Agincourt

ONE

The River Aisne swirled slow through a wide valley edged with low wooded hills. It was spring and the new leaves were a startling green. Long weeds swayed in the river where it looped around the city of Soissons.

The city had walls, a cathedral, and a castle. It was a fortress that guarded the Flanders road, which led north from Paris, and now it was held by the enemies of France. The garrison wore the jagged red cross of Burgundy and above the castle flew the gaudy flag of Burgundy’s duke, a flag that quartered the royal arms of France with blue and yellow stripes, all of it badged with a rampant lion.

The rampant lion was at war with the lilies of France, and Nicholas Hook understood none of it. “You don’t need to understand it,” Henry of Calais had told him in London, “on account of it not being your goddam business. It’s the goddam French falling out amongst themselves, that’s all you need to know, and one side is paying us money to fight, and I hire archers and I send them to kill whoever they’re told to kill. Can you shoot?”

“I can shoot.”

“We’ll see, won’t we?”

Nicholas Hook could shoot, and so he was in Soissons, beneath the flag with its stripes, lion, and lilies. He had no idea where Burgundy was, he knew only that it had a duke called John the Fearless, and that the duke was first cousin to the King of France.

“And he’s mad, the French king is,” Henry of Calais had told Hook in England. “He’s mad as a spavined polecat, the stupid bastard thinks he’s made of glass. He’s frightened that someone will give him a smart tap and he’ll break into a thousand pieces. The truth is he’s got turnips for brains, he does, and he’s fighting against the duke who isn’t mad. He’s got brains for brains.”

“Why are they fighting?” Hook had asked.

“How in God’s name would I know? Or care? What I care about, son, is that the duke’s money comes from the bankers. There.” He had slapped some silver on the tavern table. Earlier that day Hook had gone to the Spital Fields beyond London’s Bishop’s Gate and there he had loosed sixteen arrows at a straw-filled sack hanging from a dead tree a hundred and fifty paces away. He had loosed very fast, scarce time for a man to count to five between each shaft, and twelve of his sixteen arrows had slashed into the sack while the other four had just grazed it. “You’ll do,” Henry of Calais had said grudgingly when he was told of the feat.

The silver went before Hook had left London. He had never been so lonely or so far from his home village and so his coins went on ale, tavern whores, and on a pair of tall boots that fell apart long before he reached Soissons. He had seen the sea for the first time on that journey, and he had scarce believed what he saw, and he still sometimes tried to remember what it looked like. He imagined a lake in his head, only a lake that never ended and was angrier than any water he had ever seen before. He had traveled with twelve other archers and they had been met in Calais by a dozen men-at-arms who wore the livery of Burgundy and Hook remembered thinking they must be English because the yellow lilies on their coats were like those he had seen on the king’s men in London, but these men-at-arms spoke a strange tongue that neither Hook nor his companions understood. After that they had walked all the way to Soissons because there was no money to buy the horses that every archer expected to receive from his lord in England. Two horse-drawn carts had accompanied their march, the carts loaded with spare bowstaves and thick, rattling sheaves of arrows.

They were a strange group of archers. Some were old men, a few limped from ancient wounds, and most were drunkards.

“I scrape the barrel,” Henry of Calais had told Hook before they had left England, “but you look fresh, boy. So what did you do wrong?”

“Wrong?”

“You’re here, aren’t you? Are you outlaw?”

Hook nodded. “I think so.”

“Think so! You either are or you aren’t. So what did you do wrong?”

“I hit a priest.”

“You did?” Henry, a stout man with a bitter, closed face and a bald head, had looked interested for a moment, then shrugged. “You want to be careful about the church these days, boy. The black crows are in a burning mood. So is the king. Tough little bastard, our Henry. Have you ever seen him?”

“Once,” Hook said.

“See that scar on his face? Took an arrow there, smack in the cheek and it didn’t kill him! And ever since he’s been convinced that God is his best friend and now he’s set on burning God’s enemies. Right, tomorrow you’re going to help fetch arrows from the Tower, then you’ll sail to Calais.”

And so Nicholas Hook, outlaw and archer, had traveled to Soissons where he wore the jagged red cross of Burgundy and walked the high city wall. He was part of an English contingent hired by the Duke of Burgundy and commanded by a supercilious man-at-arms named Sir Roger Pallaire. Hook rarely saw Pallaire, taking his orders instead from a centenar named Smithson who spent his time in a tavern called L’Oie, the Goose. “They all hate us,” Smithson had greeted his newest troops, “so don’t walk the city at night on your own. Not unless you want a knife in your back.”

The garrison was Burgundian, but the citizens of Soissons were loyal to their imbecile king, Charles VI of France. Hook, even after three months in the fortress-city, still did not understand why the Burgundians and the French so loathed each other, for they seemed indistinguishable to him. They spoke the same language and, he was told, the Duke of Burgundy was not only the mad king’s cousin, but also father-in-law to the French dauphin. “Family quarrel, lad,” John Wilkinson told him, “worst kind of quarrel there is.”

Wilkinson was an old man, of at least forty years, who served as bowyer, fletcher, and arrow-maker to the English archers hired by the garrison. He lived in a stable at the Goose where his files, saws, drawknives, chisels, and adzes hung neatly on the wall. He had asked Smithson for an assistant and Hook, the youngest newcomer, was chosen. “And at least you’re competent,” Wilkinson offered Hook the grudging compliment, “it’s mostly rubbish that arrives here. Men and weapons, both rubbish. They call themselves archers, but half of them can’t hit a barrel at fifty paces. And as for Sir Roger?” The old man spat. “He’s here for the money. Lost everything at home. I hear he has debts of over five hundred pounds! Five hundred pounds! Can you even imagine that?” Wilkinson picked up an arrow and shook his gray head. “And we have to fight for Sir Richard with this rubbish.”

“The arrows came from the king,” Hook said defensively. He had helped carry the sheaves from the Tower’s undercroft.

Wilkinson grinned. “What the king did, God save his soul, is find some arrows from old King Edward’s reign. I know what I’ll do, he said to himself, I’ll sell these useless arrows to Burgundy!” Wilkinson tossed the arrow to Hook. “Look at that!”

The arrow, made of ash and longer than Hook’s arm, was bent. “Bent,” Hook said.

“Bent as a bishop! Can’t shoot with that! Be shooting around corners!”

It was hot in Wilkinson’s stable. The old man had a fire burning in a round brick oven on top of which a cauldron of water steamed. He took the bent arrow from Hook and laid it with a dozen others across the cauldron’s top, then carefully placed a thick pad of folded cloth over the ash shafts and weighted the cloth’s center with a stone. “I steam them, boy,” Wilkinson explained, “then I weights them, and with any luck I straightens them, and then the fledging falls off because of the steam. Half aren’t fledged anyway!”

A brazier burned beneath a second smaller cauldron that stank of hoof glue. Wilkinson used the glue to replace the goose feathers that fledged the arrows. “And there’s no silk,” he grumbled, “so I’m having to use sinew.” The sinew bound the slit feathers to the arrow’s tail, reinforcing the glue. “But sinew’s no good,” Wilkinson complained, “it dries out, it shrinks and it goes brittle. I’ve told Sir Roger we need silk thread, but he don’t understand. He thinks an arrow is just an arrow, but it isn’t.” He tied a knot in the sinew, then turned the arrow to inspect the nock, which would lie on the string when the arrow was shot. The nock was reinforced by a sliver of horn that prevented the bow’s cord from splitting the ash shaft. The horn resisted Wilkinson’s attempt to dislodge it and he grunted with reluctant satisfaction before taking another arrow from its leather discs. A pair of the stiff discs, which had indented edges, held two dozen arrows apiece, holding them apart so that the fragile goose-feather fledgings would not get crushed while the arrows were transported. “Feathers and horn, ash and silk, steel and varnish,” Wilkinson said softly. “You can have a bow good as you like and an archer to match it, but if you don’t have feathers and ash and horn and silk and steel and varnish you might as well spit at your enemy. Ever killed a man, Hook?”

“Yes.”

Wilkinson heard the belligerent tone and grinned. “Murder? Battle? Have you ever killed a man in battle?”

“No,” Hook confessed.

“Ever killed a man with your bow?”

“One, a poacher.”

“Did he shoot at you?”

“No.”

“Then you’re not an archer, are you? Kill a man in battle, Hook, and you can call yourself an archer. How did you kill your last man?”

“I hanged him.”

“And why did you do that?”

“Because he was a heretic,” Hook explained.

Wilkinson pushed a hand through his thinning gray hair. He was thin as a weasel with a lugubrious face and sharp eyes that now stared belligerently at Hook. “You hanged a heretic?” he asked. “Short of firewood, are they, in England these days? And when was this brave act done?”

“Last winter.”

“A Lollard, was he?” Wilkinson asked, then smirked when Hook nodded. “So you hanged a man because he disagreed with the church about a morsel of bread? ‘I’m the living bread come from heaven,’ says the Lord, and the Lord said nothing about being dead bread on a priest’s platter, did He? He didn’t say He was moldy bread, did He? No, He said He was the living bread, son, but no doubt you knew better than Him what you were doing.”

Hook recognized the challenge in the old man’s words, but he did not feel capable of meeting it and so he said nothing. He had never cared much for religion or for God, not till he heard the voice in his head, and now he sometimes wondered if he really had heard that voice. He remembered the girl in the stable of the London tavern, and how her eyes had pleaded with him and how he had failed her. He remembered the stench of burning flesh, the smoke dipping low in the small wind to whirl about the lilies and leopards of England’s badge. He remembered the face of the young king, scarred and unforgiving.

“This one,” Wilkinson said, picking up an arrow with a warped tip, “we can make into a proper killer. Something to send a gentry’s soul to hell.” He put the arrow on a wooden block and selected a knife that he tested for sharpness against his thumbnail. He sliced off the top six inches of the arrow with one quick cut, then tossed it to Hook. “Make yourself useful, lad, get the bodkin off.”

The arrow’s head was a narrow piece of steel a fraction longer than Hook’s middle finger. It was three sided and sharpened to a point. There were no barbs. The bodkin was heavier than most arrowheads because it had been made to pierce armor and, at close range, when shot from one of the great bows that only a man muscled like Hercules could draw, it would slice through the finest plate. It was a knight-killer, and Hook twisted the head until the glue inside the socket gave way and the bodkin came loose.

“You know how they harden those points?” Wilkinson asked.

“No.”

Wilkinson was bending over the stump of the arrow. He was using a fine saw, its blade no longer than his little finger, to make a deep wedge-shaped notch in the cut end. “What they do,” he said, staring at his work as he spoke, “is throw bones on the fire when they make the iron. Bones, boy, bones. Dry bones, dead bones. Now why would dead bones in burning charcoal turn iron into steel?”

“I don’t know.”

“Nor do I, but it does. Bones and charcoal,” Wilkinson said. He held the notched arrow up, blew some sawdust from the cut, and nodded in satisfaction. “I knew a fellow in Kent who used human bones. He reckoned the skull of a child made the best steel, and perhaps he was right. The bastard used to dig them up from graveyards, break them into fragments, and burn them on his furnace. Babies’ skulls and charcoal! Oh, he was a rotten turd of a man, but his arrows could kill. Oh, they could kill. They didn’t punch through armor, they whispered through!” Wilkinson had selected a six-inch shaft of oak while he spoke. One end had already been sharpened into a wedge that he fitted into the notched ash of the cut arrow. “Look at that,” he said proudly, holding up the scarfed joint, “a perfect fit. I’ve been doing this too long!” He held out his hand for the bodkin, which he slipped onto the head of the oak. “I’ll glue it all together,” he said, “and you can kill someone with it.” He admired the arrow. The oak made the head even heavier, so the weight of steel and wood would help punch the arrow through plate armor. “Believe me, boy,” the old man went on grimly, “you’ll be killing soon.”

“I will?”

Wilkinson gave a brief, humorless laugh. “The King of France might be mad, but he’s not going to let the Duke of Burgundy hold on to Soissons. We’re too close to Paris! The king’s men will be here soon enough, and if they get into the town, boy, you go to the castle, and if they get into the castle, you kill yourself. The French don’t like the English and they hate English archers, and if they capture you, boy, you’ll die screaming.” He looked up at Hook. “I’m serious, young Hook. Better to cut your own throat than be caught by a Frenchman.”

“If they come we’ll fight them off,” Hook said.

“We will, will we?” Wilkinson asked with a harsh laugh. “Pray that the duke’s army comes first, because if the French come, young Hook, we’ll be trapped in Soissons like rats in a butter churn.”

And so every morning Hook would stand above the gate and stare at the road that led beside the Aisne toward Compiègne. He spent even more time gazing down into the yard of one of the many houses built outside the wall. It was a dyer’s house standing next to the town ditch and every day a girl with red hair would hang the newly colored cloths to dry on a long line, and sometimes she would look up and wave at Hook or the other archers, who would whistle back at her. One day an older woman saw the girl wave and slapped her hard for being friendly with the hated foreign soldiers, but next day the redhead was again wiggling her rump for her audience’s pleasure. And when the girl was not visible Hook watched the road for the glint of sunlight on armor or the sudden appearance of bright banners that would announce the arrival of the duke’s army or, worse, the enemy army, but the only soldiers he saw were Burgundians from the city’s garrison bringing food back to the city. Sometimes the English archers rode with those foraging parties, but they saw no enemy except the folk whose grain and livestock they stole. The country folk took refuge in the woods when the Burgundians came, but the citizens of Soissons could not hide when the soldiers ransacked their houses for hoarded food. Sire Enguerrand de Bournonville, the Burgundian commander, expected his French enemies to arrive in the early summer and he was planning to endure a long siege, and so he piled grain and salted meat in the cathedral to feed the garrison and townsfolk.

Nick Hook helped pile the food in the cathedral, which soon smelled of grain, though beneath that rich aroma was always the tang of cured leather because Soissons was famous for its cobblers and saddlers and tanners. The tanning pits were south of the town and the stench of the urine in which the hides were steeped made the air foul when the wind blew warm. Hook often wandered the cathedral, staring at the painted walls or at the rich altars decorated with silver, gold, enamel, and finely embroidered silks and linens. He had never been inside a cathedral before and the size of it, the shadows far away in the high roof, the silence of the stones, all gave him an uneasy feeling that there must be more to life than a bow, an arrow, and the muscles to use them. He did not know what that something was, but the knowledge of it had started in London when an old man, an archer, had spoken to him and when the voice had sounded in his head. One day, feeling awkward, he knelt before a statue of the Virgin Mary and he asked her forgiveness for what he had failed to do in London. He gazed up at her slightly sad face and he thought her eyes, made bright with blue and white paint, were fixed on him and in those eyes he saw reproof. Talk to me, he prayed, but there was no voice in his head. No forgiveness for Sarah’s death, he thought. He had failed God. He was cursed.

“Think she can help you?” a sour voice interrupted his prayers. Hook turned and saw John Wilkinson.

“If she can’t,” Hook asked, “who can?”

“Her son?” Wilkinson suggested caustically. The old man looked furtively around him. There were a half-dozen priests saying masses at side altars, but otherwise the only other folk in the cathedral were nuns who were hurrying across the wide nave, shepherded and guarded by priests. “Poor girls,” Wilkinson said.

“Poor?”

“You think they want to be nuns? Their parents put them here to keep them from trouble. They’re bastards of the rich, boy, locked away so they can’t have bastards of their own. Come here, I want to show you something.” He did not wait for a response, but stumped toward the cathedral’s high altar that reared golden bright beneath the astonishing arches that stood, row above row, in a semicircle at the building’s eastern end. Wilkinson knelt beside the altar and dropped his head reverently. “Take a look in the boxes, boy,” he ordered Hook.

Hook climbed to the altar where silver and gold boxes stood on either side of a gold crucifix. Most of the boxes had crystal faces and, through those distorting windows, Hook saw scraps of leather. “What are they?” he asked.

“Shoes, boy,” Wilkinson said, his head still bowed and his voice muffled.

“Shoes?”

“You put them on your feet, young Hook, to keep the mud from getting between your toes.”

The leather looked old, dark and shrunken. One reliquary held a shriveled shoe so small that Hook decided it had to be a piece of child’s footwear. “Why shoes?” he asked.

“You’ve heard of Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian?”

“No.”

“Patron saints of cobblers, boy, and of leather-workers. They made those shoes, or so we’re told, and they lived here and were probably killed here. Martyred, boy, like that old man you burned in London.”

“He was a…”

“Heretic, I know. You said. But every martyr was killed because someone stronger disagreed with what he believed. Or what she believed. Christ on His cross, boy, Jesus Himself was crucified for heresy! Why the hell else do you think they nailed Him up? Did you kill women too?”

“I didn’t,” Hook said uncomfortably.

“But there were women?” Wilkinson asked, looking at Hook. He saw the answer in Hook’s face and grimaced. “Oh, I’m sure God was delighted with that day’s work!” The old man shook his head in disgust before reaching into a purse hanging from his belt. He took out a handful of what Hook presumed were coins and dropped them into the huge copper jar that stood by the altar to receive the tribute of pilgrims. A priest had been watching the two English archers suspiciously, but visibly relaxed when he heard the sound of metal falling onto metal in the big jar. “Arrowheads,” Wilkinson explained with a grin. “Old rusted broadheads that are no good any more. Now why don’t you kneel and say a prayer to Crispin and Crispinian?”

Hook hesitated. God, he was sure, would have seen Wilkinson drop valueless arrowheads into the jar instead of coins, and the threat of hell’s fires suddenly seemed very close and so Hook hurriedly took a coin from his own pouch and dropped it into the copper jar. “Good lad,” Wilkinson said, “the bishop will be right glad of that. It’ll pay for a sup of his ale, won’t it?”

