Azincourt

Instead of sending its stone ball screaming across to the French siege-works the cannon vanished in a welter of smoke, flying metal and shredded flesh. The five gunners and the priest were killed instantly, turned to blood-red mist and ribboned meat. A man-at-arms screamed and writhed as red-hot metal sliced into his belly. Sir Roger, who had been standing next to the screaming man, stepped fastidiously away and grimaced at the blood that had spattered across the badge on his surcoat. That badge showed three hawks on a green field. ‘Tonight, Smithson,’ Sir Roger spoke amidst the blood-reeking smoke that writhed about the rampart, ‘you will meet me after sundown in Saint Antoine-le-Petit’s church. You and your whole company.’

‘Yes, sir, yes,’ Smithson said faintly, ‘of course, Sir Roger.’ The sergeant was staring at the ruined cannon. The first ten feet of the shattered barrel lay canted and ripped open, while the breech had been torn into jagged shards of smoking metal. Part of a hoop and a man’s hand lay by Hook’s feet while the gunners, hired at great expense, were nothing but eviscerated carcasses. The Sire de Bournonville, his jupon spattered with blood and scraps of flesh, made the sign of the cross, while derisive jeers sounded from the French siege lines.

‘We must plan for the assault,’ Sir Roger said, apparently oblivious to the wet horror a few paces away.

‘Very good, Sir Roger,’ Smithson said. The centenar scooped a jellied mess from his belt. ‘A Dutchman’s goddam brains,’ he said in disgust, flicking the gob towards Sir Roger who had turned and now strode away.

Sir Roger, with three men-at-arms all wearing his badge of the three hawks, met the English and Welsh archers of the Soissons garrison in the church of Saint Antoine-le-Petit just after sunset. Sir Roger’s surcoat had been washed, though the bloodstains were still faintly visible on the green linen. He stood in front of the altar, lit by guttering rushlights that burned feebly in brackets mounted on the church’s pillars, and his face still bore the distant look of a man pained to be in his present company. ‘Your job,’ he said, without any preamble once the eighty-nine archers had settled on the floor of the nave, ‘will be to defend the breach. I cannot tell you when the enemy will assault, but I can assure you it will be soon. I trust you will repel any such assault.’

‘Oh we will, Sir Roger,’ Smithson put in helpfully, ‘rely on it, sir!’

Sir Roger’s long face shuddered at the comment. Rumour in the English contingent said that he had borrowed money from Italian bankers in expectation of inheriting an estate from an uncle, but the land had passed to a cousin and Sir Roger had been left owing a fortune to unforgiving Lombards. The only hope of paying the debt was to capture and ransom a rich French knight, which was presumably why he had sold his services to the Duke of Burgundy. ‘In the event,’ he said, ‘that you fail to keep the enemy out of the city, you are to gather here, in this church.’ Those words caused a stir as men frowned and looked at each other. If they failed to defend the breach and lost the new defences behind it, then they expected to retreat to the castle.

‘Sir Roger?’ Smithson ventured hesitantly.

‘I had not invited questions,’ Sir Roger said.

‘Of your goodness, Sir Roger,’ Smithson persevered, knuckling his forehead as he spoke, ‘but wouldn’t we be safer in the castle?’

‘You will assemble here, in this church!’ Sir Roger said firmly.

‘Why not the castle?’ an archer near Hook demanded belligerently.

Sir Roger paused, searching the dim nave for whoever had spoken. He could not discover the questioner, but deigned to offer an answer anyway. ‘The townspeople,’ he finally spoke, ‘detest us. If you attempt to reach the castle you will be assaulted in the streets. This place is much closer to the breach, so come here.’ He paused again. ‘I shall endeavour to arrange a truce for you.’

There was an uncomfortable silence. Sir Roger’s explanation made some sense. The archers knew that most folk in Soissons hated them. The townspeople were French, they supported their king and hated the Burgundians, but they hated the English even more, and so it was more than likely that they would assault the archers retreating towards the castle. ‘A truce,’ Smithson said dubiously.

