Agincourt

FOUR

Nick Hook could scarce believe the world held so many ships. He first saw the fleet when Sir John’s men mustered on the shore of Southampton Water so that the king’s officers could count the company. Sir John had contracted to supply ninety archers and thirty men-at-arms and the king had agreed to pay Sir John the balance of the money owed for those men when the army embarked, but first the numbers and condition of Sir John’s company had to be approved. Hook, standing in line with his companions, gazed in awe at the fleet. There were anchored ships as far as he could see; so many ships that their hulls hid the water. Peter Goddington, the centenar, had claimed there were fifteen hundred vessels waiting to transport the army, and Hook had not believed so many ships could exist, yet there they were.

The king’s inspector, an elderly and round-faced monk with ink-stained hands, walked down the line of soldiers to make sure that Sir John had hired no cripples, boys, or old men. He was accompanied by a grim-faced knight wearing the royal coat of arms, whose task was to inspect the company’s weapons. He found nothing amiss, but nor did he expect to discover any shortcomings in Sir John Cornewaille’s preparations. “Sir John’s indenture specifies ninety archers,” the monk said reprovingly when he reached the line’s end.

“It does indeed,” Father Christopher agreed cheerfully. Sir John was in London with the king, and Father Christopher was in charge of the company’s administration during Sir John’s absence.

“Yet there are ninety-two archers!” the monk spoke with mock severity.

“Sir John will throw the two weakest overboard,” Father Christopher said.

“That will serve! That will serve!” the monk said. He glanced at his grim-faced companion, who nodded approval of what he had seen. “The money will be brought to you this afternoon,” the monk assured Father Christopher. “God bless you one and all,” he added as he mounted his horse so he could ride to where other companies were waiting for inspection. His clerks, clutching linen bags filled with parchments, scurried after him.

Hook’s ship, the Heron, was a squat, round-bottomed merchant ship with a bluff bow, a square stern, and a thick mast from which Sir John Cornewaille’s lion banner flew. Close by, and looming above the Heron, was the king’s own ship, the Trinity Royal, which was the size of an abbey and made even bigger by the towering wooden castles added to her bows and stern. The castles, which were painted red, blue, and gold and hung with royal banners, made the Trinity Royal look top heavy, like a farm wagon piled too high with harvest sheaves. Her rails had been decorated with white shields on which red crosses were painted, while aloft she flew three vast flags. At her bows, on a short mast that sprang from her jaunty bowsprit, was a red banner decorated with four white circles joined by black-lettered strips. “That flag on the bow, Hook,” Father Christopher explained, making the sign of the cross, “is the flag of the Holy Trinity.”

Hook stared, said nothing.

“You might have thought,” Father Christopher went on slyly, “that the Holy Trinity would require three flags, but modesty reigns in heaven and one suffices. You know the significance of the flag, Hook?”

“No, father.”

“Then I shall repair your ignorance. The outer circles are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost and they’re joined by strips on which are written non est. You know what non est is, Hook?”

“Is not,” Melisande said quickly.

“Oh my God, she’s as clever as she’s beautiful,” Father Christopher said happily. He gave Melisande a slow and appreciative look that started at her face and finished at her feet. She was wearing a dress of thin linen decorated with Sir John’s crest of the red lion, though the priest was hardly examining the heraldry. “So,” he said slowly, looking back up her body, “the Father is not the Son, who is not the Holy Ghost, who is not the Father, yet all those outer circles connect to the inner, which is God, and on the strips connecting to God’s circle is the word est. So the Father is God, and the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God, but they’re not each other. It’s really very simple.”

Hook frowned. “I don’t think it’s simple.”

Father Christopher grinned. “Of course it’s not simple! I don’t think anyone understands the Holy Trinity, except maybe the pope, but which pope, eh? We’ve got two of them now, and we’re only supposed to have one! Gregory non est Benedict and Benedict non est Gregory, so let’s just hope God knows which one est which. God, you’re a pretty thing, Melisande. Wasted on Hook, you are.”

Melisande made a face at the priest who laughed, kissed his fingertips, and blew the kiss to her. “Look after her, Hook,” he said.

“I do, father.”

Father Christopher managed to tear his gaze from Melisande and stare across the water at the Trinity Royal, which was being nuzzled by a dozen small launches nosing into her flank like piglets suckling on a sow. Great bundles were being slung from those smaller boats into the larger. At the Trinity Royal’s stern, on another short mast, flew the flag of England, the red cross of Saint George on its white field. Every man in Henry’s army had been given two red linen crosses, which had to be sewn on the front and back of their jupons, defacing the badge of their lord. In battle, Sir John had explained, there were too many badges, too many beasts and birds and colors, but if all the English wore one badge, Saint George’s badge, then in the chaos of killing they might recognize their own compatriots.

The Trinity Royal’s tall mast carried the largest flag, the king’s flag, the great quartered banner that twice displayed the golden leopards of England and twice the golden lilies of France. Henry claimed to be king of both countries, which was why his banner showed both, and the great fleet that filled Southampton Water would carry an army to make the banner’s boast come true. It was an army, Sir John Cornewaille had told his men the night before he left for London, like no other army that had ever sailed from England. “Our king has done it right!” he had said proudly. “We’re good!” He had grinned wolfishly. “Our lord the king has spent money! He’s pawned his royal jewels! He’s bought the best army we’ve ever had, and we’re part of it. And we’re not just any part, we’re the best part of it! We will not let our king down! God is on our side, isn’t that right, Father?”

“Oh, God detests the French,” Father Christopher had put in confidently, as though he were intimate with God’s mind.

“That’s because God is no fool,” Sir John went on, “but the Almighty knows He made a mistake when He created the French! So He’s sending us to correct it! We’re God’s army, and we’re going to gut those devil-spawned bastards!”

Fifteen hundred ships would carry twelve thousand men and at least twice that many horses across the Channel. The men were mostly English, with some Welshmen and a few score who had come from Henry’s possessions in Aquitaine. Hook could hardly imagine twelve thousand men, the number was so vast, but Father Christopher, leaning on the Heron’s rail, had repeated the cautionary note he had sounded outside the tavern before the confrontation with Sir Martin. “The French can muster triple our numbers,” he said musingly, “and maybe even more. If it comes to a fight, Hook, we’ll need your arrows.”

“They won’t fight us, though,” one of Sir John’s men-at-arms said. He had overheard the priest’s comment.

“They don’t like fighting us,” Father Christopher agreed. The priest was wearing a haubergeon and had a sword hanging at his waist. “It’s not like the good old days.”

The man-at-arms, young and round-faced, grinned. “Crécy and Poitiers?”

“That would have been grand!” Father Christopher said wistfully. “Can you imagine being at Poitiers? Capturing the French king! It won’t happen this time.”

“It won’t, father?” Hook asked.

“They’ve learned about our archers, Hook. They stay away from us. They lock themselves up in their towns and castles and wait till we get bored. We can march around France a dozen times and they won’t come out to fight, but if we can’t get into their castles, what use is marching around France?”

“Then why don’t they have archers?” Hook asked, but he already knew the answer because he was the answer himself. It had taken ten years to turn Nicholas Hook into an archer. He had started at seven years old with a small bow which his father had insisted he practice every day, and every year until his father died the bows got bigger and were strung more tightly, and the young Hook had learned to draw the bow with his full body, not just his arms. “Lay into the bow, you little bastard,” his father would say again and again, and each time strike him across the back with his big bowstave, and so Hook learned to lay into the bow and thus grew stronger and stronger. On his father’s death he had taken the big bow and practiced with that, shooting arrow after arrow at the butts in the church field. The arrowheads were sharpened on a post of the lych gate and the constant scraping had worn deep grooves in the stone. Nick Hook had poured his anger into those arrows, sometimes shooting till it was almost too dark to see. “Don’t snatch at the string,” Pearce the blacksmith had told him again and again, and Hook had learned the whispering release that let the string slip through his fingers, which hardened to thick leather pads. And as he drew and released, drew and released, year after year, the muscles of his back, his chest, and his arms grew massive. That was one requirement, the huge muscles needed to draw the bow, while the other, which was harder to acquire, was to forget the eye.

When he first started as a boy Hook would draw the cord to his cheek and look down the arrow’s length to aim, but that cheated the bow of its full power. If a bodkin was to shear through plate armor it needed all the power of the yew, and that meant drawing the cord to the ear, and then the arrow slanted across the eye, and it had taken Hook years to learn how to think his arrow to the target. He could not explain it, but no archer could. He only knew that when he drew the cord he looked at the target and the arrow flew there because he wanted it to, not because he had lined eye, arrow, and target. That was why the French had no archers other than a few huntsmen, because they had no men who had spent years learning to make a length of yew and a cord of hemp into a part of themselves.

North of the Heron, somewhere among the tangle of moored ships, a vessel burned, sending a thick plume of smoke across the summer sky. Rumor said there had been a rebellion against the king and that the rebels had planned to burn the fleet. Father Christopher had curtly acknowledged that there had indeed been some rebels, lords all of them, but they were now dead. “Beheaded,” he said. The burning ship, he thought, was probably an accident. “No one will burn the Heron,” he had reassured the archers, and no one did. Also north of the Heron was the Lady of Falmouth and she was being loaded with horses that were swum out to the ship’s side and then hoisted aboard in great leather slings. The horses rose dripping, legs dangling limp and eyes rolling white with fear, then were slowly lowered into padded stalls in the Lady of Falmouth’s hold. Hook saw his black gelding, Raker, lifted dripping from the sea, then Melisande’s small piebald mare, Dell. Men swam among the horses, deftly fixing the slings. Sir John’s great destrier, a black stallion called Lucifer, glared about him as he was lifted from the sea.

Next day Sir John Cornewaille arrived from London with the king. The French, it seemed, had sent a last embassy, but their terms had been rejected and so the fleet would sail. Sir John was rowed to the Heron in a small boat and he bellowed orders and greetings as he clambered over the side. A moment later trumpets sounded from the Trinity Royal as a barge, painted blue and gold, and with white-shafted oars, carried the king to the great ship’s side. Henry was in full plate armor, burnished and polished and scoured until it reflected the sun in white flashes of dazzling light, yet he climbed the ladder as nimbly as a ship’s cabin boy as the trumpeters in the stern castle raised their instruments and blew another fanfare. Cheers sounded from the Trinity Royal, then other ships took up the acclaim, which spread through the fleet of fifteen hundred vessels.

That afternoon, as the wind blew steady from the west, a pair of swans flew through the fleet, their wingbeats loud in the warm air. The swans flew south and Sir John, seeing them, thumped the ship’s rail and gave a cheer.

“The swan,” Father Christopher announced to the bemused archers, “is our king’s private badge! The swans are leading us to victory!”

And the king must have seen the omen for himself, because, just after the swans had beaten their way past his ship, the sail of the Trinity Royal was hauled up the mast. The sail was painted with the royal arms; red, gold, and blue. It reached halfway and the wind billowed it from its long yard, and the sound of its thrashing reached the Heron before, suddenly, it dropped again. It was the signal to leave and, one by one the ships hauled their anchors and set their sails. The wind was fair for France.

A wind to carry England to war.

No one knew where in France they were going to war. Some men suggested the fleet would go south to Aquitaine, others thought it would be Calais, and most had no idea at all. A few did not care, but just leaned over the side and retched.

The fleet sailed for two days and two nights beneath skies of small white clouds that scurried eastward and beneath stars as bright as jewels. Father Christopher told stories on board the Heron and Hook was enthralled by the tale of Jonah and the whale, and he searched the sun-glinting sea for a sight of another such monster, but he saw none. He saw only the endless ships scattered across the heaving waters like a flock released to summer pastures.

On the second dawn Hook was standing as far forward as the ship’s cramped bows permitted and he was watching the sea, hoping to find a man-swallowing fish, when Sir John silently joined him. Hook hastily knuckled his forehead and Sir John nodded companionably. Melisande was sleeping on deck, sheltered by stacks of barrels and wrapped in Hook’s cloak, and Sir John smiled toward her. “A good girl, Hook,” he said.

“Yes, Sir John.”

“And doubtless we’ll bring a score of other good French girls home! New wives. See those clouds?” Sir John was staring straight ahead to where a cloud bank lay across the horizon. “That’s Normandy, Hook.”

Hook gazed, but could see nothing beneath the clouds except the foremost ships of the fleet. “Sir John?” he asked tentatively and received an encouraging look. “What do you know about,” he paused, “the Seigneur d’Enfer,” he struggled with the French words.

“Lanferelle? Melisande’s father?” Sir John asked.

“She told you about him?” Hook asked, surprised.

“Oh, she did,” Sir John said, smiling, “indeed she did. Why do you want to know?”

“I’m curious,” Hook said.

“Worried because she’s a lord’s daughter?” Sir John asked shrewdly.

“Yes,” Hook admitted.

Sir John smiled, then pointed over the Heron’s bows. “See those small sails?” Far ahead of the English fleet was another spread of ships, far fewer and all much smaller, nothing but a scatter of tiny brown sails. “French fishermen,” Sir John said grimly, “taking news of us to their home ports. Let’s pray the bastards won’t guess where we’re coming ashore, because that’s their chance to kill us, Hook! As we go ashore. They know we’re coming! And all they need do is have two hundred men-at-arms waiting on the beach and we’ll never manage a landing.”

Hook watched the tiny sails that did not appear to be moving against the sea’s immensity. The western sky was still dark, the east was glowing. He wondered how the sailors of the English fleet knew where they were going. He wondered whether Saint Crispinian would ever speak to him again.

“There,” Sir John said softly. It seemed he had decided to ignore Hook’s question about the Sire of Lanferelle and was instead pointing straight ahead.

And there it was. The coast of Normandy. It was nothing but a shadowed speck for now, a scrap of dark solidity where the clouds and the sea met.

“I talked to Lord Slayton,” Sir John said. Hook stayed silent. “He can’t travel to France, of course, not crippled as he is, but he was in London to wish the king well. He says you’re a good man in a fight.”

Hook said nothing. The only fights that Lord Slayton would have known about were tavern brawls. They could be murderous, but it was not the same as battle.

“Lord Slayton was a good fighter too,” Sir John said, “before he got wounded in the back. He was a bit slow on the down-stroke parry, I remember. It’s always dangerous to raise a sword above your shoulder, Hook.”

“Yes, Sir John,” Hook said dutifully.

“And he did declare you outlawed,” Sir John went on, “but that doesn’t matter now. You’re going to France, Hook, and you’re no outlaw there. Whatever crimes you’re accused of in England don’t count in France, and even that doesn’t matter because you’re my man now.”

“Yes, Sir John,” Hook said again.

“You’re my man,” Sir John said firmly, “and Lord Slayton agreed that you are. But you’ve still got a quarrel. That priest wants you dead, and Lord Slayton said there were others who’d happily fillet you.”

Hook thought of the Perrill brothers. “There are,” he admitted.

“And Lord Slayton told me other things about you,” Sir John went on. “He said you’re a murderer, a thief, and a liar.”

Hook felt the old flare of anger, but it died instantly like the spume of the waves. “I was those things,” he said defensively.

“And that you’re competent,” Sir John said, “and what you are, Hook, is what le Seigneur d’Enfer is. Ghillebert, Lord of Lanferelle, is competent. He’s a rogue, and he’s also charming, clever and sly. He speaks English!” He said the last three words as though that were a very strange accomplishment. “He was taken prisoner in Aquitaine,” he explained, “and held in Suffolk till his ransom was paid. That took three years. He was released ten years ago and I dare say there are plenty of small children with his long nose growing up in Suffolk. He’s the only man I never beat in a tournament.”

“They say you never lost!” Hook said fiercely.

“He didn’t beat me either,” Sir John said, smiling. “We fought till we had no strength to fight more. I told you, he’s good. I did put him down, though.”

“You did?” Hook asked, intrigued.

“I think he slipped. So I stepped back and gave him time to get up.”

“Why?” Hook asked.

Sir John laughed. “In a tournament, Hook, you must display chivalry. Good manners are as important as fighting in a tournament, but not in battle. So if you see Lanferelle in battle, leave him to me.”

“Or to an arrow,” Hook said.

“He can afford the best armor, Hook. He’ll have Milanese plate and your arrow will like as not get blunted. Then he’ll kill you without even knowing he fought you. Leave him to me.”

Hook heard something close to admiration in Sir John’s tone. “You like him?”

Sir John nodded. “I like him, but that won’t stop me killing him. And as for him being Melisande’s father, so what? He must have littered half France with his bastards. My bastards aren’t lords, Hook, and nor are his.”

Hook nodded, frowning. “At Soissons,” he began, and paused.

“Go on.”

“He just watched as archers were tortured!” Hook said indignantly.

Sir John leaned on the rail. “We talk about chivalry, Hook, we’re even chivalrous! We salute our enemies, we take their surrenders gallantly, we dress our hostility in silks and fine linen, we are the chivalry of Christendom.” He spoke wryly, then turned his extraordinarily bright blue eyes on Hook. “But in battle, Hook, it’s blood and anger and savagery and killing. God hides His face in battle.”

“This was after the battle,” Hook said.

“Battle anger is like being drunk. It doesn’t go away quickly. Your girl’s father is an enemy, an enemy of charm, but he’s as dangerous as I am.” Sir John grinned and lightly punched Hook’s shoulder. “Leave him to me, Hook. I’ll kill him. I’ll hang his skull in my hall.”

The sun rose in splendor and the shadows fled and the coast of Normandy grew to reveal a line of white cliffs topped with green. All day the fleet beat southward, helped by a shift of wind that flicked the tops of the waves white and filled the sails. Sir John was impatient. He spent the day staring at the distant coast and insisting that the shipmaster get closer.

“Rocks, my lord,” the shipmaster said laconically.

“No rocks here! Get closer! Get closer!” He was looking for some evidence that the enemy was tracking the fleet from the clifftops, but there was no sign of horsemen riding south to keep pace with the fleet’s slow progress. Fishing boats still scattered ahead of the English ships that, one by one, rounded a vast headland of white chalk and entered a bay where they turned into the wind and anchored.

The bay was wide and not well sheltered. The big waves heaved from the west to roll the Heron and make her snub at her anchor. The shore was close here, scarce two bowshots distant, but there was little to be seen other than a beach where the waves broke white, a stretch of marsh and a steep thick-wooded hill behind. Someone said they were in the mouth of the Seine, a river that ran deep into France, but Hook could see no sign of any river. Far off to the south was another shore, too distant to be seen clearly. More ships, the laggards, rounded the great headland and gradually the bay became thick with the anchored vessels.

“Normandie,” Melisande said, staring at the land.

“France,” Hook said.

“Normandie,” Melisande insisted, as though the distinction were important.

Hook was watching the trees, wondering when a French force would appear there. It seemed clear that the English army was going to land in this bay, which was little more than a shingled cove, so why were the French not trying to stop the invasion on the beach? Yet no men or horses showed at the treeline. A hawk spiraled up the face of the hill and gulls wheeled over the breaking waves. Hook saw Sir John being rowed in a small boat to the Trinity Royal where sailors were busy decorating the rails with the white shields painted with the cross of Saint George. Other boats were converging on the king’s ship, carrying the great lords to a council of war.

“What will happen to us?” Melisande asked.

“I don’t know,” Hook admitted, but nor did he care much. He was going to war in a company he had come to love, and he had Melisande, whom he loved, though he wondered if she would leave him now she was back in her own country. “You’re going home,” he said, wanting her to deny it.

For a long time she said nothing, just gazed at the trees and beach and marsh. “Maman was home,” she said finally. “I do not know where home is now.”

“With me,” Hook said awkwardly.

“Home is where you feel safe,” Melisande said. Her eyes were gray as the heron that glided above the shingle to land in the low ground beyond. Pages were kneeling on the Heron’s deck where they scoured the men-at-arms’ plate armor. Each piece was scrubbed with sand and vinegar to burnish the steel to a rustless shine, then wiped with lanolin. Peter Goddington ordered a pot of beeswax opened and the archers smeared woolen cloths with the wax and rubbed it into their bowstaves.

“Was your mother cruel to you?” Hook asked Melisande as he waxed the huge bow.

“Cruel?” she seemed puzzled. “Why would she be cruel?”

“Some mothers are,” Hook said, thinking of his grandmother.

“She was lovely,” Melisande said.

“My father was cruel,” he said.

“Then you must not be,” Melisande said. She frowned, evidently thinking.

“What?”

She shrugged. “When I went to the nunnery? Before?” She stopped.

“Go on,” Hook said.

“My father? He called me to him. I was thirteen? Perhaps fourteen?” She had lowered her voice. “He made me take off all my clothes,” she stared at Hook as she spoke, “and I stood there for him, nue. He walked around me and he said no man could have me.” She paused. “I thought he was going to…”

“But he didn’t?”

“No,” she said quickly. “He stroked my épaule,” she hesitated, finding the English word, “shoulder. He was, how do you say? Frissonnant?” she held out her hands and shook them.

“Shivering?” Hook suggested.

She nodded abruptly. “Then he sent me away to the nuns. I begged him not to. I said I hated the sisters, but he said I must pray for him. That was my duty, to work hard and to pray for him.”

“And did you?”

“Every day,” she said, “and I prayed he would come for me, but he never did.”

The sun was sinking when Sir John returned to the Heron. There was still no sign of any French soldiers on the shore, but the trees beyond the beach could have hidden an army. Smoke rose from the hill to the east of the cove, evidence that someone was on that height, but who or how many was impossible to say. Sir John clambered aboard and walked around the deck, sometimes thrusting a finger at a man-at-arms or archer. He pointed at Hook. “You,” he said, then walked on. “Everyone I pointed to,” he turned and shouted, “will be going ashore with me. We go tonight! After dark. The rest of you? Be ready at dawn. If we’re still alive you’ll join us. And those of you going ashore? Armor! Weapons! We’re not going to dance with the bastards! We’re going to kill them!”

That night there was a three-quarters moon silvering the sea. The shadows on land were black and stark as Hook dressed for war. He had his long boots, leather breeches, a leather jerkin, a mail coat, and a helmet. He wore his archer’s horn bracer on his left forearm, not so much to protect his arm against the string’s lash because the mail would do that, but rather to stop the string fraying on the armor’s links. He had a short sword hanging from his belt, a poleax slung on his back, and a linen arrow bag at his right side with the feathers of twenty-four arrows poking from the opening. Five men-at-arms and twelve archers were going ashore with Sir John and they all climbed down into an open boat that sailors rowed toward the surf. Other boats from other ships were also heading for the shore. No one spoke, though now and then a voice called soft from an anchored ship, wishing them luck. If the French were in the trees, Hook thought, then they would see the boats coming. Maybe even now the French were drawing swords and winding the thick strings of their steel-shafted crossbows.

The boat began to heave in short sharp lurches as the waves steepened near the shore. The sound of the surf became louder and more ominous. The sailors were digging their blades deep in the water, trying to outrace the curling, breaking waves, but suddenly the boat seemed to surge ahead and the sea was moonlit white, shattered and violent all about them, and then the boat dropped like a stone and there was a scraping sound as its keel dragged on the shingle. The boat slewed around and the water seethed about the hull before being sucked back to sea. “Out!” Sir John hissed, “out!”

Other boats slammed into the beach and men leaped out and trudged up the shingle bank with drawn swords. They gathered above the thick line of weed and driftwood that marked the high tide line. Huge boulders littered the beach, their moon-shadowed sides black. Hook had expected Sir John to be in charge of this first landing, but instead it was a much younger man who waited till all the boats had discharged their passengers. The sailors shoved their launches off the beach and held them just beyond the breaking waves. If the French were waiting and awake then the boats could come to pick up the landing party, but Hook doubted many would escape. There would be blood in the sucking shingle instead. “We stay together,” the young man said in a low voice, “archers to the right!”

“You heard Sir John!” Sir John Cornewaille hissed. The young man was Sir John Holland, nephew to the king and Sir John Cornewaille’s stepson. “Goddington?”

“Sir John?”

“Take your archers far enough out to give us flanking cover!”

It seemed the older Sir John was really in charge, merely yielding the appearance of command to his stepson. “Forward!” the younger Sir John called, and the line of men, forty men-at-arms on the left and forty archers on the right, advanced farther up the beach.

To find defenses.

At first Hook thought he was approaching a great ridge of earth at the top of the shingle, but as he drew closer he saw that the ridge was man-made and had a ditch in front of it. It was a bank thrown up to serve as a rampart, and not only was it ditched, but there were bastions jutting out onto the shingle from which crossbowmen could shoot into the flanks of any attacker advancing up the beach. The ramparts, which had hardly been eroded by wind or rain, stretched the width of the cove and Hook imagined how hard it would be to fight up their front with men-at-arms hacking down from the summit and crossbow bolts slashing from the sides, but all he could do was imagine, because the rampart, that must have taken days to make, was entirely deserted.

“Been busy little farts, haven’t they?” Sir John Cornewaille remarked caustically. He kicked the rampart’s summit. “What’s the point of making defenses and then abandoning them?”

“They knew we’d land here?” Sir John Holland suggested cautiously.

“Then why aren’t they here to greet us?” Sir John asked. “They probably built ramparts like these on every beach in Normandy! Bastards are pissing in their breeches and digging walls. Archers! You can all whistle, can’t you?”

The archers said nothing. Most were too surprised by the question to make any response.

“You can all whistle?” Sir John asked again. “Good! And you all know the tune of ‘Robin Hood’s Lament’?”

Every archer knew that tune. It would have been astonishing had they not, for Robin Hood was the archers’ hero, the bowman who had stood up against the lords and princes and sheriffs of England. “Right!” Sir John announced. “We’re going up the hill! Men-at-arms on the track and archers into the woods! Explore to the top of the hill! If you hear or see someone then come and find me! But whistle ‘Robin Hood’s Lament’ so I know it’s an Englishman coming and not some prick-sucking Frenchman! Let’s go!”

Before they could climb the hill they needed to cross a sullen stretch of moon-glossed marsh that lay behind the beach’s thick bank of earth and shingle. There was a path of sorts that doglegged its way over the swampy ground, but Sir John Cornewaille insisted the archers spread either side of the track so that, if an ambush was sprung, they could shoot their arrows in from the flanks. Peter Goddington cursed as he waded between the tussocks. “He’ll have us killed,” he grumbled as newly woken birds screeched up from the marsh, their sudden wingbeats loud in the night. The surf fell and sucked on the beach.

The marsh was a bowshot wide, a little more than two hundred paces. Hook could shoot further, but so could every crossbowman in France and, as he splashed toward the dark woods that grew almost to the marsh’s edge, he watched the black shadows in fear of a sudden noise that would betray the release of a bolt. The French had known the English were coming. They would have had spies counting the shipping in Southampton Water and the fishermen would have brought news that the great fleet was off the coast. And the French had taken the trouble to defend even this small cove with an elaborate earthwork, so why were they not manning it? Because, Hook thought, they were waiting in the woods. Because they wanted to kill this advance party as it crossed the marsh.

“Hook! Tom and Matt! Dale! Go right!” Goddington waved the four men toward the eastern side of the marsh. “Head on up the hill!”

Hook splashed off to his right, followed by the twins and by William of the Dale. Behind them the men-at-arms were grouped on the track. Every man, whether lord or archer, was wearing the badge of Saint George on his surcoat. The legs of the men-at-arms were cased in plate armor that reflected the moon white and bright, while their drawn swords looked like streaks of purest silver. No crossbow bolts flew from the woods. If the French were waiting then they must be higher up the slope.

Hook climbed a short bank of crumbling earth at the marsh’s northern edge. He turned to see the fleet on the moon-glittered sea, its few lanterns dull red and its masts a forest. The stars were brilliant. He turned back to the wood’s edge that was black as the pit. “Bows are no good in the trees,” he told his companions. He unstrung the stave and slipped it into the horsehide case that had been folded and tucked in his belt. Leave a bow strung too long and it followed the cord to become permanently curved and so lost its power. It was better to store the stave straight and so he slung the case’s leather loop over his shoulder and drew his short sword. His three companions did the same and then followed Hook into the trees.

No Frenchman waited. No sudden sword blow greeted Hook, no crossbow bolt whipped from the dark. There was nothing but the sound of the sea and the blackness under the leaves and the small sounds of a wood at night.

