“Which is just what happened,” Sir John said. The archers, gathering at the wagons, had driven the raiders away with two volleys. “So you did the right thing, Hook. The bastards only came to make mischief. They wanted to kill a few men and have a look at what progress we were making, and you saw them off!”
“I wasn’t there, Sir John,” Hook said, “it was the other archers what drove them off.”
“You were with the Sire of Lanferelle, I know. And he let you live.” Sir John gave Hook an appraising look. “Why?”
“He wants to kill me later,” Hook said, not sure that was the right answer, “or maybe it’s because of Melisande?”
“He’s a cat,” Sir John said, “and you’re his mouse. A wounded mouse,” he glanced at Hook’s right hand, which was still bandaged. “You can still shoot?”
“Good as ever, Sir John.”
“So I’m making you a ventenar. Which means I’m doubling your pay.”
“Me!” Hook stared at Sir John.
Sir John did not answer straightaway. He had turned a critical eye on his men-at-arms, who were practicing sword strokes against tree trunks. Practice, practice, practice was one of Sir John’s constant refrains. He claimed to strike a thousand blows a day in never-ending practice and he demanded the same of his men. “Put some muscle into it, Ralph,” he shouted at one man, then turned back to Hook. “Did you think about what to do when you saw the French?”
“No.”
“That’s why I’m making you a sergeant. I don’t want men who have to think about what to do, but just do it. Tom Evelgold’s now your centenar, so you can take his company. I tell him what to do, he tells you what to do, and you tell your archers what to do. If they don’t do it, you thump the bastards, and if they still don’t do it, I thump you.”
“Yes, Sir John.”
Sir John’s battered face grinned. “You’re good, young Hook, and you’re something else.” He pointed at Hook’s bandaged hand. “You’re lucky. Here,” he took a thin silver chain from a pouch and dropped it into Hook’s hand. “Your badge of office. And tomorrow you build a sow.”
“What’s a sow, Sir John?”
“It’s a pig to build, I’ll tell you that much,” Sir John said, “a goddam pig!”
It began to rain that night. The rain came from the sea, carried on a cold west wind. It began softly, pattering on the besiegers’ tents, and then the wind rose to tear at the banners on their makeshift poles and the rain hardened and came at an angle and drenched the ground into a morass of mud. The flood waters, which had largely subsided, began to rise again and the midden overflowed. The gunners cursed and raised awnings over their weapons, while every archer carefully hid his bowstrings from the soaking rain.
There was no need for Hook to carry a bow. His job was to raise the sow and it was, as Sir John had promised, a pig of a job. It was not intricate work, not even skilled, but it needed strength and it had to be done in full view of the defenders and within range of their cannons, springolts, catapults, and crossbows.
The sow was a giant shield, shaped like the toe of a shoe, behind and beneath which men could work safe from enemy missiles, and it would have to be built strong enough to withstand the repeated strike of gun-stones.
A white-haired Welshman, Dafydd ap Traharn, supervised the work. “I come from Pontygwaith,” he told the archers, “and in Pontygwaith we know more about building things than all you miserable English bastards put together!” He had planned to run two wagons loaded with earth and stones to the place where the sow would be built and use the wagons to protect the archers from enemy missiles, but the rain had softened the ground and the wagons had become bogged down. “We’ll have to dig,” he said with the relish of a man who knew he would not have to wield a spade himself. “We know about digging in Pontygwaith, know more than all you English fart-makers put together!”
“That’s because you were digging graves for all the Welshmen we killed,” Will of the Dale retorted.
“Burying you sais, we were,” Dafydd ap Traharn replied happily. Later, as he chatted with Hook, he cheerfully admitted he had been a rebel against the English king just fifteen years before. “Now that Owain Glyn Dwr,” he said warmly, “what a man!”
“What happened to him?”
“He’s still alive, boy!” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “still alive!” Glyn Dwr’s rebellion had burned for over a decade, giving young Henry, Prince of Wales and now King of England, a long education in warfare. The revolt had been defeated and some of the Welsh leaders had been dragged on hurdles through London to their executions, but Owain Glyn Dwr himself had never been captured. “We have magicians in Wales,” Dafydd ap Traharn lowered his voice and leaned close to Hook as he spoke, “and they can turn a man invisible!”
“I’d like to see that,” Hook said wistfully.
“Well, you can’t, can you? That’s the whole thing about being invisible, you can’t see them! Why, Owain Glyn Dwr could be here right now and you couldn’t see him! And that’s what has happened to him, see? He’s living in luxury, boy, with women and apples, but if an Englishman gets within a mile of him, he turns invisible!”
“So what’s a rebel Welshman doing with this army?” Hook asked.
“A man has to live,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “and eating an enemy’s loaf of bread is better than staring into an empty oven. There’s dozens of Glyn Dwr’s men in this army, boy, and we’ll fight as hard for Henry as we ever did for Owain.” He grinned. “Mind you, there are a few of Owain Glyn Dwr’s men in France as well, and they’ll fight against us.”
“Archers?”
“God be praised, no. Archers can’t afford to run away to France, can they now? No, it’s the gentry who lost their land who went to France, not the archers. Have you ever faced an archer in battle?”
“God be praised, no,” Hook said.
“It is not what I would call a happy experience,” Dafydd ap Traharn said grimly. “My God, boy, but we Welsh don’t take fright easily, but when Henry’s archers shot at Shrewsbury it was death from the sky. Like hail, it was, only hail with steel points, and hail that never stopped, and men were dying all around me and their screams were like tortured gulls on a black shore. An archer is a terrible thing.”
“I’m an archer.”
“You’re a digger now, boy,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, grinning, “so dig.”
They dug a trench away from a gun-pit, digging it toward the walls of Harfleur, and the defenders saw the trench being made and rained crossbow bolts and gun-stones on the work. The defenders’ catapults tried to lob stones onto the new trench, but the missiles went wide, landing in showers of splattering mud. After thirty paces of new trench had been made Dafydd ap Traharn declared himself satisfied and ordered a new pit to be excavated. It had to be big, square and deep, and so the archers hacked and shoveled till they reached a layer of chalk. The new pit’s side seeped water so that they slopped about in muck as they raised a parapet of tree trunks on three sides of the pit, only leaving the rear that led to the English camp unprotected. They laid the trunks flat, four abreast, and piled more on top, so that a man could stand upright in the pit and be invisible to the enemy on Harfleur’s walls. “Tonight,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “we’ll make a roof and our lovely sow will be finished.”
They made the roof at night because the pit was close enough to the walls to be within easy range of a crossbow, but the enemy must have guessed what was happening and they shot blind through the rain-soaked darkness and three men were wounded by the short, sharp bolts that spat from the night. It took all that night to lay long trunks over the pit and then to cover those timbers with a thick layer of earth and chalk rubble before adding a final covering of more tree trunks. “And now the real work begins,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “which means we have to use Welshmen.”
“The real work?” Hook asked.
“We’re going to make a mine, lad. We’re going to dig deep.”