“Why pray to Crispin and Crispinian?” Hook asked Wilkinson.

“Because they’re the local saints, boy. That’s their job, to listen to prayers from Soissons, so they’re the best saints to pray to here.”

So Hook went to his knees and prayed to Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian that they would beg forgiveness for his sin in London, and he prayed that they would keep him safe in this their town of martyrdom and send him home unscathed to England. The prayer did not feel as powerful as those he had addressed to the mother of Christ, but it made sense, he decided, to pray to the two saints because this was their town and they would surely keep a special watch on those who prayed to them in Soissons.

“I’m done, lad,” Wilkinson announced briskly. He was pushing something into his pocket and Hook, moving to the altar’s flank, saw that the frontal’s end, where it hung down to the floor, was frayed and ragged because a great square had been crudely cut away. The old man grinned. “Silk, lad, silk. I need silk thread for arrows, so I just stole it.”

“From God?”

“If God can’t afford a few threads of silk, boy, then He’s in dire trouble. And you should be glad. You want to kill Frenchmen, young Hook? Pray that I have enough silk thread to tie up your arrows.”

But Hook had no chance to pray because, next day, under the rising sun, the French came.

The garrison had known they were coming. News had reached Soissons of the surrender of Compiègne, another town that had been captured by the Burgundians, and Soissons was now the only fortress that barred the French advance into Flanders where the main Burgundian army lay, and the French army was reported to be coming east along the Aisne.

And then, suddenly, on a bright summer morning, they were there.

Hook watched their arrival from the western ramparts. Horsemen came first. They wore armor and had bright surcoats, and some galloped close to the town as if daring the bowmen on the walls to shoot. Some crossbowmen loosed bolts, but no horseman or horse was hit. “Save your arrows,” Smithson, the centenar, ordered his English archers. He flicked a careless finger at Hook’s strung bow. “Don’t use it, lad,” he said. “Don’t waste an arrow.” The centenar had come from his tavern, the Goose, and now blinked at the cavorting horsemen, who were shouting inaudibly at the ramparts where men were hanging the Burgundian standard alongside the personal standard of the garrison’s commander, the Sire de Bournonville. Some townsfolk had also come to the walls and they too gazed at the newly arrived horsemen. “Look at the bastards,” Smithson grumbled, gesturing at the townsfolk, “they’d like to betray us. We should have killed every last one of them. We should have slit their goddam French throats.” He spat. “Nothing will happen for a day. Might as well drink ale while it’s still available.” He stumped away, leaving Hook and a half-dozen other English archers on the wall.

All day the French came. Most were on foot, and those men surrounded Soissons and chopped down trees on the low hills to the south. Tents were erected on the cleared land, and beside the tents were the bright standards of the French nobility, a riot of red, blue, gold, and silver flags. Barges came up the river, propelled by giant sweeps, and the barges carried four mangonels, huge machines that could hurl rocks at the city walls. Only one of the massive catapults was brought ashore that day, and Enguerrand de Bournonville, thinking to tip it back into the river, led two hundred mounted men-at-arms on a sally from the western gate, but the French had expected the attack and sent twice as many horsemen to oppose the Burgundians. The two sides reined in, lances upright, and after a while the Burgundians wheeled back, pursued by French jeers. That afternoon smoke began to thicken as the besieging French burned the houses just outside Soissons’s walls. Hook watched the redheaded girl carry a bundle toward the new French encampment. None of the fugitives asked to be admitted to the city, instead they went toward the enemy lines. The girl turned in the thickening smoke to wave farewell to the archers. The first enemy crossbowmen appeared in that smoke, each archer protected by a companion holding a thick pavise, a shield large enough to hide a man as he laboriously re-cranked the crossbow after each bolt was loosed. The heavy bolts thumped into the walls or whistled overhead to fall somewhere in the city.

Then, as the sun began to sink toward the monstrous catapult on the river’s bank, a trumpet sounded. It called three times, its notes clear and sharp in the smoke-hazed air, and as the last blast faded, so the crossbowmen ceased shooting. There was a sudden surge of sparks as a thatched roof collapsed into a burning house and the smoke whirled thick along the Compiègne road where Hook saw two horsemen appear.

Neither horseman was in armor. Both men, instead, wore bright colored surcoats, and their only weapons were slender white wands that they held aloft as their horses high-stepped delicately on the rutted road. The Sire de Bournonville must have expected them because the west gate opened and the town’s commander rode out with a single companion to meet the approaching riders.

“Heralds,” Jack Dancy said. Dancy was from Herefordshire and was a few years older than Hook. He had volunteered for service under the Burgundian flag because he had been caught stealing at home. “It was either be hanged there or be killed here,” he had told Hook one night. “What those heralds are doing,” he said now, “is telling us to surrender, and let’s hope we do.”

“And be captured by the French?” Hook asked.

“No, no. He’s a good fellow,” Dancy nodded at de Bournonville, “he’ll make sure we’re safe. If we surrender they’ll let us march away.”

“Where to?”

“Wherever they want us to be,” Dancy said vaguely.

The heralds, who had been followed at a distance by two standard-bearers and a trumpeter, had met de Bournonville not far from the gate. Hook watched as the men bowed to each other from their saddles. This was the first time he had seen heralds, but he knew they were never to be attacked. A herald was an observer, a man who watched for his lord and reported what he saw, and an enemy’s herald was to be treated with respect. Heralds also spoke for their lords, and these men must have spoken for the King of France for one of their flags was the French royal banner, a great square of blue silk on which three gold lilies were emblazoned. The other flag was purple with a white cross and Dancy told him that was the banner of Saint Denis who was France’s patron saint, and Hook wondered whether Denis had more influence in heaven than Crispin and Crispinian. Did they argue their cases before God, he wondered, like two pleaders in a manor court? He touched the wooden cross hanging about his neck.

The men spoke for a brief while, then bowed to each other again before the two royal heralds turned their gray horses and rode away. The Sire de Bournonville watched them for a moment, then wheeled his own horse. He galloped back to the city, curbing beside the dyer’s burning house from where he shouted up at the wall. He spoke French, of which Hook had learned little, but then added some words in English. “We fight! We do not give France this citadel! We fight and we will defeat them!”

That ringing announcement was greeted by silence as Burgundian and English alike let the words die away without echoing their commander’s defiance. Dancy sighed, but said nothing, and then a crossbow bolt whirred overhead to clatter into a nearby street. De Bournonville had waited for a response from his men on the walls, but, receiving none, spurred through the gate and Hook heard the squeal of its huge hinges, the crash as the timbers closed and the heavy thump as the locking bar was dropped into its brackets.

The sun was hazed now, shining red gold and bright through the diffusing smoke beneath which a party of enemy horsemen rode parallel to the city wall. They were men-at-arms, armored and helmeted, and one of them, mounted on a great black horse, carried a strange banner that streamed behind him. The banner bore no badge, it was simply a long pennon of the brightest red cloth, a rippling streak of silken blood made almost transparent by the vapor-wrapped sun behind, but the sight of it caused men on the wall to make the sign of the cross.

“The oriflamme,” Dancy said quietly.

“Oriflamme?”

“The French war-banner,” Dancy said. He touched his middle finger to his tongue, then crossed himself again. “It means no prisoners,” he said bleakly. “It means they want to kill us all.” He fell backward.

For a heartbeat Hook did not know what had happened, then he thought Dancy must have tripped and he instinctively held out a hand to pull him up, and it was then he saw the leather-fledged crossbow bolt jutting from Dancy’s forehead. There was very little blood. A few droplets had spattered Dancy’s face, which otherwise looked peaceful, and Hook went to one knee and stared at the thick-shafted bolt. Less than a hand’s breadth protruded, the rest was deep in the Herefordshire man’s brain and Dancy had died without a sound, except for the meat-axe noise of the bolt striking home. “Jack?” Hook asked.

“No good talking to him, Nick,” one of the other archers said, “he’s chatting to the devil now.”

Hook stood and turned. Later he had little memory of what happened or even why it happened. It was not as though Jack Dancy had been a close friend, for Hook had no such friends in Soissons except, perhaps, John Wilkinson. Yet there was a sudden anger in Hook. Dancy was an Englishman, and in Soissons the English felt beleaguered as much by their own side as by the enemy, and now Dancy was dead and so Hook took a varnished arrow from his white linen arrow bag that hung on his right side.

He turned and lowered his bow so that it lay horizontally in front of him and he laid the arrow across the stave and trapped the shaft with his left thumb as he engaged the cord. He swung the long bow upright as his right hand took the arrow’s fledged end and drew it back with the cord.

“We’re not to shoot,” one of the archers said.

“Don’t waste an arrow!” another put in.

The cord was at Hook’s right ear. His eyes searched the smoke-shrouded ground outside the town and he saw a crossbowman step from behind a pavise decorated with the symbol of crossed axes.

“You can’t shoot as far as they can,” the first archer warned him.

But Hook had learned the bow from childhood. He had strengthened himself until he could pull the cord of the largest war bows, and he had taught himself that a man did not aim with the eye, but with the mind. You saw, and then you willed the arrow, and the hands instinctively twitched to point the bow, and the crossbowman was bringing up his heavy weapon as two bolts seared the evening air close to Hook’s head.

He was oblivious. It was like the moment in the greenwood when the deer showed for an instant between the leaves, and the arrow would fly without the archer knowing he had even loosed the string. “The skill is all between your ears, boy,” a villager had told him years before, “all between your ears. You don’t aim a bow. You think where the arrow will go, and it goes.” Hook released.

“You goddam fool,” an archer said, and Hook watched the white goose feathers flicker in the white-hazed air and saw the arrow fall faster than a stooping hawk. Steel-tipped, silk-bound, ash-shafted, feathered death flying in the evening’s quiet.

“Good God,” the first archer said quietly.

The crossbowman did not die as easily as Dancy. Hook’s arrow pierced his throat and the man twisted around and the crossbow released itself so that the bolt spun crazily into the sky as the man fell backward, still twisting as he fell, then he thrashed on the ground, hands scrabbling at his throat where the pain was like liquid fire, and above him the sky was red now, a smoke-hazed blood-red sky lit by fires and glowing with the sun’s daily death.

That, Hook, thought, had been a good arrow. Straight-shafted and properly fledged with its feathers all plucked from the same goose-wing. It had flown true. It had gone where he willed it, and he had killed a man in battle. He could, at last, call himself an archer.

On the evening of the siege’s second day Hook thought the world had ended.

It was an evening of warm and limpid light. The air was pale-bright and the river slid gently between its flowery banks where willows and alders grew. The French banners hung motionless above their tents. Some smoke still sifted from the burned houses to rise soft into the evening air until it faded high in the cloudless sky. Martins and swallows hunted beside the city’s wall, swooping and twisting.

Nicholas Hook leaned on the ramparts. His unstrung bow was propped beside him as his thoughts drifted back to England, to the manor, to the fields behind the long barn where the hay would be almost ready for cutting. There would be hares in the long grass, trout in the stream, and larks in the twilight. He thought about the decaying cattle byre in the field called Shortmead, the byre with rotting thatch and a screen of honeysuckle behind which William Snoball’s young wife Nell would meet him and make silent, desperate love. He wondered who was coppicing the Three Button wood and, for the thousandth time, how the wood had got its name. The tavern in the village was called the Three Buttons and no one knew why, not even Lord Slayton, who sometimes limped on crutches beneath the tavern’s lintel and put silver on the serving hatch to buy all present an ale. Then Hook thought of the Perrills, malevolent and ever-present. He could not go home now, not ever, because he was an outlaw. The Perrills could kill him and it would not be murder, not even manslaughter, because an outlaw was beyond the law’s help. He remembered the window in the London stable, and knew God had told him to take the Lollard girl through that window, but he had failed and he thought he must be cut off from the heavenly light beyond that window forever. Sarah. He often murmured her name aloud as though the repetition could bring forgiveness.

The evening peace vanished in noise.

But first there was light. Dark light, Hook thought later, a stab of dark light, flame-black red light that licked like a hell-serpent’s tongue from an earthwork the French had dug close to one of their gaunt catapults. That tongue of wicked fire was visible for an instant before it was obliterated in a thunder-cloud of dense black smoke that billowed sudden, and then the noise came, an ear-punching blow of sound that shook the heavens to be followed by another crack, almost as loud, as something struck the city wall.

The wall shook. Hook’s bow toppled and clattered onto the stones. Birds were screaming as they flew from the flame, smoke and lingering noise. The sun was gone, hidden by the black cloud, and Hook stared and was convinced, at least for a moment, that a crack had opened in the earth and that the fires of hell had vomited their way to the surface.

“Sweet bloody Christ!” an archer said in awe.

“Was wondering when that would happen,” another archer said in disgust. “A gun,” he explained to the first man, “have you never seen a gun?”

“Never.”

“You’ll see them now,” the second man said grimly.

Hook had never seen a gun either, and he flinched when a second one fired to add its filthy smoke to the summer sky. Next day another four cannons added their fire and the six French guns did far more damage than the four big wooden machines. The catapults were inaccurate and their jagged boulders often missed the ramparts and dropped into the city to crush houses that started burning as their kitchen fires were scattered, but the gun-stones ate steadily at the city wall, which was already in bad repair. It took only two days for the outer face of the wall to crumble into the wide fetid ditch, and then the gunners systematically widened the breach as the Burgundians countered by making a semicircular barricade behind the disintegrating wall.

Each gun fired three times a day, their shots as regular as the bells of a monastery calling men to prayer. The Burgundians had their own gun, which had been mounted on a southern bastion in the expectation that the French would attack from the Paris road, and it took two days to drag the weapon to the western ramparts where it was slung up onto the roof of the gate-tower. Hook was fascinated by its tube, which was twice as long as his bowstave and hooped like an ale-pot. The tube and its bindings were made of dark pitted iron and rested on a squat wooden carriage. The gunners were Dutchmen who spent a long time watching the enemy guns and finally aimed their tube at one of those French cannon and then set about the laborious task of loading their machine. Gunpowder was put into the barrel with a long-handled ladle, then tamped tight with a cloth-wrapped rammer. Soft loam was added next. The loam was puddled in a wide wooden pail, rammed onto the powder, then left to dry as the gunners sat in a circle and played dice. The gun-stone, a boulder chipped into a crude ball, waited beside the tube until the chief gunner, a portly man with a forked beard, decided the loam was dry enough, and only then was the stone pushed down the long hooped barrel. A wooden wedge was shoved after it and hammered into place to keep the shaped boulder tight against the loam and powder. A priest sprinkled holy water on the gun and said a prayer as the Dutchmen used long levers to make a final small adjustment to the tube’s aim.

“Stand back, boy,” Sergeant Smithson told Hook. The centenar had deigned to leave the Goose tavern to watch the Dutchmen fire their weapon. A score of other men had also arrived, including the Sire de Bournonville who called encouragement to the gunners. None of the spectators stood close to the gun, but instead watched as if the black tube were a wild beast that could not be trusted. “Good morning, Sir Roger,” Smithson said, knuckling his forehead toward a tall, arrow-thin man. Sir Roger Pallaire, commander of the English contingent, ignored the greeting. He had a narrow, beak-nosed face with a lantern jaw, dark hair and, in the company of his archers, the expression of a man forced to endure the stench of a latrine.

The portly Dutchman waited till the priest had finished his prayer, then he pushed a stripped quill into a small hole that had been drilled into the gun’s breech. He used a copper funnel to fill the quill with powder, squinted one more time down the length of the barrel, then stepped to one side and held out a hand for a long, burning taper. The priest, the only man other than the artillerymen to be close to the weapon, made the sign of the cross and spoke a quick blessing, then the chief gunner touched the flame to the powder-filled quill.

The gun exploded.

Instead of sending its stone ball screaming across to the French siege-works the cannon vanished in a welter of smoke, flying metal, and shredded flesh. The five gunners and the priest were killed instantly, turned to blood-red mist and ribboned meat. A man-at-arms screamed and writhed as red-hot metal sliced into his belly. Sir Roger, who had been standing next to the screaming man, stepped fastidiously away and grimaced at the blood that had spattered across the badge on his surcoat. That badge showed three hawks on a green field. “Tonight, Smithson,” Sir Roger spoke amidst the blood-reeking smoke that writhed about the rampart, “you will meet me after sundown in Saint Antoine-le-Petit’s church. You and your whole company.”

“Yes, sir, yes,” Smithson said faintly, “of course, Sir Roger.” The sergeant was staring at the ruined cannon. The first ten feet of the shattered barrel lay canted and ripped open, while the breech had been torn into jagged shards of smoking metal. Part of a hoop and a man’s hand lay by Hook’s feet while the gunners, hired at great expense, were nothing but eviscerated carcasses. The Sire de Bournonville, his jupon spattered with blood and scraps of flesh, made the sign of the cross, while derisive jeers sounded from the French siege lines.

“We must plan for the assault,” Sir Roger said, apparently oblivious to the wet horror a few paces away.

“Very good, Sir Roger,” Smithson said. The centenar scooped a jellied mess from his belt. “A Dutchman’s goddam brains,” he said in disgust, flicking the gob toward Sir Roger who had turned and now strode away.

Sir Roger, with three men-at-arms all wearing his badge of the three hawks, met the English and Welsh archers of the Soissons garrison in the church of Saint Antoine-le-Petit just after sunset. Sir Roger’s surcoat had been washed, though the bloodstains were still faintly visible on the green linen. He stood in front of the altar, lit by guttering rushlights that burned feebly in brackets mounted on the church’s pillars, and his face still bore the distant look of a man pained to be in his present company. “Your job,” he said, without any preamble once the eighty-nine archers had settled on the floor of the nave, “will be to defend the breach. I cannot tell you when the enemy will assault, but I can assure you it will be soon. I trust you will repel any such assault.”