Hook was at home in the trees, even among these foreign trees. Thomas and Matthew Scarlet were fuller’s sons, reared to a mill where great water-driven beams thumped clay into cloth to release the wool’s grease. William of the Dale was a carpenter, but Hook was a forester and a huntsman and he instinctively took the lead. He could hear men off to his left and, not wanting them to mistake him for a Frenchman, headed further to his right. He could smell a boar, and remembered a winter dawn when he had put five man-killing arrows into a great tusked male that had still charged him, arrows clattering in its side, anger fierce in its small eyes, and Hook had only escaped by scrambling up an oak. The boar had died eventually, its hooves stirring the blood-soaked leaf mold as its life drained away.

“Where are we going?” Thomas Scarlet asked.

“Top of the hill,” Hook answered curtly.

“What do we do there?”

“We wait,” Hook said. He did not know the answer. He could smell woodsmoke now, the pungent scent betraying that folk were nearby. He wondered if there was a charcoal-making camp in the woods because that would explain the smell, or perhaps the unseen fire warmed crossbowmen who waited for their targets to appear on the hilltop.

“We’re going to kill the turd-sucking bastards,” William of the Dale said in his uncanny imitation of Sir John. Matt Scarlet laughed.

“Quiet,” Hook said sharply, “and go faster!” If crossbowmen were waiting then it was better to move quickly rather than present an easy target, but his instincts were telling him that there was no enemy in these trees. The wood felt deserted. When he had hunted deer-poachers on Lord Slayton’s land he had always felt their presence, a knowledge that came from beyond sight, smell, or hearing; an instinct. Hook reckoned these woods were empty, yet there was still that smell of woodsmoke. Instinct could be wrong.

The slope flattened and the trees became sparser. Hook was still leading his companions to the east, anxious to stay well away from a nervous English archer. Then, suddenly, he had reached the summit and the trees ended to reveal a sunken road running along the ridge. “Bows,” he told his companions, though he did not unsheathe his own stave. He had heard something off to his left, some noise that could not have been made by any of Sir John’s men. It was the thump of a hoof.

The four archers crouched in the trees above the road. The hoofbeats sounded louder, but nothing could be seen. It was one horse, Hook thought, judging from the sound, and then, suddenly, the horse and its rider were visible, riding eastward. The rider was swathed in darkness as if he wore a cloak, but Hook could see no weapons. “Don’t shoot,” he told his companions, “he’s mine.”

Hook waited till the horseman was nearly opposite his hiding place, then leaped down the bank and snatched at the bridle. The horse slewed and reared. Hook reached up with his free hand, grasped a handful of the rider’s cloak and hauled downward. The horse whinnied, but obeyed Hook’s touch, while the rider gasped as he thumped hard onto the road. The man tried to scramble away, but Hook kicked him hard in the belly, and then Thomas, Matthew, and William were at his side, hauling the prisoner to his feet.

“He’s a monk!” William of the Dale said.

“He was riding to fetch help,” Hook said. That was a guess, but hardly a difficult surmise.

The monk began to protest, speaking too quickly for Hook to understand any of his words. He spoke loudly too. “Shut your face,” Hook said, and the monk, as if in response, began to shout his protests, so Hook hit him once and the monk’s head snapped back and blood sprang from his nose, and he went instantly quiet. He was a young man who now looked very scared.

“I told you to shut your face,” Hook said. “You three, whistle! Whistle loud!”

William, Matthew, and Thomas whistled “Robin Hood’s Lament” as Hook led the prisoner and horse back along the road that lay sunken between two tree-shrouded banks. The track curved to the left to reveal a great stone building with a tower. It looked like a church. “Une église?” he asked the monk.

“Un monastère,” the monk said sullenly.

“Keep whistling,” Hook said.

“What did he say?” Tom Scarlet asked.

“He said it’s a monastery. Now whistle!”

Smoke came from a chimney of the monastery, explaining the smell that had haunted Hook as they climbed the hill. No one else from the landing party was in sight yet, but as Hook led his small party toward the building a gate opened and a wash of lantern light revealed a group of monks standing in the gateway. “Arrows on strings,” Hook said, “and keep goddam whistling, for God’s sake.”

A tall, thin, gray-haired man, robed in black, advanced down the track. “Je suis le prieur,” he announced himself.

“What did he say?” Tom Scarlet asked.

“He says he’s the prior,” Hook said, “just keep whistling.”

The prior reached out a hand as if to take the bloodied monk, but Hook turned on him and the tall man stepped hastily back. The other monks began to protest, but then more archers came from the woods and Sir John Holland and his stepfather appeared around the priory’s edge with the men-at-arms.

“Well done, Hook!” Sir John Cornewaille shouted, “got yourself a horse!”

“And a monk, Sir John,” Hook said. “He was riding for help, leastways I think he was.”

Sir John strode to Hook’s side. The prior made the sign of the cross as the men-at-arms filled the road in front of the monastery, then stepped toward Sir John and made a voluble complaint that involved frequent gestures at Hook and at the bleeding monk. Sir John tipped up the wounded man’s face to inspect the broken nose by moonlight. “They must have sent a warning of our arrival yesterday,” he said, “so this man was plainly sent to tell someone we were landing. Did you hit him, Hook?”

“Hit him, Sir John?” Hook asked, playing dumb while he thought what answer would serve him best.

“The prior says you hit him,” Sir John said accusingly.

Hook’s instinct was to lie, just as he had always lied when faced with such accusations, but he did not want to sour his service to Sir John with untruths so he nodded. “I did, Sir John,” he said.

Sir John’s face showed a hint of a smile. “That’s a pity, Hook. Our king has said he’ll hang any man who hurts a priest, a nun, or a monk. He’s very pious is our Henry, so I want you to think very carefully about your answer. Did you hit him, Hook?”

“Oh no, Sir John,” Hook said. “I wouldn’t dream of doing that.”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Sir John said, “he just tumbled out of his saddle, didn’t he? And he fell right onto his nose.” He blandly offered that explanation to the prior before pushing the bloody-nosed monk toward his brethren. “Archers,” Sir John said, turning to his men, “I want you all on the skyline, there,” he pointed eastward, “and stay on the road. I’ll take the horse, Hook.”

The archers waited on the road, which fell away in front of them before rising to another tree-covered crest. The stars were fading as the dawn smeared the east. Peter Goddington gave permission for some men to sleep as others kept watch and Hook made a bed on a mossy bank and must have slept an hour before more hoofbeats woke him. It was full light now and the sun was streaming through green leaves. A dozen horsemen were on the road, one of them Sir John Cornewaille. The horses were shivering and skittish and Hook guessed they had just been swum ashore and were still uncertain of their footing. “On to the next ridge!” Sir John shouted at the archers and Hook hastily picked up his arrow bag and cased bow. He followed the archers eastward, and the men-at-arms, in no apparent hurry, walked their horses behind.

The view from the farther ridge was astonishing. To Hook’s right the sea narrowed toward the Seine’s mouth. The river’s southern bank was all low wooded hills. To the north were more hills, but in front of Hook, glinting under the morning sun, the road fell away through woods and fields to a town and its harbor. The harbor was small, crammed with ships, and protected by the town walls that were built clear around the port, leaving only a narrow entrance leading to a slender channel that twisted to the sea. Behind the port was the town itself, all roofs and churches ringed by a great stone wall that was obscured in places by houses that had been built outside its perimeter. The houses, which spread out on all sides of the town, could not hide the great towers that studded the wall. Hook counted the towers. Twenty-four. Banners hung from the towers and from the walls in between. The archers were much too far away to see the flags, but the message of the banners was obvious: the town knew the English had landed and was proclaiming its defiance.

“Harfleur,” Sir John Cornewaille announced to the archers. “A nest of goddamned pirates! They’re villains who live there, boys! They raid our shipping, raid our coast, and we’re going to scour them out of that town like rats out of a granary!”

Hook could see more now. He could see a river looping through fields to Harfleur’s north. The river evidently ran clear through the town, entering under a great arch and flowing through the houses to empty itself in the walled harbor. But the citizens of Harfleur, warned the previous day of the coming of the English, must have dammed the archway so that the river was now flooding to spread a great lake about the town’s northern and western sides. Harfleur, under that morning sun, looked like a walled island.

A crossbow bolt seared overhead. Hook had seen the flicker of its first appearance, down and to his left, meaning that whoever had shot the bolt was in the woods north of the road. The bolt landed somewhere in the trees behind.

“Someone doesn’t like us,” one of the mounted men-at-arms said lightly.

“Anyone see where it came from?” another rider demanded sharply.

Hook and a half-dozen other archers all pointed to the same patch of dense trees and undergrowth. The road dropped in front of them, then ran level for a hundred paces to the lip of a shelf before falling again toward the flood-besieged town, and the crossbowman was somewhere on that wide wooded ledge.

“I don’t suppose he’ll go away,” Sir John Cornewaille remarked mildly.

“There may be more than one?” someone else suggested.

“Just one, I think,” Sir John said. “Hook? You want to fetch the wretched man for me?”

Hook ran to his left, plunged into the trees, then turned down the short slope. He reached the wide ledge and there went more slowly, picking his way carefully to keep from making a noise. He had strung his bow. In thick trees the bow was a dubious weapon, but he did not want to encounter a crossbowman without having an arrow on the string.

The wood was oak, ash, and a few maples. The undergrowth was hawthorn and holly, and there was mistletoe growing high in the oaks, something Hook noted for he rarely saw it sprouting from oak in England. His grandmother had valued oak mistletoe, using it in a score of medicines she had made for the villagers, and even for Lord Slayton when the ague struck him. Her chief use for the mistletoe had been the treatment of barren women for which she had pounded the small berries with mangrove root, the whole moistened with the urine of a mother. There had been a fecund woman in the village, Mary Carter, who had given birth to fifteen healthy children, and Hook had often been sent with a pot to request her urine, and once he had been beaten by his grandmother for coming back with the pot empty because she had refused to believe that Mary Carter was away from home. The next time Hook had pissed in the pot himself and his grandmother had never noticed the difference.

He was thinking about that, and wondering whether Melisande would become pregnant, when he heard the fierce, quick sound of a crossbow being shot. The noise was close. He crouched, crept forward, and suddenly saw the shooter. It was a boy, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, who was grunting slightly as he worked the crank to span his weapon. The head of the bow had a stirrup in which the boy had placed his foot, and at its butt was the socket where he had fitted the two handles that turned to wind back the cord. It was hard work and the boy was grimacing with the effort of inching the thick cord up the weapon’s stock. He was concentrating so hard that he did not notice Hook until the archer picked him up by the scruff of his coat. The boy beat at Hook, then yelped as he was slapped around the head.

“You’re a rich one, aren’t you?” Hook said. The boy’s coat, which Hook was holding by the collar, was of finely woven woolen cloth. His breeches and shoes were expensive, and his crossbow, which Hook scooped up with his right hand, looked as though it had been made specially for the boy because it was much smaller than a man’s bow. The stock was walnut and beautifully inlaid with silver and ivory chasings that depicted a deer hunt in a forest. “They’ll probably hang you, boy,” Hook said cheerfully, and walked out to the road with the boy tucked under his left arm and his own bow and the valuable crossbow held in his right. He climbed back up the hill to where grinning archers lined the ridge and mounted men-at-arms blocked the road. “Here’s the enemy, Sir John!” Hook said cheerfully, dropping the boy beside Sir John’s horse.

“A brave enemy,” a horseman said admiringly and Hook looked up to see the king. Henry was in plate armor and wore a surcoat showing his royal arms. He wore a helmet ringed with a golden crown, though his visor was lifted to reveal his long-nosed face with its deep dark pit of a scar. Hook dropped to his knees and dragged the boy down with him.

“Votre nom?” the king demanded of the boy, who did not answer, but just glared up at Henry. Hook cuffed him around the head again.

“Philippe,” the boy said sullenly.

“Philippe?” Henry asked, “just Philippe?”

“Philippe de Rouelles,” the boy answered, defiant now.

“It seems that Master Philippe is the only man in France who dares face us!” the king said loudly enough for everyone on the hilltop to hear. “He shoots two crossbow bolts at us! You try to kill your own king, boy,” Henry went on, speaking French again, “and I am king here. I am King of Normandy, King of Aquitaine, King of Picardy, and King of France. I am your king.” He swung his leg over the saddle and dropped to the grass. A squire spurred forward to take the reins of the king’s horse as Henry took two steps to stand above Philippe de Rouelles. “You tried to kill your king,” he said, and drew his sword. The blade made a hissing noise as it scraped through the scabbard’s throat. “What do you do with a boy who tries to kill a king?” Henry demanded loudly.

“You kill him, sire,” a horseman growled.

The king’s blade rose. Philippe was shaking and his eyes were tear-bright, but his face was still stubbornly defiant. Then he flinched as the blade flashed down.

It stopped an inch above his shoulder. Henry smiled. He tapped the blade once, then tapped it again on the boy’s other shoulder. “You’re a brave subject,” he said lightly. “Rise, Sir Philippe.” The horsemen laughed as Hook hauled the wide-eyed boy to his feet.

Henry was wearing a golden chain about his neck from which hung a thick ivory pendant decorated with an antelope made of jet. The antelope was another of his personal badges, though Hook, seeing the badge, neither knew what the beast was nor that it was the king’s private insignia. Henry now lifted the chain from his neck and draped it over Philippe’s head. “A keepsake of a day on which you should have died, boy,” Henry said. Philippe said nothing, but just looked from the rich gift to the man who had given it to him. “Your father is the Sire of Rouelles?” the king asked.

“Yes, lord,” Philippe said in a voice scarce more than a whisper.

“Then tell your father his rightful king has come and that his king is merciful. Now go, Sir Philippe.” Henry dropped his sword back into its black scabbard. The boy glanced at the crossbow in Hook’s hand. “No, no,” the king said, “we keep your bow. Your punishment will be whatever your father deems appropriate for its loss. Let him go,” the king ordered Hook. He appeared not to recognize the archer with whom he had spoken in the Tower.

Henry watched the boy run down the slope, then climbed back into his saddle. “The French send a lad to do their work,” he said sourly.

“And when he grows, sire,” Sir John said equally sourly, “we’ll have to kill him.”

“He is our subject,” the king said loudly, “and this is our land! These people are ours!” He stared at Harfleur for a long time. The town might be his by right, but the folk inside had a different opinion. Their gates were shut, their walls were hung with defiant banners, and their valley was flooded. Harfleur, it seemed, was determined to fight.

“Let’s get the army ashore,” Henry said.

And the fight for France had begun.

The army began to come ashore on Thursday, August fifteenth, the feast of Saint Alipius, and it took till Saturday, the feast of Saint Agapetus, until the last man, horse, gun, and cargo had been brought to the boulder-strewn beach. The horses staggered when they were swum ashore. They whinnied and cavorted, eyes white, until grooms calmed them. Archers cut a wider road up from the beach to the monastery where the king had his quarters. Henry spent hours on the beach, encouraging and chivvying the work, or else he rode to the crest where Philippe de Rouelles had tried to kill him and from there he stared eastward at Harfleur. Sir John Cornewaille’s men guarded the ridge, but no French came to drive the English back into the sea. A few horsemen rode from the town, but they stayed well out of bowshot, content to gaze at the enemy on the skyline.

The flood waters spread about Harfleur. Some of the houses built outside the walls were flooded so that only their rooftops showed above the water, but two wide stretches of dry ground remained in the base of the bowl where the town sat. The nearer stretch led to one of Harfleur’s three gates and, from his aerie high on the hill, Hook could see the enemy making the finishing touches to a huge bastion that protected that gate. The bastion was like a small castle blocking the road, so that any attack on the gate would first have to take that new and massive fortification.

On the Friday afternoon, the feast of Saint Hyacinth, Hook and a dozen men were sent to retrieve Sir John’s last horses, which were swum ashore from the Lady of Falmouth. The animals floundered on the shingle and the archers ran ropes through their bridles to keep them together. Melisande had come with Hook and she stroked the nose of Dell, her small piebald mare that had been a gift from Sir John’s wife. She murmured soothing words to the mare. “That horse don’t speak French, Melisande!” Matthew Scarlet said, “she’s an English mare!”

“She’s learning French,” Melisande said.

“Language of the devil,” William of the Dale said in his imitation of Sir John, and the other archers laughed. Matthew Scarlet, one of the twins, was leading Lucifer, Sir John’s big battle-charger, who now lunged away from him. One of Sir John’s grooms ran to help. Hook had a leading rein with eight horses attached and he pulled them toward Melisande, intending to add Dell to his string. He called her name, but Melisande was staring up the beach, frowning, and Hook looked to see where she was gazing.

A group of men-at-arms was kneeling on the stones as a priest prayed and for a moment he thought that was what had caught her eye, then he saw a second priest just beyond one of the great boulders. It was Sir Martin, and with him were the Perrill brothers, and the three men were looking at Melisande, and Hook had the impression, no more, that they had made obscene gestures. “Melisande,” he said, and she turned to him.

Sir Martin grinned. He was gazing at Hook now and he slowly lifted his right hand and folded back his fingers so that only the longest finger protruded, and then, still slowly, he slipped his left fist over that one finger and, holding his hands together, made the sign of the cross toward Hook and Melisande. “Bastard,” Hook said softly.

“Who is it?” Melisande asked.

“They’re enemies,” Hook said. The Perrill brothers were laughing.

Tom and Matthew Scarlet came to stand with Hook. “You know them?” Tom Scarlet asked.

“I know them.”

Sir Martin again made the sign of the cross before turning away in response to a shout. “He’s a priest?” Tom Scarlet asked in a tone of disbelief.

“A priest,” Hook said, “a rapist and gentry born. But he was bitten by the devil’s dog and he’s dangerous.”

“And you know him?”

“I know him,” Hook said, then turned on the twins. “You all look after Melisande,” he said fiercely.

“We do,” Matthew Scarlet said, “you know that.”

“What did he want?” Melisande asked.

“You,” Hook said, and that night he gave her the small crossbow and its bag of bolts. “Practice with it,” he said.

Next day, on the feast of Saint Agapetus, the eight great guns were hauled up from the beach. One gun, which was named the King’s Daughter, needed two wagons for its massive hooped barrel which was longer than three bowstaves and had a gaping mouth large enough to take a barrel of ale. The other cannon were smaller, but all needed teams of over twenty horses to drag them to the hilltop.

Patrols rode north, bringing back supplies and commandeering farm wagons that would carry the provisions and tents and arrows and newly felled oaks, which would be trimmed and shaped to make the catapults that would add their missiles to the shaped gun-stones that all had to be carried up the hill by yet more wagons. But, at last, the whole army and all its horses and all its supplies was ashore, and under a bright afternoon sun the cumbersome wagons were lined on the road beside the monastery and the army of England, banners flying, assembled around them. There were nine thousand archers and three thousand men-at-arms, all of them mounted, and there were pages and squires and women and servants and priests and yet more spare horses, and the flags snapped bright in the midday wind as the king, mounted on a snow-white gelding, rode along his red-crossed army. The sun glinted from the crown that surmounted his helmet. He reached the skyline above the town and he stared for a few minutes, then nodded to Sir John Holland who would have the honor of leading the vanguard. “With God’s blessing, Sir John!” the king called, “on to Harfleur!”

Trumpets sounded, drums beat, and the horsemen of England spilled over the edge of the hill. They wore the cross of Saint George and above their helmeted heads their lords’ banners were gold and red and blue and yellow and green and to anyone watching from Harfleur’s walls it must have seemed as though the hills were pouring an armored mass toward their town.

“How many people live in the town?” Melisande asked Hook. She rode beside him, and hanging by her saddle was the ivory and silver inlaid crossbow Hook had given her.

“Sir John reckons they’ve only got about a hundred soldiers in the town,” Hook said.

“Is that all?”

“But they have the townsfolk as well,” Hook said, “and there must be two thousand of them? Maybe three thousand!”

“But all these men!” Melisande said and twisted in her saddle to look at the long lines of horsemen who filled the space on either side of the road. Mounted drummers beat on their instruments, making a noise to warn the citizens of Harfleur that their rightful king was coming in wrath.

Yet Henry of England was not the only person approaching the town. Even as the English spilled down the slope toward the dry ground to Harfleur’s west, another cavalcade was riding from the east. They were a long way off, but clearly visible: a column of men-at-arms and wagons, a long line of reinforcements riding toward the ramparts. “That,” Sir John Cornewaille said, watching the distant men, “is a pity.”

“They’re bringing guns,” Peter Goddington remarked.

“As I said,” Sir John said with surprising mildness, “it is a pity.” He spurred Lucifer to the head of the column and other lords, all wanting the honor of being the first to face the defiant town, raced after him. Hook watched the riders gallop down the hill and onto the flat ground, then saw the great blossom of black smoke billow and grow from Harfleur’s wall. A few seconds later the sound of the gun punched the summer air, a flat crack that seemed to linger in the bowl of the hills in which the port was built. The gun-stone struck the meadows where the horsemen rode, ricocheted upward in a flurry of turf, then plunged harmlessly into the trees beyond.

And Harfleur was under siege.

FIVE

It seemed to Hook that he never stopped digging in the first few days of the siege. It was midden trenches first. “Our ma fell into a shit-pit once,” Tom Scarlet said, “she was drunk. She dropped some beads in it and then tried to fish them out with a rake.”

“They were nice beads,” Matthew Scarlet put in, “bits of old silver, weren’t they?”

“Coins,” his twin said, “which our dad found in a buried jar. He bored them through and hung them on a scrap of bowstring.”

“Which broke,” Matt said.

“So ma tried to fish them out with a rake,” Tom picked up the tale, “and fell right in, head first!”

“She got the beads back,” Matt said.

“She sobered up quick enough,” Tom Scarlet went on, “but she couldn’t stop laughing. Our dad took her down the duck pond and pushed her in. He made her take all her clothes off and then the ducks all flew away. They would, wouldn’t they? A naked woman splashing about and laughing. Whole village was laughing!”

The first thing the king had ordered was the burning of the houses outside the town’s walls so that nothing would stand between the ramparts and his guns. The job was done at night, so that the flames burst into the darkness to light the defiant banners on Harfleur’s pale walls, and all next day the smoke of the smoldering buildings lingered in the flooded bowl of hills that cradled the port and reminded Hook of the smoke that had veiled the land around Soissons.

“Of course the priest wasn’t happy,” Matthew Scarlet continued his brother’s story, “but our parish priest always was a rank piece of piss. He had our mother up in front of the manor court! Breaking the peace, he said, but his lordship gave her three shillings to buy cloth for new clothes and a kiss for being happy. He said she could go swimming in his shit any time she wanted.”

“Did she ever?” Peter Scoyle asked. Scoyle was a rarity, a bowman born and bred in London. He had been a combmaker’s apprentice and had been convicted of causing a murderous affray, but had been pardoned on condition that he served in the king’s army.

“She never did,” Tom Scarlet said, “she always said that one bath in shit was enough for a lifetime.”

“One bath is enough for any lifetime!” Father Christopher had evidently heard the twins telling their tale. “Beware of cleanliness, boys! The blessed Saint Jerome warns us that a clean body means an unclean soul, and the holy Saint Agnes was proud of never having washed in her life.”

“Melisande won’t approve,” Hook said, “she likes being clean.”

“Warn her!” Father Christopher said seriously, “the physicians all agree, Hook, that washing weakens the skin. It lets in disease!”

Then, when the pits were dug, Hook and a hundred other archers rode north up the valley of the River Lézarde and dug again, this time making a great dam across the valley. They demolished a dozen half-timbered houses in a village and used the beams to strengthen the huge earthen bank that stopped up the river. The Lézarde was small and the summer had been dry, but it still took four days of hard digging to make a barrier high enough to divert most of the river water westward. By the time Hook and his companions went back to Harfleur the flood waters had partly subsided, though the ground about the town was still waterlogged and the river itself still spilled over its banks to make a wide lake north of the town.

Next they dug pits for guns. Two cannon, one called Londoner because the citizens of London had paid for it, were already in place and their gun-stones were biting at the huge bastion the defenders had built outside the Leure Gate. The Duke of Clarence, who was the king’s brother, had marched clear around the town and his forces, which were a third of the English army, were attacking Harfleur’s eastern side. They had their own guns that had been fortuitously captured from a supply convoy making for Harfleur. The Dutch gunners, hired to defend Harfleur from its English enemies, happily took English coin and turned their cannon against the town’s defenders. Harfleur was surrounded now. No more reinforcements could reach the town unless they fought their way past the English army or sailed past the fleet of royal warships that guarded the harbor entrance.

On the day that the gun-pits were finished Hook and forty other archers climbed the hill to the west of the encampment, following the road by which the army had approached Harfleur. Huge oaks lined the nearest crest, and they were ordered to fell those trees and lop off the straightest limbs, which were to be sawn to the length of a bowstave and loaded onto wagons. The day was hot. A half-dozen archers stayed by the road with the huge two-handled saws while the rest spread along the crest. Peter Goddington marked the trees he wanted felled, and assigned a pair of archers to each. Hook and Will of the Dale were almost the farthest south, with only the Scarlet twins closer to the sea. Melisande was with Hook. Her hands were raw from washing clothes and there were still more clothes to be boiled and scrubbed back in the encampment, but Sir John’s steward had let her accompany Hook. She carried the small crossbow on her back and never left Sir John’s company without the weapon. “I will shoot that priest if he touches me,” she had told Hook, “and I’ll shoot his friends.” Hook had nodded, but said nothing. She might, he thought, shoot one of them, but the weapon took so long to reload that she had no chance of defending herself against more than one man.

The trees muffled the occasional sound of a cannon firing and dulled the crash of the gun-stones striking home on Harfleur’s walls. The axes were loud. “Why did we come so far from the camp?” Melisande asked.

“Because we’ve chopped down all the big trees that are closer,” Hook said. He was stripped to the waist, his huge muscles driving the ax deep into an oak’s trunk so that the chips flew.

“And we’re not that far away from the camp,” Will of the Dale added. He was standing back, letting Hook do the work and Hook did not mind. He was used to wielding a forester’s ax.

Melisande spanned the crossbow. She found it hard work, but she would not let Hook or Will help her crank the twin handles. She was sweating by the time the pawl clicked to hold the cord under its full tension. She laid a bolt in the groove, then aimed at a tree no more than ten paces away. She frowned, bit her lower lip, then pulled the trigger and watched as the bolt flew a yard wide to skitter through the undergrowth beyond. “Don’t laugh,” she said before either man had any chance to laugh.

“I’m not laughing,” Hook said, grinning at Will.

“I wouldn’t dare,” Will said.

“I will learn,” Melisande said.

“You’ll learn better if you keep your eyes open,” Hook said.

“It’s hard,” she said.

“Look down the arrow,” Will advised her, “hold the bow firm and pull the trigger nice and slowly. And may God bless you when you shoot,” he added the last words in Father Christopher’s sly voice.

She nodded, then cranked the bow again. It took a long time before it clicked, then instead of shooting it she laid the weapon on the leaf mold and just watched Hook and she thought how he made felling a great oak look easy, just as he made shooting a bow seem simple.

“I’ll see if the twins need help,” Will of the Dale said, “because you don’t, Nick.”

“I don’t,” Hook agreed, “so go and help them. They’re fuller’s sons which means they’ve never done a proper day’s work in their lives.”

Will picked up his ax, his arrow bag, and his cased bow and disappeared among the southern trees. Melisande watched him go, then looked down at the cocked crossbow as though she had never seen such a thing before. “Father Christopher was talking to me,” she said quietly.

“Was he?” Hook asked. He looked up at the tree, then back to the cut he had made. “This great thing will fall in a minute,” he warned her. He went to the back side of the trunk and buried the ax in the wood. He wrenched the blade free. “So what did Father Christopher want?”

“He wanted to know if we would marry.”

“Us? Marry?” The ax chopped again and a wedge of wood came away when Hook pulled the blade back. Any moment now, he thought. He could sense the tension in the oak, the silent tearing of the timber that preceded the tree’s death. He stepped away to stand beside Melisande who was well clear of the trunk. He noticed the crossbow was still cocked and almost told her that she would weaken the weapon by leaving the shank stressed, but then decided that might not be a bad thing. A weakened shank would make it easier for her to span. “Marry?” he asked again.

