Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [89]
“No!” Perrill said. “Get me out of here, Nick! I can’t move!”
“So what happens now?” Hook asked again. Crossbow bolts were cracking into the sow so frequently that it sounded like hail on a timber roof.
“I won’t kill you,” Perrill said.
“What should I do?” Hook asked.
“Pull me out, Nick, please,” Perrill said.
“I wasn’t talking to you. What should I do?”
“What do you think?” Saint Crispin, the harsher brother, said in a mocking voice.
“It’s murder,” Hook said.
“I won’t kill you!” Perrill insisted.
“You think we saved the girl so she could be raped?” Saint Crispinian asked.
“Get me out of this muck,” Perrill said, “please!”
Instead Hook reached out and found one of the spent crossbow bolts. It was as long as his forearm, as thick as two thumbs, and fledged with stiff leather vanes. The point was rusted, but still sharp.
He killed Perrill the easiest way. He smacked him hard around the head, and while the archer was still recovering from the blow, drove the bolt down through one eye. It went in easily, glancing off the socket, and Hook kept driving the thick shaft into Perrill’s brain until the rusted point scraped against the back of Perrill’s skull. The archer twisted and jerked, choked and quivered, but he died quickly enough.
“Robert!” Tom Perrill shouted from the sow.
A springolt bolt struck a masonry chimney breast left standing in the scorched remains of a burned house. The bolt spun into the falling darkness, end over end, soaring over the English trenches to fall far beyond. Hook wiped his wounded right hand on Robert Perrill’s tunic, cleaning off the muck that had spurted from the dead man’s eye, then heaved himself free of the soil. It was very nearly night and the smoke of the gunshots still shrouded what little light remained. He stepped over Perrill and staggered toward the sow, his legs slow to find their strength again. Crossbow bolts flicked past him, but their aim was wild now and Hook reached the sow safely. He held on to its flank as he walked, then dropped into the safety of the trench. Lanterns lit his dirt-crusted face and men stared at him.
“How many others survived?” a man-at-arms asked.
“Don’t know,” Hook said.
“Here,” a priest brought him a pot and Hook drank. He had not realized how thirsty he was until he tasted the ale.
“My brother?” Thomas Perrill was among the men staring at Hook.
“Killed by a crossbow bolt,” Hook said curtly and stared up into Perrill’s long face. “Straight through the eye,” he added brutally. Perrill stared at him, and then Sir John Cornewaille pushed through the small crowd in the sow’s pit.
“Hook!”
“I’m alive, Sir John.”
“You don’t look it. Come.” Sir John grasped Hook’s arm and led him toward the camp. “What happened?”
“They came from above,” Hook said. “I was on my way out when the roof fell in.”
“It fell on you?”
“Yes, Sir John.”
“Someone loves you, Hook.”
“Saint Crispinian does,” Hook said, then he saw Melisande in the light of a campfire and went to her embrace.
And afterward, in the darkness, had nightmares.
Sir John’s men started dying next morning. A man-at-arms and two archers, all three of them struck by the sickness that turned bowels into sewers of filthy water. Alice Godewyne died. A dozen other men-at-arms were sick, as were at least twenty archers. The army was being ravaged by the plague and the stench of shit hung over the camp, and the French built their walls higher every night and in the dawn men struggled to the gun-pits and trenches where they vomited and voided their bowels.
Father Christopher caught the sickness. Melisande found him shivering in his tent, face pale, lying in his own filth and too weak to move. “I ate some nuts,” he told her.
“Nuts?”
“Les noix,” he explained in a voice that was like a breathless groan. “I didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know?”
“The doctors tell me now that you shouldn’t eat nuts or cabbage. Not with the sickness about. I ate nuts.”
Melisande washed him. “You’ll make me sicker,” he complained, but was too weak to prevent her from cleaning him. She found him a blanket,