Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [88]
Hook was up to his waist in earth. He reached down beside his right leg and took hold of Robert Perrill’s leather jerkin. He pulled, and the earth was loose enough to let him drag the choking archer up into the last of the daylight. A crossbow bolt thumped into the soil a few inches from Hook and he went very still.
He was in what looked like a crude trench and the high sides of the trench gave him some protection from the French bolts. The town’s defenders were cheering. They had seen the tunnel’s collapse and they saw the English trying to rescue anyone who might have survived the catastrophe and so they were filling the twilight with crossbow bolts to drive those rescuers back.
“Oh, God,” Robert Perrill sighed.
“You’re alive,” Hook said.
“Nick?”
“We have to wait,” Hook said.
Robert Perrill choked and spat out earth. “Wait?”
“Can’t move till dark,” Hook said, “they’re shooting at us.”
“My brother!”
“He ran away,” Hook said. He wondered what had happened to Sir Edward. Had that deeper part of the mine collapsed? Or had the French killed all the men in the tunnel? The enemy had driven their own shaft above the English excavation and then dropped into the tunnel and Hook imagined the sudden fight, the death in the darkness, and the pain of dying in the ready-made grave. “You were going to kill me,” he said to Robert Perrill.
Perrill said nothing. He was half lying on the trench floor, but his legs were still buried. He had lost his sword.
“You were going to kill me,” Hook said again.
“My brother was.”
“You held the sword,” Hook said.
Perrill wiped dirt from his face. “I’m sorry, Nick,” he said.
Hook snorted, said nothing.
“Sir Martin said he’d pay us,” Perrill admitted.
“Your father?” Hook sneered.
Perrill hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.”
“Because he hates me?”
“Your mother rejected him,” Perrill said.
Hook laughed. “And your mother whored herself,” he said flatly.
“He told her she’d go to heaven,” Perrill said, “that if you do it with a priest you go to heaven. That’s what he said.”
“He’s mad,” Hook said flatly, “moon-touched mad.”
Perrill ignored that. “He gave her money, he still does, and he’ll give us money.”
“To kill me?” Hook asked, though the French were trying hard enough to save Sir Martin the trouble. The crossbow bolts were thudding and spitting, some tumbling end over end down the crude trench made by the collapsed tunnel.
“He wants your woman,” Robert Perrill said.
“How much is he paying you?”
“A mark each,” Perrill said, eager to help Hook now.
A mark. One hundred and sixty pennies, or three hundred and twenty pence if both brothers were paid. Fifty-three days’ pay for an archer. The price of Hook’s life and Melisande’s misery. “So you have to kill me?” Hook asked, “then take my girl?”
“He wants that.”
“He’s an evil mad bastard,” Hook said.
“He can be kind,” Perrill said pathetically. “Do you remember John Luttock’s daughter?”
“Of course I remember her.”
“He took her away, but he paid John in the end, gave him the girl’s dowry.”
“A hundred and sixty pennies for raping her?”
“No!” Perrill was puzzled by the question. “I think it was two pounds, might have been more. John was happy.”
The light was fading fast now. The French had saved their loaded guns for the moment when their counter-mine pierced the English tunnel and now they fired shot after shot from Harfleur’s walls. The smoke billowed like thunderclouds to darken the already dark sky as the gun-stones bounced and thudded off the sow’s stout flanks.
“Robert!” a voice shouted from the sow.
“That’s Tom!” Robert Perrill said, recognizing his brother’s voice. He took a breath to call back, but Hook stopped his mouth with a hand.
“Keep quiet,” Hook snarled. A crossbow bolt tumbled down the trench and smacked into Hook’s mail. It had lost its force and bounced away as another bolt struck sparks from a lump of flint nearby. “What happens now?” Hook asked, taking his hand away from Robert Perrill’s mouth.
“What do you mean?”
“I take you back and