Читать книгу Azincourt - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 9

The River Aisne swirled slow through a wide valley edged with low wooded hills. It was spring and the new leaves were a startling green. Long weeds swayed in the river where it looped around the city of Soissons.

The city had walls, a cathedral and a castle. It was a fortress that guarded the Flanders road, which led north from Paris, and now it was held by the enemies of France. The garrison wore the jagged red cross of Burgundy and above the castle flew the gaudy flag of Burgundy’s duke, a flag that quartered the royal arms of France with blue and yellow stripes, all of it badged with a rampant lion.

The rampant lion was at war with the lilies of France, and Nicholas Hook understood none of it. ‘You don’t need to understand it,’ Henry of Calais had told him in London, ‘on account of it not being your goddam business. It’s the goddam French falling out amongst themselves, that’s all you need to know, and one side is paying us money to fight, and I hire archers and I send them to kill whoever they’re told to kill. Can you shoot?’

‘I can shoot.’

‘We’ll see, won’t we?’

Nicholas Hook could shoot, and so he was in Soissons, beneath the flag with its stripes, lion and lilies. He had no idea where Burgundy was, he knew only that it had a duke called John the Fearless, and that the duke was first cousin to the King of France.

‘And he’s mad, the French king is,’ Henry of Calais had told Hook in England. ‘He’s mad as a spavined polecat, the stupid bastard thinks he’s made of glass. He’s frightened that someone will give him a smart tap and he’ll break into a thousand pieces. The truth is he’s got turnips for brains, he does, and he’s fighting against the duke who isn’t mad. He’s got brains for brains.’

‘Why are they fighting?’ Hook had asked.

‘How in God’s name would I know? Or care? What I care about, son, is that the duke’s money comes from the bankers. There.’ He had slapped some silver on the tavern table. Earlier that day Hook had gone to the Spital Fields beyond London’s Bishop’s Gate and there he had loosed sixteen arrows at a straw-filled sack hanging from a dead tree a hundred and fifty paces away. He had loosed very fast, scarce time for a man to count to five between each shaft, and twelve of his sixteen arrows had slashed into the sack while the other four had just grazed it. ‘You’ll do,’ Henry of Calais had said grudgingly when he was told of the feat.

The silver went before Hook had left London. He had never been so lonely or so far from his home village and so his coins went on ale, tavern whores and on a pair of tall boots that fell apart long before he reached Soissons. He had seen the sea for the first time on that journey, and he had scarce believed what he saw, and he still sometimes tried to remember what it looked like. He imagined a lake in his head, only a lake that never ended and was angrier than any water he had ever seen before. He had travelled with twelve other archers and they had been met in Calais by a dozen men-at-arms who wore the livery of Burgundy and Hook remembered thinking they must be English because the yellow lilies on their coats were like those he had seen on the king’s men in London, but these men-at-arms spoke a strange tongue that neither Hook nor his companions understood. After that they had walked all the way to Soissons because there was no money to buy the horses that every archer expected to receive from his lord in England. Two horse-drawn carts had accompanied their march, the carts loaded with spare bowstaves and thick, rattling sheaves of arrows.

They were a strange group of archers. Some were old men, a few limped from ancient wounds, and most were drunkards.

‘I scrape the barrel,’ Henry of Calais had told Hook before they had left England, ‘but you look fresh, boy. So what did you do wrong?’

‘Wrong?’

‘You’re here, aren’t you? Are you outlaw?’

Hook nodded. ‘I think so.’

‘Think so! You either are or you aren’t. So what did you do wrong?’

‘I hit a priest.’

‘You did?’ Henry, a stout man with a bitter, closed face and a bald head, had looked interested for a moment, then shrugged. ‘You want to be careful about the church these days, boy. The black crows are in a burning mood. So is the king. Tough little bastard, our Henry. Have you ever seen him?’

‘Once,’ Hook said.

‘See that scar on his face? Took an arrow there, smack in the cheek and it didn’t kill him! And ever since he’s been convinced that God is his best friend and now he’s set on burning God’s enemies. Right, tomorrow you’re going to help fetch arrows from the Tower, then you’ll sail to Calais.’

And so Nicholas Hook, outlaw and archer, had travelled to Soissons where he wore the jagged red cross of Burgundy and walked the high city wall. He was part of an English contingent hired by the Duke of Burgundy and commanded by a supercilious man-at-arms named Sir Roger Pallaire. Hook rarely saw Pallaire, taking his orders instead from a centenar named Smithson who spent his time in a tavern called L’Oie, the Goose. ‘They all hate us,’ Smithson had greeted his newest troops, ‘so don’t walk the city at night on your own. Not unless you want a knife in your back.’

The garrison was Burgundian, but the citizens of Soissons were loyal to their imbecile king, Charles VI of France. Hook, even after three months in the fortress-city, still did not understand why the Burgundians and the French so loathed each other, for they seemed indistinguishable to him. They spoke the same language and, he was told, the Duke of Burgundy was not only the mad king’s cousin, but also father-in-law to the French dauphin. ‘Family quarrel, lad,’ John Wilkinson told him, ‘worst kind of quarrel there is.’

Wilkinson was an old man, of at least forty years, who served as bowyer, fletcher and arrow-maker to the English archers hired by the garrison. He lived in a stable at the Goose where his files, saws, drawknives, chisels and adzes hung neatly on the wall. He had asked Smithson for an assistant and Hook, the youngest newcomer, was chosen. ‘And at least you’re competent,’ Wilkinson offered Hook the grudging compliment, ‘it’s mostly rubbish that arrives here. Men and weapons, both rubbish. They call themselves archers, but half of them can’t hit a barrel at fifty paces. And as for Sir Roger?’ The old man spat. ‘He’s here for the money. Lost everything at home. I hear he has debts of over five hundred pounds! Five hundred pounds! Can you even imagine that?’ Wilkinson picked up an arrow and shook his grey head. ‘And we have to fight for Sir Richard with this rubbish.’

