The sun was hazed now, shining red gold and bright through the diffusing smoke beneath which a party of enemy horsemen rode parallel to the city wall. They were men-at-arms, armored and helmeted, and one of them, mounted on a great black horse, carried a strange banner that streamed behind him. The banner bore no badge, it was simply a long pennon of the brightest red cloth, a rippling streak of silken blood made almost transparent by the vapor-wrapped sun behind, but the sight of it caused men on the wall to make the sign of the cross.
“The oriflamme,” Dancy said quietly.
“Oriflamme?”
“The French war-banner,” Dancy said. He touched his middle finger to his tongue, then crossed himself again. “It means no prisoners,” he said bleakly. “It means they want to kill us all.” He fell backward.
For a heartbeat Hook did not know what had happened, then he thought Dancy must have tripped and he instinctively held out a hand to pull him up, and it was then he saw the leather-fledged crossbow bolt jutting from Dancy’s forehead. There was very little blood. A few droplets had spattered Dancy’s face, which otherwise looked peaceful, and Hook went to one knee and stared at the thick-shafted bolt. Less than a hand’s breadth protruded, the rest was deep in the Herefordshire man’s brain and Dancy had died without a sound, except for the meat-axe noise of the bolt striking home. “Jack?” Hook asked.
“No good talking to him, Nick,” one of the other archers said, “he’s chatting to the devil now.”
Hook stood and turned. Later he had little memory of what happened or even why it happened. It was not as though Jack Dancy had been a close friend, for Hook had no such friends in Soissons except, perhaps, John Wilkinson. Yet there was a sudden anger in Hook. Dancy was an Englishman, and in Soissons the English felt beleaguered as much by their own side as by the enemy, and now Dancy was dead and so Hook took a varnished arrow from his white linen arrow bag that hung on his right side.
He turned and lowered his bow so that it lay horizontally in front of him and he laid the arrow across the stave and trapped the shaft with his left thumb as he engaged the cord. He swung the long bow upright as his right hand took the arrow’s fledged end and drew it back with the cord.
“We’re not to shoot,” one of the archers said.
“Don’t waste an arrow!” another put in.
The cord was at Hook’s right ear. His eyes searched the smoke-shrouded ground outside the town and he saw a crossbowman step from behind a pavise decorated with the symbol of crossed axes.
“You can’t shoot as far as they can,” the first archer warned him.
But Hook had learned the bow from childhood. He had strengthened himself until he could pull the cord of the largest war bows, and he had taught himself that a man did not aim with the eye, but with the mind. You saw, and then you willed the arrow, and the hands instinctively twitched to point the bow, and the crossbowman was bringing up his heavy weapon as two bolts seared the evening air close to Hook’s head.
He was oblivious. It was like the moment in the greenwood when the deer showed for an instant between the leaves, and the arrow would fly without the archer knowing he had even loosed the string. “The skill is all between your ears, boy,” a villager had told him years before, “all between your ears. You don’t aim a bow. You think where the arrow will go, and it goes.” Hook released.
“You goddam fool,” an archer said, and Hook watched the white goose feathers flicker in the white-hazed air and saw the arrow fall faster than a stooping hawk. Steel-tipped, silk-bound, ash-shafted, feathered death flying in the evening’s quiet.
“Good God,” the first archer said quietly.
The crossbowman did not die as easily as Dancy. Hook’s arrow pierced his throat and the man twisted around and the crossbow released itself so that the bolt spun crazily into the sky as the man fell backward, still twisting as he fell, then he thrashed on the ground, hands scrabbling at his throat where the pain was like liquid fire, and above him the sky was red now, a smoke-hazed blood-red sky lit by fires and glowing with the sun’s daily death.
That, Hook, thought, had been a good arrow. Straight-shafted and properly fledged with its feathers all plucked from the same goose-wing. It had flown true. It had gone where he willed it, and he had killed a man in battle. He could, at last, call himself an archer.
On the evening of the siege’s second day Hook thought the world had ended.
It was an evening of warm and limpid light. The air was pale-bright and the river slid gently between its flowery banks where willows and alders grew. The French banners hung motionless above their tents. Some smoke still sifted from the burned houses to rise soft into the evening air until it faded high in the cloudless sky. Martins and swallows hunted beside the city’s wall, swooping and twisting.
Nicholas Hook leaned on the ramparts. His unstrung bow was propped beside him as his thoughts drifted back to England, to the manor, to the fields behind the long barn where the hay would be almost ready for cutting. There would be hares in the long grass, trout in the stream, and larks in the twilight. He thought about the decaying cattle byre in the field called Shortmead, the byre with rotting thatch and a screen of honeysuckle behind which William Snoball’s young wife Nell would meet him and make silent, desperate love. He wondered who was coppicing the Three Button wood and, for the thousandth time, how the wood had got its name. The tavern in the village was called the Three Buttons and no one knew why, not even Lord Slayton, who sometimes limped on crutches beneath the tavern’s lintel and put silver on the serving hatch to buy all present an ale. Then Hook thought of the Perrills, malevolent and ever-present. He could not go home now, not ever, because he was an outlaw. The Perrills could kill him and it would not be murder, not even manslaughter, because an outlaw was beyond the law’s help. He remembered the window in the London stable, and knew God had told him to take the Lollard girl through that window, but he had failed and he thought he must be cut off from the heavenly light beyond that window forever. Sarah. He often murmured her name aloud as though the repetition could bring forgiveness.
The evening peace vanished in noise.
But first there was light. Dark light, Hook thought later, a stab of dark light, flame-black red light that licked like a hell-serpent’s tongue from an earthwork the French had dug close to one of their gaunt catapults. That tongue of wicked fire was visible for an instant before it was obliterated in a thunder-cloud of dense black smoke that billowed sudden, and then the noise came, an ear-punching blow of sound that shook the heavens to be followed by another crack, almost as loud, as something struck the city wall.
The wall shook. Hook’s bow toppled and clattered onto the stones. Birds were screaming as they flew from the flame, smoke and lingering noise. The sun was gone, hidden by the black cloud, and Hook stared and was convinced, at least for a moment, that a crack had opened in the earth and that the fires of hell had vomited their way to the surface.
“Sweet bloody Christ!” an archer said in awe.
“Was wondering when that would happen,” another archer said in disgust. “A gun,” he explained to the first man, “have you never seen a gun?”
“Never.”
“You’ll see them now,” the second man said grimly.
Hook had never seen a gun either, and he flinched when a second one fired to add its filthy smoke to the summer sky. Next day another four cannons added their fire and the six French guns did far more damage than the four big wooden machines. The catapults were inaccurate and their jagged boulders often missed the ramparts and dropped into the city to crush houses that started burning as their kitchen fires were scattered, but the gun-stones ate steadily at the city wall, which was already in bad repair. It took only two days for the outer face of the wall to crumble into the wide fetid ditch, and then the gunners systematically widened the breach as the Burgundians countered by making a semicircular barricade behind the disintegrating wall.