Agincourt

ELEVEN

Dawn was cold and gray. A few spatters of rain blew fitfully across the plowed field, but Hook sensed the night’s downpours had ended. Small patches of mist clung to the furrows and lingered in the dripping trees.

The drummers behind the center of the English line were beating a quick rhythm that was punctuated by the flaring sound of trumpets. The musicians were massed where the king’s banner, the largest in the army, was flanked by the cross of Saint George, by the banner of Edward the Confessor, and by the flag of the Holy Trinity. That quartet of banners, all flown from extra-long poles, was in the middle of the center battle, while the flanking battles, the rearguard and vanguard, were similarly dominated by their leaders’ standards. There were at least fifty other flags flying in the damp air above Henry’s men-at-arms, but those English standards were as nothing to the array of silk and linen that was flaunted by the French. “Count the banners,” Thomas Evelgold had suggested as a way of estimating the French numbers, “and reckon every flag is a lord with twenty men.” Some French lords would have fewer men-at-arms and most would have far more, but Tom Evelgold was certain his method would yield an approximation of the enemy’s numbers, except that even Hook, with his good eyesight, could not distinguish the separate flags. There were simply too many. “There are thousands of the bastards,” Evelgold said unhappily, “and look at all those goddam crossbowmen!” The French archers were on the enemy’s flanks, but some way behind the leading men-at-arms.

“You wait!” an elderly man-at-arms, gray-haired and mounted on a mud-spattered gelding, shouted at the archers. He was just one of the numerous men who had come to offer advice or orders. “You wait,” he called again, “till I throw my baton in the air!” The man held up a short, thick staff that was wrapped in green cloth and surmounted by golden finials. “That’s the signal to shoot arrows! No one is to shoot before that! You watch for my baton!”

“Who’s that?” Hook asked Evelgold.

“Sir Thomas Erpingham.”

“Who’s he?”

“The man who throws the baton,” Evelgold said.

“I shall throw it high!” Sir Thomas shouted, “like this!” He threw the baton vigorously so that it circled high in the rain above him. He lunged to catch it as it fell, but missed. Hook wondered if that was a bad omen.

“Fetch it, Horrocks,” Evelgold said, “and look lively, lad!” Horrocks could not run, the furrows and ridges were too thick with mud and so his feet sank up to his ankles, but he retrieved the green stick and held it to the gray-haired knight. Sir Thomas thanked him, then moved down the line of archers to shout his orders again. Hook noticed how Sir Thomas’s horse struggled in the plowed land. “They must have set the share deep,” Evelgold said.

“Winter wheat,” Hook said.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Always plow deeper for winter wheat,” Hook explained.

“I never had to plow,” Evelgold said. He had been a tanner before he was appointed as a ventenar to Sir John.

“Plow deep in autumn and shallow in spring,” Hook said.

“I suppose it’ll save the bastards from digging us graves,” Evelgold said dourly, “they can just roll us into those big furrows and kick the soil over us.”

“Sky’s clearing,” Hook said. Off to the west, above the ramparts of the small castle of Agincourt that just showed above the woodland, the light was brightening.

“At least the bowstrings will be dry,” Evelgold remarked, “which means we might kill a few of the goddam bastards before they slaughter us.”

The enemy flew more banners and they also had more musicians. The English trumpeters were playing brief series of defiant notes, then pausing to let the drummers beat their sharp, insistent rhythm, but the French trumpets never stopped. They clawed at English ears, a braying sound that rose and fell on the cold wind. Most of the French army was on foot, like the English, but on either wing Hook could see masses of mounted knights. The horses wore long linen trappers embroidered with coats of arms. Their riders were trying to keep the beasts warm by walking them up and down. Lances pricked the sky. “The goddam bastards will come soon,” Tom Scarlet said.

“Maybe,” Hook said, “maybe not.” He half wished the French would come and get the ordeal over, and he half wished he was safely back in England, abed.

“Don’t string up till they move,” Evelgold called to Sir John’s archers. He had offered the advice at least six times already, but none of the bowmen seemed to notice. They shivered and watched the enemy. “Shit!” Evelgold added.

“What?” Hook asked, alarmed.

“I just stepped in some.”

“That’s supposed to bring you luck,” Hook said.

“Then I’d better dance in the goddam stuff.”

Priests were saying mass among the archers and, one by one, the men went to receive the bread of life and have their sins forgiven. The king was ostentatiously kneeling bareheaded before one of his chaplains out in front of the center battle. He had ridden the line once, mounted on a small white horse, and the gilded crown that circled his battle-helm had looked unnaturally bright in the morning’s gloom. He had chivvied men into position and leaned out of his saddle to tug at an archer’s stake to ensure it was well bedded in the soil. “God is with us, fellows!” he had called to the archers. The bowmen had started to kneel in deference, but he had waved them up. “God is on our side! Be confident!”

“Wish God has sent more Englishmen,” a voice had dared to call from among the bowmen.

“Never wish that!” the king had sounded cheerful. “God’s providence is sufficient! We are enough to do His work!”

Hook hoped to God the king was right as he went back to kneel before Father Christopher who was dressed in a black priestly robe over which he wore a mud-spattered chasuble embroidered with white doves, green crosses, and the Cornewaille red lions. “I’ve sinned, father,” Hook said, and he made a confession he had never made before; that he had murdered Robert Perrill and still planned to murder both Thomas Perrill and Sir Martin. It was hard to say the words, but Hook was driven to it by the thought, almost a certainty, that this was his last day on earth.

Father Christopher’s hands tightened on Hook’s head. “Why did you commit murder?” he asked.

“The Perrills murdered my grandfather, my father, and my brother,” Hook said.

“And now you have murdered one of them,” Father Christopher said sternly. “Nick, it must finish.”

“I hate them, father.”

“It’s a day of battle,” Father Christopher said, “and you should go to your enemies and beg their forgiveness and make your peace.” The priest paused, but Hook said nothing. “Other men are doing that,” Father Christopher went on. “They’re seeking out their enemies and making their peace. You should do the same.”

“I promised not to kill him in the battle,” Hook said.

“That’s not enough, Nick. You want to go to God’s judgment with hatred in your heart?”

“I can’t make peace with them,” Hook said, “not after they killed Michael.”

“Christ forgave His enemies, Nick, and we are to be like Christ.”

“I’m not Christ, father. I’m Nick Hook.”

“And God loves you,” Father Christopher sighed, then made the sign of the cross on Nick’s head. “You will not murder either man, Nick. That is a command from God. You understand me? You will not go into this battle with hatred in your heart. That way God will look gently on you. Promise me you will think no murder, Nick.”

It was a struggle. Hook was silent for a while, then he nodded abruptly. “I won’t kill them, father,” he said unhappily.

“Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. You swear that?”

There was another pause. Hook was thinking of the long years, of the embedded hatred, of the loathing he felt for Sir Martin and for Tom Perrill, and then he thought of what he had to face this day and he knew that if he were to go to heaven then he must give Father Christopher the solemn promise. He nodded abruptly. “I swear it,” he said.

Father Christopher’s hands tightened on Hook’s bare scalp again. “Your penance is to shoot well this day, Nicholas Hook. Shoot well for God and your king. Te absolvo,” he said. “Your sins are forgiven. Now look up at me.”

Hook looked up. The rain had finally stopped. He stared into Father Christopher’s eyes as the priest took a sliver of charcoal and carefully wrote on Hook’s forehead. “There,” he said when he was finished.

“What’s that, father?”

Father Christopher smiled, “I’ve written IHC Nazar on your forehead. Some folk believe it protects a man from sudden death.”

“What does it mean, father?”

“It’s the name of Christ, the Nazarene.”

“Write it on Melisande’s forehead, father.”

“I will, Hook, of course I will. Now ready yourself for the body of Christ.” Hook received the sacrament and then, as other men were doing and as the king had done, he took a pinch of wet earth and swallowed it with the wafer to show he was ready for death. The gesture proclaimed he was prepared to receive the earth as the earth might have to receive him. “God bless you, Nick,” Father Christopher said.

“I hope we meet when it’s over, father,” Hook said, pulling the helmet over his aventail.

“I pray that too,” the priest said.

“The shit-eating bastards must come soon,” Will of the Dale grumbled when Hook rejoined his men, yet the French showed no sign of wanting to attack. They waited, their deep ranks almost filling the wide space between the woods. The English heralds, resplendent in their liveries and holding their long white wands, had ridden halfway to the enemy’s line where they had been met by French and Burgundian heralds and now they all made a bright group that sat on their horses at the edge of the trees beside a tumbledown hovel with a mossy roof. They would observe the battle together and at its end they would decree the winner.

“Come on, you goddam bastards,” a man grumbled.

But the goddam bastards did not come. Their trumpets howled, but the long steel ranks showed no sign of being ready to advance. They waited. The trapper-bright horses milled about to hide the crossbowmen behind. A brief ray of sunlight shone on the center of their line and Hook saw the oriflamme, the red forked pennant that announced to the French that they were to take no prisoners. Kill everyone.

“Evelgold! Hook! Magot! Candeler!” Now it was Sir John Cornewaille’s turn to pace in front of the archers. “Come here! The four of you!”

Hook joined the other three sergeants. It was extraordinarily hard to walk through the deep plow because the clay soil had turned to a viscous reddish mud that clung to his boots. It was even harder for Sir John who was wearing full plate armor, sixty pounds of steel, so that he lurched as he walked, forced to drag each steel-plated foot out of the earth’s sucking grip. Sir John struggled to a place some forty or fifty paces ahead of the archers and there waited for his sergeants. “You always want to look at your own army,” he greeted them, “to see it as the enemy does. Have a look.”

Hook turned to stare at a mud-spattered, rusted and bedraggled army. His army. The center of the line was made of three battles, each of around three hundred men-at-arms. The central battle was commanded by the king, the one on the far right by Lord Camoys, while the left-hand battle was led by the Duke of York. Between the three battles were two small groups of archers, while on either flank were the much larger contingents of bowmen. Those two flanking groups, with their stakes, were angled ahead of the line’s center so that their arrows could fly in from the sides. “So what do the French do?” Sir John demanded.

“Attack,” Evelgold said dourly.

“Attack what and why?” Sir John asked harshly. None of the four archers answered, instead they gazed at their own small army and wondered what reply Sir John wanted. “Think!” Sir John growled, his bright blue eyes darting between his sergeants. “You’re a Frenchman! You live in some shit-spattered manor with rats in the damp walls and mice dancing in the roof. What do you want?”

“Money,” Hook suggested.

“So what do you attack?”

“The flags,” Thomas Evelgold said.

“Because that’s where the money is,” Sir John said. “The goddamned bastards are flying the oriflamme,” he went on, “but that means nothing. They want prisoners. They want rich prisoners. They want the king, the Duke of York, the Duke of Gloucester, they want me, they want ransoms! There’s no profit in slaughtering archers, so the bastards will attack the men-at-arms. They’ll attack the flags, but some might come for you so drive them into the center with arrows. That’s what you do! Drive their flanks into the center. Because that’s where I can kill them.”

“If we’ve got enough arrows,” Evelgold said doubtfully.

“Save enough!” Sir John said forcibly, “because if you run out of arrows you’re going to have to fight them hand to hand and they’re trained to that, you’re not.”

“You trained us, Sir John,” Hook said, remembering the winter of practice with swords and axes.

“You’re half-trained, but the other archers?” Sir John asked derisively, and Hook, looking at the waiting men, knew they were no match for French men-at-arms. The archers were tailors and cordwainers, fullers and carpenters, millers and butchers. They were tradesmen who possessed a superb skill, the ability to draw the cord of a yew bow to their ear and send the arrow on its deathward journey. They were killers, but they were not men hardened to war by tournaments and trained from childhood in the discipline of blades. Many of them had no armor other than a padded jacket, and some did not even possess that small protection. “God keep the French from getting among them!” Sir John said.

None of the sergeants responded. They were thinking of what would happen when French men-at-arms, clad in steel, came to kill them. Hook shivered, then was distracted by the sight of five horsemen riding under the English royal banner toward the waiting French army. “What are they doing, Sir John?” Evelgold asked.

“The king has sent them to make an appeal for peace,” Sir John said, “they’ll demand that the French yield the crown to Henry, and then we’ll agree not to slaughter them.”

Evelgold just stared at Sir John as if he did not believe what he had heard. Hook suppressed a laugh and Sir John shrugged. “So they won’t accept the terms,” he said, “and that means we fight, but it doesn’t mean that they’ll attack us.”

“They won’t?” Magot asked.

“We have to get past them to reach Calais, so maybe we’ll have to cut our way through them.”

“Jesus,” Evelgold muttered.

“They want us to attack them, Sir John?” Magot asked.

“I would, if I were them!” Sir John turned to stare at the enemy. “They don’t want to cross this ground any more than we do, but they don’t need to cross it. We do. We have to reach Calais or we die here of starvation. So if they don’t attack us, we have to attack them.”

“Jesus,” Evelgold said again, and Hook tried to imagine the effort that would be needed to cross that half-mile of sucking, slippery, clinging mud. Let the French attack, he thought, and suddenly shivered violently. He was cold, he was hungry, he was tired. The fear came in waves and was turning his bowels to water. He was not the only one, lots of men were slipping into the woods to empty their bowels.

“I need to go to the woods,” he said.

“If you need to shit, do it here,” Sir John said harshly, then shouted at the massed archers. “No one’s to use the woods!” He feared that men, losing courage, would hide in the trees. “You’re to shit where you stand!”

“Shit and die,” Tom Evelgold said.

“And go to hell with fouled breeches,” Sir John snarled, “who cares?” He looked at each of his sergeants in turn, then spoke with a quiet intensity. “This battle’s not lost. Remember, we have archers, they don’t.”

“But we don’t have enough arrows,” Evelgold said.

“Then make each one count,” Sir John said, impatient with his centenar’s pessimism, then scowled at Hook. “Jesus, man, can’t you do that upwind of me?”

“Sorry, Sir John.”

Sir John grinned. “At least you can take a shit. Try doing that in full armor. I tell you, we’re not going to smell like lilies by the time we’ve finished our work today.” He gazed at the enemy, his bright eyes looking at the oriflamme. “And one last thing,” he said forcefully, “no one’s to start taking prisoners until we give the order that it’s safe to capture instead of kill.”

“You think we’ll take prisoners?” Evelgold asked with astonished disbelief.

“If men try to take prisoners too soon they weaken the line,” Sir John said, ignoring the question. “You have to fight and kill until the bastards can fight no more, and only then can you set about finding ransoms.” He clapped Evelgold on a mail-clad shoulder. “Tell your lads we’ll be feasting on captured French provisions tonight.”

Either that, Hook thought, or eating hell’s rations. He struggled back to his men who each stood by a stake. Those stakes, over two thousand of them on this right flank of the English army, made a dense thicket of sharpened points. Men could move among them easily enough, but no warhorse could maneuver about them.

“What did Sir John want?” Will of the Dale asked.

“To tell you that we’ll be eating French rations tonight.”

“He thinks they’ll take us prisoner?” Will asked skeptically.

“No, he thinks we’ll win.”

That prompted some bitter laughter. Hook ignored it and watched the enemy. The front rank of their dismounted men-at-arms stretched across the skyline, thick with the metal points of shortened lances. Still they did not move and still the English waited. French horsemen went on exercising their destriers and, because the horses disliked the thick furrows, many of the knights went to the grassy pastures beyond the woods. The sun climbed higher behind the thinning clouds. The king’s emissaries, sent to make an offer of peace, had met with a similar group of Frenchmen and now rode back across the plowland and, moments later, a rumor spread that the French had agreed to let the English pass, then the rumor was denied. “If they don’t want to fight,” Tom Scarlet said, “then perhaps they’ll just stand there all day!”

“We have to get past them, Tom.”

“Jesus, we could sneak off tonight! Go back to Harfleur.”

“The king won’t do that.”

“Why not for God’s sake? He wants to die?”

“He’s got God on his side,” Hook said.

Tom shivered. “God might have sent us a decent breakfast.”

Women brought what little food they had hoarded against this day. Melisande gave Hook an oatcake. “We share it,” Hook said.

“It’s for you,” she insisted. There was mold on the oats, but Hook ate half anyway and gave Melisande the other half. There was no ale, just water from a stream that Melisande brought in an old leather wine bottle. The water tasted rank. Melisande stood beside him and stared at the French. “So many,” she said quietly.

“They’re not moving,” Hook said.

“So what will happen?”

“We’ll have to attack them.”

She shivered. “You think my father’s there?”

“I’m sure of it.”

She said nothing. They waited. Waited. The trumpets and drums still sounded, but the musicians were tiring and the music was less exuberant. Hook could hear robins singing fitfully among the trees, some of which had already lost their leaves so that their branches were gaunt as scaffolds against the gray sky. The glistening wet plowland between the waiting armies was flitting with fieldfares and redwings that sought worms in the furrows. Hook thought of home, of the cows being milked, the sound of rutting stags in the woods, the shortening evenings and firelight in the cottages.

Then there was a stir and Hook, startled back to reality, saw that the king, mounted once again on the small white horse and accompanied only by his standard-bearer, had ridden out ahead of the army. He was coming toward the archers on the right flank and his horse, troubled by the uncertain footing, was lifting its hooves high. The king had taken off his crowned helm and the small wind tousled his short brown hair, making him look younger than his twenty-eight years. He curbed the horse a few paces in front of the foremost stakes and the centenars shouted at their men to take off their helmets and kneel. This time the king accepted the obeisance, waiting until all two and a half thousand archers were on their knees.

