He backed away, leaving the Duke of York face down in the mud. The duke, stunned and trampled, had drowned in a blood-drenched puddle and now the English advanced across his corpse, coming for Lanferelle and for his standard of the sun and falcon, and Lanferelle held them at bay with swift hard strokes. He did not know the duke was dead, only regretted that he had temporarily lost him, but then he saw another standard to his left, a standard deep in the French ranks that showed a rearing lion blazoned with a crown and he reckoned Sir John Cornewaille’s ransom would make him rich enough. “With me!” he bellowed, and he rammed and shoved and fought his way toward Sir John.
Away to Lanferelle’s right a furious battle raged around the king’s four standards. Scores of Frenchmen wanted the honor of capturing England’s king, but they faced the same horrors that dogged the rest of the French attackers. Their front rank had gone down fast, its men exhausted by the mud and wounded by the arrow-storm, and the king’s bodyguard had killed them with axes, maces, and mauls. Now the attackers tripped on bodies and were met by ax strokes, yet still they pushed forward and a French lance pierced the faulds of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the king’s younger brother, and the blow to the groin drove him down into the furrows. Frenchmen surged to take the fallen man prisoner, but Henry stood over his injured brother and used his sword two-handed to hack at the enemy. He fought with a sword because he regarded that as a royal weapon, and if it put him at a disadvantage against men armed with poleaxes and maces, then Henry did not acknowledge it, because he knew God was with him. He could feel God in his heart, he sensed God giving him strength, and even when a French poleax rang on his crowned helmet with a sudden blinding force, God protected him. A golden fleuret was chopped from the crown and his helmet was dented, but the steel was not broken and the leather liner soaked some of the blow’s force and Henry stayed conscious as he lunged the sword into the axman’s armpit and screamed his war cry. “Saint George!”
Henry of England was filled by a God-given joy. Never, in all his life, had he felt closer to God, and he almost pitied the men who came to be killed for they were being killed by God. Henry’s bodyguard flanked him and, one by one, they killed eighteen Frenchmen who, only the night before, had sworn a solemn oath to kill or capture the King of England. The eighteen had been bound together by their oath and they had advanced together and now they died together. Their bodies lay tangled and bloody to impede the men who still wanted the fame of capturing a king. A Frenchman bellowed his challenge, stumbling forward, spiked mace thrashing at the king, and the king slammed the sword hard forward to lodge the point in the slit of the Frenchman’s visor, and the mace struck a man next to the king, who staggered, and another Englishman drove his poleax spike into the Frenchman’s throat so that blood ran down the ax’s iron-sheathed handle. The man sank to his knees, and the king rammed the blade into the visor’s slit, butchering the man’s lips and tongue. Blood welled at the slit, a poleax slammed onto the man’s helmet, driving in the steel and opening the skull to spray the king with blood as he ripped his sword free and parried a lance thrust. “Saint George!” he shouted and felt the divine power thrill through his veins. The Frenchman with the lance had an open visor and Henry saw fear in the man’s eyes, then a mute appeal for mercy as his lance was wrenched from his hands, but God did not want mercy for Henry’s enemies and so the king cut his sword across the man’s face to slice open both his eyeballs. One of the royal bodyguard cracked the blinded man’s helmet with a maul, and so another body was added to the heap of French dead that protected the English line.
And the English line held. In places it had been driven back by the weight of attacking men-at-arms, but the line did not break, and now it was protected by ramparts of dead and wounded Frenchmen, and in places the line bulged forward as the English counterattacked into the French formation. And the French, unable to march straight ahead, began to spread to their flanks.
Where the archers had no arrows.
“You can die, or you can fight.” The voice was distant and amused, as though the speaker did not care what Nicholas Hook’s fate would be.
“God’s holy shit, Nick, they’re coming for us,” Tom Scarlet said nervously. The archers had pulled back behind the foremost stakes and then watched the French men-at-arms crash into the English line. There had been loud cheers from the archers when that perilously thin line stopped the enemy, but now that enemy was spreading toward the stakes.
“We can fight or die,” Hook said. He threw down his bow. It was useless without arrows, and there were no arrows.
“So fight,” the voice spoke again, and Hook knew it was Saint Crispin, the harsher saint, who was talking to him.
“You’re here!” he said aloud in relief and wonderment.
“I’m here, Nick,” Scarlet said, “don’t want to be, but I am.”
“Of course we’re here!” Saint Crispin said harshly. “We’re here to get revenge! So fight them, you bastard! What are you waiting for?”
Hook had paused to watch the French. He sensed they were not trying to outflank the English men-at-arms, but rather to escape the killing that was so loud to his left, but soon, he thought, some Frenchman would decide to attack the lightly armored archers and thus reach the rear of the king’s line.
“What are you waiting for?” the saint again demanded angrily. “Do God’s work, for Christ’s sake! Just kill the goddamned bastards!”
Hook felt a tremor of fear. A Frenchman staggered closer to the stakes. His left arm was hanging limply from his shoulder where an espalier was split and bloody.
“What do we do, Nick?” Scarlet asked.
Hook took the poleax from his shoulder. “Kill them!” he roared. “Kill the goddamned bastards! Saint Crispin! Kill!”
The shout released the archers, who suddenly gave a great shout of defiance and streamed between their stakes to attack the French flank. The bowmen were armed with poleaxes, swords, or mallets. Most were barefoot, none had leg armor and few could afford a breastplate, but in the mud they could move much faster than the French. “Kill them!” Evelgold bellowed, and still more archers took up the shout. There was a wildness in the gray air, a sudden and savage desire to kill the men who had promised to chop off archers’ fingers, and so Welshmen and Englishmen, their arms hardened by years of archery, went to massacre the gentry of France.