Agincourt - Cornwell Bernard - Страница 64
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And next morning, under a heavy gray sky, they headed east.
Hope had sustained the army, but now despair crept in. Disease returned. Men were forever dismounting, running to one side and dropping their breeches so that the rearguard rode through the stink of shit. Men rode silently and sullenly. Rain came in bands from the ocean, sweeping inland, leaving the column wet and dripping.
Every ford across the Somme was staked and guarded. The bridges had been destroyed, and a French army now shadowed the English. It was not the main army, not the great assembly of men-at-arms and crossbowmen that had gathered in Rouen, but a smaller force that was more than adequate to block any attempted crossing of a barricaded ford. They were in sight every day, men-at-arms and crossbowmen, all of them mounted, riding along the river’s northern bank to keep pace with the English on the southern. More than once Sir John led archers and men-at-arms in a headlong gallop to try and seize a ford before the French reached it, but the French were always waiting. They had put garrisons at every crossing.
Food became scarce, though the small unwalled towns grudgingly yielded baskets of bread, cheese, and smoked fish rather than be attacked and burned. And each day the army became hungrier and marched deeper into enemy country.
“Why don’t we just go back to Harfleur?” Thomas Evelgold grumbled.
“Because that would be running away,” Hook said.
“That’s better than dying,” Evelgold said.
There were also enemies on the English side of the river. French men-at-arms watched the passing column from low hilltops to the south. They were usually in small bands, perhaps six or seven men, and if a force of English knights rode toward them they would invariably draw away, though once in a while an enemy might raise his lance as a signal that he was offering single combat. Then, perhaps, an Englishman would respond and the two men would gallop together, there would be a clatter of iron-shod lances on armor and one man would topple slowly from his horse. Once two men skewered each other and both died, each impaled on his enemy’s lance. Sometimes a band of French would charge together, as many as forty or fifty men-at-arms, attacking a weak point in the marching column to kill a few men before galloping away.
Other Frenchmen were busy ahead of the column, taking away the harvest to leave nothing for the invaders. The food, collected from barns and granaries, was taken to Amiens, a city the English skirted on the day they should have arrived in Calais. The bags that had held food were now empty. Hook, riding in a thin drizzle, had stared at the distant white vision of Amiens Cathedral towering above the city and he had thought of all the food inside the walls. He was hungry. They were all hungry.
Next day they camped near a castle that stood atop a white chalk cliff. Sir John’s men-at-arms had captured a pair of enemy knights who had strayed too close to the vanguard and the prisoners had boasted how the French would defeat Henry’s small army. They had even repeated the boasts to Henry himself, and Sir John brought his archers orders from the king. He stood amidst their campfires. “Tomorrow morning,” he said, “every man is to cut a stake as long as a bowstave. Longer if you can! Cut a stake as thick as your arm and sharpen both ends.”
Rain hissed in the fire. Hook’s archers had eaten poorly on a hare that Tom Scarlet had killed with an arrow and that Melisande had roasted over the fire, which was surrounded by flat stones on which she had made flat cakes from a mix of oats and acorns. They had a few nuts and some hard green apples. There was no ale left, no wine either, so they took water from a stream. Melisande was now swathed in Hook’s enormous mail coat and huddled beside him.
“Stakes?” Thomas Evelgold inquired cautiously.
“The French, may they rot in hell,” Sir John said as he walked closer to the biggest fire, “have decided how to beat you. You! The archers! They fear you! Are you all listening to me?”
The archers watched him in silence. Sir John was wearing a leather hat and a thick leather coat. Rainwater dripped from the brim and hems. He carried a shortened lance, one cut down so that a man-at-arms could use it on foot. “We’re listening, Sir John,” Evelgold growled.
“Instructions have been sent from Rouen!” Sir John announced. “The Marshal of France has a plan! And the plan is to kill you, the archers, first, then kill the rest of us.”
“Take the gentry prisoner, you mean,” Evelgold said, but too quietly for Sir John to hear.
“They’re assembling knights on well-armored horses,” Sir John said, “and the riders will have the best armor they can find! Milanese armor! And you all know about Milanese armor.”
Hook knew that the armor made in Milan, wherever that was, had the reputation of being the best in Christendom. It was said that Milanese plate would resist the heaviest bodkin, but luckily such armor was rare because it was so expensive. Hook had been told that a complete suit of Milanese plate would cost close to a hundred pounds, over ten years’ pay for an archer, and a heavy outlay for most men-at-arms, who thought themselves rich if they had forty pounds a year.
“So they’ll armor their horses and wear Milanese plate,” Sir John went on, “and charge you, the archers! They want to get in among you with swords and maces.” The archers were listening intently now, imagining the big horses with steel faces and padded flanks wheeling and rearing among their panicked ranks. “If they send a thousand horsemen you’ll be lucky to stop a hundred of them! And the rest will just slaughter you, except they won’t, because you’ll have stakes!” He lifted the shortened lance to show what he meant, then thrust its butt end onto the leaf mold and slanted the shaft so that the iron-tipped point was about breast height. “That’s how you’ll drive the stake into the ground,” he told them. “If a horse charges home onto that it’ll get impaled, and that’s how you stop a man in Milanese armor! So tomorrow morning you all cut a stake. One man, one stake, and you sharpen both ends.”
“Tomorrow, Sir John?” Evelgold asked. He sounded skeptical. “Are they that close?”
“They could be anywhere,” Sir John said. “From tomorrow’s dawn you ride in mail and leather, you wear helmets, you keep your strings dry, and you carry a stake.”
Next morning Hook cut a bough from an oak and sharpened the green wood with his poleax blade. “When we left England,” Will of the Dale said ruefully, “they said we were the best army ever gathered! Now we’re down to wet strings, acorn cakes, and stakes! Goddamned stakes!”
The long oak stake was awkward to carry on horseback. The horses were tired, wet, and hungry, and the rain came again, harder, blowing from behind and pattering the river’s surface into a myriad dimples. The French were on the far bank. They were always on the far bank.
Then new orders came from the king and the vanguard turned away from the river to climb a long damp slope that led to a wide plateau of wet, featureless land. “Where are we going now?” Hook asked as the river disappeared from sight.
“God knows,” Father Christopher said.
“And He’s not telling you, father?”
“Does your saint tell you anything?”
“Not a word.”
“So God alone knows where we are,” Father Christopher said, “but only God.” The plateau had clay soil and the road was soon churned into a morass of mud on which the rain fell incessantly. It was growing colder, and the plateau had few trees, which meant fuel for fires was scarce. Some archers in another company burned their sharpened stakes for warmth at night and the army paused to watch those men being whipped. Their ventenar had his ears cut off.
The French horsemen sensed the despair in Henry’s army. They rode just to the south, tracking the army, and the English men-at-arms were too tired and their horses too hungry to accept the implied challenge of the raised lances, and so the French grew bolder, riding ever closer. “Don’t waste your arrows!” Sir John told his archers.
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