Agincourt - Cornwell Bernard (читать книги онлайн без сокращений .txt) 📗

“Attack,” Evelgold said dourly.

“Attack what and why?” Sir John asked harshly. None of the four archers answered, instead they gazed at their own small army and wondered what reply Sir John wanted. “Think!” Sir John growled, his bright blue eyes darting between his sergeants. “You’re a Frenchman! You live in some shit-spattered manor with rats in the damp walls and mice dancing in the roof. What do you want?”

“Money,” Hook suggested.

“So what do you attack?”

“The flags,” Thomas Evelgold said.

“Because that’s where the money is,” Sir John said. “The goddamned bastards are flying the oriflamme,” he went on, “but that means nothing. They want prisoners. They want rich prisoners. They want the king, the Duke of York, the Duke of Gloucester, they want me, they want ransoms! There’s no profit in slaughtering archers, so the bastards will attack the men-at-arms. They’ll attack the flags, but some might come for you so drive them into the center with arrows. That’s what you do! Drive their flanks into the center. Because that’s where I can kill them.”

“If we’ve got enough arrows,” Evelgold said doubtfully.

“Save enough!” Sir John said forcibly, “because if you run out of arrows you’re going to have to fight them hand to hand and they’re trained to that, you’re not.”

“You trained us, Sir John,” Hook said, remembering the winter of practice with swords and axes.

“You’re half-trained, but the other archers?” Sir John asked derisively, and Hook, looking at the waiting men, knew they were no match for French men-at-arms. The archers were tailors and cordwainers, fullers and carpenters, millers and butchers. They were tradesmen who possessed a superb skill, the ability to draw the cord of a yew bow to their ear and send the arrow on its deathward journey. They were killers, but they were not men hardened to war by tournaments and trained from childhood in the discipline of blades. Many of them had no armor other than a padded jacket, and some did not even possess that small protection. “God keep the French from getting among them!” Sir John said.

None of the sergeants responded. They were thinking of what would happen when French men-at-arms, clad in steel, came to kill them. Hook shivered, then was distracted by the sight of five horsemen riding under the English royal banner toward the waiting French army. “What are they doing, Sir John?” Evelgold asked.

“The king has sent them to make an appeal for peace,” Sir John said, “they’ll demand that the French yield the crown to Henry, and then we’ll agree not to slaughter them.”

Evelgold just stared at Sir John as if he did not believe what he had heard. Hook suppressed a laugh and Sir John shrugged. “So they won’t accept the terms,” he said, “and that means we fight, but it doesn’t mean that they’ll attack us.”

“They won’t?” Magot asked.

“We have to get past them to reach Calais, so maybe we’ll have to cut our way through them.”

“Jesus,” Evelgold muttered.

“They want us to attack them, Sir John?” Magot asked.

“I would, if I were them!” Sir John turned to stare at the enemy. “They don’t want to cross this ground any more than we do, but they don’t need to cross it. We do. We have to reach Calais or we die here of starvation. So if they don’t attack us, we have to attack them.”

“Jesus,” Evelgold said again, and Hook tried to imagine the effort that would be needed to cross that half-mile of sucking, slippery, clinging mud. Let the French attack, he thought, and suddenly shivered violently. He was cold, he was hungry, he was tired. The fear came in waves and was turning his bowels to water. He was not the only one, lots of men were slipping into the woods to empty their bowels.

“I need to go to the woods,” he said.

“If you need to shit, do it here,” Sir John said harshly, then shouted at the massed archers. “No one’s to use the woods!” He feared that men, losing courage, would hide in the trees. “You’re to shit where you stand!”

“Shit and die,” Tom Evelgold said.

“And go to hell with fouled breeches,” Sir John snarled, “who cares?” He looked at each of his sergeants in turn, then spoke with a quiet intensity. “This battle’s not lost. Remember, we have archers, they don’t.”

“But we don’t have enough arrows,” Evelgold said.

“Then make each one count,” Sir John said, impatient with his centenar’s pessimism, then scowled at Hook. “Jesus, man, can’t you do that upwind of me?”

“Sorry, Sir John.”

Sir John grinned. “At least you can take a shit. Try doing that in full armor. I tell you, we’re not going to smell like lilies by the time we’ve finished our work today.” He gazed at the enemy, his bright eyes looking at the oriflamme. “And one last thing,” he said forcefully, “no one’s to start taking prisoners until we give the order that it’s safe to capture instead of kill.”

“You think we’ll take prisoners?” Evelgold asked with astonished disbelief.

“If men try to take prisoners too soon they weaken the line,” Sir John said, ignoring the question. “You have to fight and kill until the bastards can fight no more, and only then can you set about finding ransoms.” He clapped Evelgold on a mail-clad shoulder. “Tell your lads we’ll be feasting on captured French provisions tonight.”

Either that, Hook thought, or eating hell’s rations. He struggled back to his men who each stood by a stake. Those stakes, over two thousand of them on this right flank of the English army, made a dense thicket of sharpened points. Men could move among them easily enough, but no warhorse could maneuver about them.

“What did Sir John want?” Will of the Dale asked.

“To tell you that we’ll be eating French rations tonight.”

“He thinks they’ll take us prisoner?” Will asked skeptically.

“No, he thinks we’ll win.”

That prompted some bitter laughter. Hook ignored it and watched the enemy. The front rank of their dismounted men-at-arms stretched across the skyline, thick with the metal points of shortened lances. Still they did not move and still the English waited. French horsemen went on exercising their destriers and, because the horses disliked the thick furrows, many of the knights went to the grassy pastures beyond the woods. The sun climbed higher behind the thinning clouds. The king’s emissaries, sent to make an offer of peace, had met with a similar group of Frenchmen and now rode back across the plowland and, moments later, a rumor spread that the French had agreed to let the English pass, then the rumor was denied. “If they don’t want to fight,” Tom Scarlet said, “then perhaps they’ll just stand there all day!”

“We have to get past them, Tom.”

“Jesus, we could sneak off tonight! Go back to Harfleur.”

“The king won’t do that.”

“Why not for God’s sake? He wants to die?”

“He’s got God on his side,” Hook said.

Tom shivered. “God might have sent us a decent breakfast.”

Women brought what little food they had hoarded against this day. Melisande gave Hook an oatcake. “We share it,” Hook said.

“It’s for you,” she insisted. There was mold on the oats, but Hook ate half anyway and gave Melisande the other half. There was no ale, just water from a stream that Melisande brought in an old leather wine bottle. The water tasted rank. Melisande stood beside him and stared at the French. “So many,” she said quietly.

“They’re not moving,” Hook said.

“So what will happen?”

“We’ll have to attack them.”

She shivered. “You think my father’s there?”

“I’m sure of it.”

She said nothing. They waited. Waited. The trumpets and drums still sounded, but the musicians were tiring and the music was less exuberant. Hook could hear robins singing fitfully among the trees, some of which had already lost their leaves so that their branches were gaunt as scaffolds against the gray sky. The glistening wet plowland between the waiting armies was flitting with fieldfares and redwings that sought worms in the furrows. Hook thought of home, of the cows being milked, the sound of rutting stags in the woods, the shortening evenings and firelight in the cottages.