“That’s what he said.”

“What did you say?”

“I didn’t know,” she said, staring at the ground, “maybe?”

“Maybe,” Hook echoed her, and just then the timber cracked and ripped and the huge oak fell, slowly at first, then faster as it crashed through leaves and branches to shudder down. Birds shrieked. For a moment the woods were full of alarm, then all that was left was the ringing sound of the other axes along the ridge. “I think, maybe,” Hook said slowly, “that it’s a good idea.”

“You do?”

He nodded. “I do.”

She looked at him, said nothing for a while, then picked up the crossbow. “I look down the arrow,” she said, “and hold the bow tight?”

“And you squeeze gently,” he said. “Hold your breath while you squeeze, and don’t look at the bolt, just look at the place where you want the bolt to go.”

She nodded, laid a bolt in the groove, and aimed at the same tree she had missed before. It was a couple of paces closer now. Hook watched her, saw the concentration on her face and saw her flinch in anticipation of the weapon’s kick. She held her breath, closed her eyes and pulled the trigger and the bolt flashed past the tree’s edge and vanished down the gentle farther slope. Melisande stared forlorn at where it had gone.

“You haven’t got that many bolts,” Hook said, “and those are special.”

“Special?”

“They’re smaller than most,” he said, “they’re made specially to fit that bow.”

“I should find the ones I shot?”

He grinned. “I’ll chop off a couple of these boughs, and you should find those two bolts.”

“I have nine left.”

“Eleven would be better.”

She laid the crossbow on the ground and picked her way down the slope to vanish in the sunlit green of the undergrowth. Hook cocked the crossbow, winding the cord back easily, hoping that the continual stress would weaken the stave and so help Melisande, then he went back to lopping branches. He wondered why the king had demanded so many pieces of straight timber the height of a bowstave. Not his business, he decided. He made short work of a second branch, then a third. The great trunk would be sawn eventually, but for the moment he would leave it where it had fallen. He lopped off more of the smaller branches, and heard the long collapse of another tree somewhere along the ridge. Pigeons clattered through the leaves. He thought he might have to go and help Melisande find the bolts because she had been gone far too long, but just as he had that thought she came running back, her face alarmed and her eyes wide. She pointed down the westward slope. “There are men!” she said.

“Course there are men,” Hook said, and sliced off a limb the size of a man’s arm with a one-handed stroke of the ax. “We’re all over the place.”

“Men-at-arms,” Melisande hissed, “chevaliers!”

“Probably our fellows,” Hook said. Mounted men-at-arms patrolled the surrounding countryside every day, looking for supplies and watching for the French army that everyone expected would come to Harfleur’s relief.

“They are French!” Melisande hissed.

Hook doubted it, but he swung the ax to bury its blade in the fallen trunk, then jumped down and took her arm. “Let’s have a look.”

There were indeed men. There were horsemen in a fern-thick gully that twisted through the high wood. Hook could see a dozen of them in single file, following a track through the trees, but he sensed there were more riders behind them. And he saw, too, that Melisande was right. The horsemen were not wearing the cross of Saint George. They had surcoats, but none of the badges was familiar, and the riders were armored in plate and all wore helmets. They had their visors raised and Hook could see the leading horseman’s eyes glitter in the steel’s shadow. The man held up his hand to check the column, then stared intently up the slope, trying to discover exactly where the sound of ax blows came from, and as he stared, so more horsemen appeared from the far trees.

“French,” Melisande whispered.

“They are,” Hook said softly. Most of the horsemen carried drawn swords.

“What do you do?” Melisande asked, still whispering, “hide?”

“No,” Hook said, because he knew what he must do. The knowledge was instinctive and he did not doubt it, nor did he hesitate. He led her back to the felled tree, snatched up the cocked crossbow, then ran along the ridge. “The French!” he shouted. “They’re coming! Get back to the wagons! Fast!” He shouted it over and over. “Back to the wagons!” He first ran to his right, away from the wagons, to find Tom Scarlet and Will of the Dale standing and staring. “Will,” Hook said, “use Sir John’s voice. Tell them the French are here, and get everyone back to the wagons.”

Will of the Dale just gaped at him.

“Use Sir John’s voice!” Hook said harshly, shaking the carpenter by the shoulders. “The goddam French are coming! Now go! Where’s Matt?” he asked the last question of Tom Scarlet, who mutely pointed southward.

Will of the Dale was obeying Hook. He was hurrying back along the crest and using his imitation of Sir John’s harsh voice to pull the archers back to where the big wagons waited on the road. Peter Goddington, confused by the mimicry, searched for Sir John and found Hook, Melisande, and Tom Scarlet instead. “What in God’s name is happening?” Goddington demanded angrily.

“French, sergeant,” Hook said, pointing down the western slope.

“Don’t be daft, Hook,” Goddington said, “there are no goddam French here.”

“I saw them,” Hook said. “Men-at-arms. They’re in armor and carrying swords.”

“They were our men, you fool,” Goddington insisted. “Probably a forage party.”

The centenar was so sure of himself that Hook was beginning to doubt what he had seen, and his uncertainty was increased because the horsemen, though they must have heard the shouting on the crest, had not reacted. He had expected the men-at-arms to spur up the slope and burst through the trees, but none had appeared. Yet he stuck to his story. “There were about twenty of them,” he told Goddington, “armored, and with strange livery. Melisande saw them too.”

The sergeant glanced at Melisande and decided her opinion was worthless. “I’ll have a look,” he said grudgingly. “Where did you say they were?”

“In the trees down that slope,” Hook said, pointing. “They’re not on the road. They’re in the trees, like they didn’t want to be seen.”

“You’d better not be dreaming,” the centenar grumbled and went down the slope.

“Where’s Matt?” Hook asked Tom Scarlet again.

“He went to look at the sea,” Tom Scarlet answered.

“Matt!” Hook bellowed, cupping his hands.

There was no answer. The warm wind sighed in the branches and chaffinches made a busy noise somewhere down the eastern slope. A gun sounded from the siege lines, the echo rumbling in the bowl of the hills and melding with the crash of the stone’s impact. Hook could not hear the clink of bridles or the thump of hooves and he wondered if he had imagined the horsemen. The shouting on the crest had ended, suggesting that the bemused archers must have assembled back at the wagons.

“We’d never seen the sea before,” Tom Scarlet said nervously, “not before we sailed here. Matt wanted to look again.”

“Matt!” Hook shouted again, but again there was no answer.

Peter Goddington had vanished over the crest’s lip. Hook gave the crossbow to Melisande and then uncased his bow, strung it, and put an arrow across the stave. He walked to the gully’s lip and gazed down into the ferns. Peter Goddington was alone in the gully. There was not a horseman in sight and the centenar looked up and gave Hook a glance of pure disgust. “Nothing here, you fool,” he shouted, and just then Hook saw the two horsemen come from the trees on the right.

“Behind you!” he shouted, and Goddington began to run up the slope as Hook raised the bow, hauled the cord back and loosed just as the man-at-arms nearest the centenar swerved left. The arrow, a bodkin, glanced off the espalier that armored the man’s shoulder. The sword chopped down and Hook, as he pulled another arrow from the bag, saw blood bright and sudden in the glowing green woodland, he saw Peter Goddington’s head turn red, saw him stumble as the second Frenchman, his sword held rigid as a lance, took the centenar in the back. Goddington fell.

Hook loosed again. The white feathers streaked through shadow and sunlight and the bodkin head, shafted with oak, slammed through the second man’s breastplate and hurled him back in his tall saddle. More horsemen were coming now, spurring from the thick trees to put their horses at the slope, and Tom Scarlet was tugging at Hook’s arm. “Nick! Nick!”

And suddenly it was panic because there were more riders to their left, between them and the sea, and Hook seized Melisande’s sleeve and dragged her back. He had not seen that southernmost column, and Hook realized the French had come in at least two parties and he had seen only one, and he ran desperately, hearing the hooves loud and getting louder, and he dragged Melisande fast to one side, dodging like a hare pursued by hounds, but then a horseman galloped in front of him and slewed about in a slithering flurry of leaf mold. Hook twisted to his left to find refuge by the bole of a great hollow oak. It was really no refuge at all, because he was cornered now, and still more horsemen came and a rider laughed from his saddle as the men-at-arms surrounded Melisande and the two archers.

“Matt!” Tom said, and Hook saw that Matthew Scarlet was already a prisoner. A Frenchman in blue and green livery had him by his jacket’s collar, dragging him alongside his horse.

“Archers,” a horseman said. The word was the same in French and English, and there was no mistaking the pleasure with which the man spoke.

“Père!” Melisande gasped. “Père?”

And that was when Hook saw the falcon stooping against the sun. The livery was newly embroidered and bright, almost as bright as the sword blade that reached toward him. The blade came within a hand’s breadth of his throat, then suddenly stopped. The rider, sitting straight-legged in his destrier’s saddle, stared down at Hook. The haunch of a roe deer, newly killed, hung from his saddle’s pommel and its blood had dripped onto the scale-armored foot of the horseman, who was Ghillebert, Seigneur de Lanferelle, the lord of hell.

He was a lord in splendor, mounted on a magnificent stallion and wearing plate armor that shone like the sun. He alone among the horsemen was bareheaded so that his long black hair hung sleek almost to his waist. His face was like polished metal, hard edged, bronze dark, with a hawk’s nose and hooded eyes that showed amusement as he stared first at Hook who was trapped by the sword blade, then at Melisande who had raised the cocked crossbow. If Lanferelle was astonished at discovering his daughter in a high Norman wood he did not show it. He offered her a flicker of a wry smile, then said something in French and the girl fumbled in the pouch and took out a bolt that she laid in the weapon’s groove. Ghillebert, Lord of Lanferelle, could easily have stopped her, but he merely smiled again as the now loaded weapon was raised once more to point at his face. He spoke, much too fast for Hook to understand, and Melisande answered just as fast, but passionately.

There was a shout from behind Hook, far behind, from where the road dropped to the English camp. The Lord of Lanferelle gestured to his men, gave an order, and they rode toward the shout. Half of the men, who numbered eighteen, wore the livery of the hawk and sun, the rest had the same blue and green livery as the man holding Matt Scarlet prisoner, and that man, together with a squire wearing Lanferelle’s badge were the only ones who stayed with le Seigneur d’Enfer.

“Three English archers,” Lanferelle spoke in English suddenly, and Hook remembered how this Frenchman had learned English when he was a prisoner waiting for his ransom to be collected, “three goddam archers, and I give gold to my men for bringing me the fingers of goddam archers.” Lanferelle grinned suddenly, his teeth very white against his sun-darkened skin. “There are fingerless peasants all across Normandy and Picardy because my men cheat.” He seemed proud of that, because he gave a sudden braying laugh. “You know she is my daughter?”

“I know,” Hook said.

“She’s the prettiest of them! I have nine that I know of, but only one from my wife. But this one,” he looked at Melisande who still held the crossbow on him, “this one I thought to protect from the world.”

“I know,” Hook said again.

“She was supposed to pray for my soul,” Lanferelle said, “but it seems I must breed other daughters if my soul is to be saved.”

Melisande spat some fast words that only made Lanferelle smile more. “I put you in the convent,” he said, still speaking English, “because you were too pretty to be humped by some sweaty peasant and too ill-born to be married to a gentleman. But now it seems you found the peasant anyway,” he gave Hook a derisive glance, “and the fruit is picked, eh? But picked or not,” he said, “you are still my possession.”

“She’s mine,” Hook said, and was ignored.

“So what shall I do? Take you back to the nunnery?” Lanferelle asked, then grinned delightedly when Melisande raised the crossbow an inch higher. “You won’t shoot,” he said.

“I will,” Hook said, but it was a barren threat for he had no arrow on his string and knew he would be given no time to pull one from the bag.

“Who do you serve?” Lanferelle asked.

“Sir John Cornewaille,” Hook said proudly.

Lanferelle was pleased. “Sir John! Ah, there’s a man. His mother must have slept with a Frenchman! Sir John! I like Sir John,” he smiled. “But what of Melisande, eh? What of my little novice?”

“I hated the convent,” she spat at him, using English.

Lanferelle frowned as though her sudden outburst puzzled him. “You were safe there,” he said, “and your soul was safe.”

“Safe!” Melisande protested, “in Soissons? Every nun was raped or killed!”

“You were raped?” Lanferelle asked, his voice dangerous.

“Nicholas stopped him,” she said, gesturing at Hook, “he killed him first.”

The dark eyes brooded on Hook for an instant, then returned to Melisande. “So what do you want?” he asked, almost angrily. “You want a husband? Someone to look after you? How about him?” Lanferelle jerked his head toward his squire. “Maybe you should marry him? He’s gently born, but not too gently. His mother was a saddler’s daughter.” The squire, who plainly did not understand a word that was being said, stared dumbly at Melisande. He wore no helmet, but had an aventail instead, a hood of chain mail that framed a sweaty face scarred by childhood pox. His nose had been flattened in some fight and he had thick, wet-looking lips. Melisande grimaced and spoke urgently in French, so urgently that Hook only understood part of what she said. She was scornful and tearful at the same time, and her words appeared to amuse her father. “She says she will stay with you,” Lanferelle translated for Hook, “but that depends upon my wishes. It depends on whether I let you live.”

Hook was thinking that he could lunge upward with the bowstave and drive the horn-nocked tip into Lanferelle’s throat, or else into the soft tissue under his chin and keep driving the shaft so that it pierced the Frenchman’s brain.

“No,” the voice spoke in his head. It was almost a whisper, but unmistakably the voice of Saint Crispinian who had been silent for so long. “No,” the saint said again.

Hook almost fell to his knees in gratitude. His saint had returned. Lanferelle was smiling. “Were you thinking to attack me, Englishman?”

“Yes,” Hook admitted.

“And I would have killed you,” Lanferelle said, “and maybe I will anyway?” He stared toward the place where the wagons waited beside the road. Those wagons were hidden by the thick summer foliage, but shouts were loud and Hook could hear the sharp sound of bowstrings being loosed. “How many of you are there?” Lanferelle asked.

Hook thought about lying, but decided Lanferelle would discover the truth soon enough. “Forty archers,” he admitted.

“No men-at-arms?”

“None,” Hook said.

Lanferelle shrugged as if the information were not that important. “So, you capture Harfleur, and what then? Do you march on Paris? On Rouen? You don’t know. But I know. You will march somewhere. Your Henry has not spent all that money to capture one little harbor! He wants more. And when you march, Englishman, we shall be around you and in front of you and behind you, and you will die in ones and twos until there are only a few of you left, and then we shall close on you like wolves on a flock. And will my daughter die because you will be too weak to protect her?”

“I protected her in Soissons,” Hook said, “you didn’t.”

A tremor of anger showed on Lanferelle’s face. The sword tip quivered, but there was also an uncertainty in the Frenchman’s eyes. “I looked for her,” he said. He sounded defensive.

“Not well enough,” Hook responded fiercely, “and I found her.”

“God led him to me,” Melisande spoke in English for the first time.

“Oh! God?” Lanferelle had recovered his poise and sounded amused. “You think God is on your side, Englishman?”

“I know He is,” Hook said stoutly.

“And you know what they call me?”

“The Lord of Hell,” Hook said.

Lanferelle nodded. “It is a name, Englishman, just a name to frighten the ignorant. But despite that name I want my soul in heaven when I die, and for that I need people to pray for me. I need masses said, I need prayers chanted, and I need nuns and priests on their knees.” He nodded at Melisande. “Why should she not pray for me?”

“I do,” Melisande said.

“But will God listen to her prayers?” Lanferelle asked. “She deserted God for you, and that is her choice, but let us see what God wants, Englishman. Hold up your hand.” He paused and Hook did not move. “You want to live?” Lanferelle snarled. “Hold up your hand! Not that one!” He wanted Hook’s right hand, the hand with the fingertips hardened to calluses by the friction of the bow’s cord.

Hook held up his right hand.

“Spread your fingers,” Lanferelle ordered and moved his sword slowly so that the blade’s tip just touched Hook’s palm. “I could kill you,” Lanferelle said, “but my daughter likes you and I have an affection for her. But you took her blood without my permission, and blood demands blood.” He moved his wrist, only his wrist, but so deftly and so strongly that the blade’s tip moved an arrow’s length in the air, and moved so fast that Hook had no chance to evade before the blade sliced off his smallest finger. The blood welled and ran. Melisande screamed, but did not pull the crossbow’s trigger. Hook felt no pain for a heartbeat, then the agony streaked through his arm.

“There,” Lanferelle said, amused, “I leave you the fingers for the string, yes? For her sake. But when the wolves close on you, Englishman, you and I shall play our game. If you win, you keep her, but if you lose, she goes to his marriage bed,” he jerked his head at his slack-mouthed squire. “It’s a stinking bed and he ruts like a boar. He grunts. Do you agree to our game?”

“God will give us victory,” Hook said. His hand was all pain, but he had kept the hurt from showing on his face.

“Let me tell you something,” Lanferelle said, leaning from his saddle. “God does not give a cow’s wet turd about your king or mine. Do you agree to our game? We fight for Melisande, yes?”

“Yes,” Hook said.

“Then put your arrows down,” Lanferelle said, “and throw your bows away.”

Hook understood that the Frenchman did not want an arrow in his back as he rode away, and so he and Tom Scarlet threw their bowstaves into the tangled leaves of the felled oak, then dropped their arrow bags.

Lanferelle smiled. “We have an agreement, Englishman! The prize is Melisande, but we must seal it with blood, yes?”

“It is sealed,” Hook said, holding up his blood-soaked hand.

“We are playing for a life,” Lanferelle said, “not for blood,” and with that he touched a knee to his stallion, which turned obediently and the Lord of Hell swept his sword with the swiveling horse and the blade’s tip ripped through Matt Scarlet’s throat to fill the greenwood with a spray of red and a jet of blood, and Tom Scarlet cried aloud and Lanferelle laughed as he spurred eastward followed by his two men.

“Matt!” Tom Scarlet dropped to his knees beside his twin brother, but Matthew Scarlet was dying as fast as the blood that pumped from his torn and bubbling throat.

The hoofbeats faded. There was no more shouting from where the wagons were parked. Melisande was crying.

Hook fetched the bows. The French had gone. He used an ax to make a grave under an oak tree, a wide grave, wide enough for Matt Scarlet and Peter Goddington to lie together on the ridge above the sea.

Above Harfleur, where the guns tore the walls into rubble.

It was hard and ceaseless work. Hook and the archers cut timber and split timber and sawed timber to shore up the gun-pits and trenches. New gun-pits were made, closer to the town, but the precious weapons had to be protected from Harfleur’s defenders and so the archers constructed thick screens of wooden balks that stood in front of the cannons’ mouths. Each screen was made from oak trunks thick as a girl’s waist, and they were sloped backward so that they would deflect the enemy’s missiles skyward. The cleverest thing about the screens, Hook thought, was how they were mounted on frames so that they could swivel. An order was given when a gun was at last ready to fire and men would turn a great windlass that hauled down the top of the screen and so raised the lower edge to expose the cannon’s blackened muzzle. The gun would fire and the world would vanish in a sickening, stinking, thick cloud of smoke that smelled exactly like rotted eggs, and the sound of the gun-stone striking the wall would be lost in the echo of the great cannon’s bellow, and then the windlass would be released and the screen would thump down to protect the gun and its Dutch gunners again.

The enemy had learned to watch for the opening screens and would wait for that moment before shooting their own guns and springolts, so the English guns were also protected by enormous wicker baskets filled with earth and by more timber balks, and sometimes a screen would be raised even though a gun was not ready to be fired, just to trick the enemy into loosing their missiles, which would thump harmlessly into the baskets and oak trunks. Then, when the gun was ready, the wicker basket immediately in front of the barrel was rolled clear, the screen was raised, and the noise could be heard far up the Lézarde’s flooded valley.

The enemy also possessed cannon, but their guns were much smaller, firing a stone no bigger than an apple and lacking the weight to smash through the heavy screens. Their springolts, giant crossbows that shot thick bolts, had even less power. Hook, delivering a wagon of timber to reinforce the trenches, had a springolt bolt hit one of his horses plumb on the chest. The missile buried itself in the horse’s body, ripping through lungs, heart, and belly so that the beast simply collapsed, feet spreading in a sudden pool of blood. The heat shimmered off the blood and off the flooded land and off the marshes beside the wide glittering sea.

Trenches defended the besiegers from the enemy’s guns and springolts, though there was small defense against the ballista that hurled stones high in the air so that they fell almost vertically. The English had their own catapults, made from the timber cut on the slopes above the port, and those machines rained both stones and festering animal corpses into Harfleur. From the hill Hook could see shattered roofs and two broken church towers. He could see the wall broken open so that the rubble spilled into the ditch, and he could see the giant bastion defending the gate being ripped and frayed and broken and battered. That bastion had been constructed from earth and timber, and the English gun-stones chopped and gnawed at its two towers, which flanked a short, thick curtain wall.

“We’ll be making a sow next,” Sir John told his archers, “our lord the king is in a hurry!”

“There’s a great hole in their town wall, Sir John,” Thomas Evelgold remarked. He had replaced Peter Goddington as the centenar.

“And behind that gap is a new wall,” Sir John said, “and to attack it we’d have to get past their barbican.” The barbican was the twin-towered bastion protecting the Leure Gate. “You want their bastard crossbowmen shooting at you from the side? That barbican has to go, so we’ll be making a sow. We’ll have to fell more trees! Hook, I want you.”

The other archers watched as Sir John took Hook aside. “There’ll be no more French men-at-arms in the hills,” Sir John said, “we’ve got our own men out there now, and we’ve got more men watching for a relief force, but they’re seeing nothing.” That was a puzzle. August was ending and still the French had sent no army to relieve the besieged town. English horsemen rode every day to scout the roads from the north and the east, but the country stayed empty. Sometimes a small force of French men-at-arms challenged the patrols, but there was no cloud of dust to betray a marching army. “So tell me what you did on the ridge,” Sir John said, “the day poor Peter Goddington died.”

“I just warned our fellows,” Hook said.

“No, you didn’t. You told them to get back to the wagons, is that right?”

“Yes, Sir John.”

“Why?” Sir John asked belligerently.

Hook frowned as he remembered. At the time it had seemed an obvious precaution, but he had not thought why it was so obvious. “Our bows were no good in the trees,” he now said slowly, “but if they were back at the wagons they could shoot. They needed space to shoot.”

“Which is just what happened,” Sir John said. The archers, gathering at the wagons, had driven the raiders away with two volleys. “So you did the right thing, Hook. The bastards only came to make mischief. They wanted to kill a few men and have a look at what progress we were making, and you saw them off!”

“I wasn’t there, Sir John,” Hook said, “it was the other archers what drove them off.”

“You were with the Sire of Lanferelle, I know. And he let you live.” Sir John gave Hook an appraising look. “Why?”

“He wants to kill me later,” Hook said, not sure that was the right answer, “or maybe it’s because of Melisande?”

“He’s a cat,” Sir John said, “and you’re his mouse. A wounded mouse,” he glanced at Hook’s right hand, which was still bandaged. “You can still shoot?”

“Good as ever, Sir John.”

“So I’m making you a ventenar. Which means I’m doubling your pay.”

“Me!” Hook stared at Sir John.

Sir John did not answer straightaway. He had turned a critical eye on his men-at-arms, who were practicing sword strokes against tree trunks. Practice, practice, practice was one of Sir John’s constant refrains. He claimed to strike a thousand blows a day in never-ending practice and he demanded the same of his men. “Put some muscle into it, Ralph,” he shouted at one man, then turned back to Hook. “Did you think about what to do when you saw the French?”

“No.”

“That’s why I’m making you a sergeant. I don’t want men who have to think about what to do, but just do it. Tom Evelgold’s now your centenar, so you can take his company. I tell him what to do, he tells you what to do, and you tell your archers what to do. If they don’t do it, you thump the bastards, and if they still don’t do it, I thump you.”

“Yes, Sir John.”

Sir John’s battered face grinned. “You’re good, young Hook, and you’re something else.” He pointed at Hook’s bandaged hand. “You’re lucky. Here,” he took a thin silver chain from a pouch and dropped it into Hook’s hand. “Your badge of office. And tomorrow you build a sow.”

“What’s a sow, Sir John?”

“It’s a pig to build, I’ll tell you that much,” Sir John said, “a goddam pig!”

It began to rain that night. The rain came from the sea, carried on a cold west wind. It began softly, pattering on the besiegers’ tents, and then the wind rose to tear at the banners on their makeshift poles and the rain hardened and came at an angle and drenched the ground into a morass of mud. The flood waters, which had largely subsided, began to rise again and the midden overflowed. The gunners cursed and raised awnings over their weapons, while every archer carefully hid his bowstrings from the soaking rain.

There was no need for Hook to carry a bow. His job was to raise the sow and it was, as Sir John had promised, a pig of a job. It was not intricate work, not even skilled, but it needed strength and it had to be done in full view of the defenders and within range of their cannons, springolts, catapults, and crossbows.

The sow was a giant shield, shaped like the toe of a shoe, behind and beneath which men could work safe from enemy missiles, and it would have to be built strong enough to withstand the repeated strike of gun-stones.

A white-haired Welshman, Dafydd ap Traharn, supervised the work. “I come from Pontygwaith,” he told the archers, “and in Pontygwaith we know more about building things than all you miserable English bastards put together!” He had planned to run two wagons loaded with earth and stones to the place where the sow would be built and use the wagons to protect the archers from enemy missiles, but the rain had softened the ground and the wagons had become bogged down. “We’ll have to dig,” he said with the relish of a man who knew he would not have to wield a spade himself. “We know about digging in Pontygwaith, know more than all you English fart-makers put together!”

“That’s because you were digging graves for all the Welshmen we killed,” Will of the Dale retorted.

“Burying you sais, we were,” Dafydd ap Traharn replied happily. Later, as he chatted with Hook, he cheerfully admitted he had been a rebel against the English king just fifteen years before. “Now that Owain Glyn Dwr,” he said warmly, “what a man!”

“What happened to him?”

“He’s still alive, boy!” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “still alive!” Glyn Dwr’s rebellion had burned for over a decade, giving young Henry, Prince of Wales and now King of England, a long education in warfare. The revolt had been defeated and some of the Welsh leaders had been dragged on hurdles through London to their executions, but Owain Glyn Dwr himself had never been captured. “We have magicians in Wales,” Dafydd ap Traharn lowered his voice and leaned close to Hook as he spoke, “and they can turn a man invisible!”

“I’d like to see that,” Hook said wistfully.

“Well, you can’t, can you? That’s the whole thing about being invisible, you can’t see them! Why, Owain Glyn Dwr could be here right now and you couldn’t see him! And that’s what has happened to him, see? He’s living in luxury, boy, with women and apples, but if an Englishman gets within a mile of him, he turns invisible!”

“So what’s a rebel Welshman doing with this army?” Hook asked.

“A man has to live,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “and eating an enemy’s loaf of bread is better than staring into an empty oven. There’s dozens of Glyn Dwr’s men in this army, boy, and we’ll fight as hard for Henry as we ever did for Owain.” He grinned. “Mind you, there are a few of Owain Glyn Dwr’s men in France as well, and they’ll fight against us.”

“Archers?”

“God be praised, no. Archers can’t afford to run away to France, can they now? No, it’s the gentry who lost their land who went to France, not the archers. Have you ever faced an archer in battle?”

“God be praised, no,” Hook said.

“It is not what I would call a happy experience,” Dafydd ap Traharn said grimly. “My God, boy, but we Welsh don’t take fright easily, but when Henry’s archers shot at Shrewsbury it was death from the sky. Like hail, it was, only hail with steel points, and hail that never stopped, and men were dying all around me and their screams were like tortured gulls on a black shore. An archer is a terrible thing.”

“I’m an archer.”

“You’re a digger now, boy,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, grinning, “so dig.”