“Bowmen of England!” the king called, then was silent as the men shuffled closer to hear him. Cased bows and poleaxes were slung on their shoulders. Some men were armed with foresters’ axes or lead-weighted mallets. Most had a sword, though some carried nothing except a bow and a knife. Those with helmets had taken off their bascinets and others clawed back their mail hoods as they stared at their bareheaded king.

“Bowmen of England!” Henry called again, and there was a catch in his voice, so that he paused again. The wind stirred the mane of his horse. “We fight today because of my quarrel!” the king shouted, his voice clear and confident now. “Our enemy deny me the crown that God has granted me! Today they believe they will humble us! Today they believe they will drag me as a prisoner before the crowds in Paris!” He paused as a murmur of protest went through the hundreds of bowmen. “Our enemy,” the king went on, “have threatened to cut off the fingers of every Englishman who draws a bow!” The murmur was louder now, a growl of indignation, and Hook remembered the square in Soissons where the cutting off of fingers had just been the start of the horror. “Of every Welshman who draws a bow!” the king added, and a ripple of cheers sounded from among the archers’ ranks.

“All that they believe,” the king called, “yet they have forgotten God’s will. They are blind to Saint George and to Saint Edward who watch over us, and it is not just those saints who offer us their protection! This day is the feast of Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian, and those saints want vengeance for the evils done to them at Soissons.” He paused again, but no murmur sounded. To most of the archers Soissons was a name that meant nothing, but they were still listening intently. “It has fallen to us,” the king said, “to wreak that vengeance and you must know, as certainly as I know, that we are God’s instruments this day! God is in your bows, God is in your arrows, God is in your weapons, God is in your hearts, and God is in your souls. God will preserve us and God will destroy our enemies!” He paused again as another low murmur sounded among the archers. “With your help!” the king shouted loud now, “with your strength! We will win today!” There was a heartbeat of silence, then the archers cheered. The king waited for the sound to die away. “I have offered peace to our foe! Grant me my rights, I said to them, and we shall have peace, but there is neither peace in their hearts nor mercy in their souls, and so we have come to this place of judgment!” Here, for the first time, the king took his eyes from the throng of kneeling archers and turned to look at the clay furrows that lay between the armies.

He looked back to his audience. “I have brought you to this place,” he said, his voice lower now, but intense, “to this field in France, but I will not leave you here! I am, by the grace of God, your king,” his voice rose, “but this day I am no more than you and I am no less than you. This day I fight for you and I pledge you my life!” The king had to pause because the bowmen were cheering him again. He raised a gauntleted hand and waited for silence. “If you die here, I die here! I will not be taken captive!” Again the archers cheered, and again the king raised a hand and waited till the sound stopped. He smiled then, a confiding smile. “But I do not expect to be taken captive nor will I be killed, because all that I ask is that you fight for me this day as I will fight for you!” He thrust his right hand toward the archers, sweeping his fingers around to encompass them all. His horse capered sideways in the mud and the king calmed it expertly. “Today I fight for your homes, for your wives, for your sweethearts, for your mothers, for your fathers, for your children, for your lives, for your England!” The cheer that greeted those words must have been heard at the field’s far end where the French still waited beneath their bright banners. “Today we are brothers! We were born in England, we were born in Wales, and I swear on the lance of Saint George and on the dove of Saint David that I shall take you home to England, home to Wales, with new glories to our name! Fight as Englishmen! That is all I ask of you! And I promise that I will fight beside you and for you! I am your king, but this day I am your brother, and I swear on my immortal soul that I will not forsake my brothers! God save you, my brothers!” And with those words the king wheeled his horse and rode to give the same speech to the men-at-arms, leaving the archers on the right flank cheering him.

“By God,” Will of the Dale said, “but he really thinks we’ll win!”

And at the field’s far end the gusting wind lifted the red silk of the oriflamme so that it rippled above the enemy’s lance points. No prisoners.

And still the French did not move. The archers were sitting now, despite the damp ground. Some even slept, snoring in the mud. The priests still offered absolution. Father Christopher used his stub of charcoal to write the talismanic name of Jesus on Melisande’s forehead. “You will stay with the baggage train,” he told her.

“I will, father.”

“And keep your horse saddled,” the priest advised.

“To run away?” she asked.

“To run away,” he agreed.

“And wear your father’s jupon,” Hook added.

“I will,” she promised. She had the surcoat in a sack that held her worldly possessions, and now she took out the fine linen and unfolded it. “Give me your knife, Nick.”

He gave her his archer’s dagger and she used it to cut a sliver of material from the bottom hem of the jupon. She gave it to him. “There,” she said.

“I wear it?” Hook asked.

“Of course you do,” Father Christopher said. “That’s what a soldier does. He wears his lady’s colors.” He gestured toward the English men-at-arms, most of whom wore a silken handkerchief or favor around their necks. Hook looped his own strip about his neck, then took Melisande into his arms.

“You heard the king,” he told her, “God is on our side.”

“I hope God knows that,” she said.

“I pray so too,” Father Christopher said.

Then, suddenly, there was movement. Not from the French who showed no sign of wanting to attack, but from a group of English men-at-arms who had mounted horses and now rode along the army’s front. “We’re to advance!” the man who came to the right wing shouted. “Pick up your stakes! We’re to advance!”

“Fellows!” It was the king himself who had gone a few paces ahead of the line and now stood in his stirrups and waved his arms to encompass all his countrymen. “Fellows! Let’s go!”

“Oh, my God, my God,” Melisande said.

“Go back to the baggage,” Hook told her, then began wrestling his thick stake out of the clinging earth. “Go on, love,” he said, “I’ll be all right. There’s not a Frenchman who can kill me.” He did not believe that, but he forced a smile for her sake. He felt his stomach lurch. Fear was making him cold. He felt fragile, weak, shaking, but somehow he dragged the stake free and laid it over his shoulder.

He did not look back at Melisande. He started walking, struggling in the thick mud, and all along the English line men were doing the same. They moved pitifully slowly, dragging their feet out of the wet, clinging soil, and going pace by difficult pace toward the French.

And the French watched them. Just watched. “If the bastards had any sense they’d attack us now,” Evelgold said.

“Maybe they will,” Hook said. He watched the distant enemy. Some horsemen who had been exercising their destriers were walking them back toward the flanks of the army, but there appeared to be no urgency in their actions. The trumpets did not change their tune. The French seemed content to let the English march the length of the plowland, and Hook felt his mind skittering like a hare in the spring grass. Had it really been the king who came to the archers in the night? He had forgotten to whip the center of one of his spare bowstrings where the cord engaged an arrow’s nock. Would the king really pray for Michael? Would death be quick? Piers Candeler suddenly loosed a string of oaths and kicked off both boots to negotiate the plow barefoot. Hook remembered the archer he had hanged in London and wondered if that man had felt just this same fear when he watched the Scottish army come to fight on Homildon’s green hill, and then he thought of all the other Englishmen who had carried a war bow for their king. They had fought the Scots, the Welsh, each other, and always, always, they had fought the French, and still these French did not move. Their immobility was scaring Hook. They seemed content to wait, knowing that the small English army must throw itself on their blades.

Hook’s left foot was trapped in the soil’s suction so he did what other archers were doing, let the boot go. He pulled off the other boot and went barefoot, finding it easier. “If they move,” Evelgold shouted in warning, “we stop, string bows, and plant stakes.”

Yet the French did not move. Hook could see still more men joining their army, most coming from the east. The mounted men-at-arms on either flank were watching the English, but not spurring the big warhorses, which had armored faces and padded cloths over their chests and rumps. The riders’ long lances were held upright. Some of the steel-tipped, ash-shafted lances had pennons attached. The horsemen had their helmets’ visors open and Hook could see steel-framed faces. He was cold even though he was sweating. He wore a padded haubergeon over his leather-lined mail coat, and that armor might stop a sword swing, but it would easily be pierced by a lance. He tried to imagine dodging a spear’s thrust in this thick mud and knew it would be impossible.

“Slow down!” a voice ordered. The archers were getting too far ahead of the English men-at-arms who, encumbered by their armor, were making hard work of the waterlogged plowland. Yet, step by step, they advanced steadily, and the woods on either side drew closer so that the English line now filled the space between the trees. The bright group of heralds, French, English, and Burgundian, were walking their horses closer to the French, holding a position halfway between the two armies.

“Christ on His goddam cross,” Evelgold grumbled, “but how close does he want us?”

Then a voice bellowed at the archers to replant their stakes. The enemy was close now, only a little more than two hundred paces away, and that was no farther than the most distant marks at an archery contest, and Hook remembered those summer days with jugglers and dancing bears and free ale and the crowds cheering as the archers drew and loosed. “Stakes!” a man shouted, “plant them firm!”

Hook’s stake slid easily enough into the soft ground. He glanced at the enemy, saw that they were still not moving, and so unslung his poleax and gave the stake’s sharpened tip three hard blows that blunted the wood even as it drove the stake deeper into the ground. He used his knife to shave away the crushed wood and thus sharpen the replanted stake, and then, at last, he uncased the bow from its horsehide sheath. All around him archers were fixing stakes or stringing bows. Hook braced his bow against the stake’s lower end and bent the yew to slip the cord’s noose over the upper nock. He took both arrow bags from his shoulder. He pulled the arrows free and pushed them point down into the soil, bodkins to the left and the half-dozen broadheads to the right. He kissed the bow’s belly, where the dark wood met the light. Dear God, he prayed, and then he prayed to Saint Crispinian, and his heart felt like a trapped bird and his mouth was dry and his right leg shivered, and still the French were motionless and Saint Crispinian made no answer to Hook’s prayer.

The archers were spread out. Their stakes did not make a solid line facing the French, but instead were sunk in scattered lines, filling a space as wide and deep as the marketplace where Henry had burned and hanged the Lollards. There were a couple of paces between stakes, space enough for a man to move, but too tight for any horse to maneuver freely. The archers’ crude ranks stretched back so that the men in the rear could not see the enemy because of the archers in front of them, but that did not matter yet because at two hundred paces they would need to shoot high in the air if their arrows were to reach the French. Hook was in the foremost rank and he turned to see Thomas Perrill hammering in his stake some paces behind and to his right. There was no sign of Sir Martin and Hook wondered if the priest had gone back to the camp. That thought made him shiver for Melisande’s safety, but there was no time to worry about that because Tom Evelgold was shouting at his men to face front.

Hook thought the enemy was at last advancing, but the French were not stirring. Their center was a long thick line of dismounted men-at-arms in bright surcoats and polished armor, while their flanks were two masses of horsemen armed with lances. The flags were silken-bright against the gray sky and, in the very center of the French line, where the banners were thickest, the oriflamme was a red streak of wind-driven ripples telling the English that the enemy would show them no mercy.

Hook tried to find the Sire de Lanferelle in the enemy ranks, but could not see him. Instead he saw the weapons. He saw swords, lances, poleaxes, falcon-beaks, mauls, battleaxes, and maces. Some of the maces had spiked heads. He laid a broadhead across the bow’s thick-bellied stave and suddenly wanted to empty his bowels again. He closed his eyes for an instant and said another fervent prayer to Saint Crispinian, then planted his bare feet in the slimy earth. He braced himself.

“Sweet Jesus Christ,” Thomas Scarlet said.

“Oh God, oh God,” Will of the Dale muttered.

Sir Thomas Erpingham, gray-haired and bareheaded, had mounted his small horse and ridden a few paces ahead of the English line. The horse picked its feet high, unhappy with the sticky soil. Behind Sir Thomas the English men-at-arms waited. The nine hundred were arrayed four deep, with the king, resplendent in shining armor and with a jeweled crown of gold ringing his battle-helm, standing in their center. Sir Thomas, in a green surcoat blazoned with the red cross of Saint George, turned the horse so that his back was toward the French. He waited a few heartbeats.

“Be with me now,” Hook prayed aloud to Saint Crispinian.

He wished the saint would talk to him, but Crispinian was still silent.

“Draw!” Thomas Evelgold ordered in a low voice.

Hook lifted the bow. He drew the hemp-string all the way to his ear and felt the savage power in the bent wood. He aimed at a horse directly ahead of him, but knew it would be luck if the arrow struck where he aimed. If the French had been fifty paces closer he would have picked his targets and been sure of hitting each one, but at extreme bowshot he would be lucky to land the arrow within four or five feet of his target. He held the string back and his right arm quivered.

Five thousand archers had drawn their bows. Five thousand arrows were held on five thousand strings.

A flock of starlings flew up beyond the Tramecourt woods, their wingbeats sudden and loud. They resembled a swirl of dark smoke above the trees and then, as suddenly as they had appeared, they went. All along the French line the visors were being dropped. Hook had seen faces, but now could see only faceless steel.

“God be with us,” an archer muttered as Sir Thomas stood in his saddle.

Sir Thomas Erpingham threw the green baton high so that it circled in the damp air. There was silence above the field of Agincourt, a silence in which the green baton flew, its golden finials bright against the dull sky. “Now,” Sir Thomas shouted, “strike!”

The baton fell.

Hook released.

The arrows flew.

The first sound was the bowstrings, the snap of five thousand hemp cords being tightened by stressed yew, and that sound was like the devil’s harpstrings being plucked. Then there was the arrow sound, the sigh of air over feathers, but multiplied, so that it was like the rushing of a wind. That sound diminished as two clouds of arrows, thick as any flock of starlings, climbed into the gray sky. Hook, reaching for another broadhead, marveled at the sight of five thousand arrows in two sky-shadowing groups. The two storms seemed to hover for a heart’s beat at the height of their trajectory, and then the missiles fell.

It was Saint Crispin’s Day in Picardy.

For an instant there was silence.

Then the arrows struck.

It was the sound of steel on steel. A clatter, like Satan’s hailstorm.

And the day’s noise of pain began. It was a scream from a horse that reared with a broadhead deep in its rump. The horse bolted forward, jerking its steel-clad rider in his high saddle, and the motion of the wounded horse served as a signal so that more horses followed, then all the riders spurred and the whole French line gave a great shout as their cavalry began their charge. “Saint Denis! Montjoie!”

“Saint George!” someone shouted in the English line, and the shout was taken up by the small army. “Saint George!” The men-at-arms taunted the French with hunting calls, and the noise grew to a clamor as the trumpets screamed at the sky.

Where Hook’s second broadhead was on its way.

Ghillebert, Seigneur de Lanferelle, was in the front rank of the French army. He was one of over eight thousand dismounted men-at-arms who formed the first of the three French battles. He wore polished plate armor beneath his surcoat of the sun and falcon, though the armor’s leg pieces were now spattered with mud. At his side hung a long battle-sword, across his shoulder was a lead-weighted mace studded with spikes, while in his hands was an ash-shafted lance shortened to seven feet and tipped with a steel spike. His head was enclosed in a leather hood that was laced beneath his chin and beneath which his long hair was coiled. Over the hood he wore a chain-mail aventail that covered his head and shoulders, and above the aventail, completely encasing his skull, was an Italian battle-helm. The helm’s visor was pushed up so he could see the English and see, too, that their army was risibly small.

The French were ebullient. Henry of England had dared to march his pathetic army from Normandy to Picardy, thinking he could shame his enemy by parading his insolent banners across French territory, and now he was trapped. Lanferelle, watching the enemy since dawn, had reckoned that there were only a thousand men-at-arms in their line, and that figure had seemed so ridiculously small that he had checked again and again by dividing the line into quarters, counting heads and multiplying by four, and each time he arrived at the same total. Maybe one thousand men-at-arms who were faced by three successive French battles, each with at least eight thousand men-at-arms, but there were also the two wings of the English.

Archers.

Thousands of archers, too many to count, though the French scouts had reported figures as various as four thousand to eight thousand. And those archers, Lanferelle knew, carried the long yew bows and had bags of steel-tipped arrows that, at close range, could slash through the best armor in Christendom. That was why all Lanferelle’s armor was shaped and curved so that the arrows would be deflected, yet even so he knew an unlucky hit could find lodgment. And so Ghillebert, the Lord of Hell, Sire of Lanferelle, did not share his compatriots’ ebullience. He did not doubt for a second that the French men-at-arms could slaughter the English men-at-arms, but to reach that paltry battle-line they would have to endure the arrows.

In the night, as other men drank, the Sire of Lanferelle had gone to an astrologer, a famous man from Paris who was reputed to see the future, and Lanferelle had joined the long line waiting to consult the seer. The man, bearded, grave, and swathed in a fur-edged black cloak, had taken Lanferelle’s gold and then, after much groaning and sighing, had declared he saw nothing but glory in the future. “You will kill, my lord,” the astrologer had said, “you will kill and kill, and gain both glory and riches.” Afterward, standing outside the astrologer’s tent in the seething rain, Lanferelle had felt hollow.

He would kill and kill, of that he was certain, but the ambition was not to slaughter the English, but to capture them, and at the very center of the enemy line, beneath the tallest banners, was the King of England. Take Henry captive and the English nation would spend years raising the ransom. Frenchmen were relishing that prospect. There were also royal dukes in the English line, and great lords, and any one of them could make a man rich beyond his wildest dream.

But between the dream and the reality were the archers.

And Ghillebert, Seigneur de Lanferelle, understood the power of the yew bow.

