Agincourt - Cornwell Bernard (читать книги онлайн без сокращений .txt) 📗
TWELVE
The gun fired, belching smoke above the left flank of the French army.
Hook saw the gun-stone and did not recognize what it was, but for an instant there was a dark object rising and falling above the plowland and it seemed as if the thing, it was just a dark flicker, was coming straight for him and then the gun’s noise splintered the sky and birds rose screeching from the trees as the gun-stone struck an archer’s head a few paces from Hook.
The man’s skull was obliterated in an instant spray of blood and shattered skull. The stone kept flying, leaving a feathered trail of misted blood until it slapped into the mud two hundred paces behind the English line. It narrowly missed the destriers of the men-at-arms that were empty-saddled and under the guard of pageboys.
“Jesus,” Tom Scarlet said in disgust. There were jellied scraps of brain trickling down his bow’s shaft.
“Just keep shooting,” Hook said.
“Did you see that?” Scarlet asked in indignant amazement.
What Hook saw was dead and dying horses, dead riders, and beyond them a mass of dismounted men-at-arms advancing toward him. Crossbow bolts whirred close, but there were very few enemy bowmen who had a clear sight of the English. The French crossbowmen were aligned with the rearmost battle, too far to be sure of their aim, and most could not even see their enemy. Then, as the first French battle advanced to fill the space between the woodlands of Tramecourt and Agincourt, the French bowmen lost sight of the English altogether and the missiles stopped flying.
The first French battle was spread across the wide plowed field between the trees, but, because those woods funneled ever closer together, the line of armored men was being squeezed inward. Their ranks were already ragged, torn apart by the panicked horses that had bolted through them, but now they were jostling for space as the field contracted and all the while the arrows drove into them.
Hook was shooting steadily. He had already gone through one sheaf of arrows and had shouted for more. Boys were dumping fresh bundles among the archers, but hundreds of thousands were needed. Five thousand archers could easily shoot sixty thousand arrows in a minute and, when the cavalry had charged, they had shot even faster. Some men were still drawing and releasing as quickly as they could, but Hook slowed down. The closer the enemy came, the more lethal each arrow would be, so for now he was content to use broadheads against the advancing French.
The broadheads could never hope to pierce plate armor, but the blow of their strike was sufficient to knock a man backward, and each man Hook knocked back caused a ripple of chaos, slowing the French, and the enemy were struggling, not just with mud, but with the incessant arrow strikes. He could hear the arrows cracking against steel, a weird noise, never-ending, and the French men-at-arms, who were still a hundred and fifty paces away, looked as though they bent into the face of a gale, but a gale that was bringing steel hail.
Thomas Brutte cursed when his bow cord snapped to send an arrow spinning crazily into the air. He took a spare string from his pouch and restrung the bow. Hook saw how each of the enemy banners had a dozen or more arrows caught in their weave. He aimed at a man in a bright yellow surcoat, loosed, and his arrow threw the man backward. A horse lay on its side in front of the advancing French. The stallion’s death throes made it thrash its head and beat its hooves and the French line became even more disordered as men tried to avoid the animal. Bowstrings made their dull quick noise all around Hook. The sky was dark with arrows. Most archers were shooting at the men-at-arms who directly threatened them and, to avoid that arrow-storm, the foremost ranks of the French crowded still further inward, and that shrinking of the French line became more marked as the rearmost English archers, their aim frustrated by the men to their front, went into the thick briar underbrush of the Tramecourt woods and lined the edge of the trees from where they poured bodkins into the French flank.
The bravest of the French struggled to reach the English quickly, while the more prudent fell behind to gain the protection of the bolder men in front, and Hook saw how the French men-at-arms, who had begun their advance in a long straight line, were now coalescing into three crude wedges that were aimed at the flags waving in the center of each of the three English battles. It would be man-at-arms against man-at-arms, and the French, Hook supposed, were hoping to punch three bloody holes through the English line. And once that line of nine hundred men broke there would be chaos and death. He spared a glance north, worried that the narrowing of the French battle would give their crossbowmen a chance to shoot past the attackers’ flank, but those French archers seemed to have gone backward, almost as though they had lost interest in the fighting.
He picked up a bodkin and found the man in the yellow surcoat again. He drew, released, and was plucking up another arrow when he saw the yellow-clad man fall to his knees. So the bodkins were piercing, and Hook shot again and again, punching arrows into the slow-moving mass of men. He aimed at the leading rank and not all his arrows pierced their armor, but some struck plumb and tore their way through. Frenchmen were falling, tripping the ranks behind, yet still the great armored crowd struggled on.
“I need arrows!” a man shouted.
“Bring us goddamned arrows!” another shouted.
Hook still had a dozen. The enemy was close now, less than a hundred paces from the English line, but the arrow-storm was weakening as archers ran out of shafts. Hook drew long, picked a victim in a black surcoat, released and saw his arrow slap through the side of the pot-helm and the man seemed to totter in a circle, the arrow protruding from his brain as his lance knocked over another knight before the dying man dropped to his knees and fell full length in the mud. The next arrow glanced off a breastplate. Hook shot again, close enough now to see the details of his target’s livery. He saw a man in blue and green who had what appeared to be a gilded coronet around his helmet and Hook shot at him, then cursed himself because such a man could afford the finest armor and sure enough the arrow was deflected by the plate, though the man did stagger and was only rescued by his standard-bearer who pushed him back upright. Hook loosed again, shooting his arrow in a low trajectory that ended in a Frenchman’s thigh, and then there was only one arrow left. He held it on the stave, watching. It seemed to Hook that all the thousands of arrows had done surprisingly little damage to the enemy. Many Frenchmen were down and their bodies impeded the rest, but still the plowland seemed filled with living, mud-plastered, armored Frenchmen carrying their lances, swords, maces, and axes to the thin English line. They lumbered closer, each step an effort in the cloying earth, and Hook selected a man who seemed more eager than the rest and he sent his final arrow into that tall man’s chest. The bodkin point struck through steel plate and punctured a rib to pierce a lung and so fill the man’s helmet with a rush of blood that bubbled from his mouth and spilled from his visor’s holes.
“Arrows!” Hook bellowed, but there were none except the few remaining in the hands of the rearmost archers, and those men saved their missiles. The archers were spectators now. They stood among their stakes, a few yards from the nearest French wedge that was just paces from the English vanguard.
The archers had done their job. Now it was England’s men-at-arms who would have to fight.
While the French, spared the arrows at last, gave a hoarse shout and lunged to the kill.