‘The French quarrel is with Burgundy,’ Sir Roger said, ‘not with us.’

‘Will you be joining us here, Sir Roger?’ an archer called out.

‘Of course,’ Sir Roger said. He paused, but no one spoke. ‘Fight well,’ he said distantly, ‘and remember you are Englishmen!’

‘Welshmen,’ someone intervened.

Sir Roger visibly flinched at that and then, without another word, led his three men-at-arms from the church. A chorus of protests sounded as he left. The church of Saint Antoine-le-Petit was stone-built and defensible, but not nearly so safe as the castle, though it was true the castle was at the other end of the town and Hook wondered how difficult it would be to reach that refuge if townsfolk were blocking the streets and French men-at-arms were howling through the breached ramparts. He looked up at the painted wall that showed men, women and children tumbling into hell. There were priests and even bishops among the doomed souls who fell in a screaming cascade to a lake of fire where black devils waited with leering grins and triple-barbed eel-spears. ‘You’ll wish you were in hell if the Frenchies capture you,’ Smithson said, noticing where Hook was looking. ‘You’ll all be begging for the comforts of hell if those French bastards catch you. So remember! We fight at the barricade and then, if it all goes to shit, we come here.’

‘Why here?’ a man called out.

‘Because Sir Roger knows what he’s doing,’ Smithson said, sounding anything but certain, ‘and if you’ve got sweethearts here,’ he went on with a leer, ‘make certain the little darlings come with you.’ He began thrusting his meaty hips backwards and forwards. ‘Don’t want our sweethearts left in the streets to be humped by half the French army, do we?’

Next morning, as he did each morning, Hook gazed north across the Aisne to the low wooded hills where the beleaguered garrison hoped to see a Burgundian relief force. None came. The great gun-stones whirred across the ashes of the burned houses and bit into the crumbling wall to start up their clouds of dust that settled on the river to drift seawards like pale grey stains on the water. Hook rose early every morning, before it was light, and went to the cathedral where he knelt and prayed. He had been warned not to walk the streets by himself, but the people of Soissons left him alone, perhaps scared of his height and size, or perhaps because they knew he was the one archer who prayed regularly and so tolerated him. He had abandoned praying to Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian because he reckoned they cared more about the townsfolk, their own folk, and so he prayed instead to the mother of Christ because his own mother had been called Mary and he begged the blessed virgin for forgiveness because of the girl who had died in London. On one such morning a priest knelt beside him. Hook ignored the man.

‘You’re the Englishman who prays,’ the priest said in English, stumbling over the unfamiliar language. Hook said nothing. ‘They wonder why you pray,’ the priest went on, jerking his head to indicate the women who knelt before other statues and altars.

Hook’s instinct was to go on ignoring the man, but the priest had a friendly face and a kindly voice. ‘I’m just praying,’ he said, sounding surly.

‘Are you praying for yourself?’

‘Yes,’ Hook admitted. He prayed so that God would forgive him and lift the curse that he was certain blighted his life.

‘Then ask something for someone else,’ the priest suggested gently. ‘God listens to those prayers more readily, I think, and if you pray for someone else then He will grant your own request too.’ He smiled, stood and lightly touched Hook’s shoulder. ‘And pray to our saints, Crispin and Crispinian. I think they are less busy than the blessed Virgin. God watch over you, Englishman.’

