Azincourt

And Hook saved his soul.

He dropped through the hole in the attic floor. He forgot his sword, instead drawing the thick-bladed knife that he had once used to eviscerate deer carcasses. He fell just behind the man who could not see because his mail coat was over his head, but he heard Hook’s arrival and he turned just as Hook’s blade ripped across his belly. Nicholas Hook gutted the man. The strength of an archer’s right arm was in the cut and the blade went deep and the guts slithered out like wet eels sliding from a slit sack as the man gave a strangulated cry that was muffled by the heavy coat shrouding his head, and he cried again as the knife gave a second cut, upwards this time as Hook pushed his knife hand deep into the man’s ruined belly to drive the blade up under the ribcage to find and puncture the would-be rapist’s heart.

The man dropped back onto the bed and was dead before he hit the pallet.

And Hook, blood-wet to his elbow, stared down at his victim.

He realised later that the down-filled pallet had saved his life for it soaked up the blood that otherwise would have dripped through the floorboards to alarm the men beneath. There were two of them, both wearing Sir Roger’s livery, but Hook, standing in fear over his victim, noticed that the dead man’s surcoat was made of finely woven linen, much finer than the usual cheap surcoat. He moved away from the hatch in the floor. The two men were ransacking a store cupboard and seemed oblivious of the killing that had just occurred above their heads.

The dead man’s mail coat was tight-linked and polished, studded with the buckles that had anchored his plate armour. Hook crouched and tugged the coat clear of the man’s head and saw that he had killed Sir Roger Pallaire. Sir Roger, ostensibly a Burgundian ally, had been left alive to rape and steal, which surely meant that Sir Roger had been secretly on the side of the French. Hook tried to comprehend that betrayal, while the naked girl stared at him with eyes and mouth wide open. She looked scared and Hook feared she was about to scream and so he put a finger to his lips, but she shook her head and suddenly began to make small desperate noises, half moans, half gasps, and Hook frowned at first, then understood that silence was more suspicious than the noise of her distress. That was clever of her, he thought. He nodded at her, then cut away a blood-drenched purse attached to Sir Roger’s belt. He also pulled Sir Roger’s surcoat clear of the mail coat and tossed it with the purse into the attic, then reached up and gripped one of the beams. He pulled himself into the roof space, then stretched his right arm for the girl.

She turned away and Hook hissed at her to come with him, but the girl knew what she wanted. She spat at Sir Roger’s corpse, then spat a second time before giving Hook her hand. He pulled her up as easily as he hauled back a bowstring. He gestured at the surcoat and purse and she scooped them up, then followed him along the attic. He pushed through the flimsy wattle screen that divided the roof space and so led her into the neighbouring attic. He trod carefully as the light diminished. He went to the very end, three houses down from where he had killed Sir Roger, and he gestured at the girl again, motioning her to crouch by the gable wall, and then, working slowly so as to make as little noise as possible, he pulled down the roof thatch.

It took maybe an hour. He not only dragged down the thatch, but forced some pegged rafters off the ridge timber, and when he had finished he reckoned it looked as though the roof had collapsed and he and the girl crept under the straw and timbers and huddled there. He had made a hiding place.

And all he could do was wait. The girl sometimes spoke, but Hook had learned little French during his stay in Soissons and he did not understand what she said. He hushed her, and after a while she leaned against him and fell asleep, though sometimes she would whimper and Hook awkwardly tried to soothe her. She was wearing Sir Roger’s surcoat, still damp with his blood. Hook untied the purse’s strings and saw coins, gold and silver; the price, he suspected, of betrayal.

Dawn was smoky grey. Sir Roger’s gutted corpse was found before the sun came up and there was a great hue and cry and Hook heard the men ransacking the row of houses beneath him, but his hiding place was cunningly made and no one thought to look in the tangle of straw and timber. The girl woke then and Hook laid a finger on her lips and she shivered as she clung to him. Hook’s fear was still there, but it had settled into a resignation, and somehow the company of the girl gave him a hope that had not been in his soul the night before. Or perhaps, he thought, the twin saints of Soissons were protecting him and he made the sign of the cross and sent a prayer of gratitude to Crispin and Crispinian. They were silent now, but he had done what they had told him to do, and then he wondered if it had been Crispinian who had spoken to him in London. That seemed unlikely, but who had it been? God? Yet that question was unimportant against his realisation that he had done what he had failed to do in London and so hope flickered inside him. Hope of redemption and survival. It was a feeble hope, small as a candle’s flame in a high wind, but it was there.

The city had become quieter as the dawn approached, but as the sun rose over the cathedral the noise began again. There were screams and moans and cries. There was a gap in the ragged collapsed thatch and Hook could see down into the small square in front of the church of Saint Antoine-le-Petit. The two girls who had been tied to the barrels were gone, though the crossbowmen and men-at-arms were still there. A brindled dog sniffed at the corpse of a nun who lay with her head in a pool of black blood and with her habit pulled up above her waist. A man-at-arms rode through the square, a naked girl draped belly down across the saddle in front of him. He slapped her rump two-handed, as though he played a drum, and the watching men laughed.

