Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [180]
“Kill them all!” Henry shouted. He pointed a gauntleted hand at the captives. One of his men-at-arms had made a swift count and reckoned over two thousand Frenchmen had been taken and Henry’s gesture encompassed them all. “Kill them!” Henry commanded.
The French had flaunted the oriflamme, promising no quarter, so now no quarter would be given.
The prisoners would die.
The Sire de Lanferelle wandered bleakly behind the English line. He saw the English king in a battle-scarred helmet sitting on horseback, then was shocked to see that the Duke of Orleans, the French king’s nephew, was a prisoner. He was just a young man, charming and witty, yet now, in a blood-spattered surcoat and with his arm gripped by an archer in English royal livery, he looked dazed, stricken and ill. “Sire,” Lanferelle said, dropping to one knee.
“What happened?” Orleans asked.
“Mud,” Lanferelle said, standing again.
“My God,” the duke said. He flinched, not from pain for he was hardly wounded, but out of shame. “Alençon’s dead,” he went on, “and so are Bar and Brabant. Sens died too.”
“The archbishop?” Lanferelle asked, somehow more shocked that a prince of the church was dead than that three of France’s noblest dukes should have been killed.
“They gutted him, Lanferelle,” the duke said, “they just gutted him. And d’Albret’s dead too.”
“The constable?”
“Dead,” Orleans said, “and Bourbon’s captured.”
“Dear sweet God,” Lanferelle said, not because the Constable of France was dead or because the Duke of Bourbon, the victor of Soissons, was a prisoner, but because Marshal Boucicault, reckoned the toughest man in France, was now being led to join the Duke of Orleans.
Boucicault stared at Lanferelle, then at the royal duke, then shook his grizzled head. “It seems we’re all doomed to English hospitality,” he growled.
“They treated me well enough when I was a prisoner,” Lanferelle said.
“Jesus Christ, you have to find a second ransom?” Boucicault asked. His white surcoat with its red badge of a two-headed eagle was ripped and bloodstained. His armor, that had been polished through the night to a dazzling sheen, was scarred by blades and streaked with mud. He turned a bitter gaze on the other prisoners. “What’s it like over there?” he asked.
“Sour wine and good ale,” Lanferelle said, “and rain, of course.”
“Rain,” Boucicault said bitterly, “that was our undoing. Rain and mud.” He had advised against fighting Henry’s army at all, rain or no rain, fearing what the English archers could do. Better, he had said, to let them straggle dispiritedly into Calais and to concentrate France’s forces on the recapture of Harfleur, but the hot-headed royal dukes, like young Orleans, had insisted that the battle be fought. Boucicault felt a surge of bile, a temptation to spit an accusation at the duke, but he resisted it. “Damp England,” he said instead. “Tell me the women are damp too?”
“Oh, they are,” Lanferelle said.
“I’ll need women,” the Marshal of France said, staring up at the gray sky. “I doubt France can raise our ransoms, which means we’ll all probably die in England, and we’ll need something to pass the time.”
Lanferelle wondered where Melisande was. He suddenly wanted to see her, to talk to her, but the only women in sight were a handful who brought water to wounded men. Priests were offering other men the final rites, while doctors knelt beside the injured. They cut armor buckles, pulled mangled steel from pulverized flesh, and held men down as they thrashed in agony. Lanferelle saw one of his own men and, leaving Orleans and the marshal to their guards, went to crouch beside the man and flinched at the mangled ruin of his left leg that had been half severed by ax blows. Someone had tied a bow cord around the man’s thigh, but blood still seeped in thick pulses from the ragged wound. “I’m sorry, Jules,” Lanferelle said.
Jules could say nothing. He twisted his head from side to side. He had bitten his lower lip so hard that blood trickled down his chin.
“You’ll live, Jules,