Agincourt - Cornwell Bernard - Страница 35

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

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

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

“Is that all?”

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

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

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

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

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

And Harfleur was under siege.

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

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

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

“Which broke,” Matt said.

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

“She got the beads back,” Matt said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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