‘The arrows came from the king,’ Hook said defensively. He had helped carry the sheaves from the Tower’s undercroft.

Wilkinson grinned. ‘What the king did, God save his soul, is find some arrows from old King Edward’s reign. I know what I’ll do, he said to himself, I’ll sell these useless arrows to Burgundy!’ Wilkinson tossed the arrow to Hook. ‘Look at that!’

The arrow, made of ash and longer than Hook’s arm, was bent. ‘Bent,’ Hook said.

‘Bent as a bishop! Can’t shoot with that! Be shooting around corners!’

It was hot in Wilkinson’s stable. The old man had a fire burning in a round brick oven on top of which a cauldron of water steamed. He took the bent arrow from Hook and laid it with a dozen others across the cauldron’s top, then carefully placed a thick pad of folded cloth over the ash shafts and weighted the cloth’s centre with a stone. ‘I steam them, boy,’ Wilkinson explained, ‘then I weights them, and with any luck I straightens them, and then the fledging falls off because of the steam. Half aren’t fledged anyway!’

A brazier burned beneath a second smaller cauldron that stank of hoof glue. Wilkinson used the glue to replace the goose feathers that fledged the arrows. ‘And there’s no silk,’ he grumbled, ‘so I’m having to use sinew.’ The sinew bound the slit feathers to the arrow’s tail, reinforcing the glue. ‘But sinew’s no good,’ Wilkinson complained, ‘it dries out, it shrinks and it goes brittle. I’ve told Sir Roger we need silk thread, but he don’t understand. He thinks an arrow is just an arrow, but it isn’t.’ He tied a knot in the sinew, then turned the arrow to inspect the nock, which would lie on the string when the arrow was shot. The nock was reinforced by a sliver of horn that prevented the bow’s cord from splitting the ash shaft. The horn resisted Wilkinson’s attempt to dislodge it and he grunted with reluctant satisfaction before taking another arrow from its leather discs. A pair of the stiff discs, which had indented edges, held two dozen arrows apiece, holding them apart so that the fragile goose-feather fledgings would not get crushed while the arrows were transported. ‘Feathers and horn, ash and silk, steel and varnish,’ Wilkinson said softly. ‘You can have a bow good as you like and an archer to match it, but if you don’t have feathers and ash and horn and silk and steel and varnish you might as well spit at your enemy. Ever killed a man, Hook?’

‘Yes.’

Wilkinson heard the belligerent tone and grinned. ‘Murder? Battle? Have you ever killed a man in battle?’

‘No,’ Hook confessed.

‘Ever killed a man with your bow?’

‘One, a poacher.’

‘Did he shoot at you?’

‘No.’

‘Then you’re not an archer, are you? Kill a man in battle, Hook, and you can call yourself an archer. How did you kill your last man?’

‘I hanged him.’

‘And why did you do that?’

‘Because he was a heretic,’ Hook explained.

Wilkinson pushed a hand through his thinning grey hair. He was thin as a weasel with a lugubrious face and sharp eyes that now stared belligerently at Hook. ‘You hanged a heretic?’ he asked, ‘short of firewood, are they, in England these days? And when was this brave act done?’

‘Last winter.’

‘A Lollard, was he?’ Wilkinson asked, then smirked when Hook nodded. ‘So you hanged a man because he disagreed with the church about a morsel of bread? “I’m the living bread come from heaven,” says the Lord, and the Lord said nothing about being dead bread on a priest’s platter, did He? He didn’t say He was mouldy bread, did He? No, He said He was the living bread, son, but no doubt you knew better than Him what you were doing.’

Hook recognised the challenge in the old man’s words, but he did not feel capable of meeting it and so he said nothing. He had never cared much for religion or for God, not till he heard the voice in his head, and now he sometimes wondered if he really had heard that voice. He remembered the girl in the stable of the London tavern, and how her eyes had pleaded with him and how he had failed her. He remembered the stench of burning flesh, the smoke dipping low in the small wind to whirl about the lilies and leopards of England’s badge. He remembered the face of the young king, scarred and unforgiving.

‘This one,’ Wilkinson said, picking up an arrow with a warped tip, ‘we can make into a proper killer. Something to send a gentry’s soul to hell.’ He put the arrow on a wooden block and selected a knife that he tested for sharpness against his thumbnail. He sliced off the top six inches of the arrow with one quick cut, then tossed it to Hook. ‘Make yourself useful, lad, get the bodkin off.’

The arrow’s head was a narrow piece of steel a fraction longer than Hook’s middle finger. It was three sided and sharpened to a point. There were no barbs. The bodkin was heavier than most arrowheads because it had been made to pierce armour and, at close range, when shot from one of the great bows that only a man muscled like Hercules could draw, it would slice through the finest plate. It was a knight-killer, and Hook twisted the head until the glue inside the socket gave way and the bodkin came loose.

‘You know how they harden those points?’ Wilkinson asked.

‘No.’

