Agincourt by Bernard Cornwell
The rampant lion was at war with the lilies of France, and Nicholas Hook understood none of it. “You don’t need to understand it,” Henry of Calais had told him in London, “on account of it not being your goddam business. It’s the goddam French falling out amongst themselves, that’s all you need to know, and one side is paying us money to fight, and I hire archers and I send them to kill whoever they’re told to kill. Can you shoot?”
“I can shoot.”
“We’ll see, won’t we?”
Nicholas Hook could shoot, and so he was in Soissons, beneath the flag with its stripes, lion, and lilies. He had no idea where Burgundy was, he knew only that it had a duke called John the Fearless, and that the duke was first cousin to the King of France.
“And he’s mad, the French king is,” Henry of Calais had told Hook in England. “He’s mad as a spavined polecat, the stupid bastard thinks he’s made of glass. He’s frightened that someone will give him a smart tap and he’ll break into a thousand pieces. The truth is he’s got turnips for brains, he does, and he’s fighting against the duke who isn’t mad. He’s got brains for brains.”
“Why are they fighting?” Hook had asked.
“How in God’s name would I know? Or care? What I care about, son, is that the duke’s money comes from the bankers. There.” He had slapped some silver on the tavern table. Earlier that day Hook had gone to the Spital Fields beyond London’s Bishop’s Gate and there he had loosed sixteen arrows at a straw-filled sack hanging from a dead tree a hundred and fifty paces away. He had loosed very fast, scarce time for a man to count to five between each shaft, and twelve of his sixteen arrows had slashed into the sack while the other four had just grazed it. “You’ll do,” Henry of Calais had said grudgingly when he was told of the feat.
The silver went before Hook had left London. He had never been so lonely or so far from his home village and so his coins went on ale, tavern whores, and on a pair of tall boots that fell apart long before he reached Soissons. He had seen the sea for the first time on that journey, and he had scarce believed what he saw, and he still sometimes tried to remember what it looked like. He imagined a lake in his head, only a lake that never ended and was angrier than any water he had ever seen before. He had traveled with twelve other archers and they had been met in Calais by a dozen men-at-arms who wore the livery of Burgundy and Hook remembered thinking they must be English because the yellow lilies on their coats were like those he had seen on the king’s men in London, but these men-at-arms spoke a strange tongue that neither Hook nor his companions understood. After that they had walked all the way to Soissons because there was no money to buy the horses that every archer expected to receive from his lord in England. Two horse-drawn carts had accompanied their march, the carts loaded with spare bowstaves and thick, rattling sheaves of arrows.
They were a strange group of archers. Some were old men, a few limped from ancient wounds, and most were drunkards.
“I scrape the barrel,” Henry of Calais had told Hook before they had left England, “but you look fresh, boy. So what did you do wrong?”
“Wrong?”
“You’re here, aren’t you? Are you outlaw?”
Hook nodded. “I think so.”
“Think so! You either are or you aren’t. So what did you do wrong?”
“I hit a priest.”
“You did?” Henry, a stout man with a bitter, closed face and a bald head, had looked interested for a moment, then shrugged. “You want to be careful about the church these days, boy. The black crows are in a burning mood. So is the king. Tough little bastard, our Henry. Have you ever seen him?”
“Once,” Hook said.
“See that scar on his face? Took an arrow there, smack in the cheek and it didn’t kill him! And ever since he’s been convinced that God is his best friend and now he’s set on burning God’s enemies. Right, tomorrow you’re going to help fetch arrows from the Tower, then you’ll sail to Calais.”
And so Nicholas Hook, outlaw and archer, had traveled to Soissons where he wore the jagged red cross of Burgundy and walked the high city wall. He was part of an English contingent hired by the Duke of Burgundy and commanded by a supercilious man-at-arms named Sir Roger Pallaire. Hook rarely saw Pallaire, taking his orders instead from a centenar named Smithson who spent his time in a tavern called L’Oie, the Goose. “They all hate us,” Smithson had greeted his newest troops, “so don’t walk the city at night on your own. Not unless you want a knife in your back.”