“Oh we will, Sir Roger,” Smithson put in helpfully, “rely on it, sir!”

Sir Roger’s long face shuddered at the comment. Rumor in the English contingent said that he had borrowed money from Italian bankers in expectation of inheriting an estate from an uncle, but the land had passed to a cousin and Sir Roger had been left owing a fortune to unforgiving Lombards. The only hope of paying the debt was to capture and ransom a rich French knight, which was presumably why he had sold his services to the Duke of Burgundy. “In the event,” he said, “that you fail to keep the enemy out of the city, you are to gather here, in this church.” Those words caused a stir as men frowned and looked at each other. If they failed to defend the breach and lost the new defenses behind it, then they expected to retreat to the castle.

“Sir Roger?” Smithson ventured hesitantly.

“I had not invited questions,” Sir Roger said.

“Of your goodness, Sir Roger,” Smithson persevered, knuckling his forehead as he spoke, “but wouldn’t we be safer in the castle?”

“You will assemble here, in this church!” Sir Roger said firmly.

“Why not the castle?” an archer near Hook demanded belligerently.

Sir Roger paused, searching the dim nave for whoever had spoken. He could not discover the questioner, but deigned to offer an answer anyway. “The townspeople,” he finally spoke, “detest us. If you attempt to reach the castle you will be assaulted in the streets. This place is much closer to the breach, so come here.” He paused again. “I shall endeavor to arrange a truce for you.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. Sir Roger’s explanation made some sense. The archers knew that most folk in Soissons hated them. The townspeople were French, they supported their king and hated the Burgundians, but they hated the English even more, and so it was more than likely that they would assault the archers retreating toward the castle. “A truce,” Smithson said dubiously.

“The French quarrel is with Burgundy,” Sir Roger said, “not with us.”

“Will you be joining us here, Sir Roger?” an archer called out.

“Of course,” Sir Roger said. He paused, but no one spoke. “Fight well,” he said distantly, “and remember you are Englishmen!”

“Welshmen,” someone intervened.

Sir Roger visibly flinched at that and then, without another word, led his three men-at-arms from the church. A chorus of protests sounded as he left. The church of Saint Antoine-le-Petit was stone-built and defensible, but not nearly so safe as the castle, though it was true the castle was at the other end of the town and Hook wondered how difficult it would be to reach that refuge if townsfolk were blocking the streets and French men-at-arms were howling through the breached ramparts. He looked up at the painted wall that showed men, women and children tumbling into hell. There were priests and even bishops among the doomed souls who fell in a screaming cascade to a lake of fire where black devils waited with leering grins and triple-barbed eel-spears. “You’ll wish you were in hell if the Frenchies capture you,” Smithson said, noticing where Hook was looking. “You’ll all be begging for the comforts of hell if those French bastards catch you. So remember! We fight at the barricade and then, if it all goes to shit, we come here.”

“Why here?” a man called out.

“Because Sir Roger knows what he’s doing,” Smithson said, sounding anything but certain, “and if you’ve got sweethearts here,” he went on with a leer, “make certain the little darlings come with you.” He began thrusting his meaty hips backward and forward. “Don’t want our sweethearts left in the streets to be humped by half the French army, do we?”

Next morning, as he did each morning, Hook gazed north across the Aisne to the low wooded hills where the beleaguered garrison hoped to see a Burgundian relief force. None came. The great gun-stones whirred across the ashes of the burned houses and bit into the crumbling wall to start up their clouds of dust that settled on the river to drift seaward like pale gray stains on the water. Hook rose early every morning, before it was light, and went to the cathedral where he knelt and prayed. He had been warned not to walk the streets by himself, but the people of Soissons left him alone, perhaps scared of his height and size, or perhaps because they knew he was the one archer who prayed regularly and so tolerated him. He had abandoned praying to Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian because he reckoned they cared more about the townsfolk, their own folk, and so he prayed instead to the mother of Christ because his own mother had been called Mary and he begged the blessed Virgin for forgiveness because of the girl who had died in London. On one such morning a priest knelt beside him. Hook ignored the man.

“You’re the Englishman who prays,” the priest said in English, stumbling over the unfamiliar language. Hook said nothing. “They wonder why you pray,” the priest went on, jerking his head to indicate the women who knelt before other statues and altars.

Hook’s instinct was to go on ignoring the man, but the priest had a friendly face and a kindly voice. “I’m just praying,” he said, sounding surly.

“Are you praying for yourself?”

“Yes,” Hook admitted. He prayed so that God would forgive him and lift the curse that he was certain blighted his life.

“Then ask something for someone else,” the priest suggested gently. “God listens to those prayers more readily, I think, and if you pray for someone else then He will grant your own request too.” He smiled, stood, and lightly touched Hook’s shoulder. “And pray to our saints, Crispin and Crispinian. I think they are less busy than the blessed Virgin. God watch over you, Englishman.”

The priest walked away and Hook decided to take his advice and pray again to the two local saints and so he went to an altar beneath a painting of the two martyrs and there he prayed for the soul of Sarah, whose life he had failed to save in London. He stared up at the painting as he prayed. The two saints stood in a green field scattered with golden stars on a hill high above a white-walled city. They looked gravely and a little sadly toward Hook. They did not look like shoemakers. They were dressed in white robes and Crispin carried a shepherd’s crook while Crispinian held a wicker tray of apples and pears. Their names were painted beneath each man and Hook, though he could not read, could tell which saint was which because one name was longer than the other. Crispinian looked much the friendlier man. He had a rounder face and blue eyes and a half-smile of great kindliness, while Saint Crispin appeared much sterner and was half turned away, as though he had no time for an onlooker and was about to walk down the hill and into the city, and so Hook fell into the habit of praying to Crispinian each morning, though he always acknowledged Crispin too. He dropped two pennies in the jar each time he prayed.

“To look at you,” John Wilkinson said one evening, “I wouldn’t take you for a man of prayer.”

“I wasn’t,” Hook said, “till now.”

“Frightened for your soul?” the old archer asked.

Hook hesitated. He was binding arrow fledging with the silk stolen from the cathedral’s altar frontal. “I heard a voice,” he blurted out suddenly.

“A voice?” Wilkinson asked. Hook said nothing. “God’s voice?” the older man asked.

“It was in London,” Hook said.

He felt foolish for his admission, but Wilkinson took it seriously. He stared at Hook for a long time, then nodded abruptly. “You’re a lucky man, Nicholas Hook.”

“I am?”

“If God spoke to you then He must have a purpose for you. That means you might survive this siege.”

“If it was God who spoke to me,” Hook said, embarrassed.

“Why shouldn’t He? He needs to speak to people, on account that the church don’t listen to Him.”

“It doesn’t?”

Wilkinson spat. “The church is about money, lad, money. Priests are supposed to be shepherds, aren’t they? They’re meant to be looking after the flock, but they’re all in the manor hall stuffing their faces with pastries, so the sheep have to look after themselves.” He pointed an arrow at Hook. “And if the French break into the town, Hook, don’t go to Saint Anthony the Lesser! Go to the castle.”

“Sir Roger…” Hook began.

“Wants us dead!” Wilkinson said angrily.

“Why would he want that?”

“Because he’s got no money and a heap of debt, boy, so the man with the biggest purse can buy him. And because he’s not a real Englishman. His family came to England with the Normans and he hates you and me because we’re Saxons. And because he’s crammed to the throat with Norman shit, that’s why. You go to the castle, lad! That’s what you do.”

The next few nights were dark, and the waning moon was a sliver like a cutthroat’s blade. The Sire de Bournonville feared a night attack and ordered dogs to be tethered out in the wasteland where the houses had been burned. If the dogs barked, he said, the warning bell on the western gate was to be rung, and the dogs did bark and the bell was rung, but no Frenchmen assaulted the breach. Instead, as the dawn mist shimmered above the river, the besiegers catapulted the dogs’ corpses into the town. The animals had been gelded and had their throats cut as a warning of the fate that awaited the defiant garrison.

The feast of Saint Abdus passed, and no relief force arrived, and then Saint Possidius’s feast came and went, and next day was the feast of the seven holy virgins, and Hook prayed to each one, and in the next dawn he sent a plea to Saint Dunstan, the Englishman, on his feast day, and the day after that to Saint Ethelbert, who had been a king of England, and all the time he also prayed to Crispinian and to Crispin, begging their protection, and on the very next day, on the feast of Saint Hospitius, he received his answer.

When the French, who had been praying to Saint Denis, attacked Soissons.

TWO

The first Hook knew of the assault was the sound of the city’s church bells clanging in frantic haste and jangling disorder. It was dark and he was momentarily confused. He slept on straw at the back of John Wilkinson’s workshop and he woke to the glare of flames leaping high as the old man threw wood on the brazier to provide light. “Don’t lie there like a pregnant sow, boy,” Wilkinson said, “they’re here.”

“Mary, mother of God.” Hook felt the surge of panic like icy water seething through his body.

“I’ve an inkling she don’t care one way or the other,” Wilkinson said. He was pulling on a mail coat, struggling to get the heavy links over his head. “There’s an arrow bag by the door,” he went on, his voice now muffled by the coat, “full of straight ones. Left it for you. Go, boy, kill some bastards.”

“What about you?” Hook asked. He was tugging on his boots, new boots made by a skilled cobbler of Soissons.

“I’ll catch up with you! String your bow, son, and go!”

Hook buckled his sword belt, strung his bow, snatched his arrow bag, then took the second bag from beside the door and ran into the tavern yard. He could hear shouting and screams, but where they came from he could not tell. Archers were pouring into the yard and he instinctively followed them toward the new defenses behind the breach. The church bells were hammering the night sky with jangling noise. Dogs barked and howled.

Hook had no armor except for an ancient helmet that Wilkinson had given him and which sat on his head like a bowl. He had a padded jacket that might stop a feeble sword swing, but that was his only protection. Other archers had short mail coats and close-fitting helmets, but they all wore Burgundy’s brief surcoat blazoned with the jagged red cross and Hook saw those liveries lining the new wall that was made of wicker baskets filled with earth. None of the archers was drawing a cord yet, instead they just looked toward the breach that flared with sudden light as Burgundian men-at-arms threw pitch-soaked torches into the gap of the gun-ravaged wall.

There were close to fifty men-at-arms at the new wall, but no enemy in the breach. Yet the bells still rang frantically to announce a French attack, and Hook swung around to see a glow in the sky above the city’s southern rooftops, a glow that flickered lurid on the cathedral’s tower as evidence that buildings burned somewhere near the Paris gate. Was that where the French attacked? The Paris gate was commanded by Sir Roger Pallaire and defended by the English men-at-arms and Hook wondered, not for the first time, why Sir Roger had not demanded that the English archers join that gate’s garrison.

Instead the archers waited by the western breach where still no enemy appeared. Smithson, the centenar, was nervous. He kept fingering the silver chain that denoted his rank and glancing toward the glow of the southern fires, then back to the breach. “Devil’s turd,” he said of no one in particular.

“What’s happening?” an archer demanded.

“How in God’s name would I know?” Smithson snarled.

“I think they’re already inside the city,” John Wilkinson said mildly. He had brought a dozen sheaves of spare arrows that he now dropped behind the archers. The sound of screams came from somewhere in the city and a troop of Burgundian crossbowmen ran past Hook, abandoning the breach and heading toward the Paris gate. Some of the men-at-arms followed them.

“If they’re inside the town,” Smithson said uncertainly, “then we should go to the church.”

“Not to the castle?” a man demanded.

“We go to the church, I think,” Smithson said, “as Sir Roger says. He’s gentry, isn’t he? He must know what he’s doing.”

“Aye, and the Pope lays eggs,” Wilkinson commented.

“Now?” a man asked, “we go now?” but Smithson said nothing. He just tugged at the silver chain and looked left and right.

Hook was staring at the breach. His heart was beating hard, his breathing was shallow and his right leg trembled. “Help me, God,” he prayed, “sweet Jesu protect me,” but he got no comfort from the prayer. All he could think of was that the enemy was in Soissons, or attacking Soissons and he did not know what was happening and he felt vulnerable and helpless. The bells banged inside his head, confusing him. The wide breach was dark except for the feeble flicker of dying flames from the torches, but slowly Hook became aware of other lights moving there, of shifting silver-gray lights, lights like smoke in moonlight or like the ghosts who came to earth on Allhallows Eve. The lights, Hook thought, were beautiful; they were filmy and vaporous in the darkness. He stared, wondering what the glowing shapes were, and then the silver-gray wraiths turned to red and he realized, with a start of fear, that the shifting shapes were men. He was seeing the light of the torches reflected from plate armor. “Sergeant!” he shouted.

“What is it?” Smithson snapped back.

“The bastards are here!” Hook called, and so they were. The bastards were coming through the breach. Their plate armor was scoured bright enough to reflect the firelight and they were advancing beneath a banner of blue on which golden lilies blossomed. Their visors were closed and their long swords flashed back the flame-light. They were no longer vaporous, now they resembled men of burning metal, phantoms from the dreams of hell, death coming through the dark to Soissons. Hook could not count them, they were so many.

“Oh my God’s shit,” Smithson said in panic, “stop them!”

Hook did what he was told. He stepped back to the barricade, plucked an arrow from the linen bag, and laid it on the bow’s stave. The fear was suddenly gone, or else had been pushed aside by the certain knowledge of what needed to be done. Hook needed to haul back the bow’s cord.

Most grown men in the prime of their strength could not pull a war bow’s cord back to the ear. Most men-at-arms, despite being toughened by war and hardened by constant sword exercises, could only draw the hemp cord halfway, but Hook made it look easy. His arm flowed back, his eyes sought a mark for the arrow’s bright head, and he did not even think as he released. He was already reaching for the second arrow as the first, a shaft-weighted bodkin, slapped through a breastplate of shining steel and threw the man back onto the French standard-bearer.

And Hook loosed again, not thinking, only knowing that he had been told to stop this attack. He loosed shaft after shaft. He drew the cord to his right ear and was not aware of the tiny shifts his left hand made to send the white-feathered arrows on their short journey from cord to victim. He was not aware of the deaths he caused or the injuries he gave or of the arrows that glanced off armor to spin uselessly away. Most were not useless. The long bodkin heads could easily punch through armor at this close range and Hook was stronger than most archers, who were stronger than most men, and his bow was heavy. John Wilkinson, when he had first met Hook, had drawn the younger man’s bow and failed to get the cord past his chin, and he had given Hook a glance of respect, and now that long, thick-bellied bow cut from the trunk of a yew in far-off Savoy, was sending death through the bell-ringing dark, except that Hook was only seeing the enemy who came across the breach where the guttering torches burned, and he did not notice the dark floods of men who surged at either edge of the wall’s gap and who were already tugging at the wicker baskets. Then part of the barricade collapsed and the noise made Hook turn to see that he was the only archer left at the defenses. The breach, despite the dead who lay there and the injured who crawled there, was filled with howling men. The night was lit by fire, flame red, riddled with smoke and loud with war-shouts. Hook realized then that John Wilkinson had shouted at him to run, but in the moment’s excitement, the warning had not lodged in Hook’s mind.

But now it did. He plucked up the arrow bag and ran.

Men howled behind him as the barricade fell and the French swarmed across its remnants and into the city.

Hook understood then how the deer felt when the hounds were in every thicket and men were beating the undergrowth and arrows were whickering through the leaves. He had often wondered if an animal could know what death was. They knew fear, and they knew defiance, but beyond fear and defiance came the gut-emptying panic, the last moments of life as the hunters close in and the heart races and the mind slithers frantically. Hook felt that panic and ran. At first he just ran. The bells were still crashing, dogs were howling, men were roaring war-shouts, and horns were calling. He ran into a small square, a space where leather merchants usually displayed their hides, and it was oddly deserted, but then he heard the sounds of bolts being shot and he understood that folk were hiding in their houses and barring their doors. Crashes announced where soldiers were kicking or beating those locked doors down. Go to the castle, he thought, and he ran that way, but turned a corner to see the wide space in front of the cathedral filled with men in unfamiliar liveries, their surcoats lit by the torches they carried, and he doubled back like a deer recoiling from hounds. He decided to go to Saint Antoine-le-Petit’s church and sprinted down an alley, twisted into another, ran across the open space in front of the city’s biggest nunnery, then turned down the street where the Goose tavern stood and saw still more men in their strange liveries, and those men blocked his way to the church. They spotted him and a growl sounded, and the growl turned into a triumphant howl as they ran toward him, and Hook, desperate as any doomed animal, bolted into an alley, leaped at the wall that blocked the end, sprawled over into a small yard that stank of sewage, scrambled across a second wall and then, surrounded by shouts and quivering with fear he sank into a dark corner and waited for the end.

A hunted deer would do that. When it saw no escape it would freeze, shiver and wait for the death it must sense. Now Hook shivered. Better to kill yourself, John Wilkinson had said, than be caught by the French and so Hook felt for his knife, but he could not draw it. He could not kill himself, and so he waited to be killed.

Then he realized his pursuers had evidently abandoned the chase. There was so much plunder for them in Soissons and so many victims, that one fugitive did not interest them and Hook, slowly recovering his senses, realized he had found a temporary refuge. He was in one of the Goose’s back yards, a place where the brewery barrels were washed and repaired. A door of the tavern suddenly opened and a flaming torch illuminated the trestles and staves and tuns. A man peered into the yard, said something dismissive, and went back into the tavern where a woman screamed.