They dug a trench away from a gun-pit, digging it toward the walls of Harfleur, and the defenders saw the trench being made and rained crossbow bolts and gun-stones on the work. The defenders’ catapults tried to lob stones onto the new trench, but the missiles went wide, landing in showers of splattering mud. After thirty paces of new trench had been made Dafydd ap Traharn declared himself satisfied and ordered a new pit to be excavated. It had to be big, square and deep, and so the archers hacked and shoveled till they reached a layer of chalk. The new pit’s side seeped water so that they slopped about in muck as they raised a parapet of tree trunks on three sides of the pit, only leaving the rear that led to the English camp unprotected. They laid the trunks flat, four abreast, and piled more on top, so that a man could stand upright in the pit and be invisible to the enemy on Harfleur’s walls. “Tonight,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “we’ll make a roof and our lovely sow will be finished.”

They made the roof at night because the pit was close enough to the walls to be within easy range of a crossbow, but the enemy must have guessed what was happening and they shot blind through the rain-soaked darkness and three men were wounded by the short, sharp bolts that spat from the night. It took all that night to lay long trunks over the pit and then to cover those timbers with a thick layer of earth and chalk rubble before adding a final covering of more tree trunks. “And now the real work begins,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “which means we have to use Welshmen.”

“The real work?” Hook asked.

“We’re going to make a mine, lad. We’re going to dig deep.”

The rain ended at dawn. A chill wind came from the west and the rain slid away across France and the sun fought against cloud as the enemy gunners hammered the newly made sow with gun-stones that wasted their power on the thick log parapet. Hook and his archers slept, sheltering under the crude cabins they had made from tree boughs, earth, and ferns. When Hook woke he found Melisande scrubbing his mail coat with sand and vinegar. “Rouille,” she said in explanation.

“Rust?”

“That’s what I said.”

“You can polish my coat, darling,” Will of the Dale said as he crawled from his shelter.

“Do your own, William,” Melisande said. “I cleaned Tom’s, though.”

“Well done,” Hook said. All the archers were worried about Thomas Scarlet whose customary cheerfulness had been buried with his twin brother. Scarlet scowled these days, or else sat by himself, brooding. “All he wants,” Hook said quietly, “is to meet your father again.”

“Then Thomas will die,” Melisande said bleakly.

“He loves you,” Hook said.

“My father?”

“He let you live. He let you stay with me.”

“He let you live too,” she said, almost resentfully.

“I know.”

She paused. Her gray eyes watched Harfleur, which was ringed with gunsmoke like a sea fog shrouding a cliff. Hook put his wet boots to dry beside the campfire. The burning wood spat and shot sparks. It was willow, and willow always protested against burning. “He loved my mother, I think,” Melisande said wistfully.

“Did he?”

“She was beautiful,” Melisande said, “and she loved him. She said he was so beautiful too. A beautiful man.”

“Handsome,” Hook allowed.

“Beautiful,” Melisande insisted.

“When you met him in the trees,” Hook asked, “did you want him to take you away?”

She gave an abrupt shake of her head. “No,” she said, “I think he is a bad angel. And I think he is in my head like the saint is in yours,” she turned to look at him, “and I wish he would go away.”

“You think about him? Is that it?”

“I always wanted him to love me,” she said harshly, and started scouring the mail again.

“As he loved your mother?”

“No! Non!” She was angry, and for a while she said nothing, then relented. “Life is hard, Nicholas, you know that. It is work and work and work and worry where the food will come from and it is more work, and a lord, any lord, can stop all that. They can wave their hand and there is no more work, no more worry, just facile.”

“Easy?”

“And I wanted that.”

“Tell him you want that.”

“He is beautiful,” Melisande said, “but he is not kind. I know that. And I love you. Je t’aime.” She said the last words decidedly, without apparent affection, but Hook was struck dumb by them. He watched archers bringing firewood to the camp. Melisande grimaced with the effort of scrubbing the sand on the mail coat. “You know of Sir Robert Knolles?” she asked suddenly.

“Of course I do,” Hook said. Every archer knew of Sir Robert, who had died rich not many years before.

“He was an archer once,” Melisande said.

“That’s how he started,” Hook agreed, wondering how Melisande knew of the legendary Sir Robert.

“And he became a knight,” Melisande said, “he led armies! And now Sir John has made you a ventenar.”

“A ventenar isn’t a knight,” Hook said, smiling.

“But Sir Robert was a ventenar once!” Melisande said fiercely, “and then he became a centenar, and then a man-at-arms, and after that a knight! Alice told me. And if he could do it, why not you?”

That vision was so astonishing that Hook could only stare at her for a moment. “Me? A man-at-arms?” he finally said.

“Why not?”

“I’m not born to that!”

“Nor was Sir Robert.”

“Well, it does happen,” Hook said dubiously. He knew of other archers who had led companies and become rich. Sir Robert was the most famous, but archers also remembered Thomas of Hookton who had died as lord of a thousand acres. “But it doesn’t happen often,” Hook went on, “and it takes money.”

“And what is war to you men but money? They talk without end of prisoners? Of ransoms?” Melisande pointed her brush at him and grinned mischievously. “Capture my father. We’ll ransom him. We’ll take his money.”

“You’d like that, would you?” Hook asked.

“Yes,” she said vengefully, “I would like that.”

Hook tried to imagine being rich. Of receiving a ransom that would be more than most men could earn in a lifetime, and then he forgot that dream as John Fletcher, who was one of the older archers and a man who had shown some resentment at Hook’s promotion, suddenly flinched and ran toward the midden trench. Fletcher’s face looked pale. “Fletch is ill,” Hook said.

“And poor Alice was horribly sick this morning,” Melisande said, wrinkling her nose in distaste, “la diarrhée!”

Hook decided he did not want to know more about Alice Godewyne’s sickness, and he was saved from further details by Sir John Cornewaille’s arrival. “Are we awake?” the knight bellowed, “are we awake and breathing?”

“We are now, Sir John,” Hook answered for the archers.

“Then down to the trenches! Down to the trenches! Let’s get this goddam siege done!”

Hook donned his damp boots and half-scrubbed mail, pulled on his helmet and surcoat, then went to the trenches. The siege went on.

SIX

The sow shuddered each time a gun-stone struck its sloping face. The logs that formed the face were battered, split, and bristling with springolt bolts, but the enemy’s missiles had failed to break the heavy shield or even weaken it, and beneath the layers of timber and earth the Welsh miners went to work.

Other shafts were being driven on Harfleur’s eastern side where the Duke of Clarence’s forces were camped, and from both east and west the guns roared and the stones clawed at the walls, the mangonels and trebuchets dropped boulders into the town, smoke and dust erupted and plumed from the narrow streets while the mines crept toward the ramparts. The eastern shafts were being driven under the walls where great caverns, shored with timber, would be clawed out of the chalk and, when the time came, the timber supports would be burned away so that the caverns would collapse and bring down the ramparts above. The western mine, its entrance guarded by the sow Hook had helped make, was intended to tunnel under the vast battered bastion that protected the Leure Gate. Bring that barbican down and the English army could attack the breach beside the gate without any danger of being assaulted on their flank by the barbican’s garrison. So the Welshmen dug and the archers guarded their sow and the town suffered.

The barbican had been made from great oak trunks that had been sunk into the earth and then hooped with iron. The trunks had formed the outline of two squat round towers joined by a brief curtain wall, and their interior had been rammed with earth and rubble, the whole protected by a flooded ditch facing the besiegers. The English guns had splintered the nearest timbers so that the earth had spilled out to make a steep unstable ramp that filled one part of the ditch, yet still the bastion resisted. Its ruin was manned by crossbowmen and men-at-arms, and its banners hung defiantly from what remained of its wooden ramparts. Each night, when the English guns ceased fire, the defenders made repairs and the dawn would reveal a new timber palisade and the guns would have to begin their slow work of demolition again. Other guns fired at the town itself.

When Hook had first seen Harfleur it had looked almost magical to him: a town of tight roofs and church steeples all girdled by a white, tower-studded wall that had glowed in the August sun. It had looked like the painted town in the picture of Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian in Soissons Cathedral, the picture he had stared at for so long as he said his prayers.

Now the painted town was a battered heap of stones, mud, smoke, and shattered houses. Long stretches of the walls still stood and still flaunted their derisive banners that displayed the badges of the garrison’s leaders, images of the saints and invocations to God, but eight of the towers had been collapsed into the town ditch, and one long length of rampart had been beaten into wreckage close to the Leure Gate. The great missiles lobbed into the town by the catapults smashed houses and started fires so that a pall of smoke hung constantly above the besieged town. A church steeple had fallen, taking its bells in a mighty cacophony, and still the boulders and gun-stones hammered at the already hammered town.

And still the defenders fought back. Each dawn Hook led men into the pits that defended the English guns and in every dawn he saw where the garrison had been working. They were making a new wall behind the broken rampart and they shored up the collapsing barbican with new timbers. English heralds, holding their white wands and gaudy in their colored coats, rode to the enemy walls to offer terms, but the enemy commanders rebuffed the heralds each time. “What they’re hoping,” Father Christopher told Hook one early September morning, “is that their king will lead an army to their rescue.”

“I thought the French king was mad?”

“Oh, so he is! He believes he is made of glass!” Father Christopher said mockingly. The priest visited the trenches every morning, offering blessings and jests to the archers. “It’s true! He thinks he’s made of glass and will shatter if he falls. He also chews rugs and tells his troubles to the moon.”

“So he won’t be leading any army here, father,” Hook said, smiling.

“But the mad king has sons, Hook, and they’re all blood-thirsty little scum. Any one of them would love to grind our bones to powder.”

“Will they try?”

“God knows, Hook, God alone knows and He isn’t telling me. But I do know there’s an army gathering at Rouen.”

“Is that far?”

“See that road?” The priest pointed to the faint remains of a road that had once led from the Leure Gate, but which was now only a scar in a muddy, missile-battered landscape. “Follow that,” Father Christopher said, “and turn right when it reaches the hill and keep going, and after fifty miles you’ll find a great bridge and a huge city. That’s Rouen, Hook. Fifty miles? An army can march that in three days!”

“So they come,” Hook said, “and we’ll kill them.”

“King Harold said much the same just before Hastings,” Father Christopher said gently.

“Did Harold have archers?” Hook asked.

“Just men-at-arms, I think.”

“Well, then,” Hook said and grinned.

The priest raised his head to peer at Harfleur. “We should have captured the place by now,” he said wistfully. “It’s taking much too long.” He turned because a passing man-at-arms had greeted him cheerfully. Father Christopher returned the greeting and made a sketchy sign of blessing toward the hurrying man. “You know who that was, Hook?”

Hook looked at the retreating figure who wore a bright surcoat of red and white. “No, father, no idea.”

“Geoffrey Chaucer’s son,” the priest said proudly.

“Who?”

“You’ve not heard of Geoffrey Chaucer?” Father Christopher asked. “The poet?”

“Oh, I thought he might be someone useful,” Hook said, then slammed a hand onto the priest’s shoulder and so forced him to crouch. A heartbeat later a crossbow bolt slapped into the muddy back of the trench where Father Christopher had been standing. “That’s Catface,” Hook explained, “he’s useful.”

“Catface?”

“A bastard on the barbican, father. He’s got a face like a polecat. I can see him raise his bow.”

“You can’t shoot him?”

“Twenty paces too far off, father,” Hook said, and peered between two battered wicker baskets filled with disintegrating earth that formed the parapet. He waved, and a figure on the bastion waved back. “I always let him know I’m still living.”

“Polecat,” Father Christopher said musingly. “You know Rob Pole is ill?”

“So’s Fletch. And Dick Godewyne’s wife.”

“Alice? Is she sick too?”

“Horrible, I hear.”

“Rob Pole can’t stop shitting,” the priest said, “and nothing but blood and mucky water comes out.”

“God help us,” Hook said, “Fletch is the same.”

“I’d better start praying,” Father Christopher said earnestly, “we can’t lose men to sickness. Are you feeling well?”

“I am.”

“God be praised for that. And your hand? How’s your hand?”

“It throbs, father,” Hook said, holding up his right hand, which was still bandaged. Melisande had covered the wound with honey, then wrapped it.

“Throbbing is a good sign,” the priest said. He leaned forward and sniffed at the bandage, “and it smells good! Well, it stinks of mud, sweat, and shit, but so do we all. It doesn’t smell rotten, and that’s the important thing. How’s your piss? Is it cloudy? Strong-colored? Feeble?”

“Just normal, father.”

“That’s grand, Hook. We can’t lose you!”

And strange to tell, Hook thought, but he reckoned the priest was telling the truth because he knew he was doing his ventenar’s job well. He had expected to be embarrassed by the small authority, and had feared that some of the older men would deliberately ignore his orders, but if there was any resentment it was muted and his commands were obeyed readily enough. He wore the silver chain with pride.

The weather had turned hot again, baking the mud into a crust that crumbled into fine dust with every footstep. Harfleur crumbled too, yet still the garrison defied the besiegers. The king would come to the archers’ pits four or five times a day and stare at the ramparts. At the beginning of the siege he had chatted with the archers, but now his face was drawn and his lips thin and the archers gave him and his small entourage space. They watched him stare and they could read from his scarred face that he did not think an assault could break through the new inner walls. Any such attack would have to stumble over the ruins of the burned houses, suffer the bolts spitting from the barbican, then cross the great town ditch before climbing the wreckage of the gun-shattered wall and all the time the crossbow bolts would slash in from the flanks, and once across the wall’s ruins the attackers would be faced with the new inner wall that was made from thick baskets of earth, and from balks of timber and stones fetched from the fallen buildings inside the town. “We need another length of wall down,” Hook overheard the king say, “and then we attack instantly into the new breach.”

“Can’t be done, sire,” Sir John Cornewaille said grimly. “This is the only dry approach we’ve got.” The flood waters had receded, but they still ringed much of the town, restricting the English attacks to the two places where the mine shafts were being hacked toward the town.

“Then bring down the barbican,” the king insisted, “and beat the gate beyond into splinters.” He stared, long-nosed and grim-faced, at the stubborn barbican, then suddenly became aware of the anxious archers and men-at-arms watching him. “God didn’t bring us this far to fail!” he shouted confidently. “The town will be ours, fellows, and soon! There will be ale and good food! It will all be ours soon!”

All day the chalk and soil was dragged from the mine shaft while the timbers, cut to a bowstave’s length, were carried inside to support the tunnel. The guns kept up their fire, shrouding the besiegers’ lines with smoke, punching their eardrums with noise, and pounding the already pounded defenses.

“How are your ears?” Sir John greeted Hook on an early September morning.

“My ears, Sir John?”

“Those ugly things on the sides of your head.”

“Nothing wrong with them, Sir John.”

“Then come with me.”

Sir John, his fine armor and surcoat covered in dust, led Hook back through a trench and so to the mine’s entrance beneath the sow. The shaft sloped sharply down for fifteen paces, then the tunnel leveled. It was two paces wide and as high as a bowstave. Rushlights burned from small brackets nailed to the timber supports, but as Hook followed Sir John he noted how the small flames grew feebler the deeper they went. Every few paces Sir John stopped and flattened himself against the tunnel’s side and Hook did the same to let some miner pass with a load of excavated chalk. Dust hung in the air, while the floor was a slurry of water and chalk dust. “All right, boys,” Sir John said when he reached the tunnel’s end, “time to rest. Everyone stay still and silent!”

The far end of the tunnel was lit by horn-shielded lanterns hanging from the last beam to be propped into place. Two miners had been using pick-axes on the tunnel’s face and they gratefully put down their tools and sank to the floor as Dafydd ap Traharn, supervising the work, nodded a greeting to Hook. Sir John crouched near the gray-haired Welshman and motioned for Hook to squat. “Listen,” Sir John hissed.

Hook listened. A miner coughed. “Shh,” Sir John said.

Sometimes, in the long woods that fell from Lord Slayton’s pastures to the river, Hook would stand quite motionless, just listening. He knew every sound of those trees, whether it was a deer’s hoof-fall, a boar snuffling, a woodpecker drumming, the clack of a raven’s bill as it preened its feathers or just the wind in the leaves, and from those sounds his ear would find the discordant note, the signal that told him a trespasser was prowling the undergrowth. Now he listened in just the same way, ignoring the breathing of the half-dozen men, letting his mind wander, just allowing the silence to fill his head and so alert him to the smallest disturbance. He listened a long time.

“My ears ring all the time,” Sir John whispered, “I think because I’ve got beaten on the helmet with blades too much and…” Hook held up an impatient hand, unaware that he was ordering a Knight of the Garter to silence. Sir John obeyed anyway. Hook listened, heard something and then heard it again. “Someone’s digging,” he said.

“Oh, the bastards,” Sir John said quietly. “Are you sure?”

Now that he had identified the sound Hook was surprised no one else could hear the rhythmic thunk of picks striking chalk. The garrison was making a counter-mine, driving their own tunnel toward the besiegers in hope of intercepting the English tunnel before it could be finished. “Maybe two tunnels,” Hook said. The sound was slightly irregular, as if two mismatched rhythms were mixing.

“That’s what I thought,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “but I wasn’t sure. The ears play tricks underground, they do.”

“Busy little bastards, aren’t they?” Sir John said vengefully. He looked at Dafydd ap Traharn. “How far to go?”

“Twenty paces, Sir John, say two days. Another two to make the chamber. One to fill it with incendiaries.”

“They’re still a long way off,” Sir John said. “Maybe they won’t find this tunnel?”

“They’ll be listening too, Sir John. And the closer they get the clearer they hear us.”

“Putrid stinking prickless rancid bastards,” Sir John said to no one in particular. He nodded at Hook. “I still can’t hear them.”

“They’re there,” Hook said confidently. They spoke in whispers, shrouded by a darkness scarce relieved by the rushlight lanterns flickering in the foul air.

One of the miners spoke in Welsh. Dafydd ap Traharn silenced him with a cautionary hand. “He’s worried what happens if the enemy breaks into the tunnel, Sir John.”

“Make a chamber here,” Sir John said, “big enough for six or seven men. We’ll have archers and men-at-arms standing guard here. Have your own weapons at hand, but for the moment, keep digging. Let’s bring that bastard barbican down.” The mine shaft was aiming for the northernmost tower of the obstinate bastion in hope of tumbling it to fill the flooded ditch. A cavern would be made beneath the tower, a cavern supported by timber balks that would be burned away so that the roof would collapse and, with it, the tower. Sir John slapped the miners on their shoulders. “Well done, boys,” he said, “God is with you.” He beckoned to Hook and the two of them went back toward the sow. “I hope to God He is with us,” Sir John grumbled, then stopped and frowned as he contemplated the tunnel’s entrance. “We’ll have to put some defenses here,” he said.

“In the sow?”

“If the bastards break into our tunnel, Hook, they’ll come swarming out of that hole like rats smelling a free breakfast. We’ll put a wall here and garrison it with archers.”

Hook watched two men carry pit supports into the tunnel. “A wall here will slow the work, Sir John,” he said.

“God damn you, Hook, I know that!” Sir John snapped, then gazed at the tunnel’s mouth. “We need to end this siege! It’s gone on too long. Men are getting sick. We need to be away from this stinking place.”

“Barrels?” Hook suggested.

“Barrels?” Sir John echoed with another snarl.

“Fill three or four barrels with stones and soil,” Hook said patiently, “and if the French come, just roll the barrels into the entrance and stand them upright. Half a dozen archers can take care of any bastard that tries to get past them.”

Sir John stared at the entrance for a few heartbeats, then nodded. “Your mother wasn’t wasting her time when she spread her thighs, Hook. Good man. I want the barrels in place by sundown.”

The barrels were in place by dusk. Hook, waiting to be relieved, went to the trench beside the sow and watched the broken walls that were lit red by the sun sinking beyond the tree-stripped hills. Behind him, in the English camp, a man played a flute plaintively, repeating the same phrase over and over as though trying to get it right. Hook was tired. He wanted to eat and sleep, nothing more, and he paid small attention as a man-at-arms came to stand beside him at the parapet. The man was wearing a close-fitting helmet that half shadowed his face, but otherwise had no armor, just a leather jerkin, but his muddied boots were well made and a golden chain at his neck denoted his high status. “Is that a dead dog?” the man asked, nodding toward a furry corpse lying halfway between the English forward trench and the French barbican. Three ravens were pecking at the dead beast.

“The French shoot them,” Hook said. “The dogs run out of our lines and the crossbowmen shoot them. Then they vanish in the night.”

“The dogs?”

“They’re food for the French,” Hook explained curtly. “Fresh meat.”

“Ah, of course,” the man said. He watched the ravens for a while. “I’ve never eaten dog.”

“Tastes a bit like hare,” Hook said, “but stringier.” Then he glanced at the man and saw the deep-pitted scar beside the long nose. “Sire,” he added hastily, and dropped to one knee.

“Stand up, stand up,” the king said. He stared at the barbican, which now resembled little more than a heap of earth with a wall of battered tree trunks rammed into its crumbling forward slope. “We must take that barbican,” he said absently, speaking to himself. Hook was watching the bastion, looking for the telltale flicker of movement that would warn him of a crossbowman taking aim, but he reckoned the king was safe enough because the French usually went quiet as the sun sank beneath the western horizon, and this evening was no different. The guns and catapults of both sides were silent. “I remember the first day of the siege,” the king said, sounding almost puzzled, “and the church bells were always ringing in the town. I thought they were being defiant, then I realized they were burying their dead. But they don’t ring any more.”

“Too many dead, sire,” Hook said awkwardly, “or maybe there’s no bells left.” There was something about talking to a king that made his thoughts stumble.

“It must be ended quickly,” the king said earnestly, then stepped back from the parapet. “Does the saint still speak to you?” he asked, and Hook was so astonished that the king remembered him that he said nothing, just nodded hastily. “That’s good,” Henry said, “because if God is on our side then nothing can prevail against us. Remember that!” He gave Hook a half smile. “And we will prevail,” Henry added softly, almost as though he spoke to himself. Then he walked down the trench leading back to the sow where a dozen men waited for him.

Hook went to bed.

Next morning, when a gun fired, the earth trembled.

Hook was in the mine, down at the lowest level where Sir John had led him to listen again, and suddenly the earth shuddered and the rushlights flickered dark.

Everyone crouched in the half dark, listening. A miner began coughing wetly and Hook waited until the echo of the cough had died away. Listening. Listening for death, listening.

A second gun fired and the earth seemed to quiver as the tiny flames spluttered again and dust jarred from the roof and gobbets of earth spattered down to splash in the tunnel’s slurry. The rumble of the gun’s noise seemed to last forever, then there was a moaning sound, a creaking, as though the oaken supports were bending under the weight of the earth they carried.

“Hook?” Sir John asked.

There was a scratching noise, so faint that Hook wondered if he imagined it, but then there was a muffled crack followed by silence. After a while the scratching started again, and this time Hook was sure he heard it. The men in the tunnel watched him anxiously. He crossed to the farther wall and pressed an ear against the chalk.

Scratching. Hook looked at Dafydd ap Traharn. “How are you digging now, sir?” he asked.

“The way we always do,” the Welshman said, puzzled.

“Show me, sir?”

The Welshman took a pick and went to the tunnel’s face where, instead of swinging the pick to bury its blade in the soft rock, he dragged it down a natural cleft. He dragged it again, deepening the cleft, and then pushed the blade into the hole and tried to lever out a chunk of stone, but the hole was not deep enough and so he scratched the steel point down the groove again. He scratched it. He was working quietly, trying not to alert the French as the tunnel went closer to the ravaged walls, and Hook realized that was the sound he was hearing. Both teams of tunnelers were trying to work silently.

“They’re very close,” Hook said.

“Cymorth ni, O Arglwydd,” a miner muttered and crossed himself.

“How close?” Sir John demanded, ignoring the plea for God’s help.

“Can’t tell, Sir John.”

“God damn the goddam bastards,” Sir John spat.

“They may be above us,” Dafydd ap Traharn suggested, “or below.”

“You’ll know when they’re really close,” Hook said, “you’ll hear the scratching loud.”

“Scratching?” the Welshman asked.

“It’s what I hear, sir.”

“They’ll hack their way through the last few feet,” Dafydd ap Traharn said grimly, “and come on us like demons.”

“We have our own demons waiting for them,” Sir John said. “We’re not abandoning this tunnel! We need it! We’ll fight the bastards underground. It will save us digging them graves, won’t it?”

The war bows were too long to use in the tunnel and so at midday Sir John brought a half-dozen crossbows. “If they break in,” he told Hook, “greet them with these. Then use your poleaxes.”

The scratching was louder, so loud that Dafydd ap Traharn decided there was no longer any purpose in trying to be silent and so his men began to swing their pickaxes, filling the tunnel’s end with noise and a fine choking dust. Every now and then a blade struck flint and a spark would fly fierce and bright across the gloomy shaft. The sparks looked like shooting stars and Hook remembered his grandmother crossing herself whenever she saw such a star, then she would say a prayer and she claimed such prayers, carried by the hurrying stars, were more effective. He closed his eyes when the sparks flew and prayed for Melisande and for Father Christopher and for his brother, Michael. Michael, at least, was in England, far from the Perrill brothers and their mad priest father. “Another day’s work,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, interrupting Hook’s thoughts of home, “and we can start making the cavern. Then we’ll bring down their tower like the walls of Jericho!”

The men-at-arms and the archers sat at the tunnel’s edge, drawing in their feet to let the laborers carry out the excavated spoil and bring in the new timbers to support the roof. They listened to the sounds of the French miners. Those noises were louder, inescapable and ominous. They came from the north where the enemy had to be driving a counter-mine to intercept the English work and, in the dust-shrouded light of the small flames, Hook constantly watched the far wall, expecting to see a great hole appear through which an armored enemy would erupt. Sir John spent much of the afternoon in the tunnel, his sword drawn and face shadowed. “We have to fight them back into their hole,” he said, “and then collapse their work. Jesus, it smells like a midden down here!”

“It is a midden,” Dafydd ap Traharn said. Some of the laborers had fallen ill and constantly fouled the wet slurry underfoot.

Sir John left late in the day and, an hour later, sent other men to relieve the mine’s guards. Those new men came stooping down the tunnel, their shadows flickering monstrously in the half darkness. “Christ on his cross,” a voice grumbled, “can’t breathe this air.”

“You have crossbows for us?” another voice demanded.

“We’ve got them,” Hook acknowledged, “and they’re cocked.”

“Leave them for us,” the man said, then peered at the archers he was relieving. “Hook? Is that you?”

“Sir Edward!” Hook said. He laid the crossbow on the floor and stood, smiling.

“It is you!” Sir Edward Derwent, Lord Slayton’s man who, in London, had saved Hook from the manor court and its inevitable punishment, was smiling back in the dirty light. “I heard you were here,” he said, “how are you?”

“Still alive, Sir Edward,” Hook said, grinning.

“God be praised for that, though God knows how anyone survives down here.” Sir Edward, his scar-ravaged face half hidden by his helmet, listened to the ominous noises. “They sound close!”

“We think they are,” Hook said.

“It’s deceptive,” Dafydd ap Traharn put in. “They could be ten paces away still. It’s hard to tell with sounds underground.”

“So they could be a hand’s breadth away?” Sir Edward inquired sourly.

“Oh, they could be!” the Welshman said dourly.

Sir Edward looked at the drawn crossbows. “And the idea is to welcome them with bolts?” he asked, “then kill the bastards?”

“The idea is to keep me alive,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “and you’re blocking the tunnel, you are! There are too many of you! There’s work to be done.”

Sir John’s men-at-arms had already gone, and now Hook sent his archers after them. He lingered a moment. “I wish you a quiet night,” he said to Sir Edward.

“Dear God, I echo that prayer,” Sir Edward said. He grinned. “It’s good to see you, Hook.”

“A pleasure to see you, sir,” Hook said, “and thank you.”

“Go and rest, man,” Sir Edward said.

Hook nodded. He hefted his poleax and, with a farewell nod to Dafydd ap Traharn, edged past Sir Edward’s men, one of whom tried to trip him and Hook saw the lantern jaw and sunken eyes and, for a moment, in the half darkness, he thought it was Sir Martin, then realized it was the priest’s elder son, Tom Perrill. Both brothers were there, stooping under the beams, but Hook ignored them, knowing that neither would attack him while Sir Edward was present.

He trudged up the tunnel toward the fading daylight far ahead. He was thinking of Melisande, of the stew she would have ready, and of songs around the campfire when the world shattered.

