Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [75]
Above Harfleur, where the guns tore the walls into rubble.
It was hard and ceaseless work. Hook and the archers cut timber and split timber and sawed timber to shore up the gun-pits and trenches. New gun-pits were made, closer to the town, but the precious weapons had to be protected from Harfleur’s defenders and so the archers constructed thick screens of wooden balks that stood in front of the cannons’ mouths. Each screen was made from oak trunks thick as a girl’s waist, and they were sloped backward so that they would deflect the enemy’s missiles skyward. The cleverest thing about the screens, Hook thought, was how they were mounted on frames so that they could swivel. An order was given when a gun was at last ready to fire and men would turn a great windlass that hauled down the top of the screen and so raised the lower edge to expose the cannon’s blackened muzzle. The gun would fire and the world would vanish in a sickening, stinking, thick cloud of smoke that smelled exactly like rotted eggs, and the sound of the gun-stone striking the wall would be lost in the echo of the great cannon’s bellow, and then the windlass would be released and the screen would thump down to protect the gun and its Dutch gunners again.
The enemy had learned to watch for the opening screens and would wait for that moment before shooting their own guns and springolts, so the English guns were also protected by enormous wicker baskets filled with earth and by more timber balks, and sometimes a screen would be raised even though a gun was not ready to be fired, just to trick the enemy into loosing their missiles, which would thump harmlessly into the baskets and oak trunks. Then, when the gun was ready, the wicker basket immediately in front of the barrel was rolled clear, the screen was raised, and the noise could be heard far up the Lézarde’s flooded valley.
The enemy also possessed cannon, but their guns were much smaller, firing a stone no bigger than an apple and lacking the weight to smash through the heavy screens. Their springolts, giant crossbows that shot thick bolts, had even less power. Hook, delivering a wagon of timber to reinforce the trenches, had a springolt bolt hit one of his horses plumb on the chest. The missile buried itself in the horse’s body, ripping through lungs, heart, and belly so that the beast simply collapsed, feet spreading in a sudden pool of blood. The heat shimmered off the blood and off the flooded land and off the marshes beside the wide glittering sea.
Trenches defended the besiegers from the enemy’s guns and springolts, though there was small defense against the ballista that hurled stones high in the air so that they fell almost vertically. The English had their own catapults, made from the timber cut on the slopes above the port, and those machines rained both stones and festering animal corpses into Harfleur. From the hill Hook could see shattered roofs and two broken church towers. He could see the wall broken open so that the rubble spilled into the ditch, and he could see the giant bastion defending the gate being ripped and frayed and broken and battered. That bastion had been constructed from earth and timber, and the English gun-stones chopped and gnawed at its two towers, which flanked a short, thick curtain wall.
“We’ll be making a sow next,” Sir John told his archers, “our lord the king is in a hurry!”
“There’s a great hole in their town wall, Sir John,” Thomas Evelgold remarked. He had replaced Peter Goddington as the centenar.
“And behind that gap is a new wall,” Sir John said, “and to attack it we’d have to get past their barbican.” The barbican was the twin-towered bastion protecting the Leure Gate. “You want their bastard crossbowmen shooting at you from the side? That barbican has to go, so we’ll be making a sow. We’ll have to fell more trees! Hook, I want you.”
The other archers watched as Sir John took Hook aside. “There’ll be no more French men-at-arms in the hills,” Sir John said, “we’ve got our own men out there now, and we’ve got more men watching for a relief force,