Which was why, when the English had begun their long, laborious advance across the plow-ruined field between Tramecourt and Agincourt, Lanferelle had called to the constable that it was time to attack. The English, as they struggled forward, had lost their cohesion. Instead of being an army in battle formation they were suddenly a mud-spattered rabble trudging across the treacherous furrows, and Lanferelle had seen the archers in disarray and had called again to Marshal Boucicault and to the constable, d’Albret. “Let the horsemen go now!”

The horsemen were on either French wing, big men on big horses, the stallions with armored faces and thick padding covering their chests, and their job was to charge into the archers on the wings and slaughter them mercilessly, but many of the horsemen had ridden away to exercise their destriers on the grassy meadows beyond the woods to keep the animals warm and the remaining horsemen merely watched the English.

“The decision isn’t mine,” Marshal Boucicault answered Lanferelle.

“Then whose is it?”

“Not mine,” Boucicault said curtly and grimly, and Lanferelle understood that Boucicault shared his fear of the archers’ abilities.

“For the love of Christ!” Lanferelle said when still no order was given for the horsemen to charge. Instead they stood their big destriers and watched as the English struggled ever closer.

“Who leads us? For Christ’s sake, who leads us?” Lanferelle asked loudly. No one had given the French a rousing speech before the battle, though Lanferelle had seen the English king ride and pause along the enemy line and he had guessed Henry was rousing his men to slaughter.

Yet who spoke for France? Neither the constable nor the marshal commanded the vast army. That honor seemed to lie with the Duke of Brabant, or perhaps it was the young Duke of Orleans who had only just arrived on the field and was now watching the English advance and doubtless counting the ransoms to be made. The duke seemed content to let the enemy struggle toward their slaughter and so no order was given to the horsemen on either French wing.

Lanferelle watched, incredulous, as the English were allowed to come within long bowshot. The French had crossbowmen, they even had a handful of men who could shoot the yew bow, and they possessed some small cannons that were ready and loaded, but the waiting horsemen masked both the guns and the bowmen. The crossbow had a longer range than the yew bow, but the crossbowmen could not shoot and so the enemy archers pounded in their stakes unmolested. Dear God, Lanferelle thought, but this was madness. The archers should have been scattered and slaughtered by now, but instead they had been allowed to come within their bows’ range and to pound their stakes into the soft ground as a deterrent to horsemen. He watched as they strung their bows, doing it all within crossbow range yet staying entirely undisturbed. “Jesus,” he said to no one in particular, “she comes in, takes off her clothes, lies on the bed, spreads her legs, and we do nothing.”

“Sire?” his squire asked.

Lanferelle ignored the question. “Visors!” he shouted at his men. He led sixteen men-at-arms and he turned to make certain they had closed their visors before pulling down his own with a metallic thud.

He was instantly engulfed in darkness. A moment before he had been able to see the enemy clearly. He had even seen the glitter of gold circling Henry of England’s helmet, but now there was a steel shutter in front of his eyes and the shutter was pierced by twenty small holes, none wide enough to admit even a bodkin arrow’s narrow point, and to see anything through those holes Lanferelle had to move his head from side to side, and even then he could make out little of what happened.

Yet he did see the lone horseman ride from the center of the English line.

And he saw the baton thrown into the air.

And he heard the words. “Now, strike!”

He lowered his head as if he struggled into a fierce wind and he heard the rising rush of arrows and he flinched, teeth grinding together, and then the missiles struck.

There was a terrible noise as thousands of steel arrowheads plunged onto steel armor, and a man called out in sudden pain, and Lanferelle felt a thumping blow on his right shoulder, and even though the arrow was deflected it lurched him to one side with the sheer force of its blow. A second arrow quivered in his lance, though he could not see it. Some fool in the rear rank had left his visor open and was making a gargling noise around an arrow that had fallen from the sky to pierce his mouth and drive down into his windpipe. The man slowly sank to his knees and coughed a stream of thick blood. Other arrows plunged into the soil, or else glanced off armor. A horse whinnied and reared to Lanferelle’s left.

“Saint Denis! Montjoie!” the French shouted and Lanferelle, jerking his head so that he could make some sense of what the small holes in his visor revealed, saw the horsemen at last start forward. Then another shout to advance came from the center of the French line, where the oriflamme flew, and all the first battle lurched toward the enemy.

“Montjoie!” they shouted, the sound of their voices huge and deafening inside their helmets, and Lanferelle could hardly move because his armored feet were stuck in the mud, but he jerked his right leg free and so began the advance. Men of mud and steel, no flesh in sight, lumbering toward the waiting English. And the English were howling hunting cries like rabid devils pursuing Christian souls.

And the second arrow-storm fell.

And the devil’s hail rattled and more men screamed.

As the French, at last, attacked.

The horsemen came first. Hook saw one horse rearing, saw the rider topple backward as his pennanted lance scraped a circle against the sky, and then that horse was swallowed by the charge. Knights roweled back their spurs, lowered their lances and called their battle cry, and Hook saw great clods of earth being thrown up behind the monstrous hooves. The stallions tossed their armor-weighted heads, hating the uneven ground, and the spurs struck back again and the charge took shape as the horses gained speed.

The skill of a mounted charge was to start slow, the riders knee to knee, and to advance in that close formation so that the whole line of heavy horses struck the enemy together. Only at the last minute should a man kick his destrier into a gallop, but the plowland was so soft and the arrow fall so sudden that men spurred impulsively forward to escape both. No one had ordered the charge, rather it was the sting of the first arrow-storm that prompted it, and now, on both flanks, the horsemen charged as fast as their big horses could carry them. Three hundred horsemen attacked the English right wing, and even fewer assaulted the left. There were supposed to be a thousand horsemen on either flank, but the other riders were missing, still exercising their destriers.

And the archers drew and loosed.

Hook used broadheads. They were useless against armor, but they could pierce the padded cloths protecting the horses’ chests and, as the range shortened, so the arrows flew at a lower and lower trajectory, none wasting their force on the upper air, but searing straight into the charging animals, and for a moment Hook thought the arrows were having no effect, but then a horse stumbled and went down in a great flurry of mud, man, lance, and harness. The horse screamed and its rider, trapped by the rolling body, screamed with it and the horse behind struck the rolling beast in front and Hook saw the second rider being pitched forward over his horse’s head. He drew again, picking a big horse with shaggy fetlocks and drove an arrow into its side, just in front of the saddle’s girth and the horse swerved away, colliding with another, and Hook’s next arrow thumped into a padded chest to bury itself to the fledging and the world was hoofbeats and screams and the sound of bow cords and at least a dozen horses were on the ground, some struggling to get up, others splashing mud with frantic hooves as their lives drained away through sliced arteries. Will of the Dale put a bodkin into a rider’s throat and the man jerked back under the arrow’s strike, then rebounded forward from his saddle’s high cantle and his lance buried its point in a furrow and so lifted the man out of his saddle as his horse galloped on, eyes white and visible through the holes in its face armor, and the man was dragged along by the stirrup as the horse took an arrow in the eye and veered to one side and so brought down two more horses.

The archers were shooting fast. The horsemen did not have far to charge, but the ground slowed them and in the minute it took the three hundred to reach the archers on the English right they were the target of over four thousand arrows. Only the bowmen in the front two ranks were shooting at the horses, the other archers, their view of the charge obscured by those front ranks, were still hoisting arrows high so that they fell among the dismounted French.

A maddened horse, blood spurting from a ripped belly, twisted away and charged at the French men-at-arms in the field’s center. Others followed it. Some horsemen, balked by the corpses and by the dying horses to their front, pulled up, and then they were easy targets and the arrows whipped into them, each one striking a horse with the sound of a butcher’s cleaver, and the horses were screaming and men were trying to control them.

Yet still some horses reached the English line.

“Back!” centenars shouted, “back!”

The front ranks of archers stepped backward to leave their stakes facing the enemy. They still shot. Hook had taken a handful of bodkin arrows and he let one fly at less than twenty paces and saw the heavy, oak-weighted point glance off a manat-arm’s armor. He drew again, this time plunging the arrow into the horse’s chest.

Then the charge struck home.

But the riders had their visors down and could see nothing through the small slits or holes, while the horses, wearing their steel chamfrons, were almost as blinkered as the men. The charge struck home, but struck onto the stakes and a horse whimpered pitifully, a stake deep in its rib-shattered chest and blood bubbling from its open mouth. The stallion’s rider flailed his lance at empty air. Arrows drove into him and both man and horse were twisting and screaming. Another destrier made it past the first stakes and somehow saw the second row and veered aside to lose its footing in the slick mud. Horse and rider fell in a crash of steel and ash lance. “Mine!” Thomas Evelgold shouted and ran the few paces forward with his poleax. He swung it once, thumping the lead-weighted hammer onto the man-at-arms’s helmet, then he knelt, hauled up the stunned man’s visor, and ran a knife through an exposed eye. The man-at-arms quivered and was still. The horse tried to struggle to its feet, but Evelgold stunned it with his poleax, then struck again with the ax blade that pierced the chamfron and cracked open the beast’s skull.

“See them off!” Evelgold shouted.

The charge had ended at the stakes and the first French attack had ended in failure. The horsemen had been supposed to scatter the archers, but the arrows had done their wicked work and the stakes had stopped the survivors from getting among the bowmen. Some men-at-arms were already riding away, pursued by arrows, while riderless horses, crazed with pain, charged back at their own lines. One man, braver than brave, had dropped his lance to draw his sword and now tried to steer his destrier between the stakes, but the arrows whipped into his horse, which went to its knees, and a bodkin, shot at less than ten paces, drove through the rider’s breastplate, killing him, and he sat there, a head-drooping corpse on a dying horse, and the English archers jeered him.

It was strange, Hook thought, that the fear had gone. Now, instead, an excitement sang in his veins and a thin shrill voice keened in his head. He went back to his stake and plucked up a bodkin. The horsemen were gone, defeated by arrows, but the main French attack still advanced. They came on foot, because armored men on foot were less vulnerable to arrows than horses, and they came beneath bright banners, but their ranks had been churned to chaos by the wounded, riderless horses that had fled in blind panic to charge through the advancing French. Men went down under the heavy hooves, and other men tried to straighten the ragged line that stumbled across the deep furrows toward the English king and his men-at-arms. Hook picked his targets. He drew, the cord flowing back with deceptive ease, and he loosed arrow after arrow. Other archers crowded him, all jostling forward to pour their shafts at the French.

Who still came on. Their ranks had been broken by the panicked horses, and men were falling as arrows found their marks, but still they advanced. All France’s high aristocracy was in the leading battle and they came beneath proud banners. Eight thousand dismounted men-at-arms attacking nine hundred.

Then a French gun fired.

Melisande was praying. It was not a conscious prayer, more a desperate and silent and unending cry for help aimed at a gray sky, which offered her no comfort.

The baggage had been supposed to follow the army up onto the plateau, but most had stayed around the village of Maisoncelles where the king had spent much of the night. The royal baggage wagons were parked there, guarded by ten men-at-arms and twenty archers, all of them reckoned too sick or lame to stand in the main line of battle. Father Christopher had led Melisande there, saying she would be safer than with the few packhorses that had been led up onto the high plowland where the two armies met. The priest had written his mysterious letters on her forehead. IHC Nazar. “It will preserve your life,” he had promised her.

“Write it on your own face,” Melisande had told him.

Father Christopher had smiled. “God has me in the palm of His hand, my dear,” he said, then made the sign of the cross, “and He will preserve you. But you must stay here. You will be safer here.” He had placed her with the other archers’ wives between two empty wagons that had brought arrows to Agincourt, made sure that her horse was nearby and that the mare was saddled, and then Father Christopher had taken one of Sir John’s horses and ridden up the slope toward the place where the armies waited. Melisande had watched him until he vanished over the crest of the hill, and that was when she had begun to pray. The other wives of Sir John’s archers prayed too.

Melisande’s prayer took shape slowly. It had begun as an incoherent cry for help, but she forced herself to choose her words carefully as she prayed to the Virgin. Nick is a good man, she told the Mother of Christ, and a strong one, but he can be angry and sour, so help him now to be strong and alive. Let him live. That was the prayer, to let her man live.

“What do we do if the French come?” Matilda Cobbold asked.

“Run,” one of the other women said, and just then there was a roar from the hidden high ground beyond the skyline. They had heard the war-shout of Saint George, but the women were too far away to hear the saint’s name, only the great bellow of sound that told them something must be happening beyond the skyline.

“God help us,” Matilda said.

Melisande opened the sack that contained her worldly belongings. She wanted the jupon her father had sent her, but the sack also contained the ivory-stocked crossbow that Nick had given her almost three months before. She pulled it out.

“You’ll fight them on your own?” Matilda asked.

Melisande smiled, but found it hard to speak. She was so nervous, so frightened, knowing that what happened beyond the high horizon would decide her life’s course and that it was all beyond her control. She could only pray.

“Go up there, love,” Nell Candeler said, “and shoot some of the bastards.”

“It’s still cocked,” Melisande said in wonderment.

“What is?” Matilda asked.

“The bow,” Melisande said. “I never released it.” She stared at the crossbow, remembering the day Matt Scarlet had died, the day she had pointed the crossbow at her father. Ever since that day the bow had been cocked, its steel-shanked stave under the thick cord’s strain, and she had never noticed. She almost pulled the trigger, then impulsively thrust the bow back into her sack and pulled out the folded jupon. She stared at the bright cloth, half tempted to pull it over her head, but she suddenly knew she could not wear an enemy’s badge while Nick was fighting, and then another certainty overtook her, the knowledge that she would never see Nick again so long as she was tempted to wear her father’s jupon. It had to be thrown away. “I’m going to the river,” she said.

“You can piss here,” Nell Candeler said.

“I want to walk,” Melisande said, and she picked up her heavy sack and went south, away from the armies on the plateau and away from the baggage. She walked through the army’s sumpters that cropped the autumn grass, her feet soaked by the damp. She had an idea to throw the jupon into the Ternoise and watch it float downstream, but the River of Swords was too far away and so she settled for a stream that ran high and fast from the night’s rain. The stream flowed through the tangle of small fields and woods that lay just south of the village and she crouched on its bank where the leaves of the alders and willows had turned yellow and gold and there she dropped the sack, closed her eyes, and held the jupon in both hands as if it were an offering.

“Look after Nick,” she prayed, “let him live,” and with those words she threw her father’s jupon into the stream and watched it being carried fast away. The farther it went, she thought, the safer Nick would be.

Then the French gun fired, and that sound was loud enough to reverberate all through the valley behind the battlefield, loud enough to make Melisande turn and stare north.

To see Sir Martin, grinning and lanky, his gray hair slicked close against his narrow skull.

“Hello, little lady,” he said hungrily.

And there was no one for Melisande to ask for help.

She was alone.

A cloud of smoke rose above the horizon, marking the distant place where the gun had fired.

“All a-lonely,” Sir Martin said, “just you and me.” He made a gurgling sound that might have been laughter, hitched up his robes, and came for her.

TWELVE

The gun fired, belching smoke above the left flank of the French army.

Hook saw the gun-stone and did not recognize what it was, but for an instant there was a dark object rising and falling above the plowland and it seemed as if the thing, it was just a dark flicker, was coming straight for him and then the gun’s noise splintered the sky and birds rose screeching from the trees as the gun-stone struck an archer’s head a few paces from Hook.

The man’s skull was obliterated in an instant spray of blood and shattered skull. The stone kept flying, leaving a feathered trail of misted blood until it slapped into the mud two hundred paces behind the English line. It narrowly missed the destriers of the men-at-arms that were empty-saddled and under the guard of pageboys.

“Jesus,” Tom Scarlet said in disgust. There were jellied scraps of brain trickling down his bow’s shaft.

“Just keep shooting,” Hook said.

“Did you see that?” Scarlet asked in indignant amazement.

What Hook saw was dead and dying horses, dead riders, and beyond them a mass of dismounted men-at-arms advancing toward him. Crossbow bolts whirred close, but there were very few enemy bowmen who had a clear sight of the English. The French crossbowmen were aligned with the rearmost battle, too far to be sure of their aim, and most could not even see their enemy. Then, as the first French battle advanced to fill the space between the woodlands of Tramecourt and Agincourt, the French bowmen lost sight of the English altogether and the missiles stopped flying.

The first French battle was spread across the wide plowed field between the trees, but, because those woods funneled ever closer together, the line of armored men was being squeezed inward. Their ranks were already ragged, torn apart by the panicked horses that had bolted through them, but now they were jostling for space as the field contracted and all the while the arrows drove into them.

Hook was shooting steadily. He had already gone through one sheaf of arrows and had shouted for more. Boys were dumping fresh bundles among the archers, but hundreds of thousands were needed. Five thousand archers could easily shoot sixty thousand arrows in a minute and, when the cavalry had charged, they had shot even faster. Some men were still drawing and releasing as quickly as they could, but Hook slowed down. The closer the enemy came, the more lethal each arrow would be, so for now he was content to use broadheads against the advancing French.

The broadheads could never hope to pierce plate armor, but the blow of their strike was sufficient to knock a man backward, and each man Hook knocked back caused a ripple of chaos, slowing the French, and the enemy were struggling, not just with mud, but with the incessant arrow strikes. He could hear the arrows cracking against steel, a weird noise, never-ending, and the French men-at-arms, who were still a hundred and fifty paces away, looked as though they bent into the face of a gale, but a gale that was bringing steel hail.

