Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [125]
“So they’ll armor their horses and wear Milanese plate,” Sir John went on, “and charge you, the archers! They want to get in among you with swords and maces.” The archers were listening intently now, imagining the big horses with steel faces and padded flanks wheeling and rearing among their panicked ranks. “If they send a thousand horsemen you’ll be lucky to stop a hundred of them! And the rest will just slaughter you, except they won’t, because you’ll have stakes!” He lifted the shortened lance to show what he meant, then thrust its butt end onto the leaf mold and slanted the shaft so that the iron-tipped point was about breast height. “That’s how you’ll drive the stake into the ground,” he told them. “If a horse charges home onto that it’ll get impaled, and that’s how you stop a man in Milanese armor! So tomorrow morning you all cut a stake. One man, one stake, and you sharpen both ends.”
“Tomorrow, Sir John?” Evelgold asked. He sounded skeptical. “Are they that close?”
“They could be anywhere,” Sir John said. “From tomorrow’s dawn you ride in mail and leather, you wear helmets, you keep your strings dry, and you carry a stake.”
Next morning Hook cut a bough from an oak and sharpened the green wood with his poleax blade. “When we left England,” Will of the Dale said ruefully, “they said we were the best army ever gathered! Now we’re down to wet strings, acorn cakes, and stakes! Goddamned stakes!”
The long oak stake was awkward to carry on horseback. The horses were tired, wet, and hungry, and the rain came again, harder, blowing from behind and pattering the river’s surface into a myriad dimples. The French were on the far bank. They were always on the far bank.
Then new orders came from the king and the vanguard turned away from the river to climb a long damp slope that led to a wide plateau of wet, featureless land. “Where are we going now?” Hook asked as the river disappeared from sight.
“God knows,” Father Christopher said.
“And He’s not telling you, father?”
“Does your saint tell you anything?”
“Not a word.”
“So God alone knows where we are,” Father Christopher said, “but only God.” The plateau had clay soil and the road was soon churned into a morass of mud on which the rain fell incessantly. It was growing colder, and the plateau had few trees, which meant fuel for fires was scarce. Some archers in another company burned their sharpened stakes for warmth at night and the army paused to watch those men being whipped. Their ventenar had his ears cut off.
The French horsemen sensed the despair in Henry’s army. They rode just to the south, tracking the army, and the English men-at-arms were too tired and their horses too hungry to accept the implied challenge of the raised lances, and so the French grew bolder, riding ever closer. “Don’t waste your arrows!” Sir John told his archers.
“One less Frenchman to kill in a battle,” Hook suggested.
Sir John smiled tiredly. “It’s a matter of honor, Hook.” He nodded toward a Frenchman who trotted less than a quarter-mile away. The man was quite alone and rode with an upright lance as an invitation for some Englishman to fight him. “He’s sworn to do some deed of great valor,” Sir John explained, “like killing me or another knight, and that’s a noble ambition.”
“It saves him from an arrow?” Hook responded dourly.
“Yes, Hook, it does. Let him live. He’s a brave man.”
More brave men approached that afternoon, but still no Englishmen responded, and so the Frenchmen became still bolder, riding close enough to recognize men they had met in tournaments across Europe. They chatted. There were maybe a dozen such French knights visible at any one time, and one of them, mounted on a tall and sprightly black horse that took the heavy soil with a high-stepping