Azincourt

‘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 grey 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 mouldy 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 recognised 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 armour 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 armour, 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 armour. ‘Believe me, boy,’ the old man went on grimly, ‘you’ll be killing soon.’

‘I will?’

Wilkinson gave a brief, humourless 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 towards 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 coloured 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 armour 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 smelt 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 help you?’ a sour voice interrupted his prayers. Hook turned and saw John Wilkinson.

‘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 towards 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 shrivelled 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.’

‘He was a …’

‘Heretic, I know. You said. But every martyr was killed because someone stronger disagreed with what he believed. Or what she believed. Christ on His cross, boy, Jesus Himself was crucified for heresy! Why the hell else do you think they nailed Him up? Did you kill women too?’

‘I didn’t,’ Hook said uncomfortably.

‘But there were women?’ Wilkinson asked, looking at Hook. He saw the answer in Hook’s face and grimaced. ‘Oh, I’m sure God was delighted with that day’s work!’ The old man shook his head in disgust before reaching into a purse hanging from his belt. He took out a handful of what Hook presumed were coins and dropped them into the huge copper jar that stood by the altar to receive the tribute of pilgrims. A priest had been watching the two English archers suspiciously, but visibly relaxed when he heard the sound of metal falling onto metal in the big jar. ‘Arrowheads,’ Wilkinson explained with a grin. ‘Old rusted broadheads that are no good any more. Now why don’t you kneel and say a prayer to Crispin and Crispinian?’

Hook hesitated. God, he was sure, would have seen Wilkinson drop valueless arrowheads into the jar instead of coins, and the threat of hell’s fires suddenly seemed very close and so Hook hurriedly took a coin from his own pouch and dropped it into the copper jar. ‘Good lad,’ Wilkinson said, ‘the bishop will be right glad of that. It’ll pay for a sup of his ale, won’t it?’

‘Why pray to Crispin and Crispinian?’ Hook asked Wilkinson.

‘Because they’re the local saints, boy. That’s their job, to listen to prayers from Soissons, so they’re the best saints to pray to here.’

So Hook went to his knees and prayed to Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian that they would beg forgiveness for his sin in London, and he prayed that they would keep him safe in this their town of martyrdom and send him home unscathed to England. The prayer did not feel as powerful as those he had addressed to the mother of Christ, but it made sense, he decided, to pray to the two saints because this was their town and they would surely keep a special watch on those who prayed to them in Soissons.

‘I’m done, lad,’ Wilkinson announced briskly. He was pushing something into his pocket and Hook, moving to the altar’s flank, saw that the frontal’s end, where it hung down to the floor, was frayed and ragged because a great square had been crudely cut away. The old man grinned. ‘Silk, lad, silk. I need silk thread for arrows, so I just stole it.’