“Hook!” he shouted, but Hook did not hear him. “Melisande!” He called his daughter’s name in hope that it would pierce the turmoil of screaming. Trumpets were playing again, summoning Englishmen to their standards. “Hook!” he bellowed in desperation.
“What do you want with Hook?” a man asked, and Lanferelle turned to see four archers facing him. The man who had spoken was tall and gaunt with a lantern jaw and held a bloodied poleax. “You know Hook?” the man asked.
Lanferelle backed away.
“I asked you a question,” the man said, following Lanferelle. He was grinning, enjoying the fear on the Frenchman’s face. “Rich, are you? Cos if you’re rich then we might let you live. But you’ve got to be very rich.” He slashed the poleax at Lanferelle’s legs, hoping to cut into a knee and topple the Frenchman, but Lanferelle managed to step back without tripping and so avoided the blow. He staggered for balance in the mud.
“I’m rich,” he said desperately, “very rich.”
“He speaks English,” the archer said to his companions, “he’s rich and he speaks English.” He lunged with the poleax and the spike rammed against Lanferelle’s left cuisse, but the armor held and the point slid off Lanferelle’s thigh. “So why were you shouting for Hook?” the man asked, drawing the poleax back for another thrust.
Lanferelle raised his hands in a placatory gesture. “I am his prisoner,” he said.
The tall man laughed. “Our Nick? Got a rich prisoner, has he? That will never do.” He lunged with the poleax, striking the point onto Lanferelle’s breastplate and Lanferelle staggered backward, but again was not tripped. He glanced around desperately, hoping to see a fallen weapon and the tall English archer grinned at the fear on the Frenchman’s bloodied face. The archer was wearing a haubergeon over a mail coat, and the padded jacket had been slashed so that the wool stuffing hung in tattered blood-crusted clumps. His red cross of Saint George had run in the rain so that his short surcoat, patterned with moon and stars, looked blood red. “We can’t have Nick Hook being rich,” the man said, and raised the poleax ready to bring it down on Lanferelle’s unprotected head.
And just then Lanferelle saw the sword. It was a short and clumsy sword, a cheap sword, and it was turning in the air and for a heartbeat he thought it had been thrown at him, then realized it was being thrown to him. The blade circled, came over the tall archer’s shoulder, and Lanferelle snatched at it and somehow caught the hilt, but the ax was already falling, driven with an archer’s huge strength and Lanferelle had no time to parry, only to throw himself forward, inside the blade’s swing, and he drove his armored weight into the archer’s chest to throw him backward. The ax shaft struck his left arm and Lanferelle brought up the sword, but with no strength in the cut that wasted itself on the man’s arrow bag. One of the other archers struck with a poleax, but Lanferelle had recovered now and threw the lunge off with his blade that he flicked back with his extraordinary speed to slash across the second man’s face. That man reeled away, blood flowing from a shattered nose and split cheek as Lanferelle stepped back again, sword ready for the tall man.
Three archers faced Lanferelle now, but two had no stomach for the fight, which left the tall man alone. He glanced around to see Hook approaching. “Bastard,” he spat at Hook, “you gave him that sword!”
“He’s my prisoner,” Hook said.
“And the king said to kill the prisoners!”
“Then kill him, Tom,” Hook said, amused. “Kill him!”
Tom Perrill looked back to the Frenchman. He saw the feral look in Lanferelle’s eyes, remembered the speed with which the man had evaded and parried and so he lowered the poleax. “You kill him, Hook,” he sneered.
“My lord,” Hook spoke to Lanferelle now, “this man was offered money to rape your daughter. He failed, but so long as he lives your Melisande is in danger.”
“Then kill him,” Lanferelle said.
“I promised God I wouldn’t.”
“But I made no promise to God,” Lanferelle said and flicked the cheap sword at Tom Perrill’s face, forcing the archer back. Perrill glanced wide-eyed at Hook, unable to hide his fear and astonishment, then turned back to Lanferelle, who was smiling. The Frenchman’s weapon was puny and cheap, far outranged by the poleax, but Lanferelle showed a blithe confidence as he stepped forward.
“Kill him!” Perrill shouted at his companions, but neither of them moved, and Perrill thrust the ax forward in a desperate stab at Lanferelle’s midriff and the Frenchman swept the blade aside with contemptuous ease, then simply raised the sword and gave one lunge.
The blade sliced into Perrill’s gullet, starting a gush of blood. The archer stared at his killer, his tongue slowly pushed out and blood ran from it to pour thick and silent down the sword to soak Lanferelle’s ungauntleted hand. For a heartbeat the two men were motionless, then Perrill dropped and Lanferelle wrenched the blade loose and tossed it to Hook.
“Enough! Enough!” A man-at-arms in royal livery was riding behind the line and shouting at the archers. “Enough! Stop the killing! Hold! Enough!”
Hook walked back to the English line.
He saw gray clouds covering the plowland of Agincourt.
And he saw, in front of the English army, a field of dead and dying men. More dead, Hook thought, than the number of men the king had led to this wet slaughteryard. They lay tangled and bloody, countless dead, sprawled and bloodstained, armored corpses, ripped and stabbed and crushed. There were men and horses. There were abandoned weapons, fallen flags, and dead hopes. A field sown with winter wheat had yielded a harvest of blood.
And at the end of that field, beyond the dead, beyond the dying and the weeping, the third French battle was turning away.
The might of France was turning away and men were heading north, leaving Agincourt, riding to escape the risibly small army that had turned their world to horror.
It was over.
Epilogue
It was a November day, sky-bright and cold, filled with the sounds of church bells, cheers, and singing.
Hook had never seen such crowds. London was celebrating its king and his victory. The water towers had been filled with wine, mock castles erected at street corners, and choirs of boys costumed as angels, old men disguised as prophets, and girls masquerading as virgins sang paeans of praise, and through it all the king rode in modest dress, without crown or scepter. The noblest of the French and Burgundian prisoners followed the king; Charles, Duke of Orleans, the Duke of Bourbon, the Marshal of France, still more dukes and countless counts, all exposed to the crowd’s good-natured jeers. Small boys ran alongside the horses of the mounted archers who guarded the prisoners and reached up to touch cased bows and scabbarded swords. “Were you there?” they asked. “Were you there?”
“I was there,” Hook answered, though he had left the procession and the cheers and the singing and the white doves circling.
He had ridden with four companions into the little streets that lay north of Cheapside. Father Christopher led them, taking the group into smaller and smaller alleys, alleys so tight that they had to ride single-file and constantly duck so their heads would not strike the overhanging stories of the timber-framed houses. Hook wore a mail coat, two pairs of breeches to keep out the cold, a padded haubergeon for warmth, boots taken from a dead count at Agincourt, and over it all a new surcoat blazoned with Sir John’s proud lion. Around his neck was a chain of gold, the symbol of his rank; centenar to Sir John Cornewaille. His helmet, of Milanese steel and only slightly scarred from an ax strike, hung from his saddle’s pommel. His sword had been made in Bordeaux and its hilt was decorated with a carved horse, the badge of the Frenchman who had once owned both sword and helmet. “I was there,” he told a small ragged boy, “we were all there,” he added, then he followed Father Christopher around a corner, ducked beneath a hanging bush, the sign of a wineshop, and entered a small square that stank of the sewage flowing through its open gutters. A church stood on the square’s northern side. It was a miserable church, its walls made of wattle and daub and its sorry excuse for a tower built from wood. A single bell hung in the tower. The bell was being tolled so that its cracked note could join the cacophony of noise that rejoiced in England’s victory. “That’s it,” Father Christopher said, gesturing at the little church.