Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [68]
The first thing the king had ordered was the burning of the houses outside the town’s walls so that nothing would stand between the ramparts and his guns. The job was done at night, so that the flames burst into the darkness to light the defiant banners on Harfleur’s pale walls, and all next day the smoke of the smoldering buildings lingered in the flooded bowl of hills that cradled the port and reminded Hook of the smoke that had veiled the land around Soissons.
“Of course the priest wasn’t happy,” Matthew Scarlet continued his brother’s story, “but our parish priest always was a rank piece of piss. He had our mother up in front of the manor court! Breaking the peace, he said, but his lordship gave her three shillings to buy cloth for new clothes and a kiss for being happy. He said she could go swimming in his shit any time she wanted.”
“Did she ever?” Peter Scoyle asked. Scoyle was a rarity, a bowman born and bred in London. He had been a combmaker’s apprentice and had been convicted of causing a murderous affray, but had been pardoned on condition that he served in the king’s army.
“She never did,” Tom Scarlet said, “she always said that one bath in shit was enough for a lifetime.”
“One bath is enough for any lifetime!” Father Christopher had evidently heard the twins telling their tale. “Beware of cleanliness, boys! The blessed Saint Jerome warns us that a clean body means an unclean soul, and the holy Saint Agnes was proud of never having washed in her life.”
“Melisande won’t approve,” Hook said, “she likes being clean.”
“Warn her!” Father Christopher said seriously, “the physicians all agree, Hook, that washing weakens the skin. It lets in disease!”
Then, when the pits were dug, Hook and a hundred other archers rode north up the valley of the River Lézarde and dug again, this time making a great dam across the valley. They demolished a dozen half-timbered houses in a village and used the beams to strengthen the huge earthen bank that stopped up the river. The Lézarde was small and the summer had been dry, but it still took four days of hard digging to make a barrier high enough to divert most of the river water westward. By the time Hook and his companions went back to Harfleur the flood waters had partly subsided, though the ground about the town was still waterlogged and the river itself still spilled over its banks to make a wide lake north of the town.
Next they dug pits for guns. Two cannon, one called Londoner because the citizens of London had paid for it, were already in place and their gun-stones were biting at the huge bastion the defenders had built outside the Leure Gate. The Duke of Clarence, who was the king’s brother, had marched clear around the town and his forces, which were a third of the English army, were attacking Harfleur’s eastern side. They had their own guns that had been fortuitously captured from a supply convoy making for Harfleur. The Dutch gunners, hired to defend Harfleur from its English enemies, happily took English coin and turned their cannon against the town’s defenders. Harfleur was surrounded now. No more reinforcements could reach the town unless they fought their way past the English army or sailed past the fleet of royal warships that guarded the harbor entrance.
On the day that the gun-pits were finished Hook and forty other archers climbed the hill to the west of the encampment, following the road by which the army had approached Harfleur. Huge oaks lined the nearest crest, and they were ordered to fell those trees and lop off the straightest limbs, which were to be sawn to the length of a bowstave and loaded onto wagons. The day was hot. A half-dozen archers stayed by the road with the huge two-handled saws while the rest spread along the crest. Peter Goddington marked the trees he wanted felled, and assigned a pair of archers to