Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [169]
Then a Frenchman in mud-spattered bright mail, with a blue silk ribbon about his neck and a silver lion crowning his helmet, dropped to one knee and took off his right gauntlet, which he held toward Hook. Hook was still four or five paces away and was planning to slam the hammer onto that glittering lion, but he suddenly understood what the Frenchman wanted. “Prisoners!” he shouted. “Prisoners!” He snatched the gauntlet from the Frenchman. “Take your helmet off,” he ordered the man. No one had yet given the order to capture prisoners, and Sir John, before the fight, had stressed that none was to be taken until the king had deemed the battle won, but Hook did not care. The French were surrendering now.
More and more Frenchmen were holding out their gauntlets. Their helmets were left in the mud as their captors hauled them back from the fight. “What do we do with the bastards?” Will of the Dale asked.
“Tie their hands,” Hook suggested. “Use bow cords!”
The first French battle was retreating now. Too many had died and the living had no stomach for a fight that had spilled so much blood into the furrows. Hook leaned on his poleax and watched an archer in a blue, blood-darkened surcoat cackling among the wounded enemy. The man had discovered a falcon-beak, a weapon that was half hammer and half claw, and he was killing the wounded by piercing their helmets with the curved beak, which was mounted on a long shaft. The wedge-shaped point easily drove through steel to shatter the skulls beneath. “Like cracking eggs!” he called to no one in particular, and cracked another. “Bastards,” he kept shouting, “bastards!” He killed again and again. Injured men pleaded for mercy, but the beaked hammer would still fall. Hook had no energy to intervene. The man seemed oblivious of everything except the need to kill, and when he struck a wounded man he would do it repeatedly, long after the man was dead. A mastiff was standing over the body of its wounded master, barking at the English, and the archer killed the dog with the falcon-beak, then killed the dog’s owner. “You’d cut off my fingers!” he screamed at the man, swinging the beak to mangle the corpse’s already crumpled helmet, “I’ll cut off your goddamned prick!” He suddenly raised his two string fingers at the corpses he had made and jerked the fingers up and down. “Cut these off, would you? You bastards!”
“Sweet Jesus,” Tom Scarlet said. His face was covered in French blood, his haubergeon was red, his legs, bare beneath his short hose, were mud-covered. “Sweet Jesus,” he said again.
The farthest point of the French advance was marked by a long heap of bodies, and the first battle had retreated from that horror and the English did not follow. Men were exhausted, slaked by the killing. Prisoners were being taken behind the line where Englishmen and Welshmen stared at each other as if astonished to be alive.
Then more trumpets called, and Hook looked northward to see that the second French battle, every bit as large as the first, was coming.
So the battle must start again.
“They’ll all be dying up there,” Sir Martin said, “dying in their scores! You’re probably a widow by now.” He grinned with yellow teeth. “I heard you got married. Why, girl, why? Marriage is for the respectable folk, not for common pottage-eaters like Hook, but it doesn’t matter now. You’re a widow, girl! And oh my, but you are a beautiful widow! Now stay still, girl! Stay still! ‘The master of every woman is the man!’ That’s what the holy scripture, the blessed word of the Lord says, so you’re to obey me!” He frowned suddenly. “What’s that mucky stuff on your forehead?”
“A blessing,” Melisande said. She had at last found a bolt and was fumbling to fit it in the crossbow’s groove, but the crossbow was inside the sack and it was hard to feel its mechanism, let alone be certain the bolt was properly in place. Sir Martin was kneeling between her legs and leaning over her, propped on his left hand