Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [115]
Clouds gathered the next day, piling above the sea and slowly drifting to make a pall over Harfleur. The archers were busy making temporary repairs to the breached walls, building timber palisades that must serve as a defense until masons came from England to remake the ramparts properly. Men were still falling ill and the battered streets stank of sewage that oozed into the River Lézarde that once again ran free through a stone channel bisecting the town, and thence into the tight harbor that smelled like a cesspit.
The king sent a challenge to the dauphin, offering to fight him face-to-face and the winner would inherit the crown of France from the mad King Charles. “He won’t accept,” Sir John Cornewaille said. Sir John had come to watch the archers pound stakes into the ground to support the new palisade. “The dauphin’s a fat, lazy bastard, and our Henry is a warrior. It would be like a wolf fighting a piglet.”
“And if the dauphin doesn’t agree to fight, Sir John?” Thomas Evelgold asked.
“We’ll go home, I suppose,” Sir John said unhappily. That was the opinion throughout the army. The days were shortening and becoming colder, and soon the autumn rains would arrive and that would mean the end of the campaign season. And even if Henry had wanted to continue the campaign his army was too small and the French army was too big, and sensible men, experienced men, declared that only a fool would dare defy those odds. “If we had another six or seven thousand men,” Sir John said, “I dare say we could bloody their goddam noses, but we won’t. We’ll leave a garrison to hold this shit-hole and the rest of us will sail home.”
Reinforcements still arrived, but they were not many, not nearly enough to make up the numbers who had died or who were sick, but the boats brought them into the stinking harbor and the uncertain newcomers came down the gangplanks to stare wide-eyed at the broken roofs and the shattered churches and the scorched rubble. “Most of us will be going home soon,” Sir John told his men, “and the newcomers can defend Harfleur.” He spoke sourly. The capture of Harfleur was not enough to compensate for the money spent and the lives lost. Sir John wanted more, as rumor said the king did, but every other great lord, the royal dukes, the earls, the bishops, the captains, all advised the king to go home.
“There’s no choice,” Thomas Evelgold told Hook one evening. The great lords were at a council of war, meeting the king in an attempt to beat sense into his ambitious head, and the army waited on the council’s decision. It was a beautiful evening, a sinking sun casting shadows long over the harbor. Hook and Evelgold were sitting at a table outside Le Paon, drinking ale that had been brought from England because the breweries of Harfleur had all been destroyed. “We have to go home,” Evelgold said, evidently thinking of the heated discussion that was doubtless being waged in the guild hall beside Saint Martin’s church.
“Maybe we stay as part of the garrison?” Hook suggested.
“Christ, no!” Evelgold said harshly, then crossed himself. “That goddam great army of the French? They’ll take this town back with no trouble! They’ll beat down our palisades in three days, then kill every man here.”
Hook said nothing. He was watching the harbor’s narrow entrance where an arriving ship was being propelled by huge sweeps because the wind had fallen to a whisper. Gulls wheeled above the ship’s single