Agincourt - Cornwell Bernard (читать книги онлайн без сокращений .txt) 📗
His arrow went clean through the rider’s right eye and the force of it snapped the man’s head hard back. The sword dropped and the mare slowed and then, puzzled, stopped a short lance’s length away from Hook. No other archer had loosed.
A cheer went up from the English line as the dead rider fell slowly from the saddle. He took a long time to fall, slipping gently sideways and then suddenly collapsing in a clatter of armor. “Get his horse,” Hook told Horrocks.
Hook went to the corpse. He tugged the arrow free from the ruined eye so he could pull the thick golden chain over the dead man’s head, and then his hand stopped because there was a pendant hanging from the chain. It was a thick pendant, carved from white ivory, and mounted on that silver-rimmed disc was an antelope cut from jet.
“You stupid little bastard,” Hook said, and he lifted off the boy’s helmet that was too big for him and looked down into the ruined face of Sir Philippe de Rouelles.
“He’s just a boy,” Horrocks said in surprise.
“A stupid little bastard is what he is,” Hook said.
“What was he doing?”
“He was being goddam brave,” Hook said. He pulled off the heavy golden chain and walked the few paces to where the boy had stared down at the heaped dead, and there, lying on top of two other men, was a corpse in a surcoat that was so soaked in blood that at first Hook had difficulty making out the badge, but then he saw the outline of two red axes in the redder cloth. The dead man’s helmet had come off and his throat had been cut to the spine. “He came to find his father,” Hook told Horrocks.
“How do you know that?”
“I just know,” Hook said, “the poor little bastard. He was just looking for his father.” He thrust the pendant into the arrow bag, picked up another bodkin, and turned toward the English line.
Where the king, wearing his scarred helmet and with his surcoat torn by enemy blades, had mounted his small white horse to see the enemy more clearly. He saw the survivors of the slaughter struggling north, and beyond them was the third battle with its raised lances and he knew his archers had few or no arrows.
Then a messenger arrived to say the French were in the baggage camp, and the king twisted in the saddle to see that hundreds of his men were now guarding French prisoners. God knows how many prisoners there were, but they far outnumbered his men-at-arms. He glanced left and right. He had started with nine hundred men-at-arms and now the line was much thinner because so many men had taken prisoners and were guarding them. The archers had done the same. A few were out in the field, collecting arrows, and the king approved of that, but knew they could never collect enough arrows to kill the horses of the third battle. He watched some foolish Frenchman charge the archers and grimaced when his men cheered the brave fool’s death, then looked again at his army.
It was disordered. Henry knew that the line would form again when the final French battle charged, but now there were hundreds of prisoners behind that line and those captured men could still fight. They had no helmets and their weapons had been taken, but they could still assault the rear of his line. Most had their hands tied, but not all, and the unpinioned men could free the others to throw themselves on the perilously thin English line. Then there was the threat of the Frenchmen pillaging his baggage, but that could wait. The vital thing now was to hold off the third French charge, and to do that he needed every blade in his small army. The advancing horses would be hampered by the hundreds of corpses, yet they would eventually get past those bodies and then the long lances would stab into his line. He needed men.
And men stared up at the king. They saw him close his eyes and knew he was praying to his stern God, the God who had spared his army so far this day, and Henry prayed that God’s mercy would continue and, as his lips moved in the prayer, so the answer came to him. The answer was so astonishing that for a moment he did nothing, then he told himself God had spoken to him and so he opened his eyes.
“Kill the prisoners,” he ordered.
One of his household men-at-arms stared up at him. He was not sure he had heard right. “Sire?”
“Kill the prisoners!”
That way the prisoners could not fight again and the men guarding them would be forced back into the battle line.
“Kill them all!” Henry shouted. He pointed a gauntleted hand at the captives. One of his men-at-arms had made a swift count and reckoned over two thousand Frenchmen had been taken and Henry’s gesture encompassed them all. “Kill them!” Henry commanded.
The French had flaunted the oriflamme, promising no quarter, so now no quarter would be given.
The prisoners would die.
The Sire de Lanferelle wandered bleakly behind the English line. He saw the English king in a battle-scarred helmet sitting on horseback, then was shocked to see that the Duke of Orleans, the French king’s nephew, was a prisoner. He was just a young man, charming and witty, yet now, in a blood-spattered surcoat and with his arm gripped by an archer in English royal livery, he looked dazed, stricken and ill. “Sire,” Lanferelle said, dropping to one knee.
“What happened?” Orleans asked.
“Mud,” Lanferelle said, standing again.
“My God,” the duke said. He flinched, not from pain for he was hardly wounded, but out of shame. “Alencon’s dead,” he went on, “and so are Bar and Brabant. Sens died too.”
“The archbishop?” Lanferelle asked, somehow more shocked that a prince of the church was dead than that three of France’s noblest dukes should have been killed.
“They gutted him, Lanferelle,” the duke said, “they just gutted him. And d’Albret’s dead too.”
“The constable?”
“Dead,” Orleans said, “and Bourbon’s captured.”
“Dear sweet God,” Lanferelle said, not because the Constable of France was dead or because the Duke of Bourbon, the victor of Soissons, was a prisoner, but because Marshal Boucicault, reckoned the toughest man in France, was now being led to join the Duke of Orleans.
Boucicault stared at Lanferelle, then at the royal duke, then shook his grizzled head. “It seems we’re all doomed to English hospitality,” he growled.
“They treated me well enough when I was a prisoner,” Lanferelle said.
“Jesus Christ, you have to find a second ransom?” Boucicault asked. His white surcoat with its red badge of a two-headed eagle was ripped and bloodstained. His armor, that had been polished through the night to a dazzling sheen, was scarred by blades and streaked with mud. He turned a bitter gaze on the other prisoners. “What’s it like over there?” he asked.
“Sour wine and good ale,” Lanferelle said, “and rain, of course.”
“Rain,” Boucicault said bitterly, “that was our undoing. Rain and mud.” He had advised against fighting Henry’s army at all, rain or no rain, fearing what the English archers could do. Better, he had said, to let them straggle dispiritedly into Calais and to concentrate France’s forces on the recapture of Harfleur, but the hot-headed royal dukes, like young Orleans, had insisted that the battle be fought. Boucicault felt a surge of bile, a temptation to spit an accusation at the duke, but he resisted it. “Damp England,” he said instead. “Tell me the women are damp too?”
“Oh, they are,” Lanferelle said.
“I’ll need women,” the Marshal of France said, staring up at the gray sky. “I doubt France can raise our ransoms, which means we’ll all probably die in England, and we’ll need something to pass the time.”
Lanferelle wondered where Melisande was. He suddenly wanted to see her, to talk to her, but the only women in sight were a handful who brought water to wounded men. Priests were offering other men the final rites, while doctors knelt beside the injured. They cut armor buckles, pulled mangled steel from pulverized flesh, and held men down as they thrashed in agony. Lanferelle saw one of his own men and, leaving Orleans and the marshal to their guards, went to crouch beside the man and flinched at the mangled ruin of his left leg that had been half severed by ax blows. Someone had tied a bow cord around the man’s thigh, but blood still seeped in thick pulses from the ragged wound. “I’m sorry, Jules,” Lanferelle said.
