Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [172]
Melisande was in the stream that ran fast, full, cold and muddy, fed by the torrential rain of the last few days. She floundered in the water, pushing past low-growing branches until she saw the jupon snagged on a willow bough. She unhooked it, then forced her way through the briars and nettles that grew on the stream’s bank. She pulled the jupon over her head. The wet linen clung cold and clammy, but it covered her and she crept slowly northward through brambles and hazel scrub until she saw the horsemen.
There were fifty or sixty riders who were standing their horses to the west of the village and just watching the English encampment. They had no banner, and even if they had flown a flag Melisande doubted she would have recognized its badge, but she was certain that the small English army could never have spared so many horsemen to linger behind their line. That meant these riders were French, and Melisande, though she was French herself, now thought of the horsemen as her enemy and so she crouched in the bushes, hiding her bright surcoat behind a thornbush.
Then a new anxiety struck her. The surcoat covered her, but it also gnawed at her soul. “Forgive me,” she prayed to the Virgin, “for wearing the jupon. Let Nick live.”
She sensed no answer. There was just silence in her head.
She had sworn not to wear the jupon, believing that wearing her father’s badge would doom Nick to death in the high plowland, but now she was wearing the badge of the sun and the falcon, and the Virgin had given her no answer, and she knew she was breaking her bargain with heaven. She shivered, cold and wet, and suddenly trembled.
Nick would die, she was sure of it.
So she took the jupon off so that Nick might live.
And she crouched. She was praying, naked, cold and frightened. And from the north, beyond the horsemen and beyond the village and beyond the skyline, the sound of battle rose again.
“We killed them before,” Thomas Evelgold yelled, “and we can kill them again! Kill for England!”
“For Wales!” a man shouted.
“For Saint George!” another man called.
“For Saint David!” the Welshman responded and on that battle cry the archers surged forward to attack the new enemy. They had already savaged the first French battle, and some men reckoned they would become rich from the prisoners they had taken. Those prisoners, without helmets and with their hands tied with spare bow cords, were behind the stakes, guarded there by a handful of wounded archers. Now the bowmen went to make new corpses and take new prisoners.
They went in a rush, and by now they knew how to take down men-at-arms who could not move in the thick mud, and so the archers crashed into the flank of the French and they hammered their enemy to make a new line of dead men, most stabbed through an eye by an archer’s knife after they had been felled by a hammer blow. The screams were unending. The plateau seethed with mud-spattered steel-clad men who lumbered toward the archers, pushed onto them by the thick ranks of men behind, and the clumsy men tripped on bodies, were smashed on their helmets, were murdered with knives, and still they came. Some wore gold or silver chains around their necks, or wore armor that, by its magnificence, proclaimed the wearer’s wealth or position, and those men the archers tried to capture. They would kill the rich man’s companions and, like deerhounds about a bayed stag, would taunt and threaten the man until he pulled off his gauntlet.
“Come on, you bastard!” Tom Scarlet jeered at a man whose white surcoat bore the badge of a red swan. “Come on!” The Frenchman was watching him, blue eyes visible through a raised visor. His helmet was chased with silver swirls and his red velvet sword belt was studded with golden lozenges. He picked his way among the corpses, lunged with his lance at Scarlet’s belly, and Scarlet swatted the lance away with his poleax. A second Frenchman, wearing the same swan insignia, slashed a broad-bladed sword at the poleax, but the steel bounced