Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [1]
Perrill had turned to stare across the mill pastures where the river was a winding streak of silver under the winter-bare willows. He was wearing boots, breeches, a jerkin, and a deerskin coat and he had no idea that his death was a few heartbeats away.
Hook released. It was a smooth release, the hemp cord leaving his thumb and two fingers without so much as a tremor.
The arrow flew true. Hook tracked the gray feathers, watching as the steel-tipped tapered ash shaft sped toward Perrill’s heart. He had sharpened the wedge-shaped blade and knew it would slice through deerskin as if it were cobweb.
Nick Hook hated the Perrill family, just as the Perrills hated the Hooks. The feud went back two generations, to when Tom Perrill’s grandfather had killed Hook’s grandfather in the village tavern by stabbing him through the eye with a poker. The old Lord Slayton had declared it a fair fight and refused to punish the miller, and ever since the Hooks had tried to get revenge.
They never had. Hook’s father had been kicked to death in the yearly football match and no one had ever discovered who had killed him, though everyone knew it must have been the Perrills. The ball had been kicked into the rushes beyond the manor orchard and a dozen men had chased after it, but only eleven came out. The new Lord Slayton had laughed at the idea of calling the death murder. “If you hanged a man for killing in a game of football,” he had said, “then you’ll hang half England!”
Hook’s father had been a shepherd. He left a pregnant widow and two sons, and the widow died within two months of her husband’s death as she gave birth to a stillborn daughter. She died on the feast day of Saint Nicholas, which was Nick Hook’s thirteenth birthday, and his grandmother said the coincidence proved that Nick was cursed. She tried to lift the curse with her own magic. She stabbed him with an arrow, driving the point deep into his thigh, then told him to kill a deer with the arrow and the curse would go away. Hook had poached one of Lord Slayton’s hinds, killing it with the bloodstained arrow, but the curse had remained. The Perrills lived and the feud went on. A fine apple tree in the garden of Hook’s grandmother had died, and she insisted it had been old mother Perrill who had blighted the fruit. “The Perrills always have been putrid turd-sucking bastards,” his grandmother said. She put the evil eye on Tom Perrill and on his younger brother, Robert, but old mother Perrill must have used a counter-spell because neither fell ill. The two goats that Hook kept on the common disappeared, and the village reckoned it had to be wolves, but Hook knew it was the Perrills. He killed their cow in revenge, but it was not the same as killing them. “It’s your job to kill them,” his grandmother insisted to Nick, but he had never found the opportunity. “May the devil make you spit shit,” she cursed him, “and then take you to hell.” She threw him from her home when he was sixteen. “Go and starve, you bastard,” she snarled. She was going mad by then and there was no arguing with her, so Nick Hook left home and might well have starved except that was the year he came first in the six villages’ competition, putting arrow after arrow into the distant mark.
Lord Slayton made Nick a forester, which meant he had to keep his lordship’s table heavy with venison. “Better you kill them legally,” Lord Slayton had remarked, “than be hanged for poaching.”
Now, on Saint Winebald’s Day, just before Christmas, Nick Hook watched his arrow fly toward Tom Perrill.
It would kill, he knew it.
The arrow flew true, dipping slightly between the high, frost-bright hedges. Tom Perrill had no idea it was coming. Nick Hook smiled.
Then the arrow fluttered.
A fledging had come loose, its glue and binding must have given way and the arrow veered leftward to slice down the horse’s flank and lodge in its shoulder. The horse whinnied, reared and lunged forward, jerking the great elm trunk loose