Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [60]
The boat began to heave in short sharp lurches as the waves steepened near the shore. The sound of the surf became louder and more ominous. The sailors were digging their blades deep in the water, trying to outrace the curling, breaking waves, but suddenly the boat seemed to surge ahead and the sea was moonlit white, shattered and violent all about them, and then the boat dropped like a stone and there was a scraping sound as its keel dragged on the shingle. The boat slewed around and the water seethed about the hull before being sucked back to sea. “Out!” Sir John hissed, “out!”
Other boats slammed into the beach and men leaped out and trudged up the shingle bank with drawn swords. They gathered above the thick line of weed and driftwood that marked the high tide line. Huge boulders littered the beach, their moon-shadowed sides black. Hook had expected Sir John to be in charge of this first landing, but instead it was a much younger man who waited till all the boats had discharged their passengers. The sailors shoved their launches off the beach and held them just beyond the breaking waves. If the French were waiting and awake then the boats could come to pick up the landing party, but Hook doubted many would escape. There would be blood in the sucking shingle instead. “We stay together,” the young man said in a low voice, “archers to the right!”
“You heard Sir John!” Sir John Cornewaille hissed. The young man was Sir John Holland, nephew to the king and Sir John Cornewaille’s stepson. “Goddington?”
“Sir John?”
“Take your archers far enough out to give us flanking cover!”
It seemed the older Sir John was really in charge, merely yielding the appearance of command to his stepson. “Forward!” the younger Sir John called, and the line of men, forty men-at-arms on the left and forty archers on the right, advanced farther up the beach.
To find defenses.
At first Hook thought he was approaching a great ridge of earth at the top of the shingle, but as he drew closer he saw that the ridge was man-made and had a ditch in front of it. It was a bank thrown up to serve as a rampart, and not only was it ditched, but there were bastions jutting out onto the shingle from which crossbowmen could shoot into the flanks of any attacker advancing up the beach. The ramparts, which had hardly been eroded by wind or rain, stretched the width of the cove and Hook imagined how hard it would be to fight up their front with men-at-arms hacking down from the summit and crossbow bolts slashing from the sides, but all he could do was imagine, because the rampart, that must have taken days to make, was entirely deserted.
“Been busy little farts, haven’t they?” Sir John Cornewaille remarked caustically. He kicked the rampart’s summit. “What’s the point of making defenses and then abandoning them?”
“They knew we’d land here?” Sir John Holland suggested cautiously.
“Then why aren’t they here to greet us?” Sir John asked. “They probably built ramparts like these on every beach in Normandy! Bastards are pissing in their breeches and digging walls. Archers! You can all whistle, can’t you?”
The archers said nothing. Most were too surprised by the question to make any response.
“You can all whistle?” Sir John asked again. “Good! And you all know the tune of ‘Robin Hood’s Lament’?”
Every archer knew that tune. It would have been astonishing had they not, for Robin Hood was the archers’ hero, the bowman who had stood up against the lords and princes and sheriffs of England. “Right!” Sir John announced. “We’re going up the hill! Men-at-arms on the track and archers into the woods! Explore to