Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [29]
Then a door opened onto the alley and a flood of light washed across Hook who turned to see a man-at-arms stagger into the mud. The man wore a surcoat showing a silver wheat-sheaf on a green field. The man fell to his knees and vomited as a second man, in the same livery, came to the door and laughed. It was that second man who saw Hook and recognized the great war bow, and so put his hand on his sword’s hilt.
Hook reacted in panic. He thrust the bow at the man with the sword. In his head he was screaming, unable to think, but the lunge had all his archer’s strength in it and the horn nock of the bow’s tip pierced the man-at-arms’s throat before his sword was even half drawn. Blood misted black and still Hook thrust so that the bow ripped clean through windpipe and muscle, skin and sinew to strike the doorjamb. The kneeling man was roaring, spraying vomit as he clawed at Hook who, still in panic, made a mewing noise of utter despair as he let go of the bow and thrust his hands at his new assailant. He felt his fingers crush eyeballs and the man began to scream, and Hook was dimly aware that the rapists outside the church were coming for him and he scrambled through the door, half tripping on the first man who lay trying to pull the bow from his ruptured throat as Hook ran across a room, burst through another door, down a passage, a third door, and he was in a yard, still not thinking, over a wall, a second wall, and there were shouts behind him and screams around him and he was in absolute terror now. He had lost his great yew bow, and had dropped the arrow bags, though he still had the sword every archer was expected to wear. He had never used it. He still wore the ragged red cross of Burgundy too, and he began to tear at the surcoat, trying to rid himself of the symbol as he looked desperately for an escape, any escape, then he scrambled over a stone wall into an alley shadowed by the overhanging houses, but in the dark he saw an open door and ran to it.
The door led into a large empty room where a guttering lantern showed a dead man sprawled across a cushioned wooden bench. The man’s blood had sheeted across the flagstones. A tapestry hung on one wall and there were cupboards and a long table holding an abacus and sheets of parchment that were speared on a tall spike. Hook reckoned the dead man must have been a merchant. In one corner a ladder climbed to a higher floor and Hook went up quickly to find a plastered chamber that held a wooden bed with a pallet and blankets. A second ladder led into the attic and he clambered up and pulled the ladder into the space beneath the rafters and cursed himself for not having done the same with the first ladder. Too late now. He dared not drop back into the house and so he crouched in the bat droppings beneath the thatch. He was still shaking. Men were shouting in the houses beneath him, and for a time it seemed he must be discovered, and that discovery seemed imminent when someone climbed into the room where the bed stood, but the man only glanced briefly about before leaving, and the rest of the searchers grew bored or else found other quarry, for after a while their excited shouting died. The screaming went on, indeed the screaming became louder and it seemed to Hook, listening in puzzlement, that a whole group of women were just outside the house, all shrieking, and he flinched at the sound. He thought of Sarah in London, of Sir Martin the priest, and of the men he had just seen who had looked so bored as they raped their two silent victims.
The screaming turned into sobbing, broken only by men’s laughter. Hook was shivering, not with cold, but with fear and guilt, and then he shrank into the small space under the sloping rafters because the room beneath was suddenly lit by a lantern. The light leaked through the attic’s crude floorboards that were loosely laid over untrimmed beams. A man had climbed into the room and was shouting down the ladder to other men, and then a woman cried and there was the sound of a slap.
“You’re a pretty