“We might just have escaped,” Father Christopher greeted Hook on his return from his abortive hunt.
“The king must think so,” Hook said.
“Why?”
“Giving us a day’s halt?”
“Our gracious king,” the priest said, “is so mad that he might just be hoping the French will catch us.”
“Mad? Like the French king?”
“The French king is really mad,” Father Christopher said, “no, our king is just convinced of God’s favor.”
“Is that madness?”
Father Christopher paused as Melisande came to join them. She leaned on Hook, saying nothing. She was thinner than Hook had ever seen her, but the whole army was thin now; thin, hungry, and ill. Somehow Hook and his wife had both avoided the bowel-emptying sickness, though many others had caught the disease and the camp stank of it. Hook put his arm about her, holding her close and thinking suddenly that she had become the most precious thing in all his world. “I hope to God we have escaped,” Hook said.
“And our king half hopes that,” Father Christopher said, “and half hopes that he can prove God’s favor.”
“And that’s his madness?”
“Beware of certainty. There are men in the French army, Hook, who are as convinced as Henry that God is on their side. They’re good men too. They pray, they give alms, they confess their sins, and they vow never to sin again. They are very good men. Can they be wrong in their conviction?”
“You tell me, father,” Hook said.
Father Christopher sighed. “If I understood God, Hook, I would understand everything because God is everything. He is the stars and the sand, the wind and the calm, the sparrow and the sparrowhawk. He knows everything, He knows my fate and He knows your fate, and if I understood all that, what would I be?”
“You would be God,” Melisande said.
“And that I cannot be,” Father Christopher said, “because we cannot comprehend everything. Only God does that, so beware of a man who says he knows God’s will. He is like a horse that believes it controls its rider.”
“And our king believes that?”
“He believes he is God’s favorite,” Father Christopher said, “and perhaps he is. He is a king, after all, anointed and blessed.”
“God made him a king,” Melisande said.
“His father’s sword made him a king,” Father Christopher said tartly, “but, of course, God could have guided that sword.” He made the sign of the cross. “Yet there are those,” he spoke softly now, “who say his father had no right to the throne. And the sins of the fathers are visited on their sons.”
“You’re saying…” Hook began, then checked his tongue because the conversation was veering dangerously close to treason.
“I’m saying,” Father Christopher said firmly, “that I pray we get home to England before the French find us.”
“They’ve lost us, father,” Hook said, hoping he was right.
Father Christopher smiled gently. “They may not know where we are, Hook, but they know where we’re going. So they don’t need to find us, do they? All they need do is get ahead of us and let us find them.”
“And we’re resting for the day,” Hook said grimly.
“So we are,” the priest said, “which means we must pray that our enemy is at least two days’ march behind us.”
Next day they rode on. Hook was one of the scouts who ranged two miles ahead of the vanguard and looked for the enemy. He liked being a scout. It meant he could put his sharpened stake on a wagon and ride free in front of the army. The clouds were thickening again and the wind was cold. There had been a frost whitening the grass when the camp stirred, though it had vanished quickly enough. The beech leaves had turned to a dull red-gold and the oaks to the color of bronze, while some trees had already shed their foliage. The lower pastures were half flooded from the recent rain, while the fields that had been deep-plowed for winter wheat showed long streaks of silvery water between the ridges left by the plowshare. Hook’s men were following a drover’s path that led past villages, but the hovels were all empty. There was no livestock and no grain. Someone, he thought, knew the English were on this road and had stripped the countryside bare, but whoever had organized that deprivation had vanished. There was no sign of an enemy.
It began to rain again at midday. It was just a drizzle, but it penetrated every gap in Hook’s clothing. Raker, his horse, went slowly. The whole army was going slowly, incapable of speed. They passed a town and Hook, so dulled now to what he saw, scarce looked at the walls with their brightly defiant banners. He just rode on, following the road, leaving the town and its battlements behind until, quite suddenly, Hook knew they were doomed.
He and his men had breasted a small rise and in front of them was a wide grassy valley, its far side rising gently to the horizon where there was a church tower and a spread of woods. The valley was pastureland, empty of life now, but scarred across the valley floor was the evidence of their approaching doom.
Hook curbed Raker and stared.
Because right across his front, stretching from east to west, was a smear of mud, a great wide scar of churned land where every blade of grass had vanished. Water glinted from the myriad holes left by the hooves of horses. The ground was a mess, churned and rutted and broken and pitted, because an army had marched through the valley.
It must have been a great army, Hook thought. Thousands of horses had left the tracks that were newly made. He rode to the edge of the scar and saw the clarity of the hoofprints so distinctly that in places he could see the marks left by the horseshoe nails. He stared westward, to where that vanished army had gone, but he saw nothing, only the path by which the thousands of men had traveled. The scarred earth turned north at the valley’s end.
“Sweet Jesus,” Tom Scarlet said in awe, “there must be thousands of the bastards.”
“Ride back,” Hook told Peter Scoyle, “find Sir John, tell him about this.”
“Tell him about what?” Scoyle asked.
Hook remembered Scoyle was a Londoner. “What do you think that is?” He pointed at the scarred earth.
“A muddy mess,” Scoyle said.
“Tell Sir John the enemy was here within the last day.”
“They were?”
“Go!” Hook said impatiently, then turned back to stare at the myriad hoofprints. There were thousands upon thousands, so many they had trampled the valley into a quagmire. He had seen the drovers’ roads in England after the vast herds of cattle had been driven down to their slaughter in London, and as a boy he had been amazed by the size of the herds, but these tracks were far greater than any left by those doomed animals. Every man in France, he thought, and maybe every man in Burgundy, had ridden across this valley, and they had passed within the last day. So somewhere to the west or north, somewhere between this place and Calais, that great host waited.
“They have to be watching us,” he said.
“Sweet Jesus,” Tom Scarlet said again, and made the sign of the cross. Both archers looked at the farther woods, but no glint of reflected sunlight betrayed a man in armor. Yet Hook was sure the enemy must have scouts who were shadowing England’s tired army.
Sir John arrived with a dozen men-at-arms. He said nothing as he stared at the tracks and then, as Hook had done, he looked westward and then northward. “So they’re here,” he finally said, sounding resigned.
“That’s not the small army that was following us along the river,” Hook said.
“Of course it goddam well isn’t,” Sir John said, looking at the rutted fields. “That’s the might of France, Hook,” he said sarcastically.
“And they must be watching us, Sir John,” Hook said.