Noise thudded about his ears. It started as a thunderous growl that billowed just behind him, then there was a rending noise as though the earth itself was splitting apart, and he turned to see dust boiling toward him, a dark cloud of dust rolling in the shaft’s dark light, and men like monstrous shadows were lumbering in that darkness. There was shouting, the sound of steel on armor, and a scream. The first scream.

The French had broken through.

Hook instinctively started back toward the fighting, then remembered the barrels and wondered if he should block the tunnel’s entrance. He hesitated. A man was screeching from the dark, a horrible noise, like the sound of a clumsily gelded beast. There was another rumbling and Hook had a glimpse of more men dropping from the tunnel’s roof, then more dust surged toward him, obliterating his sight, but in the dust a figure lurched toward him. It was a man-at-arms, sword drawn. His visor was closed, he held his sword two-handed, and somehow the dust and half-light made him look like some enormous earth-giant come from nightmare’s bowels. His plate armor was coated in chalk and earth, and Hook stared, petrified by the unnatural vision, but then the man bellowed and that sound startled Hook to reality just as the man-at-arms lunged the sword at his belly. Hook twisted to one side and rammed the poleax straight at the steel-shrouded face. The spear point slid off the pig-snouted visor, but the top edge of the heavy hammer cracked into the helmet, crushing the metal. Hook had used all his archer’s strength in that blow and the earth-giant reeled backward, blood welling from his visor’s holes, and Hook remembered all those lessons in Sir John’s meadows and closed on the man fast, getting inside the sword’s reach so the enemy could not swing the blade, and he rammed the poleax like a quarterstaff, driving the man down onto the floor. Hook had no room to swing the poleax, but strength made up for that and he slammed the ax blade onto the man’s sword elbow, breaking it, then slid the spear point into the gap between the enemy’s helmet and breastplate. The Frenchman wore an aventail, a mail hood, to protect that gap, but the steel spike ripped easily through the links and gouged into the man’s throat, and then more men were coming toward Hook as the earth-giant, shrunken to normal size now, writhed on the mine floor where his blood spilled into the chalk, black draining into white.

The men coming up the tunnel were fighting each other. Hook dragged the blade free of the dying earth-giant and rammed the spear point at a man in a strange surcoat. The blade glanced off plate armor, ripping the coat and the man turned, beast-faced visor pointing at Hook, and brought his sword around, but it caught on one of the mine’s timber supports and Hook lunged again with the poleax, this time hooking the ax blade around the man’s ankle and then pulling hard so that the Frenchman lost his balance. A Welsh miner staggered toward Hook, guts spilling from an opened belly. Hook shouldered him aside and pushed the spear point under the fallen man’s breastplate, the gap just visible through the torn linen. He pushed and twisted the long haft, trying to drive the blade up into the man’s stomach and chest, but something blocked the blade, and then another rush of men pushed him backward. They were Lord Slayton’s men, retreating from the French, though a handful of the enemy was among them. Men wrestled in the dark, tripped over the dead and the dying, and slipped in sewage. Two men-at-arms forced Hook back against the side of the tunnel and he again thrust the poleax like a quarterstaff, two-handed, but a rush of men pushed his enemies aside as archers and miners fled to the sow.

“Hold them!” Sir Edward’s voice bellowed from farther down the mine.

The barrels. Hook, momentarily free of enemies, turned and ran toward the mine entrance. He made it to where the shaft sloped gently up toward the surface, but there a foot tripped him and he sprawled heavily onto the chalk. He twisted aside and tried to climb to his feet, but a boot kicked him in the belly. Hook twisted again to see Tom and Robert Perrill standing over him.

“Quick,” Tom Perrill shouted at his brother.

Robert lifted a sword, point downward, aimed at Hook’s throat.

“I’ll have your woman,” Tom Perrill said, though Hook could scarcely hear him over the shouts and screams echoing up the tunnel. More shouts sounded from the sow where attackers fought a bitter sudden battle against startled defenders. Then Robert Perrill’s sword came down and Hook rolled again, throwing himself against his enemies’ feet and he heaved up so that Robert Perrill tumbled against the far wall and the poleax was still in Hook’s hand as he scrambled to his feet and turned on Thomas Perrill, who simply ran away.

“Coward!” Hook shouted, and looked down to Robert who was flailing the sword uselessly and screaming, screaming, and Hook suddenly understood why. The earth was quivering as another scream, thin as a blade, sounded in Hook’s ears.

“Down!” Saint Crispinian said.

And the earth was shaking now, and the thin scream was lost in thunder, only the thunder was not from the sky, but from the earth, and Hook obeyed the saint, crouching down beside Robert Perrill as the tunnel roof collapsed.

It seemed to last forever. Timbers cracked, the noise groaned and boomed, and the earth fell.

Hook closed his eyes. The thin scream was back, but it was inside his head. It was fear, his own scream, his terror of death. He was breathing dust. At the last day, he knew, the dead would rise from the earth. They would come from their graves, the earth making way for their flesh and bones, and they would face east toward the shining holy city of Jerusalem, and the sky in the east would be brighter than the sun and a great terror would swamp the newly resurrected dead as they stood in their winding sheets. There would be screaming and crying, folk flinching from the sudden dazzle of new light, but all the dead priests of the parish would have been buried with their feet toward the west so that when they rose from their tombs they would face their frightened congregations and could call out reassurance. And for some reason, as the earth collapsed to make Hook’s grave, he thought of Sir Martin, and wondered whether that twisted, sour, long-jawed face would be the first he would see on the last day when trumpets filled the heavens and God came in glory to take His people.

A roof timber slammed down, and the earth fell and Hook was crouched and the thunder was all around him and the scream in his head died to a whimper.

And then there was silence.

Sudden, utter, black silence.

Hook breathed.

“Oh, God,” Robert Perrill moaned.

Something pressed on Hook’s back. It was heavy, and seemed immovable, but it was not crushing him. The darkness was absolute.

“Oh, God, please,” Perrill said.

The earth shuddered again and there was a muffled bang. A gun, Hook thought, and now he could even hear voices, but they were very far off. His mouth was full of grit. He spat.

The poleax was still in Hook’s right hand, but he could not move it. The weapon was trapped by something. He let go of it and felt around him, conscious that he was in a small, tight space. His fingers groped across Perrill’s head. “Help me,” Perrill said.

Hook said nothing.

He felt behind him and realized a roof timber had half fallen and somehow left this small space where he crouched and breathed. The timber slanted down and it was that rough oak that was pressing into his spine. “What do I do?” he asked aloud.

“You’re not far from the surface,” Saint Crispinian said.

“You must help me,” Perrill said.

If I move I die, Hook thought.

“Nick! Help me,” Perrill said, “please!”

“Just push up,” Saint Crispinian said.

“Show some courage,” Saint Crispin said in his harsher voice.

“For God’s sake, help me,” Perrill moaned.

“Move to your right,” Saint Crispinian said, “and don’t be frightened.”

Hook moved slowly. Earth fell.

“Now dig your way out,” Saint Crispinian said, “like a mole.”

“Moles die,” Hook said, and he wanted to explain how they trapped moles by blocking their tunnels and then digging out the frightened animals, but the saint did not want to listen.

“You’re not going to die,” the saint said impatiently, “not if you dig.”

So Hook pushed upward, scrabbling at the earth with both hands, and the soil caved in, filling his mouth and he wanted to scream, but he could not scream, and he pushed with his legs, using all the strength in his body, and the earth collapsed around him and he was certain he would die here, except that suddenly, quite suddenly, he was breathing clean air. His grave had been very shallow, nothing but a shroud of fallen soil and he was half standing in open air and was astonished to discover that full night had not yet fallen. It seemed to be raining, except the sky was clear, and then he realized the French were shooting crossbow bolts from the barbican and from the half-wrecked walls. They were not shooting at him, but at men peering from the English trenches and around the edges of the sow.

Hook was up to his waist in earth. He reached down beside his right leg and took hold of Robert Perrill’s leather jerkin. He pulled, and the earth was loose enough to let him drag the choking archer up into the last of the daylight. A crossbow bolt thumped into the soil a few inches from Hook and he went very still.

He was in what looked like a crude trench and the high sides of the trench gave him some protection from the French bolts. The town’s defenders were cheering. They had seen the tunnel’s collapse and they saw the English trying to rescue anyone who might have survived the catastrophe and so they were filling the twilight with crossbow bolts to drive those rescuers back.

“Oh, God,” Robert Perrill sighed.

“You’re alive,” Hook said.

“Nick?”

“We have to wait,” Hook said.

Robert Perrill choked and spat out earth. “Wait?”

“Can’t move till dark,” Hook said, “they’re shooting at us.”

“My brother!”

“He ran away,” Hook said. He wondered what had happened to Sir Edward. Had that deeper part of the mine collapsed? Or had the French killed all the men in the tunnel? The enemy had driven their own shaft above the English excavation and then dropped into the tunnel and Hook imagined the sudden fight, the death in the darkness, and the pain of dying in the ready-made grave. “You were going to kill me,” he said to Robert Perrill.

Perrill said nothing. He was half lying on the trench floor, but his legs were still buried. He had lost his sword.

“You were going to kill me,” Hook said again.

“My brother was.”

“You held the sword,” Hook said.

Perrill wiped dirt from his face. “I’m sorry, Nick,” he said.

Hook snorted, said nothing.

“Sir Martin said he’d pay us,” Perrill admitted.

“Your father?” Hook sneered.

Perrill hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.”

“Because he hates me?”

“Your mother rejected him,” Perrill said.

Hook laughed. “And your mother whored herself,” he said flatly.

“He told her she’d go to heaven,” Perrill said, “that if you do it with a priest you go to heaven. That’s what he said.”

“He’s mad,” Hook said flatly, “moon-touched mad.”

Perrill ignored that. “He gave her money, he still does, and he’ll give us money.”

“To kill me?” Hook asked, though the French were trying hard enough to save Sir Martin the trouble. The crossbow bolts were thudding and spitting, some tumbling end over end down the crude trench made by the collapsed tunnel.

“He wants your woman,” Robert Perrill said.

“How much is he paying you?”

“A mark each,” Perrill said, eager to help Hook now.

A mark. One hundred and sixty pennies, or three hundred and twenty pence if both brothers were paid. Fifty-three days’ pay for an archer. The price of Hook’s life and Melisande’s misery. “So you have to kill me?” Hook asked, “then take my girl?”

“He wants that.”

“He’s an evil mad bastard,” Hook said.

“He can be kind,” Perrill said pathetically. “Do you remember John Luttock’s daughter?”

“Of course I remember her.”

“He took her away, but he paid John in the end, gave him the girl’s dowry.”

“A hundred and sixty pennies for raping her?”

“No!” Perrill was puzzled by the question. “I think it was two pounds, might have been more. John was happy.”

The light was fading fast now. The French had saved their loaded guns for the moment when their counter-mine pierced the English tunnel and now they fired shot after shot from Harfleur’s walls. The smoke billowed like thunderclouds to darken the already dark sky as the gun-stones bounced and thudded off the sow’s stout flanks.

“Robert!” a voice shouted from the sow.

“That’s Tom!” Robert Perrill said, recognizing his brother’s voice. He took a breath to call back, but Hook stopped his mouth with a hand.

“Keep quiet,” Hook snarled. A crossbow bolt tumbled down the trench and smacked into Hook’s mail. It had lost its force and bounced away as another bolt struck sparks from a lump of flint nearby. “What happens now?” Hook asked, taking his hand away from Robert Perrill’s mouth.

“What do you mean?”

“I take you back and you try and kill me again.”

“No!” Perrill said. “Get me out of here, Nick! I can’t move!”

“So what happens now?” Hook asked again. Crossbow bolts were cracking into the sow so frequently that it sounded like hail on a timber roof.

“I won’t kill you,” Perrill said.

“What should I do?” Hook asked.

“Pull me out, Nick, please,” Perrill said.

“I wasn’t talking to you. What should I do?”

“What do you think?” Saint Crispin, the harsher brother, said in a mocking voice.

“It’s murder,” Hook said.

“I won’t kill you!” Perrill insisted.

“You think we saved the girl so she could be raped?” Saint Crispinian asked.

“Get me out of this muck,” Perrill said, “please!”

Instead Hook reached out and found one of the spent crossbow bolts. It was as long as his forearm, as thick as two thumbs, and fledged with stiff leather vanes. The point was rusted, but still sharp.

He killed Perrill the easiest way. He smacked him hard around the head, and while the archer was still recovering from the blow, drove the bolt down through one eye. It went in easily, glancing off the socket, and Hook kept driving the thick shaft into Perrill’s brain until the rusted point scraped against the back of Perrill’s skull. The archer twisted and jerked, choked and quivered, but he died quickly enough.

“Robert!” Tom Perrill shouted from the sow.

A springolt bolt struck a masonry chimney breast left standing in the scorched remains of a burned house. The bolt spun into the falling darkness, end over end, soaring over the English trenches to fall far beyond. Hook wiped his wounded right hand on Robert Perrill’s tunic, cleaning off the muck that had spurted from the dead man’s eye, then heaved himself free of the soil. It was very nearly night and the smoke of the gunshots still shrouded what little light remained. He stepped over Perrill and staggered toward the sow, his legs slow to find their strength again. Crossbow bolts flicked past him, but their aim was wild now and Hook reached the sow safely. He held on to its flank as he walked, then dropped into the safety of the trench. Lanterns lit his dirt-crusted face and men stared at him.

“How many others survived?” a man-at-arms asked.

“Don’t know,” Hook said.

“Here,” a priest brought him a pot and Hook drank. He had not realized how thirsty he was until he tasted the ale.

“My brother?” Thomas Perrill was among the men staring at Hook.

“Killed by a crossbow bolt,” Hook said curtly and stared up into Perrill’s long face. “Straight through the eye,” he added brutally. Perrill stared at him, and then Sir John Cornewaille pushed through the small crowd in the sow’s pit.

“Hook!”

“I’m alive, Sir John.”

“You don’t look it. Come.” Sir John grasped Hook’s arm and led him toward the camp. “What happened?”

“They came from above,” Hook said. “I was on my way out when the roof fell in.”

“It fell on you?”

“Yes, Sir John.”

“Someone loves you, Hook.”

“Saint Crispinian does,” Hook said, then he saw Melisande in the light of a campfire and went to her embrace.

And afterward, in the darkness, had nightmares.

Sir John’s men started dying next morning. A man-at-arms and two archers, all three of them struck by the sickness that turned bowels into sewers of filthy water. Alice Godewyne died. A dozen other men-at-arms were sick, as were at least twenty archers. The army was being ravaged by the plague and the stench of shit hung over the camp, and the French built their walls higher every night and in the dawn men struggled to the gun-pits and trenches where they vomited and voided their bowels.

Father Christopher caught the sickness. Melisande found him shivering in his tent, face pale, lying in his own filth and too weak to move. “I ate some nuts,” he told her.

“Nuts?”

“Les noix,” he explained in a voice that was like a breathless groan. “I didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know?”

“The doctors tell me now that you shouldn’t eat nuts or cabbage. Not with the sickness about. I ate nuts.”

Melisande washed him. “You’ll make me sicker,” he complained, but was too weak to prevent her from cleaning him. She found him a blanket, though Father Christopher threw it off when the day’s warmth became insufferable. Much of the low land in which Harfleur stood was still flooded and the heat seemed to shimmer off the shallow water and made the air thick as steam. The guns still fired, but less frequently because the Dutch gunners had also been struck by the murrain. No one was spared. Men in the king’s household fell ill, great lords were struck down, and the angels of death hovered on dark wings above the English camp.

Melisande found blackberries and begged some barley from Sir John’s cooks. She boiled the berries and barley to reduce the liquid that she then sweetened with honey and spooned into Father Christopher’s mouth. “I’m going to die,” he told her weakly.

“No,” she said decisively, “you are not.”

The king’s own physician, Master Colnet, came to Father Christopher’s tent. He was a young, serious man with a pale face and a small nose with which he smelled Father Christopher’s feces. He offered no judgment on what he had determined from the odors, instead he briskly opened a vein in the priest’s arm and bled him copiously. “The girl’s ministrations will do no harm,” he said.

“God bless her,” Father Christopher said weakly.

“The king sent you wine,” Master Colnet said.

“Thank his majesty for me.”

“It’s excellent wine,” Colnet said, binding the cut arm with practiced skill, “though it didn’t help the bishop.”

“Bangor’s dead?”

“Not Bangor, Norwich. He died yesterday.”

“Dear God,” Father Christopher said.

“I bled him too,” Master Colnet said, “and thought he would live, but God decreed otherwise. I shall come back tomorrow.”

The Bishop of Norwich’s body was cut into quarters, then boiled in a giant cauldron to flense the flesh from the bones. The filthy steaming liquid was poured away and the bones were wrapped in linen and nailed in a coffin that was carried to the shore so the bishop could be taken home to be buried in the diocese he had taken such care to avoid in life. Most of the dead were simply dropped into pits dug wherever there was a patch of ground high enough to hold an unflooded grave, but as more men died the grave-pits were abandoned and the corpses were carried to the tidal flats and thrown into the shallow creeks where they were at the mercy of wild dogs, gulls, and eternity. The stench of the dead and the stink of shit and the reek of smoldering fires filled the encampment.

Two mornings after Hook had stumbled away from the fallen mine there was a sudden flurry of gunshots from the walls of Harfleur. The garrison had loaded their cannon and now fired them all at the same time so that the battered town was edged with smoke. Defenders cheered from the walls and waved derisive flags.

“A ship got through to them,” Sir John explained.

“A ship?” Hook asked.

“For Christ’s sake, you know what a ship is!”

“But how?”

“Our goddam fleet was asleep, that’s how! Now the goddam bastards have got food. God damn the bastards.” It seemed God had changed sides, for the defenses of Harfleur, though battered and broken, were constantly replenished and rebuilt. New walls backed the broken old, and every night the garrison deepened the defensive ditch and raised new obstacles in the shattered breaches. The intensity of the crossbow bolts did not let up, proof that the town had been well stocked, or else that the ship that had evaded the blockade had brought a new supply. The English, meanwhile, grew more ill. Sir John ducked into Father Christopher’s tent and stared at the priest. “How is he?” he asked Melisande.

She shrugged. As far as Hook could tell the priest was already dead, for he lay unmoving on his back, his mouth slackly open and his skin grayish pale.

“Is he breathing?” Sir John demanded.

Melisande nodded.

“God help us,” Sir John said and backed out of the tent, “God help us,” he said again, and stared at the town. It should have fallen two weeks ago, yet there it lay, defiant still, the wreckage of its wall and towers protecting the new barricades that had been built behind.

There was some good news. Sir Edward Derwent was a prisoner in Harfleur, as was Dafydd ap Traharn. The heralds, returning from another vain attempt to persuade the garrison to surrender, told how the men trapped in the mine’s far end had surrendered. The collapsed mine had been abandoned, though on Harfleur’s eastern side, where the king’s brother led the siege, other shafts were still being driven toward the walls. The best news was that the French were making no effort to relieve the town. English patrols were riding far into the countryside to find grain, and there was no sign of an enemy army coming to strike at the disease-weakened English. Harfleur, it seemed, had been left to rot, though it appeared now that the besiegers would be destroyed first.

“All that money,” Sir John said bleakly, “and all we’ve done is march a couple of miles to become lords of graves and shit-pits.”

“So why don’t we just leave it?” Hook asked. “Just march away?”

“A goddam stupid question,” Sir John said. “The place might surrender tomorrow! And all Christendom is watching. If we abandon the siege we look weak. And besides, even if we did march inland we won’t necessarily find the French. They’ve learned to fear English armies and they know the quickest way to get rid of us is to hide themselves in fortresses. So we might just abandon this siege to start another. No, we have to take this goddam town.”

“Then why don’t we attack?” Hook asked.

“Because we’ll lose too many men,” Sir John said. “Imagine it, Hook. Crossbows, springolts, guns, all tearing into us as we advance, killing us while we fill the ditch, and then we get over the wall’s rubble to find a new ditch, a new wall, and more crossbows, more guns, more catapults. We can’t afford to lose a hundred dead and four hundred crippled. We came here to conquer France, not die in this rancid shit-hole.” He kicked at the hard ground, then stared at the sea where six English ships lay at anchor off the harbor entrance. “If I commanded Harfleur’s garrison,” he said ruefully, “I know just what I’d do now.”

“What’s that?”

“Attack,” Sir John said. “Kick us while we’re half crippled. We speak of chivalry, Hook, and we are chivalrous. We fight so politely! Yet you know how to win a battle?”

“Fight dirty, Sir John.”

“Fight filthy, Hook. Fight like the devil and send chivalry to hell. He’s no fool.”

“The devil?”

Sir John shook his head. “No, Raoul de Gaucourt. He commands the garrison.” Sir John nodded toward Harfleur. “He’s a gentleman, Hook, but he’s also a fighter. And he’s no fool. And if I were Raoul de Gaucourt I’d kick the shit out of us right now.”

And next day Raoul de Gaucourt did.

SEVEN

“Wake up, Nick!” It was Thomas Evelgold bellowing at him. The centenar slapped Hook’s shelter, shaking it so hard that scraps of dead leaves and pieces of turf fell onto Hook and Melisande. “God damn you, wake up!” Evelgold shouted again.

Hook opened his eyes to darkness. “Tom?” he called, but Evelgold had already moved on to wake other archers.

A second voice was shouting for the men to assemble. “Armor! Weapons! Hurry! Goddam now! I want you all here, now! Now!”

“What is it?” Melisande asked.

“Don’t know,” Hook said. He fumbled to find his mail coat. The stink of the leather lining was overpowering as pulled it over his head. He forced the unwieldy garment down his chest. “Sword belt?”

“Here,” Melisande was kneeling. The campfires were being revived and their flames reflected red from her wide open eyes.

Hook put on the short surcoat with its cross of Saint George, the badge that every man was required to wear in the siege-works. He pulled on his boots, the once good boots that he had bought in Soissons but which were now coming apart at the seams. He strapped on his belt, slid the bow from its cover, and snatched up an arrow bag. He had tied a long leather strap to the poleax and he slung that over his shoulder, then ducked into the night. “I’ll be back,” he called to Melisande.

“Casque!” she shouted after him. “Casque!” He reached back and took the helmet from her. He felt a sudden urge to tell her he loved her, but Melisande had disappeared back into the shelter and Hook said nothing. He sensed the night was ending. The stars were pale, which meant dawn would soon stain the sky above the obstinate city, but ahead of him there was tumult. The flames in the siege-works leaped higher, casting grotesque shadows across the broken ground.

“Come to me! Come to me!” Sir John was shouting beside the largest campfire. The archers were gathering quickly, but the men-at-arms, who needed more time to buckle on their plate armor, were slower to arrive. Sir John had chosen to forgo his expensive plate armor and was dressed like the archers in mail coat and jupon. “Evelgold! Hook! Magot! Candeler! Brutte!” Sir John called. Walter Magot, Piers Candeler, and Thomas Brutte were the other three ventenars.

“Here, Sir John!” Evelgold responded.

“Bastards have made a sally,” Sir John said urgently. That explained the shouting and the sound of steel clashing with steel that came from the forward trenches. Harfleur’s garrison had sallied out to attack the sow and gun-pits. “We have to kill the bastards,” Sir John said. “We’re going to attack straight down to the sow. Some of us are, but not you, Hook! You know the Savage?”

“Yes, Sir John,” Hook said, adjusting the buckle of his sword belt. The Savage was a catapult, a great wooden beast that hurled stones into Harfleur and, of all the siege engines, it lay closest to the sea at the right-hand end of the English lines.

“Take your men there,” Sir John said, “and work your way in toward the sow, got that?”

“Yes, Sir John,” Hook said again. He strung the bow by bracing one end on the ground and looping the cord over the upper nock.

“Then go! Go now!” Sir John snarled, “and kill the bastards!” He turned. “Where’s my banner! I want my banner! Bring me my goddamned banner!”

Hook led sixteen men now. It should have been twenty-three, but seven were either dead or ill. He wondered how seventeen men were supposed to fight their way along trenches and gun-pits swarming with an enemy who had sallied from the Leure Gate. It was evident the French had captured large stretches of the siege-works because, as Hook led his men down the southward track, he could see more fires springing up in the English gun-pits and the shapes of men scurrying in front of those flames. Groups of men-at-arms and archers crossed Hook’s path, all going toward the fighting. Hook could hear the clash of blades now.

“What do we do, Nick?” Will of the Dale asked.

“You heard Sir John. Start at the Savage, work our way in,” Hook said, and was surprised that he sounded confident. Sir John’s orders had been vague and given hurriedly, and Hook had simply obeyed by leading his men toward the Savage, but only now was he trying to work out what he was supposed to do. Sir John was assembling his men-at-arms and had kept most of the archers, presumably for an attack on the sow that seemed to have fallen into the enemy’s possession, but why detach Hook? Because, Hook decided, Sir John needed flank protection. Sir John and his men were the beaters and they would drive the game across Hook’s front where the archers could cut them down. Hook, recognizing the plan’s simplicity, felt a surge of pride. Sir John could have sent his centenar Tom Evelgold or any of the other ventenars, all of whom were older and more senior, but Sir John had chosen Hook.

Fires burned at the Savage, but they had not been set by the French. They were the campfires of the men who guarded the pit in which the catapult sat, and their flames lit the monstrously gaunt beams of the giant engine. A dozen archers, the sentries who guarded the machine through the night, waited with strung bows and, as they saw men coming down the slope, turned those bows toward Hook. “Saint George!” Hook bellowed, “Saint George!”

The bows dropped. The sentries were nervous. “What’s happening?” one of them demanded of Hook.

“French are out.”

“I know, but what’s happening?”

“I don’t know!” Hook snapped, then turned to count his men. He did it in the old way of the country, like a shepherd counting his flock, just as his father had taught him. Yain, tain, eddero, he counted and got to bumfit, which was fifteen, and looked for the extra man and saw two. Tain-o-bumfit? Then he saw that the seventeenth man was short and slight and carried a crossbow. “For God’s sake, girl, go back,” he called, and then he forgot Melisande because Tom Scarlet shouted a warning and Hook whipped around to see a band of men running toward the Savage down the wide trench that snaked to the catapult from the nearest gun-pit. Some of the approaching men carried torches that streamed sparks and the bright flames reflected from helmets, swords, and axes.

“No crosses!” Tom Scarlet warned, meaning that none of the men in the trench was wearing the cross of Saint George. They were French and, seeing the archers outlined by the fires burning in the Savage’s pit, they began shouting their challenge. “Saint Denis! Harfleur!”

“Bows!” Hook shouted, and his men instinctively spread out. “Kill them!” he shouted.

The range was short, less than fifty paces, and the attackers made themselves into an easy target because they were constricted by the trench’s walls. The first arrows drilled into them and the thuds of the heads striking home instantly silenced the enemy’s shouting. The sound of the bows was sharp, each release of the string followed by the briefest fluttering rush as the feathers caught the air. In the darkness those feathers made small white flickers that stopped abruptly as the arrows slapped home. To Hook it seemed as if time had slowed. He was plucking arrows from his bag, laying them over the stave, bringing up the bow, hauling the cord, releasing, and he felt no excitement, no fear, and no exhilaration. He knew exactly where each arrow would go before he even pulled it from the bag. He aimed at the approaching men’s bellies and, in the flame-light, he saw those men doubling over as his arrows struck.

The enemy’s charge ended as surely as though they had run into a stone wall. The trench was wide enough for six men to walk abreast and all the leading Frenchmen were on the ground, spitted by arrows, and the men behind tripped on them and, in their turn, were hit by arrows. Some glanced off plate armor, but others sliced straight through the metal, and even an arrow that failed to pierce the plate had sufficient force to knock a man backward. If the enemy could have spread out they might have reached the Savage, but the trench walls constricted them and the feathered bodkins ripped in from the dark and so the attacking party turned and ran back, leaving a dark mass behind, not all of it motionless. “Denton! Furnays! Cobbold!” Hook called, “make sure those bastards are dead ’uns. The rest of you, after me!”