Wilkinson was bending over the stump of the arrow. He was using a fine saw, its blade no longer than his little finger, to make a deep wedge-shaped notch in the cut end. ‘What they do,’ he said, staring at his work as he spoke, ‘is throw bones on the fire when they make the iron. Bones, boy, bones. Dry bones, dead bones. Now why would dead bones in burning charcoal turn iron into steel?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Nor do I, but it does. Bones and charcoal,’ Wilkinson said. He held the notched arrow up, blew some sawdust from the cut, and nodded in satisfaction. ‘I knew a fellow in Kent who used human bones. He reckoned the skull of a child made the best steel, and perhaps he was right. The bastard used to dig them up from graveyards, break them into fragments and burn them on his furnace. Babies’ skulls and charcoal! Oh, he was a rotten turd of a man, but his arrows could kill. Oh, they could kill. They didn’t punch through armour, they whispered through!’ Wilkinson had selected a six-inch shaft of oak while he spoke. One end had already been sharpened into a wedge that he fitted into the notched ash of the cut arrow. ‘Look at that,’ he said proudly, holding up the scarfed joint, ‘a perfect fit. I’ve been doing this too long!’ He held out his hand for the bodkin, which he slipped onto the head of the oak. ‘I’ll glue it all together,’ he said, ‘and you can kill someone with it.’ He admired the arrow. The oak made the head even heavier, so the weight of steel and wood would help punch the arrow through plate armour. ‘Believe me, boy,’ the old man went on grimly, ‘you’ll be killing soon.’

‘I will?’

Wilkinson gave a brief, humourless laugh. ‘The King of France might be mad, but he’s not going to let the Duke of Burgundy hold on to Soissons. We’re too close to Paris! The king’s men will be here soon enough, and if they get into the town, boy, you go to the castle, and if they get into the castle, you kill yourself. The French don’t like the English and they hate English archers, and if they capture you, boy, you’ll die screaming.’ He looked up at Hook. ‘I’m serious, young Hook. Better to cut your own throat than be caught by a Frenchman.’

‘If they come we’ll fight them off,’ Hook said.

‘We will, will we?’ Wilkinson asked with a harsh laugh. ‘Pray that the duke’s army comes first, because if the French come, young Hook, we’ll be trapped in Soissons like rats in a butter churn.’

And so every morning Hook would stand above the gate and stare at the road that led beside the Aisne towards Compiègne. He spent even more time gazing down into the yard of one of the many houses built outside the wall. It was a dyer’s house standing next to the town ditch and every day a girl with red hair would hang the newly coloured cloths to dry on a long line, and sometimes she would look up and wave at Hook or the other archers, who would whistle back at her. One day an older woman saw the girl wave and slapped her hard for being friendly with the hated foreign soldiers, but next day the redhead was again wiggling her rump for her audience’s pleasure. And when the girl was not visible Hook watched the road for the glint of sunlight on armour or the sudden appearance of bright banners that would announce the arrival of the duke’s army or, worse, the enemy army, but the only soldiers he saw were Burgundians from the city’s garrison bringing food back to the city. Sometimes the English archers rode with those foraging parties, but they saw no enemy except the folk whose grain and livestock they stole. The country folk took refuge in the woods when the Burgundians came, but the citizens of Soissons could not hide when the soldiers ransacked their houses for hoarded food. Sire Enguerrand de Bournonville, the Burgundian commander, expected his French enemies to arrive in the early summer and he was planning to endure a long siege, and so he piled grain and salted meat in the cathedral to feed the garrison and townsfolk.

Nick Hook helped pile the food in the cathedral, which soon smelt of grain, though beneath that rich aroma was always the tang of cured leather because Soissons was famous for its cobblers and saddlers and tanners. The tanning pits were south of the town and the stench of the urine in which the hides were steeped made the air foul when the wind blew warm. Hook often wandered the cathedral, staring at the painted walls or at the rich altars decorated with silver, gold, enamel and finely embroidered silks and linens. He had never been inside a cathedral before and the size of it, the shadows far away in the high roof, the silence of the stones, all gave him an uneasy feeling that there must be more to life than a bow, an arrow and the muscles to use them. He did not know what that something was, but the knowledge of it had started in London when an old man, an archer, had spoken to him and when the voice had sounded in his head. One day, feeling awkward, he knelt before a statue of the Virgin Mary and he asked her forgiveness for what he had failed to do in London. He gazed up at her slightly sad face and he thought her eyes, made bright with blue and white paint, were fixed on him and in those eyes he saw reproof. Talk to me, he prayed, but there was no voice in his head. No forgiveness for Sarah’s death, he thought. He had failed God. He was cursed.

‘Think she can help you?’ a sour voice interrupted his prayers. Hook turned and saw John Wilkinson.

‘If she can’t,’ Hook asked, ‘who can?’

‘Her son?’ Wilkinson suggested caustically. The old man looked furtively around him. There were a half-dozen priests saying masses at side altars, but otherwise the only other folk in the cathedral were nuns who were hurrying across the wide nave, shepherded and guarded by priests. ‘Poor girls,’ Wilkinson said.

‘Poor?’

‘You think they want to be nuns? Their parents put them here to keep them from trouble. They’re bastards of the rich, boy, locked away so they can’t have bastards of their own. Come here, I want to show you something.’ He did not wait for a response, but stumped towards the cathedral’s high altar that reared golden bright beneath the astonishing arches that stood, row above row, in a semicircle at the building’s eastern end. Wilkinson knelt beside the altar and dropped his head reverently. ‘Take a look in the boxes, boy,’ he ordered Hook.

Hook climbed to the altar where silver and gold boxes stood on either side of a gold crucifix. Most of the boxes had crystal faces and, through those distorting windows, Hook saw scraps of leather. ‘What are they?’ he asked.

‘Shoes, boy,’ Wilkinson said, his head still bowed and his voice muffled.

‘Shoes?’

‘You put them on your feet, young Hook, to keep the mud from getting between your toes.’

The leather looked old, dark and shrunken. One reliquary held a shrivelled shoe so small that Hook decided it had to be a piece of child’s footwear. ‘Why shoes?’ he asked.

‘You’ve heard of Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian?’

‘No.’

‘Patron saints of cobblers, boy, and of leather-workers. They made those shoes, or so we’re told, and they lived here and were probably killed here. Martyred, boy, like that old man you burned in London.’

