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.”
“I just warned our fellows,” Hook said.
“No, you didn’t. You told them to get back to the wagons, is that right?”
“Yes, Sir John.”
“Why?” Sir John asked belligerently.
Hook frowned as he remembered. At the time it had seemed an obvious precaution, but he had not thought why it was so obvious. “Our bows were no good in the trees,” he now said slowly, “but if they were back at the wagons they could shoot. They needed space to shoot.”