“Write it on your own face,” Melisande had told him.
Father Christopher had smiled. “God has me in the palm of His hand, my dear,” he said, then made the sign of the cross, “and He will preserve you. But you must stay here. You will be safer here.” He had placed her with the other archers’ wives between two empty wagons that had brought arrows to Agincourt, made sure that her horse was nearby and that the mare was saddled, and then Father Christopher had taken one of Sir John’s horses and ridden up the slope toward the place where the armies waited. Melisande had watched him until he vanished over the crest of the hill, and that was when she had begun to pray. The other wives of Sir John’s archers prayed too.
Melisande’s prayer took shape slowly. It had begun as an incoherent cry for help, but she forced herself to choose her words carefully as she prayed to the Virgin. Nick is a good man, she told the Mother of Christ, and a strong one, but he can be angry and sour, so help him now to be strong and alive. Let him live. That was the prayer, to let her man live.
“What do we do if the French come?” Matilda Cobbold asked.
“Run,” one of the other women said, and just then there was a roar from the hidden high ground beyond the skyline. They had heard the war-shout of Saint George, but the women were too far away to hear the saint’s name, only the great bellow of sound that told them something must be happening beyond the skyline.
“God help us,” Matilda said.
Melisande opened the sack that contained her worldly belongings. She wanted the jupon her father had sent her, but the sack also contained the ivory-stocked crossbow that Nick had given her almost three months before. She pulled it out.
“You’ll fight them on your own?” Matilda asked.
Melisande smiled, but found it hard to speak. She was so nervous, so frightened, knowing that what happened beyond the high horizon would decide her life’s course and that it was all beyond her control. She could only pray.
“Go up there, love,” Nell Candeler said, “and shoot some of the bastards.”
“It’s still cocked,” Melisande said in wonderment.
“What is?” Matilda asked.
“The bow,” Melisande said. “I never released it.” She stared at the crossbow, remembering the day Matt Scarlet had died, the day she had pointed the crossbow at her father. Ever since that day the bow had been cocked, its steel-shanked stave under the thick cord’s strain, and she had never noticed. She almost pulled the trigger, then impulsively thrust the bow back into her sack and pulled out the folded jupon. She stared at the bright cloth, half tempted to pull it over her head, but she suddenly knew she could not wear an enemy’s badge while Nick was fighting, and then another certainty overtook her, the knowledge that she would never see Nick again so long as she was tempted to wear her father’s jupon. It had to be thrown away. “I’m going to the river,” she said.
“You can piss here,” Nell Candeler said.
“I want to walk,” Melisande said, and she picked up her heavy sack and went south, away from the armies on the plateau and away from the baggage. She walked through the army’s sumpters that cropped the autumn grass, her feet soaked by the damp. She had an idea to throw the jupon into the Ternoise and watch it float downstream, but the River of Swords was too far away and so she settled for a stream that ran high and fast from the night’s rain. The stream flowed through the tangle of small fields and woods that lay just south of the village and she crouched on its bank where the leaves of the alders and willows had turned yellow and gold and there she dropped the sack, closed her eyes, and held the jupon in both hands as if it were an offering.
“Look after Nick,” she prayed, “let him live,” and with those words she threw her father’s jupon into the stream and watched it being carried fast away. The farther it went, she thought, the safer Nick would be.
Then the French gun fired, and that sound was loud enough to reverberate all through the valley behind the battlefield, loud enough to make Melisande turn and stare north.
To see Sir Martin, grinning and lanky, his gray hair slicked close against his narrow skull.
“Hello, little lady,” he said hungrily.
And there was no one for Melisande to ask for help.
She was alone.
A cloud of smoke rose above the horizon, marking the distant place where the gun had fired.
“All a-lonely,” Sir Martin said, “just you and me.” He made a gurgling sound that might have been laughter, hitched up his robes, and came for her.
TWELVE
The gun fired, belching smoke above the left flank of the French army.
Hook saw the gun-stone and did not recognize what it was, but for an instant there was a dark object rising and falling above the plowland and it seemed as if the thing, it was just a dark flicker, was coming straight for him and then the gun’s noise splintered the sky and birds rose screeching from the trees as the gun-stone struck an archer’s head a few paces from Hook.
The man’s skull was obliterated in an instant spray of blood and shattered skull. The stone kept flying, leaving a feathered trail of misted blood until it slapped into the mud two hundred paces behind the English line. It narrowly missed the destriers of the men-at-arms that were empty-saddled and under the guard of pageboys.
“Jesus,” Tom Scarlet said in disgust. There were jellied scraps of brain trickling down his bow’s shaft.
“Just keep shooting,” Hook said.
“Did you see that?” Scarlet asked in indignant amazement.
What Hook saw was dead and dying horses, dead riders, and beyond them a mass of dismounted men-at-arms advancing toward him. Crossbow bolts whirred close, but there were very few enemy bowmen who had a clear sight of the English. The French crossbowmen were aligned with the rearmost battle, too far to be sure of their aim, and most could not even see their enemy. Then, as the first French battle advanced to fill the space between the woodlands of Tramecourt and Agincourt, the French bowmen lost sight of the English altogether and the missiles stopped flying.
The first French battle was spread across the wide plowed field between the trees, but, because those woods funneled ever closer together, the line of armored men was being squeezed inward. Their ranks were already ragged, torn apart by the panicked horses that had bolted through them, but now they were jostling for space as the field contracted and all the while the arrows drove into them.
Hook was shooting steadily. He had already gone through one sheaf of arrows and had shouted for more. Boys were dumping fresh bundles among the archers, but hundreds of thousands were needed. Five thousand archers could easily shoot sixty thousand arrows in a minute and, when the cavalry had charged, they had shot even faster. Some men were still drawing and releasing as quickly as they could, but Hook slowed down. The closer the enemy came, the more lethal each arrow would be, so for now he was content to use broadheads against the advancing French.
The broadheads could never hope to pierce plate armor, but the blow of their strike was sufficient to knock a man backward, and each man Hook knocked back caused a ripple of chaos, slowing the French, and the enemy were struggling, not just with mud, but with the incessant arrow strikes. He could hear the arrows cracking against steel, a weird noise, never-ending, and the French men-at-arms, who were still a hundred and fifty paces away, looked as though they bent into the face of a gale, but a gale that was bringing steel hail.