Agincourt - Cornwell Bernard - Страница 56
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“Well done, that archer!” Sir John shouted.
Hook waited. The day became still hotter under a sun that was a great furnace in a sky clouded only by the shreds of smoke from the beleaguered city. The French had stopped shooting altogether, which only convinced Hook that they were saving their missiles for the assault they knew was coming. Priests picked their way among the ruins of the old wall, shriving the dead and the dying, while behind the wall, in the space between the ruined Leure Gate and the shattered barbican, the men-at-arms assembled under their lords’ banners. That force, at least four hundred strong, was easily visible to the defenders, but still they did not shoot.
One of Sir John’s pages, a boy of ten or eleven with a shock of bright blond hair and wide blue eyes, brought two skins of water to the archers. “We need arrows, boy,” Hook told him.
“I’ll bring some,” the boy said.
Hook tipped the skin to his mouth. “Why aren’t the men-at-arms moving?” he asked no one in particular. The king had assembled his assault force and the archers were in place, but a curious lassitude had settled over the attackers.
“A messenger came,” the page said nervously. He was a high-born lad, sent to Sir John’s household to learn a warrior’s ways, and in time he would doubtless be a great lord in shining armor mounted on a caparisoned horse, but for now he was nervous of the hard-faced archers who would one day be under his command.
“A messenger?”
“From the Duke of Clarence,” the page said, taking back the water-skin.
The duke, camped on the far side of Harfleur, was also attacking the city, though no sounds betrayed any fighting from that far-off gate. “So what did the messenger tell us?” Hook asked the page.
“That the attack failed,” the boy said.
“Sweet Jesus,” Hook said in disgust. So now, he reckoned, the king was waiting until his brother could mount another assault, and then the English would make one last effort, from both east and west, to overwhelm the stubborn defenders. And so Hook and his archers waited. If the king had sent new orders to his brother then they would take at least two hours to reach him, for the messenger had to ride far around the city’s north side and cross the flooded river by boat.
“What’s happening?” Sclate, the slow-witted laborer with a giant’s strength, asked.
“I don’t know,” Hook confessed. Sweat trickled down his face and stung his eyes. The air seemed to be filled with dust that coated his throat and made him thirsty again. The light, reflecting from the shattered chalk of the broken walls, was dazzling. He was tired. He unstrung the bow to take the tension from the stave.
“Are we attacking again?” Sclate asked.
“I reckon we attack when the duke assaults the far side,” Hook suggested. “Be a couple of hours yet.”
“They’ll be ready for us,” Sclate said gloomily.
The garrison would be ready. Ready with cannons and crossbows and springolts and boiling oil. That was what waited for the men wearing the red cross. The men-at-arms were sitting now, resting before they were ordered into the killing ground. The bright banners hung slack from their poles and a strange silence wrapped Harfleur. Waiting. Waiting.
“When we attack!” Sir John’s voice broke the silence. He was striding along the front of the sheltering archers, careless that he was fully exposed to the enemy, but the French crossbowmen, doubtless under orders to conserve their bolts, ignored him. “When we attack,” he called again, “you advance! You keep shooting! But you keep going forward! When we go over the wall I want archers with us! We’re going to have to hunt these bastards through their goddam streets! I want you all there! And good hunting! This is a day to kill our king’s enemies, so kill them!”
And when the killing was done, Hook wondered, how many English would be left? The army that had sailed from Southampton Water had been small enough, but now? Now, he reckoned, there would just be half an army, many of them sick men, crammed into the ruins of Harfleur as the French army at last stirred itself to fight. Rumors said that enemy army was vast, a horde of men eager to wipe out the impudent English invaders, though God seemed to be doing that already by sickness.
“Let’s get it over with,” Will of the Dale grumbled.
“Or let them keep the goddam town,” Tom Scarlet suggested, “it’s a shit-heap now.”
And what if the assault failed? Hook wondered. What if Harfleur did not fall? Then the remnants of Henry’s army would sail back to England, defeated. The campaign had begun so well, with all the panoply of banners and hope, and now it was blood and feces and despair.
Another trumpeter began playing the same mocking notes from the city. Sir John, stalking back past his archers, turned and snarled toward the defenders. “I want that prick-sucking bastard killed! I want him killed!” The last four words were screamed at the wall, loud enough for any Frenchmen to hear.
Then, unexpectedly, a man clambered onto the wall’s top. He was not the trumpeter, who still blew from his place behind the wall. The man on the wall was unarmed, and he stood and waved both hands at the English.
Archers stood, began to draw.
“No!” Sir John bellowed. “No! No! No! Bows down! Bows down! Bows down!”
The trumpet note wavered, faded and stopped.
The man on the wall held his empty hands high above his head.
And, miraculously, suddenly, astonishingly, it was all over.
The soldiers of Harfleur’s garrison did not want to surrender, but the townspeople had suffered enough. They were hungry. Their houses had been crushed and burned by English missiles, disease was spreading, they saw an inevitable defeat and knew that vengeful enemies would rape their daughters. The town council insisted that the city yield and, without the support of the men of Harfleur who shot crossbows from the walls and without the food prepared by the women, the garrison could not prolong the fight.
The Sire de Gaucourt, who had led the defense, asked for a three-day truce in which he could send a messenger to the French king to discover whether or not a relief force was coming to the city’s help. If not, then he would surrender on condition that the English army did not sack and rape the town. Henry agreed, and so priests and nobles gathered at the breach by the Leure Gate, and the leading men came from the town, and they all swore solemn oaths to abide by the terms of the truce. Afterward, and after Henry had taken hostages to ensure that the garrison kept its word, a herald rode close under the walls and shouted up at the townsfolk who had watched the ceremony. He called in French. “You have nothing to fear! The King of England has not come to destroy you! We are good Christians and Harfleur is not Soissons! You have nothing to fear!”
Smoke drifted from the city to haze the late summer sky. It seemed strange that no guns fired, that no trebuchets thumped as they launched their missiles, and that the fighting had stopped. The dying did not stop. The corpses were still carried to the creeks and thrown to the gulls, and it seemed there would be no end to the sickness.
And there was no French relief force.
The French army was gathering to the east, but the message came back that it would not march to relieve Harfleur and so, on the next Sunday, the feast of Saint Vincent, the city surrendered.
A pavilion was erected on the hillside behind the English encampment and a throne was placed under the canopy and draped with cloth of gold. English banners flanked the pavilion, which was filled with the high nobility in their finest clothes. A man held aloft the king’s great helm, which was ringed with a golden crown, while archers lined a long path that led across the rubble of the siege-works to the ruined gate that had resisted so many attacks. Behind the archers were the rest of Henry’s army, spectators to the day’s drama.
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