Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [94]
Another crossbow bolt hissed close by, but Hook’s men were moving fast now. Will of the Dale and his half-dozen men were moving eastward to shoot their arrows through the opening at the back of the pit, while Hook was running to the Redeemer’s flank. He jumped down into the wide trench and waited for his six men to join him. “No bows from now on,” he told them.
“No bows? We’re archers!” Will Sclate grumbled. Will Sclate always grumbled. He was not a popular man, too morose to be easy company and too slow-witted to join in the incessant chatter among the archers, but he was big and hugely strong. He had grown up on one of Sir John’s estates, a laborer’s son who might have expected to work the fields his whole life, but Sir John had seen the boy’s strength and insisted he learn the longbow. Now, as an archer, he earned far more than any laborer, but he was as slow and stubborn as the clay fields he had once worked with hoe and beetle.
“You’re a soldier,” Hook snapped at him, “and you’re going to use hand weapons.”
“What are we doing?” Geoffrey Horrocks asked. He was the youngest of Sir John’s archers, just seventeen, the son of a falconer.
“We’re going to kill some bastards,” Hook said. He slung the bow across his body and hefted the poleax instead. “And we go fast! After me! Now!”
He scrambled up the face of the trench and over the wreckage of the soil-filled wicker baskets that formed the trench’s parapet. He could see flame-light in the Redeemer’s pit and he could hear the sharp thin noise of bowstrings being released from his left where Will of the Dale’s men were lined beside the stone stump of a wrecked chimney. A shout came from the pit, then another, then a screech as an arrowhead scraped against the cannon’s flank. Seven archers were shooting into the pit. In one minute they could easily loose sixty or seventy arrows, and those arrows were flickering through the half-light, filling the gun-pit with hissing death and forcing the French to crouch for protection.
Then Hook and his men came at them from the flank. The Frenchmen did not see him because the arrows were whistling and thumping around them, and they were crouching to find what little protection the pit offered. The massive wooden screen gave splendid protection on the face that looked toward Harfleur, but the pit had never been designed to protect men being attacked from the rear and Will’s arrows were streaking down the trench and through the wide gap. Then Hook leaped across the parapet at the pit’s side and he prayed the arrows would stop.
They must have stopped because none of his men was struck by an arrow. The archers were shouting a challenge as they followed Hook over the wicker baskets, and still shouting as they started the killing. Hook was swinging the poleax as he landed and its lead-weighted hammer head crashed into a crouching Frenchman’s helmet and Hook sensed rather than saw the metal crumpling under the massive blow that collapsed metal, skull, and brain. A man reared up to his right, but Sclate hurled him back with contemptuous ease as Hook sprawled on the far side of the cannon. He had leaped clean across the Redeemer’s barrel.
He hit the far side of the pit hard, lost his footing, and fell heavily. A surge of fear flared cold in his veins. The biggest fear was that he was on the ground and vulnerable, another that he might have damaged the bow slung on his back, but later, when he remembered the fight, he realized he had also felt elation. In memory it was all a blur of screaming men, bright blades, and ringing metal, but in that welter of impressions there was a cold hard center in which Nick Hook regained his feet and saw a man-at-arms at the front of the pit. The man was wearing plate armor half covered by a surcoat that displayed a red heart pierced by a