Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [106]
His standard-bearer suddenly tumbled over the wall behind, and with him came more men-at-arms wearing Sir John’s lion. “Kill the bastards!” Sir John screamed, but the bastards had taken enough. They were spilling through a gap in the rearward wall of the barbican and scrambling down a ladder or hurling themselves at a steep slope of spilled rubble before running through the smoke for the town’s gate. The rising sun was lighting that smoke. Screaming Englishmen were killing the last defenders who could not reach the gap in time. One man held out his glove in token of surrender, but an archer beat him down with a long-hafted hammer and another skewered him with a poleax.
“Enough!” a voice shouted. “Enough! Enough!”
“Hold your blows!” Sir John called. “Hold it, I said!”
“God be thanked!” the man who had first called to end the killing said, and Hook saw it was the king who, sword in hand, suddenly knelt on the rubble and crossed himself. The king’s surcoat, its bright badge crossed by Saint George’s red, was scorched. A springolt bolt thumped into one of the timbers facing the town, making the wall quiver. “Extinguish the flames!” the king called, getting to his feet. He pulled off his helmet and its leather liner so that his thick cropped hair stuck up in small, sweat-dark clumps. “And someone have pity on that man!” He gestured at the Frenchman who had tried to surrender, and who now writhed and moaned as blood soaked the faulds just beneath his breastplate. The poleax was still embedded in his belly. A man-at-arms drew a knife, felt for the gap in the armor protecting the dying man’s throat, and stabbed home once before working the blade around inside the gullet. The man convulsed, blood bubbled from the holes in his dented visor, then he gave a spasm and was still. “God be thanked,” the king said again. An archer suddenly fell to his knees and Hook thought the man was praying, but instead he vomited. Crossbow bolts were striking the barbican’s rear wall, their strikes sounding like flails beating on a threshing floor. The king’s banner was flying from the barbican now and the heavy cloth twitched as the bolts ripped and tore at the weave. “Sir John,” the king said, “I must thank you.”
“For doing my duty, sire?” Sir John asked, going to one knee, “and this man helped,” he added, gesturing at Hook.
Hook also dropped to one knee. The king gave him a glance, but showed no recognition. “My thanks to you all,” Henry said curtly, then turned away. “Send heralds!” he ordered one of his entourage, “and tell them to yield the town! And bring water for the flames!”
Water was poured on the flames, but the fire had penetrated deep into the barbican’s shattered timbers and they smoldered on, seeping a constant and choking smoke about the captured bastion. Its ragged summit was garrisoned by archers now, and that night they manhandled the Messenger, one of the smaller cannon, up to its summit, and that gun splintered the timbers of the Leure Gate with its first shot.
The heralds had ridden to that gate after the barbican’s capture, and they had patiently explained that the English would now demolish the great gate and its towers and that the fall of Harfleur was thus inevitable, and that the garrison should therefore do the sensible, even the honorable, thing and surrender before more men died. If they refused to surrender, the heralds declared, then the law of God decreed that every man, woman, and child in Harfleur would be given to the pleasure of the English. “Think of your pretty daughters,” a herald called to the garrison’s commanders, “and for their sake, yield!”
But the garrison would not surrender, and so the English dug new gun-pits closer to the town, and they hammered the exposed Leure Gate, demolishing the towers on either side and bringing down its stone arch, yet still the defenders fought back.
And the first chill wind of summer’s end brought rain.
And the sickness did not end and Henry’s army died in blood, vomit, and watery shit.
And Harfleur remained