“You will kill them all,” Melisande promised him.
If the French did not do the job for him, Hook thought. They rode on downhill, going now toward the Somme and toward the army’s only hope; an unguarded ford or bridge.
It started to rain again.
TEN
There was not one ford across the Somme, but two, and, better still, neither was guarded. The shadowing French army on the river’s north bank had still not marched the full distance about the great looping curve and the English, arriving at the edge of a vast marsh that bordered the Somme, could see nothing but empty countryside beyond the river.
The first scouts to explore the fords reported that the river was flowing high because of the rain, but not so high as to make the fords impassable, yet to reach the crossings the army had to negotiate two causeways that ran arrow-straight across the wide marsh. Those causeways were over a mile long; twin roads that had been raised above the mire by embankments, and the French had broken both so that at the center of each was a great gap where the causeways had been demolished to leave a morass of treacherous, sucking ground. The scouts had crossed those stretches of bog, but reported that their horses had sunk over their knees, and that none of the army’s wagons could hope to negotiate the terrain. “Then we remake the causeways,” the king ordered.
It took the best part of a day. Much of the army was ordered to dismantle a nearby village so that the beams, rafters, and joists could be used as foundations for the repairs. Bundled thatch, faggots, and earth were then thrown on top of the timbers to make new embankments while the men of the rearguard formed a battle line to protect the work against any surprise attack from the south. There was no such attack. French horsemen watched from a distance, but those enemy riders were few and made no attempt to interfere.
Hook took no part in the work because the vanguard had been ordered to cross the river before any repairs were made. They left their horses behind, walked to the causeway’s gap, and jumped down into the bog where they struggled across to the causeway’s next stretch, which led to the river bank. They waded the Somme, the archers holding bows and arrow bags above their heads. Hook shivered as he went further into the river. He could not swim and he felt tremors of fear as the water crept over his waist and up to his chest, but then, as he pushed against the slow pressure of the current, the riverbed began to rise again. The footing was firm enough, though a few men slipped and one man-at-arms was swept downstream, his cries fading fast as his mail coat dragged him under. Then Hook was wading through reeds and climbing a short muddy bluff to reach the northern bank. The first men were across the Somme.
Sir John ordered his archers to go a half-mile north to where a straggling hedge and ditch snaked between two wide pastures. “If the goddam French come,” Sir John said bleakly, “just kill them.”
“You expecting their army, Sir John?” Thomas Evelgold asked.
“The one that was tracking us along the river?” Sir John asked, “those bastards will get here soon enough. But their larger army? God only knows. Let’s hope they think we’re still south of the river.”
And even if it was only the smaller army that came, Hook thought, these few archers of the vanguard could not hope to stop it. He sat by a stretch of flooded ditch, beneath a dead alder, staring north, his mind wandering. He had been a bad brother, he decided. He had never looked after Michael properly and, if he was truthful with himself, he would admit that his brother’s trusting character and unending optimism had grated on him. He gave a nod when Thomas Scarlet, who had lost his own twin brother to Lanferelle’s sword, squatted beside him. “I’m sorry about Michael,” Scarlet said awkwardly, “he was a good lad.”
“He was,” Hook said.
“Matt was too.”
“Aye, he was. A good archer.”
“He was,” Scarlet said, “he was.”
They looked north in silence. Sir John had said that the first evidence of a French force would be mounted scouts, but no horsemen were visible.
“Michael always snatched at the string,” Hook said. “I tried to teach him, but he couldn’t stop it. He always snatched. Spoiled his aim, it did.”
“It does,” Scarlet said.
“He never learned,” Hook said, “and he didn’t steal that goddamned box either.”
“He didn’t seem like a thief.”
“He wasn’t! But I know who did steal it, and I’ll cut his goddam throat.”
“Don’t hang for it, Nick.”
Hook grimaced. “If the French catch us, it won’t matter, will it? I’ll either be hanged or chopped down.” Hook had a sudden vision of the archers dying in their tortured agony in front of the little church in Soissons. He shivered.
“But we’ve crossed the river,” Scarlet said firmly, “and that’s good. How far now?”
“Father Christopher says it’s a week’s marching from here, maybe a day or two longer.”
“That’s what they said a couple of weeks ago,” Scarlet said ruefully, “but doesn’t matter. We can go hungry for a week.”
Geoffrey Horrocks, the youngest archer, brought a helmet filled with hazelnuts. “Found them up the hedge,” he said, “you want to share them out, sergeant?” he asked Hook.
“You do it, lad. Tell them it’s supper.”
“And tomorrow’s breakfast,” Scarlet said.
“If I had a net we could catch some sparrows,” Hook said.
“Sparrow pie,” Scarlet said wistfully.
They fell silent. The rain had stopped, though the keen wind was chilling the wet archers to the bone. A flock of black starlings, so thick that they looked like a writhing cloud, rose and fell two fields away. Behind Hook, far across the river, men labored to remake the causeways.
“He was a grown man, you know.”
“What did you say, Tom?” Hook asked, startled from half-waking thoughts.
“Nothing,” Scarlet said, “I was falling asleep till you woke me.”
“He was a very good man,” the voice said quietly, “and he’s resting in heaven now.”
Saint Crispinian, Hook thought, and his view of the country was misted by tears. You’re still with me, he wanted to say.
“In heaven there are no tears,” the saint went on, “and no sickness. There’s no dying and no masters. There’s no hunger. Michael is in joy.”
“You all right, Nick?” Tom Scarlet asked.
“I’m all right,” Hook said, and thought that Crispinian knew all about brothers. He had suffered and died with his own brother, Crispin, and they were both with Michael now, and somehow that seemed good.
It took the best part of the day to restore the two causeways and then the army began to cross in two long lines of horses and wagons and archers and servants and women. The king, resplendent in armor and crown, galloped past Hook’s ditch. He was followed by a score of nobles who curbed their horses and, like Hook, gazed northward. But the French army that had been keeping pace along the river’s northern bank had fallen far behind and there was no enemy in sight. The English were across the river and now had entered territory claimed by the Duke of Burgundy, though it was still France. But between the army and England there were now no major obstacles unless the French army intervened.
“We march on,” Henry told his commanders.
They would march north again, north and west. They would march toward Calais, toward England and to safety. They marched.
They left the wide River Somme behind, but next day, because the army was footsore, sick, and hungry, the king ordered a halt. The rain had cleared and the sun shone through wispy clouds. The army was now in well-wooded country so there was fuel for fires and the encampment took on a holiday air as men hung their clothes to dry on makeshift hurdles. Sentries were set, but it seemed as though England’s army was all alone in the vastness of France. Not one Frenchman appeared. Men scavenged the woods for nuts, mushrooms, and berries. Hook hoped to find a deer or a boar, but the animals, like the enemy, were nowhere to be seen.