Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [124]
Food became scarce, though the small unwalled towns grudgingly yielded baskets of bread, cheese, and smoked fish rather than be attacked and burned. And each day the army became hungrier and marched deeper into enemy country.
“Why don’t we just go back to Harfleur?” Thomas Evelgold grumbled.
“Because that would be running away,” Hook said.
“That’s better than dying,” Evelgold said.
There were also enemies on the English side of the river. French men-at-arms watched the passing column from low hilltops to the south. They were usually in small bands, perhaps six or seven men, and if a force of English knights rode toward them they would invariably draw away, though once in a while an enemy might raise his lance as a signal that he was offering single combat. Then, perhaps, an Englishman would respond and the two men would gallop together, there would be a clatter of iron-shod lances on armor and one man would topple slowly from his horse. Once two men skewered each other and both died, each impaled on his enemy’s lance. Sometimes a band of French would charge together, as many as forty or fifty men-at-arms, attacking a weak point in the marching column to kill a few men before galloping away.
Other Frenchmen were busy ahead of the column, taking away the harvest to leave nothing for the invaders. The food, collected from barns and granaries, was taken to Amiens, a city the English skirted on the day they should have arrived in Calais. The bags that had held food were now empty. Hook, riding in a thin drizzle, had stared at the distant white vision of Amiens Cathedral towering above the city and he had thought of all the food inside the walls. He was hungry. They were all hungry.
Next day they camped near a castle that stood atop a white chalk cliff. Sir John’s men-at-arms had captured a pair of enemy knights who had strayed too close to the vanguard and the prisoners had boasted how the French would defeat Henry’s small army. They had even repeated the boasts to Henry himself, and Sir John brought his archers orders from the king. He stood amidst their campfires. “Tomorrow morning,” he said, “every man is to cut a stake as long as a bowstave. Longer if you can! Cut a stake as thick as your arm and sharpen both ends.”
Rain hissed in the fire. Hook’s archers had eaten poorly on a hare that Tom Scarlet had killed with an arrow and that Melisande had roasted over the fire, which was surrounded by flat stones on which she had made flat cakes from a mix of oats and acorns. They had a few nuts and some hard green apples. There was no ale left, no wine either, so they took water from a stream. Melisande was now swathed in Hook’s enormous mail coat and huddled beside him.
“Stakes?” Thomas Evelgold inquired cautiously.
“The French, may they rot in hell,” Sir John said as he walked closer to the biggest fire, “have decided how to beat you. You! The archers! They fear you! Are you all listening to me?”
The archers watched him in silence. Sir John was wearing a leather hat and a thick leather coat. Rainwater dripped from the brim and hems. He carried a shortened lance, one cut down so that a man-at-arms could use it on foot. “We’re listening, Sir John,” Evelgold growled.
“Instructions have been sent from Rouen!” Sir John announced. “The Marshal of France has a plan! And the plan is to kill you, the archers, first, then kill the rest of us.”
“Take the gentry prisoner, you mean,” Evelgold said, but too quietly for Sir John to hear.
“They’re assembling knights on well-armored horses,” Sir John said, “and the riders will have the best armor they can find! Milanese armor! And you all know about Milanese armor.”
Hook knew that the armor made in Milan, wherever that was, had the reputation of being the best in Christendom. It was said that Milanese plate would resist