Hook stayed where he was. He dared not move. The city was full of women screaming now, full of hoarse male laughter and full of crying children. A cat stalked past him. The church bells had long ceased their clangor. He knew he could not stay where he was. Dawn would reveal him. Oh God, oh God, oh God, he prayed, unaware that he prayed. Be with me now and at the hour of my death. He shivered. Hooves sounded in the street beyond the brewery yard wall, a man laughed. A woman whimpered. Clouds scurried across the moon’s face and for some reason Hook thought of the badgers on Beggar’s Hill, and that homely thought calmed the panic.

He stood. Perhaps there was a chance he could reach the church? It was much closer than the castle, and Sir Roger had promised to make an attempt to save the archers’ lives, and, though it seemed a slender hope, it was all Hook could think of doing and so he pulled himself up the yard’s wall to peer over the top. The Goose’s stables were next door. No noise came from them and so he climbed onto the wall and from there he could step onto the stable roof that trembled under his weight, but by staying on the rooftop, where the ridge beam ran, he could shuffle until he reached the farther gable where he dropped into a dark alley. He was shaking again, knowing he was more vulnerable here. He moved silently, slowly, until he could peer about the alley’s corner to where the church lay.

And he saw there was no escape.

The church of Saint Antoine-le-Petit was guarded by enemies. There were over thirty men-at-arms and a dozen crossbowmen in the open space in front of the church steps, all in liveries that Hook had not seen before. If Smithson and the archers were inside the church then they were safe enough, for they could defend the door, but it seemed plain to Hook that the enemy must be there to prevent any archer escaping and, he assumed, they would stop any stray archer trying to approach the church. He thought of running for the doorway, but guessed it would be locked and that, while he was beating on the heavy timber, the crossbowmen would use him for a target.

The enemy was not just guarding the church. They had fetched barrels from some tavern and were drinking, and they had stripped two girls naked and tied them across the two barrels with their legs spread wide, and now the men took it in turns to hitch up their mail coats and rape the girls who lay silent as if they had been emptied of moans and tears. The city was loud with women screaming, and the sound scored across Hook’s conscience like an arrowhead scraping on slate, and perhaps that was why he did not move, but instead stood at the corner like an animal that had no place to run or hide. Hook wondered if the girls were dead, they were so still, but then the nearest turned her head and Hook remembered Sarah and flinched with guilt. The girl, who looked no older than twelve or thirteen, stared dully into the dark as a man jerked and grunted at her.

Then a door opened onto the alley and a flood of light washed across Hook who turned to see a man-at-arms stagger into the mud. The man wore a surcoat showing a silver wheat-sheaf on a green field. The man fell to his knees and vomited as a second man, in the same livery, came to the door and laughed. It was that second man who saw Hook and recognized the great war bow, and so put his hand on his sword’s hilt.

Hook reacted in panic. He thrust the bow at the man with the sword. In his head he was screaming, unable to think, but the lunge had all his archer’s strength in it and the horn nock of the bow’s tip pierced the man-at-arms’s throat before his sword was even half drawn. Blood misted black and still Hook thrust so that the bow ripped clean through windpipe and muscle, skin and sinew to strike the doorjamb. The kneeling man was roaring, spraying vomit as he clawed at Hook who, still in panic, made a mewing noise of utter despair as he let go of the bow and thrust his hands at his new assailant. He felt his fingers crush eyeballs and the man began to scream, and Hook was dimly aware that the rapists outside the church were coming for him and he scrambled through the door, half tripping on the first man who lay trying to pull the bow from his ruptured throat as Hook ran across a room, burst through another door, down a passage, a third door, and he was in a yard, still not thinking, over a wall, a second wall, and there were shouts behind him and screams around him and he was in absolute terror now. He had lost his great yew bow, and had dropped the arrow bags, though he still had the sword every archer was expected to wear. He had never used it. He still wore the ragged red cross of Burgundy too, and he began to tear at the surcoat, trying to rid himself of the symbol as he looked desperately for an escape, any escape, then he scrambled over a stone wall into an alley shadowed by the overhanging houses, but in the dark he saw an open door and ran to it.

The door led into a large empty room where a guttering lantern showed a dead man sprawled across a cushioned wooden bench. The man’s blood had sheeted across the flagstones. A tapestry hung on one wall and there were cupboards and a long table holding an abacus and sheets of parchment that were speared on a tall spike. Hook reckoned the dead man must have been a merchant. In one corner a ladder climbed to a higher floor and Hook went up quickly to find a plastered chamber that held a wooden bed with a pallet and blankets. A second ladder led into the attic and he clambered up and pulled the ladder into the space beneath the rafters and cursed himself for not having done the same with the first ladder. Too late now. He dared not drop back into the house and so he crouched in the bat droppings beneath the thatch. He was still shaking. Men were shouting in the houses beneath him, and for a time it seemed he must be discovered, and that discovery seemed imminent when someone climbed into the room where the bed stood, but the man only glanced briefly about before leaving, and the rest of the searchers grew bored or else found other quarry, for after a while their excited shouting died. The screaming went on, indeed the screaming became louder and it seemed to Hook, listening in puzzlement, that a whole group of women were just outside the house, all shrieking, and he flinched at the sound. He thought of Sarah in London, of Sir Martin the priest, and of the men he had just seen who had looked so bored as they raped their two silent victims.

The screaming turned into sobbing, broken only by men’s laughter. Hook was shivering, not with cold, but with fear and guilt, and then he shrank into the small space under the sloping rafters because the room beneath was suddenly lit by a lantern. The light leaked through the attic’s crude floorboards that were loosely laid over untrimmed beams. A man had climbed into the room and was shouting down the ladder to other men, and then a woman cried and there was the sound of a slap.

“You’re a pretty one,” the man said, and Hook was so frightened that he did not even notice that the man spoke English.

“Non,” the woman whimpered.

“Too pretty to share. You’re all mine, girl.”

Hook peered through a crack in the boards. He could see a wide-brimmed helmet that half obscured the man’s shoulders, and then he saw that the woman was a white-robed nun who crouched in a corner of the room. She was whimpering. “Jésus,” she cried, “Marie, mère de Dieu!” And the last word turned into a scream as the man drew a knife. “Non!” she shouted. “Non! Non! Non!” and the helmeted man slapped her hard enough to silence her as he pulled her upright. He put the knife at her neck, then slashed so that her habit was sliced down the front. He ripped the blade further and, despite her struggles, tore the white robe away from her and then cut at her undergarments. He threw her ruined clothes down to the lower floor and, when she was naked, pushed her onto the pallet where she curled into a ball and sobbed.

“Oh, I’m sure God was delighted with that day’s work!” the voice said, though no one spoke aloud because the voice was in Hook’s head. The words were those John Wilkinson had used to Hook in the cathedral, but the voice did not belong to the old archer. It was a richer, deeper voice, full of warmth, and Hook had a sudden vision of a white-robed man, smiling and carrying a tray heaped with pears and apples. It was Crispinian, the saint to whom he had addressed most of his prayers in Soissons, and now those prayers were being answered in Hook’s head, and in Hook’s head Crispinian looked sadly at him, and Hook understood that heaven had given him a chance to make amends. The nun in the room below had cried to Christ’s mother, and the Virgin must have spoken to the saints of Soissons who now spoke to Hook, but Hook was frightened. He was hearing voices again. He did not know it, but he was kneeling. And no wonder. God was speaking to him through Saint Crispinian.

And Nicholas Hook, outlaw and archer, did not know what to do when God spoke to him. He was filled with terror.

The man in the room below threw down his helmet. He unbuckled his sword belt and tossed it aside, then he growled something at the girl before starting to haul his mail coat and its covering surcoat over his head. Hook, peering between the crude floorboards, recognized the badge on the surcoat as Sir Roger Pallaire’s three hawks on a green field. What was that badge doing here? It was the victorious besiegers, not the defeated garrison, who were raping and ransacking the city, yet the three hawks were unmistakably Sir Roger’s arms.

“Now,” Saint Crispinian said.

Hook did not move.

“Now!” Saint Crispin snarled in Hook’s head. Saint Crispin was not as friendly as Crispinian and Hook flinched when the saint snapped the word.

The man, Hook was not sure whether it was Sir Roger himself or one of his men-at-arms, was struggling with the heavy leather-lined mail coat that was half over his head and constricting his arms.

“For God’s sake!” Crispinian appealed to Hook.

“Do it, boy,” Saint Crispin said harshly.

“Save your soul, Nicholas,” Crispinian said gently.

And Hook saved his soul.

He dropped through the hole in the attic floor. He forgot his sword, instead drawing the thick-bladed knife that he had once used to eviscerate deer carcasses. He fell just behind the man who could not see because his mail coat was over his head, but he heard Hook’s arrival and he turned just as Hook’s blade ripped across his belly. Nicholas Hook gutted the man. The strength of an archer’s right arm was in the cut and the blade went deep and the guts slithered out like wet eels sliding from a slit sack as the man gave a strangulated cry that was muffled by the heavy coat shrouding his head, and he cried again as the knife gave a second cut, upward this time as Hook pushed his knife hand deep into the man’s ruined belly to drive the blade up under the ribcage to find and puncture the would-be rapist’s heart.

The man dropped back onto the bed and was dead before he hit the pallet.

And Hook, blood-wet to his elbow, stared down at his victim.

He realized later that the down-filled pallet had saved his life for it soaked up the blood that otherwise would have dripped through the floorboards to alarm the men beneath. There were two of them, both wearing Sir Roger’s livery, but Hook, standing in fear over his victim, noticed that the dead man’s surcoat was made of finely woven linen, much finer than the usual cheap surcoat. He moved away from the hatch in the floor. The two men were ransacking a store cupboard and seemed oblivious of the killing that had just occurred above their heads.

The dead man’s mail coat was tight-linked and polished, studded with the buckles that had anchored his plate armor. Hook crouched and tugged the coat clear of the man’s head and saw that he had killed Sir Roger Pallaire. Sir Roger, ostensibly a Burgundian ally, had been left alive to rape and steal, which surely meant that Sir Roger had been secretly on the side of the French. Hook tried to comprehend that betrayal, while the naked girl stared at him with eyes and mouth wide open. She looked scared and Hook feared she was about to scream and so he put a finger to his lips, but she shook her head and suddenly began to make small desperate noises, half moans, half gasps, and Hook frowned at first, then understood that silence was more suspicious than the noise of her distress. That was clever of her, he thought. He nodded at her, then cut away a blood-drenched purse attached to Sir Roger’s belt. He also pulled Sir Roger’s surcoat clear of the mail coat and tossed it with the purse into the attic, then reached up and gripped one of the beams. He pulled himself into the roof space, then stretched his right arm for the girl.

She turned away and Hook hissed at her to come with him, but the girl knew what she wanted. She spat at Sir Roger’s corpse, then spat a second time before giving Hook her hand. He pulled her up as easily as he hauled back a bowstring. He gestured at the surcoat and purse and she scooped them up, then followed him along the attic. He pushed through the flimsy wattle screen that divided the roof space and so led her into the neighboring attic. He trod carefully as the light diminished. He went to the very end, three houses down from where he had killed Sir Roger, and he gestured at the girl again, motioning her to crouch by the gable wall, and then, working slowly so as to make as little noise as possible, he pulled down the roof thatch.

It took maybe an hour. He not only dragged down the thatch, but forced some pegged rafters off the ridge timber, and when he had finished he reckoned it looked as though the roof had collapsed and he and the girl crept under the straw and timbers and huddled there. He had made a hiding place.

And all he could do was wait. The girl sometimes spoke, but Hook had learned little French during his stay in Soissons and he did not understand what she said. He hushed her, and after a while she leaned against him and fell asleep, though sometimes she would whimper and Hook awkwardly tried to soothe her. She was wearing Sir Roger’s surcoat, still damp with his blood. Hook untied the purse’s strings and saw coins, gold and silver; the price, he suspected, of betrayal.

Dawn was smoky gray. Sir Roger’s gutted corpse was found before the sun came up and there was a great hue and cry and Hook heard the men ransacking the row of houses beneath him, but his hiding place was cunningly made and no one thought to look in the tangle of straw and timber. The girl woke then and Hook laid a finger on her lips and she shivered as she clung to him. Hook’s fear was still there, but it had settled into a resignation, and somehow the company of the girl gave him a hope that had not been in his soul the night before. Or perhaps, he thought, the twin saints of Soissons were protecting him and he made the sign of the cross and sent a prayer of gratitude to Crispin and Crispinian. They were silent now, but he had done what they had told him to do, and then he wondered if it had been Crispinian who had spoken to him in London. That seemed unlikely, but who had it been? God? Yet that question was unimportant against his realization that he had done what he had failed to do in London and so hope flickered inside him. Hope of redemption and survival. It was a feeble hope, small as a candle’s flame in a high wind, but it was there.

The city had become quieter as the dawn approached, but as the sun rose over the cathedral the noise began again. There were screams and moans and cries. There was a gap in the ragged collapsed thatch and Hook could see down into the small square in front of the church of Saint Antoine-le-Petit. The two girls who had been tied to the barrels were gone, though the crossbowmen and men-at-arms were still there. A brindled dog sniffed at the corpse of a nun who lay with her head in a pool of black blood and with her habit pulled up above her waist. A man-at-arms rode through the square, a naked girl draped belly down across the saddle in front of him. He slapped her rump two-handed, as though he played a drum, and the watching men laughed.

Hook waited. He needed to piss badly, but dared not move, so he wet his breeches and the girl smelled it and grimaced, but had to pee herself a moment later. She began to cry softly and Hook held her close until her tears stopped. She murmured to him, and he murmured back, and neither understood the other, but both were comforted.

Then the sound of more hooves made Hook twist around to peer through a gap in the straw. He could see down into the square where a score or more of horsemen had arrived in front of the church. One man carried a banner of golden lilies on a blue field, the whole surrounded by a red border blazoned with white dots. The horsemen were in armor, though none wore a helmet, and they were followed by armored men-at-arms who came on foot.

One of the newly arrived riders wore a surcoat that showed three hawks on a green field and Hook realized the horseman must be an Englishman who had been in Sir Roger’s service, and it was that man who spurred his horse to the church and, leaning from the saddle, pounded a shortened lance against the door. He shouted something, though Hook was too far away to hear, but it must have been words of reassurance because, a moment later, the church door opened and Sergeant Smithson peered out.

The two men talked, then Smithson went back into the church, and there was a long pause. Hook watched, wondering what was happening, then the church door swung open again and the English archers filed warily into the sunlight. It seemed that Sir Roger had kept his word and Hook, watching from the ravaged gable, wondered if there was any chance of joining the bowmen who now gathered in front of the Englishman’s horse. Sir Roger must have agreed that the archers would be spared, for the French appeared to be welcoming them. Smithson’s men piled their bows, arrow bags, and swords by the church door and then, one by one, knelt to a horseman whose stallion was gaudy with the golden lilies on their blue cloth. The rider wore a gold coronet and bright polished armor and he raised a hand in what appeared to be a kindly benediction. Only John Wilkinson hung back close to the church.

If I can reach the street, Hook thought, then I can run to join my countrymen. “No,” Saint Crispinian whispered in Hook’s head, startling him. The girl was clutching him.

“No?” Hook whispered aloud.

“No,” Saint Crispinian said again, very firmly.

The girl asked Hook something and he hushed her. “Wasn’t talking to you, lass,” he whispered.

The blue and gold horseman held his mailed fist high for a few heartbeats, then abruptly dropped his hand.

And the massacre began.

The dismounted men-at-arms drew swords and attacked the kneeling archers. The first of the bowmen died swiftly because they were unprepared, but others had time to draw their short knives and fight back, but the Frenchmen were in plate armor and they carried the longer blades and they came at the archers from every side. Sir Roger’s man-at-arms watched. John Wilkinson snatched up a sword from the pile by the church door, but a man-at-arms ran him through with a shortened lance, and a second Frenchman cut down through his neck so that Wilkinson’s blood sprayed high on the door’s stone archway, which was carved with angels and fishes. Some archers were taken alive, bludgeoned back to the ground and guarded there by the grinning men-at-arms.

The man in the golden coronet turned and rode away, followed by his standard-bearer, his squire, his page, and his mounted followers. The Englishman wearing the badge of the three hawks rode with them, turning his back on the surviving archers who called out for mercy. But there was no mercy.

The French had long memories of defeat and they hated the men who drew the long war bow. At Crécy the French had outnumbered the English and had trapped them, and the French had charged across the low valley to rid the world of the impudent invaders, and it had been the archers who had defeated them by filling the sky with goose-fledged death and so cut down noble knights with their long-nosed arrows. Then, at Poitiers, the archers had ripped apart the chivalry of France and at that day’s end the King of France was a prisoner, and all those insults still rankled, and so there was no mercy.

Hook and the girl listened. There were thirty or forty archers still alive and the French first chopped two fingers from each man’s right hand so they could never again draw a bow. A big-bellied, wide-grinned Frenchman took the fingers with a mallet and chisel, and some of the archers took the agony in silence, while others had to be dragged protesting to the barrel on which their hands were spread. Hook thought the revenge would end there, but it had only begun. The French wanted more than fingers, they wanted pain and death.

A tall man, mounted on a high horse, watched the archers’ deaths. The man had long black hair that fell below his armored shoulders and Hook, who had the eyesight of a hawk, could clearly see the man’s handsome, sun-darkened face. He had a sword-blade of a nose, a wide mouth, and a long jaw shadowed by stubble. Over his armor he wore a bright surcoat that showed a golden sun from which rays snaked and shot, and on the bright sun was an eagle’s head. The girl did not see the man. She had her face buried in Hook’s arms. She could hear the screams, but she would not watch. She whimpered whenever a man screamed under the exquisite pain that the French exacted as revenge.

