Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [175]
“Get out of the way,” Saint Crispin snapped.
“I’ll fight him,” Hook shouted back. He wanted to kill Lanferelle. He suddenly hated him. “I’ll kill him!” he shouted, and tried to step forward, but was checked by the Frenchman’s whip-fast blade.
“Get out of the goddamned way!” the voice roared, but this was not Saint Crispin shouting, and Hook felt himself thrust unceremoniously away as Sir John Cornewaille threw him to one side. Sir John brought men-at-arms who crashed their lances into the French, steel points against plate armor, and Hook staggered to where Will Sclate was hacking at Lanferelle’s followers. Lanferelle responded with a bellowed challenge and a charge at Sir John, and the other Frenchmen surged forward through the clay-thick mud. A poleax slammed onto Hook’s helmet and, because he was already unbalanced, he fell. The ax blow had not been given with full force, but it still rang in Hook’s head and the blade glanced off the helmet to cut through his haubergeon and almost slashed the mail on his shoulder open. He saw the Frenchman draw back the pole, ready to slide the spike into his belly or chest and Hook desperately slashed up with his own blade, a wild blow that drove the ax head into the man-at-arms’s groin. Like the blow that had felled him, it was not given with full force, but it was hard enough to make the Frenchman double over in sudden, body-crippling pain, and then Will of the Dale hauled Hook upright and Hook found his feet and slammed his spike forward, shouting as he thrust, and the spike rammed into the enemy’s upper chest, piercing the aventail and sliding over the breastplate’s top edge. Hook rammed and shook the pole, grinding the blade deep into the enemy’s ribcage, and he watched the lower part of the man’s helmet fill with blood that spilled from the visor opening. A sword smacked Hook from his right, but his mail stopped it, and he swept his weapon that way, dragging his victim with it to throw the swordsman off balance, and then Hook charged.
He used the dying man as a battering ram. He thrust him into the French ranks and Sclate and Will of the Dale followed, and both of them were shouting. “Saint George!”
“Saint Crispin!” Hook bellowed. He was pushing the dying man into the French ranks, thrusting his body against other men. The wounded man splattered blood from his mouth as Hook tried to disengage the spike. Another man stabbed a pike at Hook, but Geoffrey Horrocks had followed Hook and hit the man’s helmet with a mallet, and the strike of the lead-weighted iron thumped dully as the man’s head snapped back. He dropped into the mud. The wounded man at last fell from the poleax and Hook, the weight released, began to scream wildly and swing the weapon from side to side as he thrust into the Frenchmen. “Just kill the bastards, just kill the bastards!” he was shouting. Archers were following him, their anger released by the relief of Sir John’s arrival.
Sir John was fighting Lanferelle, both men so fast with weapons that it was difficult to see thrust, cut or parry, while the other English men-at-arms attacked on either side with such sudden savagery that Lanferelle’s followers instinctively stepped back, intent on defending themselves against the newly arrived men, and as they went back so some tripped on the bodies lying on the ground behind them. They fell and the English came at them, pole-spikes stabbing, axes splitting armor, faces grimacing with the effort of killing, and the sudden slaughter took the spirit from the remaining French who tried to back away and found archers on their flanks. Men began to shout that they yielded. They dragged off gauntlets and shouted their surrenders in desperate