Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [15]
“Yes.”
Wilkinson heard the belligerent tone and grinned. “Murder? Battle? Have you ever killed a man in battle?”
“No,” Hook confessed.
“Ever killed a man with your bow?”
“One, a poacher.”
“Did he shoot at you?”
“No.”
“Then you’re not an archer, are you? Kill a man in battle, Hook, and you can call yourself an archer. How did you kill your last man?”
“I hanged him.”
“And why did you do that?”
“Because he was a heretic,” Hook explained.
Wilkinson pushed a hand through his thinning gray hair. He was thin as a weasel with a lugubrious face and sharp eyes that now stared belligerently at Hook. “You hanged a heretic?” he asked. “Short of firewood, are they, in England these days? And when was this brave act done?”
“Last winter.”
“A Lollard, was he?” Wilkinson asked, then smirked when Hook nodded. “So you hanged a man because he disagreed with the church about a morsel of bread? ‘I’m the living bread come from heaven,’ says the Lord, and the Lord said nothing about being dead bread on a priest’s platter, did He? He didn’t say He was moldy bread, did He? No, He said He was the living bread, son, but no doubt you knew better than Him what you were doing.”
Hook recognized the challenge in the old man’s words, but he did not feel capable of meeting it and so he said nothing. He had never cared much for religion or for God, not till he heard the voice in his head, and now he sometimes wondered if he really had heard that voice. He remembered the girl in the stable of the London tavern, and how her eyes had pleaded with him and how he had failed her. He remembered the stench of burning flesh, the smoke dipping low in the small wind to whirl about the lilies and leopards of England’s badge. He remembered the face of the young king, scarred and unforgiving.
“This one,” Wilkinson said, picking up an arrow with a warped tip, “we can make into a proper killer. Something to send a gentry’s soul to hell.” He put the arrow on a wooden block and selected a knife that he tested for sharpness against his thumbnail. He sliced off the top six inches of the arrow with one quick cut, then tossed it to Hook. “Make yourself useful, lad, get the bodkin off.”
The arrow’s head was a narrow piece of steel a fraction longer than Hook’s middle finger. It was three sided and sharpened to a point. There were no barbs. The bodkin was heavier than most arrowheads because it had been made to pierce armor and, at close range, when shot from one of the great bows that only a man muscled like Hercules could draw, it would slice through the finest plate. It was a knight-killer, and Hook twisted the head until the glue inside the socket gave way and the bodkin came loose.
“You know how they harden those points?” Wilkinson asked.
“No.”
Wilkinson was bending over the stump of the arrow. He was using a fine saw, its blade no longer than his little finger, to make a deep wedge-shaped notch in the cut end. “What they do,” he said, staring at his work as he spoke, “is throw bones on the fire when they make the iron. Bones, boy, bones. Dry bones, dead bones. Now why would dead bones in burning charcoal turn iron into steel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nor do I, but it does. Bones and charcoal,” Wilkinson said. He held the notched arrow up, blew