Agincourt - Cornwell Bernard (читать книги онлайн без сокращений .txt) 📗
The King of England, crowned with a simple circlet of gold and wearing a surcoat blazoned with the French royal coat of arms, sat enthroned in silence. He was watching and waiting, and perhaps wondering what he must do next. He had come to Normandy and won this surrender, but that victory had cost him half his army.
Hook was at the Leure Gate where Sir John commanded a force of ten men-at-arms and forty archers. Sir John, clad in plate armor that had been scoured to a shine, was mounted on his great destrier, Lucifer, who had been draped in a dazzling linen trapper resplendent with Sir John’s crest, and the same lion was modeled in painted wood to rear savagely from the crest of Sir John’s helmet. The men-at-arms were also in armor, but the archers were in leather jerkins and stained breeches. All the bowmen carried halters of rough rope, the kind that a peasant might use to lead a cow to market. “Treat them courteously,” Sir John told his bowmen, “they fought well! They’re men!”
“I thought they were all scum-sucking cabbage shitters,” Will of the Dale said quietly, but not quietly enough.
Sir John turned Lucifer. “They are that!” he said, “but they fought like Englishmen! So treat them like Englishmen!”
A section of the new wall had been demolished and, just after Sir John spoke, some three dozen men emerged from the gap. They had been ordered to approach the King of England barefoot and in plain linen shirts and hose. Now, nervous and apprehensive, they walked slowly and cautiously toward the waiting archers.
“Nooses!” Sir John ordered.
Hook and the other archers tied nooses in the ropes. Sir John beckoned a squire and handed his reins to the man, then slid out of his tall saddle. He patted Lucifer on the nose, then walked toward the approaching Frenchmen.
He singled out one man, a tall man with a hooked nose and a short black beard. The man was pale, and Hook guessed he was sick, but he was forcing himself to lead the Frenchmen out of the town and to keep what small dignity he had left. The bearded man beckoned to his companions to pause while he approached Sir John alone. The two men stopped a pace apart, the Englishman glorious in armor and heraldry, his sword hilt polished, his armor gleaming, while the Frenchman was in the common, ill-fitting clothes decreed by King Henry. Sir John, his visor raised, said something that Hook did not catch, then the two men embraced.
Sir John left his right arm about the Frenchman’s shoulders as he led him toward the archers. “This is the Sire de Gaucourt,” he announced, “the leader of our enemies these last five weeks, and he has fought bravely! He deserves better than this, but our king commands and we must obey. Hook, give me the noose!”
Hook held out the halter. The Frenchman gave him an appraising look and Hook felt compelled to nod his head in respectful acknowledgment.
“I am sorry,” Sir John said in French.
“It is necessary,” Raoul de Gaucourt said harshly.
“Is it?” Sir John asked.
“We must be humiliated so that the rest of France knows what fate waits for them if they resist your king,” de Gaucourt said. He gave a wan smile then cast an appraising eye over the English army that waited to watch his humiliating walk to the king’s throne. “Though I doubt your king has the power to frighten France any more,” he went on. “You call this a victory, Sir John?” he asked, beckoning at the battered walls he had defended so bravely. Sir John did not answer. Instead he lifted the noose to place it about de Gaucourt’s head, but the Frenchman took it from him. “Allow me,” he said, and put the rope about his own neck.
The other Frenchmen had ropes placed about their necks, and then Sir John, satisfied, pulled himself back into Lucifer’s saddle. He nodded to de Gaucourt, then spurred his horse along the path made between the watching English soldiers.
The Frenchmen walked the path in silence. Some, the merchants, were old men, while others, mostly soldiers, were young and strong. They were the knights and burgesses, the men who had defied the King of England, and the nooses about their necks proclaimed that their lives were now at Henry’s mercy. They climbed the hillside, then knelt humbly before the throne canopied in cloth of gold. Henry gazed at them a long time. The wind lifted the silk banners and drifted smoke from the city’s ruins. The assembled English nobles waited, expecting the king to announce the death sentence on the kneeling men. “I am the rightful king of this realm,” Henry said, “and your resistance was treason.”
A look of pain showed briefly on de Gaucourt’s face. He ignored the accusation of treason and instead held out a thick bunch of heavy keys. “The keys of Harfleur, sire,” he said, “which are yours.”
The king did not take the offered keys. “Your defiance,” he said sternly, “was contrary to man’s law and to God’s law.” Some of the older merchants were shaking in fear and one had tears running down his face. “But God,” Henry went on loftily, “is merciful.” He lifted the keys at last, “and we shall be merciful. Your lives are not forfeit.”
A cheer sounded from the English army when the cross of Saint George was hoisted over the town. Next day Henry of England walked barefoot to the church of Saint Martin to give thanks to God for a victory, yet many who watched his humble pilgrimage reckoned that his triumph was a virtual defeat. He had wasted so much time before Harfleur’s walls and the sickness had torn his army apart, and the campaign season was almost over.
The English army moved inside the walls. They burned their encampment and dragged catapults and cannon through the ruined gate. Sir John’s men quartered themselves in a row of houses, taverns, and warehouses beside the wall-enclosed harbor where Hook found space in the attic of a tavern called Le Paon. “Le paon is a bird,” Melisande had explained, “with a big tail!” She had spread her arms wide.
“No bird’s got a tail that big!” Hook said.
“Le paon does,” she insisted.
“Must be a French bird then,” Hook said, “not an English one.”
Harfleur was now English. The cross of Saint George flew from the ruined stump of Saint Martin’s tower, and the people of the city, who had suffered so much, were now given more suffering.
They were expelled. The city, the king declared, would be resettled by English people, just as Calais had been, and to make room for those new inhabitants over two thousand men, women, and children were driven from the city. The sick were taken in carts, the rest walked, and two hundred mounted Englishmen guarded the sad column’s progress along the north bank of the Seine. The English soldiers were there to protect the refugees from their own countrymen who would otherwise have robbed and raped. Men-at-arms led the procession and archers flanked it.
Hook was one of the archers. He had been reunited with his black gelding, Raker, who was fretful and needed constant curbing. Hook’s surcoat was washed clean, though the red cross of Saint George had faded to a dull pink. Beneath the surcoat he wore a coat of good mail that he had taken from a French corpse and an aventail that Sir John had given him, and over the aventail’s hood he now had a bascinet that was another gift from a corpse. The bascinet was a helmet with a wide brim designed to deflect a downward blade, though like other archers Hook had hacked off the brim on the right side to make a space for his bow’s cord when he drew it to the full. His sword hung at his side, his cased bow was slung across his shoulder, while his arrow bag hung from the saddle’s cantle. To his right, beyond the refugees, the narrowing river rippled sun-bright, while to the left were meadows stripped of livestock by English forage parties and, beyond those pastures, gentle wooded hills still heavy in their full summer leaf. Melisande had stayed in Harfleur, but Father Christopher had insisted on accompanying the refugees. He was mounted on Sir John’s great destrier, Lucifer. Sir John wanted the horse exercised, and Father Christopher was happy to oblige. “You shouldn’t have come, father,” Hook told him.
