Agincourt - Cornwell Bernard. Страница 46

“He wants your woman,” Robert Perrill said.

“How much is he paying you?”

“A mark each,” Perrill said, eager to help Hook now.

A mark. One hundred and sixty pennies, or three hundred and twenty pence if both brothers were paid. Fifty-three days’ pay for an archer. The price of Hook’s life and Melisande’s misery. “So you have to kill me?” Hook asked, “then take my girl?”

“He wants that.”

“He’s an evil mad bastard,” Hook said.

“He can be kind,” Perrill said pathetically. “Do you remember John Luttock’s daughter?”

“Of course I remember her.”

“He took her away, but he paid John in the end, gave him the girl’s dowry.”

“A hundred and sixty pennies for raping her?”

“No!” Perrill was puzzled by the question. “I think it was two pounds, might have been more. John was happy.”

The light was fading fast now. The French had saved their loaded guns for the moment when their counter-mine pierced the English tunnel and now they fired shot after shot from Harfleur’s walls. The smoke billowed like thunderclouds to darken the already dark sky as the gun-stones bounced and thudded off the sow’s stout flanks.

“Robert!” a voice shouted from the sow.

“That’s Tom!” Robert Perrill said, recognizing his brother’s voice. He took a breath to call back, but Hook stopped his mouth with a hand.

“Keep quiet,” Hook snarled. A crossbow bolt tumbled down the trench and smacked into Hook’s mail. It had lost its force and bounced away as another bolt struck sparks from a lump of flint nearby. “What happens now?” Hook asked, taking his hand away from Robert Perrill’s mouth.

“What do you mean?”

“I take you back and you try and kill me again.”

“No!” Perrill said. “Get me out of here, Nick! I can’t move!”

“So what happens now?” Hook asked again. Crossbow bolts were cracking into the sow so frequently that it sounded like hail on a timber roof.

“I won’t kill you,” Perrill said.

“What should I do?” Hook asked.

“Pull me out, Nick, please,” Perrill said.

“I wasn’t talking to you. What should I do?”

“What do you think?” Saint Crispin, the harsher brother, said in a mocking voice.

“It’s murder,” Hook said.

“I won’t kill you!” Perrill insisted.

“You think we saved the girl so she could be raped?” Saint Crispinian asked.

“Get me out of this muck,” Perrill said, “please!”

Instead Hook reached out and found one of the spent crossbow bolts. It was as long as his forearm, as thick as two thumbs, and fledged with stiff leather vanes. The point was rusted, but still sharp.

He killed Perrill the easiest way. He smacked him hard around the head, and while the archer was still recovering from the blow, drove the bolt down through one eye. It went in easily, glancing off the socket, and Hook kept driving the thick shaft into Perrill’s brain until the rusted point scraped against the back of Perrill’s skull. The archer twisted and jerked, choked and quivered, but he died quickly enough.

“Robert!” Tom Perrill shouted from the sow.

A springolt bolt struck a masonry chimney breast left standing in the scorched remains of a burned house. The bolt spun into the falling darkness, end over end, soaring over the English trenches to fall far beyond. Hook wiped his wounded right hand on Robert Perrill’s tunic, cleaning off the muck that had spurted from the dead man’s eye, then heaved himself free of the soil. It was very nearly night and the smoke of the gunshots still shrouded what little light remained. He stepped over Perrill and staggered toward the sow, his legs slow to find their strength again. Crossbow bolts flicked past him, but their aim was wild now and Hook reached the sow safely. He held on to its flank as he walked, then dropped into the safety of the trench. Lanterns lit his dirt-crusted face and men stared at him.

“How many others survived?” a man-at-arms asked.

“Don’t know,” Hook said.

“Here,” a priest brought him a pot and Hook drank. He had not realized how thirsty he was until he tasted the ale.

“My brother?” Thomas Perrill was among the men staring at Hook.

“Killed by a crossbow bolt,” Hook said curtly and stared up into Perrill’s long face. “Straight through the eye,” he added brutally. Perrill stared at him, and then Sir John Cornewaille pushed through the small crowd in the sow’s pit.

“Hook!”

“I’m alive, Sir John.”

“You don’t look it. Come.” Sir John grasped Hook’s arm and led him toward the camp. “What happened?”

“They came from above,” Hook said. “I was on my way out when the roof fell in.”

“It fell on you?”

“Yes, Sir John.”

“Someone loves you, Hook.”

“Saint Crispinian does,” Hook said, then he saw Melisande in the light of a campfire and went to her embrace.

And afterward, in the darkness, had nightmares.

Sir John’s men started dying next morning. A man-at-arms and two archers, all three of them struck by the sickness that turned bowels into sewers of filthy water. Alice Godewyne died. A dozen other men-at-arms were sick, as were at least twenty archers. The army was being ravaged by the plague and the stench of shit hung over the camp, and the French built their walls higher every night and in the dawn men struggled to the gun-pits and trenches where they vomited and voided their bowels.

Father Christopher caught the sickness. Melisande found him shivering in his tent, face pale, lying in his own filth and too weak to move. “I ate some nuts,” he told her.

“Nuts?”

“Les noix,” he explained in a voice that was like a breathless groan. “I didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know?”

“The doctors tell me now that you shouldn’t eat nuts or cabbage. Not with the sickness about. I ate nuts.”

Melisande washed him. “You’ll make me sicker,” he complained, but was too weak to prevent her from cleaning him. She found him a blanket, though Father Christopher threw it off when the day’s warmth became insufferable. Much of the low land in which Harfleur stood was still flooded and the heat seemed to shimmer off the shallow water and made the air thick as steam. The guns still fired, but less frequently because the Dutch gunners had also been struck by the murrain. No one was spared. Men in the king’s household fell ill, great lords were struck down, and the angels of death hovered on dark wings above the English camp.

Melisande found blackberries and begged some barley from Sir John’s cooks. She boiled the berries and barley to reduce the liquid that she then sweetened with honey and spooned into Father Christopher’s mouth. “I’m going to die,” he told her weakly.

“No,” she said decisively, “you are not.”

The king’s own physician, Master Colnet, came to Father Christopher’s tent. He was a young, serious man with a pale face and a small nose with which he smelled Father Christopher’s feces. He offered no judgment on what he had determined from the odors, instead he briskly opened a vein in the priest’s arm and bled him copiously. “The girl’s ministrations will do no harm,” he said.

“God bless her,” Father Christopher said weakly.

“The king sent you wine,” Master Colnet said.

“Thank his majesty for me.”

“It’s excellent wine,” Colnet said, binding the cut arm with practiced skill, “though it didn’t help the bishop.”

“Bangor’s dead?”

“Not Bangor, Norwich. He died yesterday.”

“Dear God,” Father Christopher said.

“I bled him too,” Master Colnet said, “and thought he would live, but God decreed otherwise. I shall come back tomorrow.”

The Bishop of Norwich’s body was cut into quarters, then boiled in a giant cauldron to flense the flesh from the bones. The filthy steaming liquid was poured away and the bones were wrapped in linen and nailed in a coffin that was carried to the shore so the bishop could be taken home to be buried in the diocese he had taken such care to avoid in life. Most of the dead were simply dropped into pits dug wherever there was a patch of ground high enough to hold an unflooded grave, but as more men died the grave-pits were abandoned and the corpses were carried to the tidal flats and thrown into the shallow creeks where they were at the mercy of wild dogs, gulls, and eternity. The stench of the dead and the stink of shit and the reek of smoldering fires filled the encampment.