Thomas Brutte cursed when his bow cord snapped to send an arrow spinning crazily into the air. He took a spare string from his pouch and restrung the bow. Hook saw how each of the enemy banners had a dozen or more arrows caught in their weave. He aimed at a man in a bright yellow surcoat, loosed, and his arrow threw the man backward. A horse lay on its side in front of the advancing French. The stallion’s death throes made it thrash its head and beat its hooves and the French line became even more disordered as men tried to avoid the animal. Bowstrings made their dull quick noise all around Hook. The sky was dark with arrows. Most archers were shooting at the men-at-arms who directly threatened them and, to avoid that arrow-storm, the foremost ranks of the French crowded still further inward, and that shrinking of the French line became more marked as the rearmost English archers, their aim frustrated by the men to their front, went into the thick briar underbrush of the Tramecourt woods and lined the edge of the trees from where they poured bodkins into the French flank.

The bravest of the French struggled to reach the English quickly, while the more prudent fell behind to gain the protection of the bolder men in front, and Hook saw how the French men-at-arms, who had begun their advance in a long straight line, were now coalescing into three crude wedges that were aimed at the flags waving in the center of each of the three English battles. It would be man-at-arms against man-at-arms, and the French, Hook supposed, were hoping to punch three bloody holes through the English line. And once that line of nine hundred men broke there would be chaos and death. He spared a glance north, worried that the narrowing of the French battle would give their crossbowmen a chance to shoot past the attackers’ flank, but those French archers seemed to have gone backward, almost as though they had lost interest in the fighting.

He picked up a bodkin and found the man in the yellow surcoat again. He drew, released, and was plucking up another arrow when he saw the yellow-clad man fall to his knees. So the bodkins were piercing, and Hook shot again and again, punching arrows into the slow-moving mass of men. He aimed at the leading rank and not all his arrows pierced their armor, but some struck plumb and tore their way through. Frenchmen were falling, tripping the ranks behind, yet still the great armored crowd struggled on.

“I need arrows!” a man shouted.

“Bring us goddamned arrows!” another shouted.

Hook still had a dozen. The enemy was close now, less than a hundred paces from the English line, but the arrow-storm was weakening as archers ran out of shafts. Hook drew long, picked a victim in a black surcoat, released and saw his arrow slap through the side of the pot-helm and the man seemed to totter in a circle, the arrow protruding from his brain as his lance knocked over another knight before the dying man dropped to his knees and fell full length in the mud. The next arrow glanced off a breastplate. Hook shot again, close enough now to see the details of his target’s livery. He saw a man in blue and green who had what appeared to be a gilded coronet around his helmet and Hook shot at him, then cursed himself because such a man could afford the finest armor and sure enough the arrow was deflected by the plate, though the man did stagger and was only rescued by his standard-bearer who pushed him back upright. Hook loosed again, shooting his arrow in a low trajectory that ended in a Frenchman’s thigh, and then there was only one arrow left. He held it on the stave, watching. It seemed to Hook that all the thousands of arrows had done surprisingly little damage to the enemy. Many Frenchmen were down and their bodies impeded the rest, but still the plowland seemed filled with living, mud-plastered, armored Frenchmen carrying their lances, swords, maces, and axes to the thin English line. They lumbered closer, each step an effort in the cloying earth, and Hook selected a man who seemed more eager than the rest and he sent his final arrow into that tall man’s chest. The bodkin point struck through steel plate and punctured a rib to pierce a lung and so fill the man’s helmet with a rush of blood that bubbled from his mouth and spilled from his visor’s holes.

“Arrows!” Hook bellowed, but there were none except the few remaining in the hands of the rearmost archers, and those men saved their missiles. The archers were spectators now. They stood among their stakes, a few yards from the nearest French wedge that was just paces from the English vanguard.

The archers had done their job. Now it was England’s men-at-arms who would have to fight.

While the French, spared the arrows at last, gave a hoarse shout and lunged to the kill.

The Sire de Lanferelle could vault onto the back of his horse while wearing a full suit of plate armor, he even danced in armor sometimes, not just because women adored a man dressed for killing, but to demonstrate that he was more elegant and lithe in armor than most men were without. Yet now he could hardly move. Each step was a fight against the soil’s suction. In places he sank to mid-calf and could find no purchase to drag his feet free, yet step by step he managed to keep going, sometimes leaning on his neighbor so he could wrench an armored foot out of the clinging earth. He tried to step in the furrows where water lay, because those furrows had the firmest bottoms, but he could scarce see the ground through the tight holes of his closed visor. Nor did he dare open the helmet, because the arrows were clattering and clashing and banging all around him. He was hit on the forehead by a bodkin that snapped his head back and almost toppled him, except that one of his men pushed him upright. Another arrow struck his breastplate, tearing a long rip in his jupon and scraping across the steel with a high-pitched squeal. His armor resisted both blows, though other men were not so fortunate. Every few heartbeats, in the middle of the metallic rain of arrows, a man would gasp or scream or call for help. Lanferelle did not see them fall, only hear them, and he was aware that the attack was losing its cohesion because men were crushing in from his left where most of the arrows came from, and those men squeezed the formation. Armor plate clanged against armor plate. Lanferelle himself was pushed so tight against his right-hand neighbor that he could not move his arm holding the lance and he bellowed a protest and made a huge effort to get a step ahead of the man. He was sweeping his head from side to side, trying to make sense of the blur of gray ahead. The English, he noticed, had their visors raised. They were not threatened by arrows and so could see to kill, but Lanferelle dared not lift his own visor because a handful of archers were posted between the English battles straight ahead and those men would thank God for the target of an unvisored French face.

His breathing was hoarse inside the helmet. He reckoned himself to be a strong man, yet he was gasping as he waded through the thick soil. Sweat streamed down his face. His left foot slipped in a patch of slick mud and he sank to his right knee, but managed to heave himself upright and stagger onward. Then he tripped on something and sprawled again, this time falling beside the corpse of an unhorsed man-at-arms. Two of his men pulled him to his feet. He was sheeted in mud now. Some of the holes in his visor were blocked by mud and he pawed at them with his left hand, but the armored gauntlet could not clear the thick wet earth. Just get close, he told himself, just get close and the killing could start and Lanferelle was confident of his ability to kill. He might not be a mud-wader, but he was a killer, and so he made another huge effort, trying to get ahead of the crush so he would have room to use his weapons. He turned his head again, scanning through the visor’s remaining holes, and saw, straight ahead, a great banner showing the royal arms of England with their impudent appropriation of the French lily. The royal arms on the flag were defaced with three white bars, each bar with three red balls, and he recognized the badge as that of Edward, Duke of York. He would serve as a prisoner, Lanferelle thought. The ransom for an English royal duke would make Lanferelle rich, and that prospect seemed to give his tired legs a new strength. He was growling now, though quite unaware of it. The English line was close. “Are you with me, Jean?” he shouted, and his squire shouted yes. Lanferelle intended to strike the English line with his lance and then, as the enemy recoiled from that blow, drop the cumbersome weapon and use the mace that was slung on his shoulder, and if the mace broke he would take one of the spare weapons carried by his squire. Lanferelle felt a sudden elation. He had lived this long, he had survived the arrow-storm and he was taking his lance to the enemy, but just then a bodkin point ripped from the flank and struck plumb in one of the visor’s holes and sudden light flooded Lanferelle’s eyes as the arrow peeled back the steel and sliced a savage cut in the bridge of his nose. His head was wrenched painfully to one side as the arrow missed his right eyeball by a hair’s breadth and scored across his cheekbone to lodge in his helmet.

He could see suddenly. He could see through the ragged hole torn by the arrow that he wrenched free with his left hand. He could not see much, but a sudden noise to his left made him turn to see a tall man pitch forward with blood bubbling from his visor’s holes, and then Lanferelle looked back to his front and the Duke of York was only a few paces away and so he dropped his left hand to brace the lance, took a deep breath, and shouted his war cry. He was still shouting as he charged, or rather as he churned his way through the last paces of muddy plowland. The shout mingled anger and elation. Anger at this impudent enemy and elation that he had survived the archers.

And he had come to the killing place.

Sir John Cornewaille was also angry.

Since the day the army had landed in France he had been one of the commanders of the vanguard. He had led the short march to Harfleur, been in the first rank of the men who had assaulted that stubborn city, and he had led the march north from the Seine to this muddy field in Picardy, yet now the king’s relative, the Duke of York, had been given command of the vanguard, and the pious duke, in Sir John’s view, was an uninspiring leader.

Yet the duke commanded and Sir John, a few places to the duke’s right, could only submit to the appointment, but that did not mean he could not tell the men of the right-hand battle what they should do when the French came. He was watching the enemy men-at-arms approach, and he was seeing how they struggled in the mud, and he was awed by the thickness of the arrow-storms that converged from left and right to pierce and wound and kill. Not one French visor was open, so they were half blinded by steel and almost crippled by the mud, and Sir John was waiting for them with lance, poleax, and sword. “Are you listening!” he shouted. Ostensibly he was calling to his own men-at-arms, but only a fool would not heed Sir John Cornewaille’s words when it came to a fight. “Listen!” he bellowed through his unvisored helmet. “When they reach us they’re going to rush the last few paces! They want to hit us hard! They want the fight over! When I give the word we all step back three paces. You hear me? We step back three paces!”

His own men, he knew, would obey him, as would Sir William Porter’s men-at-arms. Sir John had trained his men in the brief maneuver. The enemy would come at a rush and expect to lunge their shortened lances straight at English groins or faces, and if the English were suddenly to step back then those first energetic blows would be wasted on air. That was the moment Sir John would counterattack, when the enemy was off balance. “You wait for my command!” he shouted, and felt a brief moment of concern. Perhaps it was dangerous to step backward in such treacherous ground, but he reckoned the enemy was more likely to slip and fall than his own men. Those men were arrayed in three crude ranks that swelled to six where the Duke of York’s big company was arrayed around their lord. The duke, anxious face showing through his open helm, had not turned to look when Sir John shouted. Instead he had stared straight ahead while the tip of his sword, made of the best Bordeaux steel, rested lightly on the furrows. “When they come to strike!” Sir John bellowed, watching to see if the duke showed any response. “Cheat their blow! Step back! And when they falter, attack!” The duke did not acknowledge the advice, he still stared at the French horde that was losing its order. The flanks were crushing inward to escape the arrows, and the leading men were skewing what was left of the French formation by deliberately advancing on those places in the English line where the banners proclaimed the position of high nobility who might expect to pay extravagant ransoms. Yet, disorganized though the French were, this first battle was still a horde. It outnumbered the English men-at-arms by eight to one; it was an armored herd spiked with lances, thick with blades, a grinding wave of steel that seemed to shrug off the arrows as a bull might ignore the stings of swarming horseflies. Some Frenchmen fell, and whenever a man was put down by a bodkin point he would trip the men behind, and Sir John saw the crowding and jostling, the pushing and shoving. Some men were struggling to be in the front rank, wanting to win renown, others were reluctant to be the first to strike, yet all, he knew, were anticipating ransoms and riches and rejoicing.

“God be with you, John,” Sir William Porter said nervously. He had moved to be next to his friend.

“I think God will let us win,” Sir John said loudly.

“I wish God had sent us a thousand more English men-at-arms,” Sir William said.

“You heard what our king said,” Sir John shouted in response, “don’t wish for another man on our side! Why share the victory? We’re English! If we were only half our number we would be enough to slaughter these turd-sucking sons of rancid whores!”

“God help us,” Sir William said softly.

“Do what I say, William,” Sir John said quietly. “Let them come at you, step back, then strike. Once you have the first man down you’ve made an obstacle for the second. You understand me?”

Sir William nodded. The two sides were now close enough for men on either side to recognize each other by their jupons, except the surcoats of the French were so spattered with mud that some were hard to read and nearly every surcoat had two or more arrows caught in its folds.

“Then kill the second man,” Sir John went on. “Don’t use your sword. A sword’s no good in this fight. Hammer the bastards down with a poleax. Stun them, break their legs, crack their skulls. Put the second man down, William, and the third can’t reach you without stumbling over two corpses.”

“I’d rather use a lance,” Sir William said diffidently.

“Then stab at their visors,” Sir John said. “That’s the weakest point in armor. Ram it home, William, and make the goddam bastards suffer.” The French were fewer than fifty paces away. The arrow strikes had almost stopped, though a few bodkins still streaked across the face of the advancing enemy to strike from the flank. The archers posted between the battles were readying to file back between the men-at-arms so that the English line of fully-armored men would be continuous. Those archers still had a few arrows left and were shooting them fast before they were ordered to the rear. More Frenchmen went down. One, an arrow deep in his belly, knelt and then opened his visor to vomit a mix of puke and blood before the men behind trod him into the furrows.

“We’re three ranks deep,” Sir John said, “and they’re at least twenty ranks deep. The men behind will push the men in front and so they’re going to be forced onto our blades.” He grinned suddenly. “And we’re sober, William. We ran out of wine so we’re fighting sober, but I’ll wager half their army is soaked in wine. God is with us, William.”

“You believe that?”

“Believe it?” Sir John laughed. “I know it! Now brace yourselves!”

The noise was rising as the enemy shouted their war cries. Off to Sir John’s left where a thick crowd of Frenchmen was advancing on the king’s banner, he could see the oriflamme, red and wicked, high on its pole, and then he forgot that symbol because the enemy in front had summoned a last great effort. They were shouting, they were even trying to run, they were coming to take their victory.

Their lances were poised to strike. They were screaming. “Saint Denis! Montjoie! Montjoie!” and the English were howling like huntsmen closing on their prey.

“Now!” Sir John bellowed. “Now!”

Sir Martin shoved Melisande down, planting his hand between her breasts and thrusting hard and quickly so that she fell back between the trees on the stream’s bank. “There,” he said, “you just stay there like a good little girl. No!” he held up a hand as she tried to scramble away. There was a terrible threat in that raised hand and Melisande went still again, making Sir Martin smile. He had yellowed stumps for teeth. “I’ve got a knife somewhere,” he told her, “I know I do.” He fumbled in a pouch at his belt. “A good knife, too. Oh! Here it is!” He smiled as he showed her the short blade. “Put a knife to thy throat, the holy book says, if thou art a man of appetite, and I am, I am, but I don’t want to cut your pretty throat, girl. It does spoil matters if you’re scrambling about in blood. So just be good and lie there like a nice little girl and it’ll soon be over.” He laughed at that, then knelt over her, his knees either side of her belly. “But I do think we want you naked. Naked is blessed, girl. In nakedness lies truth. Those are the words of our Lord and Savior.” He had invented the text, but in his mind it still had the ring of scriptural truth. He planted his left hand on her breasts, making her whimper. He was grinning, and in his deepset eyes Melisande saw the glints of madness. She hardly moved, she hardly dared move because the knife was coming toward her throat, but she groped to find the neck of her sack and slowly pulled it toward her.

“And what shall divide us from the love of Christ?” Sir Martin asked her in a hoarse voice, “tell me that, eh?” He grinned still, reaching for the neck of her dress with his left hand. “That’s what the holy scriptures ask us, girl, they ask us what shall divide us from Christ’s love! What shall divide you and me, eh? Not tribulation, the word of the Lord says, nor distress, nor persecution, nor hunger, are you listening to me?”

Melisande nodded. The sack inched toward her and she felt for its opening.

“The words of God, little girl,” Sir Martin said, this time relying on genuine words of scripture, “written for our comfort by the blessed Saint Paul himself. Neither danger nor the sword shall keep us from Christ’s love, and nor, the apostle says, will nakedness!” And with that he slashed at her dress with the short knife and, with a twitching grimace, ripped the cloth down so that her breasts were exposed.

“Oh my,” Sir Martin said reverently, “oh my, oh my, oh my. Nakedness will not keep you from Christ’s love, my child, that is the promise of the scripture. You should be glad of my coming. You should rejoice in it.” He no longer straddled her, but knelt beside her as he tore the linen dress down to its lower hem and then he stared with awed reverence at her pale body. Melisande lay still, her right hand inside the sack now, but not moving.

“We went naked, girl, before woman brought sin into the world,” Sir Martin said, “and it is only meet and just that woman should be punished for that first sin. Don’t you agree?” A vagary of the wind brought the sound of shouting from the high plateau and the priest turned and looked at the distant crest for an instant. Melisande thrust her hand deeper into the sack, fumbling for one of the short leather-fledged bolts. She went still again as Sir Martin looked back to her. “They’re having their games up there,” he said. “They do like to fight, they do, but the Frenchies will win this one! There’s thousands of the bastards! Your Nick will go down, girl. Down to a Frenchie’s sword. Cos you’re a Frenchie, aren’t you? A pretty little Frenchie. I’m just sorry your Nick will never know I’ve punished you for your sins. Woman brought sin into the world and woman must be punished. I’d like your Nick to die knowing I’d punished you, but he won’t, and so it is, so it falls out, so the good Lord disposes. My Thomas will probably die too, and that’s a pity, cos I do like my Thomas, but I’ve other sons. Maybe you’ll have one for me?” He smiled at that idea as he fumbled to hitch up his robe. “I won’t die. The Frenchies won’t kill a priest cos they really don’t want to go to hell. And if you’re nice to me, little girl, you won’t die either. You can live and have my little baby. Maybe we’ll call him Thomas? Right! Get those pretty legs apart.”

