Agincourt - Cornwell Bernard (читать книги онлайн без сокращений .txt) 📗
The Sire de Lanferelle could vault onto the back of his horse while wearing a full suit of plate armor, he even danced in armor sometimes, not just because women adored a man dressed for killing, but to demonstrate that he was more elegant and lithe in armor than most men were without. Yet now he could hardly move. Each step was a fight against the soil’s suction. In places he sank to mid-calf and could find no purchase to drag his feet free, yet step by step he managed to keep going, sometimes leaning on his neighbor so he could wrench an armored foot out of the clinging earth. He tried to step in the furrows where water lay, because those furrows had the firmest bottoms, but he could scarce see the ground through the tight holes of his closed visor. Nor did he dare open the helmet, because the arrows were clattering and clashing and banging all around him. He was hit on the forehead by a bodkin that snapped his head back and almost toppled him, except that one of his men pushed him upright. Another arrow struck his breastplate, tearing a long rip in his jupon and scraping across the steel with a high-pitched squeal. His armor resisted both blows, though other men were not so fortunate. Every few heartbeats, in the middle of the metallic rain of arrows, a man would gasp or scream or call for help. Lanferelle did not see them fall, only hear them, and he was aware that the attack was losing its cohesion because men were crushing in from his left where most of the arrows came from, and those men squeezed the formation. Armor plate clanged against armor plate. Lanferelle himself was pushed so tight against his right-hand neighbor that he could not move his arm holding the lance and he bellowed a protest and made a huge effort to get a step ahead of the man. He was sweeping his head from side to side, trying to make sense of the blur of gray ahead. The English, he noticed, had their visors raised. They were not threatened by arrows and so could see to kill, but Lanferelle dared not lift his own visor because a handful of archers were posted between the English battles straight ahead and those men would thank God for the target of an unvisored French face.
His breathing was hoarse inside the helmet. He reckoned himself to be a strong man, yet he was gasping as he waded through the thick soil. Sweat streamed down his face. His left foot slipped in a patch of slick mud and he sank to his right knee, but managed to heave himself upright and stagger onward. Then he tripped on something and sprawled again, this time falling beside the corpse of an unhorsed man-at-arms. Two of his men pulled him to his feet. He was sheeted in mud now. Some of the holes in his visor were blocked by mud and he pawed at them with his left hand, but the armored gauntlet could not clear the thick wet earth. Just get close, he told himself, just get close and the killing could start and Lanferelle was confident of his ability to kill. He might not be a mud-wader, but he was a killer, and so he made another huge effort, trying to get ahead of the crush so he would have room to use his weapons. He turned his head again, scanning through the visor’s remaining holes, and saw, straight ahead, a great banner showing the royal arms of England with their impudent appropriation of the French lily. The royal arms on the flag were defaced with three white bars, each bar with three red balls, and he recognized the badge as that of Edward, Duke of York. He would serve as a prisoner, Lanferelle thought. The ransom for an English royal duke would make Lanferelle rich, and that prospect seemed to give his tired legs a new strength. He was growling now, though quite unaware of it. The English line was close. “Are you with me, Jean?” he shouted, and his squire shouted yes. Lanferelle intended to strike the English line with his lance and then, as the enemy recoiled from that blow, drop the cumbersome weapon and use the mace that was slung on his shoulder, and if the mace broke he would take one of the spare weapons carried by his squire. Lanferelle felt a sudden elation. He had lived this long, he had survived the arrow-storm and he was taking his lance to the enemy, but just then a bodkin point ripped from the flank and struck plumb in one of the visor’s holes and sudden light flooded Lanferelle’s eyes as the arrow peeled back the steel and sliced a savage cut in the bridge of his nose. His head was wrenched painfully to one side as the arrow missed his right eyeball by a hair’s breadth and scored across his cheekbone to lodge in his helmet.
He could see suddenly. He could see through the ragged hole torn by the arrow that he wrenched free with his left hand. He could not see much, but a sudden noise to his left made him turn to see a tall man pitch forward with blood bubbling from his visor’s holes, and then Lanferelle looked back to his front and the Duke of York was only a few paces away and so he dropped his left hand to brace the lance, took a deep breath, and shouted his war cry. He was still shouting as he charged, or rather as he churned his way through the last paces of muddy plowland. The shout mingled anger and elation. Anger at this impudent enemy and elation that he had survived the archers.
And he had come to the killing place.
Sir John Cornewaille was also angry.
Since the day the army had landed in France he had been one of the commanders of the vanguard. He had led the short march to Harfleur, been in the first rank of the men who had assaulted that stubborn city, and he had led the march north from the Seine to this muddy field in Picardy, yet now the king’s relative, the Duke of York, had been given command of the vanguard, and the pious duke, in Sir John’s view, was an uninspiring leader.
Yet the duke commanded and Sir John, a few places to the duke’s right, could only submit to the appointment, but that did not mean he could not tell the men of the right-hand battle what they should do when the French came. He was watching the enemy men-at-arms approach, and he was seeing how they struggled in the mud, and he was awed by the thickness of the arrow-storms that converged from left and right to pierce and wound and kill. Not one French visor was open, so they were half blinded by steel and almost crippled by the mud, and Sir John was waiting for them with lance, poleax, and sword. “Are you listening!” he shouted. Ostensibly he was calling to his own men-at-arms, but only a fool would not heed Sir John Cornewaille’s words when it came to a fight. “Listen!” he bellowed through his unvisored helmet. “When they reach us they’re going to rush the last few paces! They want to hit us hard! They want the fight over! When I give the word we all step back three paces. You hear me? We step back three paces!”
His own men, he knew, would obey him, as would Sir William Porter’s men-at-arms. Sir John had trained his men in the brief maneuver. The enemy would come at a rush and expect to lunge their shortened lances straight at English groins or faces, and if the English were suddenly to step back then those first energetic blows would be wasted on air. That was the moment Sir John would counterattack, when the enemy was off balance. “You wait for my command!” he shouted, and felt a brief moment of concern. Perhaps it was dangerous to step backward in such treacherous ground, but he reckoned the enemy was more likely to slip and fall than his own men. Those men were arrayed in three crude ranks that swelled to six where the Duke of York’s big company was arrayed around their lord. The duke, anxious face showing through his open helm, had not turned to look when Sir John shouted. Instead he had stared straight ahead while the tip of his sword, made of the best Bordeaux steel, rested lightly on the furrows. “When they come to strike!” Sir John bellowed, watching to see if the duke showed any response. “Cheat their blow! Step back! And when they falter, attack!” The duke did not acknowledge the advice, he still stared at the French horde that was losing its order. The flanks were crushing inward to escape the arrows, and the leading men were skewing what was left of the French formation by deliberately advancing on those places in the English line where the banners proclaimed the position of high nobility who might expect to pay extravagant ransoms. Yet, disorganized though the French were, this first battle was still a horde. It outnumbered the English men-at-arms by eight to one; it was an armored herd spiked with lances, thick with blades, a grinding wave of steel that seemed to shrug off the arrows as a bull might ignore the stings of swarming horseflies. Some Frenchmen fell, and whenever a man was put down by a bodkin point he would trip the men behind, and Sir John saw the crowding and jostling, the pushing and shoving. Some men were struggling to be in the front rank, wanting to win renown, others were reluctant to be the first to strike, yet all, he knew, were anticipating ransoms and riches and rejoicing.