‘He was a …’

‘Heretic, I know. You said. But every martyr was killed because someone stronger disagreed with what he believed. Or what she believed. Christ on His cross, boy, Jesus Himself was crucified for heresy! Why the hell else do you think they nailed Him up? Did you kill women too?’

‘I didn’t,’ Hook said uncomfortably.

‘But there were women?’ Wilkinson asked, looking at Hook. He saw the answer in Hook’s face and grimaced. ‘Oh, I’m sure God was delighted with that day’s work!’ The old man shook his head in disgust before reaching into a purse hanging from his belt. He took out a handful of what Hook presumed were coins and dropped them into the huge copper jar that stood by the altar to receive the tribute of pilgrims. A priest had been watching the two English archers suspiciously, but visibly relaxed when he heard the sound of metal falling onto metal in the big jar. ‘Arrowheads,’ Wilkinson explained with a grin. ‘Old rusted broadheads that are no good any more. Now why don’t you kneel and say a prayer to Crispin and Crispinian?’

Hook hesitated. God, he was sure, would have seen Wilkinson drop valueless arrowheads into the jar instead of coins, and the threat of hell’s fires suddenly seemed very close and so Hook hurriedly took a coin from his own pouch and dropped it into the copper jar. ‘Good lad,’ Wilkinson said, ‘the bishop will be right glad of that. It’ll pay for a sup of his ale, won’t it?’

‘Why pray to Crispin and Crispinian?’ Hook asked Wilkinson.

‘Because they’re the local saints, boy. That’s their job, to listen to prayers from Soissons, so they’re the best saints to pray to here.’

So Hook went to his knees and prayed to Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian that they would beg forgiveness for his sin in London, and he prayed that they would keep him safe in this their town of martyrdom and send him home unscathed to England. The prayer did not feel as powerful as those he had addressed to the mother of Christ, but it made sense, he decided, to pray to the two saints because this was their town and they would surely keep a special watch on those who prayed to them in Soissons.

‘I’m done, lad,’ Wilkinson announced briskly. He was pushing something into his pocket and Hook, moving to the altar’s flank, saw that the frontal’s end, where it hung down to the floor, was frayed and ragged because a great square had been crudely cut away. The old man grinned. ‘Silk, lad, silk. I need silk thread for arrows, so I just stole it.’

‘From God?’

‘If God can’t afford a few threads of silk, boy, then He’s in dire trouble. And you should be glad. You want to kill Frenchmen, young Hook? Pray that I have enough silk thread to tie up your arrows.’

But Hook had no chance to pray because, next day, under the rising sun, the French came.

The garrison had known they were coming. News had reached Soissons of the surrender of Compiègne, another town that had been captured by the Burgundians, and Soissons was now the only fortress that barred the French advance into Flanders where the main Burgundian army lay, and the French army was reported to be coming east along the Aisne.

And then, suddenly, on a bright summer morning, they were there.

Hook watched their arrival from the western ramparts. Horsemen came first. They wore armour and had bright surcoats, and some galloped close to the town as if daring the bowmen on the walls to shoot. Some crossbowmen loosed bolts, but no horseman or horse was hit. ‘Save your arrows,’ Smithson, the centenar, ordered his English archers. He flicked a careless finger at Hook’s strung bow. ‘Don’t use it, lad,’ he said. ‘Don’t waste an arrow.’ The centenar had come from his tavern, the Goose, and now blinked at the cavorting horsemen, who were shouting inaudibly at the ramparts where men were hanging the Burgundian standard alongside the personal standard of the garrison’s commander, the Sire de Bournonville. Some townsfolk had also come to the walls and they too gazed at the newly arrived horsemen. ‘Look at the bastards,’ Smithson grumbled, gesturing at the townsfolk, ‘they’d like to betray us. We should have killed every last one of them. We should have slit their goddam French throats.’ He spat. ‘Nothing will happen for a day. Might as well drink ale while it’s still available.’ He stumped away, leaving Hook and a half-dozen other English archers on the wall.

All day the French came. Most were on foot, and those men surrounded Soissons and chopped down trees on the low hills to the south. Tents were erected on the cleared land, and beside the tents were the bright standards of the French nobility, a riot of red, blue, gold and silver flags. Barges came up the river, propelled by giant sweeps, and the barges carried four mangonels, huge machines that could hurl rocks at the city walls. Only one of the massive catapults was brought ashore that day, and Enguerrand de Bournonville, thinking to tip it back into the river, led two hundred mounted men-at-arms on a sally from the western gate, but the French had expected the attack and sent twice as many horsemen to oppose the Burgundians. The two sides reined in, lances upright, and after a while the Burgundians wheeled back, pursued by French jeers. That afternoon smoke began to thicken as the besieging French burned the houses just outside Soissons’s walls. Hook watched the red-headed girl carry a bundle towards the new French encampment. None of the fugitives asked to be admitted to the city, instead they went towards the enemy lines. The girl turned in the thickening smoke to wave farewell to the archers. The first enemy crossbowmen appeared in that smoke, each archer protected by a companion holding a thick pavise, a shield large enough to hide a man as he laboriously re-cranked the crossbow after each bolt was loosed. The heavy bolts thumped into the walls or whistled overhead to fall somewhere in the city.

Then, as the sun began to sink towards the monstrous catapult on the river’s bank, a trumpet sounded. It called three times, its notes clear and sharp in the smoke-hazed air, and as the last blast faded, so the crossbowmen ceased shooting. There was a sudden surge of sparks as a thatched roof collapsed into a burning house and the smoke whirled thick along the Compiègne road where Hook saw two horsemen appear.

