Agincourt - Cornwell Bernard - Страница 31
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For a long time she said nothing, just gazed at the trees and beach and marsh. “Maman was home,” she said finally. “I do not know where home is now.”
“With me,” Hook said awkwardly.
“Home is where you feel safe,” Melisande said. Her eyes were gray as the heron that glided above the shingle to land in the low ground beyond. Pages were kneeling on the Heron’s deck where they scoured the men-at-arms’ plate armor. Each piece was scrubbed with sand and vinegar to burnish the steel to a rustless shine, then wiped with lanolin. Peter Goddington ordered a pot of beeswax opened and the archers smeared woolen cloths with the wax and rubbed it into their bowstaves.
“Was your mother cruel to you?” Hook asked Melisande as he waxed the huge bow.
“Cruel?” she seemed puzzled. “Why would she be cruel?”
“Some mothers are,” Hook said, thinking of his grandmother.
“She was lovely,” Melisande said.
“My father was cruel,” he said.
“Then you must not be,” Melisande said. She frowned, evidently thinking.
“What?”
She shrugged. “When I went to the nunnery? Before?” She stopped.
“Go on,” Hook said.
“My father? He called me to him. I was thirteen? Perhaps fourteen?” She had lowered her voice. “He made me take off all my clothes,” she stared at Hook as she spoke, “and I stood there for him, nue. He walked around me and he said no man could have me.” She paused. “I thought he was going to…”
“But he didn’t?”
“No,” she said quickly. “He stroked my epaule,” she hesitated, finding the English word, “shoulder. He was, how do you say? Frissonnant?” she held out her hands and shook them.
“Shivering?” Hook suggested.
She nodded abruptly. “Then he sent me away to the nuns. I begged him not to. I said I hated the sisters, but he said I must pray for him. That was my duty, to work hard and to pray for him.”
“And did you?”
“Every day,” she said, “and I prayed he would come for me, but he never did.”
The sun was sinking when Sir John returned to the Heron. There was still no sign of any French soldiers on the shore, but the trees beyond the beach could have hidden an army. Smoke rose from the hill to the east of the cove, evidence that someone was on that height, but who or how many was impossible to say. Sir John clambered aboard and walked around the deck, sometimes thrusting a finger at a man-at-arms or archer. He pointed at Hook. “You,” he said, then walked on. “Everyone I pointed to,” he turned and shouted, “will be going ashore with me. We go tonight! After dark. The rest of you? Be ready at dawn. If we’re still alive you’ll join us. And those of you going ashore? Armor! Weapons! We’re not going to dance with the bastards! We’re going to kill them!”
That night there was a three-quarters moon silvering the sea. The shadows on land were black and stark as Hook dressed for war. He had his long boots, leather breeches, a leather jerkin, a mail coat, and a helmet. He wore his archer’s horn bracer on his left forearm, not so much to protect his arm against the string’s lash because the mail would do that, but rather to stop the string fraying on the armor’s links. He had a short sword hanging from his belt, a poleax slung on his back, and a linen arrow bag at his right side with the feathers of twenty-four arrows poking from the opening. Five men-at-arms and twelve archers were going ashore with Sir John and they all climbed down into an open boat that sailors rowed toward the surf. Other boats from other ships were also heading for the shore. No one spoke, though now and then a voice called soft from an anchored ship, wishing them luck. If the French were in the trees, Hook thought, then they would see the boats coming. Maybe even now the French were drawing swords and winding the thick strings of their steel-shafted crossbows.
The boat began to heave in short sharp lurches as the waves steepened near the shore. The sound of the surf became louder and more ominous. The sailors were digging their blades deep in the water, trying to outrace the curling, breaking waves, but suddenly the boat seemed to surge ahead and the sea was moonlit white, shattered and violent all about them, and then the boat dropped like a stone and there was a scraping sound as its keel dragged on the shingle. The boat slewed around and the water seethed about the hull before being sucked back to sea. “Out!” Sir John hissed, “out!”
Other boats slammed into the beach and men leaped out and trudged up the shingle bank with drawn swords. They gathered above the thick line of weed and driftwood that marked the high tide line. Huge boulders littered the beach, their moon-shadowed sides black. Hook had expected Sir John to be in charge of this first landing, but instead it was a much younger man who waited till all the boats had discharged their passengers. The sailors shoved their launches off the beach and held them just beyond the breaking waves. If the French were waiting and awake then the boats could come to pick up the landing party, but Hook doubted many would escape. There would be blood in the sucking shingle instead. “We stay together,” the young man said in a low voice, “archers to the right!”
“You heard Sir John!” Sir John Cornewaille hissed. The young man was Sir John Holland, nephew to the king and Sir John Cornewaille’s stepson. “Goddington?”
“Sir John?”
“Take your archers far enough out to give us flanking cover!”
It seemed the older Sir John was really in charge, merely yielding the appearance of command to his stepson. “Forward!” the younger Sir John called, and the line of men, forty men-at-arms on the left and forty archers on the right, advanced farther up the beach.
To find defenses.
At first Hook thought he was approaching a great ridge of earth at the top of the shingle, but as he drew closer he saw that the ridge was man-made and had a ditch in front of it. It was a bank thrown up to serve as a rampart, and not only was it ditched, but there were bastions jutting out onto the shingle from which crossbowmen could shoot into the flanks of any attacker advancing up the beach. The ramparts, which had hardly been eroded by wind or rain, stretched the width of the cove and Hook imagined how hard it would be to fight up their front with men-at-arms hacking down from the summit and crossbow bolts slashing from the sides, but all he could do was imagine, because the rampart, that must have taken days to make, was entirely deserted.
“Been busy little farts, haven’t they?” Sir John Cornewaille remarked caustically. He kicked the rampart’s summit. “What’s the point of making defenses and then abandoning them?”
“They knew we’d land here?” Sir John Holland suggested cautiously.
“Then why aren’t they here to greet us?” Sir John asked. “They probably built ramparts like these on every beach in Normandy! Bastards are pissing in their breeches and digging walls. Archers! You can all whistle, can’t you?”
The archers said nothing. Most were too surprised by the question to make any response.
“You can all whistle?” Sir John asked again. “Good! And you all know the tune of ‘Robin Hood’s Lament’?”
Every archer knew that tune. It would have been astonishing had they not, for Robin Hood was the archers’ hero, the bowman who had stood up against the lords and princes and sheriffs of England. “Right!” Sir John announced. “We’re going up the hill! Men-at-arms on the track and archers into the woods! Explore to the top of the hill! If you hear or see someone then come and find me! But whistle ‘Robin Hood’s Lament’ so I know it’s an Englishman coming and not some prick-sucking Frenchman! Let’s go!”
Before they could climb the hill they needed to cross a sullen stretch of moon-glossed marsh that lay behind the beach’s thick bank of earth and shingle. There was a path of sorts that doglegged its way over the swampy ground, but Sir John Cornewaille insisted the archers spread either side of the track so that, if an ambush was sprung, they could shoot their arrows in from the flanks. Peter Goddington cursed as he waded between the tussocks. “He’ll have us killed,” he grumbled as newly woken birds screeched up from the marsh, their sudden wingbeats loud in the night. The surf fell and sucked on the beach.
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