Hook watched. He reckoned the tall man who wore the eagle and the sun could have stopped the torture and murder, but the man did nothing. He sat in his saddle and watched impassively as the French stripped the surviving archers naked, then took their eyes with the points of long knives. The men-at-arms taunted the newly blinded archers and scoured out their sockets with sharp blades. One Frenchman pretended to eat an eyeball, and the others laughed. The long-haired man did not laugh, he just observed, and his face showed nothing as the blinded men were laid flat on the cobbles to be castrated. Their screams filled the city that was already filled with screaming. It was only when the last blind Englishman had been gelded that the handsome man on the handsome warhorse left the square and the archers were left to bleed to death, sightless under a summer sky. Death took a long time, and Hook shivered even though the air was warm. Saint Crispinian was silent. A naked woman, her breasts cut off and her body red with blood, collapsed amidst the dying archers and wept there until a Frenchman, tired of her tears, casually stove in her skull with a battle-ax. Dogs sniffed the dying.

The sack of the city continued all day. The cathedral and the parish churches and the nunnery and the priories were all plundered. Women and children were raped and raped again, and their menfolk were murdered and God turned His face away from Soissons. The Sire de Bournonville was executed, and he was fortunate because he died without being tortured first. The castle, supposedly a refuge, had fallen without a fight as the French, permitted into the town by the treachery of Sir Roger, found its gate open and its portcullis raised. The Burgundians died, and only Sir Roger’s men, complicit in their dead leader’s betrayal, had been allowed to live as the city was put to the sword. The citizens had resented their Burgundian garrison and had never abandoned their loyalty to the King of France, but now, in a welter of blood, rape, and theft, the French rewarded that loyalty with massacre.

“Je suis Melisande,” the girl said over and over, and Hook did not understand at first, but at last realized she was saying her name.

“Melisande?” he asked.

“Oui,” she said.

“Nicholas.”

“Nicholas,” she repeated.

“Just Nick,” he said.

“Jusnick?”

“Nick.”

“Nick.” They spoke in whispers, they waited, they listened to the sound of a city screaming, and they smelled the ale and the blood.

“I don’t know how we get out of this place,” Hook said to Melisande, who did not understand. She nodded anyway, then fell asleep under the straw with her head on his shoulder and Hook closed his eyes and prayed to Crispinian. Help us out of the city, he begged the saint, and help me get home. Except, he thought with sudden despair, an outlaw has no home.

“You will reach home,” Saint Crispinian said to him.

Hook paused, wondering how a saint could speak to him. Had he imagined the voice? Yet it seemed real, as real as the screams that had marked the death of archers. Then he wondered how he could escape the city because the French would surely have sentries on all the gates.

“Then use the breach,” Saint Crispinian suggested gently.

“We’ll go out through the breach,” Hook said to Melisande, but she was still asleep.

As night fell Hook watched pigs, evidently released from their sties behind the city’s houses, feasting on the dead archers. Soissons was quieter now, the victors’ appetites slaked on bodies, ale, and wine. The moon rose, but God sent high clouds that first misted the silver, then hid it, and in the darkness Hook and Melisande made their way downstairs, and out into the reeking street. It was the middle of the night and men snored in broken houses. No one guarded the breach. Melisande, swathed in Sir Roger’s bloody surcoat, held Hook’s hand as they clambered over the wall’s rubble, and then as they crossed the low ground where the tanning pits stank and walked uphill past the abandoned besiegers’ camp and so into the higher woods where no blood reeked and no corpses rotted.

Soissons was dead.

But Hook and Melisande lived.

“The saints talk to me,” he told her in the dawn. “Crispinian does, anyway. The other fellow is grimmer. He sometimes speaks, but he doesn’t say much.”

“Crispinian,” Melisande repeated, and seemed pleased that she understood one thing he said.

“He seems nice,” Hook said, “and he’s looking after me. Looking after you too, now, I reckon!” He smiled at her, suddenly confident. “We must get you some proper clothes, lass. You look right strange in that coat.”

Though, if Melisande looked strange, she was also lovely. Hook did not notice that until the first dawn in the high woods when the sun shot a million lances of green-shimmering gold through leaves and branches to light a slender, high-boned face wreathed in hair as black as night. She had gray eyes, pale as moonlight, a long nose, and a stubborn cast to her chin, which, as Hook was to learn, reflected her character. She was pitifully thin, but had a sinewy strength and a scorn of weakness. Her mouth was wide, expressive and talkative. Hook was eventually to discover that she had been a novice in a house of nuns who were forbidden to speak, and in those first days it seemed Melisande needed to compensate for months of enforced silence. He understood nothing, yet he listened entranced as the girl chattered on.

They stayed the first day in the woods. From time to time horsemen appeared in the valley below the beeches. They were the victors of the siege of Soissons, but they were not dressed for war. Some were hawking, others seemed to be riding for the pleasure of it, and none interfered with the few fugitives who had apparently escaped Soissons and were now walking southward, yet still Hook did not want to risk an encounter with a Frenchman and so he stayed hidden until nightfall. He had decided to head westward, toward England, though being an outlaw meant that England was as dangerous as France, but he did not know where else he could go. He and Melisande traveled by night, their way lit by the moon. Their food was stolen, usually a lamb Hook took in the darkness. He feared the dogs that guarded the flocks, but perhaps it was Saint Crispin with his shepherd’s crook who protected him, for the dogs never stirred as Hook cut an animal’s throat. He would carry the small carcass back to the deep woods where he would make a fire and cook the flesh. “You can go away on your own,” he told Melisande one morning.

“Go?” she asked, frowning, not understanding him.

“If you want, lass. You can go!” He waved vaguely southward and was rewarded with a scowl and a burst of incomprehensible French, which he took to mean that Melisande would stay with him. She did stay, and her presence was both a comfort and a worry. Hook was not sure if he could escape the French countryside, and if he did he could see no future. He prayed to Saint Crispinian, and hoped the martyr could help him once he reached England, if he reached England, but Saint Crispinian was silent.

Yet if Saint Crispinian said nothing, he did send Hook and Melisande a priest who was the curé of a parish close to the River Oise and the priest found the two fugitives sleeping under a fallen willow among a thick stand of alders, and he took them to his home where his woman fed them. Father Michel was embittered and morose, yet he took pity on them. He spoke some English that he had learned when he had been chaplain to a French lord who had held an English prisoner in his manor. That experience of being a chaplain had left Father Michel hating everyone in authority, whether it was king, bishop, or lord, and that hatred was sufficient to let him help an English archer. “You will go to Calais,” he told Hook.

“I’m an outlaw, father.”

“Outlaw?” Eventually the priest understood, but dismissed the fear. “Proscrit, eh? But England is home. A large place, yes? You go home and you stay far from where you sinned. What was your sin?”

“I hit a priest.”

Father Michel laughed and clapped Hook on the back. “That was well done! I hope it was a bishop?”

“Just a priest.”

“Next time hit a bishop, eh?”

Hook paid for his stay. He chopped firewood, cleared ditches, and helped Father Michel rethatch a cow byre, while Melisande assisted the housekeeper to cook, wash, and mend. “The villagers will not betray you,” the priest assured Hook.

“Why not, father?”

“Because they fear me. I can send them to hell,” the priest said grimly. He liked to talk with Hook as a way of improving his English and one day, as Hook trimmed the pear trees behind the house, he listened as Hook haltingly admitted to hearing voices. Father Michel crossed himself. “It could be the devil’s voice?” he suggested.

“That worries me,” Hook admitted.

“But I think not,” Father Michel said gently. “You take a lot from that tree!”

“This tree’s a mess, father. You should have cut her back last winter, but this won’t hurt her. You want some pears? You can’t let her grow wild. Trust me. Cut and cut! And when you think you’ve cut too much, cut the same amount again!”

“Cut and cut, eh? If I have no pears next year I will know you are the devil’s man.”

“It’s Saint Crispinian who talks to me,” Hook said, lopping another branch.

“But only if God lets him,” the priest said and made the sign of the cross, “which means God talks to you. I am glad no saints talk to me.”

“You’re glad?”

“I think those who hear voices? Either they are saints themselves or they are for burning.”

“I’m no saint,” Hook said.

“But God has chosen you. He makes very strange choices,” Father Michel said, then laughed.

Père Michel also talked with Melisande and so Hook learned something about the girl. Her father was a lord, the priest said, a lord called le Seigneur d’Enfer, and her mother had been a servant girl. “So your Melisande is another nobleman’s bastard,” Father Michel said, “born to trouble.” Her noble father had arranged for Melisande to enter the nunnery in Soissons as a novice and to be a kitchen maid to the nuns. “That is how lords hide their sins,” Father Michel explained bitterly, “by putting their bastards in prison.”

“Prison?”

“She did not want to be a nun. You know what her name is?”

“Melisande.”

“Melisande was a Queen of Jerusalem,” Père Michel said, smiling. “And this Melisande loves you.” Hook said nothing to that. “Take care of her,” Père Michel said sternly on the day they left.

They went in disguise. It was difficult to hide Hook’s stature, but Father Michel gave him a white penitent’s robe and a leper’s clapper, which was a piece of wood to which two others were attached by leather strips, and Melisande, also in a penitent’s robe and with her black hair chopped raggedly short, led him north and west. They were pilgrims, it appeared, seeking a cure for Hook’s disease. They lived off alms tossed by folk who did not want to go near Hook, who announced his contagious presence by rattling the clapper loudly. They still moved circumspectly, skirting the larger villages and making a wide detour to avoid the smear of smoke that marked the city of Amiens. They slept in the woods, or in cattle byres, or in haystacks, and the rain soaked them and the sun warmed them and one day, beside the River Canche, they became lovers. Melisande was silent afterward, but she clung to Hook and he said a prayer of thanks to Saint Crispinian, who ignored him.

The next day they walked north, following a road that led across a wide field between two woods, and off to the west was a small castle half hidden by a stand of trees. They rested in the eastern woods close to a tumbledown forester’s cottage with a moss-thick thatch. Barley grew in the wide field, the ears rippling prettily under the breeze. Larks tumbled above them, their song another ripple, and both Hook and Melisande dozed in the late summer’s warmth.

“What are you doing here?” a harsh voice demanded. A horseman, dressed richly and with a hooded hawk on his wrist, was watching them from the wood’s edge.

Melisande knelt in submission and lowered her head. “I take my brother to Saint-Omer, lord,” she said.

The horseman, who may or may not have been a lord, took note of Hook’s clapper and edged his horse away. “What do you seek there?” he demanded.

“The blessing of Saint Audomar, lord,” Melisande said. Father Michel had told them Saint-Omer was near Calais, and that many folk sought cures from Saint Audomar’s shrine in the town. Father Michel had also said it was much safer to say they were travelling to Saint-Omer than to admit they were headed for the English enclave around Calais.

“God give you a safe journey,” the horseman said grudgingly and tossed a coin into the leaf mold.

“Lord?” Melisande asked.

The rider turned his horse back. “Yes?”

“Where are we, lord? And how far to Saint-Omer?”

“A very long day’s walk,” the man said, gathering his reins, “and why would you care what this place is called? You won’t have heard of it.”

“No, lord,” Melisande said.

The man gazed at her for a heartbeat, then shrugged. “That castle?” he said, nodding to the battlements showing above the western trees, “is called Agincourt. I hope your brother is cured.” He gathered his reins and spurred his horse into the barley.

It was four more days before they reached the marshes about Calais. They moved cautiously, avoiding the French patrols that circled the English-held town. It was night when they reached the Nieulay bridge that led onto the causeway that approached the town. Sentries challenged them. “I’m English!” Hook shouted and then, holding Melisande’s hand, stepped cautiously into the flare of torchlight illuminating the bridge’s gate.

“Where are you from, lad?” a gray-bearded man in a close-fitting helmet asked.

“We’ve come from Soissons,” Hook said.

“You’ve come from…” the man took a step forward to peer at Hook and his companion. “Sweet Jesus Christ. Come on through.”

So Hook stepped through the small gate built into the larger one, and thus he and Melisande crossed into England where he was an outlaw.

But Saint Crispinian had kept his word and Hook had come home.

THREE

Even in summer the hall of Calais Castle was chilly. The thick stone walls kept the warmth at bay and so a great fire crackled in the hearth, and in front of the stone fireplace was a wide rug on which two couches stood and six hounds slept. The rest of the room was stone-flagged. Swords were racked along one wall, and iron-tipped lances rested on trestles. Sparrows flitted among the beams. The shutters at the western end of the hall were open and Hook could hear the endless stirring of the sea.

The garrison commander and his elegant lady sat on one couch. Hook had been told their names, but the words had slithered through his head and so he did not know who they were. Six men-at-arms stood behind the couch, all watching Hook and Melisande with skeptical and hostile eyes, while a priest stood at the rug’s edge, looking down at the two fugitives who knelt on the stone flags. “I do not understand,” the priest said in a nasally unpleasant voice, “why you left Lord Slayton’s service.”

“Because I refused to kill a girl, father,” Hook explained.

“And Lord Slayton wished her dead?”

“His priest did, sir.”

“Sir Giles Fallowby’s son,” the man on the couch put in, and his voice suggested he did not like Sir Martin.

“So a man of God wished her dead,” the priest ignored the garrison commander’s tone, “yet you knew better?” His voice was dangerous with menace.

“She was only a girl,” Hook said.

“It was through woman,” the priest pounced fiercely on Hook’s answer, “that sin entered the world.”

The elegant lady put a long pale hand over her mouth as if to hide a yawn. There was a tiny dog on her lap, a little bundle of white fur studded with pugnacious eyes, and she stroked its head. “I am bored,” she said, speaking to no one in particular.

There was a long silence. One of the hounds whimpered in its sleep and the garrison commander leaned forward to pat its head. He was a heavyset, black-bearded man who now gestured impatiently toward Hook. “Ask him about Soissons, father,” he ordered.

“I was coming to that, Sir William,” the priest said.

“Then come to it quickly,” the woman said coldly.

“Are you outlawed?” the priest asked instead and, when the archer did not answer, he repeated the question more loudly and still Hook did not answer.

“Answer him,” Sir William growled.

“I would have thought his silence was eloquence itself,” the lady said. “Ask him about Soissons.”

The priest grimaced at her commanding tone, but obeyed. “Tell us what happened in Soissons,” he demanded, and Hook told the tale again, how the French had entered the town by the southern gate and how they had raped and killed, and how Sir Roger Pallaire had betrayed the English archers.

“And you alone escaped?” the priest asked sourly.

“Saint Crispinian helped me,” Hook said.

“Oh! Saint Crispinian did?” the priest asked, raising an eyebrow. “How very obliging of him.” There was a snort of half-suppressed laughter from one of the men-at-arms, while the others just stared with distaste at the kneeling archer. Disbelief hung in the castle’s great hall like the woodsmoke that leaked around the wide hearth’s opening. Another of the men-at-arms was staring fixedly at Melisande and now leaned close to his neighbor and whispered something that made the other man laugh. “Or did the French let you go?” the priest demanded sharply.

“No, sir!” Hook said.

“Perhaps they let you go for a reason!”

“No!”

“Even a humble archer can count men,” the priest said, “and if our lord the king collects an army, then the French will wish to know numbers.”

“No, sir!” Hook said again.

“So they let you go, and bribed you with a whore?” the priest suggested.

“She’s no whore!” Hook protested and the men-at-arms sniggered.

Melisande had not yet spoken. She had seemed overawed by the big men in their mail coats and by the supercilious priest and by the languorous woman who sprawled on the cushioned couch, but now Melisande found her tongue. She might not have understood the priest’s insult, but she recognized his tone, and she suddenly straightened her back and spoke fast and defiantly. She spoke French, and spoke it so quickly that Hook did not understand one word in a hundred, but everyone else in the room spoke the language and they all listened. She spoke passionately, indignantly, and neither the garrison commander nor the priest interrupted her. Hook knew she was telling the tale of Soissons’s fall, and after a while tears came to her eyes and rolled down her cheeks and her voice rose as she hammered the priest with her story. She ran out of words, gestured at Hook and her head dropped as she began to sob.

There was silence for a few heartbeats. A sergeant in a mail coat noisily opened the hall door, saw that the room was occupied, and left just as loudly. Sir William looked judiciously at Hook. “You murdered Sir Roger Pallaire?” he asked harshly.

“I killed him, sir.”

“A good deed from an outlaw,” Sir William’s wife said firmly, “if what the girl says is true.”

“If,” the priest said.

“I believe her,” the woman said, then rose from the couch, tucked the little dog into one arm, and walked to the rug’s edge where she stooped and raised Melisande by the elbow. She spoke to her in soft French, then led her toward the hall’s far end and so through a curtained opening.

Sir William waited till his wife was gone, then stood. “I believe he’s telling the truth, father,” he said firmly.

“He might be,” the priest conceded.

“I believe he is,” Sir William insisted.

“We could put him to the test?” the priest suggested with scarcely concealed eagerness.

“You would torture him?” Sir William asked, shocked.

“The truth is sacred, my lord,” the priest said, bowing slightly. “Et cognoscetis veritatem,” he declaimed, “et veritas liberabit vos!” He made the sign of the cross. “You will know the truth, my lord,” he translated, “and the truth will set you free.”

“I am free,” the black-bearded man snarled, “and it is not our duty to rack the truth out of some poor archer. We shall leave that to others.”

“Of course, my lord,” the priest said, barely hiding his disappointment.

“Then you know where he must go.”

“Indeed, my lord.”

“So arrange it,” Sir William said before crossing to Hook and indicating that the archer should stand. “Did you kill any of them?” he demanded.

“A lot, my lord,” Hook said, remembering the arrows flying into the half-lit breach.

“Good,” Sir William said implacably, “but you also killed Sir Roger Pallaire. That makes you either a hero or a murderer.”

“I’m an archer,” Hook said stubbornly.

“And an archer whose tale must be heard across the water,” Sir William said, then handed Hook a silver coin. “We’ve heard tales of Soissons,” he went on grimly, “but you are the first to bring confirmation.”

