Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [64]
A crossbow bolt seared overhead. Hook had seen the flicker of its first appearance, down and to his left, meaning that whoever had shot the bolt was in the woods north of the road. The bolt landed somewhere in the trees behind.
“Someone doesn’t like us,” one of the mounted men-at-arms said lightly.
“Anyone see where it came from?” another rider demanded sharply.
Hook and a half-dozen other archers all pointed to the same patch of dense trees and undergrowth. The road dropped in front of them, then ran level for a hundred paces to the lip of a shelf before falling again toward the flood-besieged town, and the crossbowman was somewhere on that wide wooded ledge.
“I don’t suppose he’ll go away,” Sir John Cornewaille remarked mildly.
“There may be more than one?” someone else suggested.
“Just one, I think,” Sir John said. “Hook? You want to fetch the wretched man for me?”
Hook ran to his left, plunged into the trees, then turned down the short slope. He reached the wide ledge and there went more slowly, picking his way carefully to keep from making a noise. He had strung his bow. In thick trees the bow was a dubious weapon, but he did not want to encounter a crossbowman without having an arrow on the string.
The wood was oak, ash, and a few maples. The undergrowth was hawthorn and holly, and there was mistletoe growing high in the oaks, something Hook noted for he rarely saw it sprouting from oak in England. His grandmother had valued oak mistletoe, using it in a score of medicines she had made for the villagers, and even for Lord Slayton when the ague struck him. Her chief use for the mistletoe had been the treatment of barren women for which she had pounded the small berries with mangrove root, the whole moistened with the urine of a mother. There had been a fecund woman in the village, Mary Carter, who had given birth to fifteen healthy children, and Hook had often been sent with a pot to request her urine, and once he had been beaten by his grandmother for coming back with the pot empty because she had refused to believe that Mary Carter was away from home. The next time Hook had pissed in the pot himself and his grandmother had never noticed the difference.
He was thinking about that, and wondering whether Melisande would become pregnant, when he heard the fierce, quick sound of a crossbow being shot. The noise was close. He crouched, crept forward, and suddenly saw the shooter. It was a boy, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, who was grunting slightly as he worked the crank to span his weapon. The head of the bow had a stirrup in which the boy had placed his foot, and at its butt was the socket where he had fitted the two handles that turned to wind back the cord. It was hard work and the boy was grimacing with the effort of inching the thick cord up the weapon’s stock. He was concentrating so hard that he did not notice Hook until the archer picked him up by the scruff of his coat. The boy beat at Hook, then yelped as he was slapped around the head.
“You’re a rich one, aren’t you?” Hook said. The boy’s coat, which Hook was holding by the collar, was of finely woven woolen cloth. His breeches and shoes were expensive, and his crossbow, which Hook scooped up with his right hand, looked as though it had been made specially for the boy because it was much smaller than a man’s bow. The stock was walnut and beautifully inlaid with silver and ivory chasings that depicted a deer hunt in a forest. “They’ll probably hang you, boy,” Hook said cheerfully, and walked out to the road with the boy tucked under his left arm and his own bow and the valuable crossbow held in his right. He climbed back up the hill to where