“You don’t look it. Come.” Sir John grasped Hook’s arm and led him toward the camp. “What happened?”
“They came from above,” Hook said. “I was on my way out when the roof fell in.”
“It fell on you?”
“Yes, Sir John.”
“Someone loves you, Hook.”
“Saint Crispinian does,” Hook said, then he saw Melisande in the light of a campfire and went to her embrace.
And afterward, in the darkness, had nightmares.
Sir John’s men started dying next morning. A man-at-arms and two archers, all three of them struck by the sickness that turned bowels into sewers of filthy water. Alice Godewyne died. A dozen other men-at-arms were sick, as were at least twenty archers. The army was being ravaged by the plague and the stench of shit hung over the camp, and the French built their walls higher every night and in the dawn men struggled to the gun-pits and trenches where they vomited and voided their bowels.
Father Christopher caught the sickness. Melisande found him shivering in his tent, face pale, lying in his own filth and too weak to move. “I ate some nuts,” he told her.
“Nuts?”
“Les noix,” he explained in a voice that was like a breathless groan. “I didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know?”
“The doctors tell me now that you shouldn’t eat nuts or cabbage. Not with the sickness about. I ate nuts.”
Melisande washed him. “You’ll make me sicker,” he complained, but was too weak to prevent her from cleaning him. She found him a blanket, though Father Christopher threw it off when the day’s warmth became insufferable. Much of the low land in which Harfleur stood was still flooded and the heat seemed to shimmer off the shallow water and made the air thick as steam. The guns still fired, but less frequently because the Dutch gunners had also been struck by the murrain. No one was spared. Men in the king’s household fell ill, great lords were struck down, and the angels of death hovered on dark wings above the English camp.
Melisande found blackberries and begged some barley from Sir John’s cooks. She boiled the berries and barley to reduce the liquid that she then sweetened with honey and spooned into Father Christopher’s mouth. “I’m going to die,” he told her weakly.
“No,” she said decisively, “you are not.”
The king’s own physician, Master Colnet, came to Father Christopher’s tent. He was a young, serious man with a pale face and a small nose with which he smelled Father Christopher’s feces. He offered no judgment on what he had determined from the odors, instead he briskly opened a vein in the priest’s arm and bled him copiously. “The girl’s ministrations will do no harm,” he said.
“God bless her,” Father Christopher said weakly.
“The king sent you wine,” Master Colnet said.
“Thank his majesty for me.”
“It’s excellent wine,” Colnet said, binding the cut arm with practiced skill, “though it didn’t help the bishop.”
“Bangor’s dead?”
“Not Bangor, Norwich. He died yesterday.”
“Dear God,” Father Christopher said.
“I bled him too,” Master Colnet said, “and thought he would live, but God decreed otherwise. I shall come back tomorrow.”
The Bishop of Norwich’s body was cut into quarters, then boiled in a giant cauldron to flense the flesh from the bones. The filthy steaming liquid was poured away and the bones were wrapped in linen and nailed in a coffin that was carried to the shore so the bishop could be taken home to be buried in the diocese he had taken such care to avoid in life. Most of the dead were simply dropped into pits dug wherever there was a patch of ground high enough to hold an unflooded grave, but as more men died the grave-pits were abandoned and the corpses were carried to the tidal flats and thrown into the shallow creeks where they were at the mercy of wild dogs, gulls, and eternity. The stench of the dead and the stink of shit and the reek of smoldering fires filled the encampment.
Two mornings after Hook had stumbled away from the fallen mine there was a sudden flurry of gunshots from the walls of Harfleur. The garrison had loaded their cannon and now fired them all at the same time so that the battered town was edged with smoke. Defenders cheered from the walls and waved derisive flags.
“A ship got through to them,” Sir John explained.
“A ship?” Hook asked.
“For Christ’s sake, you know what a ship is!”
“But how?”
“Our goddam fleet was asleep, that’s how! Now the goddam bastards have got food. God damn the bastards.” It seemed God had changed sides, for the defenses of Harfleur, though battered and broken, were constantly replenished and rebuilt. New walls backed the broken old, and every night the garrison deepened the defensive ditch and raised new obstacles in the shattered breaches. The intensity of the crossbow bolts did not let up, proof that the town had been well stocked, or else that the ship that had evaded the blockade had brought a new supply. The English, meanwhile, grew more ill. Sir John ducked into Father Christopher’s tent and stared at the priest. “How is he?” he asked Melisande.
She shrugged. As far as Hook could tell the priest was already dead, for he lay unmoving on his back, his mouth slackly open and his skin grayish pale.
“Is he breathing?” Sir John demanded.
Melisande nodded.
“God help us,” Sir John said and backed out of the tent, “God help us,” he said again, and stared at the town. It should have fallen two weeks ago, yet there it lay, defiant still, the wreckage of its wall and towers protecting the new barricades that had been built behind.
There was some good news. Sir Edward Derwent was a prisoner in Harfleur, as was Dafydd ap Traharn. The heralds, returning from another vain attempt to persuade the garrison to surrender, told how the men trapped in the mine’s far end had surrendered. The collapsed mine had been abandoned, though on Harfleur’s eastern side, where the king’s brother led the siege, other shafts were still being driven toward the walls. The best news was that the French were making no effort to relieve the town. English patrols were riding far into the countryside to find grain, and there was no sign of an enemy army coming to strike at the disease-weakened English. Harfleur, it seemed, had been left to rot, though it appeared now that the besiegers would be destroyed first.
“All that money,” Sir John said bleakly, “and all we’ve done is march a couple of miles to become lords of graves and shit-pits.”
“So why don’t we just leave it?” Hook asked. “Just march away?”
“A goddam stupid question,” Sir John said. “The place might surrender tomorrow! And all Christendom is watching. If we abandon the siege we look weak. And besides, even if we did march inland we won’t necessarily find the French. They’ve learned to fear English armies and they know the quickest way to get rid of us is to hide themselves in fortresses. So we might just abandon this siege to start another. No, we have to take this goddam town.”
“Then why don’t we attack?” Hook asked.
“Because we’ll lose too many men,” Sir John said. “Imagine it, Hook. Crossbows, springolts, guns, all tearing into us as we advance, killing us while we fill the ditch, and then we get over the wall’s rubble to find a new ditch, a new wall, and more crossbows, more guns, more catapults. We can’t afford to lose a hundred dead and four hundred crippled. We came here to conquer France, not die in this rancid shit-hole.” He kicked at the hard ground, then stared at the sea where six English ships lay at anchor off the harbor entrance. “If I commanded Harfleur’s garrison,” he said ruefully, “I know just what I’d do now.”
“What’s that?”
“Attack,” Sir John said. “Kick us while we’re half crippled. We speak of chivalry, Hook, and we are chivalrous. We fight so politely! Yet you know how to win a battle?”
“Fight dirty, Sir John.”
“Fight filthy, Hook. Fight like the devil and send chivalry to hell. He’s no fool.”