Hook wrenched the poleax back, but the spear point was trapped in the man’s armor. “Take this!” Sir John said sharply, thrusting the ax at Hook, and later, much later when the fight was over, Hook marveled at Sir John’s utter calm in the middle of a fight. Sir John had seen Hook’s predicament and solved it, even though he was under attack himself. He gave Hook the ax and, in the time it took Hook to take it, Sir John drew his sword. It was Sir John’s favorite sword, the one he called Darling, and it was a heavier blade than most, strong enough to survive hard lunges into steel plate. Sir John used it to keep the enemy off balance, letting Hook do the killing now. Hook’s first blow drove the ax into a helmet, wrenching the whole visor loose so it hung askew. “Cheap steel!” Sir John said, and his sword flickered at men’s faces, making them retreat, and Hook drove the blade into an armored belly and saw the blood well out bright and fast. “Flag!” Sir John bellowed. “Bring me my goddam flag!”
Hook was standing with his feet apart, driving the ax at men who were hardly fighting back. They were hampered by the bodies at their feet and cowed by Sir John’s sheer skill and ferocity. A determined man could have attacked into Sir John’s sword and Hook’s ax, but instead the defenders tried to back away from the blades while the Frenchmen behind pushed them forward. “Trois!” Sir John was counting the men he had wounded or killed, “quatre! Come on, you goddam bastards! I’m hungry!” Hook’s ax was the more dangerous weapon because of its power. The blade crumpled armor like parchment or chopped into flesh like a slaughterman’s cleaver, and Hook was grimacing as he swung and the enemy thought he was smiling, and that smile was more frightening than the blade. The sheer press of Frenchmen made it impossible for their crossbowmen to take aim, while the surviving rear wall and the obscuring smoke hid the fight from the bowmen on the towers of the Leure Gate. Sir John was shouting and Hook was keening a mad noise and their blades were red. Hook was not trying to kill now, he was just thrusting the enemy back and putting men on the ground to make a barrier. A fallen man-at-arms made an upward cut with his sword, but Hook saw the lunge coming, took a half-step to one side, slammed the ax down hard onto the man’s visor, heard the gurgling noise as the heavy blade crushed steel into flesh, swung the ax back to dent a man’s breastplate, and then rammed the weapon forward to push a third man backward.
“My flag!” Sir John shouted again, “I want these bastards to know who’s killing them!”
His standard-bearer suddenly tumbled over the wall behind, and with him came more men-at-arms wearing Sir John’s lion. “Kill the bastards!” Sir John screamed, but the bastards had taken enough. They were spilling through a gap in the rearward wall of the barbican and scrambling down a ladder or hurling themselves at a steep slope of spilled rubble before running through the smoke for the town’s gate. The rising sun was lighting that smoke. Screaming Englishmen were killing the last defenders who could not reach the gap in time. One man held out his glove in token of surrender, but an archer beat him down with a long-hafted hammer and another skewered him with a poleax.
“Enough!” a voice shouted. “Enough! Enough!”
“Hold your blows!” Sir John called. “Hold it, I said!”
“God be thanked!” the man who had first called to end the killing said, and Hook saw it was the king who, sword in hand, suddenly knelt on the rubble and crossed himself. The king’s surcoat, its bright badge crossed by Saint George’s red, was scorched. A springolt bolt thumped into one of the timbers facing the town, making the wall quiver. “Extinguish the flames!” the king called, getting to his feet. He pulled off his helmet and its leather liner so that his thick cropped hair stuck up in small, sweat-dark clumps. “And someone have pity on that man!” He gestured at the Frenchman who had tried to surrender, and who now writhed and moaned as blood soaked the faulds just beneath his breastplate. The poleax was still embedded in his belly. A man-at-arms drew a knife, felt for the gap in the armor protecting the dying man’s throat, and stabbed home once before working the blade around inside the gullet. The man convulsed, blood bubbled from the holes in his dented visor, then he gave a spasm and was still. “God be thanked,” the king said again. An archer suddenly fell to his knees and Hook thought the man was praying, but instead he vomited. Crossbow bolts were striking the barbican’s rear wall, their strikes sounding like flails beating on a threshing floor. The king’s banner was flying from the barbican now and the heavy cloth twitched as the bolts ripped and tore at the weave. “Sir John,” the king said, “I must thank you.”
“For doing my duty, sire?” Sir John asked, going to one knee, “and this man helped,” he added, gesturing at Hook.
Hook also dropped to one knee. The king gave him a glance, but showed no recognition. “My thanks to you all,” Henry said curtly, then turned away. “Send heralds!” he ordered one of his entourage, “and tell them to yield the town! And bring water for the flames!”
Water was poured on the flames, but the fire had penetrated deep into the barbican’s shattered timbers and they smoldered on, seeping a constant and choking smoke about the captured bastion. Its ragged summit was garrisoned by archers now, and that night they manhandled the Messenger, one of the smaller cannon, up to its summit, and that gun splintered the timbers of the Leure Gate with its first shot.
The heralds had ridden to that gate after the barbican’s capture, and they had patiently explained that the English would now demolish the great gate and its towers and that the fall of Harfleur was thus inevitable, and that the garrison should therefore do the sensible, even the honorable, thing and surrender before more men died. If they refused to surrender, the heralds declared, then the law of God decreed that every man, woman, and child in Harfleur would be given to the pleasure of the English. “Think of your pretty daughters,” a herald called to the garrison’s commanders, “and for their sake, yield!”
But the garrison would not surrender, and so the English dug new gun-pits closer to the town, and they hammered the exposed Leure Gate, demolishing the towers on either side and bringing down its stone arch, yet still the defenders fought back.
And the first chill wind of summer’s end brought rain.
And the sickness did not end and Henry’s army died in blood, vomit, and watery shit.
And Harfleur remained French.
It all had to be done again. Another assault, this time on the wreckage of the Leure Gate and, to make sure the defenders could not concentrate their men on that southwestern corner of the ramparts, the forces of the Duke of Clarence would assault the Montivilliers Gate on the town’s far side.
This time, Sir John said, they were going into the town. “The goddam bastards won’t surrender! So you know what you can do with the bastards! If it’s got a prick, you kill it, if it’s got tits, you hump it! Everything in that town is yours! Every coin, every ale-pot, every woman! They’re yours! Now go and get them!”
And so the twin assaults streamed across the filled-in ditches and the arrows rained from the sky and the trumpets blared a challenge to the uncaring sun and the killing began again. And again it was Sir John Holland who led, which meant that Sir John Cornewaille’s men were in the front of the attack that swiftly captured the ruins of the Leure Gate and there, abruptly, were stopped.
The gate had once led into a closely-packed street of overhanging houses, but the garrison had pulled those buildings down to clear a killing space, behind which they had made a new barricade that had been mostly protected from the English gun-stones by the remnants of the old wall and gate. The Messenger, mounted on the barbican’s summit, had managed to shoot some stones at the fresh work, but it could only manage three shots a day and the French repaired the damage between each shot. The new wall was built from masonry blocks, roof timbers, and rubble-filled baskets, and behind it were crossbowmen, and as soon as the English men-at-arms appeared across the ruin of the Leure Gate the bolts began to fly.