“Christ on His goddam cross,” Evelgold grumbled, “but how close does he want us?”
Then a voice bellowed at the archers to replant their stakes. The enemy was close now, only a little more than two hundred paces away, and that was no farther than the most distant marks at an archery contest, and Hook remembered those summer days with jugglers and dancing bears and free ale and the crowds cheering as the archers drew and loosed. “Stakes!” a man shouted, “plant them firm!”
Hook’s stake slid easily enough into the soft ground. He glanced at the enemy, saw that they were still not moving, and so unslung his poleax and gave the stake’s sharpened tip three hard blows that blunted the wood even as it drove the stake deeper into the ground. He used his knife to shave away the crushed wood and thus sharpen the replanted stake, and then, at last, he uncased the bow from its horsehide sheath. All around him archers were fixing stakes or stringing bows. Hook braced his bow against the stake’s lower end and bent the yew to slip the cord’s noose over the upper nock. He took both arrow bags from his shoulder. He pulled the arrows free and pushed them point down into the soil, bodkins to the left and the half-dozen broadheads to the right. He kissed the bow’s belly, where the dark wood met the light. Dear God, he prayed, and then he prayed to Saint Crispinian, and his heart felt like a trapped bird and his mouth was dry and his right leg shivered, and still the French were motionless and Saint Crispinian made no answer to Hook’s prayer.
The archers were spread out. Their stakes did not make a solid line facing the French, but instead were sunk in scattered lines, filling a space as wide and deep as the marketplace where Henry had burned and hanged the Lollards. There were a couple of paces between stakes, space enough for a man to move, but too tight for any horse to maneuver freely. The archers’ crude ranks stretched back so that the men in the rear could not see the enemy because of the archers in front of them, but that did not matter yet because at two hundred paces they would need to shoot high in the air if their arrows were to reach the French. Hook was in the foremost rank and he turned to see Thomas Perrill hammering in his stake some paces behind and to his right. There was no sign of Sir Martin and Hook wondered if the priest had gone back to the camp. That thought made him shiver for Melisande’s safety, but there was no time to worry about that because Tom Evelgold was shouting at his men to face front.
Hook thought the enemy was at last advancing, but the French were not stirring. Their center was a long thick line of dismounted men-at-arms in bright surcoats and polished armor, while their flanks were two masses of horsemen armed with lances. The flags were silken-bright against the gray sky and, in the very center of the French line, where the banners were thickest, the oriflamme was a red streak of wind-driven ripples telling the English that the enemy would show them no mercy.
Hook tried to find the Sire de Lanferelle in the enemy ranks, but could not see him. Instead he saw the weapons. He saw swords, lances, poleaxes, falcon-beaks, mauls, battleaxes, and maces. Some of the maces had spiked heads. He laid a broadhead across the bow’s thick-bellied stave and suddenly wanted to empty his bowels again. He closed his eyes for an instant and said another fervent prayer to Saint Crispinian, then planted his bare feet in the slimy earth. He braced himself.
“Sweet Jesus Christ,” Thomas Scarlet said.
“Oh God, oh God,” Will of the Dale muttered.
Sir Thomas Erpingham, gray-haired and bareheaded, had mounted his small horse and ridden a few paces ahead of the English line. The horse picked its feet high, unhappy with the sticky soil. Behind Sir Thomas the English men-at-arms waited. The nine hundred were arrayed four deep, with the king, resplendent in shining armor and with a jeweled crown of gold ringing his battle-helm, standing in their center. Sir Thomas, in a green surcoat blazoned with the red cross of Saint George, turned the horse so that his back was toward the French. He waited a few heartbeats.
“Be with me now,” Hook prayed aloud to Saint Crispinian.
He wished the saint would talk to him, but Crispinian was still silent.
“Draw!” Thomas Evelgold ordered in a low voice.
Hook lifted the bow. He drew the hemp-string all the way to his ear and felt the savage power in the bent wood. He aimed at a horse directly ahead of him, but knew it would be luck if the arrow struck where he aimed. If the French had been fifty paces closer he would have picked his targets and been sure of hitting each one, but at extreme bowshot he would be lucky to land the arrow within four or five feet of his target. He held the string back and his right arm quivered.
Five thousand archers had drawn their bows. Five thousand arrows were held on five thousand strings.
A flock of starlings flew up beyond the Tramecourt woods, their wingbeats sudden and loud. They resembled a swirl of dark smoke above the trees and then, as suddenly as they had appeared, they went. All along the French line the visors were being dropped. Hook had seen faces, but now could see only faceless steel.
“God be with us,” an archer muttered as Sir Thomas stood in his saddle.
Sir Thomas Erpingham threw the green baton high so that it circled in the damp air. There was silence above the field of Agincourt, a silence in which the green baton flew, its golden finials bright against the dull sky. “Now,” Sir Thomas shouted, “strike!”
The baton fell.
Hook released.
The arrows flew.
The first sound was the bowstrings, the snap of five thousand hemp cords being tightened by stressed yew, and that sound was like the devil’s harpstrings being plucked. Then there was the arrow sound, the sigh of air over feathers, but multiplied, so that it was like the rushing of a wind. That sound diminished as two clouds of arrows, thick as any flock of starlings, climbed into the gray sky. Hook, reaching for another broadhead, marveled at the sight of five thousand arrows in two sky-shadowing groups. The two storms seemed to hover for a heart’s beat at the height of their trajectory, and then the missiles fell.
It was Saint Crispin’s Day in Picardy.
For an instant there was silence.
Then the arrows struck.
It was the sound of steel on steel. A clatter, like Satan’s hailstorm.
And the day’s noise of pain began. It was a scream from a horse that reared with a broadhead deep in its rump. The horse bolted forward, jerking its steel-clad rider in his high saddle, and the motion of the wounded horse served as a signal so that more horses followed, then all the riders spurred and the whole French line gave a great shout as their cavalry began their charge. “Saint Denis! Montjoie!”
“Saint George!” someone shouted in the English line, and the shout was taken up by the small army. “Saint George!” The men-at-arms taunted the French with hunting calls, and the noise grew to a clamor as the trumpets screamed at the sky.
Where Hook’s second broadhead was on its way.
Ghillebert, Seigneur de Lanferelle, was in the front rank of the French army. He was one of over eight thousand dismounted men-at-arms who formed the first of the three French battles. He wore polished plate armor beneath his surcoat of the sun and falcon, though the armor’s leg pieces were now spattered with mud. At his side hung a long battle-sword, across his shoulder was a lead-weighted mace studded with spikes, while in his hands was an ash-shafted lance shortened to seven feet and tipped with a steel spike. His head was enclosed in a leather hood that was laced beneath his chin and beneath which his long hair was coiled. Over the hood he wore a chain-mail aventail that covered his head and shoulders, and above the aventail, completely encasing his skull, was an Italian battle-helm. The helm’s visor was pushed up so he could see the English and see, too, that their army was risibly small.