Hook ignored the wounded man and instead attacked a giant in a bright red surcoat. His first blow was a wild swing that would have earned Sir John’s scorn had he seen it, and the Frenchman swayed back to make it miss and then lunged with his shortened lance, but Hook’s momentum had carried him past the man and, as the tall Frenchman turned to follow Hook, so Will of the Dale hammered the back of the man’s helmet with a mallet and the enemy toppled into the mud. Geoffrey Horrocks knelt on him, lifted the visor, and stabbed into an eye with a long, thin-bladed knife. Hook drove his poleax at a man in a black and white striped surcoat, thrusting him so hard in the breastplate that the enemy fell backward, and then the hammerhead swung to crash into a man’s sword arm, and another archer was there to swing a lead-weighted maul onto that man’s helmet. The French, their feet trapped by the mud’s suction, could not move to avoid the blows, and their own strokes and lunges were being wasted on air as the nimble archers dodged. The enemy, safe from arrows, was fighting with raised visors now and Hook discovered it was easy to stab the poleax’s spike at their eyes, forcing them to twist aside when one of his companions would follow up with a hammer blow. It was the poleaxes, hammers, and the mauls that were doing the damage, lead-weighted hammerheads wielded by archers’ arms, and the hammers crushed helmets and shattered armor-encased bones. Archers without hammers picked up enemy poleaxes or maces. They were suddenly scenting easy pickings as still more bowmen came from the stakes to join the brawl.
It was a brawl. It was tavern fighting. It was like the Christmas football game when the men of two villages met to punch and trip and kick, only this game was played with lead, iron, and steel. Two or three archers would attack one man, tripping him or striking him down with a hammer, then one would stoop to finish the enemy with a knife into the face. The quickest way was straight through an eye, and the Frenchmen screamed for mercy when they saw the blade approaching, then there was a slight, instantly released pressure as the knife tip pierced the eyeball before the screaming would fade as the blade slipped into the brain. Not much blood from such wounds, and all the time the English trumpets were braying and there was the steel on steel sound of men-at-arms fighting in the field’s center, and the shouts of archers who were slaughtering the enemy’s flanks.
This was revenge. Hook fought with the memory of Soissons. He knew the two saints were with him. This was their feast day, and today they would repay France for what France had done to their town. Hook stabbed the ax point at men’s faces and, when they twisted to evade the blow, he would hook the blade over a shoulder and tug until the enemy, his feet caught in the mire, stumbled forward and the hammerhead would crash into his helmet and another Frenchman was finished. Hundreds of archers were doing the same so that the deep-plowed field, filling the space between the woods, had become one wide killing ground. The furrows, newly sown with winter wheat, were filling with blood.
There were so many dead and injured Frenchmen that Hook had to clamber over their bodies to reach the enemy. Tom Scarlet, big Will Sclate, and Will of the Dale came with him, and other archers were doing the same, all yelling like demons. A sword slammed into Hook, but the blade’s force was stopped by his haubergeon and mail, and Sclate, huge and glowering, hammered the swordsman down with his ax. Hook dropped another Frenchman with a lunge, and Will of the Dale drove his ax into the fallen man’s thigh, splitting the cuisse so that thick blood welled out of the jagged rip. An archer was stoving in helmets with a maul, one blow sufficient to collapse steel, skull, and life. A Frenchman with a hammer-broken leg was on his knees and shouting that he yielded, that he could pay ransom, but no one heard and he died when an archer slid a knife into an eye socket. Hook was screaming, unaware that he screamed, fighting with a desperate fury. The archers were mud-smeared, blood-spattered and bare-legged as they howled and killed. Their fear was all released into fury.
A French knight, glorious in a surcoat woven from cloth of gold, parried Tom Scarlet’s swing and drew back his mace to crush the insolent archer’s skull and Hook’s ax head took the man in the back of his neck, powering through a steel bevor, and the man fell as Hook ripped the blade free and stabbed the spike into another man’s waist. Sclate, the country-bred giant, swung a hammer between the man’s legs and the resultant scream seared clear across Agincourt’s blood-wet field.
Then a Frenchman in mud-spattered bright mail, with a blue silk ribbon about his neck and a silver lion crowning his helmet, dropped to one knee and took off his right gauntlet, which he held toward Hook. Hook was still four or five paces away and was planning to slam the hammer onto that glittering lion, but he suddenly understood what the Frenchman wanted. “Prisoners!” he shouted. “Prisoners!” He snatched the gauntlet from the Frenchman. “Take your helmet off,” he ordered the man. No one had yet given the order to capture prisoners, and Sir John, before the fight, had stressed that none was to be taken until the king had deemed the battle won, but Hook did not care. The French were surrendering now.
More and more Frenchmen were holding out their gauntlets. Their helmets were left in the mud as their captors hauled them back from the fight. “What do we do with the bastards?” Will of the Dale asked.
“Tie their hands,” Hook suggested. “Use bow cords!”
The first French battle was retreating now. Too many had died and the living had no stomach for a fight that had spilled so much blood into the furrows. Hook leaned on his poleax and watched an archer in a blue, blood-darkened surcoat cackling among the wounded enemy. The man had discovered a falcon-beak, a weapon that was half hammer and half claw, and he was killing the wounded by piercing their helmets with the curved beak, which was mounted on a long shaft. The wedge-shaped point easily drove through steel to shatter the skulls beneath. “Like cracking eggs!” he called to no one in particular, and cracked another. “Bastards,” he kept shouting, “bastards!” He killed again and again. Injured men pleaded for mercy, but the beaked hammer would still fall. Hook had no energy to intervene. The man seemed oblivious of everything except the need to kill, and when he struck a wounded man he would do it repeatedly, long after the man was dead. A mastiff was standing over the body of its wounded master, barking at the English, and the archer killed the dog with the falcon-beak, then killed the dog’s owner. “You’d cut off my fingers!” he screamed at the man, swinging the beak to mangle the corpse’s already crumpled helmet, “I’ll cut off your goddamned prick!” He suddenly raised his two string fingers at the corpses he had made and jerked the fingers up and down. “Cut these off, would you? You bastards!”
“Sweet Jesus,” Tom Scarlet said. His face was covered in French blood, his haubergeon was red, his legs, bare beneath his short hose, were mud-covered. “Sweet Jesus,” he said again.
The farthest point of the French advance was marked by a long heap of bodies, and the first battle had retreated from that horror and the English did not follow. Men were exhausted, slaked by the killing. Prisoners were being taken behind the line where Englishmen and Welshmen stared at each other as if astonished to be alive.
Then more trumpets called, and Hook looked northward to see that the second French battle, every bit as large as the first, was coming.