Neither horseman was in armour. Both men, instead, wore bright coloured surcoats, and their only weapons were slender white wands that they held aloft as their horses high-stepped delicately on the rutted road. The Sire de Bournonville must have expected them because the west gate opened and the town’s commander rode out with a single companion to meet the approaching riders.

‘Heralds,’ Jack Dancy said. Dancy was from Herefordshire and was a few years older than Hook. He had volunteered for service under the Burgundian flag because he had been caught stealing at home. ‘It was either be hanged there or be killed here,’ he had told Hook one night. ‘What those heralds are doing,’ he said now, ‘is telling us to surrender, and let’s hope we do.’

‘And be captured by the French?’ Hook asked.

‘No, no. He’s a good fellow,’ Dancy nodded at de Bournonville, ‘he’ll make sure we’re safe. If we surrender they’ll let us march away.’

‘Where to?’

‘Wherever they want us to be,’ Dancy said vaguely.

The heralds, who had been followed at a distance by two standard-bearers and a trumpeter, had met de Bournonville not far from the gate. Hook watched as the men bowed to each other from their saddles. This was the first time he had seen heralds, but he knew they were never to be attacked. A herald was an observer, a man who watched for his lord and reported what he saw, and an enemy’s herald was to be treated with respect. Heralds also spoke for their lords, and these men must have spoken for the King of France for one of their flags was the French royal banner, a great square of blue silk on which three gold lilies were emblazoned. The other flag was purple with a white cross and Dancy told him that was the banner of Saint Denis who was France’s patron saint, and Hook wondered whether Denis had more influence in heaven than Crispin and Crispinian. Did they argue their cases before God, he wondered, like two pleaders in a manor court? He touched the wooden cross hanging about his neck.

The men spoke for a brief while, then bowed to each other again before the two royal heralds turned their grey horses and rode away. The Sire de Bournonville watched them for a moment, then wheeled his own horse. He galloped back to the city, curbing beside the dyer’s burning house from where he shouted up at the wall. He spoke French, of which Hook had learned little, but then added some words in English. ‘We fight! We do not give France this citadel! We fight and we will defeat them!’

That ringing announcement was greeted by silence as Burgundian and English alike let the words die away without echoing their commander’s defiance. Dancy sighed, but said nothing, and then a crossbow bolt whirred overhead to clatter into a nearby street. De Bournonville had waited for a response from his men on the walls, but, receiving none, spurred through the gate and Hook heard the squeal of its huge hinges, the crash as the timbers closed and the heavy thump as the locking bar was dropped into its brackets.

The sun was hazed now, shining red gold and bright through the diffusing smoke beneath which a party of enemy horsemen rode parallel to the city wall. They were men-at-arms, armoured and helmeted, and one of them, mounted on a great black horse, carried a strange banner that streamed behind him. The banner bore no badge, it was simply a long pennon of the brightest red cloth, a rippling streak of silken blood made almost transparent by the vapour-wrapped sun behind, but the sight of it caused men on the wall to make the sign of the cross.

‘The oriflamme,’ Dancy said quietly.

‘Oriflamme?’

‘The French war-banner,’ Dancy said. He touched his middle finger to his tongue, then crossed himself again. ‘It means no prisoners,’ he said bleakly. ‘It means they want to kill us all.’ He fell backwards.

For a heartbeat Hook did not know what had happened, then he thought Dancy must have tripped and he instinctively held out a hand to pull him up, and it was then he saw the leather-fledged crossbow bolt jutting from Dancy’s forehead. There was very little blood. A few droplets had spattered Dancy’s face, which otherwise looked peaceful, and Hook went to one knee and stared at the thick-shafted bolt. Less than a hand’s breadth protruded, the rest was deep in the Herefordshire man’s brain and Dancy had died without a sound, except for the meat-axe noise of the bolt striking home. ‘Jack?’ Hook asked.

‘No good talking to him, Nick,’ one of the other archers said, ‘he’s chatting to the devil now.’

Hook stood and turned. Later he had little memory of what happened or even why it happened. It was not as though Jack Dancy had been a close friend, for Hook had no such friends in Soissons except, perhaps, John Wilkinson. Yet there was a sudden anger in Hook. Dancy was an Englishman, and in Soissons the English felt beleaguered as much by their own side as by the enemy, and now Dancy was dead and so Hook took a varnished arrow from his white linen arrow bag that hung on his right side.

He turned and lowered his bow so that it lay horizontally in front of him and he laid the arrow across the stave and trapped the shaft with his left thumb as he engaged the cord. He swung the long bow upright as his right hand took the arrow’s fledged end and drew it back with the cord.

‘We’re not to shoot,’ one of the archers said.

‘Don’t waste an arrow!’ another put in.

The cord was at Hook’s right ear. His eyes searched the smoke-shrouded ground outside the town and he saw a crossbowman step from behind a pavise decorated with the symbol of crossed axes.

‘You can’t shoot as far as they can,’ the first archer warned him.

But Hook had learned the bow from childhood. He had strengthened himself until he could pull the cord of the largest war bows, and he had taught himself that a man did not aim with the eye, but with the mind. You saw, and then you willed the arrow, and the hands instinctively twitched to point the bow, and the crossbowman was bringing up his heavy weapon as two bolts seared the evening air close to Hook’s head.

He was oblivious. It was like the moment in the greenwood when the deer showed for an instant between the leaves, and the arrow would fly without the archer knowing he had even loosed the string. ‘The skill is all between your ears, boy,’ a villager had told him years before, ‘all between your ears. You don’t aim a bow. You think where the arrow will go, and it goes.’ Hook released.

‘You goddam fool,’ an archer said, and Hook watched the white goose feathers flicker in the white-hazed air and saw the arrow fall faster than a stooping hawk. Steel-tipped, silk-bound, ash-shafted, feathered death flying in the evening’s quiet.

‘Good God,’ the first archer said quietly.

