Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [34]
“Je suis Melisande,” the girl said over and over, and Hook did not understand at first, but at last realized she was saying her name.
“Melisande?” he asked.
“Oui,” she said.
“Nicholas.”
“Nicholas,” she repeated.
“Just Nick,” he said.
“Jusnick?”
“Nick.”
“Nick.” They spoke in whispers, they waited, they listened to the sound of a city screaming, and they smelled the ale and the blood.
“I don’t know how we get out of this place,” Hook said to Melisande, who did not understand. She nodded anyway, then fell asleep under the straw with her head on his shoulder and Hook closed his eyes and prayed to Crispinian. Help us out of the city, he begged the saint, and help me get home. Except, he thought with sudden despair, an outlaw has no home.
“You will reach home,” Saint Crispinian said to him.
Hook paused, wondering how a saint could speak to him. Had he imagined the voice? Yet it seemed real, as real as the screams that had marked the death of archers. Then he wondered how he could escape the city because the French would surely have sentries on all the gates.
“Then use the breach,” Saint Crispinian suggested gently.
“We’ll go out through the breach,” Hook said to Melisande, but she was still asleep.
As night fell Hook watched pigs, evidently released from their sties behind the city’s houses, feasting on the dead archers. Soissons was quieter now, the victors’ appetites slaked on bodies, ale, and wine. The moon rose, but God sent high clouds that first misted the silver, then hid it, and in the darkness Hook and Melisande made their way downstairs, and out into the reeking street. It was the middle of the night and men snored in broken houses. No one guarded the breach. Melisande, swathed in Sir Roger’s bloody surcoat, held Hook’s hand as they clambered over the wall’s rubble, and then as they crossed the low ground where the tanning pits stank and walked uphill past the abandoned besiegers’ camp and so into the higher woods where no blood reeked and no corpses rotted.
Soissons was dead.
But Hook and Melisande lived.
“The saints talk to me,” he told her in the dawn. “Crispinian does, anyway. The other fellow is grimmer. He sometimes speaks, but he doesn’t say much.”
“Crispinian,” Melisande repeated, and seemed pleased that she understood one thing he said.
“He seems nice,” Hook said, “and he’s looking after me. Looking after you too, now, I reckon!” He smiled at her, suddenly confident. “We must get you some proper clothes, lass. You look right strange in that coat.”
Though, if Melisande looked strange, she was also lovely. Hook did not notice that until the first dawn in the high woods when the sun shot a million lances of green-shimmering gold through leaves and branches to light a slender, high-boned face wreathed in hair as black as night. She had gray eyes, pale as moonlight, a long nose, and a stubborn cast to her chin, which, as Hook was to learn, reflected her character. She was pitifully thin, but had a sinewy strength and a scorn of weakness. Her mouth was wide, expressive and talkative. Hook was eventually to discover that she had been a novice in a house of nuns who were forbidden to speak, and in those first days it seemed Melisande needed to compensate for months of enforced silence. He understood nothing, yet he listened entranced as the girl chattered on.
They stayed the first day in the woods. From time to time horsemen appeared in the valley below the beeches. They were the victors of the siege of Soissons, but they were not dressed for war. Some were hawking, others seemed to be riding for the pleasure of it, and none interfered with the few fugitives