt closer to God, and he almost pitied the men who came to be killed for they were being killed by God. Henry’s bodyguard flanked him and, one by one, they killed eighteen Frenchmen who, only the night before, had sworn a solemn oath to kill or capture the King of England. The eighteen had been bound together by their oath and they had advanced together and now they died together. Their bodies lay tangled and bloody to impede the men who still wanted the fame of capturing a king. A Frenchman bellowed his challenge, stumbling forward, spiked mace thrashing at the king, and the king slammed the sword hard forward to lodge the point in the slit of the Frenchman’s visor, and the mace struck a man next to the king, who staggered, and another Englishman drove his poleax spike into the Frenchman’s throat so that blood ran down the ax’s iron-sheathed handle. The man sank to his knees, and the king rammed the blade into the visor’s slit, butchering the man’s lips and tongue. Blood welled at the slit, a poleax slammed onto the man’s helmet, driving in the steel and opening the skull to spray the king with blood as he ripped his sword free and parried a lance thrust. “Saint George!” he shouted and felt the divine power thrill through his veins. The Frenchman with the lance had an open visor and Henry saw fear in the man’s eyes, then a mute appeal for mercy as his lance was wrenched from his hands, but God did not want mercy for Henry’s enemies and so the king cut his sword across the man’s face to slice open both his eyeballs. One of the royal bodyguard cracked the blinded man’s helmet with a maul, and so another body was added to the heap of French dead that protected the English line.
And the English line held. In places it had been driven back by the weight of attacking men-at-arms, but the line did not break, and now it was protected by ramparts of dead and wounded Frenchmen, and in places the line bulged forward as the English counterattacked into the French formation. And the French, unable to march straight ahead, began to spread to their flanks.
Where the archers had no arrows.
“You can die, or you can fight.” The voice was distant and amused, as though the speaker did not care what Nicholas Hook’s fate would be.
“God’s holy shit, Nick, they’re coming for us,” Tom Scarlet said nervously. The archers had pulled back behind the foremost stakes and then watched the French men-at-arms crash into the English line. There had been loud cheers from the archers when that perilously thin line stopped the enemy, but now that enemy
was spreading toward the stakes.
“We can fight or die,” Hook said. He threw down his bow. It was useless without arrows, and there were no arrows.
“So fight,” the voice spoke again, and Hook knew it was Saint Crispin, the harsher saint, who was talking to him.
“You’re here!” he said aloud in relief and wonderment.
“I’m here, Nick,” Scarlet said, “don’t want to be, but I am.”
“Of course we’re here!” Saint Crispin said harshly. “We’re here to get revenge! So fight them, you bastard! What are you waiting for?”
Hook had paused to watch the French. He sensed they were not trying to outflank the English men-at-arms, but rather to escape the killing that was so loud to his left, but soon, he thought, some Frenchman would decide to attack the lightly armored archers and thus reach the rear of the king’s line.
“What are you waiting for?” the saint again demanded angrily. “Do God’s work, for Christ’s sake! Just kill the goddamned bastards!”
Hook felt a tremor of fear. A Frenchman staggered closer to the stakes. His left arm was hanging limply from his shoulder where an espalier was split and bloody.
“What do we do, Nick?” Scarlet asked.
Hook took the poleax from his shoulder. “Kill them!” he roared. “Kill the goddamned bastards! Saint Crispin! Kill!”
The shout released the archers, who suddenly gave a great shout of defiance and streamed between their stakes to attack the French flank. The bowmen were armed with poleaxes, swords, or mallets. Most were barefoot, none had leg armor and few could afford a breastplate, but in the mud they could move much faster than the French. “Kill them!” Evelgold bellowed, and still more archers took up the shout. There was a wildness in the gray air, a sudden and savage desire to kill the men who had promised to chop off archers’ fingers, and so Welshmen and Englishmen, their arms hardened by years of archery, went to massacre the gentry of France.
Hook ignored the wounded man and instead attacked a giant in a bright red surcoat. His first blow was a wild swing that would have earned Sir John’s scorn had he seen it, and the Frenchman swayed back to make it miss and then lunged with his shortened lance, but Hook’s momentum had carried him past the man and, as the tall Frenchman turned to follow Hook, so Will of the Dale hammered the back of the man’s helmet with a mallet and the enemy toppled into the mud. Geoffrey Horrocks knelt on him, lifted the visor, and stabbed into an eye with a long, thin-bladed knife. Hook drove his poleax at a man in a black and white striped surcoat, thrusting him so hard in the breastplate that the enemy fell backward, and then the hammerhead swung to crash into a man’s sword arm, and another archer was there to swing a lead-weighted maul onto that man’s helmet. The French, their feet trapped by the mud’s suction, could not move to avoid the blows, and their own strokes and lunges were being wasted on air as the nimble archers dodged. The enemy, safe from arrows, was fighting with raised visors now and Hook discovered it was easy to stab the poleax’s spike at their eyes, forcing them to twist aside when one of his companions would follow up with a hammer blow. It was the poleaxes, hammers, and the mauls that were doing the damage, lead-weighted hammerheads wielded by archers’ arms, and the hammers crushed helmets and shattered armor-encased bones. Archers without hammers picked up enemy poleaxes or maces. They were suddenly scenting easy pickings as still more bowmen came from the stakes to join the brawl.