The garrison was Burgundian, but the citizens of Soissons were loyal to their imbecile king, Charles VI of France. Hook, even after three months in the fortress-city, still did not understand why the Burgundians and the French so loathed each other, for they seemed indistinguishable to him. They spoke the same language and, he was told, the Duke of Burgundy was not only the mad king’s cousin, but also father-in-law to the French dauphin. “Family quarrel, lad,” John Wilkinson told him, “worst kind of quarrel there is.”
Wilkinson was an old man, of at least forty years, who served as bowyer, fletcher, and arrow-maker to the English archers hired by the garrison. He lived in a stable at the Goose where his files, saws, drawknives, chisels, and adzes hung neatly on the wall. He had asked Smithson for an assistant and Hook, the youngest newcomer, was chosen. “And at least you’re competent,” Wilkinson offered Hook the grudging compliment, “it’s mostly rubbish that arrives here. Men and weapons, both rubbish. They call themselves archers, but half of them can’t hit a barrel at fifty paces. And as for Sir Roger?” The old man spat. “He’s here for the money. Lost everything at home. I hear he has debts of over five hundred pounds! Five hundred pounds! Can you even imagine that?” Wilkinson picked up an arrow and shook his gray head. “And we have to fight for Sir Richard with this rubbish.”
“The arrows came from the king,” Hook said defensively. He had helped carry the sheaves from the Tower’s undercroft.
Wilkinson grinned. “What the king did, God save his soul, is find some arrows from old King Edward’s reign. I know what I’ll do, he said to himself, I’ll sell these useless arrows to Burgundy!” Wilkinson tossed the arrow to Hook. “Look at that!”
The arrow, made of ash and longer than Hook’s arm, was bent. “Bent,” Hook said.
“Bent as a bishop! Can’t shoot with that! Be shooting around corners!”
It was hot in Wilkinson’s stable. The old man had a fire burning in a round brick oven on top of which a cauldron of water steamed. He took the bent arrow from Hook and laid it with a dozen others across the cauldron’s top, then carefully placed a thick pad of folded cloth over the ash shafts and weighted the cloth’s center with a stone. “I steam them, boy,” Wilkinson explained, “then I weights them, and with any luck I straightens them, and then the fledging falls off because of the steam. Half aren’t fledged anyway!”
A brazier burned beneath a second smaller cauldron that stank of hoof glue. Wilkinson used the glue to replace the goose feathers that fledged the arrows. “And there’s no silk,” he grumbled, “so I’m having to use sinew.” The sinew bound the slit feathers to the arrow’s tail, reinforcing the glue. “But sinew’s no good,” Wilkinson complained, “it dries out, it shrinks and it goes brittle. I’ve told Sir Roger we need silk thread, but he don’t understand. He thinks an arrow is just an arrow, but it isn’t.” He tied a knot in the sinew, then turned the arrow to inspect the nock, which would lie on the string when the arrow was shot. The nock was reinforced by a sliver of horn that prevented the bow’s cord from splitting the ash shaft. The horn resisted Wilkinson’s attempt to dislodge it and he grunted with reluctant satisfaction before taking another arrow from its leather discs. A pair of the stiff discs, which had indented edges, held two dozen arrows apiece, holding them apart so that the fragile goose-feather fledgings would not get crushed while the arrows were transported. “Feathers and horn, ash and silk, steel and varnish,” Wilkinson said softly. “You can have a bow good as you like and an archer to match
“Yes.”
Wilkinson heard the belligerent tone and grinned. “Murder? Battle? Have you ever killed a man in battle?”
“No,” Hook confessed.
“Ever killed a man with your bow?”
“One, a poacher.”
“Did he shoot at you?”
“No.”
“Then you’re not an archer, are you? Kill a man in battle, Hook, and you can call yourself an archer. How did you kill your last man?”
“I hanged him.”
“And why did you do that?”
“Because he was a heretic,” Hook explained.