The three men jumped into the trench, drew their swords, and approached the wounded enemy. Hook meanwhile stayed above the trench, advancing beside it with an arrow on his cord. He could see men fighting around the distant sow and in the wide pit where the biggest gun, the great bombard called the King’s Daughter, was dug in. Fire burned bright there, but it was none of Hook’s business. His job was to be on Sir John’s flank.

The ground was rough, churned up by digging and by the strike of French missiles. The boulders slung by the big catapults in Harfleur littered the path, as did the remnants of the houses that had been burned when the siege began, but the dawn was now seeping a faint light in the east, just enough to cast shadows from the obstacles. A crossbow bolt whipped past Hook’s head and he sensed it had come from the nearest gun-pit where a cannon called the Redeemer was emplaced. “Will! Keep those bastards busy.”

“What bastards?”

“The ones who’ve captured the Redeemer!” Hook said, and grabbed Will of the Dale’s arm and turned him toward the gun-pit, which was a black shadow twenty paces beyond the trench. It had been protected from the springolts and guns of Harfleur by one of the ingenious wooden screens that loomed high in the darkness, but the tilting screen had not kept the enemy from capturing the cannon. “Put as many arrows into the pit as you can,” Hook told Will, “but stop shooting when we reach the gun.” Hook pushed six men toward Will. “You obey Will,” he told them, “and you look after Melisande,” he added to Will, for she was still with the group. “The rest of you, after me.”

Another crossbow bolt hissed close by, but Hook’s men were moving fast now. Will of the Dale and his half-dozen men were moving eastward to shoot their arrows through the opening at the back of the pit, while Hook was running to the Redeemer’s flank. He jumped down into the wide trench and waited for his six men to join him. “No bows from now on,” he told them.

“No bows? We’re archers!” Will Sclate grumbled. Will Sclate always grumbled. He was not a popular man, too morose to be easy company and too slow-witted to join in the incessant chatter among the archers, but he was big and hugely strong. He had grown up on one of Sir John’s estates, a laborer’s son who might have expected to work the fields his whole life, but Sir John had seen the boy’s strength and insisted he learn the longbow. Now, as an archer, he earned far more than any laborer, but he was as slow and stubborn as the clay fields he had once worked with hoe and beetle.

“You’re a soldier,” Hook snapped at him, “and you’re going to use hand weapons.”

“What are we doing?” Geoffrey Horrocks asked. He was the youngest of Sir John’s archers, just seventeen, the son of a falconer.

“We’re going to kill some bastards,” Hook said. He slung the bow across his body and hefted the poleax instead. “And we go fast! After me! Now!”

He scrambled up the face of the trench and over the wreckage of the soil-filled wicker baskets that formed the trench’s parapet. He could see flame-light in the Redeemer’s pit and he could hear the sharp thin noise of bowstrings being released from his left where Will of the Dale’s men were lined beside the stone stump of a wrecked chimney. A shout came from the pit, then another, then a screech as an arrowhead scraped against the cannon’s flank. Seven archers were shooting into the pit. In one minute they could easily loose sixty or seventy arrows, and those arrows were flickering through the half-light, filling the gun-pit with hissing death and forcing the French to crouch for protection.

Then Hook and his men came at them from the flank. The Frenchmen did not see him because the arrows were whistling and thumping around them, and they were crouching to find what little protection the pit offered. The massive wooden screen gave splendid protection on the face that looked toward Harfleur, but the pit had never been designed to protect men being attacked from the rear and Will’s arrows were streaking down the trench and through the wide gap. Then Hook leaped across the parapet at the pit’s side and he prayed the arrows would stop.

They must have stopped because none of his men was struck by an arrow. The archers were shouting a challenge as they followed Hook over the wicker baskets, and still shouting as they started the killing. Hook was swinging the poleax as he landed and its lead-weighted hammer head crashed into a crouching Frenchman’s helmet and Hook sensed rather than saw the metal crumpling under the massive blow that collapsed metal, skull, and brain. A man reared up to his right, but Sclate hurled him back with contemptuous ease as Hook sprawled on the far side of the cannon. He had leaped clean across the Redeemer’s barrel.

He hit the far side of the pit hard, lost his footing, and fell heavily. A surge of fear flared cold in his veins. The biggest fear was that he was on the ground and vulnerable, another that he might have damaged the bow slung on his back, but later, when he remembered the fight, he realized he had also felt elation. In memory it was all a blur of screaming men, bright blades, and ringing metal, but in that welter of impressions there was a cold hard center in which Nick Hook regained his feet and saw a man-at-arms at the front of the pit. The man was wearing plate armor half covered by a surcoat that displayed a red heart pierced by a burning lance. He was holding a sword. His visor was raised and his eyes reflected the small flames of the fallen torches and Hook saw fear in those eyes, and Hook felt no pity because of that fear. Kill or be killed, Sir John always said, and Hook ran at the man, poleax leveled, the haft held in both his hands, and he ignored the feeble defensive sword-swing the man offered and lunged the spear point at the Frenchman’s midriff. The blade scraped off the bottom rim of the breastplate and jarred on the faulds, the plate strips worn on a leather skirt designed to stop a sword thrust into the lower belly. But no fauld could resist a poleax thrust and Hook saw the man’s terrified eyes open wide, and saw his mouth make a great hole as the spear point ripped through steel, leather, mail undershirt, skin, muscle, and guts to ram against the Frenchman’s spine. The man made a mewing noise and Hook was bellowing a challenge as the thrust pushed his victim back against the gun-pit’s face. Hook hauled the poleax back, and the flailing man came with it, his flesh trapping the point, and Hook put his boot into the mess of blood and armor, braced his leg and tugged till the blade came free. He lunged it forward again, but checked the blow as the man fell to his knees. Hook whipped around, ready to defend himself, but the fight was already over. There had only been eight men in the pit. They must have been left there by the larger French party advancing toward the Savage and, when that party had been thrown back by arrows, these eight had been forgotten. Their job had been to wreck the cannon, a job they had been trying to do with a huge ax that lay abandoned beside the windlass that tilted the heavy protective screen on its massive axle. They had managed to chop the windlass into splinters, but now all but one of them was dead.

“Can’t hurt a cannon with an ax!” Tom Scarlet said derisively. The one living Frenchman moaned.

“Anyone hurt?” Hook demanded.

“I twisted my ankle,” Horrocks said. He was panting and his eyes were wide with astonishment or fear.

“You’ll mend,” Hook said abruptly. “Are we all here?” His men were all present, and Will of the Dale was running up the trench with Melisande and his six archers. The wounded Frenchman whimpered and drew his legs up. He had been wearing no armor except a padded haubergeon and Will Sclate had driven an ax deep into his chest so that the linen padding had spilled out and was now soaked with blood. Hook could see a mess of lungs and splintered ribs. Blood bubbled black from the man’s mouth as he moaned again. “Put him out of his misery,” Hook demanded, but his archers just stared at him. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Hook said. He stepped over a corpse, put the poleax’s spike at the man’s neck, lunged once, and so did the job himself.

Will of the Dale stared at the carnage in the pit. “Last time the silly bastards do that!” he said. He tried to speak lightly, imitating Sir John, but there was a squawk in his voice and horror in his eyes.

Melisande was close behind Will. She stared dumbly at the dead Frenchmen, next at the blood dripping thick from Hook’s poleax, then up into his eyes. “You shouldn’t be here,” he told her harshly.

“I can’t stay in the camp,” she said, “that priest might come.”

“We’ll look after her, Nick,” Will of the Dale said, his voice still strained. He took a step forward and lifted one of the fallen torches, though there was enough light in the east now to make the flames unnecessary. “Look what they did,” he said.

The Frenchmen had used their big ax to chop through the iron bands that hooped the Redeemer’s barrel. Hook had not noticed the damage before, but now he saw that two of the metal rings had been hacked clean through, which meant the gun was probably useless because, if it was fired, the barrel would expand, split, and kill every man in the pit. That was none of Hook’s business. “Search the bastards,” he ordered his men. The three archers who had plundered the bodies of the first French casualties had found silver chains, coins, brooches, and a dagger with a jeweled hilt. Those valuables were all in an arrow bag to which new riches were now added. “We’ll share it out later,” Hook decreed. “Now come on, get out of here! Bows!”

His bow had been undamaged by his fall. He took it in his left hand, slung the poleax on his shoulder, and laid an arrow on the cord. He climbed the pit’s side into a gray dawn streaked by dark smoke.

In front of him a battle raged around the sow and around the pit that held the King’s Daughter. The French had captured both, but the English had streamed from their camp and now outnumbered the raiding party, which was being forced inexorably back. Trumpets blew, the signal for the French to break off their fight and retreat to Harfleur. Flames licked at the sow’s heavy timbers and at the swinging screen sheltering the bombard. Men-at-arms were hacking at each other, blades flashing reflected light as they slashed and thrust. Hook looked for Sir John’s rampant lion banner and saw it to his left. He saw too that Sir John’s men were fighting across the main trench, driving back the large group of French who now formed the attackers’ left wing. “Bows!” Hook called.

He hauled the cord back, drawing it to his right ear. The French had been summoned back to the town, but they dared not turn and run for fear of the close English pursuit, and so they were fighting hard, trying to drive Sir John’s men back into the trench. They were half facing away from Hook and had no idea that he was on their flank. “Aim true,” Hook shouted, wanting none of his arrows to fall on Englishmen, then he released, took another bodkin and that new arrow was only half drawn as the first drove into an enemy’s back. Hook drew full again, saw a Frenchman turn toward the new threat, released, and the arrow slapped into the man’s face, and suddenly the enemy was running, defeated by the unexpected attack from their flank.

A crossbow bolt flashed in front of Hook. A springolt bolt, much larger, churned up a spout of earth as a gun fired from Harfleur’s wall. The stone banged into the ground just behind the archers as yet more bolts flickered through the smoke. The crossbow bolts made a fluttering noise and Hook reckoned their leather fledgings were twisted out of shape, perhaps because they had been badly stored. The bolts were not flying true, but they were still coming too close. Hook glanced at the barbican and saw the enemy crossbowmen taking aim from its summit. He turned and sped an arrow toward them, then called to his men. “Stop shooting! Get to the trench!”

The French were retreating fast now, but they had done what they had set out to do, which was to damage the siege-works. Three of the cannon, including the King’s Daughter, would never fire again, and all along the trenches parapets had been thrown down and men killed. And now, from the broken ramparts, the defenders jeered at the English as the returning raiding party negotiated the deep ditch in front of the broken barbican. Arrows still followed the French and some men were struck and slid into the ditch’s bottom, but the sally had been a success. The English works burned and the garrison’s insults stung.

“Bastards,” Sir John was saying repeatedly. “They caught us sleeping, the bastards!”

“The Savage isn’t touched,” Hook reported stoically, “but they broke the Redeemer.”

“We’ll break them, the goddam bastards!” Sir John said.

“And none of us was hurt,” Hook added.

“We’ll hurt them, by Christ,” Sir John vowed. His face was twisted by anger. The siege was already bogged down, but now the enemy had delivered another hard blow to the English hopes. Sir John shuddered as an enemy man-at-arms, taken prisoner, was ushered down the trench. For a heartbeat it looked as though Sir John would unleash his fury on the hapless man, but then he saw Melisande and released his frustration on her instead. “What in the name of suffering Christ is she doing here?” he demanded of Hook. “Jesus Christ on the cross, are you turd-witted? Can’t be without your woman for a goddamned minute?”

“It was not Nick!” Melisande called defiantly. She was holding the crossbow, though she had not shot with it. “It was not Nick,” she said again, “and he did tell me to go away.”

Sir John’s courtesy toward women overcame his anger. He grunted what might have been an apology, and then Melisande was explaining herself, talking in fast French, gesturing toward the camp, and as she spoke Sir John’s face showed a renewed anger. He turned on Hook. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what, Sir John?”

“That a bastard priest has threatened her?”

“I fight my own battles,” Hook said sullenly.

“No!” Sir John thrust a gauntleted hand to strike Hook’s shoulder. “You fight my battles, Hook,” he punched Hook’s shoulder again, “that’s what I pay you for. But if you fight mine, then I fight yours, you understand? We are a company!” Sir John shouted the last four words so loudly that men fifty yards down the trench turned to watch him. “We are a company! No one threatens any one of us without threatening all of us! Your girl should be able to walk naked through the whole army and not a man will dare touch her because she belongs to us! She belongs to our company! By Christ I’ll kill the holy bastard for this! I’ll rip the spine out of his goddam throat and feed his shriveled prick to the dogs! No one threatens us, no one!”

Sir John, with his real enemies safely back behind their smoke-rimmed ramparts, was looking for a fight. And Hook had just given him one.

Hook watched as Melisande spooned honey into Father Christopher’s mouth. The priest was sitting, his back supported by a barrel that had come from England filled with smoked herrings. He was skeletally thin, his face was pale and tired and he was plainly as weak as a fledgling, but he was alive.

“Cobbett’s dead,” Hook said, “and Robert Fletcher.”

“Poor Robert,” Father Christopher said, “how’s his brother?”

“Still alive,” Hook said, “but he’s sick.”

“Who else?”

“Pearson’s dead, Hull is, Borrow and John Taylor.”

“God have mercy on them all,” the priest said and made the sign of the cross. “The men-at-arms?”

“John Gaffney, Peter Dance, Sir Thomas Peters,” Hook said, “all dead.”

“God has turned His face from us,” Father Christopher said bleakly. “Does your saint still speak to you?”

“Not now,” Hook admitted.

Father Christopher sighed. He closed his eyes momentarily. “We have sinned,” he said grimly.

“We were told God was on our side,” Hook said stubbornly.

“We believed that,” the priest said, “we surely believed that, and we came here with that assurance in our hearts, but the French will believe the same thing. And now God is revealing Himself. We should not have come here.”

“You should not,” Melisande said firmly.

“Harfleur will fall,” Hook insisted.

“It probably will,” Father Christopher allowed, then paused as Melisande wiped a trickle of honey from his chin. “If the French don’t march to its relief? Yes, it will fall eventually, but what then? How much of the army is left?”

“Enough,” Hook said.

Father Christopher offered a tired smile. “Enough to do what? To march on Rouen and make another siege? To capture Paris? We’ll scarce be able to defend ourselves if the French do come here! So what will we do? We’ll go into Harfleur and remake its walls, and then sail home. We’ve failed, Hook. We’ve failed.”

Hook sat in silence. One of the remaining English cannons fired, the sound flat and lingering in the warm air. Somewhere in the camp a man sang. “We can’t just go home,” he said after a while.

“We can,” Father Christopher said, “and we most certainly will. All this money for nothing! For Harfleur, maybe. And what will it cost to rebuild those walls?” He shrugged.

“Maybe we should abandon the siege,” Hook suggested morosely.

The priest shook his head. “Henry will never do that. He has to win! That way he proves God’s favor, and besides, abandoning the siege makes him look weak.” He was silent for a while, then frowned. “His father took the throne by force, and Henry fears others might do the same if he shows weakness.”

“Eat, don’t talk,” Melisande said briskly.

“I’ve eaten enough, my dear,” Father Christopher said.

“You should eat more.”

“I will. This evening. Merci.”

“God’s sparing you, father,” Hook said.

“Perhaps He doesn’t want me in heaven?” Father Christopher suggested with a wan smile, “or perhaps He is giving me time to become a better priest.”

“You are a good priest,” Hook said warmly.

“I shall tell Saint Peter that when he asks if I deserve to be in heaven. Ask Nick Hook, I shall say. And Saint Peter will ask me, who is Nick Hook? Oh, I shall say, he’s a thief, a rogue, and probably a murderer, but ask him anyway.”

Hook grinned. “I’m honest now, father.”

“Thou art not far from the kingdom of heaven, young Hook, but let us hope it’s many a long day before we meet there. And at least we’ll be spared Sir Martin’s company.”

Melisande sneered. “He is a coward. Un poltron!”

“Most men are cowards when they meet Sir John,” Father Christopher said mildly.

“He had nothing to say!” Melisande said.

Sir John had gone to the shelters where Lord Slayton’s men were camped. He had taken Hook and Melisande with him, and he had bellowed that any man who wished to kill Hook could do so right there and then. “Come and take his woman,” Sir John had shouted. “Who wants her?”

Lord Slayton’s archers, his men-at-arms, and his camp followers had been cleaning armor, preparing food, or just resting, but all had turned to watch the show. They watched in silence.

“Come and take her!” Sir John shouted. “She’s yours! You can take turns like dogs rutting a bitch! Come on! She’s a pretty thing! You want to hump her? She’s yours!” He waited, but not one of Lord Slayton’s men moved. Then Sir John had pointed at Hook. “You can all have her! But first you have to kill my ventenar!”

Still no one moved. No one even met Sir John’s eyes.

“Which man is being paid to kill you?” Sir John had asked Hook.

“That one,” Hook said, pointing at Tom Perrill.

“Then come here,” Sir John had invited Perrill, “come and kill him. I’ll give you his woman if you do.” Perrill had not moved. He was half hiding behind William Snoball who, as Lord Slayton’s steward, had some small authority, but Snoball dared not confront Sir John Cornewaille. “There is just one thing,” Sir John had added, “which is that you have to kill both Hook and me before you get the woman. So come on! Fight me first!” He had drawn his sword and waited.

No one had moved, no one had spoken. Sir Martin had been watching from behind some men-at-arms. “Is that the priest?” Sir John had demanded of Hook.

“That’s him.”

“My name is John Cornewaille,” Sir John had shouted, “and some of you know who I am. And Hook is my man. He is my man! He is under my protection, as is this girl!” He had put his free arm around Melisande’s shoulders, then pointed his sword blade at Sir Martin. “You, priest, come here.”

Sir Martin had not moved.

“You can come here,” Sir John said, “or I can come and fetch you.”

Sir Martin, long face twitching, had sidled away from the protective men-at-arms. He looked around as if seeking a place to run, but Sir John had snarled at him to come closer and he had obeyed. “He’s a priest!” Sir John had called, “so he’s a witness to this oath. I swear by this sword and by the bones of Saint Credan, that if a hair of Hook’s head is touched, if he is attacked, if he is wounded, if he is killed, then I shall find you and I shall kill you.”

Sir Martin had been peering at Sir John as though he were a curious specimen in a fairground display; a five-legged cow, perhaps, or a woman with a beard. Now, still with a puzzled expression, the priest raised both hands to heaven. “Forgive him, Lord, forgive him!” he called.

“Priest,” Sir John began.

“Knight!” Sir Martin had retorted with surprising force. “The devil rides one horse and Christ the other. You know what that means?”

“I know what this means,” Sir John had held his sword blade toward the priest’s throat, “it means that if one of you cabbage-shitting rat-humping turds touches Hook or his woman then he will have to reckon with me. And I will tear your farting bowels out of your putrid arses with my bare hands, I will make you die screaming, I will send your shit-ridden souls to hell, I will kill you!”

Silence. Sir John had sheathed his sword, the hilt thumping loud onto the scabbard’s throat. He stared at Sir Martin, daring the priest to challenge him, but Sir Martin had drifted away into one of his reveries. “Let’s go,” Sir John had said and, when they were out of earshot of the shelters, he had laughed. “That’s settled that.”

“Thank you,” Melisande had said, her relief obvious.

“Thank me? I enjoyed that, lass.”

“He probably did enjoy it,” Father Christopher said when the tale was told to him, “but he’d have enjoyed it more if one of them had offered a fight. He does love a fight.”

“Who’s Saint Credan?” Hook asked.

“He was a Saxon,” Father Christopher said, “and when the Normans came they reckoned he shouldn’t be a saint at all because he was a Saxon peasant like you, Hook, so they burned his bones, but the bones turned to gold. Sir John likes him, I have no idea why.” He frowned. “He’s not as simple as he likes to pretend.”

“He’s a good man,” Hook said.

“He probably is,” Father Christopher agreed, “but don’t let him hear you say that.”

“And you’re recovering, father.”

“Thanks to God and to your woman, Hook, yes, I am.” The priest reached out and took Melisande’s hand. “And it’s time you made an honest woman of her, Hook.”

“I am honest,” Melisande said.

“Then it’s time you tamed Master Hook,” Father Christopher said. Melisande looked at Hook and for a moment her face betrayed nothing, then she nodded. “Maybe that’s why God spared me,” Father Christopher said, “to marry the two of you. We shall do the deed, young Hook, before we leave France.”

And it seemed that must be soon because Harfleur stood undefeated, the army of England was dying of disease, and the year was inexorably passing. It was already September. In a few weeks the autumn rains would come, and the cold would come, and the harvest would be safely gathered behind fortress walls, and so the campaign season would end. Time was running out.

England had gone to war. And she was losing.

That evening Thomas Evelgold tossed a big sack to Hook. Hook jerked aside, thinking the sack would flatten him, but it was surprisingly light and merely rolled off his shoulder. “Tow,” Evelgold said in explanation.

“Tow?”

“Tow,” Evelgold said, “for fire arrows. One sheaf of arrows for each archer. Sir John wants it done by midnight, and we’re to be down in the trench before dawn. Belly’s boiling pitch for us.” Belly was Andrew Belcher, Sir John’s steward who supervised the kitchen servants and sumpters. “Have you ever made a fire arrow?” Evelgold asked.

“Never,” Hook confessed.

“Use the broadheads, tie a fistful of tow up by the head, dip it in pitch and aim high. We need two dozen apiece.” Evelgold carried more sacks to the other groups while Hook pulled out handfuls of the greasy tow, which was simply clumps of unwashed fleece straight off the sheep’s back. A flea jumped from the wool and vanished up his sleeve.

He divided the tow into seventeen equal sections and each of his archers divided their share into twenty-four, one lump of fleece for each arrow. Hook cut up some spare bowstrings and his men used the lengths of cord to bind the bouquets of dirty wool to the arrowheads, then they lined up by Belly’s cauldron to dip the tow into the boiling pitch. They propped the arrows upright against tree stumps or barrels to let the sticky pitch solidify. “What’s happening in the dawn?” Hook asked Evelgold.

“The French kicked our arses this morning,” Evelgold said grimly, “so we have to kick theirs tomorrow morning.” He shrugged as if he did not expect to achieve much. “You lose any more men today?”

“Cobbett and Fletch. Matson can’t last long.”

Evelgold swore. “Good men,” he said grimly, “and dying, for what?” He spat toward a campfire. “When the pitch is dry,” he went on, “tease it out a bit. It lets it catch the fire easier.”

The camp was restless all night. Men were carrying faggots to the forward trench nearest to the enemy’s barbican. The faggots were great bundles of wood, bound with rope, and the sight of them made it clear enough what was intended at dawn. A flooded ditch protected the barbican and it would need to be filled if men were to cross and assault the battered fortress.

Sir John’s men-at-arms were ordered to put on full armor. Thirty men-at-arms had sailed from Southampton Water on the day the swans had flown low through the fleet to signify good fortune, but only nineteen were now fit to serve. Six had died, the other five were vomiting and shitting and shivering. The fit men-at-arms were being helped by squires and pages who buckled plates of armor over padded leather jerkins that had been wiped with grease so the shrouding metal would move easily. Sword belts were strapped over jupons, though most men-at-arms chose to carry poleaxes or shortened lances. A priest from Sir William Porter’s household heard confessions and gave blessings. Sir William was Sir John’s closest friend and also his brother-in-arms, which meant they fought side by side and had sworn to protect each other, to ransom each other if, by misfortune, either were taken prisoner, and to protect the other man’s widow if either were to die. Sir William was a studious-looking man, thin-faced and pale-eyed. His hair, before he hid it with a snout-visored helm, was thinning. He seemed out of place in armor, as though his natural home was a library or perhaps a courtroom, but he was Sir John’s chosen battle companion and that spoke volumes about his courage. He adjusted his helmet and pushed up the visor before nodding a nervous greeting to Sir John’s archers.

Those archers were armored and armed. Most men, like Hook, wore a padded haubergeon sewn with metal plates over a mail coat. They had helmets and a few had aventails, the hood of mail that was worn beneath the helmet and fell across the shoulders. Their bow arms were protected by bracers, they wore swords and carried three arrow bags, two of which contained the tow-headed fire arrows. Some chose to carry an ax as well as a bow, but most, like Hook, preferred the poleax. All the men, whether lords, knights, men-at-arms, or archers, wore the red cross of Saint George on their jupons.

“God be with you,” Sir William saluted the archers, who murmured a dutiful response.

“And the devil take the French!” Sir John called as he strode from his tent. He was in a high mood, the prospect of action giving his eyes a gleam. “It’s a simple enough job this morning!” he said dismissively. “We just have to take the barbican away from the bastards! Let’s do it before breakfast!”

Melisande had given Hook a lump cut from a flitch of bacon and a piece of bread, which he ate as Sir John’s company filed downhill toward the siege-works. It was still dark. The wind was brisk and cool from the east, bringing the scent of the salt marshes to cut the cloying smell of the dead. The arrows clattered in their bags as the archers followed the winding paths. Fires glowed in the siege lines, and on the defenses of Harfleur where, Hook knew, the garrison would be repairing the damage done during the previous day. “God bless you,” a priest called as the bowmen filed past, “God be with you! God preserve you!”

The French must have sensed something evil was brewing for they used a pair of catapults to lob two light carcasses across the ramparts. The carcasses were great balls of cloth and tinder soaked in pitch and sulfur and they wheeled and sparked as they arced through the night sky, then fell in a great gout of flame that burst bright when the wicker-strapped balls landed. The firelight reflected off helmets in the English trenches and those gleams provoked the crossbowmen on the walls to start shooting. The bolts whispered overhead or thumped into the parapets. Insults were shouted from the walls, but the shouts were half-hearted, as though the garrison was tired and uncertain.

The English trench was crowded. The archers with the fire arrows were ordered to the front, and behind them more archers waited with bundles of faggots. Sir John Holland, the king’s nephew, was in charge of the attack, though again, as when he had led the scouting party ashore before the invasion, he was accompanied by his stepfather, Sir John Cornewaille. “When I give the command,” the younger Sir John said, “the archers will loose fire arrows at the barbican. We want to set it alight!”

Iron braziers had been placed every few yards along the trench. They were heaped with burning sea-coal that gave off pungent fumes.

“Drown them with fire!” Sir John Holland urged the archers, “smoke them out like rats! And when they’re blinded by smoke we fill in the ditch and take the barbican by assault!” He made it sound easy.

The remaining English guns had been loaded with stones coated with pitch. The Dutch gunners waited, their linstocks glowing. Dawn seemed to take forever. The defenders got tired of shooting crossbow bolts and their insults, with their bolts, faded away. Both sides waited. A cockerel crowed in the camp and soon a score of birds was calling. Pageboys carrying spare sheaves of arrows waited in the saps behind the trench where priests were saying mass and hearing confessions. Men took it in turns to kneel and receive the wafers along with God’s blessing. “Your sins are forgiven,” a priest murmured to Hook, who hoped it was true. He had not confessed to Robert Perrill’s murder and, as he took the host, he wondered if that deception would condemn him. He almost blurted out his guilt, but the priest was already gesturing the next man forward so Hook stood and moved away. The wafer stuck to his palate and he said a sudden, silent prayer to Saint Crispinian. Did Harfleur have a guardian saint, he wondered, and was that saint beseeching God to kill the English?

A stir in the trench made Hook turn to see the king edging through the crowded ranks. He wore full battle armor, though he had yet to pull on his helmet. His breast and back plates were covered with a surcoat on which the royal arms were blazoned bright, crossed by the red of Saint George. The king carried a broad-bladed war-ax as well as his sheathed sword. He had no shield, but nor did any other knight or man-at-arms. Their plate armor was protection enough and iron-bound shields were a relic of olden days. The king nodded companionably to the archers. “Take the barbican,” he said as he walked along the trench, “and the city must surely fall. God be with you.” He repeated the phrases as he worked his way along the trench, followed by a squire and two men-at-arms. “I shall go with you,” he said as he neared Hook. “If God wants me to rule France then He will protect us! God be with you! And keep me company, fellows, as we take back what is rightfully ours!”

“String your bows,” Sir John Holland said when the king had gone past. “Won’t be long now!” Hook braced one end of his big bow against his right foot and bent it so that he could loop the string about the upper nock.

