Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [0]
Agincourt
Agincourt
is for my granddaughter,
Esme Cornwell,
with love.
Agincourt is one of the most instantly and vividly visualized of all epic passages in English history…. It is a victory of the weak over the strong, of the common soldier over the mounted knight, of resolution over bombast…. It is also a story of slaughter-yard behaviour and of outright atrocity.
Sir John Keegan, The Face of Battle
…there is a multitude of slain, and a great number of carcasses; and there is none end of their corpses: they stumble upon their corpses.
Nahum 3.3
Contents
Epigraph
Map
Prologue
On a winter’s day in 1413, just before Christmas, Nicholas…
Part One
Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian
One
The River Aisne swirled slow through a wide valley edged…
Two
The first Hook knew of the assault was the sound…
Three
Even in summer the hall of Calais Castle was chilly.
Part Two
Normandy
Four
Nick Hook could scarce believe the world held so many…
Five
It seemed to Hook that he never stopped digging in…
Six
The sow shuddered each time a gun-stone struck its sloping…
Seven
“Wake up, Nick!” It was Thomas Evelgold bellowing at him.
Eight
“You won’t die here,” Saint Crispinian said.
Part Three
To the River of Swords
Nine
There were to be no heavy wagons taken on the…
Ten
There was not one ford across the Somme, but two,…
Part Four
Saint Crispin’s Day
Eleven
Dawn was cold and gray. A few spatters of rain…
Twelve
The gun fired, belching smoke above the left flank of…
Thirteen
The Sire de Lanferelle spat curses. A man at his…
Epilogue
It was a November day, sky-bright and cold, filled with…
Historical Note
About the Author
Other Books by Bernard Cornwell
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Map
Prologue
On a winter’s day in 1413, just before Christmas, Nicholas Hook decided to commit murder.
It was a cold day. There had been a hard frost overnight and the midday sun had failed to melt the white from the grass. There was no wind so the whole world was pale, frozen and still when Hook saw Tom Perrill in the sunken lane that led from the high woods to the mill pastures.
Nick Hook, nineteen years old, moved like a ghost. He was a forester and even on a day when the slightest footfall could sound like cracking ice he moved silently. Now he went upwind of the sunken lane where Perrill had one of Lord Slayton’s draft horses harnessed to the felled trunk of an elm. Perrill was dragging the tree to the mill so he could make new blades for the water wheel. He was alone and that was unusual because Tom Perrill rarely went far from home without his brother or some other companion, and Hook had never seen Tom Perrill this far from the village without his bow slung on his shoulder.
Nick Hook stopped at the edge of the trees in a place where holly bushes hid him. He was one hundred paces from Perrill, who was cursing because the ruts in the lane had frozen hard and the great elm trunk kept catching on the jagged track and the horse was balking. Perrill had beaten the animal bloody, but the whipping had not helped and Perrill was just standing now, switch in hand, swearing at the unhappy beast.
Hook took an arrow from the bag hanging at his side and checked that it was the one he wanted. It was a broadhead, deep-tanged, with a blade designed to cut through a deer’s body, an arrow made to slash open arteries so that the animal would bleed to death if Hook missed the heart, though he rarely did miss. At eighteen years old he had won the three counties’ match, beating older archers famed across half England, and at one hundred paces he never missed.
He laid the arrow across the bowstave. He was watching Perrill because he did not need to look at the arrow or the bow. His left thumb trapped the arrow, and his right hand slightly stretched the cord so that it engaged in the small horn-reinforced nock at the arrow’s feathered end. He raised the stave, his eyes still on the miller’s eldest son.
He hauled back the cord with no apparent effort though most men who