It was a brawl. It was tavern fighting. It was like the Christmas football game when the men of two villages met to punch and trip and kick, only this game was played with lead, iron, and steel. Two or three archers would attack one man, tripping him or striking him down with a hammer, then one would stoop to finish the enemy with a knife into the face. The quickest way was straight through an eye, and the Frenchmen screamed for mercy when they saw the blade approaching, then there was a slight, instantly released pressure as the knife tip pierced the eyeball before the screaming would fade as the blade slipped into the brain. Not much blood from such wounds, and all the time the English trumpets were braying and there was the steel on steel sound of men-at-arms fighting in the field’s center, and the shouts of archers who were slaughtering the enemy’s flanks.
This was revenge. Hook fought with the memory of Soissons. He knew the two saints were with him. This was their feast day, and today they would repay France for what France had done to their town. Hook stabbed the ax point at men’s faces and, when they twisted to evade the blow, he would hook the blade over a shoulder and tug until the enemy, his feet caught in the mire, stumbled forward and the hammerhead would crash into his helmet and another Frenchman was finished. Hundreds of archers were doing the same so that the deep-plowed field, filling the space between the woods, had become one wide killing ground. The furrows, newly sown with winter wheat, were filling with blood.
There were so many dead and injured Frenchmen that Hook had to clamber over their bodies to reach the enemy. Tom Scarlet, big Will Sclate, and Will of the Dale came with him, and other archers were doing the same, all yelling like demons. A sword slammed into Hook, but the blade’s force was stopped by his haubergeon and mail, and Sclate, huge and glowering, hammered the swordsman down with his ax. Hook dropped another Frenchman with a lunge, and Will of the Dale drove his ax into the fallen man’s thigh, splitting the cuisse so that thick blood welled out of the jagged rip. An archer was stoving in helmets with a maul, one blow sufficient to collapse steel, skull, and life. A Frenchman with a hammer-broken leg was on his knees and shouting that he yielded, that he could pay ransom, but no one heard and he died when an archer slid a knife into an eye socket. Hook was screaming, unaware that he screamed, fighting with a desperate fury. The archers were mud-smeared, blood-spattered and bare-legged as they howled and killed. Their fear was all released into fury.
A French knight, glorious in a surcoat woven from cloth of gold, parried Tom Scarlet’s swing and drew back his mace to crush the insolent archer’s skull and Hook’s ax head took the man in the back of his neck, powering through a steel bevor, and the man fell as Hook ripped the blade free and stabbed the spike into another man’s waist. Sclate, the country-bred giant, swung a hammer between the man’s legs and the resultant scream seared clear across Agincourt’s blood-wet field.
Then a Frenchman in mud-spattered bright mail, with a blue silk ribbon about his neck and a silver lion crowning his helmet, dropped to one knee and took off his right gauntlet, which he held toward Hook. Hook was still four or five paces away and was planning to slam the hammer onto that glittering lion, but he suddenly understood what the Frenchman wanted. “Prisoners!” he shouted. “Prisoners!” He snatched the gauntlet from the Frenchman. “Take your helmet off,” he ordered the man. No one had yet given the order to capture prisoners, and Sir John, before the fight, had stressed that none was to be taken until the king had deemed the battle won, but Hook did not care. The French were surrendering now.
More and more Frenchmen were holding out their gauntlets. Their helmets were left in the mud as their captors hauled them back from the fight. “What do we do with the bastards?” Will of the Dale asked.
“Tie their hands,” Hook suggested. “Use bow cords!”
The first French battle was retreating now. Too many had died and the living had no stomach for a fight that had spilled so much blood into the furrows. Hook leaned on his poleax and watched an archer in a blue, blood-darkened surcoat cackling among the wounded enemy. The man had discovered a falcon-beak, a weapon that was half hammer and half claw, and he was killing the wounded by piercing their helmets with the curved beak, which was mounted on a long shaft. The wedge-shaped point easily drove through steel to shatter the skulls beneath. “Like cracking eggs!” he called to no one in particular, and cracked another. “Bastards,” he kept shouting, “bastards!” He killed again and again. Injured men pleaded for mercy, but the beaked hammer would still fall. Hook had no energy to intervene. The man seemed oblivious of everything except the need to kill, and when he
struck a wounded man he would do it repeatedly, long after the man was dead. A mastiff was standing over the body of its wounded master, barking at the English, and the archer killed the dog with the falcon-beak, then killed the dog’s owner. “You’d cut off my fingers!” he screamed at the man, swinging the beak to mangle the corpse’s already crumpled helmet, “I’ll cut off your goddamned prick!” He suddenly raised his two string fingers at the corpses he had made and jerked the fingers up and down. “Cut these off, would you? You bastards!”
“Sweet Jesus,” Tom Scarlet said. His face was covered in French blood, his haubergeon was red, his legs, bare beneath his short hose, were mud-covered. “Sweet Jesus,” he said again.
The farthest point of the French advance was marked by a long heap of bodies, and the first battle had retreated from that horror and the English did not follow. Men were exhausted, slaked by the killing. Prisoners were being taken behind the line where Englishmen and Welshmen stared at each other as if astonished to be alive.
Then more trumpets called, and Hook looked northward to see that the second French battle, every bit as large as the first, was coming.
So the battle must start again.
“They’ll all be dying up there,” Sir Martin said, “dying in their scores! You’re probably a widow by now.” He grinned with yellow teeth. “I heard you got married. Why, girl, why? Marriage is for the respectable folk, not for common pottage-eaters like Hook, but it doesn’t matter now. You’re a widow, girl! And oh my, but you are a beautiful widow! Now stay still, girl! Stay still! ‘The master of every woman is the man!’ That’s what the holy scripture, the blessed word of the Lord says, so you’re to obey me!” He frowned suddenly. “What’s that mucky stuff on your forehead?”