A group of men-at-arms was kneeling on the stones as a priest prayed and for a moment he thought that was what had caught her eye, then he saw a second priest just beyond one of the great boulders. It was Sir Martin, and with him were the Perrill brothers, and the three men were looking at Melisande, and Hook had the impression, no more, that they had made obscene gestures. “Melisande,” he said, and she turned to him.
Sir Martin grinned. He was gazing at Hook now and he slowly lifted his right hand and folded back his fingers so that only the longest finger protruded, and then, still slowly, he slipped his left fist over that one finger and, holding his hands together, made the sign of the cross toward Hook and Melisande. “Bastard,” Hook said softly.
“Who is it?” Melisande asked.
“They’re enemies,” Hook said. The Perrill brothers were laughing.
Tom and Matthew Scarlet came to stand with Hook. “You know them?” Tom Scarlet asked.
“I know them.”
Sir Martin again made the sign of the cross before turning away in response to a shout. “He’s a priest?” Tom Scarlet asked in a tone of disbelief.
“A priest,” Hook said, “a rapist and gentry born. But he was bitten by the devil’s dog and he’s dangerous.”
“And you know him?”
“I know him,” Hook said, then turned on the twins. “You all look after Melisande,” he said fiercely.
“We do,” Matthew Scarlet said, “you know that.”
“What did he want?” Melisande asked.
“You,” Hook said, and that night he gave her the small crossbow and its bag of bolts. “Practice with it,” he said.
Next day, on the feast of Saint Agapetus, the eight great guns were hauled up from the beach. One gun, which was named the King’s Daughter, needed two wagons for its massive hooped barrel which was longer than three bowstaves and had a gaping mouth large enough to take a barrel of ale. The other cannon were smaller, but all needed teams of over twenty horses to drag them to the hilltop.
Patrols rode north, bringing back supplies and commandeering farm wagons that would carry the provisions and tents and arrows and newly felled oaks, which would be trimmed and shaped to make the catapults that would add their missiles to the shaped gun-stones that all had to be carried up the hill by yet more wagons. But, at last, the whole army and all its horses and all its supplies was ashore, and under a bright afternoon sun the cumbersome wagons were lined on the road beside the monastery and the army of England, banners flying, assembled around them. There were nine thousand archers and three thousand men-at-arms, all of them mounted, and there were pages and squires and women and servants and priests and yet more spare horses, and the flags snapped bright in the midday wind as the king, mounted on a snow-white gelding, rode along his red-crossed army. The sun glinted from the crown that surmounted his helmet. He reached the skyline above the town and he stared for a few minutes, then nodded to Sir John Holland who would have the honor of leading the vanguard. “With God’s blessing, Sir John!” the king called, “on to Harfleur!”
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.”