Wilkinson pushed a hand through his thinning gray hair. He was thin as a weasel with a lugubrious face and sharp eyes that now stared belligerently at Hook. “You hanged a heretic?” he asked. “Short of firewood, are they, in England these days? And when was this brave act done?”
“Last winter.”
“A Lollard, was he?” Wilkinson asked, then smirked when Hook nodded. “So you hanged a man because he disagreed with the church about a morsel of bread? ‘I’m the living bread come from heaven,’ says the Lord, and the Lord said nothing about being dead bread on a priest’s platter, did He? He didn’t say He was moldy bread, did He? No, He said He was the living bread, son, but no doubt you knew better than Him what you were doing.”
Hook recognized the challenge in the old man’s words, but he did not feel capable of meeting it and so he said nothing. He had never cared much for religion or for God, not till he heard the voice in his head, and now he sometimes wondered if he really had heard that voice. He remembered the girl in the stable of the London tavern, and how her eyes had pleaded with him and how he had failed her. He remembered the stench of burning flesh, the smoke dipping low in the small wind to whirl about the lilies and leopards of England’s badge. He remembered the face of the young king, scarred and unforgiving.
“This one,” Wilkinson said, picking up an arrow with a warped tip, “we can make into a proper killer. Something to send a gentry’s soul to hell.” He put the arrow on a wooden block and selected a knife that he tested for sharpness against his thumbnail. He sliced off the top six inches of the arrow with one quick cut, then tossed it to Hook. “Make yourself useful, lad, get the bodkin off.”
The arrow’s head was a narrow piece of steel a fraction longer than Hook’s middle finger. It was three sided and sharpened to a point. There were no barbs. The bodkin was heavier than most arrowheads because it had been made to pierce armor and, at close range, when shot from one of the great bows that only a man muscled like Hercules could draw, it would slice through the finest plate. It was a knight-killer, and Hook twisted the head until the glue inside the socket gave way and the bodkin came loose.
“You know how they harden those points?” Wilkinson asked.
“No.”
Wilkinson was bending over the stump of the arrow. He was using a fine saw, its blade no longer than his little finger, to make a deep wedge-shaped notch in the cut end. “What they do,” he said, staring at his work as he spoke, “is throw bones on the fire when they make the iron. Bones, boy, bones. Dry bones, dead bones. Now why would dead bones in burning charcoal turn iron into steel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nor do I, but it does. Bones and charcoal,” Wilkinson said. He held the notched arrow up, blew some sawdust from the cut, and nodded in satisfaction. “I knew a fellow in Kent who used human bones. He reckoned the skull of a child made the best steel, and perhaps he was right. The bastard used to dig them up from graveyards, break them into fragments, and burn them on his furnace. Babies’ skulls and charcoal! Oh, he was a rotten turd of a man, but his arrows could kill. Oh, they could kill. They didn’t punch through armor, they whispered through!” Wilkinson had selected a six-inch shaft of oak while he spoke. One end had already been sharpened into a wedge that he fitted into the notched ash of the cut arrow. “Look at that,” he said proudly, holding up the scarfed joint, “a perfect fit. I’ve been doing this too long!” He held out his hand for the bodkin, which he slipped onto the head of the oak. “I’ll glue it all together,” he said, “and you can kill someone with it.” He admired the arrow. The oak made the head even heavier, so the weight of steel and wood would help punch the arrow through plate armor. “Believe me, boy,” the old man went on grimly, “you’ll be killing soon.”
“I will?”
Wilkinson gave a brief, humorless laugh. “The King of France might be mad, but he’s not going to let the Duke of Burgundy hold on to Soissons. We’re too close to Paris! The king’s men will be here soon enough, and if they get into the town, boy, you go to the castle, and if they get into the castle, you kill yourself. The French don’t like the English and they hate English archers, and if they capture you, boy, you’ll die screaming.” He looked up at Hook. “I’m serious, young Hook. Better to cut your own throat than be caught by a Frenchman.”
“If they come we’ll fight them off,” Hook said.
“We will, will we?” Wilkinson asked with a harsh laugh. “Pray that the duke’s army comes first, because if the French come, young Hook, we’ll be trapped in Soissons like rats in a butter churn.”
