Archers shot back, but the French had been cunning. The new wall had been made with chinks and holes through which the crossbowmen could shoot, and which were small enough to defeat the aim of most arrows. Hook, crouching in the rubble of the old gate, reckoned that for every crossbowman shooting there were another three or four men spanning spare bows so that the bolts never stopped. Most crossbowmen were lucky to shoot two bolts a minute, but the bolts were coming from the loopholes far more frequently and still more missiles spat from the high windows of the half-ruined houses behind the wall. This, Hook knew, was how Soissons should have been defended.
“We’ll have to bring up a gun,” Sir John snarled from another place in the ruined wall, but instead led a charge against the barricade, shouting at his archers to smother it in arrows. They did, but the crossbow bolts kept coming and even if the bolts failed to pierce armor they threw a man back by sheer force and when, at last, a half-dozen men managed to reach the wall and tried to pull down its timbers and stones, a cauldron was tipped over its coping and a stream of boiling fish oil spilled down onto the attackers. They ran and limped back, some gasping from the pain of the scalding, and Sir John, his armor slick with the oil, came back with them and dropped into the gate’s rubble and let loose a stream of impotent curses. The French were cheering. They waved taunting flags above their new low wall. A smoky haze shimmered behind the new rampart, promising that more heated oil would greet any new attack. The English catapults were trying to drop stones on the new wall, but most of the missiles flew long to crash down among the already shattered houses.
The sun climbed. The late summer’s heat had returned and both attackers and defenders roasted in their armor. Boys brought water and ale. Men-at-arms, resting in the shelter of the Leure Gate’s ruins, took off their helmets. Their hair was matted flat and their faces running with sweat. The archers crouched in the stones, sometimes shooting if a man showed himself, but for long periods neither side would loose an arrow or a bolt, but just wait for a target.
“Bastards,” Sir John spat at the enemy.
Hook saw two defenders struggling to remove an earth-filled basket from a section of the new wall. He half stood and loosed an arrow, just as a dozen other archers did the same. The two men fell back, each struck by arrows, but the basket fell with them and Hook saw a cannon barrel, squat and low, and he flattened himself in the gate’s ruins just as the cannon fired. The air whistled and screamed, stone chips were whipping in smoke, and a man gave a terrible long cry that turned to a whimper as the space in front of the wall was obscured by the thick smoke. “Oh, my God,” Will of the Dale said.
“You hurt, Will?”
“No. Just tired of this place.”
The French had loaded their cannon with a mass of small stones that had flayed the attackers. A man-at-arms was dead, a small hole punched clean through the top of his helmet. An archer staggered back toward the barbican, one hand clamped over an empty, bloody eye socket.
“We’re all going to die here,” Will said.
“No,” Hook said fiercely, though he did not believe his protest. The gun smoke cleared slowly and Hook saw that the earth-filled basket was back in its embrasure.
“Bastards,” Sir John spat again.
“We’re not giving up!” the king was shouting. He wanted to assemble a mass of men-at-arms and attempt to overwhelm the wall with numbers and his men were carrying orders to the Englishmen scattered in the old wall’s ruins. “Archers to the flanks!” a man shouted, “to the flanks!”
A French trumpeter began playing a short sharp melody. It was three notes, rising and falling, repeated over and over. There was something taunting in the sound.
“Kill that bastard!” Sir John shouted, but the bastard was hidden behind the wall.
“Move!” the king shouted.
Hook took a deep breath, then scrambled to his right. No crossbow bolts spat from the defenses. The garrison was waiting, he thought. Perhaps they were running short of bolts and so they were keeping what they had to greet the next assault. He sheltered by a stub of broken wall and just then the French trumpeter stood on the new rampart and raised his instrument to his lips, and Hook stood too, and the cord came back to his right ear, he loosed, and the string whipped his bracer and the goose-fledged arrow flew true and the bodkin point took the trumpeter in the throat and drove clean through his neck so that it stood proud at his nape. The braying trumpet screeched horribly and then ended abruptly as the man fell backward. More English arrows flitted above him as he disappeared behind the wall, leaving a fading spray of misted blood and the dying echo of the trumpet’s truncated call.
“Well done, that archer!” Sir John shouted.
Hook waited. The day became still hotter under a sun that was a great furnace in a sky clouded only by the shreds of smoke from the beleaguered city. The French had stopped shooting altogether, which only convinced Hook that they were saving their missiles for the assault they knew was coming. Priests picked their way among the ruins of the old wall, shriving the dead and the dying, while behind the wall, in the space between the ruined Leure Gate and the shattered barbican, the men-at-arms assembled under their lords’ banners. That force, at least four hundred strong, was easily visible to the defenders, but still they did not shoot.
One of Sir John’s pages, a boy of ten or eleven with a shock of bright blond hair and wide blue eyes, brought two skins of water to the archers. “We need arrows, boy,” Hook told him.
“I’ll bring some,” the boy said.
Hook tipped the skin to his mouth. “Why aren’t the men-at-arms moving?” he asked no one in particular. The king had assembled his assault force and the archers were in place, but a curious lassitude had settled over the attackers.
“A messenger came,” the page said nervously. He was a high-born lad, sent to Sir John’s household to learn a warrior’s ways, and in time he would doubtless be a great lord in shining armor mounted on a caparisoned horse, but for now he was nervous of the hard-faced archers who would one day be under his command.
“A messenger?”
“From the Duke of Clarence,” the page said, taking back the water-skin.
The duke, camped on the far side of Harfleur, was also attacking the city, though no sounds betrayed any fighting from that far-off gate. “So what did the messenger tell us?” Hook asked the page.
“That the attack failed,” the boy said.
“Sweet Jesus,” Hook said in disgust. So now, he reckoned, the king was waiting until his brother could mount another assault, and then the English would make one last effort, from both east and west, to overwhelm the stubborn defenders. And so Hook and his archers waited. If the king had sent new orders to his brother then they would take at least two hours to reach him, for the messenger had to ride far around the city’s north side and cross the flooded river by boat.
“What’s happening?” Sclate, the slow-witted laborer with a giant’s strength, asked.
“I don’t know,” Hook confessed. Sweat trickled down his face and stung his eyes. The air seemed to be filled with dust that coated his throat and made him thirsty again. The light, reflecting from the shattered chalk of the broken walls, was dazzling. He was tired. He unstrung the bow to take the tension from the stave.
“Are we attacking again?” Sclate asked.
“I reckon we attack when the duke assaults the far side,” Hook suggested. “Be a couple of hours yet.”