Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [14]
“Once,” Hook said.
“See that scar on his face? Took an arrow there, smack in the cheek and it didn’t kill him! And ever since he’s been convinced that God is his best friend and now he’s set on burning God’s enemies. Right, tomorrow you’re going to help fetch arrows from the Tower, then you’ll sail to Calais.”
And so Nicholas Hook, outlaw and archer, had traveled to Soissons where he wore the jagged red cross of Burgundy and walked the high city wall. He was part of an English contingent hired by the Duke of Burgundy and commanded by a supercilious man-at-arms named Sir Roger Pallaire. Hook rarely saw Pallaire, taking his orders instead from a centenar named Smithson who spent his time in a tavern called L’Oie, the Goose. “They all hate us,” Smithson had greeted his newest troops, “so don’t walk the city at night on your own. Not unless you want a knife in your back.”
The garrison was Burgundian, but the citizens of Soissons were loyal to their imbecile king, Charles VI of France. Hook, even after three months in the fortress-city, still did not understand why the Burgundians and the French so loathed each other, for they seemed indistinguishable to him. They spoke the same language and, he was told, the Duke of Burgundy was not only the mad king’s cousin, but also father-in-law to the French dauphin. “Family quarrel, lad,” John Wilkinson told him, “worst kind of quarrel there is.”
Wilkinson was an old man, of at least forty years, who served as bowyer, fletcher, and arrow-maker to the English archers hired by the garrison. He lived in a stable at the Goose where his files, saws, drawknives, chisels, and adzes hung neatly on the wall. He had asked Smithson for an assistant and Hook, the youngest newcomer, was chosen. “And at least you’re competent,” Wilkinson offered Hook the grudging compliment, “it’s mostly rubbish that arrives here. Men and weapons, both rubbish. They call themselves archers, but half of them can’t hit a barrel at fifty paces. And as for Sir Roger?” The old man spat. “He’s here for the money. Lost everything at home. I hear he has debts of over five hundred pounds! Five hundred pounds! Can you even imagine that?” Wilkinson picked up an arrow and shook his gray head. “And we have to fight for Sir Richard with this rubbish.”
“The arrows came from the king,” Hook said defensively. He had helped carry the sheaves from the Tower’s undercroft.
Wilkinson grinned. “What the king did, God save his soul, is find some arrows from old King Edward’s reign. I know what I’ll do, he said to himself, I’ll sell these useless arrows to Burgundy!” Wilkinson tossed the arrow to Hook. “Look at that!”
The arrow, made of ash and longer than Hook’s arm, was bent. “Bent,” Hook said.
“Bent as a bishop! Can’t shoot with that! Be shooting around corners!”
It was hot in Wilkinson’s stable. The old man had a fire burning in a round brick oven on top of which a cauldron of water steamed. He took the bent arrow from Hook and laid it with a dozen others across the cauldron’s top, then carefully placed a thick pad of folded cloth over the ash shafts and weighted the cloth’s center with a stone. “I steam them, boy,” Wilkinson explained, “then I weights them, and with any luck I straightens them, and then the fledging falls off because of the steam. Half aren’t fledged anyway!”
A brazier burned beneath a second smaller cauldron that stank of hoof glue. Wilkinson used the glue to replace the goose feathers that fledged the arrows. “And there’s no silk,” he grumbled, “so I’m having to use sinew.” The sinew bound the slit feathers to the arrow’s tail, reinforcing the glue. “But sinew’s no good,” Wilkinson complained, “it dries out, it shrinks and it goes brittle. I’ve told Sir Roger we need silk thread, but he don’t understand. He thinks an arrow is just an arrow, but it isn’t.” He tied a knot in the sinew, then