Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [103]
“Shout louder, you bastards!” Sir John called, and the attackers gave a ragged cry of Saint George. “Louder!”
A gun punched rancid smoke from the town’s walls and its stone slashed diagonally across the rough ground where the attackers advanced. A man-at-arms was struck on the thigh and he spun around, blood splashing high on his jupon, and the gun-stone kept going, disemboweling a page and still it flew, blood drops trailing, to vanish somewhere over the marshes. An archer’s bow snapped at the full draw and he cursed. “Don’t give the bastards time! Kill them!” Sir John Cornewaille bellowed as he jumped down onto the faggots that filled the ditch.
And now the shouting was constant as the first attackers staggered on the uneven faggots that did not entirely fill the moat. Crossbow bolts hissed down, and the defenders added stones and lengths of timber that they hurled from the barbican’s high rampart. Two more guns fired from the town walls, belching smoke, their stones slashing harmlessly behind the attackers. Trumpets were calling in Harfleur and the crossbows were shooting from the walls. So long as the attackers were close to the barbican they were safe from the missiles loosed from the town, but some men were trying to clamber up the bastion’s eroded flanks and there they were in full sight of Harfleur’s defenders.
Hook emptied his arrow bag at the men on the barbican’s summit, then looked around for a page with more arrows, but could see none. “Horrocks,” he shouted at his youngest archer, “go and find arrows!” He saw a wounded archer, not one of his men, sitting a few paces away and he took a handful of arrows from the man’s bag and trapped one between his thumb and the bowstave. The English banners were at the foot of the barbican and most of the men-at-arms were on its lower slopes, trying to climb between the flames that burned fiercely to blind the defenders with smoke. It was like trying to scramble up the face of a crumbling bluff, but a bluff in which fires burned and smoke writhed. The French were bellowing defiance. Their best weapons now were the stones they hurled down the face and Hook saw a man-at-arms tumble back, his helmet half crushed by a boulder. The king was there, or at least his standard was bright against the smoke and Hook wondered if the king had been the man he saw falling with a crushed helmet. What would happen if the king died? But at least he was there, in the fight, and Hook felt a surge of pride that England had a fighting king and not some half-mad monarch who circled his body with straps because he believed he was made of glass.
Sir John’s banner was on the right now, joined there by the three bells on Sir William Porter’s flag. Hook shouted at his men to follow as he ran to the ditch’s edge. He jumped in, landing on the corpse of a man in plate armor. A crossbow bolt had pierced the man’s aventail, spreading blood from his ravaged throat. Someone had already stripped the body of sword and helmet. Hook negotiated the uncertain faggots and hauled himself up the far side where the smoke was thick. He loosed three arrows, then put his last one across the bowstave. The flames were growing stronger as they fed on the barbican’s broken timbers and those fires, designed to blind the defenders, were now a barrier to the attackers. Arrows hissed overhead, evidence that the pages had found more and brought them to the archers, but Hook was too committed to the attack now to go back and replenish his arrow bag. He ran to his right, dodging bodies, unaware of the crossbow bolts that struck around him. He saw Sir John precariously perched on top of some iron-bound timbers from where he stared upward at the men who taunted the attackers.