The crossbowman did not die as easily as Dancy. Hook’s arrow pierced his throat and the man twisted around and the crossbow released itself so that the bolt spun crazily into the sky as the man fell backwards, still twisting as he fell, then he thrashed on the ground, hands scrabbling at his throat where the pain was like liquid fire, and above him the sky was red now, a smoke-hazed blood-red sky lit by fires and glowing with the sun’s daily death.

That, Hook, thought, had been a good arrow. Straight-shafted and properly fledged with its feathers all plucked from the same goose-wing. It had flown true. It had gone where he willed it, and he had killed a man in battle. He could, at last, call himself an archer.

On the evening of the siege’s second day Hook thought the world had ended.

It was an evening of warm and limpid light. The air was pale-bright and the river slid gently between its flowery banks where willows and alders grew. The French banners hung motionless above their tents. Some smoke still sifted from the burned houses to rise soft into the evening air until it faded high in the cloudless sky. Martins and swallows hunted beside the city’s wall, swooping and twisting.

Nicholas Hook leaned on the ramparts. His unstrung bow was propped beside him as his thoughts drifted back to England, to the manor, to the fields behind the long barn where the hay would be almost ready for cutting. There would be hares in the long grass, trout in the stream and larks in the twilight. He thought about the decaying cattle byre in the field called Shortmead, the byre with rotting thatch and a screen of honeysuckle behind which William Snoball’s young wife Nell would meet him and make silent, desperate love. He wondered who was coppicing the Three Button wood and, for the thousandth time, how the wood had got its name. The tavern in the village was called the Three Buttons and no one knew why, not even Lord Slayton, who sometimes limped on crutches beneath the tavern’s lintel and put silver on the serving hatch to buy all present an ale. Then Hook thought of the Perrills, malevolent and ever-present. He could not go home now, not ever, because he was an outlaw. The Perrills could kill him and it would not be murder, not even manslaughter, because an outlaw was beyond the law’s help. He remembered the window in the London stable, and knew God had told him to take the Lollard girl through that window, but he had failed and he thought he must be cut off from the heavenly light beyond that window for ever. Sarah. He often murmured her name aloud as though the repetition could bring forgiveness.

The evening peace vanished in noise.

But first there was light. Dark light, Hook thought later, a stab of dark light, flame-black red light that licked like a hell-serpent’s tongue from an earthwork the French had dug close to one of their gaunt catapults. That tongue of wicked fire was visible for an instant before it was obliterated in a thundercloud of dense black smoke that billowed sudden, and then the noise came, an ear-punching blow of sound that shook the heavens to be followed by another crack, almost as loud, as something struck the city wall.

The wall shook. Hook’s bow toppled and clattered onto the stones. Birds were screaming as they flew from the flame, smoke and lingering noise. The sun was gone, hidden by the black cloud, and Hook stared and was convinced, at least for a moment, that a crack had opened in the earth and that the fires of hell had vomited their way to the surface.

‘Sweet bloody Christ!’ an archer said in awe.

‘Was wondering when that would happen,’ another archer said in disgust. ‘A gun,’ he explained to the first man, ‘have you never seen a gun?’

‘Never.’

‘You’ll see them now,’ the second man said grimly.

Hook had never seen a gun either, and he flinched when a second one fired to add its filthy smoke to the summer sky. Next day another four cannons added their fire and the six French guns did far more damage than the four big wooden machines. The catapults were inaccurate and their jagged boulders often missed the ramparts and dropped into the city to crush houses that started burning as their kitchen fires were scattered, but the gun-stones ate steadily at the city wall, which was already in bad repair. It took only two days for the outer face of the wall to crumble into the wide fetid ditch, and then the gunners systematically widened the breach as the Burgundians countered by making a semicircular barricade behind the disintegrating wall.

Each gun fired three times a day, their shots as regular as the bells of a monastery calling men to prayer. The Burgundians had their own gun, which had been mounted on a southern bastion in the expectation that the French would attack from the Paris road, and it took two days to drag the weapon to the western ramparts where it was slung up onto the roof of the gate-tower. Hook was fascinated by its tube, which was twice as long as his bowstave and hooped like an ale-pot. The tube and its bindings were made of dark pitted iron and rested on a squat wooden carriage. The gunners were Dutchmen who spent a long time watching the enemy guns and finally aimed their tube at one of those French cannon and then set about the laborious task of loading their machine. Gunpowder was put into the barrel with a long-handled ladle, then tamped tight with a cloth-wrapped rammer. Soft loam was added next. The loam was puddled in a wide wooden pail, rammed onto the powder, then left to dry as the gunners sat in a circle and played dice. The gun-stone, a boulder chipped into a crude ball, waited beside the tube until the chief gunner, a portly man with a forked beard, decided the loam was dry enough, and only then was the stone pushed down the long hooped barrel. A wooden wedge was shoved after it and hammered into place to keep the shaped boulder tight against the loam and powder. A priest sprinkled holy water on the gun and said a prayer as the Dutchmen used long levers to make a final small adjustment to the tube’s aim.

‘Stand back, boy,’ Sergeant Smithson told Hook. The centenar had deigned to leave the Goose tavern to watch the Dutchmen fire their weapon. A score of other men had also arrived, including the Sire de Bournonville who called encouragement to the gunners. None of the spectators stood close to the gun, but instead watched as if the black tube were a wild beast that could not be trusted. ‘Good morning, Sir Roger,’ Smithson said, knuckling his forehead towards a tall, arrow-thin man. Sir Roger Pallaire, commander of the English contingent, ignored the greeting. He had a narrow, beak-nosed face with a lantern jaw, dark hair and, in the company of his archers, the expression of a man forced to endure the stench of a latrine.

