Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [135]
“And ten’s a low number,” the centenar said, “very low. More like a hundred men for every banner, maybe two hundred!”
“Sweet Jesus,” Hook said and tried counting the enemy flags, but they were too many. All he knew was that the enemy was vast and England’s army was small. “God help us,” he could not resist saying, and once again he had the shivering recollection of the blood and screams in Soissons.
“Someone has to help us,” Evelgold said briskly, then turned to his archers. “We’re on the right. Dismount! Stakes and bows! Look lively now! I want boys for the horses! Come on, don’t dawdle! Move your goddam bones! We’ve got some dying to do!”
The horses were left in the pastures beside the village as the army climbed the shallow slope to the plateau. The enemy could not be seen from the small valley, but as Hook breasted the rise onto the plowland the French were visible again and he felt his fears crawl back. What he saw was a proper army. Not a sickly, disheveled band of fugitives, but a proud, massed army come to punish the men who had dared invade France.
The English vanguard was on the right now, and its archers were farthest to the right where they were joined by half the archers who had formed the army’s center. The other half joined the rearguard who now formed on the left. So the wings of the army were each a mass of archers who flanked the men-at-arms who made a line between them.
“Sweet Christ,” Tom Scarlet said, “I’ve seen more men at a horse fair.”
He was pointing to the English men-at-arms. There were fewer than a thousand of them and they made a pathetically small line at the center of the array. The archers were far more numerous. Over two thousand were now assembled on each flank. “Stakes!” A knight wearing a green surcoat galloped along the face of the archers, “plant your stakes, lads!”
Sir John, who had formed with the men-at-arms in the line’s center, walked to where the archers readied their stakes. “We wait to see if they attack,” he explained, “and if not we’ll fight them in the morning!”
“Why don’t we just run away in the dark?” a man asked.
“I didn’t hear that question!” Sir John shouted, then went on down the line, telling men to be ready for a French assault.
The archers were not in close array like the men-at-arms who waited shoulder to armored shoulder in a line four men deep. The bowmen, instead, needed room to pull their long bowstaves and, in response to shouted orders, had moved some paces ahead of the men-at-arms where they scattered, each man finding a space. Hook was at the very front with the rest of Sir John’s men. He reckoned around two hundred archers were in line with him, the rest were behind in a dozen loose ranks where they now hammered their stakes so that the points faced toward the French. Once the stakes were in place the exposed point needed re-sharpening after the hammering it had received. “Stand in front of your stake!” the green-surcoated man shouted. “Don’t let the enemy see it!”
“Bastards aren’t blind,” Will of the Dale grumbled, “they must have seen what we were doing.”
The French were watching. They were a half-mile away, still arriving, a mass of color on horseback beneath banners brighter than the sky, which was becoming ever darker as the clouds thickened. Most of the French were milling around the skyline where tents were being erected, but hundreds rode southward to gaze at England’s army.
“I bet the bastards are laughing at us,” Tom Scarlet said. “They’re probably pissing themselves with laughter.”
The nearest enemy horsemen were just a quarter-mile away, standing or walking their horses in the plowland, and just gazing at the small army that faced them. To left and right the woods looked black in the fading evening light. Some archers, their stakes hammered home, were going into those woods to empty their bowels in the thick undergrowth of hawthorn, holly, and hazel, but most archers just stared back at the enemy and Hook reckoned Tom Scarlet was right. The French had to be laughing. They already had at least four or five men for every