The three men jumped into the trench, drew their swords, and approached the wounded enemy. Hook meanwhile stayed above the trench, advancing beside it with an arrow on his cord. He could see men fighting around the distant sow and in the wide pit where the biggest gun, the great bombard called the King’s Daughter, was dug in. Fire burned bright there, but it was none of Hook’s business. His job was to be on Sir John’s flank.
The ground was rough, churned up by digging and by the strike of French missiles. The boulders slung by the big catapults in Harfleur littered the path, as did the remnants of the houses that had been burned when the siege began, but the dawn was now seeping a faint light in the east, just enough to cast shadows from the obstacles. A crossbow bolt whipped past Hook’s head and he sensed it had come from the nearest gun-pit where a cannon called the Redeemer was emplaced. “Will! Keep those bastards busy.”
“What bastards?”
“The ones who’ve captured the Redeemer!” Hook said, and grabbed Will of the Dale’s arm and turned him toward the gun-pit, which was a black shadow twenty paces beyond the trench. It had been protected from the springolts and guns of Harfleur by one of the ingenious wooden screens that loomed high in the darkness, but the tilting screen had not kept the enemy from capturing the cannon. “Put as many arrows into the pit as you can,” Hook told Will, “but stop shooting when we reach the gun.” Hook pushed six men toward Will. “You obey Will,” he told them, “and you look after Melisande,” he added to Will, for she was still with the group. “The rest of you, after me.”
Another crossbow bolt hissed close by, but Hook’s men were moving fast now. Will of the Dale and his half-dozen men were moving eastward to shoot their arrows through the opening at the back of the pit, while Hook was running to the Redeemer’s flank. He jumped down into the wide trench and waited for his six men to join him. “No bows from now on,” he told them.
“No bows? We’re archers!” Will Sclate grumbled. Will Sclate always grumbled. He was not a popular man, too morose to be easy company and too slow-witted to join in the incessant chatter among the archers, but he was big and hugely strong. He had grown up on one of Sir John’s estates, a laborer’s son who might have expected to work the fields his whole life, but Sir John had seen the boy’s strength and insisted he learn the longbow. Now, as an archer, he earned far more than any laborer, but he was as slow and stubborn as the clay fields he had once worked with hoe and beetle.
“You’re a soldier,” Hook snapped at him, “and you’re going to use hand weapons.”
“What are we doing?” Geoffrey Horrocks asked. He was the youngest of Sir John’s archers, just seventeen, the son of a falconer.
“We’re going to kill some bastards,” Hook said. He slung the bow across his body and hefted the poleax instead. “And we go fast! After me! Now!”
He scrambled up the face of the trench and over the wreckage of the soil-filled wicker baskets that formed the trench’s parapet. He could see flame-light in the Redeemer’s pit and he could hear the sharp thin noise of bowstrings being released from his left where Will of the Dale’s men were lined beside the stone stump of a wrecked chimney. A shout came from the pit, then another, then a screech as an arrowhead scraped against the cannon’s flank. Seven archers were shooting into the pit. In one minute they could easily loose sixty or seventy arrows, and those arrows were flickering through the half-light, filling the gun-pit with hissing death and forcing the French to crouch for protection.
Then Hook and his men came at them from the flank. The Frenchmen did not see him because the arrows were whistling and thumping around them, and they were crouching to find what little protection the pit offered. The massive wooden screen gave splendid protection on the face that looked toward Harfleur, but the pit had never been designed to protect men being attacked from the rear and Will’s arrows were streaking down the trench and through the wide gap. Then Hook leaped across the parapet at the pit’s side and he prayed the arrows would stop.
They must have stopped because none of his men was struck by an arrow. The archers were shouting a challenge as they followed Hook over the wicker baskets, and still shouting as they started the killing. Hook was swinging the poleax as he landed and its lead-weighted hammer head crashed into a crouching Frenchman’s helmet and Hook sensed rather than saw the metal crumpling under the massive blow that collapsed metal, skull, and brain. A man reared up to his right, but Sclate hurled him back with contemptuous ease as Hook sprawled on the far side of the cannon. He had leaped clean across the Redeemer’s barrel.
He hit the far side of the pit hard, lost his footing, and fell heavily. A surge of fear flared cold in his veins. The biggest fear was that he was on the ground and vulnerable, another that he might have damaged the bow slung on his back, but later, when he remembered the fight, he realized he had also felt elation. In memory it was all a blur of screaming men, bright blades, and ringing metal, but in that welter of impressions there was a cold hard center in which Nick Hook regained his feet and saw a man-at-arms at the front of the pit. The man was wearing plate armor half covered by a surcoat that displayed a red heart pierced by a burning lance. He was holding a sword. His visor was raised and his eyes reflected the small flames of the fallen torches and Hook saw fear in those eyes, and Hook felt no pity because of that fear. Kill or be killed, Sir John always said, and Hook ran at the man, poleax leveled, the haft held in both his hands, and he ignored the feeble defensive sword-swing the man offered and lunged the spear point at the Frenchman’s midriff. The blade scraped off the bottom rim of the breastplate and jarred on the faulds, the plate strips worn on a leather skirt designed to stop a sword thrust into the lower belly. But no fauld could resist a poleax thrust and Hook saw the man’s terrified eyes open wide, and saw his mouth make a great hole as the spear point ripped through steel, leather, mail undershirt, skin, muscle, and guts to ram against the Frenchman’s spine. The man made a mewing noise and Hook was bellowing a challenge as the thrust pushed his victim back against the gun-pit’s face. Hook hauled the poleax back, and the flailing man came with it, his flesh trapping the point, and Hook put his boot into the mess of blood and armor, braced his leg and tugged till the blade came free. He lunged it forward again, but checked the blow as the man fell to his knees. Hook whipped around, ready to defend himself, but the fight was already over. There had only been eight men in the pit. They must have been left there by the larger French party advancing toward the Savage and, when that party had been thrown back by arrows, these eight had been forgotten. Their job had been to wreck the cannon, a job they had been trying to do with a huge ax that lay abandoned beside the windlass that tilted the heavy protective screen on its massive axle. They had managed to chop the windlass into splinters, but now all but one of them was dead.
“Can’t hurt a cannon with an ax!” Tom Scarlet said derisively. The one living Frenchman moaned.
“Anyone hurt?” Hook demanded.
“I twisted my ankle,” Horrocks said. He was panting and his eyes were wide with astonishment or fear.
“You’ll mend,” Hook said abruptly. “Are we all here?” His men were all present, and Will of the Dale was running up the trench with Melisande and his six archers. The wounded Frenchman whimpered and drew his legs up. He had been wearing no armor except a padded haubergeon and Will Sclate had driven an ax deep into his chest so that the linen padding had spilled out and was now soaked with blood. Hook could see a mess of lungs and splintered ribs. Blood bubbled black from the man’s mouth as he moaned again. “Put him out of his misery,” Hook demanded, but his archers just stared at him. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Hook said. He stepped over a corpse, put the poleax’s spike at the man’s neck, lunged once, and so did the job himself.