Melisande did not move, but the priest kicked at her knees, then kicked harder and so forced his foot between her thighs. “Our Henry has led his men into the devil’s shit-pot, hasn’t he?” he said. “And now they’re all going to be dead. They’re all going to be dead and there’ll just be you and me, little girl, just you and me, so you might as well be nice to me.” He pulled the black robe above his waist and grinned at her. “Handsome, isn’t he? Now, little one, make him welcome.”

He forced his knees between her legs.

“I’ve been wanting to do this,” he said, kneeling above her, “forever such a long time.” He gave a spasm, then leaned forward, propping himself on his left hand while still holding the knife to her throat with his right. A second pouch was about his neck, tied next to a wooden crucifix with a leather cord, and both cross and pouch swung free, annoying the priest. “Don’t need those, do we?” he asked. “They just gets in the way, girl.” He used his knife hand to take the pouch and crucifix from his neck. The pouch clinked as he dropped it on the stream’s bank and the sound made him grin. “That’s Frenchie gold, little girl, gold that I found in Harfleur, and if you’re nice to me I’ll give you a groat or two. You are going to be nice, aren’t you? All quiet and nice like a good little girl?”

Melisande pushed her hand deeper into the sack and found what she wanted.

“I shall be nice,” she said in a frightened voice.

“Oh you will,” Sir Martin said hoarsely, putting the knife back to her throat, “you surely will.”

Sir John stepped back. Two paces were sufficient. At first he thought he had called the command too soon, then feared it was too late because his feet were stuck in the mud, but he wrenched them free and stumbled back two paces and the opposing Frenchmen gave a shout, thinking the English were trying to run away, then their lances thrust into empty air and the momentum of the lunges unbalanced them, and that was when Sir John struck. “Now!” he bellowed. “Strike!” and he rammed his own lance forward, spearing the iron-tipped point into the groin of the closest enemy. The English lances, like the French, had been cut down, but the French had cut their shafts shorter and so did not have the reach of the English weapons. Sir John’s lance slammed into metal and he leaned into the blow and saw the enemy fold over the point, and he pulled the lance back, watching the man fall, then struck it forward again.

The French, wasting their first blows on air, were stumbling. They were tired and could not pull their feet out of the sticky furrows and the force of the English lance blows was toppling them. To Sir John’s left and right there were men on their knees, and he slammed the lance hard into the visored face of a man in the second rank to throw him backward. Then he hurled the lance down and reached behind with his right hand. “Poleax!”

His squire gave him the weapon.

And the killing could start.

A lance struck Sir John’s head. His visor was missing and the Frenchman had tried to skewer Sir John’s eyes, but the blow glanced off his helmet and Sir John pushed a step forward and swung the poleax in a short cut that smacked on the man’s helmet, crushing it, and so another man was down in the mud. A whole rank of men had stumbled, and Sir John made certain they stayed down by cracking the lead-weighted hammer on their helmets. The man who had folded around Sir John’s lance was trying to rise again and Sir John chopped the ax blade hard against his backplate, then shouted at his squire to finish the man off. “Open his visor,” he shouted, “kill him!” Then Sir John planted his feet and began picking his enemies.

Those enemies were already encumbered. The first rank of Frenchmen was mostly on the ground where they were bleeding in a tangle of bodies and discarded lances, and the following ranks had to stumble over those obstacles and as they tried so they were met with ax blades, mace heads, and lance points. It might not have mattered if the French had been able to negotiate the obstacles in their own time, but they were pushed onto them by the press of men behind and so they stumbled haplessly into the English blades. “Kill them!” Sir John bellowed. “Kill them! Kill them! Kill them!” That was when the battle joy came to him, the pure joy of being a warlord, armored and armed, dangerous and invincible. He used the poleax’s hammerhead to beat down armored enemies. The hammer did not need to pierce armor, few weapons could, but the weight alone could stun a man and one blow was usually sufficient to put a man down or cripple him.

The French, it seemed to Sir John, moved with a painful slowness, while he was endowed with a godlike speed. He was grinning and he was watching three or four enemies at once, picking which one to attack first and already knowing how the second and third would be destroyed. They came to him and he sensed their panic. The rearward ranks of the French carried short weapons, maces or swords or axes, but they had no time to use them as they were forced onto the bodies of the fallen. They tripped into the blows of Sir John and his men, and so many were put down that Sir John had to negotiate the dead himself. Now the English were carrying the fight to the French. Nine hundred men were attacking eight thousand, but the nine hundred could take care where they stepped without fear of being pushed from behind.

A Frenchman in mud-spattered armor that had been scoured until it shone like silver, lunged a sword at Sir John who let the weapon waste its force against the cuisse protecting his left thigh. The man to Sir John’s left battered the polished helmet with a poleax hammer, and the Frenchman collapsed like a felled ox as Sir John rammed his pole’s spike into the face of a man wearing the livery of a wheatsheaf. The spike mangled visor, teeth, and palate, jerking the man’s head back as his body was pushed forward. Sir John let his neighbor crack a hammer against the fallen man’s helmet as he back-swung his poleax into a pot-helm surmounted by a plume of feathers. “Come on, you bastards! I want you!” Sir John shouted. He was laughing. At that moment it never once occurred to him that some Frenchmen were eager for the renown that would follow the death or capture of Sir John Cornewaille. They came and they fell, victims of the wet ground and of the obstacles they could not see through their closed visors, and they came to the short, hard blows of a poleax that made more obstacles.

“Stay tight, stay tight!” Sir John bellowed, making sure there was a man to his left and Sir William to his right. You fought shoulder to shoulder to give the enemy no room to pierce the line, and Sir John’s men-at-arms were fighting as he had trained them to fight. They had stepped over the first fallen Frenchmen and the second line of English were lifting enemy visors and sliding knives into the eyes or mouths of the wounded to stop them from striking up from the ground. Frenchmen screamed when they saw the blade coming, they twisted in the mud to escape the quick stabs, they died in spasms, and still more came to be hammered or chopped or crushed. Some Frenchmen, reckoning themselves safe from arrows, had lifted their visors and Sir John slammed the poleax’s spike into a man’s face, twisting it as it pierced the eye socket, dragging it back jellied and bloodied, watching as the man, in frantic dying pain, flailed and impeded more Frenchmen. Sir William Porter was stabbing his lance at men’s faces. One blow was usually enough to unbalance an enemy and Sir William’s other neighbor would finish the job with a hammer blow. Sir William, usually a quiet and studious man, was growling and snarling as he picked his victims. “God’s blood, William,” Sir John shouted, “but this is joy!”

The noise was unending. Steel on steel, screams, war-shouts. Enough Frenchmen had fallen to stop the ponderous charge, and the men behind could not negotiate the piled bodies without stumbling into the English blades. There was blood in the furrows. Sir John stepped on a wounded Frenchman’s helmet, unaware that he did so, but conscious that his right foot had found firm standing, and his weight drove the man’s visor into the mud that seeped through the visor holes and slowly stifled him. He drowned in mud, choking for breath as Sir John taunted the French, begged them to come to him, then stepped forward again, hungry for more death. “Kill them!” he screamed. “Kill them!” He felt a burst of energy and used it to crash into the French line, opening it so his men could follow, stabbing and lunging with the speed of Christendom’s most feared tournament fighter. He crippled men with the spike, driving it through the faulds covering their groins, and as they doubled in screaming pain he would crash the hammer or ax onto their helmets and leave it to the men behind to give the fallen enemy the mercy of death. Sir John took blows on his armor, but they were feeble until a Frenchman managed a hard swing with a poleax and Sir John was only saved because the enemy’s shaft broke and Sir John screamed in challenge and swung his own ax at the man’s legs, driving the blade through a roundel to chop into a knee. The man went down and lunged with his weapon’s broken shaft, and Sir John smashed the hammerhead onto the enemy’s helmet with such force that the steel collapsed and bloody ooze spurted from the visor. Sir John and his men-at-arms were hacking a deep hole in the crammed French ranks, killing again to make new corpses to trip the enemy.

To his left, unseen by Sir John, the Duke of York died.

The French attack had struck the English vanguard first. A hundred men were dead in that fight before the oriflamme reached King Henry’s men, and in the front of the foremost men was Ghillebert, Seigneur de Lanferelle, and he was half aware that the English to his left had stepped back as the charge crashed home, but the Duke of York and his men had stayed put, thrusting with lances, and Lanferelle had twisted aside, letting a lance slide off his breastplate’s flank, then ramming his own lance into an unvisored face. “Lanferelle!” he shouted, “Lanferelle!” He wanted the English to know whom they faced, and he fended off a lance with his own then unslung his mace and started to hack. This was no place for the subtle graces of a tournament field, no place to show a swordsman’s skills, this was a place to hack and kill, chop and wound, to fill an enemy with fear, and Lanferelle drove the spiked mace down into a man wearing the duke’s livery and wrenched the bloody spikes out of the split helmet and skull and thumped it forward into another man, hurling him back and he could see the duke clearly now, just to his right, but first he had to kill a man to his left, which he did with the heavy mace in a blow that rang up his arm. “Yield!” he shouted at the duke who had dropped his visor, and the duke’s response was to swing his sword that clanged on Lanferelle’s plate and Lanferelle dropped the mace head over the duke’s shoulder and pulled so that the tall man stumbled forward, lost his footing, and fell full length. “He’s mine!” Lanferelle shouted, “the bastard’s mine,” and that was when the battle joy came to Lanferelle, the exultation of a fighter who dominated his foes.

He stood over the duke, one foot on the fallen man’s spine, and killed any man who tried a rescue. Four of his own men-at-arms flanked him with poleaxes and they shouted insults at the English before killing them. “I want the standard!” Lanferelle shouted. He thought the duke’s great flag would be a welcome decoration in his manor hall where it could hang from the smoke-darkened beams beneath the musicians’ gallery and the duke, a prisoner in Lanferelle’s keeping, would be forced to see that standard every day. “Come and die!” Lanferelle shouted at the standard-bearer, but English men-at-arms pushed the man back out of immediate danger and closed on Lanferelle and he parried their blows, thrusting back hard, depending on the weight of his mace to throw his opponents off balance, and all the while he shouted at his men in the second rank to defend his back. They had to keep the crush of Frenchmen from crowding him, and they did it by threatening their own ranks, giving Lanferelle room to slash the mace at any man who dared oppose him. His four men were using their poleaxes to hack at the English line that was so thin Lanferelle reckoned he could fight through it and lead a mass of Frenchmen to the rear of the English center. Why not capture a king as well as a duke? “Forward!” he bellowed.’ Forward!” but when he tried to go forward he half tripped on the bodies that had fallen across the Duke of York’s legs. Lanferelle tried to kick the dead men out of his path, but a lance thrust from an Englishman hammered his breastplate and threw him back. “Bastard!” Lanferelle shouted, driving the mace’s bloody spikes toward the snarling face, then a shout of warning made him glance to his left and he saw that the English were driving into the French ranks and threatening to fight around to his rear. He reckoned there was still time to break the enemy line and he tried to go forward again and once more was checked by the dead men, and a sudden rush of Englishmen came to oppose him, their lances, poleaxes, and maces battering his armor and he had no choice but to step back. His chance to cleave the line was gone for the moment.

He backed away, leaving the Duke of York face down in the mud. The duke, stunned and trampled, had drowned in a blood-drenched puddle and now the English advanced across his corpse, coming for Lanferelle and for his standard of the sun and falcon, and Lanferelle held them at bay with swift hard strokes. He did not know the duke was dead, only regretted that he had temporarily lost him, but then he saw another standard to his left, a standard deep in the French ranks that showed a rearing lion blazoned with a crown and he reckoned Sir John Cornewaille’s ransom would make him rich enough. “With me!” he bellowed, and he rammed and shoved and fought his way toward Sir John.

Away to Lanferelle’s right a furious battle raged around the king’s four standards. Scores of Frenchmen wanted the honor of capturing England’s king, but they faced the same horrors that dogged the rest of the French attackers. Their front rank had gone down fast, its men exhausted by the mud and wounded by the arrow-storm, and the king’s bodyguard had killed them with axes, maces, and mauls. Now the attackers tripped on bodies and were met by ax strokes, yet still they pushed forward and a French lance pierced the faulds of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the king’s younger brother, and the blow to the groin drove him down into the furrows. Frenchmen surged to take the fallen man prisoner, but Henry stood over his injured brother and used his sword two-handed to hack at the enemy. He fought with a sword because he regarded that as a royal weapon, and if it put him at a disadvantage against men armed with poleaxes and maces, then Henry did not acknowledge it, because he knew God was with him. He could feel God in his heart, he sensed God giving him strength, and even when a French poleax rang on his crowned helmet with a sudden blinding force, God protected him. A golden fleuret was chopped from the crown and his helmet was dented, but the steel was not broken and the leather liner soaked some of the blow’s force and Henry stayed conscious as he lunged the sword into the axman’s armpit and screamed his war cry. “Saint George!”

Henry of England was filled by a God-given joy. Never, in all his life, had he felt closer to God, and he almost pitied the men who came to be killed for they were being killed by God. Henry’s bodyguard flanked him and, one by one, they killed eighteen Frenchmen who, only the night before, had sworn a solemn oath to kill or capture the King of England. The eighteen had been bound together by their oath and they had advanced together and now they died together. Their bodies lay tangled and bloody to impede the men who still wanted the fame of capturing a king. A Frenchman bellowed his challenge, stumbling forward, spiked mace thrashing at the king, and the king slammed the sword hard forward to lodge the point in the slit of the Frenchman’s visor, and the mace struck a man next to the king, who staggered, and another Englishman drove his poleax spike into the Frenchman’s throat so that blood ran down the ax’s iron-sheathed handle. The man sank to his knees, and the king rammed the blade into the visor’s slit, butchering the man’s lips and tongue. Blood welled at the slit, a poleax slammed onto the man’s helmet, driving in the steel and opening the skull to spray the king with blood as he ripped his sword free and parried a lance thrust. “Saint George!” he shouted and felt the divine power thrill through his veins. The Frenchman with the lance had an open visor and Henry saw fear in the man’s eyes, then a mute appeal for mercy as his lance was wrenched from his hands, but God did not want mercy for Henry’s enemies and so the king cut his sword across the man’s face to slice open both his eyeballs. One of the royal bodyguard cracked the blinded man’s helmet with a maul, and so another body was added to the heap of French dead that protected the English line.

And the English line held. In places it had been driven back by the weight of attacking men-at-arms, but the line did not break, and now it was protected by ramparts of dead and wounded Frenchmen, and in places the line bulged forward as the English counterattacked into the French formation. And the French, unable to march straight ahead, began to spread to their flanks.

Where the archers had no arrows.

“You can die, or you can fight.” The voice was distant and amused, as though the speaker did not care what Nicholas Hook’s fate would be.

“God’s holy shit, Nick, they’re coming for us,” Tom Scarlet said nervously. The archers had pulled back behind the foremost stakes and then watched the French men-at-arms crash into the English line. There had been loud cheers from the archers when that perilously thin line stopped the enemy, but now that enemy was spreading toward the stakes.

“We can fight or die,” Hook said. He threw down his bow. It was useless without arrows, and there were no arrows.

“So fight,” the voice spoke again, and Hook knew it was Saint Crispin, the harsher saint, who was talking to him.

“You’re here!” he said aloud in relief and wonderment.

“I’m here, Nick,” Scarlet said, “don’t want to be, but I am.”

“Of course we’re here!” Saint Crispin said harshly. “We’re here to get revenge! So fight them, you bastard! What are you waiting for?”

Hook had paused to watch the French. He sensed they were not trying to outflank the English men-at-arms, but rather to escape the killing that was so loud to his left, but soon, he thought, some Frenchman would decide to attack the lightly armored archers and thus reach the rear of the king’s line.

“What are you waiting for?” the saint again demanded angrily. “Do God’s work, for Christ’s sake! Just kill the goddamned bastards!”

Hook felt a tremor of fear. A Frenchman staggered closer to the stakes. His left arm was hanging limply from his shoulder where an espalier was split and bloody.

“What do we do, Nick?” Scarlet asked.

Hook took the poleax from his shoulder. “Kill them!” he roared. “Kill the goddamned bastards! Saint Crispin! Kill!”

The shout released the archers, who suddenly gave a great shout of defiance and streamed between their stakes to attack the French flank. The bowmen were armed with poleaxes, swords, or mallets. Most were barefoot, none had leg armor and few could afford a breastplate, but in the mud they could move much faster than the French. “Kill them!” Evelgold bellowed, and still more archers took up the shout. There was a wildness in the gray air, a sudden and savage desire to kill the men who had promised to chop off archers’ fingers, and so Welshmen and Englishmen, their arms hardened by years of archery, went to massacre the gentry of France.

