Agincourt - Cornwell Bernard (читать книги онлайн без сокращений .txt) 📗
Jules could say nothing. He twisted his head from side to side. He had bitten his lower lip so hard that blood trickled down his chin.
“You’ll live, Jules,” Lanferelle said, doubting he spoke the truth, and then he twisted as he heard a bellow of anger.
He stared, incredulous. English archers were murdering the prisoners. For a moment Lanferelle thought the archers must be mad, then he saw that a man-at-arms in royal livery commanded them. French prisoners, their hands tied, tried to run away, but the archers caught them, turned them and slashed long knives across their throats. Blood was spraying from the cuts to soak the grinning archers, and more bowmen were hurrying to the slaughter with drawn blades. Some English men-at-arms were dragging prisoners away, evidently intent on preserving their prospects of ransoms, while the noblest and most valuable captives, like Marshal Boucicault and the Dukes of Orleans and Bourbon, were being guarded against the massacre, but the rest were being ruthlessly killed. Lanferelle understood then. The King of England was frightened of the prisoners attacking the rear of his line when the last French battle made its assault and to prevent that he was killing the captives, and though that made sense it still astonished Lanferelle. Then he saw archers coming toward him and he patted Jules’s shoulder. “Pretend to be dead, Jules,” he said. He could think of no other way of preventing the man’s killing for he could not defend him without weapons, and so he hurried away in search of Sir John. Sir John, he was sure, would protect him, and if he could not find Sir John he would try to reach the Tramecourt woods and hide in its briar thickets.
Some prisoners tried to fight back, but they were unarmed and the archers felled them with poleaxes. The bowmen moved deftly in the mud, killing with a horrible efficiency. The English destriers, almost a thousand saddled stallions, were at the southern end of the field and a handful of prisoners tried to reach them, but some of the pageboys who guarded the horses mounted and drove the fugitives back to where the archers killed. There was panic and blood and screams as men died and as others were herded toward the slaughter-men. More archers came to the killing, and the prisoners blundered through the thick plow in search of an escape that did not exist. It did not exist for Lanferelle either. He reached the right flank of the English line where a small forester’s cottage stood at the treeline. It was burning, and he heard the screams of dying men coming from the flames and thick smoke. The archers who had set the cottage ablaze saw Lanferelle and headed toward him and he swerved northward, but only to see more archers between him and the English line where Sir John’s standard flew. Then, to his relief, he recognized the tall figure and dark face of Nicholas Hook.
“Hook!” he shouted, but Hook did not hear him. “Melisande!” He called his daughter’s name in hope that it would pierce the turmoil of screaming. Trumpets were playing again, summoning Englishmen to their standards. “Hook!” he bellowed in desperation.
“What do you want with Hook?” a man asked, and Lanferelle turned to see four archers facing him. The man who had spoken was tall and gaunt with a lantern jaw and held a bloodied poleax. “You know Hook?” the man asked.
Lanferelle backed away.
“I asked you a question,” the man said, following Lanferelle. He was grinning, enjoying the fear on the Frenchman’s face. “Rich, are you? Cos if you’re rich then we might let you live. But you’ve got to be very rich.” He slashed the poleax at Lanferelle’s legs, hoping to cut into a knee and topple the Frenchman, but Lanferelle managed to step back without tripping and so avoided the blow. He staggered for balance in the mud.
“I’m rich,” he said desperately, “very rich.”
“He speaks English,” the archer said to his companions, “he’s rich and he speaks English.” He lunged with the poleax and the spike rammed against Lanferelle’s left cuisse, but the armor held and the point slid off Lanferelle’s thigh. “So why were you shouting for Hook?” the man asked, drawing the poleax back for another thrust.
Lanferelle raised his hands in a placatory gesture. “I am his prisoner,” he said.
The tall man laughed. “Our Nick? Got a rich prisoner, has he? That will never do.” He lunged with the poleax, striking the point onto Lanferelle’s breastplate and Lanferelle staggered backward, but again was not tripped. He glanced around desperately, hoping to see a fallen weapon and the tall English archer grinned at the fear on the Frenchman’s bloodied face. The archer was wearing a haubergeon over a mail coat, and the padded jacket had been slashed so that the wool stuffing hung in tattered blood-crusted clumps. His red cross of Saint George had run in the rain so that his short surcoat, patterned with moon and stars, looked blood red. “We can’t have Nick Hook being rich,” the man said, and raised the poleax ready to bring it down on Lanferelle’s unprotected head.
And just then Lanferelle saw the sword. It was a short and clumsy sword, a cheap sword, and it was turning in the air and for a heartbeat he thought it had been thrown at him, then realized it was being thrown to him. The blade circled, came over the tall archer’s shoulder, and Lanferelle snatched at it and somehow caught the hilt, but the ax was already falling, driven with an archer’s huge strength and Lanferelle had no time to parry, only to throw himself forward, inside the blade’s swing, and he drove his armored weight into the archer’s chest to throw him backward. The ax shaft struck his left arm and Lanferelle brought up the sword, but with no strength in the cut that wasted itself on the man’s arrow bag. One of the other archers struck with a poleax, but Lanferelle had recovered now and threw the lunge off with his blade that he flicked back with his extraordinary speed to slash across the second man’s face. That man reeled away, blood flowing from a shattered nose and split cheek as Lanferelle stepped back again, sword ready for the tall man.
Three archers faced Lanferelle now, but two had no stomach for the fight, which left the tall man alone. He glanced around to see Hook approaching. “Bastard,” he spat at Hook, “you gave him that sword!”
“He’s my prisoner,” Hook said.
“And the king said to kill the prisoners!”
“Then kill him, Tom,” Hook said, amused. “Kill him!”
Tom Perrill looked back to the Frenchman. He saw the feral look in Lanferelle’s eyes, remembered the speed with which the man had evaded and parried and so he lowered the poleax. “You kill him, Hook,” he sneered.
“My lord,” Hook spoke to Lanferelle now, “this man was offered money to rape your daughter. He failed, but so long as he lives your Melisande is in danger.”
“Then kill him,” Lanferelle said.
“I promised God I wouldn’t.”
“But I made no promise to God,” Lanferelle said and flicked the cheap sword at Tom Perrill’s face, forcing the archer back. Perrill glanced wide-eyed at Hook, unable to hide his fear and astonishment, then turned back to Lanferelle, who was smiling. The Frenchman’s weapon was puny and cheap, far outranged by the poleax, but Lanferelle showed a blithe confidence as he stepped forward.
“Kill him!” Perrill shouted at his companions, but neither of them moved, and Perrill thrust the ax forward in a desperate stab at Lanferelle’s midriff and the Frenchman swept the blade aside with contemptuous ease, then simply raised the sword and gave one lunge.
The blade sliced into Perrill’s gullet, starting a gush of blood. The archer stared at his killer, his tongue slowly pushed out and blood ran from it to pour thick and silent down the sword to soak Lanferelle’s ungauntleted hand. For a heartbeat the two men were motionless, then Perrill dropped and Lanferelle wrenched the blade loose and tossed it to Hook.
