Instead the French horsemen had come from the west, and now they spurred into the village and Melisande watched as they cut down pages and then dismounted to start pillaging the English baggage.
The horsemen drove away the peasants who had arrived first. A handful of English men-at-arms and wounded archers had been left to guard the encampment, but they only numbered thirty and they had spent their arrows on the serfs and those men now retreated uphill. The women of the army went with them as the horsemen found the English king’s quarters. A priest and two pages had stayed with the king’s treasures, and those three were quickly slaughtered and the plunder began.
Melisande watched. She saw a man parade in a fur-trimmed red robe and with a crown on his head, making his companions laugh. She did not understand what was happening. She could only pray that Nick lived, and so she shut her eyes, crouched low, and prayed.
Hook lived.
The two French battles had retreated, struggling back over the plowland and leaving the space in front of the English thick with bodies in mud-smeared armor. The third French battle was mounted now. It was the smallest of the three French battles, yet it still outnumbered the English. The riders’ lances were upright, some flaunted pennants. Trumpets sounded. The third battle could not charge yet for so many dismounted Frenchmen were in front of them, but they moved their horses a few paces forward before stopping again.
“Arrows!” Hook shouted at his men.
“We don’t have any!” Will of the Dale called back.
“Yes we do,” Hook said. He found his bow, slung it on his shoulder and led his men out into the field where the French bodies lay, and all around those fallen men were spent arrows. Some, because they had struck good armor head on, were now useless because their bodkin points had bent or crumpled, but many were in fine condition. Hook found some undamaged points on arrows that had splintered shafts and he pulled those bodkins free and married them to good shafts. He also pillaged the French bodies. He found a silver chain about one man’s neck and he thrust that into his arrow bag. Men-at-arms were also searching among the heaped French casualties, hauling the corpses away from the living, killing men too injured to survive or too poor to be worth ransoming, and rescuing the wealthy. Hook picked up a gray-fledged arrow trapped in the surcoat of a man lying on his back, and the man suddenly moved. Hook had thought he was dead, but the man groaned and turned his visored face toward the archer. Hook lifted the visor and saw scared eyes. “Aidez moi,” the man said, half choking. Hook could see no wound, no puncture in the armor, but the man screamed when Hook tried to lift him. The Frenchman was in such pain that he lost consciousness and Hook let him fall again. He took the arrow and moved on. A dog barked at him. It was standing over a corpse in a blood-soaked surcoat. Hook left the dog alone, skirting it to pick up a dozen more arrows that he thrust into his arrow bag.
“Nick!” Will of the Dale called, and Hook looked up to see a lone French horseman had ridden through the retreating fugitives of the first two battles. The rider was short and slightly built, and the only weapon he carried was a scabbarded sword. He wore plate armor, but he was not mounted on an armored destrier, instead he rode a small piebald mare. His white linen jupon was decorated with two red axes above which was the glimmer of gold from a heavy chain that hung around his neck. His helmet’s visor was raised and he seemed to be searching among the bodies, but checked his horse when he realized the archers were staring at him.
“Bastard wants trouble,” Will said.
“No, he’s just looking at us,” Hook said, “and he’s only a little fellow. Let him be.” He picked up a broadhead, then another bodkin, and glanced again at the horseman who had suddenly drawn his sword and kicked his horse forward. “Maybe he does want trouble,” Hook said and he took the bow off his shoulder, braced it on a corpse’s breastplate, and looped its string about the upper nock.
The horseman stopped again, this time to gaze down into a tangle of armor and bodies. The dead lay on top of each other and the man seemed fascinated by the sight. He stared for a long time, now no more than twenty paces from the archers and then, abruptly, he screamed a high-pitched challenge and kicked his piebald horse straight at Hook. The mare responded, flailing its hooves in the mud to throw up great clods of earth.
“Stupid bastard,” Hook said angrily. He laid a bodkin over the string and raised the bow, just as a dozen other archers did the same. Hook thought the man must swerve away, but instead the rider lowered his sword to spear the blade at Hook who drew the cord to his right ear and did not even think about what he did. It was all instinctive. The cord came back, he watched the horseman rise and fall with the piebald’s motion, saw the open visor and the unnaturally bright eyes, and loosed.
His arrow went clean through the rider’s right eye and the force of it snapped the man’s head hard back. The sword dropped and the mare slowed and then, puzzled, stopped a short lance’s length away from Hook. No other archer had loosed.
A cheer went up from the English line as the dead rider fell slowly from the saddle. He took a long time to fall, slipping gently sideways and then suddenly collapsing in a clatter of armor. “Get his horse,” Hook told Horrocks.
Hook went to the corpse. He tugged the arrow free from the ruined eye so he could pull the thick golden chain over the dead man’s head, and then his hand stopped because there was a pendant hanging from the chain. It was a thick pendant, carved from white ivory, and mounted on that silver-rimmed disc was an antelope cut from jet.
“You stupid little bastard,” Hook said, and he lifted off the boy’s helmet that was too big for him and looked down into the ruined face of Sir Philippe de Rouelles.
“He’s just a boy,” Horrocks said in surprise.
“A stupid little bastard is what he is,” Hook said.
“What was he doing?”
“He was being goddam brave,” Hook said. He pulled off the heavy golden chain and walked the few paces to where the boy had stared down at the heaped dead, and there, lying on top of two other men, was a corpse in a surcoat that was so soaked in blood that at first Hook had difficulty making out the badge, but then he saw the outline of two red axes in the redder cloth. The dead man’s helmet had come off and his throat had been cut to the spine. “He came to find his father,” Hook told Horrocks.
“How do you know that?”
“I just know,” Hook said, “the poor little bastard. He was just looking for his father.” He thrust the pendant into the arrow bag, picked up another bodkin, and turned toward the English line.
Where the king, wearing his scarred helmet and with his surcoat torn by enemy blades, had mounted his small white horse to see the enemy more clearly. He saw the survivors of the slaughter struggling north, and beyond them was the third battle with its raised lances and he knew his archers had few or no arrows.
Then a messenger arrived to say the French were in the baggage camp, and the king twisted in the saddle to see that hundreds of his men were now guarding French prisoners. God knows how many prisoners there were, but they far outnumbered his men-at-arms. He glanced left and right. He had started with nine hundred men-at-arms and now the line was much thinner because so many men had taken prisoners and were guarding them. The archers had done the same. A few were out in the field, collecting arrows, and the king approved of that, but knew they could never collect enough arrows to kill the horses of the third battle. He watched some foolish Frenchman charge the archers and grimaced when his men cheered the brave fool’s death, then looked again at his army.