Hook ignored the wounded man and instead attacked a giant in a bright red surcoat. His first blow was a wild swing that would have earned Sir John’s scorn had he seen it, and the Frenchman swayed back to make it miss and then lunged with his shortened lance, but Hook’s momentum had carried him past the man and, as the tall Frenchman turned to follow Hook, so Will of the Dale hammered the back of the man’s helmet with a mallet and the enemy toppled into the mud. Geoffrey Horrocks knelt on him, lifted the visor, and stabbed into an eye with a long, thin-bladed knife. Hook drove his poleax at a man in a black and white striped surcoat, thrusting him so hard in the breastplate that the enemy fell backward, and then the hammerhead swung to crash into a man’s sword arm, and another archer was there to swing a lead-weighted maul onto that man’s helmet. The French, their feet trapped by the mud’s suction, could not move to avoid the blows, and their own strokes and lunges were being wasted on air as the nimble archers dodged. The enemy, safe from arrows, was fighting with raised visors now and Hook discovered it was easy to stab the poleax’s spike at their eyes, forcing them to twist aside when one of his companions would follow up with a hammer blow. It was the poleaxes, hammers, and the mauls that were doing the damage, lead-weighted hammerheads wielded by archers’ arms, and the hammers crushed helmets and shattered armor-encased bones. Archers without hammers picked up enemy poleaxes or maces. They were suddenly scenting easy pickings as still more bowmen came from the stakes to join the brawl.

It was a brawl. It was tavern fighting. It was like the Christmas football game when the men of two villages met to punch and trip and kick, only this game was played with lead, iron, and steel. Two or three archers would attack one man, tripping him or striking him down with a hammer, then one would stoop to finish the enemy with a knife into the face. The quickest way was straight through an eye, and the Frenchmen screamed for mercy when they saw the blade approaching, then there was a slight, instantly released pressure as the knife tip pierced the eyeball before the screaming would fade as the blade slipped into the brain. Not much blood from such wounds, and all the time the English trumpets were braying and there was the steel on steel sound of men-at-arms fighting in the field’s center, and the shouts of archers who were slaughtering the enemy’s flanks.

This was revenge. Hook fought with the memory of Soissons. He knew the two saints were with him. This was their feast day, and today they would repay France for what France had done to their town. Hook stabbed the ax point at men’s faces and, when they twisted to evade the blow, he would hook the blade over a shoulder and tug until the enemy, his feet caught in the mire, stumbled forward and the hammerhead would crash into his helmet and another Frenchman was finished. Hundreds of archers were doing the same so that the deep-plowed field, filling the space between the woods, had become one wide killing ground. The furrows, newly sown with winter wheat, were filling with blood.

There were so many dead and injured Frenchmen that Hook had to clamber over their bodies to reach the enemy. Tom Scarlet, big Will Sclate, and Will of the Dale came with him, and other archers were doing the same, all yelling like demons. A sword slammed into Hook, but the blade’s force was stopped by his haubergeon and mail, and Sclate, huge and glowering, hammered the swordsman down with his ax. Hook dropped another Frenchman with a lunge, and Will of the Dale drove his ax into the fallen man’s thigh, splitting the cuisse so that thick blood welled out of the jagged rip. An archer was stoving in helmets with a maul, one blow sufficient to collapse steel, skull, and life. A Frenchman with a hammer-broken leg was on his knees and shouting that he yielded, that he could pay ransom, but no one heard and he died when an archer slid a knife into an eye socket. Hook was screaming, unaware that he screamed, fighting with a desperate fury. The archers were mud-smeared, blood-spattered and bare-legged as they howled and killed. Their fear was all released into fury.

A French knight, glorious in a surcoat woven from cloth of gold, parried Tom Scarlet’s swing and drew back his mace to crush the insolent archer’s skull and Hook’s ax head took the man in the back of his neck, powering through a steel bevor, and the man fell as Hook ripped the blade free and stabbed the spike into another man’s waist. Sclate, the country-bred giant, swung a hammer between the man’s legs and the resultant scream seared clear across Agincourt’s blood-wet field.

Then a Frenchman in mud-spattered bright mail, with a blue silk ribbon about his neck and a silver lion crowning his helmet, dropped to one knee and took off his right gauntlet, which he held toward Hook. Hook was still four or five paces away and was planning to slam the hammer onto that glittering lion, but he suddenly understood what the Frenchman wanted. “Prisoners!” he shouted. “Prisoners!” He snatched the gauntlet from the Frenchman. “Take your helmet off,” he ordered the man. No one had yet given the order to capture prisoners, and Sir John, before the fight, had stressed that none was to be taken until the king had deemed the battle won, but Hook did not care. The French were surrendering now.

More and more Frenchmen were holding out their gauntlets. Their helmets were left in the mud as their captors hauled them back from the fight. “What do we do with the bastards?” Will of the Dale asked.

“Tie their hands,” Hook suggested. “Use bow cords!”

The first French battle was retreating now. Too many had died and the living had no stomach for a fight that had spilled so much blood into the furrows. Hook leaned on his poleax and watched an archer in a blue, blood-darkened surcoat cackling among the wounded enemy. The man had discovered a falcon-beak, a weapon that was half hammer and half claw, and he was killing the wounded by piercing their helmets with the curved beak, which was mounted on a long shaft. The wedge-shaped point easily drove through steel to shatter the skulls beneath. “Like cracking eggs!” he called to no one in particular, and cracked another. “Bastards,” he kept shouting, “bastards!” He killed again and again. Injured men pleaded for mercy, but the beaked hammer would still fall. Hook had no energy to intervene. The man seemed oblivious of everything except the need to kill, and when he struck a wounded man he would do it repeatedly, long after the man was dead. A mastiff was standing over the body of its wounded master, barking at the English, and the archer killed the dog with the falcon-beak, then killed the dog’s owner. “You’d cut off my fingers!” he screamed at the man, swinging the beak to mangle the corpse’s already crumpled helmet, “I’ll cut off your goddamned prick!” He suddenly raised his two string fingers at the corpses he had made and jerked the fingers up and down. “Cut these off, would you? You bastards!”

“Sweet Jesus,” Tom Scarlet said. His face was covered in French blood, his haubergeon was red, his legs, bare beneath his short hose, were mud-covered. “Sweet Jesus,” he said again.

The farthest point of the French advance was marked by a long heap of bodies, and the first battle had retreated from that horror and the English did not follow. Men were exhausted, slaked by the killing. Prisoners were being taken behind the line where Englishmen and Welshmen stared at each other as if astonished to be alive.

Then more trumpets called, and Hook looked northward to see that the second French battle, every bit as large as the first, was coming.

So the battle must start again.

“They’ll all be dying up there,” Sir Martin said, “dying in their scores! You’re probably a widow by now.” He grinned with yellow teeth. “I heard you got married. Why, girl, why? Marriage is for the respectable folk, not for common pottage-eaters like Hook, but it doesn’t matter now. You’re a widow, girl! And oh my, but you are a beautiful widow! Now stay still, girl! Stay still! ‘The master of every woman is the man!’ That’s what the holy scripture, the blessed word of the Lord says, so you’re to obey me!” He frowned suddenly. “What’s that mucky stuff on your forehead?”

“A blessing,” Melisande said. She had at last found a bolt and was fumbling to fit it in the crossbow’s groove, but the crossbow was inside the sack and it was hard to feel its mechanism, let alone be certain the bolt was properly in place. Sir Martin was kneeling between her legs and leaning over her, propped on his left hand and using his right to grope between her thighs. A small stream of spittle swayed from his mouth.

“I don’t like it,” Sir Martin said and took his right hand away from her groin to rub at the charcoal lettering. “Don’t like your blessing. You should look pretty for me! You’re not staying still, girl! You want me to hit you?”

“I am still,” Melisande said, though in truth she was shifting desperately, heaving up as she tried to dislodge the awful weight that pressed on her. Sir Martin abandoned his attempt to clean her forehead and put his hand back between her legs. Melisande screamed at his touch and the sound made the priest grin.

“The woman is the glory of the man,” he said, “which is the holy word of Almighty God. So let’s make a baby, shall we?”

She thought the bolt was in the groove, she was not sure, but nor could she wait to be sure, and so she wrenched the crossbow around, dragging the whole sack with it as Sir Martin raised himself, ready to plunge down. “Ave Maria,” he said, “ave Maria,” and Melisande thrust the sack into the space between her belly and his, then pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

The crossbow had been lying untended and fully cocked in her sack and the trigger mechanism must have rusted. She screamed. Sir Martin’s spittle fell and slapped across her face and she jerked her finger again and this time the pawl gave way to release the cord, the steel-shanked span made its vicious sound and the short, thick, iron bolt ripped through the sacking.

Sir Martin seemed to be lifted off her. He stared at her, wide-eyed, his mouth shaped into a horrified circle.

Then he bellowed like a boar being gelded. Blood spurted from his groin to pour warm and sudden on Melisande’s thighs. The leather fledging of the bolt protruded from his bladder while the rusted point was protruding between his legs, and Melisande twisted away, scrambling desperately, and Sir Martin’s clawing hands caught hold of her torn dress and held on. He was screaming now, clutching the linen as though it could save him, and Melisande tore herself away from him, abandoning the dress, and he curled up on the wet ground, whimpering and gasping, thrusting the torn linen into his ravaged groin.

“You’ll die,” Melisande said. “You will bleed to death.” She stooped beside him and his bloodshot eyes looked up at her desperately. “And I shall laugh as you die,” she added.

Another scream sounded. It came from the village and Melisande saw strangers among the baggage. She saw more people running toward the wagons and other folk coming along the stream’s bank. They were local people, bringing hoes and axes and cleavers, peasants who wanted plunder. A man had spotted her and was heading toward her with the same hungry expression she had seen on Sir Martin’s face.

Melisande was naked.

Then she remembered the jupon.

She took one last look at Sir Martin, who was dying in agony, snatched up her sack and his leather purse of coins, then jumped into the stream.

THIRTEEN

The Sire de Lanferelle spat curses. A man at his feet, his visor dented and sheeted with blood, moaned and gasped. The whole of the man’s lower right leg had been lopped off and the blood pulsed slow and thick onto the corpse beneath him. “A priest,” the man gasped, “for the love of God, a priest.”

“There are no priests,” Lanferelle said angrily. He had thrown away his mace, deciding that a poleax would be a more vicious weapon, and viciousness was what he needed if he were to pull a victory from this apparent disaster. Lanferelle understood well enough what had happened. The French, exhausted by their slog through the mud and half blinded by their closed visors, had been easy victims for the English men-at-arms, but he also understood that those men-at-arms could not stretch their thin line to fill the whole space between the two woods. The ends of the line were manned by archers, and the archers, so far as he could tell, had no arrows. He snapped up his ripped visor, forcing the split metal over the rim of his helmet. “We’re going left,” he said.

None of his men answered him. The first French battle had pulled back a score of paces and the English, as if by agreement, had not followed. Both sides were tired. Men leaned on their weapons to draw breath. Between the two armies was a long heap of armor-encased bodies, some dead, some injured, many piled on top of others. The fallen men’s plate, polished in the night to a bright sheen, was jagged with rips, plastered with mud, and streaked with blood. Banners had fallen among the casualties, and a few Englishmen dragged those proud flags free and passed them back to where the French prisoners were being gathered. The oriflamme, which had proclaimed its merciless purpose above the French center, had vanished.

The English were passing skins of water or wine from man to man and Lanferelle suddenly felt parched. “Where’s the wine?” he asked his squire.

“I don’t have any, sire. You didn’t tell me to bring any.”

“Do I have to order you to piss? Jesus, you stink like a midden. Did you shit yourself?”

The squire nodded miserably. He was not the only man whose bowels had loosened in terror, but he quailed under Lanferelle’s scorn. “We’re going left!” Lanferelle called again. He had tried and failed to reach Sir John, so now he planned to lead his men to attack the lightly armored archers instead. He could see the bowmen were carrying maces and poleaxes, but that was better than having them armed with yew bows and ash arrows. He would cut the bastards down and lead Frenchmen through the stakes so they could turn the flank of the English men-at-arms. “This battle isn’t lost,” he told his followers, “it hasn’t even begun! They have no arrows left! So now we can kill the bastards! You hear me? We kill them!”

Trumpets sounded from the northern end of the field. The second French battle, its armor still gleaming and its banners untorn by arrows, was advancing on foot through the morass of plowland churned deep by horses and by the eight thousand Frenchmen of the first attack. That second battle was passing the small group of heralds, English, French, and Burgundian, who watched the battle together from the edge of the Tramecourt woods and the reinforcements, another eight thousand men-at-arms, would reach the killing place in another minute. Lanferelle, not wanting to be caught by the crush of the new arrivals, worked his way toward the flank of the French men-at-arms. He had eleven men with him now, and he reckoned they were enough to cut their way through the archers. And if the twelve led, other men would follow. “Those goddam archers aren’t trained to arms,” he told his men. “They’re tradesmen! They’re nothing but tailors and basket-weavers! They’re just hacking with those axes. So don’t attack them first. Let them hack, then you parry and kill, you understand me?”

Men nodded. They understood, but the field reeked of blood, the oriflamme was gone, and a dozen great lords of France were dead or missing, and Lanferelle knew that victory would only come when men began to believe in victory. So he would give that belief to them. He would fight his way through the English line and he would give France a triumph.

Englishmen saw the second attack closing and they straightened and hoisted weapons. The second French battle had reached the first and the newcomers gave a huge shout. “Saint Denis! Montjoie! Montjoie!”

“Saint George!” the English responded, and the hunting howls started again, the mocking sound of men inviting their quarry to come and die.

But the second battle could not reach the English because the survivors of the first were in their way, and they could only push those survivors forward, and so they churned through the mud, lances leveled, driving tired men onto the heaps of dead and onto the English blades beyond. The noise rose, the clash of steel and the screams of the dying and the desperate blare of trumpets as eight thousand new French men-at-arms went to the killing ground.

And Lanferelle went for the archers.

The women and servants fled from the English baggage, running uphill toward the embattled army while behind them serfs and peasants scrambled over the English wagons in search of easy plunder.

Melisande was in the stream that ran fast, full, cold and muddy, fed by the torrential rain of the last few days. She floundered in the water, pushing past low-growing branches until she saw the jupon snagged on a willow bough. She unhooked it, then forced her way through the briars and nettles that grew on the stream’s bank. She pulled the jupon over her head. The wet linen clung cold and clammy, but it covered her and she crept slowly northward through brambles and hazel scrub until she saw the horsemen.

There were fifty or sixty riders who were standing their horses to the west of the village and just watching the English encampment. They had no banner, and even if they had flown a flag Melisande doubted she would have recognized its badge, but she was certain that the small English army could never have spared so many horsemen to linger behind their line. That meant these riders were French, and Melisande, though she was French herself, now thought of the horsemen as her enemy and so she crouched in the bushes, hiding her bright surcoat behind a thornbush.

Then a new anxiety struck her. The surcoat covered her, but it also gnawed at her soul. “Forgive me,” she prayed to the Virgin, “for wearing the jupon. Let Nick live.”

She sensed no answer. There was just silence in her head.

She had sworn not to wear the jupon, believing that wearing her father’s badge would doom Nick to death in the high plowland, but now she was wearing the badge of the sun and the falcon, and the Virgin had given her no answer, and she knew she was breaking her bargain with heaven. She shivered, cold and wet, and suddenly trembled.

Nick would die, she was sure of it.

So she took the jupon off so that Nick might live.

And she crouched. She was praying, naked, cold and frightened. And from the north, beyond the horsemen and beyond the village and beyond the skyline, the sound of battle rose again.

“We killed them before,” Thomas Evelgold yelled, “and we can kill them again! Kill for England!”

“For Wales!” a man shouted.

“For Saint George!” another man called.

“For Saint David!” the Welshman responded and on that battle cry the archers surged forward to attack the new enemy. They had already savaged the first French battle, and some men reckoned they would become rich from the prisoners they had taken. Those prisoners, without helmets and with their hands tied with spare bow cords, were behind the stakes, guarded there by a handful of wounded archers. Now the bowmen went to make new corpses and take new prisoners.

They went in a rush, and by now they knew how to take down men-at-arms who could not move in the thick mud, and so the archers crashed into the flank of the French and they hammered their enemy to make a new line of dead men, most stabbed through an eye by an archer’s knife after they had been felled by a hammer blow. The screams were unending. The plateau seethed with mud-spattered steel-clad men who lumbered toward the archers, pushed onto them by the thick ranks of men behind, and the clumsy men tripped on bodies, were smashed on their helmets, were murdered with knives, and still they came. Some wore gold or silver chains around their necks, or wore armor that, by its magnificence, proclaimed the wearer’s wealth or position, and those men the archers tried to capture. They would kill the rich man’s companions and, like deerhounds about a bayed stag, would taunt and threaten the man until he pulled off his gauntlet.

“Come on, you bastard!” Tom Scarlet jeered at a man whose white surcoat bore the badge of a red swan. “Come on!” The Frenchman was watching him, blue eyes visible through a raised visor. His helmet was chased with silver swirls and his red velvet sword belt was studded with golden lozenges. He picked his way among the corpses, lunged with his lance at Scarlet’s belly, and Scarlet swatted the lance away with his poleax. A second Frenchman, wearing the same swan insignia, slashed a broad-bladed sword at the poleax, but the steel bounced off the iron-sheathed staff. Scarlet drove the ax hard forward, cracking its spike against the swan-badged belly armor and the man staggered back. The swordsman struck again and Scarlet just managed to block the cut with the ax shaft, then Will Sclate was beside him and grunted as he swung his poleax, which crushed the swordsman’s helmet as though it were made of parchment. The helmet collapsed, bursting at its seams in a spray of blood and brains, and Sclate, huge and vicious, drew the hammerhead back.

