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

“See them off!” Evelgold shouted.

The charge had ended at the stakes and the first French attack had ended in failure. The horsemen had been supposed to scatter the archers, but the arrows had done their wicked work and the stakes had stopped the survivors from getting among the bowmen. Some men-at-arms were already riding away, pursued by arrows, while riderless horses, crazed with pain, charged back at their own lines. One man, braver than brave, had dropped his lance to draw his sword and now tried to steer his destrier between the stakes, but the arrows whipped into his horse, which went to its knees, and a bodkin, shot at less than ten paces, drove through the rider’s breastplate, killing him, and he sat there, a head-drooping corpse on a dying horse, and the English archers jeered him.

It was strange, Hook thought, that the fear had gone. Now, instead, an excitement sang in his veins and a thin shrill voice keened in his head. He went back to his stake and plucked up a bodkin. The horsemen were gone, defeated by arrows, but the main French attack still advanced. They came on foot, because armored men on foot were less vulnerable to arrows than horses, and they came beneath bright banners, but their ranks had been churned to chaos by the wounded, riderless horses that had fled in blind panic to charge through the advancing French. Men went down under the heavy hooves, and other men tried to straighten the ragged line that stumbled across the deep furrows toward the English king and his men-at-arms. Hook picked his targets. He drew, the cord flowing back with deceptive ease, and he loosed arrow after arrow. Other archers crowded him, all jostling forward to pour their shafts at the French.

Who still came on. Their ranks had been broken by the panicked horses, and men were falling as arrows found their marks, but still they advanced. All France’s high aristocracy was in the leading battle and they came beneath proud banners. Eight thousand dismounted men-at-arms attacking nine hundred.

Then a French gun fired.

Melisande was praying. It was not a conscious prayer, more a desperate and silent and unending cry for help aimed at a gray sky, which offered her no comfort.

The baggage had been supposed to follow the army up onto the plateau, but most had stayed around the village of Maisoncelles where the king had spent much of the night. The royal baggage wagons were parked there, guarded by ten men-at-arms and twenty archers, all of them reckoned too sick or lame to stand in the main line of battle. Father Christopher had led Melisande there, saying she would be safer than with the few packhorses that had been led up onto the high plowland where the two armies met. The priest had written his mysterious letters on her forehead. IHC Nazar. “It will preserve your life,” he had promised her.

“Write it on your own face,” Melisande had told him.

Father Christopher had smiled. “God has me in the palm of His hand, my dear,” he said, then made the sign of the cross, “and He will preserve you. But you must stay here. You will be safer here.” He had placed her with the other archers’ wives between two empty wagons that had brought arrows to Agincourt, made sure that her horse was nearby and that the mare was saddled, and then Father Christopher had taken one of Sir John’s horses and ridden up the slope toward the place where the armies waited. Melisande had watched him until he vanished over the crest of the hill, and that was when she had begun to pray. The other wives of Sir John’s archers prayed too.

Melisande’s prayer took shape slowly. It had begun as an incoherent cry for help, but she forced herself to choose her words carefully as she prayed to the Virgin. Nick is a good man, she told the Mother of Christ, and a strong one, but he can be angry and sour, so help him now to be strong and alive. Let him live. That was the prayer, to let her man live.

“What do we do if the French come?” Matilda Cobbold asked.

“Run,” one of the other women said, and just then there was a roar from the hidden high ground beyond the skyline. They had heard the war-shout of Saint George, but the women were too far away to hear the saint’s name, only the great bellow of sound that told them something must be happening beyond the skyline.

“God help us,” Matilda said.

Melisande opened the sack that contained her worldly belongings. She wanted the jupon her father had sent her, but the sack also contained the ivory-stocked crossbow that Nick had given her almost three months before. She pulled it out.

“You’ll fight them on your own?” Matilda asked.

Melisande smiled, but found it hard to speak. She was so nervous, so frightened, knowing that what happened beyond the high horizon would decide her life’s course and that it was all beyond her control. She could only pray.

“Go up there, love,” Nell Candeler said, “and shoot some of the bastards.”

“It’s still cocked,” Melisande said in wonderment.

“What is?” Matilda asked.

“The bow,” Melisande said. “I never released it.” She stared at the crossbow, remembering the day Matt Scarlet had died, the day she had pointed the crossbow at her father. Ever since that day the bow had been cocked, its steel-shanked stave under the thick cord’s strain, and she had never noticed. She almost pulled the trigger, then impulsively thrust the bow back into her sack and pulled out the folded jupon. She stared at the bright cloth, half tempted to pull it over her head, but she suddenly knew she could not wear an enemy’s badge while Nick was fighting, and then another certainty overtook her, the knowledge that she would never see Nick again so long as she was tempted to wear her father’s jupon. It had to be thrown away. “I’m going to the river,” she said.

“You can piss here,” Nell Candeler said.

“I want to walk,” Melisande said, and she picked up her heavy sack and went south, away from the armies on the plateau and away from the baggage. She walked through the army’s sumpters that cropped the autumn grass, her feet soaked by the damp. She had an idea to throw the jupon into the Ternoise and watch it float downstream, but the River of Swords was too far away and so she settled for a stream that ran high and fast from the night’s rain. The stream flowed through the tangle of small fields and woods that lay just south of the village and she crouched on its bank where the leaves of the alders and willows had turned yellow and gold and there she dropped the sack, closed her eyes, and held the jupon in both hands as if it were an offering.

“Look after Nick,” she prayed, “let him live,” and with those words she threw her father’s jupon into the stream and watched it being carried fast away. The farther it went, she thought, the safer Nick would be.

Then the French gun fired, and that sound was loud enough to reverberate all through the valley behind the battlefield, loud enough to make Melisande turn and stare north.

To see Sir Martin, grinning and lanky, his gray hair slicked close against his narrow skull.

“Hello, little lady,” he said hungrily.

And there was no one for Melisande to ask for help.

She was alone.

A cloud of smoke rose above the horizon, marking the distant place where the gun had fired.

“All a-lonely,” Sir Martin said, “just you and me.” He made a gurgling sound that might have been laughter, hitched up his robes, and came for her.