Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [108]
“You hurt, Will?”
“No. Just tired of this place.”
The French had loaded their cannon with a mass of small stones that had flayed the attackers. A man-at-arms was dead, a small hole punched clean through the top of his helmet. An archer staggered back toward the barbican, one hand clamped over an empty, bloody eye socket.
“We’re all going to die here,” Will said.
“No,” Hook said fiercely, though he did not believe his protest. The gun smoke cleared slowly and Hook saw that the earth-filled basket was back in its embrasure.
“Bastards,” Sir John spat again.
“We’re not giving up!” the king was shouting. He wanted to assemble a mass of men-at-arms and attempt to overwhelm the wall with numbers and his men were carrying orders to the Englishmen scattered in the old wall’s ruins. “Archers to the flanks!” a man shouted, “to the flanks!”
A French trumpeter began playing a short sharp melody. It was three notes, rising and falling, repeated over and over. There was something taunting in the sound.
“Kill that bastard!” Sir John shouted, but the bastard was hidden behind the wall.
“Move!” the king shouted.
Hook took a deep breath, then scrambled to his right. No crossbow bolts spat from the defenses. The garrison was waiting, he thought. Perhaps they were running short of bolts and so they were keeping what they had to greet the next assault. He sheltered by a stub of broken wall and just then the French trumpeter stood on the new rampart and raised his instrument to his lips, and Hook stood too, and the cord came back to his right ear, he loosed, and the string whipped his bracer and the goose-fledged arrow flew true and the bodkin point took the trumpeter in the throat and drove clean through his neck so that it stood proud at his nape. The braying trumpet screeched horribly and then ended abruptly as the man fell backward. More English arrows flitted above him as he disappeared behind the wall, leaving a fading spray of misted blood and the dying echo of the trumpet’s truncated call.
“Well done, that archer!” Sir John shouted.
Hook waited. The day became still hotter under a sun that was a great furnace in a sky clouded only by the shreds of smoke from the beleaguered city. The French had stopped shooting altogether, which only convinced Hook that they were saving their missiles for the assault they knew was coming. Priests picked their way among the ruins of the old wall, shriving the dead and the dying, while behind the wall, in the space between the ruined Leure Gate and the shattered barbican, the men-at-arms assembled under their lords’ banners. That force, at least four hundred strong, was easily visible to the defenders, but still they did not shoot.
One of Sir John’s pages, a boy of ten or eleven with a shock of bright blond hair and wide blue eyes, brought two skins of water to the archers. “We need arrows, boy,” Hook told him.
“I’ll bring some,” the boy said.
Hook tipped the skin to his mouth. “Why aren’t the men-at-arms moving?” he asked no one in particular. The king had assembled his assault force and the archers were in place, but a curious lassitude had settled over the attackers.
“A messenger came,” the page said nervously. He was a high-born lad, sent to Sir John’s household to learn a warrior’s ways, and in time he would doubtless be a great lord in shining armor mounted on a caparisoned horse, but for now he was nervous of the hard-faced archers who would one day be under his command.
“A messenger?”
“From the Duke of Clarence,” the page said, taking back the water-skin.
The duke, camped on the far side of Harfleur, was also