“If he was there,” the priest remarked snidely.

“You heard the girl,” Sir William snarled at the priest who bridled at the admonition. Sir William turned back to Hook. “Tell your tale in England.”

“I’m outlawed,” Hook said uncertainly.

“You’ll do what you’re told to do,” Sir William snapped, “and you’re going to England.”

And so Hook and Melisande were taken aboard a ship that sailed to England. They then traveled with a courier who carried messages to London and also had money that paid for ale and food on the journey. Melisande was dressed in decent clothes now, provided by Lady Bardolf, Sir William’s wife, and she rode a small mare that the courier had demanded from the stables in Dover Castle. She was saddle-sore by the time they reached London where, having crossed the bridge, they surrendered their horses to the grooms in the Tower. “You will wait here,” the courier commanded them, and would not tell Hook more, and so he and Melisande found a place to sleep in the cow byre, and no one in the great fortress seemed to know why they had been summoned there.

“You’re not prisoners,” a sergeant of archers told them.

“But we’re not allowed out,” Hook said.

“No, you’re not allowed out,” the ventenar conceded, “but you’re not prisoners.” He grinned. “If you were prisoners, lad, you wouldn’t be cuddling that little lass every night. Where’s your bow?”

“Lost it in France.”

“Then let’s find you a new one,” the ventenar said. He was called Venables and he had fought for the old king at Shrewsbury where he had taken an arrow in the leg that had left him with a limp. He led Hook to an undercroft of the great keep where there were wide wooden racks holding hundreds of newly made bows. “Pick one,” Venables said.

It was dim in the undercroft where the bowstaves, each longer than a tall man, lay close together. None was strung, though all were tipped with horn nocks ready to take their cords. Hook pulled them out one by one and ran a hand across their thick bellies. The bows, he decided, had been well made. Some were knobbly where the bowyer had let a knot stand proud rather than weaken the wood, and most had a faintly greasy feel because they had been painted with a mix of wax and tallow. A few bows were unpainted, the wood still seasoning, but those bows were not yet ready for the cord and Hook ignored them. “They’re mostly made in Kent,” Venables said, “but a few come from London. They don’t make good archers in this part of the world, boy, but they do make good bows.”

“They do,” Hook agreed. He had pulled one of the longest staves from the rack. The timber swelled to a thick belly that he gripped in his left hand as he flexed the upper limb a small amount. He took the bow to a place where sunlight shone through a rusted grating.

The stave was a thing of beauty, he thought. The yew had been cut in a southern country where the sun shone brighter, and this bow had been carved from the tree’s trunk. It was close-grained and had no knots. Hook ran his hand down the wood, feeling its swell and fingering the small ridges left by the bowyer’s float, the drawknife that shaped the weapon. The stave was new because the sapwood, which formed the back of the bow, was almost white. In time, he knew, it would turn to the color of honey, but for now the bow’s back, which would be farthest from him when he hauled the cord, was the shade of Melisande’s breasts. The belly of the bow, made from the trunk’s heartwood, was dark brown, the color of Melisande’s face, so that the bow seemed to be made of two strips of wood, one white and one brown, which were perfectly married, though in truth the stave was one single shaft of beautifully smoothed timber cut from where the heartwood and sapwood met in the yew’s trunk.

God made the bow, a priest had once said in Hook’s village church, as God made man and woman. The visiting priest had meant that God had married heartwood and sapwood, and it was this marriage that made the great war bow so lethal. The dark heartwood of the bow’s belly was stiff and unyielding. It resisted bending, while the light-colored sapwood of the bow’s spine did not mind being pulled into a curve, yet, like the heartwood, it wanted to straighten and it possessed a springiness that, released from pressure, whipped the stave back to its normal shape. So the flexible spine pulled and the stiff belly pushed, and so the long arrow flew.

“Have to be strong to pull that one,” Venables said dubiously. “God knows what that bowyer was thinking! Maybe he thought Goliath needed a stave, eh?”

“He didn’t want to cut the stave,” Hook suggested, “because it’s perfect.”

“If you think you can draw it, lad, it’s yours. Help yourself to a bracer,” Venables said, gesturing to a pile of horn bracers, “and to a cord.” He waved toward a barrel of strings.

The cords had a faintly sticky feel because the hemp had been coated with hoof glue to protect the strings from damp. Hook found a couple of long cords and tied a loop-knot in the end of one that he hooked over the notched horn-tip of the bow’s lower limb. Then, using all his strength, he flexed the bow to judge the length of cord needed, made a loop in the other end of the string and, again exerting every scrap of muscle power, bent the bow and slipped the new loop over the top horn nock. The center of the cord, where it would lie on the horn-sliver in an arrow’s nock, had been whipped with more hemp to strengthen the string where it notched into the arrows.

“Shoot it in,” Venables suggested. He was a middle-aged man in the service of the Tower’s constable and he was a friendly soul, liking to spend his day chattering to anyone who would listen to his stories of battles long ago. He carried an arrow bag up to the stretch of mud and grass outside the keep and dropped it with a clatter. Hook put the bracer on his left forearm, tying its strings so the slip of horn lay on the inside of his wrist to protect his skin from the bowstring’s lash. A scream sounded and was cut off. “That’s Brother Bailey,” Venables said in explanation.

“Brother Bailey?”

“Brother Bailey is a Benedictine,” Venables said, “and the king’s chief torturer. He’s getting the truth out of some poor bastard.”

“They wanted to torture me in Calais,” Hook said.

“They did?”

“A priest did.”

“They’re always eager to twist the rack, aren’t they? I never did understand that! They tell you God loves you, then they kick the shit out of you. Well, if they do question you, lad, tell them the truth.”

“I did.”

“Mind you, that doesn’t always help,” Venables said. The scream sounded again and he jerked his head toward the muffled noise. “That poor bastard probably did tell the truth, but Brother Bailey does like to be certain, he does. Let’s see how that stave shoots, shall we?”

Hook planted a score of arrows point down in the soil. A faded and much punctured target was propped in front of a stack of rotting hay at the top of the stretch of grass. The range was short, no more than a hundred paces, and the target was twice as wide as a man and Hook would have expected to hit that easy mark every time, but he suspected his first arrows would fly wild.

The bow was under tension, but now he had to teach it to bend. He drew it only a short way the first time and the arrow scarcely reached the target. He drew it a little further, then again, each time bringing the cord closer to his face, yet never drawing the bow to its full curve. He shot arrow after arrow, and all the time he was learning the bow’s idiosyncrasies and the bow was learning to yield to his pressure, and it was an hour before he pulled the cord back to his ear and loosed the first arrow with the stave’s full power.

He did not know it, but he was smiling. There was a beauty there, a beauty of yew and hemp, of silk and feathers, of steel and ash, of man and weapon, of pure power, of the bow’s vicious tension that, released through fingers rubbed raw by the coarse hemp, shot the arrow to hiss in its flight and thump as it struck home. The last arrow went clean through the riddled target’s center and buried itself to its feathers in the hay. “You’ve done this before,” Venables said with a grin.

“I have,” Hook agreed, “but I’ve been away too long. Fingers are sore!”

“They’ll harden fast, lad,” Venables said, “and if they don’t torture and kill you, then you might think of joining us! Not a bad life at the Tower. Good food, plenty of it, and not much in the way of duties.”

“I’d like that,” Hook said absent-mindedly. He was concentrating on the bow. He had thought that the weeks of travel might have diminished his strength and eroded his skill, but he was pulling easily, loosing smoothly, and aiming true. There was a slight ache in his shoulder and back, and his two fingertips were scraped raw, but that was all. And he was happy, he suddenly realized. That thought checked him, made him stare in wonder at the target. Saint Crispinian had guided him into a sunlit place and had given him Melisande, and then the happiness soured as he remembered he was still an outlaw. If Sir Martin or Lord Slayton discovered that Nicholas Hook was alive and in England they would demand him and would probably hang him.

“Let’s see how quick you are,” Venables suggested.

Hook pushed another handful of arrows into the turf and remembered the night of smoke and screams when the glimmering metal-clad men had come through the breach of Soissons and he had shot again and again, not thinking, not aiming, just letting the bow do its work. This new bow was stronger, more lethal, but just as quick. He did not think, he just loosed, picked a new arrow and laid it over the bow, raised the stave, hauled the cord and loosed again. A dozen arrows whickered over the turf and struck the target one after the other. If a man’s spread hand had been over the central mark then each arrow would have struck it.

“Twelve,” a cheerful voice said behind him, “one arrow for each disciple.” Hook turned to see a priest watching him. The man, who had a round, merry face framed by wispy white hair, was carrying a great leather bag in one hand and had Melisande’s elbow firmly clutched in the other. “You must be Master Hook!” the priest said, “of course you are! I’m Father Ralph, may I try?” He put down the bag, released Melisande’s arm, and reached for Hook’s bow. “Do allow me,” he pleaded, “I used to draw the bow in my youth!”

Hook surrendered the bow and watched as Father Ralph tried to pull the cord. The priest was a well-built man, though grown rather portly from good living, but even so he only managed to pull the cord back about a hand’s breadth before the stave began quivering with the effort. Father Ralph shook his head. “I’m not the man I was!” he said, then gave the bow back and watched as Hook, apparently effortlessly, bent the long stave to unhook the string. “It is time we all talked,” Father Ralph said very cheerfully. “A most excellent day to you, Sergeant Venables, how are you?”

“I’m well, father, very well!” Venables grinned, bobbed his head, and knuckled his forehead. “Leg doesn’t hurt much, father, not if the wind ain’t in the east.”

“Then I shall pray God to send you nothing but west winds!” Father Ralph said happily, “nothing but westerlies! Come, Master Hook! Shed light upon my darkness! Illuminate me!”

The priest, again clutching his bag, led Hook and Melisande to rooms built against the Tower’s curtain wall. The chamber he chose, which was small and paneled with carved timber, had two chairs and a table and Father Ralph insisted on finding a third chair. “Sit yourselves,” he said, “sit, sit!”

He wished to know the full story of Soissons and so, in English and French, Hook and Melisande told their tale again. They described the assault, the rapes and the murders, and Father Ralph’s pen never stopped scratching. His bag contained sheets of parchment, an ink flask and quills, and he wrote unceasingly, occasionally throwing in a question. Melisande spoke the most, her voice sounding indignant as she recounted the night’s horrors. “Tell me about the nuns,” Father Ralph said, then made a fluttery gesture as if he had been a fool and repeated the question in French. Melisande sounded ever more indignant, staring wide-eyed at Father Ralph when he motioned her to silence so his pen could catch up with her flood of words.

Hoofbeats sounded outside and, a few moments later, there was the clangor of swords striking each other. Hook, as Melisande told her story, looked through the open window to see men-at-arms practicing on the ground where his arrows had flown. They were all dressed in full plate armor that made a dull sound if a blade struck. One man, distinctive because his armor was black, was being attacked by two others and he was defending himself skillfully, though Hook had the impression that the two men were not trying as hard as they might. A score of other men applauded the contest. “Et gladius diaboli,” Father Ralph read aloud slowly as he finished writing a sentence, “repletus est sanguine. Good! Oh, that is most excellent!”

“Is that Latin, father?” Hook asked.

“It is, yes! Yes, indeed! Latin! The language of God! Or perhaps He speaks Hebrew? I suppose that’s more likely and it will make things rather awkward in heaven, won’t it? Will we all have to learn Hebrew? Or maybe we shall find ourselves gloriously voluble in that language when we reach the heavenly pastures. I was saying how the devil’s sword was slaked with blood!” Father Ralph chuckled at that sentiment, then motioned for Melisande to continue. He wrote again, his pen flying over the parchment. The sound of confident male laughter sounded from the turf outside where two other men-at-arms now fought, their swords quick in the sunlight. “You wonder,” Father Ralph asked when he had finished yet another page, “why I transcribe your tale into Latin?”

“Yes, father.”

“So all Christendom will know what sanguinary devils the French are! We shall copy this tale a hundred times and send it to every bishop, every abbot, every king, and every prince in Christendom. Let them know the truth of Soissons! Let them know how the French treat their own people! Let them know that Satan’s dwelling place is in France, eh?” He smiled.

“Satan does live there,” a harsh voice spoke behind Hook, “and he must be driven out!” Hook twisted in his chair to see that the black-armored man-at-arms was standing in the doorway. He had taken off his helmet and his brown hair was plastered down by sweat in which an impression of his helmet liner remained. He was a young man who looked familiar, though Hook could not place him, but then Hook saw the deep scar beside the long nose and he almost knocked the chair over as he scrambled to kneel before his king. His heart was beating fast and the terror was as great as when he had waited by the breach at Soissons. The king. That was all he could think of, this was the king.

Henry made an irritable gesture that Hook should rise, an order Hook was too nervous to obey. The king edged between the table and the wall to look at what Father Ralph had written. “My Latin is not what it should be,” he said, “but the gist is clear enough.”

“It confirms all the rumors we heard, sire,” Father Ralph said.

“Sir Roger Pallaire?”

“Killed by this young man, sire,” Father Ralph said, gesturing at Hook.

“He was a traitor,” the king said coldly, “our agents in France have confirmed that.”

“He screams in hell now, sire,” Father Ralph said, “and his screams shall not end with time itself.”

“Good,” Henry said curtly and sifted the pages. “Nuns? Surely not?”

“Indeed, sire,” Father Ralph said. “The brides of Christ were violated and murdered. They were dragged from their prayers to become playthings, sire. We had heard of it and we had scarce dared to believe it, but this young lady confirms it.”

The king rested his gaze on Melisande, who, like Hook, had dropped to her knees where, like Hook, she quivered with nervousness. “Get up,” the king said to her, then looked at a crucifix hanging on the wall. He frowned and bit his lower lip. “Why did God allow it, father?” he asked after a while, and there was both pain and puzzlement in his voice. “Nuns? God should have protected them, surely? He should have sent angels to guard them!”

“Perhaps God wanted their fate to be a sign,” Father Ralph suggested.

“A sign?”

“Of the wickedness of the French, sire, and thus the righteousness of your claim to that unhappy realm’s crown.”

“My task, then, is to avenge the nuns,” Henry said.

“You have many tasks, sire,” Father Ralph said humbly, “but that is certainly one.”

Henry looked at Hook and Melisande, his armored fingers tapping on the table. Hook dared to look up once and saw the anxiety on the king’s narrow face. That surprised him. He would have guessed that a king was above worry and aloof to questions of right or wrong, but it was clear that this king was pained by his need to discover God’s will. “So these two,” Henry said, still watching Hook and Melisande, “are telling the truth?”

“I would swear to it, sire,” Father Ralph said warmly.

The king gazed at Melisande, his face betraying no emotion, then the cold eyes slid to Hook. “Why did you alone survive?” he asked in a suddenly hard voice.

“I prayed, sire,” Hook said humbly.

“The others didn’t pray?” the king asked sharply.

“Some did, sire.”

“But God chose to answer your prayers?”

“I prayed to Saint Crispinian, sire,” Hook said, paused, then plunged on with his answer, “and he spoke to me.”

Silence again. A raven cawed outside and the clash of swords echoed from the Tower’s keep. Then the King of England reached out his gauntleted hand and tipped Hook’s face up so he could look into the archer’s eyes. “He spoke to you?” the king asked.

Hook hesitated. He felt as though his heart was beating at the base of his throat. Then he decided to tell the whole truth, however unlikely it sounded. “Saint Crispinian spoke to me, sire,” he said, “in my head.”

The king just stared at Hook. Father Ralph opened his mouth as though he were about to speak, but a mailed royal hand cautioned the priest to silence and Henry, King of England, went on staring so that Hook felt fear creep up his spine like a cold snake. “It’s warm in here,” the king said suddenly, “you will talk with me outside.”

For a heartbeat Hook thought he must have been speaking to Father Ralph, but it was Hook the king wanted, and so Nicholas Hook went into the afternoon sunshine and walked beside his king. Henry’s armor squeaked slightly as it rubbed against the greased leather beneath. His men-at-arms had instinctively approached as he appeared, but he waved them away. “Tell me,” Henry said, “how Crispinian spoke to you.”

Hook told how both saints had appeared to him, and how both had spoken to him, but that it was Crispinian who had been the friendly voice. He felt embarrassed to describe the conversations, but Henry took it seriously. He stopped and faced Hook. He was half a head shorter than the archer, so he had to look up to judge Hook’s face, but it appeared he was more than satisfied by what he saw. “You are blessed,” he said. “I would wish the saints would speak to me,” he said wistfully. “You have been spared for a purpose,” he added firmly.

“I’m just a forester, sire,” Hook said awkwardly. For a heartbeat he was tempted to tell the further truth, that he was an outlaw too, but caution checked his tongue.

“No, you are an archer,” the king insisted, “and it was in our realm of France that the saints assisted you. You are God’s instrument.”

Hook did not know what to say and so said nothing.

“God granted me the thrones of England and of France,” the king said harshly, “and if it is His will, we shall take the throne of France back.” His mailed right fist clenched suddenly. “If we do so decide,” he went on, “I shall want men favored by the saints of France. Are you a good archer?”

“I think so, sire,” Hook said diffidently.

“Venables!” the king called and the ventenar limped hurriedly across the turf and fell to his knees. “Can he shoot?” Henry asked.

Venables grinned. “As good as any man I ever did see, sire. As good as the man who put that arrow into your face.”

The king evidently liked Venables for he smiled at the slight insolence, then touched an iron-sheathed finger to the deep scar beside his nose. “If he’d shot harder, Venables, you would have another king now.”

“Then God did a good deed that day, sire, in preserving you, and God be thanked for that great mercy.”