“Shoot high with the fire arrows!” Thomas Evelgold growled. “You can’t do a full draw or you’ll scorch your hand! So shoot high! And make sure the pitch is well alight before you loose!”

The gray light seeped brighter. Hook, gazing between two gabions of the battered parapet, could see that the barbican was a wreck. Its great iron-bound timbers that had once formed such a formidable wall had been broken and driven in by gunfire, yet the enemy had patched the gaps with more timbers so that the whole outlying fort now resembled an ugly hill studded with wooden balks. The summit, which had once stood close to forty feet high, was half that now, yet it was still a formidable obstacle. The face was steep, the ditch deep, and there was room at the top for forty or fifty crossbowmen and men-at-arms. Banners hung down the ruined face, displaying saints and coats of arms. Once in a while a helmeted face would peer past a timber as the men on the ragged top watched for the expected assault.

“You start shooting your fire arrows when the guns fire!” Sir John Cornewaille reminded his men. “That’s the signal!

Shoot steadily! If you see a man trying to extinguish the fires, kill the bastard!”

The coals in the nearest brazier shifted, provoking a spurt of light and a galaxy of sparks. A page crouched beside the iron basket with a handful of kindling that he would pile on the coals to make the flames to light the pitch-soaked arrows. Gulls wheeled and flocked above the salt marsh where the bodies of the dead were thrown into the tidal creeks. The gulls of Normandy were getting fat on English dead. The wafer was still stuck in Hook’s dry mouth.

“Any moment now,” Sir William Porter said as though that would be a comfort to the waiting men.

There was a creaking sound and Hook looked to his left to see men turning the windlass that lifted the tilting screen in front of the nearest gun. The French saw it too and a springolt bolt whipped from the ramparts to thump into the lifting screen. A gunner pulled a gabion away from the cannon’s black mouth.

And the gun fired.

The pitch that coated the stone had caught fire from the powder’s explosion so that the gun-stone looked like a sear of dull light as it whipped from the smoke to flash across the broken ground and crash into the barbican.

“Now!” Sir John Holland called and the page piled the kindling onto the coals so that bright flames burst from the brazier. “Don’t let the arrows touch each other,” Evelgold advised as the archers held the first missiles in the newly roused fire. More guns fired. A timber on the barbican shattered and a spill of earth scumbled down the steep face. Hook waited till his pitch bouquet was well alight, then placed the arrow on the string. He feared the ash shaft would burn through, so he hauled fast, winced as the flames burned his left hand, aimed high and released quickly. Other fire arrows were already arcing toward the barbican, their flight slow and awkward. His own arrow leaped off the string and trailed sparks as it fluttered. It fell short. Other arrows were thumping into the splintered timbers of the barbican. The cannon smoke drifted like a screen between the archers and their target.

“Keep shooting,” Sir John Holland called.

Hook took the rag he used to wax his bow from a pouch and wrapped it about his left hand to protect himself from the flames. His second arrow flew true, striking one of the broken balks of wood. The burning missiles curved through the early light in showers of fire, and the barbican was already dotted with small flames as more and more arrows fell. Hook saw defenders moving on the makeshift rampart and guessed they were pouring water or earth down the barbican’s face and so he took a broadhead and shot it fast and true. Then he loosed his last fire arrow and saw that the flames were spreading and smoke was writhing from the broken barbican in a hundred places. One of the banners was alight, its linen flaring sudden and bright. He loosed three more broadheads at the ramparts, and just then a trumpet called from a few yards down the trench and the men carrying the bundled faggots pushed past him, climbed the parapet, and ran forward.

“After them!” Sir John Holland shouted, “give them arrows!”

The archers and men-at-arms scrambled from the trench. Now Hook could shoot over the heads of the men in front, aiming at the crossbowmen who suddenly crowded the barbican’s smoke-wreathed parapet. “Arrows,” he bellowed, and a page brought him a fresh bag. He was shooting instinctively now, sending bodkin after bodkin at the defenders who were little more than shadows in the thickening smoke. There were shouts from the ditch’s edge. Men were dying there, but their faggots were filling the deep hole.

“For Harry and Saint George!” Sir John Cornewaille bellowed. “Standard-bearer!”

“I’m here!” a squire, given the task of carrying Sir John’s banner, called back.

“Forward!”

The men-at-arms went with Sir John, shouting as they advanced over the uneven, broken and scorched ground. The archers came behind. The trumpet still sounded. Other men were advancing to the left and right. The bowmen who had filled the ditch had run to either side and were now shooting arrows up at the rampart. Crossbow bolts smacked into men. One of Sir John’s men opened his mouth suddenly, clutched his belly and, without a sound, doubled over and fell. Another man-at-arms, the son of an earl, had blood dripping from his helmet and a bolt sticking from his open visor. He staggered, then fell to his knees. He shook off Hook’s helping hand and, with the bolt still in his shattered face, managed to stand and run forward again.

“Shout louder, you bastards!” Sir John called, and the attackers gave a ragged cry of Saint George. “Louder!”

A gun punched rancid smoke from the town’s walls and its stone slashed diagonally across the rough ground where the attackers advanced. A man-at-arms was struck on the thigh and he spun around, blood splashing high on his jupon, and the gun-stone kept going, disemboweling a page and still it flew, blood drops trailing, to vanish somewhere over the marshes. An archer’s bow snapped at the full draw and he cursed. “Don’t give the bastards time! Kill them!” Sir John Cornewaille bellowed as he jumped down onto the faggots that filled the ditch.

And now the shouting was constant as the first attackers staggered on the uneven faggots that did not entirely fill the moat. Crossbow bolts hissed down, and the defenders added stones and lengths of timber that they hurled from the barbican’s high rampart. Two more guns fired from the town walls, belching smoke, their stones slashing harmlessly behind the attackers. Trumpets were calling in Harfleur and the crossbows were shooting from the walls. So long as the attackers were close to the barbican they were safe from the missiles loosed from the town, but some men were trying to clamber up the bastion’s eroded flanks and there they were in full sight of Harfleur’s defenders.

Hook emptied his arrow bag at the men on the barbican’s summit, then looked around for a page with more arrows, but could see none. “Horrocks,” he shouted at his youngest archer, “go and find arrows!” He saw a wounded archer, not one of his men, sitting a few paces away and he took a handful of arrows from the man’s bag and trapped one between his thumb and the bowstave. The English banners were at the foot of the barbican and most of the men-at-arms were on its lower slopes, trying to climb between the flames that burned fiercely to blind the defenders with smoke. It was like trying to scramble up the face of a crumbling bluff, but a bluff in which fires burned and smoke writhed. The French were bellowing defiance. Their best weapons now were the stones they hurled down the face and Hook saw a man-at-arms tumble back, his helmet half crushed by a boulder. The king was there, or at least his standard was bright against the smoke and Hook wondered if the king had been the man he saw falling with a crushed helmet. What would happen if the king died? But at least he was there, in the fight, and Hook felt a surge of pride that England had a fighting king and not some half-mad monarch who circled his body with straps because he believed he was made of glass.

Sir John’s banner was on the right now, joined there by the three bells on Sir William Porter’s flag. Hook shouted at his men to follow as he ran to the ditch’s edge. He jumped in, landing on the corpse of a man in plate armor. A crossbow bolt had pierced the man’s aventail, spreading blood from his ravaged throat. Someone had already stripped the body of sword and helmet. Hook negotiated the uncertain faggots and hauled himself up the far side where the smoke was thick. He loosed three arrows, then put his last one across the bowstave. The flames were growing stronger as they fed on the barbican’s broken timbers and those fires, designed to blind the defenders, were now a barrier to the attackers. Arrows hissed overhead, evidence that the pages had found more and brought them to the archers, but Hook was too committed to the attack now to go back and replenish his arrow bag. He ran to his right, dodging bodies, unaware of the crossbow bolts that struck around him. He saw Sir John precariously perched on top of some iron-bound timbers from where he stared upward at the men who taunted the attackers. One of those defenders appeared briefly and hoisted a boulder over his head, ready to hurl it down at Sir John, and Hook paused, drew, released, and his arrow caught the man in his armpit so that he turned slowly and fell back out of sight.

A gust of the east wind swirled the smoke away from the barbican’s right-hand flank and Hook saw an opening there, a cave in the half-collapsed tower that had defended the seaward side. He slung the bow and took the poleax off his shoulder. He shouted incoherently as he ran, then as he jumped up the barbican’s face and scrabbled for a foothold in the steep rubble slope. He was at the right-hand edge of the broken fort and he could see down the southern face of Harfleur where the harbor lay. Defenders on the walls could also see him, and their crossbow bolts thumped into the barbican, but Hook had rolled into the cave that was a ledge of rubble sheltered by collapsed timbers. There was scarce room to move in the space that was little more than a wild dog’s den. Now what? Hook wondered. The crossbow bolts were hissing just beyond his shallow refuge. He could hear men shouting and it seemed to Hook that the French shouted louder, evidence they believed they were winning. He leaned slightly outward trying to get a glimpse of Sir John, but just then an eddy of wind blew a great gout of smoke to shroud Hook’s aerie.

Yet just to his right, toward the face of the barbican, he saw the metal hoops that strapped three great tree trunks together, and the hoops, he thought, made a ladder upward and the smoke was hiding him and so he leaped across and clung to the timbers with his left hand while his boots found a small foothold on another of the iron rings. He reached up with the poleax and hooked it over the top ring and hauled himself up, up, and he was nearly at the top and the French had not seen him because of the smoke and because they were watching the howling mass of Englishmen who were trying to clamber up the barbican’s center where the slope was the least precipitous. Bolts, stones, and broken timbers rained down on them, while the English arrows flitted through the smoke in answer.

“Hook!” a voice roared beneath him. “Hook, you bastard! Pull me up!”

It was Sir John Cornewaille. Hook lowered the poleax, let Sir John grip the hammer head, and then hauled him across to the timbers.

“You don’t get ahead of me, Hook,” Sir John growled, “and what in Christ’s name are you doing here? You’re meant to be shooting arrows.”

“I wanted to see what was on the other side of this ruin,” Hook said. Flames crept up the timbers, getting closer to Sir John’s feet.

“You wanted to see…” Sir John began, then gave a bark of laughter. “I’m getting goddam roasted. Pull me up more.” Hook again used the poleax to lift Sir John, this time to the top of the timbers. The two of them were like flies on a broken, burning pillar, perched just below the makeshift parapet, but still unseen by the defenders. “Sweet Jesus Christ and all his piss-drinking saints, but this seems a good enough place to die,” Sir John said, and slipped the sling of his battle-ax off his shoulder. “Are you going to die with me, Hook?”

“Looks like it, Sir John.”

“Good man. Push me up first, then join me, and let’s die well, Hook, let’s die very well.”

Hook took hold of the back of Sir John’s sword belt and, when he got the nod, heaved. Sir John vanished upward, tumbled over the wall, and gave his war-shout. “Harry and Saint George!” And for Harry, Saint George, and Saint Crispinian, Hook followed.

And screamed.

EIGHT

“You won’t die here,” Saint Crispinian said.

Hook hardly heard the voice because he was screaming a battle cry that was part terror and part exhilaration.

Hook and Sir John had reached the top of the barbican where the remnants of the fighting platform lay. The English bombardment had shattered the barbican’s face so that the earth and rubble filling had spilled out and what had once been the fighting platform was now a crude lumpy space. The rearward wall, looking toward the city’s Leure Gate, was much less damaged and served as a screen to hide what happened on the broken, rough summit from the defenders of Harfleur’s walls. That summit was now a treacherous heap of earth, stones, and burning timbers, which was crammed with crossbowmen and men-at-arms. Hook and Sir John had come from their left flank, and now Sir John attacked the enemy like the avenging angel.

He was fast. That was why he was the most feared tournament fighter in Christendom. In the time it took a man to strike a blow, Sir John gave two. Hook saw it because, once again, it seemed to him that time itself had slowed. He was moving to Sir John’s right, aware suddenly that Saint Crispinian had broken his silence and feeling a great surge of relief that the saint was still his patron. Hook lunged with his poleax as Sir John used his double-bladed battle-ax in short brutal strokes. The first smashed the roundel protecting a man-at-arms’s knee, the second, a rising slash, gutted a crossbowman, and the third felled the man-at-arms whose knee had been broken. Another man-at-arms turned to drive a sword at Sir John, but Hook’s poleax sliced into his side, piercing the edge of his breastplate and throwing him back on the men behind. Hook just kept ramming, driving the man back, crushing him into his comrades, and Sir John was making a whooping noise, a sound of pure joy. Hook was screaming, though he was not aware of it, and using his huge archer’s strength to push the enemy back while Sir John was taking advantage of their confusion to chop, wound, and kill.

Hook wrenched the poleax back, but the spear point was trapped in the man’s armor. “Take this!” Sir John said sharply, thrusting the ax at Hook, and later, much later when the fight was over, Hook marveled at Sir John’s utter calm in the middle of a fight. Sir John had seen Hook’s predicament and solved it, even though he was under attack himself. He gave Hook the ax and, in the time it took Hook to take it, Sir John drew his sword. It was Sir John’s favorite sword, the one he called Darling, and it was a heavier blade than most, strong enough to survive hard lunges into steel plate. Sir John used it to keep the enemy off balance, letting Hook do the killing now. Hook’s first blow drove the ax into a helmet, wrenching the whole visor loose so it hung askew. “Cheap steel!” Sir John said, and his sword flickered at men’s faces, making them retreat, and Hook drove the blade into an armored belly and saw the blood well out bright and fast. “Flag!” Sir John bellowed. “Bring me my goddam flag!”

Hook was standing with his feet apart, driving the ax at men who were hardly fighting back. They were hampered by the bodies at their feet and cowed by Sir John’s sheer skill and ferocity. A determined man could have attacked into Sir John’s sword and Hook’s ax, but instead the defenders tried to back away from the blades while the Frenchmen behind pushed them forward. “Trois!” Sir John was counting the men he had wounded or killed, “quatre! Come on, you goddam bastards! I’m hungry!” Hook’s ax was the more dangerous weapon because of its power. The blade crumpled armor like parchment or chopped into flesh like a slaughterman’s cleaver, and Hook was grimacing as he swung and the enemy thought he was smiling, and that smile was more frightening than the blade. The sheer press of Frenchmen made it impossible for their crossbowmen to take aim, while the surviving rear wall and the obscuring smoke hid the fight from the bowmen on the towers of the Leure Gate. Sir John was shouting and Hook was keening a mad noise and their blades were red. Hook was not trying to kill now, he was just thrusting the enemy back and putting men on the ground to make a barrier. A fallen man-at-arms made an upward cut with his sword, but Hook saw the lunge coming, took a half-step to one side, slammed the ax down hard onto the man’s visor, heard the gurgling noise as the heavy blade crushed steel into flesh, swung the ax back to dent a man’s breastplate, and then rammed the weapon forward to push a third man backward.

“My flag!” Sir John shouted again, “I want these bastards to know who’s killing them!”

His standard-bearer suddenly tumbled over the wall behind, and with him came more men-at-arms wearing Sir John’s lion. “Kill the bastards!” Sir John screamed, but the bastards had taken enough. They were spilling through a gap in the rearward wall of the barbican and scrambling down a ladder or hurling themselves at a steep slope of spilled rubble before running through the smoke for the town’s gate. The rising sun was lighting that smoke. Screaming Englishmen were killing the last defenders who could not reach the gap in time. One man held out his glove in token of surrender, but an archer beat him down with a long-hafted hammer and another skewered him with a poleax.

“Enough!” a voice shouted. “Enough! Enough!”

“Hold your blows!” Sir John called. “Hold it, I said!”

“God be thanked!” the man who had first called to end the killing said, and Hook saw it was the king who, sword in hand, suddenly knelt on the rubble and crossed himself. The king’s surcoat, its bright badge crossed by Saint George’s red, was scorched. A springolt bolt thumped into one of the timbers facing the town, making the wall quiver. “Extinguish the flames!” the king called, getting to his feet. He pulled off his helmet and its leather liner so that his thick cropped hair stuck up in small, sweat-dark clumps. “And someone have pity on that man!” He gestured at the Frenchman who had tried to surrender, and who now writhed and moaned as blood soaked the faulds just beneath his breastplate. The poleax was still embedded in his belly. A man-at-arms drew a knife, felt for the gap in the armor protecting the dying man’s throat, and stabbed home once before working the blade around inside the gullet. The man convulsed, blood bubbled from the holes in his dented visor, then he gave a spasm and was still. “God be thanked,” the king said again. An archer suddenly fell to his knees and Hook thought the man was praying, but instead he vomited. Crossbow bolts were striking the barbican’s rear wall, their strikes sounding like flails beating on a threshing floor. The king’s banner was flying from the barbican now and the heavy cloth twitched as the bolts ripped and tore at the weave. “Sir John,” the king said, “I must thank you.”

“For doing my duty, sire?” Sir John asked, going to one knee, “and this man helped,” he added, gesturing at Hook.

Hook also dropped to one knee. The king gave him a glance, but showed no recognition. “My thanks to you all,” Henry said curtly, then turned away. “Send heralds!” he ordered one of his entourage, “and tell them to yield the town! And bring water for the flames!”

Water was poured on the flames, but the fire had penetrated deep into the barbican’s shattered timbers and they smoldered on, seeping a constant and choking smoke about the captured bastion. Its ragged summit was garrisoned by archers now, and that night they manhandled the Messenger, one of the smaller cannon, up to its summit, and that gun splintered the timbers of the Leure Gate with its first shot.

The heralds had ridden to that gate after the barbican’s capture, and they had patiently explained that the English would now demolish the great gate and its towers and that the fall of Harfleur was thus inevitable, and that the garrison should therefore do the sensible, even the honorable, thing and surrender before more men died. If they refused to surrender, the heralds declared, then the law of God decreed that every man, woman, and child in Harfleur would be given to the pleasure of the English. “Think of your pretty daughters,” a herald called to the garrison’s commanders, “and for their sake, yield!”

But the garrison would not surrender, and so the English dug new gun-pits closer to the town, and they hammered the exposed Leure Gate, demolishing the towers on either side and bringing down its stone arch, yet still the defenders fought back.

And the first chill wind of summer’s end brought rain.

And the sickness did not end and Henry’s army died in blood, vomit, and watery shit.

And Harfleur remained French.

It all had to be done again. Another assault, this time on the wreckage of the Leure Gate and, to make sure the defenders could not concentrate their men on that southwestern corner of the ramparts, the forces of the Duke of Clarence would assault the Montivilliers Gate on the town’s far side.

This time, Sir John said, they were going into the town. “The goddam bastards won’t surrender! So you know what you can do with the bastards! If it’s got a prick, you kill it, if it’s got tits, you hump it! Everything in that town is yours! Every coin, every ale-pot, every woman! They’re yours! Now go and get them!”

And so the twin assaults streamed across the filled-in ditches and the arrows rained from the sky and the trumpets blared a challenge to the uncaring sun and the killing began again. And again it was Sir John Holland who led, which meant that Sir John Cornewaille’s men were in the front of the attack that swiftly captured the ruins of the Leure Gate and there, abruptly, were stopped.

The gate had once led into a closely-packed street of overhanging houses, but the garrison had pulled those buildings down to clear a killing space, behind which they had made a new barricade that had been mostly protected from the English gun-stones by the remnants of the old wall and gate. The Messenger, mounted on the barbican’s summit, had managed to shoot some stones at the fresh work, but it could only manage three shots a day and the French repaired the damage between each shot. The new wall was built from masonry blocks, roof timbers, and rubble-filled baskets, and behind it were crossbowmen, and as soon as the English men-at-arms appeared across the ruin of the Leure Gate the bolts began to fly.

Archers shot back, but the French had been cunning. The new wall had been made with chinks and holes through which the crossbowmen could shoot, and which were small enough to defeat the aim of most arrows. Hook, crouching in the rubble of the old gate, reckoned that for every crossbowman shooting there were another three or four men spanning spare bows so that the bolts never stopped. Most crossbowmen were lucky to shoot two bolts a minute, but the bolts were coming from the loopholes far more frequently and still more missiles spat from the high windows of the half-ruined houses behind the wall. This, Hook knew, was how Soissons should have been defended.

“We’ll have to bring up a gun,” Sir John snarled from another place in the ruined wall, but instead led a charge against the barricade, shouting at his archers to smother it in arrows. They did, but the crossbow bolts kept coming and even if the bolts failed to pierce armor they threw a man back by sheer force and when, at last, a half-dozen men managed to reach the wall and tried to pull down its timbers and stones, a cauldron was tipped over its coping and a stream of boiling fish oil spilled down onto the attackers. They ran and limped back, some gasping from the pain of the scalding, and Sir John, his armor slick with the oil, came back with them and dropped into the gate’s rubble and let loose a stream of impotent curses. The French were cheering. They waved taunting flags above their new low wall. A smoky haze shimmered behind the new rampart, promising that more heated oil would greet any new attack. The English catapults were trying to drop stones on the new wall, but most of the missiles flew long to crash down among the already shattered houses.

The sun climbed. The late summer’s heat had returned and both attackers and defenders roasted in their armor. Boys brought water and ale. Men-at-arms, resting in the shelter of the Leure Gate’s ruins, took off their helmets. Their hair was matted flat and their faces running with sweat. The archers crouched in the stones, sometimes shooting if a man showed himself, but for long periods neither side would loose an arrow or a bolt, but just wait for a target.

“Bastards,” Sir John spat at the enemy.

Hook saw two defenders struggling to remove an earth-filled basket from a section of the new wall. He half stood and loosed an arrow, just as a dozen other archers did the same. The two men fell back, each struck by arrows, but the basket fell with them and Hook saw a cannon barrel, squat and low, and he flattened himself in the gate’s ruins just as the cannon fired. The air whistled and screamed, stone chips were whipping in smoke, and a man gave a terrible long cry that turned to a whimper as the space in front of the wall was obscured by the thick smoke. “Oh, my God,” Will of the Dale said.

“You hurt, Will?”

“No. Just tired of this place.”

The French had loaded their cannon with a mass of small stones that had flayed the attackers. A man-at-arms was dead, a small hole punched clean through the top of his helmet. An archer staggered back toward the barbican, one hand clamped over an empty, bloody eye socket.

“We’re all going to die here,” Will said.

“No,” Hook said fiercely, though he did not believe his protest. The gun smoke cleared slowly and Hook saw that the earth-filled basket was back in its embrasure.

“Bastards,” Sir John spat again.

“We’re not giving up!” the king was shouting. He wanted to assemble a mass of men-at-arms and attempt to overwhelm the wall with numbers and his men were carrying orders to the Englishmen scattered in the old wall’s ruins. “Archers to the flanks!” a man shouted, “to the flanks!”

A French trumpeter began playing a short sharp melody. It was three notes, rising and falling, repeated over and over. There was something taunting in the sound.

“Kill that bastard!” Sir John shouted, but the bastard was hidden behind the wall.

“Move!” the king shouted.

Hook took a deep breath, then scrambled to his right. No crossbow bolts spat from the defenses. The garrison was waiting, he thought. Perhaps they were running short of bolts and so they were keeping what they had to greet the next assault. He sheltered by a stub of broken wall and just then the French trumpeter stood on the new rampart and raised his instrument to his lips, and Hook stood too, and the cord came back to his right ear, he loosed, and the string whipped his bracer and the goose-fledged arrow flew true and the bodkin point took the trumpeter in the throat and drove clean through his neck so that it stood proud at his nape. The braying trumpet screeched horribly and then ended abruptly as the man fell backward. More English arrows flitted above him as he disappeared behind the wall, leaving a fading spray of misted blood and the dying echo of the trumpet’s truncated call.

“Well done, that archer!” Sir John shouted.

Hook waited. The day became still hotter under a sun that was a great furnace in a sky clouded only by the shreds of smoke from the beleaguered city. The French had stopped shooting altogether, which only convinced Hook that they were saving their missiles for the assault they knew was coming. Priests picked their way among the ruins of the old wall, shriving the dead and the dying, while behind the wall, in the space between the ruined Leure Gate and the shattered barbican, the men-at-arms assembled under their lords’ banners. That force, at least four hundred strong, was easily visible to the defenders, but still they did not shoot.

One of Sir John’s pages, a boy of ten or eleven with a shock of bright blond hair and wide blue eyes, brought two skins of water to the archers. “We need arrows, boy,” Hook told him.

“I’ll bring some,” the boy said.

Hook tipped the skin to his mouth. “Why aren’t the men-at-arms moving?” he asked no one in particular. The king had assembled his assault force and the archers were in place, but a curious lassitude had settled over the attackers.

“A messenger came,” the page said nervously. He was a high-born lad, sent to Sir John’s household to learn a warrior’s ways, and in time he would doubtless be a great lord in shining armor mounted on a caparisoned horse, but for now he was nervous of the hard-faced archers who would one day be under his command.

“A messenger?”

“From the Duke of Clarence,” the page said, taking back the water-skin.

The duke, camped on the far side of Harfleur, was also attacking the city, though no sounds betrayed any fighting from that far-off gate. “So what did the messenger tell us?” Hook asked the page.

“That the attack failed,” the boy said.

“Sweet Jesus,” Hook said in disgust. So now, he reckoned, the king was waiting until his brother could mount another assault, and then the English would make one last effort, from both east and west, to overwhelm the stubborn defenders. And so Hook and his archers waited. If the king had sent new orders to his brother then they would take at least two hours to reach him, for the messenger had to ride far around the city’s north side and cross the flooded river by boat.

“What’s happening?” Sclate, the slow-witted laborer with a giant’s strength, asked.

“I don’t know,” Hook confessed. Sweat trickled down his face and stung his eyes. The air seemed to be filled with dust that coated his throat and made him thirsty again. The light, reflecting from the shattered chalk of the broken walls, was dazzling. He was tired. He unstrung the bow to take the tension from the stave.

“Are we attacking again?” Sclate asked.

“I reckon we attack when the duke assaults the far side,” Hook suggested. “Be a couple of hours yet.”

“They’ll be ready for us,” Sclate said gloomily.

The garrison would be ready. Ready with cannons and crossbows and springolts and boiling oil. That was what waited for the men wearing the red cross. The men-at-arms were sitting now, resting before they were ordered into the killing ground. The bright banners hung slack from their poles and a strange silence wrapped Harfleur. Waiting. Waiting.

“When we attack!” Sir John’s voice broke the silence. He was striding along the front of the sheltering archers, careless that he was fully exposed to the enemy, but the French crossbowmen, doubtless under orders to conserve their bolts, ignored him. “When we attack,” he called again, “you advance! You keep shooting! But you keep going forward! When we go over the wall I want archers with us! We’re going to have to hunt these bastards through their goddam streets! I want you all there! And good hunting! This is a day to kill our king’s enemies, so kill them!”

And when the killing was done, Hook wondered, how many English would be left? The army that had sailed from Southampton Water had been small enough, but now? Now, he reckoned, there would just be half an army, many of them sick men, crammed into the ruins of Harfleur as the French army at last stirred itself to fight. Rumors said that enemy army was vast, a horde of men eager to wipe out the impudent English invaders, though God seemed to be doing that already by sickness.

“Let’s get it over with,” Will of the Dale grumbled.

“Or let them keep the goddam town,” Tom Scarlet suggested, “it’s a shit-heap now.”

And what if the assault failed? Hook wondered. What if Harfleur did not fall? Then the remnants of Henry’s army would sail back to England, defeated. The campaign had begun so well, with all the panoply of banners and hope, and now it was blood and feces and despair.

Another trumpeter began playing the same mocking notes from the city. Sir John, stalking back past his archers, turned and snarled toward the defenders. “I want that prick-sucking bastard killed! I want him killed!” The last four words were screamed at the wall, loud enough for any Frenchmen to hear.

Then, unexpectedly, a man clambered onto the wall’s top. He was not the trumpeter, who still blew from his place behind the wall. The man on the wall was unarmed, and he stood and waved both hands at the English.

Archers stood, began to draw.

“No!” Sir John bellowed. “No! No! No! Bows down! Bows down! Bows down!”

The trumpet note wavered, faded and stopped.

The man on the wall held his empty hands high above his head.

And, miraculously, suddenly, astonishingly, it was all over.