Hook waited. He needed to piss badly, but dared not move, so he wet his breeches and the girl smelt it and grimaced, but had to pee herself a moment later. She began to cry softly and Hook held her close until her tears stopped. She murmured to him, and he murmured back, and neither understood the other, but both were comforted.

Then the sound of more hooves made Hook twist around to peer through a gap in the straw. He could see down into the square where a score or more of horsemen had arrived in front of the church. One man carried a banner of golden lilies on a blue field, the whole surrounded by a red border blazoned with white dots. The horsemen were in armour, though none wore a helmet, and they were followed by armoured men-at-arms who came on foot.

One of the newly arrived riders wore a surcoat that showed three hawks on a green field and Hook realised the horseman must be an Englishman who had been in Sir Roger’s service, and it was that man who spurred his horse to the church and, leaning from the saddle, pounded a shortened lance against the door. He shouted something, though Hook was too far away to hear, but it must have been words of reassurance because, a moment later, the church door opened and Sergeant Smithson peered out.

The two men talked, then Smithson went back into the church, and there was a long pause. Hook watched, wondering what was happening, then the church door swung open again and the English archers filed warily into the sunlight. It seemed that Sir Roger had kept his word and Hook, watching from the ravaged gable, wondered if there was any chance of joining the bowmen who now gathered in front of the Englishman’s horse. Sir Roger must have agreed that the archers would be spared, for the French appeared to be welcoming them. Smithson’s men piled their bows, arrow bags and swords by the church door and then, one by one, knelt to a horseman whose stallion was gaudy with the golden lilies on their blue cloth. The rider wore a gold coronet and bright polished armour and he raised a hand in what appeared to be a kindly benediction. Only John Wilkinson hung back close to the church.

If I can reach the street, Hook thought, then I can run to join my countrymen. ‘No,’ Saint Crispinian whispered in Hook’s head, startling him. The girl was clutching him.

‘No?’ Hook whispered aloud.

‘No,’ Saint Crispinian said again, very firmly.

The girl asked Hook something and he hushed her. ‘Wasn’t talking to you, lass,’ he whispered.

The blue and gold horseman held his mailed fist high for a few heartbeats, then abruptly dropped his hand.

And the massacre began.

The dismounted men-at-arms drew swords and attacked the kneeling archers. The first of the bowmen died swiftly because they were unprepared, but others had time to draw their short knives and fight back, but the Frenchmen were in plate armour and they carried the longer blades and they came at the archers from every side. Sir Roger’s man-at-arms watched. John Wilkinson snatched up a sword from the pile by the church door, but a man-at-arms ran him through with a shortened lance, and a second Frenchman cut down through his neck so that Wilkinson’s blood sprayed high on the door’s stone archway, which was carved with angels and fishes. Some archers were taken alive, bludgeoned back to the ground and guarded there by the grinning men-at-arms.

The man in the golden coronet turned and rode away, followed by his standard-bearer, his squire, his page and his mounted followers. The Englishman wearing the badge of the three hawks rode with them, turning his back on the surviving archers who called out for mercy. But there was no mercy.

The French had long memories of defeat and they hated the men who drew the long war bow. At Crécy the French had outnumbered the English and had trapped them, and the French had charged across the low valley to rid the world of the impudent invaders, and it had been the archers who had defeated them by filling the sky with goose-fledged death and so cut down noble knights with their long-nosed arrows. Then, at Poitiers, the archers had ripped apart the chivalry of France and at that day’s end the King of France was a prisoner, and all those insults still rankled, and so there was no mercy.

Hook and the girl listened. There were thirty or forty archers still alive and the French first chopped two fingers from each man’s right hand so they could never again draw a bow. A big-bellied, wide-grinned Frenchman took the fingers with a mallet and chisel, and some of the archers took the agony in silence, while others had to be dragged protesting to the barrel on which their hands were spread. Hook thought the revenge would end there, but it had only begun. The French wanted more than fingers, they wanted pain and death.

A tall man, mounted on a high horse, watched the archers’ deaths. The man had long black hair that fell below his armoured shoulders and Hook, who had the eyesight of a hawk, could clearly see the man’s handsome, sun-darkened face. He had a sword-blade of a nose, a wide mouth and a long jaw shadowed by stubble. Over his armour he wore a bright surcoat that showed a golden sun from which rays snaked and shot, and on the bright sun was an eagle’s head. The girl did not see the man. She had her face buried in Hook’s arms. She could hear the screams, but she would not watch. She whimpered whenever a man screamed under the exquisite pain that the French exacted as revenge.

Hook watched. He reckoned the tall man who wore the eagle and the sun could have stopped the torture and murder, but the man did nothing. He sat in his saddle and watched impassively as the French stripped the surviving archers naked, then took their eyes with the points of long knives. The men-at-arms taunted the newly-blinded archers and scoured out their sockets with sharp blades. One Frenchman pretended to eat an eyeball, and the others laughed. The long-haired man did not laugh, he just observed, and his face showed nothing as the blinded men were laid flat on the cobbles to be castrated. Their screams filled the city that was already filled with screaming. It was only when the last blind Englishman had been gelded that the handsome man on the handsome warhorse left the square and the archers were left to bleed to death, sightless under a summer sky. Death took a long time, and Hook shivered even though the air was warm. Saint Crispinian was silent. A naked woman, her breasts cut off and her body red with blood, collapsed amidst the dying archers and wept there until a Frenchman, tired of her tears, casually stove in her skull with a battle-axe. Dogs sniffed the dying.