The portly Dutchman waited till the priest had finished his prayer, then he pushed a stripped quill into a small hole that had been drilled into the gun’s breech. He used a copper funnel to fill the quill with powder, squinted one more time down the length of the barrel, then stepped to one side and held out a hand for a long, burning taper. The priest, the only man other than the artillerymen to be close to the weapon, made the sign of the cross and spoke a quick blessing, then the chief gunner touched the flame to the powder-filled quill.

The gun exploded.

Instead of sending its stone ball screaming across to the French siege-works the cannon vanished in a welter of smoke, flying metal and shredded flesh. The five gunners and the priest were killed instantly, turned to blood-red mist and ribboned meat. A man-at-arms screamed and writhed as red-hot metal sliced into his belly. Sir Roger, who had been standing next to the screaming man, stepped fastidiously away and grimaced at the blood that had spattered across the badge on his surcoat. That badge showed three hawks on a green field. ‘Tonight, Smithson,’ Sir Roger spoke amidst the blood-reeking smoke that writhed about the rampart, ‘you will meet me after sundown in Saint Antoine-le-Petit’s church. You and your whole company.’

‘Yes, sir, yes,’ Smithson said faintly, ‘of course, Sir Roger.’ The sergeant was staring at the ruined cannon. The first ten feet of the shattered barrel lay canted and ripped open, while the breech had been torn into jagged shards of smoking metal. Part of a hoop and a man’s hand lay by Hook’s feet while the gunners, hired at great expense, were nothing but eviscerated carcasses. The Sire de Bournonville, his jupon spattered with blood and scraps of flesh, made the sign of the cross, while derisive jeers sounded from the French siege lines.

‘We must plan for the assault,’ Sir Roger said, apparently oblivious to the wet horror a few paces away.

‘Very good, Sir Roger,’ Smithson said. The centenar scooped a jellied mess from his belt. ‘A Dutchman’s goddam brains,’ he said in disgust, flicking the gob towards Sir Roger who had turned and now strode away.

Sir Roger, with three men-at-arms all wearing his badge of the three hawks, met the English and Welsh archers of the Soissons garrison in the church of Saint Antoine-le-Petit just after sunset. Sir Roger’s surcoat had been washed, though the bloodstains were still faintly visible on the green linen. He stood in front of the altar, lit by guttering rushlights that burned feebly in brackets mounted on the church’s pillars, and his face still bore the distant look of a man pained to be in his present company. ‘Your job,’ he said, without any preamble once the eighty-nine archers had settled on the floor of the nave, ‘will be to defend the breach. I cannot tell you when the enemy will assault, but I can assure you it will be soon. I trust you will repel any such assault.’

‘Oh we will, Sir Roger,’ Smithson put in helpfully, ‘rely on it, sir!’

Sir Roger’s long face shuddered at the comment. Rumour in the English contingent said that he had borrowed money from Italian bankers in expectation of inheriting an estate from an uncle, but the land had passed to a cousin and Sir Roger had been left owing a fortune to unforgiving Lombards. The only hope of paying the debt was to capture and ransom a rich French knight, which was presumably why he had sold his services to the Duke of Burgundy. ‘In the event,’ he said, ‘that you fail to keep the enemy out of the city, you are to gather here, in this church.’ Those words caused a stir as men frowned and looked at each other. If they failed to defend the breach and lost the new defences behind it, then they expected to retreat to the castle.

‘Sir Roger?’ Smithson ventured hesitantly.

‘I had not invited questions,’ Sir Roger said.

‘Of your goodness, Sir Roger,’ Smithson persevered, knuckling his forehead as he spoke, ‘but wouldn’t we be safer in the castle?’

‘You will assemble here, in this church!’ Sir Roger said firmly.

‘Why not the castle?’ an archer near Hook demanded belligerently.

Sir Roger paused, searching the dim nave for whoever had spoken. He could not discover the questioner, but deigned to offer an answer anyway. ‘The townspeople,’ he finally spoke, ‘detest us. If you attempt to reach the castle you will be assaulted in the streets. This place is much closer to the breach, so come here.’ He paused again. ‘I shall endeavour to arrange a truce for you.’

There was an uncomfortable silence. Sir Roger’s explanation made some sense. The archers knew that most folk in Soissons hated them. The townspeople were French, they supported their king and hated the Burgundians, but they hated the English even more, and so it was more than likely that they would assault the archers retreating towards the castle. ‘A truce,’ Smithson said dubiously.

‘The French quarrel is with Burgundy,’ Sir Roger said, ‘not with us.’

‘Will you be joining us here, Sir Roger?’ an archer called out.

‘Of course,’ Sir Roger said. He paused, but no one spoke. ‘Fight well,’ he said distantly, ‘and remember you are Englishmen!’

‘Welshmen,’ someone intervened.

Sir Roger visibly flinched at that and then, without another word, led his three men-at-arms from the church. A chorus of protests sounded as he left. The church of Saint Antoine-le-Petit was stone-built and defensible, but not nearly so safe as the castle, though it was true the castle was at the other end of the town and Hook wondered how difficult it would be to reach that refuge if townsfolk were blocking the streets and French men-at-arms were howling through the breached ramparts. He looked up at the painted wall that showed men, women and children tumbling into hell. There were priests and even bishops among the doomed souls who fell in a screaming cascade to a lake of fire where black devils waited with leering grins and triple-barbed eel-spears. ‘You’ll wish you were in hell if the Frenchies capture you,’ Smithson said, noticing where Hook was looking. ‘You’ll all be begging for the comforts of hell if those French bastards catch you. So remember! We fight at the barricade and then, if it all goes to shit, we come here.’

‘Why here?’ a man called out.

