Agincourt - Cornwell Bernard (читать книги онлайн без сокращений .txt) 📗
“Get out of the way,” Saint Crispin snapped.
“I’ll fight him,” Hook shouted back. He wanted to kill Lanferelle. He suddenly hated him. “I’ll kill him!” he shouted, and tried to step forward, but was checked by the Frenchman’s whip-fast blade.
“Get out of the goddamned way!” the voice roared, but this was not Saint Crispin shouting, and Hook felt himself thrust unceremoniously away as Sir John Cornewaille threw him to one side. Sir John brought men-at-arms who crashed their lances into the French, steel points against plate armor, and Hook staggered to where Will Sclate was hacking at Lanferelle’s followers. Lanferelle responded with a bellowed challenge and a charge at Sir John, and the other Frenchmen surged forward through the clay-thick mud. A poleax slammed onto Hook’s helmet and, because he was already unbalanced, he fell. The ax blow had not been given with full force, but it still rang in Hook’s head and the blade glanced off the helmet to cut through his haubergeon and almost slashed the mail on his shoulder open. He saw the Frenchman draw back the pole, ready to slide the spike into his belly or chest and Hook desperately slashed up with his own blade, a wild blow that drove the ax head into the man-at-arms’s groin. Like the blow that had felled him, it was not given with full force, but it was hard enough to make the Frenchman double over in sudden, body-crippling pain, and then Will of the Dale hauled Hook upright and Hook found his feet and slammed his spike forward, shouting as he thrust, and the spike rammed into the enemy’s upper chest, piercing the aventail and sliding over the breastplate’s top edge. Hook rammed and shook the pole, grinding the blade deep into the enemy’s ribcage, and he watched the lower part of the man’s helmet fill with blood that spilled from the visor opening. A sword smacked Hook from his right, but his mail stopped it, and he swept his weapon that way, dragging his victim with it to throw the swordsman off balance, and then Hook charged.
He used the dying man as a battering ram. He thrust him into the French ranks and Sclate and Will of the Dale followed, and both of them were shouting. “Saint George!”
“Saint Crispin!” Hook bellowed. He was pushing the dying man into the French ranks, thrusting his body against other men. The wounded man splattered blood from his mouth as Hook tried to disengage the spike. Another man stabbed a pike at Hook, but Geoffrey Horrocks had followed Hook and hit the man’s helmet with a mallet, and the strike of the lead-weighted iron thumped dully as the man’s head snapped back. He dropped into the mud. The wounded man at last fell from the poleax and Hook, the weight released, began to scream wildly and swing the weapon from side to side as he thrust into the Frenchmen. “Just kill the bastards, just kill the bastards!” he was shouting. Archers were following him, their anger released by the relief of Sir John’s arrival.
Sir John was fighting Lanferelle, both men so fast with weapons that it was difficult to see thrust, cut or parry, while the other English men-at-arms attacked on either side with such sudden savagery that Lanferelle’s followers instinctively stepped back, intent on defending themselves against the newly arrived men, and as they went back so some tripped on the bodies lying on the ground behind them. They fell and the English came at them, pole-spikes stabbing, axes splitting armor, faces grimacing with the effort of killing, and the sudden slaughter took the spirit from the remaining French who tried to back away and found archers on their flanks. Men began to shout that they yielded. They dragged off gauntlets and shouted their surrenders in desperate panic. “Too late,” Will of the Dale sneered at one man and chopped down with his ax to split an espalier and slice the blade down through shoulder blade and upper ribs. Another Frenchman in a ripped surcoat crawled on hands and knees, blood drooling from his mouth, weeping from sightless eyes, blundering through mud till an archer kicked him down and casually killed him with a knife thrust in the mouth. Young Horrocks was beating a count to death, slamming a poleax again and again into the fallen man’s backplate and screaming insults as the blade tore into steel and spine.
Lanferelle was left, still fighting Sir John, and by some unspoken agreement the other English men-at-arms did not intervene. Neither man spoke. They had their feet planted in the mud and they cut, lunged, and feinted, yet both were so skilled and so quick that neither could find an advantage. They were the tournament champions of Christendom, one French, one English, and they were accustomed to the silken glories of the lists; the admiring women, the bright flags, the courtesy of chivalry, yet now they fought among corpses, amidst the moans and whimpers of the dying, on a field reeking of blood and shit.
The end came by accident. Lanferelle feinted a lunge to Sir John’s left, recovered with astonishing speed, cut, and so forced Sir John to step to his right and his foot landed on the hoof of a dead destrier and the hoof rolled under the weight and Sir John slipped and fell onto one knee and Lanferelle, fast as a snake, whipped the poleax around and struck Sir John’s helmet a ringing blow and Sir John fell full length onto the horse’s bloody belly where he floundered, trying to find his balance and so get to his feet, and Lanferelle raised the poleax for the killing blow.
And thrust.
The French second battle had forced the survivors of the first back to the killing ground where the English waited behind a rampart of dead and dying Frenchmen. So many of the high nobility of France were already dead or bleeding; their bones shattered, their guts torn, their brains spilling from mangled helmets, their eyes gouged and bellies ripped. Men were weeping, some calling for God or for their wives or for their mothers, but neither God nor any woman was there to offer comfort.
The King of England was going forward now. He had pulled one corpse from atop two others to make a passage through the heaped dead and he carried his sword to an enemy who had dared defy God’s choice for France’s throne. His men-at-arms advanced with him, cutting their axes and grinding their maces and chopping their sharp-curved falcon-beaks into a demoralized and mud-wearied enemy. They made new piles of dead, new blood-laced corpses, and more cripples whose cries for help went unanswered. Henry led them, despite the shouts of men who wanted him to protect himself. His helmet was dented and scarred, a fleuret of gold had been severed from the bright crown, but England’s king was replete with a righteous and holy joy because he saw in the enemy’s suffering the proof of divine providence. Underfoot the plowland’s ridges and furrows had been trampled into a flat morass that was the color of blood. Men waded in a slurry of mud, blood, and shit, they struggled and died, and Henry’s soul soared. God was with him and, in that assurance, he found new strength and went on killing.
Lanferelle thrust hard and vicious just as a poleax blade hooked about his left espalier and hauled him back hard and fast. The Frenchman’s blow fell short of Sir John, but Lanferelle, miraculously keeping his footing, turned on his new enemy and then stopped.
The poleax had pulled him away from Sir John and denied him his kill, and now its spike was in his face, its point mashing his lip against his teeth and Lanferelle found himself staring into Hook’s face.
“When you fought him before,” Hook said, “he let you stand up. You wouldn’t do the same for him?”
“This is battle,” Lanferelle said, his voice distorted by the spike’s pressure, “and that was a tournament.”
“Then if this is battle,” Hook asked, “why shouldn’t I kill you?”
Sir John stood, but did not intervene. He just watched.