“Amen,” Henry said. He offered Hook a swift smile. “The arrow glanced off a helmet,” he explained, “and that took the force from it, but it still went deep.”

“You should have had your visor closed, sire,” Venables said reprovingly.

“Men should see a prince’s face in battle,” Henry said firmly, then looked back to Hook. “We shall find you a lord.”

“I’m outlawed, lord,” Hook blurted out, unable to conceal the truth any longer. “I’m sorry, sire.”

“Outlawed?” the king asked harshly, “for what crime?”

Hook had dropped to his knees again. “For hitting a priest, sire.”

The king was silent and Hook dared not look up. He expected punishment, but instead, to his astonishment, the king chuckled. “It seems that Saint Crispinian has forgiven you that grievous error, so who am I to condemn you? And in this realm,” Henry went on, his voice harder now, “a man is what I say he is, and I say you are an archer and we shall find you a lord.” Henry, without another word, walked back to his companions and Hook let out a long breath.

Sergeant Venables climbed to his feet, flinching from the pain in his wounded leg. “Chatted to you, did he?”

“Yes, sergeant.”

“He likes doing that. His father didn’t. His father was all gloomy, but our Hal is never too grand to say a word or two to a common bastard like you or me.” Venables spoke warmly. “So, he’s finding you a new lord?”

“So he said.”

“Well, let’s hope it’s not Sir John.”

“Sir John?”

“Mad bastard he is,” Venables said, “mad and bad. Sir John will have you killed in no time at all!” Venables chuckled, then nodded to the houses built against the curtain wall. “Father Ralph is looking for you.”

Father Ralph was beckoning from the doorway. So Hook went to finish his tale.

“Jesus weeping Christ, you spavined fart! Cross it! Cross it! Don’t flap it like a wet cock! Cross it! Then close me!” Sir John Cornewaille snarled at Hook.

The sword came again, slashing at Hook’s waist, and this time Hook managed to cross his own blade to parry the blow and, as he did so, pushed forward, only to be thumped back by a thrust of Sir John’s mailed fist. “Keep coming,” Sir John urged him, “crowd me, get me down on the ground, then finish me!” Instead Hook stepped back and brought up his sword to deflect the next swing of Sir John’s blade. “What in Christ’s name is the matter with you?” Sir John shouted in rage. “Have you been weakened by that French whore of yours? By that titless streak of scabby French gristle? Christ’s bones, man, find a real woman! Goddington!” Sir John glanced at his centenar, “why don’t you spread that scabby whore’s skinny legs and see if she can even be humped?”

Hook felt the sudden anger then, a red mist of rage that drove him onto Sir John’s blade, but the older man stepped lithely aside and flicked his sword so that the blade’s flat rapped the back of Hook’s skull. Hook turned, his own sword scything at Sir John, who parried easily. Sir John was in full armor, yet moved as lightly as a dancer. He lunged at Hook, and this time Hook remembered the advice and he swept the lunge aside and threw himself on his opponent, using all his weight and height to unbalance the older man, and he knew he was going to hammer Sir John onto the ground where he would beat him to a pulp, but instead he felt a thumping smack on the back of his skull, his vision went dark, the world reeled, and a second crashing blow with the heavy pommel of Sir John’s sword threw him face down into the early winter stubble.

He did not hear much of what Sir John said in the next few minutes. Hook’s head was painful and spinning, but as he gradually recovered his senses he heard some of the snarled peroration. “You can feel anger before a fight! But in the fight? Keep your goddam wits about you! Anger will get you killed.” Sir John wheeled on Hook. “Get up. Your mail’s filthy. Clean it. And there’s rust on the sword blade. I’ll have you whipped if it’s still there at sundown.”

“He won’t whip you,” Goddington, the centenar, told Hook that evening. “He’ll thump you and cut you and maybe break your bones, but it’ll be in a fair fight.”

“I’ll break his bones,” Hook said vengefully.

Goddington laughed. “One man, Hook, just one man has held Sir John to a drawn fight in the last ten years. He’s won every tournament in Europe. You won’t beat him, you won’t even come close. He’s a fighter.”

“He’s a bastard!” Hook said. The back of his head was matted with blood. Melisande was cleaning his mail and Hook was scrubbing at the rust on his sword blade with a stone. Both sword and mail had been supplied by Sir John Cornewaille.

“He was goading you, boy, he meant nothing,” Goddington said to Hook. “He insults everyone, but if you’re his man, and you will be, he’ll fight for you too. And he’ll fight for your woman.”

Next day Hook watched as Sir John put archer after archer onto the ground. When his own turn came to face Sir John he managed to trade a dozen blows before being turned, tripped, and thrown down. Sir John backed away from him, scorn on his scarred face, and that scorn drove Hook to his feet and to a wild, savage charge and a searing cut with the sword that Sir John contemptuously flicked away before tripping Hook again. “Anger, Hook,” Sir John growled, “if you don’t control it, it’ll kill you, and a dead archer’s no good to me. Fight cold, man. Fight cold and hard. Fight clever!” To Hook’s surprise he reached out a hand and pulled Hook to his feet. “But you’re quick, Hook,” Sir John said, “you’re quick! And that’s good.”

Sir John looked to be close on forty years old, but he was still the most feared tournament fighter in Europe. He was a squat, thick-chested man, bowlegged from years spent on horseback. He had the brightest blue eyes Hook had ever seen, while his flat, broken-nosed face showed the scars of battles, whether fought against rebels, Frenchmen, tavern brawlers, or tournament opponents. Now, in anticipation of war with France, he was raising a company of archers and another of men-at-arms, though in Sir John’s eyes, there was no great difference between the two. “We are a company!” he shouted at the archers, “archers and men-at-arms together! We fight for each other! No one hurts one of us and goes unhurt!” He turned and poked a metal finger into Hook’s chest. “You’ll do, Hook. Give him his coat, Goddington.”

Peter Goddington brought Hook a surcoat of white linen that showed Sir John’s badge: a red rampant lion with a golden star on its shoulder and a golden crown on its snarling head.

“Welcome to the company,” Sir John said, “and to your new duties. What are your new duties, Hook?”

“To serve you, Sir John.”

“No! I’ve got servants who do that! Your job, Hook, is to rid the world of anyone I don’t like! What is it?”

“To rid the world of anyone you don’t like, Sir John.”

And that was liable to be a large part of the world. Sir John Cornewaille loved his king, he worshipped his older wife who was the king’s aunt, he adored the women on whom he fathered bastards, and he was devoted to his men, but the rest of the world were nearly all goddam scum who deserved to die. He tolerated his fellow Englishmen, but the Welsh were cabbage-farting dwarves, the Scots were scabby arse-suckers, and the French were shriveled turds. “You know what you do with shriveled turds, Hook?”

“You kill them, Sir John.”

“You get up close and kill them,” Sir John said. “You let them smell your breath as they die. You let them see you grinning as you disembowel them. You hurt them, Hook, and then you kill them. Isn’t that right, father?”

“You speak with the tongue of angels, Sir John,” Father Christopher said blandly. He was Sir John’s confessor and, like the company of archers gathered in the field, wore a mail coat, tall boots, and a close-fitting helmet. There was nothing about him to suggest he was a priest, but if there had been any such evidence then he would not have been in Sir John’s employment. Sir John wanted soldiers.

“You’re not archers,” Sir John growled at the bowmen in the winter field. “You shoot arrows till the putrid bastards are on top of you, and then you kill them like men-at-arms! You’re no good to me if you can only shoot! I want you so close you can smell their dying farts! Ever killed a man so close you could have kissed him, Hook?”

“Yes, Sir John.”

Sir John grinned. “Tell me about the last one? How did you do it?”

“With a knife, Sir John.”

“How! Not what with! How?”

“Ripped his belly, Sir John,” Hook said, “straight up.”

“Did you get your hand wet, Hook?”

“Drenched, Sir John.”

“Wet with a Frenchman’s blood, eh?”

“He was an English knight, Sir John.”

“God damn your bollocks, Hook, but I love you!” Sir John exclaimed. “That’s how you do it!” he shouted at the archers, “you rip their bellies open, shove blades in their eyes, slice their throats, cut off their bollocks, drive swords up their arses, tear out their gullets, gouge their livers, skewer their kidneys, I don’t care how you do it, so long as you kill them! Isn’t that right, Father Christopher?”

“Our Lord and Savior could not have expressed the sentiment more eloquently, Sir John.”

“And next year,” Sir John said, glowering at his archers, “we might be going to war! Our king, God bless him, is the rightful King of France, but the French deny him his throne, and if God is doing what He’s supposed to do then He’ll let us invade France! And if that happens, we will be ready!”

No one was certain if war was coming or not. The French sent ambassadors to King Henry who sent emissaries back to France, and rumors swept England like the winter rains that seethed on the west wind. Sir John, though, was confident there would be war and he made a contract with the king as scores of other men were doing. The contract obliged Sir John to bring thirty men-at-arms and ninety archers to serve the king for twelve months, and in turn the king promised to pay wages to Sir John and his soldiers. The contract had been written in London and Hook was among the ten men who rode to Westminster when Sir John added his signature and pressed his lion seal into a blob of wax. The clerk waited for the wax to harden, then carefully cut the parchment into two unequal parts, not neatly, but zigzagging his blade randomly down the document’s length. He put one ragged part into a white linen bag, and gave the other to Sir John. Now, if anyone doubted the document’s provenance, the two uneven parts could be matched and neither party to the contract could forge the document and expect the forgery to go undiscovered. “The exchequer will advance you monies, Sir John,” the clerk said.

The king was raising money by taxes, by loans, and by pawning his jewels. Sir John received a bag of coins and a second bag that contained loose jewels, a golden brooch, and a heavy silver box. It was not enough to allow Sir John to raise the extra men and to buy the weapons and horses he needed, and so he borrowed more money from an Italian banker in London.

Men, horses, armor, and weapons had to be purchased. Sir John, his pages, squires, and servants needed over fifty horses between them. Each man-at-arms was expected to own at least three horses, including a properly trained destrier for fighting, while Sir John undertook to supply every archer with a riding horse. Hay was needed to feed all the horses and had to be purchased until the spring rains greened the pastures. The men-at-arms provided their own armor and weapons, though Sir John did order a hundred short lances for use by men fighting on foot. He had also equipped his ninety archers with mail coats, helmets, good boots, and a weapon to use in the close-quarter fighting when their bows were no longer useful. “Swords won’t help you much in battle,” he told his archers. “Your enemies will be in plate armor and you can’t cut plate armor with a sword. Use a poleax! Beat the bastards down! Then kneel on the arse-sucking scabs, lift their visors, and put a knife into one of their filthy eyes.”

“Unless they are wealthy,” Father Christopher put in mildly. The priest was the oldest man in Sir John’s company, over forty years old, with a round, cheerful face, a twisted smile, gray hair, and eyes that were both curious and mischievous.

“Unless the arse-licking scab is wealthy,” Sir John agreed, “in which case you take him prisoner and so make me rich!”

Sir John ordered a hundred poleaxes made for his archers. Hook, who knew how to shape wood, helped carve the long ash handles, while blacksmiths forged the heads. One side of each head was a heavy hammer, weighted with lead, which could be used to crush plate armor or, at the very least, knock an armored man off balance. The opposing side was an ax that, in the hands of an archer, could split a helmet as though it were made of parchment, while the head of the ax was a spike thin enough to pierce the slits of a knight’s visor. The upper shaft of each ax was sheathed in iron so an opponent could not cut through the handle. “Beautiful,” Sir John said when the first weapons were delivered. He stroked the iron-clad handle as though it were a woman’s flank. “Just beautiful.”

By late spring the news came that God had done His duty by persuading the king to make an invasion of France and so Sir John’s company marched south on roads lined with the white blossom of hawthorn hedges. Sir John was cheerful, animated by the prospect of war. He rode ahead, followed by his pages, his squire, and a standard-bearer who carried the flag of the crowned red lion with its golden star. Three carts bore provisions, short lances, armor, spare bowstaves, and sheaves of arrows. The road south led through woods that were thickly hazed with bluebells and past fields where the year’s first hay had already been cut and was laid to dry in long rows. Newly shorn sheep looked naked and thin in the meadows. More bands of men joined the road, all horsemen, all in strange livery, and all going toward the south coast where the king had summoned the men who had signed his jaggedly cut contracts. Most of the horsemen, Hook noted, were archers, outnumbering the men-at-arms by three to one. The long bows were stored in leather cases that were slung over their owners’ shoulders.

Hook was happy. Sir John’s men were his companions now. Peter Goddington, the centenar, was a fair man, tough with laggards, but warm in his approval of the men who shared his dream of creating the best company of archers in England. Thomas Evelgold was next in command and he, like Goddington, was an older man, almost thirty. He was a morose man, slower thinking than the centenar, but he was grudgingly helpful to the younger archers among whom Hook found his particular friends. There were the twins, Thomas and Matthew Scarlet, both a year younger than Hook, and Will of the Dale who could reduce the company to helpless laughter with his imitations of Sir John. The four drank together, ate together, laughed together, and competed against each other, though it was recognized among all the archers that none could outshoot Nicholas Hook. They had practiced with weapons all winter and now France was ahead and God was on their side. Father Christopher had assured them of that in a sermon preached the day before they rode. “Our lord the king’s quarrel with the French is just,” Father Christopher had said with unusual seriousness, “and our God will not abandon him. We go to right a wrong, and the forces of heaven will march with us!” Hook did not understand the quarrel except that somewhere in the king’s ancestry was a marriage that led Henry to the French throne, and perhaps he was the rightful king and perhaps he was not, but Hook did not care. He was just happy to wear the Cornewaille lion and star.

And he was happy that Melisande was one of the women chosen to ride with the company. She had a small, fine-boned mare that belonged to Sir John’s wife, the sister of the late king, and she rode it well. “We must take women with us,” Sir John had explained.

“God is merciful,” Father Christopher had murmured.

“We can’t wash our own clothes!” Sir John had said. “We can’t sew! We can’t cook! We must have women! Useful things, women. We don’t want to be like the French! Humping each other when a sheep isn’t available, so we’ll take women!” He liked Melisande to ride alongside him and chatted away to her in French, making her laugh.

“He does not really hate the French,” Melisande told Hook on the evening that they arrived near a town with a large abbey. The abbey bell was summoning the faithful to prayer, but Hook did not move. He and Melisande were sitting beside a small river that flowed placidly through lush water meadows. Across the river, two fields away, another company of men-at-arms and archers was making camp. The fires of Sir John’s men were already burning, hazing the trees and the distant abbey tower with smoke. “He just likes to be rude about the French,” Melisande said.

“About everyone.”

“He is kind inside,” Melisande said, then leaned back to rest her head on his chest. When standing she barely reached his shoulder. Hook loved the fragility of her looks, though he knew that apparent frailty was deceptive for he had learned that Melisande had the supple strength of a bowstave and, like a bow that had followed the string and so been bent into a permanent curve even when unstrung, she possessed fiercely held opinions. He loved that in her. He also feared for her.

“Maybe you shouldn’t come,” Hook said.

“Why? Because it is dangerous?”

“Yes.”

Melisande shrugged. “It is safer to be French in France than to be English, I think. If they capture Alice or Matilda then they will be raped.” Alice and Matilda were her particular friends.

“And you won’t be?” Hook asked.

Melisande said nothing for a while, perhaps thinking of Soissons. “I want to come,” she finally said.

“Why?”

“To be with you,” she said, as though the answer were obvious. “What’s a centenar?”

“Like Peter Goddington? Just a man who leads archers.”

“And a ventenar?”

“Well, a centenar leads a whole lot of archers, maybe a hundred? And a ventenar is in charge of perhaps twenty of them. They’re all sergeants.”

Melisande thought about that for a few seconds. “You should be a ventenar, Nick.”

Hook smiled, but said nothing. The river was crystal clear as it flowed over a sandy bed where water crowsfoot and cress waved languidly. Mayflies were dancing and, every now and then, a splash betrayed a feeding trout. Two swans and four cygnets swam beside the far bank and, as Hook watched them, he saw a shadow stir in the water beneath. “Don’t move,” he warned Melisande and, moving very slowly, took the cased bow from his shoulder.

“Sir John knows my father,” Melisande said suddenly.

“He does?” Hook asked, surprised. He unlaced the leather case and gently slid the bow free.

“Ghillebert,” Melisande said the name slowly, as if it was unfamiliar, “the Seigneur de Lanferelle.”

Father Michel, in France, had said Melisande’s father was the Seigneur d’Enfer, but Hook supposed he had misheard. “He’s a lord, eh?” he remarked.

“Lords have many children,” Melisande said, “et je suis une bâtarde.”

Hook said nothing. He braced the bowstave against the bole of an ash tree and bent the yew to loop the string over the upper nock.

“I am a bastard,” Melisande said bitterly. “That is why he put me in the nunnery.”

“To hide you.”

“And protect me, I think,” Melisande said. “He paid money to the abbess. He paid for my food and bed. He said I would be safe there.”

“Safe to be a servant girl?”

“My mother was a servant girl. Why not me? And I would have become a nun one day.”

“You’re not a servant girl,” Hook said, “you’re a lord’s daughter.” He took an arrow from his bag, choosing a bodkin with its long, sharp, and heavy head. He was holding the bow horizontally on his lap and now laid the arrow on the stave and notched the feathered end on the string. The shadow stirred. “How well do you know your father?” Hook asked.

“I have only met him twice,” Melisande said. “Once when I was small, and I do not remember that well, and then before I went to the nunnery. I liked him.” She paused, searching for the right English words. “In the beginning, I liked him.”

“Did he like you?” Hook asked carelessly, concentrating on the shadow rather than on Melisande. He was drawing the bow now, still holding it horizontally and unwilling to raise it vertically in case the movement sent the shadow fast upstream.