“We want him, Will! Bastard’s rich!” Tom Scarlet shouted and he slammed the poleax into the rich man again, and the lord, Scarlet was sure he opposed a nobleman, struck with his lance and this time Scarlet seized the lance one-handed and tugged hard. The man stumbled forward, tripping, and Scarlet gripped the bottom rim of the man’s helmet and dragged him out of the killing line. Will Sclate was hammering down more men, helped by a dozen of Sir John’s archers, as Scarlet turned his prisoner over. He crouched and grinned into the man’s face. “Rich, are you?”

The man stared back with hatred, so Scarlet drew his knife. He held the point just over the man’s left eyeball. “If you’re rich,” he said, “you live, and if you’re poor, you die.”

“Je suis le comte de Pavilly,” the man said, “je me rends! Je me rends!”

“Does that mean you’re rich?” Scarlet asked.

“Behind you, Tom!” Hook’s voice bellowed, and Tom Scarlet turned to see Frenchmen coming toward him, and at that moment the Count of Pavilly drove his own knife up into Tom Scarlet’s groin. Scarlet screeched, the count heaved up from the mud, and stabbed again, this time into Tom Scarlet’s belly, ripping and cutting, and then Will Sclate’s poleax swung in a hay-cutting slash and the ax blade tore into the Count of Pavilly’s face, breaking his remaining teeth and driving their fragments to the back of his skull. His blood mingled with Tom Scarlet’s. The two bodies, rich man and poor man, were lying together as Sclate ripped his blade from the snagging tangle of steel and bone before being driven back by the sudden rush of Frenchmen.

And Hook was also being driven back.

A wedge of Frenchmen was crashing into the archers. So far the archers had been winning because they attacked and because they were more mobile than their enemy, but at last the French had found a way to carry the fight back to the bowmen. They came shoulder to shoulder and they let the archers waste their blows by parrying instead of cutting back, and if an archer slipped, or swung too hard and was slow to recover his balance, a blade would flicker and an Englishman would sink into the mud to be hammered with a mace. “Just kill them!” the Sire de Lanferelle shouted as he led the wedge. “One at a time! God will give us time to kill them all! Saint Denis! Montjoie!” He sensed victory now. Up to this moment the French had panicked and had allowed themselves to be driven like cattle to the winter slaughter, but Lanferelle was calm, he was deadly and he was confident, and more and more Frenchmen came to follow him, sensing at last that someone had taken command of their destiny.

Hook saw the falcon in its sunlit splendor.

“Behind you, Tom!” he had shouted at Scarlet, and then he had seen the Frenchman in the red and white jupon suddenly heave up, but he had no time to see more because Lanferelle was ahead of him, and Hook was forced to step back as Lanferelle’s poleax stabbed at him. It was not meant as a killing thrust, but rather to unbalance Hook who had to step back a second time to avoid the spike and he might have tripped in the furrows except the small of his back struck one of the slanting stakes that held him upright. He swept his own poleax at Lanferelle’s weapon, but the Frenchman somehow flicked Hook’s cut aside and lunged again, and Hook had to twist around the stake, but the sharpened point caught in his haubergeon and he could not move. Panic blinded him. “Get close,” Saint Crispin said, and Hook rammed his poleax hard forward, struggling in the mud to find good footing, and Lanferelle was so surprised at the sudden counterattack that he checked his next thrust. Hook’s blade glanced off Lanferelle’s armor, but the thrust had released the haubergeon and Hook could step back just before a blow from one of Lanferelle’s men would have crushed his hand where it held the pole.

“I hoped we would meet,” Lanferelle said.

“You wanted to die?” Hook snarled. The panic still rippled in his body, but there was also a relief that he had survived, then he had to parry desperately as two blades darted toward his unarmored legs. Tom Evelgold came to his help, as did Will of the Dale.

“Tom’s dead,” Will said, then swept his big ax around to knock a lance aside.

“How’s Melisande?” Lanferelle asked.

“So far as I know,” Hook said, “she lives.” He thrust again and had the ax knocked aside again, but he had not put all his strength into the blow and recovered fast to sweep the lead-weighted head back to hit Lanferelle’s arm, but still without sufficient force and the Frenchman scarce seemed to notice.

Lanferelle smiled. “She lives,” he said, “and you die.” He began stabbing his weapon in short, very controlled strokes that came fast, sometimes low, sometimes high, and Hook, unable to parry and without time to counter-strike, could only retreat. Lanferelle had crusted blood beside one eye, but his face was strangely calm, and that calmness scared Hook. The Frenchman watched Hook’s eyes all the time, and Hook knew he would die unless he could somehow get past that flickering blade. Tom Evelgold had the same idea and he managed to shove a lance to one side and push past the blade so that he was on Lanferelle’s right, and the centenar, holding his poleax two-handed like a leveled lance, screamed a curse as he rammed the blade forward with its spike aimed at the Frenchman’s faulds. The spike would go through the plates, through the mail, through the leather to rip open Lanferelle’s lower belly, except at the last moment Lanferelle raised the butt end of his pole to deflect the lunge and so take its huge force on his breastplate. The Milanese steel withstood the blow and threw it off, then Lanferelle jerked his head forward, smashing his raised visor hard into Tom Evelgold’s face as another Frenchman skewered a sword into the Englishman’s thigh and twisted it. Evelgold staggered, blood pouring down his leg and spreading from his crushed nose. He had been blinded by the head butt and so did not see the poleax spike that drove into his face. He made a high-pitched whining noise as he fell, and another ax chopped into his belly, cleaving haubergeon and mail, opening his guts, and then the Frenchmen were past him, treading deliberately and carefully, driving deeper through the stakes and so ever closer to the English rear.

“Get close,” Saint Crispin shouted at Hook.

“I can’t,” Hook said.

Tom Evelgold shuddered. A French man-at-arms slid a sword point into his gullet and there was a thick gush of blood and then the centenar was still. More and more Frenchmen were following Lanferelle, thickening his wedge, and though archers fought them, the enemy was at last driving forward. The stakes helped by giving them something firm to lean on in the treacherous ground and the archers were being outfought. Hook tried to rally them, but they did not have the armor to stand against trained men-at-arms and so they retreated. They had not broken, not yet, but they were being pushed farther and farther back.

Hook tried to stand. He traded blows with Lanferelle, but knew he could not beat the Frenchman. Lanferelle was too fast. He did not have Hook’s strength, but he was much quicker with his weapons. “I am sorry for Melisande,” Lanferelle said, “because she will grieve for you.”

“Bastard,” Hook said, and rammed the poleax forward, had the lunge deflected, and he pulled the weapon back and this time the ax head caught on Lanferelle’s ax head, and Hook hauled back hard and for the first time saw a look of surprise on the Frenchman’s face, but Lanferelle simply let go of the shaft and Hook almost tumbled backward.

“But women recover from grief,” Lanferelle said, “by finding another man.” He stooped and picked up a fallen poleax, and did it so quickly that Hook had no chance to attack while he was down, and by the time Hook saw his chance it was too late. “Or perhaps I will put her back in a nunnery,” Lanferelle said, “and make her a proper bride of Christ.” Lanferelle grinned at Hook, then the new poleax started its relentless stabbing.

“Get out of the way,” Saint Crispin snapped.

“I’ll fight him,” Hook shouted back. He wanted to kill Lanferelle. He suddenly hated him. “I’ll kill him!” he shouted, and tried to step forward, but was checked by the Frenchman’s whip-fast blade.

“Get out of the goddamned way!” the voice roared, but this was not Saint Crispin shouting, and Hook felt himself thrust unceremoniously away as Sir John Cornewaille threw him to one side. Sir John brought men-at-arms who crashed their lances into the French, steel points against plate armor, and Hook staggered to where Will Sclate was hacking at Lanferelle’s followers. Lanferelle responded with a bellowed challenge and a charge at Sir John, and the other Frenchmen surged forward through the clay-thick mud. A poleax slammed onto Hook’s helmet and, because he was already unbalanced, he fell. The ax blow had not been given with full force, but it still rang in Hook’s head and the blade glanced off the helmet to cut through his haubergeon and almost slashed the mail on his shoulder open. He saw the Frenchman draw back the pole, ready to slide the spike into his belly or chest and Hook desperately slashed up with his own blade, a wild blow that drove the ax head into the man-at-arms’s groin. Like the blow that had felled him, it was not given with full force, but it was hard enough to make the Frenchman double over in sudden, body-crippling pain, and then Will of the Dale hauled Hook upright and Hook found his feet and slammed his spike forward, shouting as he thrust, and the spike rammed into the enemy’s upper chest, piercing the aventail and sliding over the breastplate’s top edge. Hook rammed and shook the pole, grinding the blade deep into the enemy’s ribcage, and he watched the lower part of the man’s helmet fill with blood that spilled from the visor opening. A sword smacked Hook from his right, but his mail stopped it, and he swept his weapon that way, dragging his victim with it to throw the swordsman off balance, and then Hook charged.

He used the dying man as a battering ram. He thrust him into the French ranks and Sclate and Will of the Dale followed, and both of them were shouting. “Saint George!”

“Saint Crispin!” Hook bellowed. He was pushing the dying man into the French ranks, thrusting his body against other men. The wounded man splattered blood from his mouth as Hook tried to disengage the spike. Another man stabbed a pike at Hook, but Geoffrey Horrocks had followed Hook and hit the man’s helmet with a mallet, and the strike of the lead-weighted iron thumped dully as the man’s head snapped back. He dropped into the mud. The wounded man at last fell from the poleax and Hook, the weight released, began to scream wildly and swing the weapon from side to side as he thrust into the Frenchmen. “Just kill the bastards, just kill the bastards!” he was shouting. Archers were following him, their anger released by the relief of Sir John’s arrival.

Sir John was fighting Lanferelle, both men so fast with weapons that it was difficult to see thrust, cut or parry, while the other English men-at-arms attacked on either side with such sudden savagery that Lanferelle’s followers instinctively stepped back, intent on defending themselves against the newly arrived men, and as they went back so some tripped on the bodies lying on the ground behind them. They fell and the English came at them, pole-spikes stabbing, axes splitting armor, faces grimacing with the effort of killing, and the sudden slaughter took the spirit from the remaining French who tried to back away and found archers on their flanks. Men began to shout that they yielded. They dragged off gauntlets and shouted their surrenders in desperate panic. “Too late,” Will of the Dale sneered at one man and chopped down with his ax to split an espalier and slice the blade down through shoulder blade and upper ribs. Another Frenchman in a ripped surcoat crawled on hands and knees, blood drooling from his mouth, weeping from sightless eyes, blundering through mud till an archer kicked him down and casually killed him with a knife thrust in the mouth. Young Horrocks was beating a count to death, slamming a poleax again and again into the fallen man’s backplate and screaming insults as the blade tore into steel and spine.

Lanferelle was left, still fighting Sir John, and by some unspoken agreement the other English men-at-arms did not intervene. Neither man spoke. They had their feet planted in the mud and they cut, lunged, and feinted, yet both were so skilled and so quick that neither could find an advantage. They were the tournament champions of Christendom, one French, one English, and they were accustomed to the silken glories of the lists; the admiring women, the bright flags, the courtesy of chivalry, yet now they fought among corpses, amidst the moans and whimpers of the dying, on a field reeking of blood and shit.

The end came by accident. Lanferelle feinted a lunge to Sir John’s left, recovered with astonishing speed, cut, and so forced Sir John to step to his right and his foot landed on the hoof of a dead destrier and the hoof rolled under the weight and Sir John slipped and fell onto one knee and Lanferelle, fast as a snake, whipped the poleax around and struck Sir John’s helmet a ringing blow and Sir John fell full length onto the horse’s bloody belly where he floundered, trying to find his balance and so get to his feet, and Lanferelle raised the poleax for the killing blow.

And thrust.

The French second battle had forced the survivors of the first back to the killing ground where the English waited behind a rampart of dead and dying Frenchmen. So many of the high nobility of France were already dead or bleeding; their bones shattered, their guts torn, their brains spilling from mangled helmets, their eyes gouged and bellies ripped. Men were weeping, some calling for God or for their wives or for their mothers, but neither God nor any woman was there to offer comfort.

The King of England was going forward now. He had pulled one corpse from atop two others to make a passage through the heaped dead and he carried his sword to an enemy who had dared defy God’s choice for France’s throne. His men-at-arms advanced with him, cutting their axes and grinding their maces and chopping their sharp-curved falcon-beaks into a demoralized and mud-wearied enemy. They made new piles of dead, new blood-laced corpses, and more cripples whose cries for help went unanswered. Henry led them, despite the shouts of men who wanted him to protect himself. His helmet was dented and scarred, a fleuret of gold had been severed from the bright crown, but England’s king was replete with a righteous and holy joy because he saw in the enemy’s suffering the proof of divine providence. Underfoot the plowland’s ridges and furrows had been trampled into a flat morass that was the color of blood. Men waded in a slurry of mud, blood, and shit, they struggled and died, and Henry’s soul soared. God was with him and, in that assurance, he found new strength and went on killing.

Lanferelle thrust hard and vicious just as a poleax blade hooked about his left espalier and hauled him back hard and fast. The Frenchman’s blow fell short of Sir John, but Lanferelle, miraculously keeping his footing, turned on his new enemy and then stopped.

The poleax had pulled him away from Sir John and denied him his kill, and now its spike was in his face, its point mashing his lip against his teeth and Lanferelle found himself staring into Hook’s face.

“When you fought him before,” Hook said, “he let you stand up. You wouldn’t do the same for him?”

“This is battle,” Lanferelle said, his voice distorted by the spike’s pressure, “and that was a tournament.”

“Then if this is battle,” Hook asked, “why shouldn’t I kill you?”

Sir John stood, but did not intervene. He just watched.

“Because Melisande would never forgive you,” Lanferelle said, and he saw the hesitation on Hook’s face and he tensed, ready to bring up his own poleax, but then the steel spike ground into his mouth, ripping his upper gum.

“Go on,” Hook said, “try.”

Sir John still watched.

“Just try,” Hook begged. He kept his eyes on Lanferelle’s face. “You want him, Sir John?”

“He’s yours, Hook.”

“You’re mine,” Hook said to Lanferelle.

“Je me rends,” Lanferelle said, and he released his poleax shaft so the weapon thumped into the mud.

“Take your helmet off,” Hook ordered, drawing back the blood-tipped poleax.

Lanferelle took off his helmet, then his aventail and the leather hood beneath, so releasing his long black hair. He gave Hook his right gauntlet and Hook, triumphant, took his prisoner back to where the other French captives were under guard. The Sire de Lanferelle looked tired suddenly, tired and distraught. “Don’t tie my hands,” he begged.

“Why not?”

“Because I have honor, Nicholas Hook. I have surrendered and I give you my word I will not try to fight again, nor will I try to escape.”

“Then wait here,” Hook said.

“I will wait,” Lanferelle promised.

Hook shouted at a pageboy to bring the Frenchman some water and then went back to the battle that was once again dying. The second French battle had done no better than the first. They had added more bodies to the heaps of the dead, and now the survivors struggled back through the mud, leaving corpses, injured men, and prisoners behind. Hundreds of prisoners. Dukes and counts and lords and men-at-arms, all in surcoats streaked with mud and sodden with blood, all now standing behind the English line and watching, in disbelief, as the remnants of the two French battles limped away.

The third French battle remained. Its flags flew and all along that line men were climbing into saddles and calling on their squires to bring their long lances. “Arrows,” Saint Crispinian spoke in Hook’s head, “you need arrows.”

The day’s work was not over.

Melisande watched.

The English baggage was in the village of Maisoncelles and in the wet pastures around it, and some was halfway up the hill as pages and servants led packhorses toward the protection of the English army beyond the skyline, if indeed there was an English army anymore. Melisande did not know. She had watched men spill over that horizon into the valley where Maisoncelles lay, but those men were few and, by their movements, she guessed they were wounded soldiers, and after a while other men had come, but slowly, not in panicked flight, and she had not understood that they were prisoners being taken toward the village. The lack of panic suggested the English army still held their line on the plateau, but she half expected and half feared to see it come spilling over the edge pursued by the vengeful French.

Instead the French horsemen had come from the west, and now they spurred into the village and Melisande watched as they cut down pages and then dismounted to start pillaging the English baggage.

The horsemen drove away the peasants who had arrived first. A handful of English men-at-arms and wounded archers had been left to guard the encampment, but they only numbered thirty and they had spent their arrows on the serfs and those men now retreated uphill. The women of the army went with them as the horsemen found the English king’s quarters. A priest and two pages had stayed with the king’s treasures, and those three were quickly slaughtered and the plunder began.

Melisande watched. She saw a man parade in a fur-trimmed red robe and with a crown on his head, making his companions laugh. She did not understand what was happening. She could only pray that Nick lived, and so she shut her eyes, crouched low, and prayed.

Hook lived.

The two French battles had retreated, struggling back over the plowland and leaving the space in front of the English thick with bodies in mud-smeared armor. The third French battle was mounted now. It was the smallest of the three French battles, yet it still outnumbered the English. The riders’ lances were upright, some flaunted pennants. Trumpets sounded. The third battle could not charge yet for so many dismounted Frenchmen were in front of them, but they moved their horses a few paces forward before stopping again.

“Arrows!” Hook shouted at his men.

“We don’t have any!” Will of the Dale called back.

