Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [178]
“Arrows!” Hook shouted at his men.
“We don’t have any!” Will of the Dale called back.
“Yes we do,” Hook said. He found his bow, slung it on his shoulder and led his men out into the field where the French bodies lay, and all around those fallen men were spent arrows. Some, because they had struck good armor head on, were now useless because their bodkin points had bent or crumpled, but many were in fine condition. Hook found some undamaged points on arrows that had splintered shafts and he pulled those bodkins free and married them to good shafts. He also pillaged the French bodies. He found a silver chain about one man’s neck and he thrust that into his arrow bag. Men-at-arms were also searching among the heaped French casualties, hauling the corpses away from the living, killing men too injured to survive or too poor to be worth ransoming, and rescuing the wealthy. Hook picked up a gray-fledged arrow trapped in the surcoat of a man lying on his back, and the man suddenly moved. Hook had thought he was dead, but the man groaned and turned his visored face toward the archer. Hook lifted the visor and saw scared eyes. “Aidez moi,” the man said, half choking. Hook could see no wound, no puncture in the armor, but the man screamed when Hook tried to lift him. The Frenchman was in such pain that he lost consciousness and Hook let him fall again. He took the arrow and moved on. A dog barked at him. It was standing over a corpse in a blood-soaked surcoat. Hook left the dog alone, skirting it to pick up a dozen more arrows that he thrust into his arrow bag.
“Nick!” Will of the Dale called, and Hook looked up to see a lone French horseman had ridden through the retreating fugitives of the first two battles. The rider was short and slightly built, and the only weapon he carried was a scabbarded sword. He wore plate armor, but he was not mounted on an armored destrier, instead he rode a small piebald mare. His white linen jupon was decorated with two red axes above which was the glimmer of gold from a heavy chain that hung around his neck. His helmet’s visor was raised and he seemed to be searching among the bodies, but checked his horse when he realized the archers were staring at him.
“Bastard wants trouble,” Will said.
“No, he’s just looking at us,” Hook said, “and he’s only a little fellow. Let him be.” He picked up a broadhead, then another bodkin, and glanced again at the horseman who had suddenly drawn his sword and kicked his horse forward. “Maybe he does want trouble,” Hook said and he took the bow off his shoulder, braced it on a corpse’s breastplate, and looped its string about the upper nock.
The horseman stopped again, this time to gaze down into a tangle of armor and bodies. The dead lay on top of each other and the man seemed fascinated by the sight. He stared for a long time, now no more than twenty paces from the archers and then, abruptly, he screamed a high-pitched challenge and kicked his piebald horse straight at Hook. The mare responded, flailing its hooves in the mud to throw up great clods of earth.
“Stupid bastard,” Hook said angrily. He laid a bodkin over the string and raised the bow, just as a dozen other archers did the same. Hook thought the man must swerve away, but instead the rider lowered his sword to spear the blade at Hook who drew the cord to his right ear and did not even think about what he did. It was all instinctive. The cord came back, he watched the horseman rise and fall with the piebald’s motion, saw the open visor and the unnaturally bright eyes, and loosed.
His arrow went clean through the rider’s right eye and the force of it snapped the man’s head hard back. The sword dropped and the mare slowed and then, puzzled, stopped a short lance’s length away from Hook. No other archer