Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [173]
“We want him, Will! Bastard’s rich!” Tom Scarlet shouted and he slammed the poleax into the rich man again, and the lord, Scarlet was sure he opposed a nobleman, struck with his lance and this time Scarlet seized the lance one-handed and tugged hard. The man stumbled forward, tripping, and Scarlet gripped the bottom rim of the man’s helmet and dragged him out of the killing line. Will Sclate was hammering down more men, helped by a dozen of Sir John’s archers, as Scarlet turned his prisoner over. He crouched and grinned into the man’s face. “Rich, are you?”
The man stared back with hatred, so Scarlet drew his knife. He held the point just over the man’s left eyeball. “If you’re rich,” he said, “you live, and if you’re poor, you die.”
“Je suis le comte de Pavilly,” the man said, “je me rends! Je me rends!”
“Does that mean you’re rich?” Scarlet asked.
“Behind you, Tom!” Hook’s voice bellowed, and Tom Scarlet turned to see Frenchmen coming toward him, and at that moment the Count of Pavilly drove his own knife up into Tom Scarlet’s groin. Scarlet screeched, the count heaved up from the mud, and stabbed again, this time into Tom Scarlet’s belly, ripping and cutting, and then Will Sclate’s poleax swung in a hay-cutting slash and the ax blade tore into the Count of Pavilly’s face, breaking his remaining teeth and driving their fragments to the back of his skull. His blood mingled with Tom Scarlet’s. The two bodies, rich man and poor man, were lying together as Sclate ripped his blade from the snagging tangle of steel and bone before being driven back by the sudden rush of Frenchmen.
And Hook was also being driven back.
A wedge of Frenchmen was crashing into the archers. So far the archers had been winning because they attacked and because they were more mobile than their enemy, but at last the French had found a way to carry the fight back to the bowmen. They came shoulder to shoulder and they let the archers waste their blows by parrying instead of cutting back, and if an archer slipped, or swung too hard and was slow to recover his balance, a blade would flicker and an Englishman would sink into the mud to be hammered with a mace. “Just kill them!” the Sire de Lanferelle shouted as he led the wedge. “One at a time! God will give us time to kill them all! Saint Denis! Montjoie!” He sensed victory now. Up to this moment the French had panicked and had allowed themselves to be driven like cattle to the winter slaughter, but Lanferelle was calm, he was deadly and he was confident, and more and more Frenchmen came to follow him, sensing at last that someone had taken command of their destiny.
Hook saw the falcon in its sunlit splendor.
“Behind you, Tom!” he had shouted at Scarlet, and then he had seen the Frenchman in the red and white jupon suddenly heave up, but he had no time to see more because Lanferelle was ahead of him, and Hook was forced to step back as Lanferelle’s poleax stabbed at him. It was not meant as a killing thrust, but rather to unbalance Hook who had to step back a second time to avoid the spike and he might have tripped in the furrows except the small of his back struck one of the slanting stakes that held him upright. He swept his own poleax at Lanferelle’s weapon, but the Frenchman somehow flicked Hook’s cut aside and lunged again, and Hook had to twist around the stake, but the sharpened point caught in his haubergeon and he could not move. Panic blinded him. “Get close,” Saint Crispin said, and Hook rammed his poleax hard forward, struggling in the mud to find good footing, and Lanferelle was so