“Yes we do,” Hook said. He found his bow, slung it on his shoulder and led his men out into the field where the French bodies lay, and all around those fallen men were spent arrows. Some, because they had struck good armor head on, were now useless because their bodkin points had bent or crumpled, but many were in fine condition. Hook found some undamaged points on arrows that had splintered shafts and he pulled those bodkins free and married them to good shafts. He also pillaged the French bodies. He found a silver chain about one man’s neck and he thrust that into his arrow bag. Men-at-arms were also searching among the heaped French casualties, hauling the corpses away from the living, killing men too injured to survive or too poor to be worth ransoming, and rescuing the wealthy. Hook picked up a gray-fledged arrow trapped in the surcoat of a man lying on his back, and the man suddenly moved. Hook had thought he was dead, but the man groaned and turned his visored face toward the archer. Hook lifted the visor and saw scared eyes. “Aidez moi,” the man said, half choking. Hook could see no wound, no puncture in the armor, but the man screamed when Hook tried to lift him. The Frenchman was in such pain that he lost consciousness and Hook let him fall again. He took the arrow and moved on. A dog barked at him. It was standing over a corpse in a blood-soaked surcoat. Hook left the dog alone, skirting it to pick up a dozen more arrows that he thrust into his arrow bag.

“Nick!” Will of the Dale called, and Hook looked up to see a lone French horseman had ridden through the retreating fugitives of the first two battles. The rider was short and slightly built, and the only weapon he carried was a scabbarded sword. He wore plate armor, but he was not mounted on an armored destrier, instead he rode a small piebald mare. His white linen jupon was decorated with two red axes above which was the glimmer of gold from a heavy chain that hung around his neck. His helmet’s visor was raised and he seemed to be searching among the bodies, but checked his horse when he realized the archers were staring at him.

“Bastard wants trouble,” Will said.

“No, he’s just looking at us,” Hook said, “and he’s only a little fellow. Let him be.” He picked up a broadhead, then another bodkin, and glanced again at the horseman who had suddenly drawn his sword and kicked his horse forward. “Maybe he does want trouble,” Hook said and he took the bow off his shoulder, braced it on a corpse’s breastplate, and looped its string about the upper nock.

The horseman stopped again, this time to gaze down into a tangle of armor and bodies. The dead lay on top of each other and the man seemed fascinated by the sight. He stared for a long time, now no more than twenty paces from the archers and then, abruptly, he screamed a high-pitched challenge and kicked his piebald horse straight at Hook. The mare responded, flailing its hooves in the mud to throw up great clods of earth.

“Stupid bastard,” Hook said angrily. He laid a bodkin over the string and raised the bow, just as a dozen other archers did the same. Hook thought the man must swerve away, but instead the rider lowered his sword to spear the blade at Hook who drew the cord to his right ear and did not even think about what he did. It was all instinctive. The cord came back, he watched the horseman rise and fall with the piebald’s motion, saw the open visor and the unnaturally bright eyes, and loosed.

His arrow went clean through the rider’s right eye and the force of it snapped the man’s head hard back. The sword dropped and the mare slowed and then, puzzled, stopped a short lance’s length away from Hook. No other archer had loosed.

A cheer went up from the English line as the dead rider fell slowly from the saddle. He took a long time to fall, slipping gently sideways and then suddenly collapsing in a clatter of armor. “Get his horse,” Hook told Horrocks.

Hook went to the corpse. He tugged the arrow free from the ruined eye so he could pull the thick golden chain over the dead man’s head, and then his hand stopped because there was a pendant hanging from the chain. It was a thick pendant, carved from white ivory, and mounted on that silver-rimmed disc was an antelope cut from jet.

“You stupid little bastard,” Hook said, and he lifted off the boy’s helmet that was too big for him and looked down into the ruined face of Sir Philippe de Rouelles.

“He’s just a boy,” Horrocks said in surprise.

“A stupid little bastard is what he is,” Hook said.

“What was he doing?”

“He was being goddam brave,” Hook said. He pulled off the heavy golden chain and walked the few paces to where the boy had stared down at the heaped dead, and there, lying on top of two other men, was a corpse in a surcoat that was so soaked in blood that at first Hook had difficulty making out the badge, but then he saw the outline of two red axes in the redder cloth. The dead man’s helmet had come off and his throat had been cut to the spine. “He came to find his father,” Hook told Horrocks.

“How do you know that?”

“I just know,” Hook said, “the poor little bastard. He was just looking for his father.” He thrust the pendant into the arrow bag, picked up another bodkin, and turned toward the English line.

Where the king, wearing his scarred helmet and with his surcoat torn by enemy blades, had mounted his small white horse to see the enemy more clearly. He saw the survivors of the slaughter struggling north, and beyond them was the third battle with its raised lances and he knew his archers had few or no arrows.

Then a messenger arrived to say the French were in the baggage camp, and the king twisted in the saddle to see that hundreds of his men were now guarding French prisoners. God knows how many prisoners there were, but they far outnumbered his men-at-arms. He glanced left and right. He had started with nine hundred men-at-arms and now the line was much thinner because so many men had taken prisoners and were guarding them. The archers had done the same. A few were out in the field, collecting arrows, and the king approved of that, but knew they could never collect enough arrows to kill the horses of the third battle. He watched some foolish Frenchman charge the archers and grimaced when his men cheered the brave fool’s death, then looked again at his army.

It was disordered. Henry knew that the line would form again when the final French battle charged, but now there were hundreds of prisoners behind that line and those captured men could still fight. They had no helmets and their weapons had been taken, but they could still assault the rear of his line. Most had their hands tied, but not all, and the unpinioned men could free the others to throw themselves on the perilously thin English line. Then there was the threat of the Frenchmen pillaging his baggage, but that could wait. The vital thing now was to hold off the third French charge, and to do that he needed every blade in his small army. The advancing horses would be hampered by the hundreds of corpses, yet they would eventually get past those bodies and then the long lances would stab into his line. He needed men.

And men stared up at the king. They saw him close his eyes and knew he was praying to his stern God, the God who had spared his army so far this day, and Henry prayed that God’s mercy would continue and, as his lips moved in the prayer, so the answer came to him. The answer was so astonishing that for a moment he did nothing, then he told himself God had spoken to him and so he opened his eyes.

“Kill the prisoners,” he ordered.

One of his household men-at-arms stared up at him. He was not sure he had heard right. “Sire?”

“Kill the prisoners!”

That way the prisoners could not fight again and the men guarding them would be forced back into the battle line.

“Kill them all!” Henry shouted. He pointed a gauntleted hand at the captives. One of his men-at-arms had made a swift count and reckoned over two thousand Frenchmen had been taken and Henry’s gesture encompassed them all. “Kill them!” Henry commanded.

The French had flaunted the oriflamme, promising no quarter, so now no quarter would be given.

The prisoners would die.

The Sire de Lanferelle wandered bleakly behind the English line. He saw the English king in a battle-scarred helmet sitting on horseback, then was shocked to see that the Duke of Orleans, the French king’s nephew, was a prisoner. He was just a young man, charming and witty, yet now, in a blood-spattered surcoat and with his arm gripped by an archer in English royal livery, he looked dazed, stricken and ill. “Sire,” Lanferelle said, dropping to one knee.

“What happened?” Orleans asked.

“Mud,” Lanferelle said, standing again.

“My God,” the duke said. He flinched, not from pain for he was hardly wounded, but out of shame. “Alençon’s dead,” he went on, “and so are Bar and Brabant. Sens died too.”

“The archbishop?” Lanferelle asked, somehow more shocked that a prince of the church was dead than that three of France’s noblest dukes should have been killed.

“They gutted him, Lanferelle,” the duke said, “they just gutted him. And d’Albret’s dead too.”

“The constable?”

“Dead,” Orleans said, “and Bourbon’s captured.”

“Dear sweet God,” Lanferelle said, not because the Constable of France was dead or because the Duke of Bourbon, the victor of Soissons, was a prisoner, but because Marshal Boucicault, reckoned the toughest man in France, was now being led to join the Duke of Orleans.

Boucicault stared at Lanferelle, then at the royal duke, then shook his grizzled head. “It seems we’re all doomed to English hospitality,” he growled.

“They treated me well enough when I was a prisoner,” Lanferelle said.

“Jesus Christ, you have to find a second ransom?” Boucicault asked. His white surcoat with its red badge of a two-headed eagle was ripped and bloodstained. His armor, that had been polished through the night to a dazzling sheen, was scarred by blades and streaked with mud. He turned a bitter gaze on the other prisoners. “What’s it like over there?” he asked.

“Sour wine and good ale,” Lanferelle said, “and rain, of course.”

“Rain,” Boucicault said bitterly, “that was our undoing. Rain and mud.” He had advised against fighting Henry’s army at all, rain or no rain, fearing what the English archers could do. Better, he had said, to let them straggle dispiritedly into Calais and to concentrate France’s forces on the recapture of Harfleur, but the hot-headed royal dukes, like young Orleans, had insisted that the battle be fought. Boucicault felt a surge of bile, a temptation to spit an accusation at the duke, but he resisted it. “Damp England,” he said instead. “Tell me the women are damp too?”

“Oh, they are,” Lanferelle said.

“I’ll need women,” the Marshal of France said, staring up at the gray sky. “I doubt France can raise our ransoms, which means we’ll all probably die in England, and we’ll need something to pass the time.”

Lanferelle wondered where Melisande was. He suddenly wanted to see her, to talk to her, but the only women in sight were a handful who brought water to wounded men. Priests were offering other men the final rites, while doctors knelt beside the injured. They cut armor buckles, pulled mangled steel from pulverized flesh, and held men down as they thrashed in agony. Lanferelle saw one of his own men and, leaving Orleans and the marshal to their guards, went to crouch beside the man and flinched at the mangled ruin of his left leg that had been half severed by ax blows. Someone had tied a bow cord around the man’s thigh, but blood still seeped in thick pulses from the ragged wound. “I’m sorry, Jules,” Lanferelle said.

Jules could say nothing. He twisted his head from side to side. He had bitten his lower lip so hard that blood trickled down his chin.

“You’ll live, Jules,” Lanferelle said, doubting he spoke the truth, and then he twisted as he heard a bellow of anger.

He stared, incredulous. English archers were murdering the prisoners. For a moment Lanferelle thought the archers must be mad, then he saw that a man-at-arms in royal livery commanded them. French prisoners, their hands tied, tried to run away, but the archers caught them, turned them and slashed long knives across their throats. Blood was spraying from the cuts to soak the grinning archers, and more bowmen were hurrying to the slaughter with drawn blades. Some English men-at-arms were dragging prisoners away, evidently intent on preserving their prospects of ransoms, while the noblest and most valuable captives, like Marshal Boucicault and the Dukes of Orleans and Bourbon, were being guarded against the massacre, but the rest were being ruthlessly killed. Lanferelle understood then. The King of England was frightened of the prisoners attacking the rear of his line when the last French battle made its assault and to prevent that he was killing the captives, and though that made sense it still astonished Lanferelle. Then he saw archers coming toward him and he patted Jules’s shoulder. “Pretend to be dead, Jules,” he said. He could think of no other way of preventing the man’s killing for he could not defend him without weapons, and so he hurried away in search of Sir John. Sir John, he was sure, would protect him, and if he could not find Sir John he would try to reach the Tramecourt woods and hide in its briar thickets.

Some prisoners tried to fight back, but they were unarmed and the archers felled them with poleaxes. The bowmen moved deftly in the mud, killing with a horrible efficiency. The English destriers, almost a thousand saddled stallions, were at the southern end of the field and a handful of prisoners tried to reach them, but some of the pageboys who guarded the horses mounted and drove the fugitives back to where the archers killed. There was panic and blood and screams as men died and as others were herded toward the slaughter-men. More archers came to the killing, and the prisoners blundered through the thick plow in search of an escape that did not exist. It did not exist for Lanferelle either. He reached the right flank of the English line where a small forester’s cottage stood at the treeline. It was burning, and he heard the screams of dying men coming from the flames and thick smoke. The archers who had set the cottage ablaze saw Lanferelle and headed toward him and he swerved northward, but only to see more archers between him and the English line where Sir John’s standard flew. Then, to his relief, he recognized the tall figure and dark face of Nicholas Hook.

“Hook!” he shouted, but Hook did not hear him. “Melisande!” He called his daughter’s name in hope that it would pierce the turmoil of screaming. Trumpets were playing again, summoning Englishmen to their standards. “Hook!” he bellowed in desperation.

“What do you want with Hook?” a man asked, and Lanferelle turned to see four archers facing him. The man who had spoken was tall and gaunt with a lantern jaw and held a bloodied poleax. “You know Hook?” the man asked.

Lanferelle backed away.

“I asked you a question,” the man said, following Lanferelle. He was grinning, enjoying the fear on the Frenchman’s face. “Rich, are you? Cos if you’re rich then we might let you live. But you’ve got to be very rich.” He slashed the poleax at Lanferelle’s legs, hoping to cut into a knee and topple the Frenchman, but Lanferelle managed to step back without tripping and so avoided the blow. He staggered for balance in the mud.

“I’m rich,” he said desperately, “very rich.”

“He speaks English,” the archer said to his companions, “he’s rich and he speaks English.” He lunged with the poleax and the spike rammed against Lanferelle’s left cuisse, but the armor held and the point slid off Lanferelle’s thigh. “So why were you shouting for Hook?” the man asked, drawing the poleax back for another thrust.

Lanferelle raised his hands in a placatory gesture. “I am his prisoner,” he said.

The tall man laughed. “Our Nick? Got a rich prisoner, has he? That will never do.” He lunged with the poleax, striking the point onto Lanferelle’s breastplate and Lanferelle staggered backward, but again was not tripped. He glanced around desperately, hoping to see a fallen weapon and the tall English archer grinned at the fear on the Frenchman’s bloodied face. The archer was wearing a haubergeon over a mail coat, and the padded jacket had been slashed so that the wool stuffing hung in tattered blood-crusted clumps. His red cross of Saint George had run in the rain so that his short surcoat, patterned with moon and stars, looked blood red. “We can’t have Nick Hook being rich,” the man said, and raised the poleax ready to bring it down on Lanferelle’s unprotected head.

And just then Lanferelle saw the sword. It was a short and clumsy sword, a cheap sword, and it was turning in the air and for a heartbeat he thought it had been thrown at him, then realized it was being thrown to him. The blade circled, came over the tall archer’s shoulder, and Lanferelle snatched at it and somehow caught the hilt, but the ax was already falling, driven with an archer’s huge strength and Lanferelle had no time to parry, only to throw himself forward, inside the blade’s swing, and he drove his armored weight into the archer’s chest to throw him backward. The ax shaft struck his left arm and Lanferelle brought up the sword, but with no strength in the cut that wasted itself on the man’s arrow bag. One of the other archers struck with a poleax, but Lanferelle had recovered now and threw the lunge off with his blade that he flicked back with his extraordinary speed to slash across the second man’s face. That man reeled away, blood flowing from a shattered nose and split cheek as Lanferelle stepped back again, sword ready for the tall man.

Three archers faced Lanferelle now, but two had no stomach for the fight, which left the tall man alone. He glanced around to see Hook approaching. “Bastard,” he spat at Hook, “you gave him that sword!”

“He’s my prisoner,” Hook said.

“And the king said to kill the prisoners!”

“Then kill him, Tom,” Hook said, amused. “Kill him!”

Tom Perrill looked back to the Frenchman. He saw the feral look in Lanferelle’s eyes, remembered the speed with which the man had evaded and parried and so he lowered the poleax. “You kill him, Hook,” he sneered.

“My lord,” Hook spoke to Lanferelle now, “this man was offered money to rape your daughter. He failed, but so long as he lives your Melisande is in danger.”

“Then kill him,” Lanferelle said.

“I promised God I wouldn’t.”

“But I made no promise to God,” Lanferelle said and flicked the cheap sword at Tom Perrill’s face, forcing the archer back. Perrill glanced wide-eyed at Hook, unable to hide his fear and astonishment, then turned back to Lanferelle, who was smiling. The Frenchman’s weapon was puny and cheap, far outranged by the poleax, but Lanferelle showed a blithe confidence as he stepped forward.

“Kill him!” Perrill shouted at his companions, but neither of them moved, and Perrill thrust the ax forward in a desperate stab at Lanferelle’s midriff and the Frenchman swept the blade aside with contemptuous ease, then simply raised the sword and gave one lunge.

The blade sliced into Perrill’s gullet, starting a gush of blood. The archer stared at his killer, his tongue slowly pushed out and blood ran from it to pour thick and silent down the sword to soak Lanferelle’s ungauntleted hand. For a heartbeat the two men were motionless, then Perrill dropped and Lanferelle wrenched the blade loose and tossed it to Hook.

“Enough! Enough!” A man-at-arms in royal livery was riding behind the line and shouting at the archers. “Enough! Stop the killing! Hold! Enough!”

Hook walked back to the English line.

He saw gray clouds covering the plowland of Agincourt.

And he saw, in front of the English army, a field of dead and dying men. More dead, Hook thought, than the number of men the king had led to this wet slaughteryard. They lay tangled and bloody, countless dead, sprawled and bloodstained, armored corpses, ripped and stabbed and crushed. There were men and horses. There were abandoned weapons, fallen flags, and dead hopes. A field sown with winter wheat had yielded a harvest of blood.

And at the end of that field, beyond the dead, beyond the dying and the weeping, the third French battle was turning away.

The might of France was turning away and men were heading north, leaving Agincourt, riding to escape the risibly small army that had turned their world to horror.

It was over.