Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [67]
Patrols rode north, bringing back supplies and commandeering farm wagons that would carry the provisions and tents and arrows and newly felled oaks, which would be trimmed and shaped to make the catapults that would add their missiles to the shaped gun-stones that all had to be carried up the hill by yet more wagons. But, at last, the whole army and all its horses and all its supplies was ashore, and under a bright afternoon sun the cumbersome wagons were lined on the road beside the monastery and the army of England, banners flying, assembled around them. There were nine thousand archers and three thousand men-at-arms, all of them mounted, and there were pages and squires and women and servants and priests and yet more spare horses, and the flags snapped bright in the midday wind as the king, mounted on a snow-white gelding, rode along his red-crossed army. The sun glinted from the crown that surmounted his helmet. He reached the skyline above the town and he stared for a few minutes, then nodded to Sir John Holland who would have the honor of leading the vanguard. “With God’s blessing, Sir John!” the king called, “on to Harfleur!”
Trumpets sounded, drums beat, and the horsemen of England spilled over the edge of the hill. They wore the cross of Saint George and above their helmeted heads their lords’ banners were gold and red and blue and yellow and green and to anyone watching from Harfleur’s walls it must have seemed as though the hills were pouring an armored mass toward their town.
“How many people live in the town?” Melisande asked Hook. She rode beside him, and hanging by her saddle was the ivory and silver inlaid crossbow Hook had given her.
“Sir John reckons they’ve only got about a hundred soldiers in the town,” Hook said.
“Is that all?”
“But they have the townsfolk as well,” Hook said, “and there must be two thousand of them? Maybe three thousand!”
“But all these men!” Melisande said and twisted in her saddle to look at the long lines of horsemen who filled the space on either side of the road. Mounted drummers beat on their instruments, making a noise to warn the citizens of Harfleur that their rightful king was coming in wrath.
Yet Henry of England was not the only person approaching the town. Even as the English spilled down the slope toward the dry ground to Harfleur’s west, another cavalcade was riding from the east. They were a long way off, but clearly visible: a column of men-at-arms and wagons, a long line of reinforcements riding toward the ramparts. “That,” Sir John Cornewaille said, watching the distant men, “is a pity.”
“They’re bringing guns,” Peter Goddington remarked.
“As I said,” Sir John said with surprising mildness, “it is a pity.” He spurred Lucifer to the head of the column and other lords, all wanting the honor of being the first to face the defiant town, raced after him. Hook watched the riders gallop down the hill and onto the flat ground, then saw the great blossom of black smoke billow and grow from Harfleur’s wall. A few seconds later the sound of the gun punched the summer air, a flat crack that seemed to linger in the bowl of the hills in which the port was built. The gun-stone struck the meadows where the horsemen rode, ricocheted upward in a flurry of turf, then plunged harmlessly into the trees beyond.
And Harfleur was under siege.
FIVE
It seemed to Hook that he never stopped digging in the first few days of the siege. It was midden trenches first. “Our ma fell into a shit-pit once,” Tom Scarlet said, “she was drunk. She dropped some beads in it and then tried to fish them out with a rake.”
“They were nice beads,” Matthew Scarlet put in, “bits of old silver, weren’t they?”
“Coins,” his twin said, “which our dad found in a buried jar. He bored them through and hung them on a scrap of bowstring.”
“Which broke,” Matt said.
“So ma tried to fish them out with a rake,” Tom picked up the tale, “and fell right in, head first!”
“She got the beads back,” Matt said.
“She sobered up quick enough,” Tom Scarlet went on, “but she couldn’t stop