The priest walked away and Hook decided to take his advice and pray again to the two local saints and so he went to an altar beneath a painting of the two martyrs and there he prayed for the soul of Sarah, whose life he had failed to save in London. He stared up at the painting as he prayed. The two saints stood in a green field scattered with golden stars on a hill high above a white-walled city. They looked gravely and a little sadly towards Hook. They did not look like shoemakers. They were dressed in white robes and Crispin carried a shepherd’s crook while Crispinian held a wicker tray of apples and pears. Their names were painted beneath each man and Hook, though he could not read, could tell which saint was which because one name was longer than the other. Crispinian looked much the friendlier man. He had a rounder face and blue eyes and a half-smile of great kindliness, while Saint Crispin appeared much sterner and was half turned away, as though he had no time for an onlooker and was about to walk down the hill and into the city, and so Hook fell into the habit of praying to Crispinian each morning, though he always acknowledged Crispin too. He dropped two pennies in the jar each time he prayed.

‘To look at you,’ John Wilkinson said one evening, ‘I wouldn’t take you for a man of prayer.’

‘I wasn’t,’ Hook said, ‘till now.’

‘Frightened for your soul?’ the old archer asked.

Hook hesitated. He was binding arrow fledging with the silk stolen from the cathedral’s altar frontal. ‘I heard a voice,’ he blurted out suddenly.

‘A voice?’ Wilkinson asked. Hook said nothing. ‘God’s voice?’ the older man asked.

‘It was in London,’ Hook said.

He felt foolish for his admission, but Wilkinson took it seriously. He stared at Hook for a long time, then nodded abruptly. ‘You’re a lucky man, Nicholas Hook.’

‘I am?’

‘If God spoke to you then He must have a purpose for you. That means you might survive this siege.’

‘If it was God who spoke to me,’ Hook said, embarrassed.

‘Why shouldn’t He? He needs to speak to people, on account that the church don’t listen to Him.’

‘It doesn’t?’

Wilkinson spat. ‘The church is about money, lad, money. Priests are supposed to be shepherds, aren’t they? They’re meant to be looking after the flock, but they’re all in the manor hall stuffing their faces with pastries, so the sheep have to look after themselves.’ He pointed an arrow at Hook. ‘And if the French break into the town, Hook, don’t go to Saint Anthony the Lesser! Go to the castle.’

‘Sir Roger …’ Hook began.

‘Wants us dead!’ Wilkinson said angrily.

‘Why would he want that?’

‘Because he’s got no money and a heap of debt, boy, so the man with the biggest purse can buy him. And because he’s not a real Englishman. His family came to England with the Normans and he hates you and me because we’re Saxons. And because he’s crammed to the throat with Norman shit, that’s why. You go to the castle, lad! That’s what you do.’

The next few nights were dark, and the waning moon was a sliver like a cutthroat’s blade. The Sire de Bournonville feared a night attack and ordered dogs to be tethered out in the wasteland where the houses had been burned. If the dogs barked, he said, the warning bell on the western gate was to be rung, and the dogs did bark and the bell was rung, but no Frenchmen assaulted the breach. Instead, as the dawn mist shimmered above the river, the besiegers catapulted the dogs’ corpses into the town. The animals had been gelded and had their throats cut as a warning of the fate that awaited the defiant garrison.

The feast of Saint Abdus passed, and no relief force arrived, and then Saint Possidius’s feast came and went, and next day was the feast of the seven holy virgins, and Hook prayed to each one, and in the next dawn he sent a plea to Saint Dunstan, the Englishman, on his feast day, and the day after that to Saint Ethelbert, who had been a king of England, and all the time he also prayed to Crispinian and to Crispin, begging their protection, and on the very next day, on the feast of Saint Hospitius, he received his answer.

When the French, who had been praying to Saint Denis, attacked Soissons.

The first Hook knew of the assault was the sound of the city’s church bells clanging in frantic haste and jangling disorder. It was dark and he was momentarily confused. He slept on straw at the back of John Wilkinson’s workshop and he woke to the glare of flames leaping high as the old man threw wood on the brazier to provide light. ‘Don’t lie there like a pregnant sow, boy,’ Wilkinson said, ‘they’re here.’

‘Mary, mother of God,’ Hook felt the surge of panic like icy water seething through his body.