It was disordered. Henry knew that the line would form again when the final French battle charged, but now there were hundreds of prisoners behind that line and those captured men could still fight. They had no helmets and their weapons had been taken, but they could still assault the rear of his line. Most had their hands tied, but not all, and the unpinioned men could free the others to throw themselves on the perilously thin English line. Then there was the threat of the Frenchmen pillaging his baggage, but that could wait. The vital thing now was to hold off the third French charge, and to do that he needed every blade in his small army. The advancing horses would be hampered by the hundreds of corpses, yet they would eventually get past those bodies and then the long lances would stab into his line. He needed men.
And men stared up at the king. They saw him close his eyes and knew he was praying to his stern God, the God who had spared his army so far this day, and Henry prayed that God’s mercy would continue and, as his lips moved in the prayer, so the answer came to him. The answer was so astonishing that for a moment he did nothing, then he told himself God had spoken to him and so he opened his eyes.
“Kill the prisoners,” he ordered.
One of his household men-at-arms stared up at him. He was not sure he had heard right. “Sire?”
“Kill the prisoners!”
That way the prisoners could not fight again and the men guarding them would be forced back into the battle line.
“Kill them all!” Henry shouted. He pointed a gauntleted hand at the captives. One of his men-at-arms had made a swift count and reckoned over two thousand Frenchmen had been taken and Henry’s gesture encompassed them all. “Kill them!” Henry commanded.
The French had flaunted the oriflamme, promising no quarter, so now no quarter would be given.
The prisoners would die.
The Sire de Lanferelle wandered bleakly behind the English line. He saw the English king in a battle-scarred helmet sitting on horseback, then was shocked to see that the Duke of Orleans, the French king’s nephew, was a prisoner. He was just a young man, charming and witty, yet now, in a blood-spattered surcoat and with his arm gripped by an archer in English royal livery, he looked dazed, stricken and ill. “Sire,” Lanferelle said, dropping to one knee.
“What happened?” Orleans asked.
“Mud,” Lanferelle said, standing again.
“My God,” the duke said. He flinched, not from pain for he was hardly wounded, but out of shame. “Alençon’s dead,” he went on, “and so are Bar and Brabant. Sens died too.”
“The archbishop?” Lanferelle asked, somehow more shocked that a prince of the church was dead than that three of France’s noblest dukes should have been killed.
“They gutted him, Lanferelle,” the duke said, “they just gutted him. And d’Albret’s dead too.”
“The constable?”
“Dead,” Orleans said, “and Bourbon’s captured.”
“Dear sweet God,” Lanferelle said, not because the Constable of France was dead or because the Duke of Bourbon, the victor of Soissons, was a prisoner, but because Marshal Boucicault, reckoned the toughest man in France, was now being led to join the Duke of Orleans.
Boucicault stared at Lanferelle, then at the royal duke, then shook his grizzled head. “It seems we’re all doomed to English hospitality,” he growled.
“They treated me well enough when I was a prisoner,” Lanferelle said.
“Jesus Christ, you have to find a second ransom?” Boucicault asked. His white surcoat with its red badge of a two-headed eagle was ripped and bloodstained. His armor, that had been polished through the night to a dazzling sheen, was scarred by blades and streaked with mud. He turned a bitter gaze on the other prisoners. “What’s it like over there?” he asked.
“Sour wine and good ale,” Lanferelle said, “and rain, of course.”
“Rain,” Boucicault said bitterly, “that was our undoing. Rain and mud.” He had advised against fighting Henry’s army at all, rain or no rain, fearing what the English archers could do. Better, he had said, to let them straggle dispiritedly into Calais and to concentrate France’s forces on the recapture of Harfleur, but the hot-headed royal dukes, like young Orleans, had insisted that the battle be fought. Boucicault felt a surge of bile, a temptation to spit an accusation at the duke, but he resisted it. “Damp England,” he said instead. “Tell me the women are damp too?”
“Oh, they are,” Lanferelle said.
“I’ll need women,” the Marshal of France said, staring up at the gray sky. “I doubt France can raise our ransoms, which means we’ll all probably die in England, and we’ll need something to pass the time.”
Lanferelle wondered where Melisande was. He suddenly wanted to see her, to talk to her, but the only women in sight were a handful who brought water to wounded men. Priests were offering other men the final rites, while doctors knelt beside the injured. They cut armor buckles, pulled mangled steel from pulverized flesh, and held men down as they thrashed in agony. Lanferelle saw one of his own men and, leaving Orleans and the marshal to their guards, went to crouch beside the man and flinched at the mangled ruin of his left leg that had been half severed by ax blows. Someone had tied a bow cord around the man’s thigh, but blood still seeped in thick pulses from the ragged wound. “I’m sorry, Jules,” Lanferelle said.
Jules could say nothing. He twisted his head from side to side. He had bitten his lower lip so hard that blood trickled down his chin.
“You’ll live, Jules,” Lanferelle said, doubting he spoke the truth, and then he twisted as he heard a bellow of anger.
He stared, incredulous. English archers were murdering the prisoners. For a moment Lanferelle thought the archers must be mad, then he saw that a man-at-arms in royal livery commanded them. French prisoners, their hands tied, tried to run away, but the archers caught them, turned them and slashed long knives across their throats. Blood was spraying from the cuts to soak the grinning archers, and more bowmen were hurrying to the slaughter with drawn blades. Some English men-at-arms were dragging prisoners away, evidently intent on preserving their prospects of ransoms, while the noblest and most valuable captives, like Marshal Boucicault and the Dukes of Orleans and Bourbon, were being guarded against the massacre, but the rest were being ruthlessly killed. Lanferelle understood then. The King of England was frightened of the prisoners attacking the rear of his line when the last French battle made its assault and to prevent that he was killing the captives, and though that made sense it still astonished Lanferelle. Then he saw archers coming toward him and he patted Jules’s shoulder. “Pretend to be dead, Jules,” he said. He could think of no other way of preventing the man’s killing for he could not defend him without weapons, and so he hurried away in search of Sir John. Sir John, he was sure, would protect him, and if he could not find Sir John he would try to reach the Tramecourt woods and hide in its briar thickets.
Some prisoners tried to fight back, but they were unarmed and the archers felled them with poleaxes. The bowmen moved deftly in the mud, killing with a horrible efficiency. The English destriers, almost a thousand saddled stallions, were at the southern end of the field and a handful of prisoners tried to reach them, but some of the pageboys who guarded the horses mounted and drove the fugitives back to where the archers killed. There was panic and blood and screams as men died and as others were herded toward the slaughter-men. More archers came to the killing, and the prisoners blundered through the thick plow in search of an escape that did not exist. It did not exist for Lanferelle either. He reached the right flank of the English line where a small forester’s cottage stood at the treeline. It was burning, and he heard the screams of dying men coming from the flames and thick smoke. The archers who had set the cottage ablaze saw Lanferelle and headed toward him and he swerved northward, but only to see more archers between him and the English line where Sir John’s standard flew. Then, to his relief, he recognized the tall figure and dark face of Nicholas Hook.