‘Because Sir Roger knows what he’s doing,’ Smithson said, sounding anything but certain, ‘and if you’ve got sweethearts here,’ he went on with a leer, ‘make certain the little darlings come with you.’ He began thrusting his meaty hips backwards and forwards. ‘Don’t want our sweethearts left in the streets to be humped by half the French army, do we?’

Next morning, as he did each morning, Hook gazed north across the Aisne to the low wooded hills where the beleaguered garrison hoped to see a Burgundian relief force. None came. The great gun-stones whirred across the ashes of the burned houses and bit into the crumbling wall to start up their clouds of dust that settled on the river to drift seawards like pale grey stains on the water. Hook rose early every morning, before it was light, and went to the cathedral where he knelt and prayed. He had been warned not to walk the streets by himself, but the people of Soissons left him alone, perhaps scared of his height and size, or perhaps because they knew he was the one archer who prayed regularly and so tolerated him. He had abandoned praying to Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian because he reckoned they cared more about the townsfolk, their own folk, and so he prayed instead to the mother of Christ because his own mother had been called Mary and he begged the blessed virgin for forgiveness because of the girl who had died in London. On one such morning a priest knelt beside him. Hook ignored the man.

‘You’re the Englishman who prays,’ the priest said in English, stumbling over the unfamiliar language. Hook said nothing. ‘They wonder why you pray,’ the priest went on, jerking his head to indicate the women who knelt before other statues and altars.

Hook’s instinct was to go on ignoring the man, but the priest had a friendly face and a kindly voice. ‘I’m just praying,’ he said, sounding surly.

‘Are you praying for yourself?’

‘Yes,’ Hook admitted. He prayed so that God would forgive him and lift the curse that he was certain blighted his life.

‘Then ask something for someone else,’ the priest suggested gently. ‘God listens to those prayers more readily, I think, and if you pray for someone else then He will grant your own request too.’ He smiled, stood and lightly touched Hook’s shoulder. ‘And pray to our saints, Crispin and Crispinian. I think they are less busy than the blessed Virgin. God watch over you, Englishman.’

The priest walked away and Hook decided to take his advice and pray again to the two local saints and so he went to an altar beneath a painting of the two martyrs and there he prayed for the soul of Sarah, whose life he had failed to save in London. He stared up at the painting as he prayed. The two saints stood in a green field scattered with golden stars on a hill high above a white-walled city. They looked gravely and a little sadly towards Hook. They did not look like shoemakers. They were dressed in white robes and Crispin carried a shepherd’s crook while Crispinian held a wicker tray of apples and pears. Their names were painted beneath each man and Hook, though he could not read, could tell which saint was which because one name was longer than the other. Crispinian looked much the friendlier man. He had a rounder face and blue eyes and a half-smile of great kindliness, while Saint Crispin appeared much sterner and was half turned away, as though he had no time for an onlooker and was about to walk down the hill and into the city, and so Hook fell into the habit of praying to Crispinian each morning, though he always acknowledged Crispin too. He dropped two pennies in the jar each time he prayed.

‘To look at you,’ John Wilkinson said one evening, ‘I wouldn’t take you for a man of prayer.’

‘I wasn’t,’ Hook said, ‘till now.’

‘Frightened for your soul?’ the old archer asked.

Hook hesitated. He was binding arrow fledging with the silk stolen from the cathedral’s altar frontal. ‘I heard a voice,’ he blurted out suddenly.

‘A voice?’ Wilkinson asked. Hook said nothing. ‘God’s voice?’ the older man asked.

‘It was in London,’ Hook said.

He felt foolish for his admission, but Wilkinson took it seriously. He stared at Hook for a long time, then nodded abruptly. ‘You’re a lucky man, Nicholas Hook.’

‘I am?’

‘If God spoke to you then He must have a purpose for you. That means you might survive this siege.’

‘If it was God who spoke to me,’ Hook said, embarrassed.

‘Why shouldn’t He? He needs to speak to people, on account that the church don’t listen to Him.’

‘It doesn’t?’

Wilkinson spat. ‘The church is about money, lad, money. Priests are supposed to be shepherds, aren’t they? They’re meant to be looking after the flock, but they’re all in the manor hall stuffing their faces with pastries, so the sheep have to look after themselves.’ He pointed an arrow at Hook. ‘And if the French break into the town, Hook, don’t go to Saint Anthony the Lesser! Go to the castle.’

‘Sir Roger …’ Hook began.

‘Wants us dead!’ Wilkinson said angrily.

‘Why would he want that?’

‘Because he’s got no money and a heap of debt, boy, so the man with the biggest purse can buy him. And because he’s not a real Englishman. His family came to England with the Normans and he hates you and me because we’re Saxons. And because he’s crammed to the throat with Norman shit, that’s why. You go to the castle, lad! That’s what you do.’

The next few nights were dark, and the waning moon was a sliver like a cutthroat’s blade. The Sire de Bournonville feared a night attack and ordered dogs to be tethered out in the wasteland where the houses had been burned. If the dogs barked, he said, the warning bell on the western gate was to be rung, and the dogs did bark and the bell was rung, but no Frenchmen assaulted the breach. Instead, as the dawn mist shimmered above the river, the besiegers catapulted the dogs’ corpses into the town. The animals had been gelded and had their throats cut as a warning of the fate that awaited the defiant garrison.

The feast of Saint Abdus passed, and no relief force arrived, and then Saint Possidius’s feast came and went, and next day was the feast of the seven holy virgins, and Hook prayed to each one, and in the next dawn he sent a plea to Saint Dunstan, the Englishman, on his feast day, and the day after that to Saint Ethelbert, who had been a king of England, and all the time he also prayed to Crispinian and to Crispin, begging their protection, and on the very next day, on the feast of Saint Hospitius, he received his answer.

When the French, who had been praying to Saint Denis, attacked Soissons.