And so every morning Hook would stand above the gate and stare at the road that led beside the Aisne toward Compiègne. He spent even more time gazing down into the yard of one of the many houses built outside the wall. It was a dyer’s house standing next to the town ditch and every day a girl with red hair would hang the newly colored cloths to dry on a long line, and sometimes she would look up and wave at Hook or the other archers, who would whistle back at her. One day an older woman saw the girl wave and slapped her hard for being friendly with the hated foreign soldiers, but next day the redhead was again wiggling her rump for her audience’s pleasure. And when the girl was not visible Hook watched the road for the glint of sunlight on armor or the sudden appearance of bright banners that would announce the arrival of the duke’s army or, worse, the enemy army, but the only soldiers he saw were Burgundians from the city’s garrison bringing food back to the city. Sometimes the English archers rode with those foraging parties, but they saw no enemy except the folk whose grain and livestock they stole. The country folk took refuge in the woods when the Burgundians came, but the citizens of Soissons could not hide when the soldiers ransacked their houses for hoarded food. Sire Enguerrand de Bournonville, the Burgundian commander, expected his French enemies to arrive in the early summer and he was planning to endure a long siege, and so he piled grain and salted meat in the cathedral to feed the garrison and townsfolk.
Nick Hook helped pile the food in the cathedral, which soon smelled of grain, though beneath that rich aroma was always the tang of cured leather because Soissons was famous for its cobblers and saddlers and tanners. The tanning pits were south of the town and the stench of the urine in which the hides were steeped made the air foul when the wind blew warm. Hook often wandered the cathedral, staring at the painted walls or at the rich altars decorated with silver, gold, enamel, and finely embroidered silks and linens. He had never been inside a cathedral before and the size of it, the shadows far away in the high roof, the silence of the stones, all gave him an uneasy feeling that there must be more to life than a bow, an arrow, and the muscles to use them. He did not know what that something was, but the knowledge of it had started in London when an old man, an archer, had spoken to him and when the voice had sounded in his head. One day, feeling awkward, he knelt before a statue of the Virgin Mary and he asked her forgiveness for what he had failed to do in London. He gazed up at her slightly sad face and he thought her eyes, made bright with blue and white paint, were fixed on him and in those eyes he saw reproof. Talk to me, he prayed, but there was no voice in his head. No forgiveness for Sarah’s death, he thought. He had failed God. He was cursed.
“Think she can hel
“If she can’t,” Hook asked, “who can?”
“Her son?” Wilkinson suggested caustically. The old man looked furtively around him. There were a half-dozen priests saying masses at side altars, but otherwise the only other folk in the cathedral were nuns who were hurrying across the wide nave, shepherded and guarded by priests. “Poor girls,” Wilkinson said.
“Poor?”
“You think they want to be nuns? Their parents put them here to keep them from trouble. They’re bastards of the rich, boy, locked away so they can’t have bastards of their own. Come here, I want to show you something.” He did not wait for a response, but stumped toward the cathedral’s high altar that reared golden bright beneath the astonishing arches that stood, row above row, in a semicircle at the building’s eastern end. Wilkinson knelt beside the altar and dropped his head reverently. “Take a look in the boxes, boy,” he ordered Hook.
Hook climbed to the altar where silver and gold boxes stood on either side of a gold crucifix. Most of the boxes had crystal faces and, through those distorting windows, Hook saw scraps of leather. “What are they?” he asked.
“Shoes, boy,” Wilkinson said, his head still bowed and his voice muffled.
“Shoes?”
“You put them on your feet, young Hook, to keep the mud from getting between your toes.”
The leather looked old, dark and shrunken. One reliquary held a shriveled shoe so small that Hook decided it had to be a piece of child’s footwear. “Why shoes?” he asked.
“You’ve heard of Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian?”
“No.”
“Patron saints of cobblers, boy, and of leather-workers. They made those shoes, or so we’re told, and they lived here and were probably killed here. Martyred, boy, like that old man you burned in London.”