“He was so,” she paused, looking for the word, “beau. He was tall. And he has a beautiful badge. He wears a great yellow sun with golden rays. And on the sun there is the head of…”

“An eagle,” Hook interrupted.

“Un faucon,” Melisande said.

“A falcon then,” Hook said, and remembered the long-haired man who had watched the archers being murdered in front of the church of Saint Antoine-le-Petit. “He was in Soissons,” he said harshly. He had paused with the bow partially drawn. The shadow drifted in the water and Hook thought it would vanish downstream, then it flicked its tail and was back under the far bank.

Melisande was staring up at Hook. “He was there?”

“Long black hair,” Hook said.

“I did not see him!”

“You had your head buried in my shoulder most of the time,” Hook said. “You didn’t want to look. They were torturing men. Taking their eyes. Cutting them.”

Melisande was silent a long time. Hook raised the bow slightly, then she spoke again, but in a smaller voice. “My father is called something else,” she said, “le Seigneur d’Enfer.”

“That’s the name I heard,” Hook said.

“Le Seigneur d’Enfer,” Melisande said again. “The lord of hell. It is because Lanferelle sounds like l’enfer, and l’enfer is hell, but maybe because he is so fierce in a fight. He has sent many men to hell, I think. And some to heaven too.”

Swallows flickered fast over the river and, from the corner of his eye, Hook saw the brilliant blue flash of a kingfisher’s flight. The shadow was unmoving again. He drew the cord further back, unable to pull it to the full extent because Melisande’s slender body obstructed him, but even at half draw the great war bow was a dreadful weapon.

“He is not a bad man,” Melisande said as though she tried to persuade herself of that fact.

“You don’t sound very certain,” Hook said.

“He is my father.”

“Who put you in a nunnery.”

“I did not want to go!” she said fiercely. “I told him! No! No!”

Hook smiled. “You didn’t want to be a nun, eh?”

“I knew the sisters. My mother would take me to visit them. We gave them,” she paused, looking for the English words and failing to find them, “les prunes de damas, abricots et coings.” She shrugged. “I do not know what those things are. Fruit? We gave the sisters fruit, but they were never kind to us. They were horrid.”

“But your father sent you there anyway,” Hook said.

“He said I should pray for him. That was my duty. But you know what I prayed for instead? I prayed he would come for me one day,” she said wistfully, “that he would ride on his great horse through the convent gate and take me away.”

“Is that why you want to go to France?”

She shook her head. “I want to be with you.”

“Your father won’t like me.”

She dismissed that with a shrug. “Why should he ever see us again?”

Hook aimed just beneath the shadow, though he was not thinking about his aim. Instead he was thinking about a tall man with long black hair who did nothing to stop torture and agony. He was thinking about the lord of hell. “Supper,” he said harshly, and released the cord.

The arrow leaped off the string, its white feathers bright in the sinking sun. It slashed into the water and there was a sudden thrashing, a churning turmoil that sent trout exploding upstream, and the thrashing went on as Hook jumped into the river.

The pike had been spitted by the arrow that had pinned it to the river’s far bank, and Hook had to pull hard to yank the shaft free. He carried the fish back. It twisted on the arrow and tried to bite him, but once on the western bank he rapped its skull with the hilt of his knife and the huge fish died instantly. It was almost as long as his bow, a great dark hunter with savage teeth.

“Un brochet!” Melisande said with delight.

“A pike,” Hook said, “and there’s good eating on a pike.” He gutted the fish on the bank, spilling the offal back into the river.

Next day Sir John led a contingent of men-at-arms and archers westward to buy grain, dried peas, and smoked meat, and Sir John gave Hook the easy duty, which was to stay in a village under a fold of the hills and to guard the sacks and barrels that were being piled on a wagon, which stood outside a tavern called the Mouse and Cheese. The wagon’s two draft horses were picketed on the village green. Hook’s bow, unstrung, lay on an outside table beside the pot of ale that the tavern keeper had given him, but Hook was up on the wagon bed, pounding flour into a barrel. Father Christopher, dressed in shirt, breeches, and boots, wandered aimlessly, peering into the cottages, petting cats, and teasing the women who washed clothes in the stream that edged the village’s one street. He finally came back to the Mouse and Cheese and dropped a small bag of silver coins onto the table. It was the priest’s job to pay for any food that a farmer or villager might wish to sell. “Why are you hitting the flour, young Hook?” the priest asked.

“I’m packing it down tight, father. Salt, hazel, and flour!”

Father Christopher gave an exaggerated grimace of distaste. “You’re salting the flour?”

“There’s a layer of salt at the bottom of the barrel,” Hook explained, “to stop the flour getting damp, and I add the hazel to keep it fresh.” He showed Father Christopher some hazel wands he had plucked from a hedge and stripped of their leaves.

“And that works?” the priest asked.

“Of course it does! Did you never fetch flour from a mill?”

“Hook!” the priest protested, “I’m a man of God. We don’t actually work!” He laughed.

Hook thrust another pair of wands into the barrel, then stood back and dusted his hands. “Aye, well that’s a good piece of work,” he said, nodding at the flour.

Father Christopher smiled benignly, then leaned back and gazed at the sunlit woods climbing the hills above the thatched roofs. “God, I love England,” he said, “and God knows why young Hal wants France.”

“Because he’s the King of France,” Hook said.

Father Christopher shrugged. “He’s got a claim, Hook, but so do others. If I were King of England I’d stay here. Is this your ale?”

“It is, father.”

“Be a Christian and give me some.” Father Christopher said, then raised the pot in Hook’s direction and drank from it. “But to France we go, and doubtless we’ll win!”

“We will?”

“Only God knows the answer to that, Hook,” Father Christopher said, suddenly thoughtful. “There’s a powerful lot of Frenchmen! And if they stop quarreling among themselves and turn on us? Still, we have these things,” he slapped Hook’s bow, “and they don’t.”

“Can I ask you something, father?” Hook said, climbing down from the wagon and sitting beside the priest.

“Oh, for Christ’s blessed sake don’t ask me which side God is on.”

“You told us He was on our side!”

“True, Hook, I did, and there are thousands of French priests saying the same thing to the French!” Father Christopher grinned. “Let me give you some priestly advice, Hook. Put your trust in the yew bow, my boy, and not in any priest’s words.”

Hook touched the bow, feeling the slick tallow he had rubbed into the wood. “What do you know about Saint Crispinian, father?”

“Oh, a theological inquiry,” Father Christopher said. He drank the rest of Hook’s ale, then rapped the pot on the table as a signal that he needed more. “Not sure I remember much! I didn’t really study as I should at Oxford. There were too many girls I liked.” He smiled for a moment. “There was a brothel there, Hook, where all the girls dressed as nuns. You could hardly get inside the house because of priests! I met the Bishop of Oxford there at least half a dozen times. Happy days.” He sighed and gave Hook a sideways grin. “So, what do I know? Well, Crispinian had a brother called Crispin, though not everyone says they were brothers. Some say they were noblemen, and some say they weren’t. They might have been shoemakers, which doesn’t sound like a nobleman’s occupation, does it? They were certainly Romans. They lived about a thousand years ago, Hook, and of course they were martyred.”

“So Crispinian’s in heaven,” Hook said.

“He and his brother live on the right hand of God,” Father Christopher confirmed, “where I hope they get quicker service than I do!” He rapped the table again, and a girl came running from the tavern door to be greeted with a wide priestly smile. “More ale, my lovely darling,” Father Christopher said, and rolled one of Sir John’s coins down the table. “Two pots, my sweet,” he smiled again, then sighed when the girl had gone. “Oh, I wish I were young again.”

“You are young, father.”

“Dear God, I’m forty-three! I’ll be dead soon! I’ll be as dead as Crispinian, but he was a hard man to kill.”

“He was?”

Father Christopher frowned. “I’m trying to remember. He and Crispin were tortured because they were Christians. They were racked, and they had nails driven under their fingernails, and strips of flesh cut out of them, but none of that killed them! They were singing God’s praises to the torturers all the time! Not sure I could be that brave.” He made the sign of the cross, then smiled as the girl put down the ale. He waved off the coins she offered as change.

“So there they were,” he went on, enjoying his tale, “and the man who was torturing them decided to finish them off quickly, maybe because he was tired of hearing them sing, so he tied millstones around their necks and threw them into a river. But that didn’t work either because the millstones floated! So the torturer had them pulled out of the river and threw them onto a fire! And even that didn’t kill them. They went on singing and the fire wouldn’t touch them, and God filled the torturer with despair and the wretched man threw himself on the fire instead. He burned, but the two saints lived.”

A small group of horsemen appeared at the end of the village street. Hook glanced at them, but none was wearing Sir John Cornewaille’s livery, so he turned back to the priest.

“God had saved the brothers from the torture and from the drowning and from the fire,” Father Christopher said, “but for some reason He let them die anyway. They had their heads chopped off by the emperor, and that stopped them singing. It would, wouldn’t it?”

“But it was still a miracle,” Hook said in wonderment.

“It was a miracle they survived so long,” Father Christopher agreed. “But why are you so interested in Crispinian? He’s really a French saint, not ours. He and his brother went to France, see? To do their work.”

Hook hesitated, not sure whether he wanted to confess that a headless saint talked to him, but before he could decide either way a voice sneered. “God’s belly!” the voice said, “look who we have here! Master Nicholas Hook!”

Hook looked up to see Sir Martin leering triumphantly from his horse. There were eight horsemen and all but Sir Martin were wearing Lord Slayton’s moon and stars. Thomas Perrill and his brother Robert were among the riders, as was Lord Slayton’s centenar, William Snoball. Hook knew them all.

“Friends of yours?” Father Christopher asked.

“I thought you were dead, Hook,” Sir Martin said. He was in a priest’s robe that was tucked up so his skinny legs could straddle the horse and, though priests were forbidden to carry edged weapons, he wore an old-fashioned sword with a wide crosspiece on the hilt. “I hoped you were dead,” he added, “doomed, damned and dead.” His long face grimaced in what might have been a smile.

“I live,” Hook said curtly.

“And you wear another man’s livery,” Sir Martin said, “which is not right, Hook, not right at all. It defies law and the scriptures, and Lord Slayton will not like it. Is this yours?” He pointed to the wagon.

“It is ours,” Father Christopher answered pleasantly.

Sir Martin appeared to notice Father Christopher for the first time. He peered intensely at the gray-haired man for a few heartbeats, then shook his head. “I don’t know you,” he said, “and I don’t need to know you. I need food. That’s why we came, and there,” he pointed a bony finger at the wagon, “is food. Manna from heaven. As God sent ravens to feed Elijah the Tishbite, so He has sent us Hook.” He found that amusing and laughed to himself, and in the laughter was the cackle of madness.

“But that food is ours,” Father Christopher said as though he spoke to a small child.

“But he,” Sir Martin sneered, pointing at Hook, “he, he, he,” and with each repetition he stabbed his finger toward Hook, “that piece of shit beside you, is Lord Slayton’s man. And he is an outlaw.”

Father Christopher turned a surprised face on Hook. “Are you?” he asked.

Hook nodded, said nothing.

“Well, well,” Father Christopher said mildly.

“An outlaw can possess nothing,” Sir Martin rasped, “which is the commandment of the scriptures, so that food is ours.”

“I think not,” Father Christopher replied calmly, smiling.

“You may think what you like,” Sir Martin said with a sudden vehemence, “because we’ll take it anyway, and we’ll take him.” He pointed to Hook.

“You know the livery?” Father Christopher asked gently, gesturing at Hook’s surcoat.

“An outlaw can wear no livery,” Sir Martin said. He looked happy as he anticipated the pleasure of Hook’s death. “Tom?” he twisted in the saddle to look at the older Perrill brother, “rip that surcoat off him, tie his hands tight and bring him.”

William Snoball had an arrow on his string. The rest of Sir Martin’s archers followed his example so that half a dozen arrows were pointed at Hook as Tom Perrill slid from the saddle. “Been waiting to do this,” Perrill said. His face, long-nosed and lantern-jawed like Sir Martin’s, was lit by a grin. “Do we hang him here, Sir Martin?”

“It would save Lord Slayton the trouble of a trial, wouldn’t it?” the priest said. “And remove from his lordship the temptation of mercy.” He cackled again.

Father Christopher held up a slim hand in warning, but Tom Perrill ignored the gesture. He came around the table and was just reaching for Hook when he was stopped by the sound of a sword scraping through a scabbard’s throat.

Sir Martin turned.

A single horseman watched the scene from the edge of the village. There were more horsemen behind him, but they had evidently been ordered to wait.

“I really would advise you,” Father Christopher said very mildly, “to take those arrows off their strings.”

None of the archers followed his advice. They glanced nervously at Sir Martin, but Sir Martin seemed not to know what to do, and just then the lone horseman touched his spurs to his stallion’s flanks.

“Sir Martin!” William Snoball appealed for orders.

But Sir Martin said nothing. He merely watched as the man-at-arms spurred toward him, the stallion’s hooves spewing puffs of dust as it cantered, and the rider drew back his sword arm and then, as he galloped past, swept once.

The flat of the blade smacked across Robert Perrill’s skull. The archer, whose selection had been random, toppled slowly from the saddle to drop heavily onto the street. The arrow, released by his nerveless hand, thumped into the tavern’s wall, half drilling through it. It had missed Hook by inches. Tom Perrill turned to help his brother, who stirred groggily in the dust, then went still as Sir John Cornewaille wheeled his horse. Sir John spurred again, and now Sir Martin’s archers hurriedly took the arrows off their strings. Sir John slowed the stallion, then curbed it.

“Greetings, Sir John,” Father Christopher said happily.

“What’s happening?” Sir John asked harshly.

Robert Perrill staggered to his feet, the right side of his head sheeted with blood. Tom Perrill was unmoving now, his eyes fixed on the sword that had struck his brother.

Father Christopher drank some ale, then wiped his lips. “These men, Sir John,” he waved at Sir Martin and his archers, “expressed a desire to take our food. I did advise them against such a course, but they insisted the food was theirs because it was under the protection of young Hook here and, according to this holy priest, Hook is an outlaw.”

“He is,” Sir Martin found his voice, “deemed so by law and doomed thereby!”

“I know he’s an outlaw,” Sir John said flatly, “and so did the king when he gave Hook to me. Are you saying the king made a mistake?”

Sir Martin glanced at Hook with surprise, but held his ground. “He is an outlaw,” he insisted, “and Lord Slayton’s man.”

“He is my man,” Sir John said.

“He is…” Sir Martin began, then faltered under Sir John’s gaze.

“He is my man,” Sir John said again, his voice dangerous now, “he fights for me, and that means I fight for him. You know who I am?” Sir John waited for an acknowledgment from the priest, but Sir Martin’s gaze had dissolved into vagueness and he was now staring into the sky as though he were communing with angels. “Tell his lordship,” Sir John went on, “to discuss the matter with me.”

“We will, sir, we will,” William Snoball answered after glancing at Sir Martin.

“Elijah the Tishbite,” Sir Martin spoke suddenly, “ate bread and flesh by the brook Cherith. Did you know that?” This question was asked earnestly of Sir John who merely looked bemused. “The brook Cherith,” Sir Martin said as though he imparted a great secret, “is where a man may hide himself.”

“Jesus wept,” Sir John said.

“And no wonder,” Father Christopher sighed. Then he gently lifted Hook’s bow and slammed it hard down onto the table and the abrupt noise made the horses twitch and snapped Sir Martin’s eyes into comprehension. “I forgot to mention,” Father Christopher said, smiling seraphically at Sir Martin, “that I am also a priest. So let me offer you a blessing.” He pulled out a golden crucifix that had been hidden beneath his shirt and held it toward Lord Slayton’s men. “May the peace and love of our Lord Jesus Christ,” he said, “comfort and sustain you while you take your farting mouths and your turd-reeking presence out of our sight.” He waved a sketchy cross toward the horsemen. “And thus farewell.”

Tom Perrill stared at Hook. For a moment it seemed his hatred might conquer his caution, but then he twisted away and helped his brother remount. Sir Martin, his face dreamy again, allowed William Snoball to lead him away. The other horsemen followed.

Sir John dropped from his saddle, took Hook’s ale, and drained it. “Remind me why you were outlawed, Hook?”

“Because I hit a priest, Sir John,” Hook admitted.

“That priest?” Sir John asked, jerking a thumb toward the retreating horsemen.

“Yes, Sir John.”

Sir John shook his head. “You did wrong, Hook, you did very wrong. You shouldn’t have hit him.”

“No, Sir John,” Hook said humbly.

“You should have slit the goddam bastard’s putrid bowels open and ripped his heart out through his stinking arse,” Sir John said, looking at Father Christopher as if hoping his words might offend the priest, but Father Christopher merely smiled. “Is the bastard mad?” Sir John demanded.

“Famously,” Father Christopher said, “but so were half the saints and most of the prophets. I can’t think you’d want to go hawking with Jeremiah, Sir John?”

“Damn Jeremiah,” Sir John said, “and damn London. I’m summoned there again, father. The king demands it.”

“May God bless your going forth, Sir John, and your returning hence.”

“And if King Harry doesn’t make peace,” Sir John said, “I’ll be back soon. Very soon.”

“There’ll be no peace,” Father Christopher said confidently. “The bow is drawn and the arrow yearns to fly.”

“Let’s hope it does. I need the money a good war will bring.”

“I shall pray for war, then,” Father Christopher said lightly.

“For months now,” Sir John said, “I’ve prayed for nothing else.”

And now, Hook thought, Sir John’s prayers were being answered. Because soon, very soon, they would be sailing to war. They would sail to play the devil’s game. They would sail to France. They were going to fight.