The soldiers of Harfleur’s garrison did not want to surrender, but the townspeople had suffered enough. They were hungry. Their houses had been crushed and burned by English missiles, disease was spreading, they saw an inevitable defeat and knew that vengeful enemies would rape their daughters. The town council insisted that the city yield and, without the support of the men of Harfleur who shot crossbows from the walls and without the food prepared by the women, the garrison could not prolong the fight.

The Sire de Gaucourt, who had led the defense, asked for a three-day truce in which he could send a messenger to the French king to discover whether or not a relief force was coming to the city’s help. If not, then he would surrender on condition that the English army did not sack and rape the town. Henry agreed, and so priests and nobles gathered at the breach by the Leure Gate, and the leading men came from the town, and they all swore solemn oaths to abide by the terms of the truce. Afterward, and after Henry had taken hostages to ensure that the garrison kept its word, a herald rode close under the walls and shouted up at the townsfolk who had watched the ceremony. He called in French. “You have nothing to fear! The King of England has not come to destroy you! We are good Christians and Harfleur is not Soissons! You have nothing to fear!”

Smoke drifted from the city to haze the late summer sky. It seemed strange that no guns fired, that no trebuchets thumped as they launched their missiles, and that the fighting had stopped. The dying did not stop. The corpses were still carried to the creeks and thrown to the gulls, and it seemed there would be no end to the sickness.

And there was no French relief force.

The French army was gathering to the east, but the message came back that it would not march to relieve Harfleur and so, on the next Sunday, the feast of Saint Vincent, the city surrendered.

A pavilion was erected on the hillside behind the English encampment and a throne was placed under the canopy and draped with cloth of gold. English banners flanked the pavilion, which was filled with the high nobility in their finest clothes. A man held aloft the king’s great helm, which was ringed with a golden crown, while archers lined a long path that led across the rubble of the siege-works to the ruined gate that had resisted so many attacks. Behind the archers were the rest of Henry’s army, spectators to the day’s drama.

The King of England, crowned with a simple circlet of gold and wearing a surcoat blazoned with the French royal coat of arms, sat enthroned in silence. He was watching and waiting, and perhaps wondering what he must do next. He had come to Normandy and won this surrender, but that victory had cost him half his army.

Hook was at the Leure Gate where Sir John commanded a force of ten men-at-arms and forty archers. Sir John, clad in plate armor that had been scoured to a shine, was mounted on his great destrier, Lucifer, who had been draped in a dazzling linen trapper resplendent with Sir John’s crest, and the same lion was modeled in painted wood to rear savagely from the crest of Sir John’s helmet. The men-at-arms were also in armor, but the archers were in leather jerkins and stained breeches. All the bowmen carried halters of rough rope, the kind that a peasant might use to lead a cow to market. “Treat them courteously,” Sir John told his bowmen, “they fought well! They’re men!”

“I thought they were all scum-sucking cabbage shitters,” Will of the Dale said quietly, but not quietly enough.

Sir John turned Lucifer. “They are that!” he said, “but they fought like Englishmen! So treat them like Englishmen!”

A section of the new wall had been demolished and, just after Sir John spoke, some three dozen men emerged from the gap. They had been ordered to approach the King of England barefoot and in plain linen shirts and hose. Now, nervous and apprehensive, they walked slowly and cautiously toward the waiting archers.

“Nooses!” Sir John ordered.

Hook and the other archers tied nooses in the ropes. Sir John beckoned a squire and handed his reins to the man, then slid out of his tall saddle. He patted Lucifer on the nose, then walked toward the approaching Frenchmen.

He singled out one man, a tall man with a hooked nose and a short black beard. The man was pale, and Hook guessed he was sick, but he was forcing himself to lead the Frenchmen out of the town and to keep what small dignity he had left. The bearded man beckoned to his companions to pause while he approached Sir John alone. The two men stopped a pace apart, the Englishman glorious in armor and heraldry, his sword hilt polished, his armor gleaming, while the Frenchman was in the common, ill-fitting clothes decreed by King Henry. Sir John, his visor raised, said something that Hook did not catch, then the two men embraced.

Sir John left his right arm about the Frenchman’s shoulders as he led him toward the archers. “This is the Sire de Gaucourt,” he announced, “the leader of our enemies these last five weeks, and he has fought bravely! He deserves better than this, but our king commands and we must obey. Hook, give me the noose!”

Hook held out the halter. The Frenchman gave him an appraising look and Hook felt compelled to nod his head in respectful acknowledgment.

“I am sorry,” Sir John said in French.

“It is necessary,” Raoul de Gaucourt said harshly.

“Is it?” Sir John asked.

“We must be humiliated so that the rest of France knows what fate waits for them if they resist your king,” de Gaucourt said. He gave a wan smile then cast an appraising eye over the English army that waited to watch his humiliating walk to the king’s throne. “Though I doubt your king has the power to frighten France any more,” he went on. “You call this a victory, Sir John?” he asked, beckoning at the battered walls he had defended so bravely. Sir John did not answer. Instead he lifted the noose to place it about de Gaucourt’s head, but the Frenchman took it from him. “Allow me,” he said, and put the rope about his own neck.

The other Frenchmen had ropes placed about their necks, and then Sir John, satisfied, pulled himself back into Lucifer’s saddle. He nodded to de Gaucourt, then spurred his horse along the path made between the watching English soldiers.

The Frenchmen walked the path in silence. Some, the merchants, were old men, while others, mostly soldiers, were young and strong. They were the knights and burgesses, the men who had defied the King of England, and the nooses about their necks proclaimed that their lives were now at Henry’s mercy. They climbed the hillside, then knelt humbly before the throne canopied in cloth of gold. Henry gazed at them a long time. The wind lifted the silk banners and drifted smoke from the city’s ruins. The assembled English nobles waited, expecting the king to announce the death sentence on the kneeling men. “I am the rightful king of this realm,” Henry said, “and your resistance was treason.”

A look of pain showed briefly on de Gaucourt’s face. He ignored the accusation of treason and instead held out a thick bunch of heavy keys. “The keys of Harfleur, sire,” he said, “which are yours.”

The king did not take the offered keys. “Your defiance,” he said sternly, “was contrary to man’s law and to God’s law.” Some of the older merchants were shaking in fear and one had tears running down his face. “But God,” Henry went on loftily, “is merciful.” He lifted the keys at last, “and we shall be merciful. Your lives are not forfeit.”

A cheer sounded from the English army when the cross of Saint George was hoisted over the town. Next day Henry of England walked barefoot to the church of Saint Martin to give thanks to God for a victory, yet many who watched his humble pilgrimage reckoned that his triumph was a virtual defeat. He had wasted so much time before Harfleur’s walls and the sickness had torn his army apart, and the campaign season was almost over.

The English army moved inside the walls. They burned their encampment and dragged catapults and cannon through the ruined gate. Sir John’s men quartered themselves in a row of houses, taverns, and warehouses beside the wall-enclosed harbor where Hook found space in the attic of a tavern called Le Paon. “Le paon is a bird,” Melisande had explained, “with a big tail!” She had spread her arms wide.

“No bird’s got a tail that big!” Hook said.

“Le paon does,” she insisted.

“Must be a French bird then,” Hook said, “not an English one.”

Harfleur was now English. The cross of Saint George flew from the ruined stump of Saint Martin’s tower, and the people of the city, who had suffered so much, were now given more suffering.

They were expelled. The city, the king declared, would be resettled by English people, just as Calais had been, and to make room for those new inhabitants over two thousand men, women, and children were driven from the city. The sick were taken in carts, the rest walked, and two hundred mounted Englishmen guarded the sad column’s progress along the north bank of the Seine. The English soldiers were there to protect the refugees from their own countrymen who would otherwise have robbed and raped. Men-at-arms led the procession and archers flanked it.

Hook was one of the archers. He had been reunited with his black gelding, Raker, who was fretful and needed constant curbing. Hook’s surcoat was washed clean, though the red cross of Saint George had faded to a dull pink. Beneath the surcoat he wore a coat of good mail that he had taken from a French corpse and an aventail that Sir John had given him, and over the aventail’s hood he now had a bascinet that was another gift from a corpse. The bascinet was a helmet with a wide brim designed to deflect a downward blade, though like other archers Hook had hacked off the brim on the right side to make a space for his bow’s cord when he drew it to the full. His sword hung at his side, his cased bow was slung across his shoulder, while his arrow bag hung from the saddle’s cantle. To his right, beyond the refugees, the narrowing river rippled sun-bright, while to the left were meadows stripped of livestock by English forage parties and, beyond those pastures, gentle wooded hills still heavy in their full summer leaf. Melisande had stayed in Harfleur, but Father Christopher had insisted on accompanying the refugees. He was mounted on Sir John’s great destrier, Lucifer. Sir John wanted the horse exercised, and Father Christopher was happy to oblige. “You shouldn’t have come, father,” Hook told him.

“You’re a doctor of medicine now, Hook?”

“You’re supposed to rest, father.”

“There’ll be rest enough in heaven,” Father Christopher said happily. He was still pale, but he was eating again. He was wearing a priest’s robe, something he had done more frequently since his recovery. “I learned something during that illness,” the priest said in apparent seriousness.

“Aye? What was that?”

“In heaven, Hook, there will be no shitting.”

Hook laughed. “But will there be women, father?”

“In abundance, young Hook, but what if they’re all good women?”

“You mean the bad ones will all be in the devil’s cellar, father?”

“That is a worry,” Father Christopher said with a smile, “but I trust God to make suitable arrangements.” He grinned, happy to be alive and riding under a September sun beside a hedge thick with blackberries. A corncrake’s grating cry echoed from the hills. Just after dawn, when the protesting refugees had been forced out of Harfleur, a stag had appeared on the Rouen road resplendent in his new antlers. Hook had taken it as a good omen, but Father Christopher, looking up at the dark branches of a dead elm tree, now found a gloomy one. “The swallows are gathering early,” he said.

“A bad winter then,” Hook said.

“It means summer’s end, Hook, and with it go our hopes. Like those swallows, we will disappear.”

“Back to England?”

“And to disappointment,” the priest said sadly. “The king has debts to pay, and he can’t pay them. If he had carried home a victory then it wouldn’t matter.”

“We won, father,” Hook said, “we captured Harfleur.”

“We used a pack of wolfhounds to kill a hare,” Father Christopher said, “and out there,” he nodded eastward, “there’s a much larger pack of hounds gathering.”

Some of that larger pack appeared at midday. The front of the long column of refugees had stopped in some meadows beside the river and now the tail of the column crowded in behind them. What had checked their progress was a band of enemy horsemen who barred the road where it led through the gate of a walled town. The townsfolk watched from the walls. The enemy had a single banner, a great white flag on which a red and double-headed eagle spread its long talons. The French men-at-arms were dressed for battle, their polished armor gleaming beneath bright surcoats, but few wore helmets and those who did had their visors raised, a clear sign that they expected no fighting. Hook guessed there were a hundred enemy and they were here under an arranged truce to receive the refugees, who were to be taken to Rouen in a fleet of barges that was moored on the river’s northern bank. “Dear God,” Father Christopher said, staring at the eagle banner, which lifted and fell in the wind that drove ripples across the river. “That’s the marshal,” Father Christopher explained, making the sign of the cross.

“The marshal?”

“Jean de Maingre, Lord of Boucicault, Marshal of France,” Father Christopher said the name and titles slowly, his voice betraying admiration for the man who wore the badge of the double-headed eagle.

“Never heard of him, father,” Hook said cheerfully.

“France is ruled by a madman,” the priest said, “and the royal dukes are young and headstrong, but our enemies do have the marshal, and the marshal is a man to fear.”

Sir William Porter, Sir John Cornewaille’s brother-in-arms, led the English contingent and he now rode bareheaded to greet the marshal who, in turn, spurred his destrier toward Sir William. The Frenchman, who was a big man on a tall horse, towered over the Englishman as the two spoke, and Hook, watching from a distance, thought they laughed together. Then, invited by a gesture from the courtly Sir William, the Marshal of France kicked his horse toward the English troops. He ignored the French civilians and instead rode slowly down the ragged line of men-at-arms and archers.

The marshal wore no helmet. His hair was dark brown, cut bluntly short and graying at the temples, and it framed a face of such ferocity that Hook was taken aback. It was a square, blunt face, scarred and broken, beaten by battle and by life, but undefeated. A hard face, a man’s face, a warrior’s face, with keen dark eyes that searched men and horses for clues to their condition. His mouth was set in a grim line, but suddenly smiled when he saw Father Christopher, and in the smile Hook saw a man who might inspire other men to great loyalty and victory. “A priest on a destrier!” the marshal said, amused. “We mount our priests on knackered mares, not on war chargers!”

“We English have so many destriers, sire,” Father Christopher answered, “that we can spare them for men of God.”

The marshal looked appraisingly at Lucifer. “A good horse,” he said, “whose is it?”

“Sir John Cornewaille’s,” the priest answered.

“Ah!” the marshal was pleased. “You will give the good Sir John my compliments! Tell him I am glad he has visited France and that I hope he will carry fond memories of it back to England. And that he will carry them very soon.” The marshal smiled at Father Christopher, then looked at Hook with apparent interest, taking in the archer’s weapons and armor, before holding out a steel-gauntleted hand. “Do me the honor,” he said, “and lend me your bow.”

Father Christopher translated for Hook who had understood anyway, but had not responded because he was not certain quite what he should do. “Let him have the bow, Hook,” Father Christopher said, “and string it first.”

Hook uncased the great stave, placed its lower end in his left stirrup, and looped the noose about the upper nock. He could feel the raw power in the tensed yew stave. It sometimes seemed to him that the wood came alive when he strung the bow. It seemed to quiver in anticipation. The marshal was still holding out his hand and Hook stretched the bow toward him.

“It is a large bow,” Boucicault said in very careful English.

“One of the largest I’ve seen,” Father Christopher said, “and it’s carried by a very strong archer.”

A dozen French men-at-arms had followed the marshal and they watched from a few paces away as he held the stave in his left hand and tentatively pulled on the string with his right. His eyebrows lifted in surprise at the effort it took, and he gave Hook an appreciative glance. He looked back to the bow, hesitated, then raised it as though there were an imaginary arrow on the string. He took a breath, then pulled.

English archers watched, half smiling, knowing that only a trained archer could pull such a bow to the full draw. The cord went back halfway and stopped, then Boucicault hauled again and the string kept going back, back until it had reached his mouth, and Hook could see the strain showing on the Frenchman’s face, but Boucicault was not finished. He gave a small grimace, pulled again, and the cord went all the way to his right ear, and he held it there at the full draw and looked at Hook with a raised eyebrow.

Hook could not help it. He laughed, and suddenly the English archers were cheering the French marshal, whose face showed pure delight as he slowly relaxed his grip and handed the bow back to Hook. Hook, grinning, took the stave and half bowed in his saddle. “Englishman,” Boucicault called, “here!” he tossed Hook a coin and, still smiling delightedly, rode on down the line of applauding archers.

“I told you,” Father Christopher said, smiling, “he’s a man.”

“A generous man,” Hook said, staring at the coin. It was gold, the size of a shilling, and he guessed it was worth a year’s wages. He pushed the gold into his pouch, which held spare arrowheads and three spare cords.

“A good and generous man,” Father Christopher agreed, “but not a man to be your enemy.”

“Nor am I,” a voice intruded, and Hook twisted in his saddle to see that one of the men-at-arms who had followed the marshal was the Sire de Lanferelle who now leaned on his saddle’s pommel to stare at Hook. He looked down at Hook’s missing finger and a suggestion of a smile showed on his face. “Are you my son-in-law yet?”

“No, sire,” Hook said and named Lanferelle to Father Christopher.

The Frenchman looked speculatively at the priest. “You’ve been ill, father.”

“I have,” Father Christopher agreed.

“Is this a judgment of God? Did He in His mercy strike your army as a punishment for your king’s wickedness?”

“Wickedness?” Father Christopher asked gently.

“In coming to France,” Lanferelle said, then straightened in his saddle. His hair was oiled so that it hung sleek, raven black and shining to his waist, which was encircled by a silver-plated sword belt. His face, so strikingly handsome, was even darker after a summer in the sun, making his eyes seem unnaturally bright. “Yet I hope you stay in France, father.”

“Is that an invitation?”

“It is!” Lanferelle smiled, showing very white teeth. “How many men do you have now?”

“We are counted as the grains of sand on the seashore,” the priest answered blithely, “and are as numerous as the multitudinous stars of the firmament, and are as many as the biting fleas in a French whore’s crotch.”

“And just about as dangerous,” Lanferelle said, unbitten by the priest’s defiant words. “You number what? Fewer than ten thousand now? And I hear your king is sending the sick men home?”

“He sends men home,” Father Christopher said, “because we have enough to do whatever must be done.”

Hook wondered how Lanferelle knew that the sick were being sent home, then supposed that French spies must be watching Harfleur from the surrounding hills and would have seen the litters being carried onto the English ships that could at last come right into the walled harbor.

“And your king brings in reinforcements,” Lanferelle said, “but how many of his men must he leave in Harfleur to protect its broken walls? A thousand?” He smiled again. “It is such a little army, father.”

“But at least it fights,” Father Christopher said, “whereas your army slumbers in Rouen.”

“But our army,” Lanferelle said, his voice suddenly harsh, truly does number as the fleas in a Parisian whore’s crotch.” He gathered his reins. “I do hope you stay, father, and come to where the fleas can feed on English blood.” He nodded to Hook. “Give Melisande my compliments. And give her something else.” He turned in his saddle. “Jean! Venez!” The same dull-faced squire who had gazed at Melisande in the woods above Harfleur spurred to his master and, on Lanferelle’s orders, fumbled his jupon over his head. The Sire de Lanferelle took the gaudy garment with its bright sun and proud falcon and folded it into a square that he threw at Hook. “If it comes to a battle,” he said, “tell Melisande to wear that. It might be sufficient to protect her. I would regret her death. Good day to you both.” And with that he rode on after the marshal.

Clouds gathered the next day, piling above the sea and slowly drifting to make a pall over Harfleur. The archers were busy making temporary repairs to the breached walls, building timber palisades that must serve as a defense until masons came from England to remake the ramparts properly. Men were still falling ill and the battered streets stank of sewage that oozed into the River Lézarde that once again ran free through a stone channel bisecting the town, and thence into the tight harbor that smelled like a cesspit.

The king sent a challenge to the dauphin, offering to fight him face-to-face and the winner would inherit the crown of France from the mad King Charles. “He won’t accept,” Sir John Cornewaille said. Sir John had come to watch the archers pound stakes into the ground to support the new palisade. “The dauphin’s a fat, lazy bastard, and our Henry is a warrior. It would be like a wolf fighting a piglet.”

“And if the dauphin doesn’t agree to fight, Sir John?” Thomas Evelgold asked.

“We’ll go home, I suppose,” Sir John said unhappily. That was the opinion throughout the army. The days were shortening and becoming colder, and soon the autumn rains would arrive and that would mean the end of the campaign season. And even if Henry had wanted to continue the campaign his army was too small and the French army was too big, and sensible men, experienced men, declared that only a fool would dare defy those odds. “If we had another six or seven thousand men,” Sir John said, “I dare say we could bloody their goddam noses, but we won’t. We’ll leave a garrison to hold this shit-hole and the rest of us will sail home.”

Reinforcements still arrived, but they were not many, not nearly enough to make up the numbers who had died or who were sick, but the boats brought them into the stinking harbor and the uncertain newcomers came down the gangplanks to stare wide-eyed at the broken roofs and the shattered churches and the scorched rubble. “Most of us will be going home soon,” Sir John told his men, “and the newcomers can defend Harfleur.” He spoke sourly. The capture of Harfleur was not enough to compensate for the money spent and the lives lost. Sir John wanted more, as rumor said the king did, but every other great lord, the royal dukes, the earls, the bishops, the captains, all advised the king to go home.

“There’s no choice,” Thomas Evelgold told Hook one evening. The great lords were at a council of war, meeting the king in an attempt to beat sense into his ambitious head, and the army waited on the council’s decision. It was a beautiful evening, a sinking sun casting shadows long over the harbor. Hook and Evelgold were sitting at a table outside Le Paon, drinking ale that had been brought from England because the breweries of Harfleur had all been destroyed. “We have to go home,” Evelgold said, evidently thinking of the heated discussion that was doubtless being waged in the guild hall beside Saint Martin’s church.

“Maybe we stay as part of the garrison?” Hook suggested.

“Christ, no!” Evelgold said harshly, then crossed himself. “That goddam great army of the French? They’ll take this town back with no trouble! They’ll beat down our palisades in three days, then kill every man here.”

Hook said nothing. He was watching the harbor’s narrow entrance where an arriving ship was being propelled by huge sweeps because the wind had fallen to a whisper. Gulls wheeled above the ship’s single mast and over her high, richly gilded castles. “The Holy Ghost,” Evelgold said, nodding at the ship.

The Holy Ghost was a new ship, built with the king’s money to support his invading army, but now she was chiefly employed in taking diseased men home to England. She crept closer and closer to the quay. Hook could see men on her deck, but they were not nearly as many as the ship had brought on her previous voyage and he guessed these might be the last reinforcements to arrive.

“Fifteen hundred ships brought us here,” Evelgold said, “but we won’t need that many to take us home.” He laughed bitterly. “What a waste of a goddamned summer.” The sun glinted reflections from the gilding on the Holy Ghost’s two castles. The passengers on board stared at the shore. “Welcome to Normandy,” Evelgold said. “Will your woman go back to England?”

“She will.”

“Thought you were getting married?”

“I think we are.”

“Do it in England, Hook.”

“Why England?”

“Because it’s God’s country, not like this goddam place.”

Centenars and men-at-arms had come to the quay to discover if any of the newcomers belonged to their companies. Lord Slayton’s centenar, William Snoball, was one of them, and he greeted Hook civilly. “I’m surprised to see you here, Master Snoball,” Hook said.

“Why?”

“Who’s stewarding while you’re here?”

“John Willetts. He can manage well enough without me. And his lordship wanted me to come.”

“Because you’ve got experience,” Evelgold put in.

“Aye there’s that,” Snoball agreed, “and his lordship wanted me to keep an eye on,” he hesitated, “well, you know.”

“Sir Martin?” Hook asked. “And why in God’s name did he send him?”

“Why do you think?” Snoball answered harshly.

Hook mimed drawing a knife across his throat. “Is that what he hopes?”

“He hopes Sir Martin will minister to our souls,” Snoball said distantly and then, perhaps thinking he had betrayed too much, walked some distance down the wharf.

Hook watched the Holy Ghost creep closer. “Are we expecting any new men?” he asked.

“None that I know of, Sir John hasn’t said anything.”

“He’s not happy,” Hook said.

“Because he’s crazy, moon-touched. Daft as a hare.” Thomas Evelgold brooded for a moment. “He wants to march into France! Man’s daft! He wants us all dead! But it’s all right for him, isn’t it?”

“All right?”

“He won’t be killed, will he? What happens if we march into France to find a battle? The gentry don’t get killed, Hook, they get taken prisoner! But no one will ransom you and me. We get slaughtered, Hook, while their lordships go off to some comfortable castle and get fed and given whores. Sir John don’t care. He just wants a fight! But he knows he’ll like as not live through a battle. He should give a thought to us.” Evelgold drained his ale. “Still, won’t happen. We’ll all be home by Saint Martin’s feast day.”

“The king wants to march,” Hook said.

“The king can count as well as you and me,” Evelgold said dismissively, “and he won’t march.”

Lines were hurled from the Holy Ghost to be caught by men ashore, and slowly, laboriously, the great ship was hauled in to the quay. Gangplanks were lowered and then the newcomers, looking unnaturally clean, were chivvied ashore. There were around sixty archers, all carrying cased bows, arrow bags, and bundles. The red crosses of Saint George on their jupons looked very bright. A priest came down the nearer gangplank, fell to his knees on the wharf, and made the sign of the cross. Behind him were four archers wearing the Slayton moon and stars and one of them had springy gold hair sticking wildly from beneath his helmet’s brim. For a heartbeat Hook did not believe what he saw, then he stood and shouted. “Michael! Michael!”

It was his younger brother. Michael saw him and grinned. “My brother,” Hook explained to Evelgold, then strode to meet Michael. They embraced. “My God, it is you,” Hook said.

William Snoball called Michael’s name, but Hook turned on the steward. “He’ll come when he’s ready, Master Snoball. Where are you quartered?”

Snoball grudgingly told him and Hook promised to bring his brother, then took Michael to the table and poured a pot of ale. Thomas Evelgold left them alone. “What in God’s name are you doing here?” Hook demanded.

“Lord Slayton sent his last archers,” Michael said, grinning, “he reckoned you all needed help. I didn’t even know you were here!”

Then there was a catching up of news. Hook said that Robert Perrill had been killed in the siege, though he did not say how, and Michael told how their grandmother had died, a fact that did not trouble Hook in the least. “She was a bitter old bitch,” he said.

“She looked after us, though,” Michael said.

“She looked after you, not me.”

Then Melisande came from the tavern and she was introduced, and Hook felt a sudden, wild and unfamiliar happiness. The two people he loved most were with him, and he had money in his pockets, and all seemed well with the world. The campaign in France might be over, and over before it had gained any great victory, but he was still happy. “I’ll ask Sir John if you can join us,” he told Michael.

“I don’t think Lord Slayton will allow that,” Michael said.

“Aye, well, we can only ask.”

“So what’s going to happen here?” Michael wanted to know.

“I reckon some poor bastards will be left here to defend this town,” Hook said, “and the rest of us will go home.”

“Go home?” Michael frowned. “But we just got here!”

“That’s what folk are saying. The lords are trying to make the decision now, but it’s too late in the year to go marching inland and, besides, the French army’s too big. We’ll be going home.”

“I hope not,” Michael said. He grinned. “I didn’t come this far to go home again. I want to fight.”

“No, you don’t,” Hook said, and surprised himself by saying it. Melisande was also surprised, looking at him curiously.

“I don’t?”

“It’s blood,” Hook said, “and men crying for their mothers, and too much screaming, and pain and bastards in metal trying to kill you.”

Michael was taken aback. “They say we just shoot arrows at them,” he said falteringly.

“Aye, you do, but in the end, brother, you have to get close. Close enough to see their eyes. Close enough to kill them.”

“And Nicholas is good at that,” Melisande said flatly.

“Not every man is,” Hook said, suspecting that Michael, with his generous and trusting nature, lacked the ruthlessness to get close and commit slaughter.

“Maybe just one battle,” Michael said wistfully, “not a very big one.”

Hook took Michael through the town at sundown. Lord Slayton’s men had found houses close to the Montivilliers Gate and Hook led his brother there and so into the yard of a merchant’s house where the archers were quartered. His old companions went silent as the Hook brothers appeared. There was no sign of Sir Martin, but Tom Perrill, dark and brooding, was sitting against a wall, and he stared expressionless at the two Hooks. William Snoball sensed trouble and stood up.

“Michael’s joining you,” Hook announced loudly, “and Sir John Cornewaille wants you to know that my brother is under his protection.” Sir John had said no such thing, but none of Lord Slayton’s men would know that.

Tom Perrill gave a mocking laugh, but said nothing. William Snoball confronted Hook. “There’ll be no trouble,” he agreed.

“There will indeed be no trouble!” A voice echoed the statement and Hook turned to see Sir Edward Derwent, Lord Slayton’s captain who had been captured in the mine, standing in the courtyard entrance. Sir Edward had been freed when the town surrendered, and Hook reckoned he must have been at the council of war because he was dressed in his finest clothes. Sir Edward now strode to the courtyard’s center. “There will be no trouble!” he said again. “None of you will fight each other, because your job is to fight the French!”

“I thought we were going home,” Snoball said, puzzled.

“Well, you’re not,” Sir Edward said. “The king wants more, and what the king wants, he gets.”

“We’re staying here?” Hook asked, incredulous. “In Harfleur?”

“No, Hook,” Sir Edward said, “we’re marching.” He sounded grim, as though he disapproved of the decision. But Henry was king and, as Sir Edward had said, what the king wanted the king got.

And what Henry wanted was more war.

And so the army would march into France.