Azincourt

‘Yes, Sir Edward.’

‘Henry of Calais is recruiting archers,’ Sir Edward said. A man in royal livery was carrying a burning log towards the second pyre where the other Lollard leader was tied to the tall stake. ‘They need archers in Picardy,’ Sir Edward said, ‘and they pay good money.’

‘Picardy,’ Hook repeated the name dully. He thought it must be a town somewhere else in England.

‘Earn yourself some money in Picardy, Hook,’ Sir Edward said, ‘because God knows you’ll need it.’

Hook hesitated. ‘I’m an outlaw?’ he asked nervously.

‘You’re a dead man, Hook,’ Sir Edward said, ‘and dead men are outside the law. You’re a dead man because my orders are that you’re to wait in the tavern and then be taken back to the judgment of the manor court, and Lord Slayton will have no choice but to hang you. So go and do what I just said.’

But before Hook could obey there was a shout from the next corner. ‘Hats off!’ men called abruptly, ‘hats off!’ The shout and a clatter of hooves announced the arrival of a score of horsemen who swept into the wide square where their horses fanned out, pranced, and then stood with breath smoking from their nostrils, and hooves pawing the mud. Men and women were clawing off their hats and kneeling in the mud.

‘Down, boy,’ Sir Edward said to Hook.

The leading horseman was young, not much older than Hook, but his long-nosed face showed a serene certainty as he swept his cold gaze across the marketplace. His face was narrow, his eyes were dark and his mouth thin-lipped and grim. He was clean-shaven, and the razor seemed to have abraded his skin so that it looked raw-scraped. He rode a black horse that was richly bridled with polished leather and glittering silver. He had black boots, black breeches, a black tunic and a fleece-lined cloak of dark purple cloth. His hat was black velvet and sported a black feather, while at his side hung a black-scabbarded sword. He looked all around the marketplace, then urged the horse forward to watch the one woman and three men who now jerked and twisted from the bell ropes hanging from the Bull’s beam. A vagary of wind gusted spark-laden smoke at his stallion, which whinnied and shied away. The rider soothed it by patting its neck with a black-gloved hand, and Hook saw that the man wore jewelled rings over his gloves. ‘They were given a chance to repent?’ the horseman demanded.

‘Many chances, sire,’ Sir Martin answered unctuously. The priest had hurried out of the tavern yard and was down on one knee. He made the sign of the cross and his haggard face looked almost saintly, as though he suffered for his Lord God. He could appear that way, his devil-dog-bitten eyes suddenly full of pain and tenderness and compassion.

‘Then their deaths,’ the young man said harshly, ‘are pleasing to God and they are pleasing to me. England will be rid of heresy!’ His eyes, brown and intelligent, rested briefly on Nick Hook, who immediately dropped his gaze and stared at the mud until the black-dressed horseman spurred away towards the second fire, which had just been lit. But, in the moment before Hook had looked away, he had seen the scar on the young man’s face. It was a battle scar, showing where an arrow had slashed into the corner between nose and eye. It should have killed, yet God had decreed that the man should live.

‘You know who that is, Hook?’ Sir Edward asked quietly.

Hook did not know for sure, but nor was it hard to guess that he was seeing, for the first time in his life, the Earl of Chester, the Duke of Aquitaine and the Lord of Ireland. He was seeing Henry, by the grace of God, the King of England.

And, according to all who claimed to understand the tangled webs of royal ancestry, the King of France too.

The flames reached the second man and he screamed. Henry, the fifth King of England to carry that name, calmly watched the Lollard’s soul go to hell.

‘Go, Hook,’ Sir Edward said quietly.

‘Why, Sir Edward?’ Hook asked.

‘Because Lord Slayton doesn’t want you dead,’ Sir Edward said, ‘and perhaps God did speak to you, and because we all need His grace. Especially today. So just go.’

And Nicholas Hook, archer and outlaw, went.

PART ONE (#u2f14002f-e106-572e-aa7f-2d54eea9b193)

Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian (#u2f14002f-e106-572e-aa7f-2d54eea9b193)

The River Aisne swirled slow through a wide valley edged with low wooded hills. It was spring and the new leaves were a startling green. Long weeds swayed in the river where it looped around the city of Soissons.

The city had walls, a cathedral and a castle. It was a fortress that guarded the Flanders road, which led north from Paris, and now it was held by the enemies of France. The garrison wore the jagged red cross of Burgundy and above the castle flew the gaudy flag of Burgundy’s duke, a flag that quartered the royal arms of France with blue and yellow stripes, all of it badged with a rampant lion.

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 travelled 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 travelled 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 grey 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 centre 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 it, but if you don’t have feathers and ash and horn and silk and steel and varnish you might as well spit at your enemy. Ever killed a man, Hook?’