Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [55]
“Oh, God detests the French,” Father Christopher had put in confidently, as though he were intimate with God’s mind.
“That’s because God is no fool,” Sir John went on, “but the Almighty knows He made a mistake when He created the French! So He’s sending us to correct it! We’re God’s army, and we’re going to gut those devil-spawned bastards!”
Fifteen hundred ships would carry twelve thousand men and at least twice that many horses across the Channel. The men were mostly English, with some Welshmen and a few score who had come from Henry’s possessions in Aquitaine. Hook could hardly imagine twelve thousand men, the number was so vast, but Father Christopher, leaning on the Heron’s rail, had repeated the cautionary note he had sounded outside the tavern before the confrontation with Sir Martin. “The French can muster triple our numbers,” he said musingly, “and maybe even more. If it comes to a fight, Hook, we’ll need your arrows.”
“They won’t fight us, though,” one of Sir John’s men-at-arms said. He had overheard the priest’s comment.
“They don’t like fighting us,” Father Christopher agreed. The priest was wearing a haubergeon and had a sword hanging at his waist. “It’s not like the good old days.”
The man-at-arms, young and round-faced, grinned. “Crécy and Poitiers?”
“That would have been grand!” Father Christopher said wistfully. “Can you imagine being at Poitiers? Capturing the French king! It won’t happen this time.”
“It won’t, father?” Hook asked.
“They’ve learned about our archers, Hook. They stay away from us. They lock themselves up in their towns and castles and wait till we get bored. We can march around France a dozen times and they won’t come out to fight, but if we can’t get into their castles, what use is marching around France?”
“Then why don’t they have archers?” Hook asked, but he already knew the answer because he was the answer himself. It had taken ten years to turn Nicholas Hook into an archer. He had started at seven years old with a small bow which his father had insisted he practice every day, and every year until his father died the bows got bigger and were strung more tightly, and the young Hook had learned to draw the bow with his full body, not just his arms. “Lay into the bow, you little bastard,” his father would say again and again, and each time strike him across the back with his big bowstave, and so Hook learned to lay into the bow and thus grew stronger and stronger. On his father’s death he had taken the big bow and practiced with that, shooting arrow after arrow at the butts in the church field. The arrowheads were sharpened on a post of the lych gate and the constant scraping had worn deep grooves in the stone. Nick Hook had poured his anger into those arrows, sometimes shooting till it was almost too dark to see. “Don’t snatch at the string,” Pearce the blacksmith had told him again and again, and Hook had learned the whispering release that let the string slip through his fingers, which hardened to thick leather pads. And as he drew and released, drew and released, year after year, the muscles of his back, his chest, and his arms grew massive. That was one requirement, the huge muscles needed to draw the bow, while the other, which was harder to acquire, was to forget the eye.
When he first started as a boy Hook would draw the cord to his cheek and look down the arrow’s length to aim, but that cheated the bow of its full power. If a bodkin