Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [20]
“The oriflamme,” Dancy said quietly.
“Oriflamme?”
“The French war-banner,” Dancy said. He touched his middle finger to his tongue, then crossed himself again. “It means no prisoners,” he said bleakly. “It means they want to kill us all.” He fell backward.
For a heartbeat Hook did not know what had happened, then he thought Dancy must have tripped and he instinctively held out a hand to pull him up, and it was then he saw the leather-fledged crossbow bolt jutting from Dancy’s forehead. There was very little blood. A few droplets had spattered Dancy’s face, which otherwise looked peaceful, and Hook went to one knee and stared at the thick-shafted bolt. Less than a hand’s breadth protruded, the rest was deep in the Herefordshire man’s brain and Dancy had died without a sound, except for the meat-axe noise of the bolt striking home. “Jack?” Hook asked.
“No good talking to him, Nick,” one of the other archers said, “he’s chatting to the devil now.”
Hook stood and turned. Later he had little memory of what happened or even why it happened. It was not as though Jack Dancy had been a close friend, for Hook had no such friends in Soissons except, perhaps, John Wilkinson. Yet there was a sudden anger in Hook. Dancy was an Englishman, and in Soissons the English felt beleaguered as much by their own side as by the enemy, and now Dancy was dead and so Hook took a varnished arrow from his white linen arrow bag that hung on his right side.
He turned and lowered his bow so that it lay horizontally in front of him and he laid the arrow across the stave and trapped the shaft with his left thumb as he engaged the cord. He swung the long bow upright as his right hand took the arrow’s fledged end and drew it back with the cord.
“We’re not to shoot,” one of the archers said.
“Don’t waste an arrow!” another put in.
The cord was at Hook’s right ear. His eyes searched the smoke-shrouded ground outside the town and he saw a crossbowman step from behind a pavise decorated with the symbol of crossed axes.
“You can’t shoot as far as they can,” the first archer warned him.
But Hook had learned the bow from childhood. He had strengthened himself until he could pull the cord of the largest war bows, and he had taught himself that a man did not aim with the eye, but with the mind. You saw, and then you willed the arrow, and the hands instinctively twitched to point the bow, and the crossbowman was bringing up his heavy weapon as two bolts seared the evening air close to Hook’s head.
He was oblivious. It was like the moment in the greenwood when the deer showed for an instant between the leaves, and the arrow would fly without the archer knowing he had even loosed the string. “The skill is all between your ears, boy,” a villager had told him years before, “all between your ears. You don’t aim a bow. You think where the arrow will go, and it goes.” Hook released.
“You goddam fool,” an archer said, and Hook watched the white goose feathers flicker in the white-hazed air and saw the arrow fall faster than a stooping hawk. Steel-tipped, silk-bound, ash-shafted, feathered death flying in the evening’s quiet.
“Good God,” the first archer said quietly.
The crossbowman did not die as easily as Dancy. Hook’s arrow pierced his throat and the man twisted around and the crossbow released itself so that the bolt spun crazily into the sky as the man fell backward, still twisting as he fell, then he thrashed on the ground, hands scrabbling at his throat where the pain was like liquid fire, and above him the sky was red now, a smoke-hazed blood-red sky lit by fires and glowing with the sun’s daily death.
That, Hook, thought, had been a good arrow. Straight-shafted and properly fledged with its feathers all plucked from the same goose-wing. It had flown true. It had gone where he willed it, and he had killed a man in battle. He could, at last, call himself an archer.
On the evening of the