The sack of the city continued all day. The cathedral and the parish churches and the nunnery and the priories were all plundered. Women and children were raped and raped again, and their menfolk were murdered and God turned His face away from Soissons. The Sire de Bournonville was executed, and he was fortunate because he died without being tortured first. The castle, supposedly a refuge, had fallen without a fight as the French, permitted into the town by the treachery of Sir Roger, found its gate open and its portcullis raised. The Burgundians died, and only Sir Roger’s men, complicit in their dead leader’s betrayal, had been allowed to live as the city was put to the sword. The citizens had resented their Burgundian garrison and had never abandoned their loyalty to the King of France, but now, in a welter of blood, rape and theft, the French rewarded that loyalty with massacre.

‘Je suis Melisande,’ the girl said over and over, and Hook did not understand at first, but at last realised she was saying her name.

‘Melisande?’ he asked.

‘Oui,’ she said.

‘Nicholas.’

‘Nicholas,’ she repeated.

‘Just Nick,’ he said.

‘Jusnick?’

‘Nick.’

‘Nick.’ They spoke in whispers, they waited, they listened to the sound of a city screaming, and they smelt the ale and the blood.

‘I don’t know how we get out of this place,’ Hook said to Melisande, who did not understand. She nodded anyway, then fell asleep under the straw with her head on his shoulder and Hook closed his eyes and prayed to Crispinian. Help us out of the city, he begged the saint, and help me get home. Except, he thought with sudden despair, an outlaw has no home.

‘You will reach home,’ Saint Crispinian said to him.

Hook paused, wondering how a saint could speak to him. Had he imagined the voice? Yet it seemed real, as real as the screams that had marked the death of archers. Then he wondered how he could escape the city because the French would surely have sentries on all the gates.

‘Then use the breach,’ Saint Crispinian suggested gently.

‘We’ll go out through the breach,’ Hook said to Melisande, but she was still asleep.

As night fell Hook watched pigs, evidently released from their sties behind the city’s houses, feasting on the dead archers. Soissons was quieter now, the victors’ appetites slaked on bodies, ale and wine. The moon rose, but God sent high clouds that first misted the silver, then hid it, and in the darkness Hook and Melisande made their way downstairs, and out into the reeking street. It was the middle of the night and men snored in broken houses. No one guarded the breach. Melisande, swathed in Sir Roger’s bloody surcoat, held Hook’s hand as they clambered over the wall’s rubble, and then as they crossed the low ground where the tanning pits stank and walked uphill past the abandoned besiegers’ camp and so into the higher woods where no blood reeked and no corpses rotted.

Soissons was dead.

But Hook and Melisande lived.

‘The saints talk to me,’ he told her in the dawn. ‘Crispinian does, anyway. The other fellow is grimmer. He sometimes speaks, but he doesn’t say much.’

‘Crispinian,’ Melisande repeated, and seemed pleased that she understood one thing he said.

‘He seems nice,’ Hook said, ‘and he’s looking after me. Looking after you too, now, I reckon!’ He smiled at her, suddenly confident. ‘We must get you some proper clothes, lass. You look right strange in that coat.’

Though, if Melisande looked strange, she was also lovely. Hook did not notice that until the first dawn in the high woods when the sun shot a million lances of green-shimmering gold through leaves and branches to light a slender, high-boned face wreathed in hair as black as night. She had grey eyes, pale as moonlight, a long nose and a stubborn cast to her chin, which, as Hook was to learn, reflected her character. She was pitifully thin, but had a sinewy strength and a scorn of weakness. Her mouth was wide, expressive and talkative. Hook was eventually to discover that she had been a novice in a house of nuns who were forbidden to speak, and in those first days it seemed Melisande needed to compensate for months of enforced silence. He understood nothing, yet he listened entranced as the girl chattered on.

They stayed the first day in the woods. From time to time horsemen appeared in the valley below the beeches. They were the victors of the siege of Soissons, but they were not dressed for war. Some were hawking, others seemed to be riding for the pleasure of it, and none interfered with the few fugitives who had apparently escaped Soissons and were now walking southwards, yet still Hook did not want to risk an encounter with a Frenchman and so he stayed hidden until nightfall. He had decided to head westwards, towards England, though being an outlaw meant that England was as dangerous as France, but he did not know where else he could go. He and Melisande travelled by night, their way lit by the moon. Their food was stolen, usually a lamb Hook took in the darkness. He feared the dogs that guarded the flocks, but perhaps it was Saint Crispin with his shepherd’s crook who protected him, for the dogs never stirred as Hook cut an animal’s throat. He would carry the small carcass back to the deep woods where he would make a fire and cook the flesh. ‘You can go away on your own,’ he told Melisande one morning.