Agincourt

The English were passing skins of water or wine from man to man and Lanferelle suddenly felt parched. “Where’s the wine?” he asked his squire.

“I don’t have any, sire. You didn’t tell me to bring any.”

“Do I have to order you to piss? Jesus, you stink like a midden. Did you shit yourself?”

The squire nodded miserably. He was not the only man whose bowels had loosened in terror, but he quailed under Lanferelle’s scorn. “We’re going left!” Lanferelle called again. He had tried and failed to reach Sir John, so now he pla

Trumpets sounded from the northern end of the field. The second French battle, its armor still gleaming and its ba

Men nodded. They understood, but the field reeked of blood, the oriflamme was gone, and a dozen great lords of France were dead or missing, and Lanferelle knew that victory would only come when men began to believe in victory. So he would give that belief to them. He would fight his way through the English line and he would give France a triumph.

Englishmen saw the second attack closing and they straightened and hoisted weapons. The second French battle had reached the first and the newcomers gave a huge shout. “Saint Denis! Montjoie! Montjoie!”

“Saint George!” the English responded, and the hunting howls started again, the mocking sound of men inviting their quarry to come and die.

But the second battle could not reach the English because the survivors of the first were in their way, and they could only push those survivors forward, and so they churned through the mud, lances leveled, driving tired men onto the heaps of dead and onto the English blades beyond. The noise rose, the clash of steel and the screams of the dying and the desperate blare of trumpets as eight thousand new French men-at-arms went to the killing ground.

And Lanferelle went for the archers.

The women and servants fled from the English baggage, ru

Melisande was in the stream that ran fast, full, cold and muddy, fed by the torrential rain of the last few days. She floundered in the water, pushing past low-growing branches until she saw the jupon snagged on a willow bough. She unhooked it, then forced her way through the briars and nettles that grew on the stream’s bank. She pulled the jupon over her head. The wet linen clung cold and clammy, but it covered her and she crept slowly northward through brambles and hazel scrub until she saw the horsemen.

There were fifty or sixty riders who were standing their horses to the west of the village and just watching the English encampment. They had no ba

Then a new anxiety struck her. The surcoat covered her, but it also gnawed at her soul. “Forgive me,” she prayed to the Virgin, “for wearing the jupon. Let Nick live.”

She sensed no answer. There was just silence in her head.

She had sworn not to wear the jupon, believing that wearing her father’s badge would doom Nick to death in the high plowland, but now she was wearing the badge of the sun and the falcon, and the Virgin had given her no answer, and she knew she was breaking her bargain with heaven. She shivered, cold and wet, and suddenly trembled.

Nick would die, she was sure of it.

So she took the jupon off so that Nick might live.

And she crouched. She was praying, naked, cold and frightened. And from the north, beyond the horsemen and beyond the village and beyond the skyline, the sound of battle rose again.

“We killed them before,” Thomas Evelgold yelled, “and we can kill them again! Kill for England!”

“For Wales!” a man shouted.

“For Saint George!” another man called.

“For Saint David!” the Welshman responded and on that battle cry the archers surged forward to attack the new enemy. They had already savaged the first French battle, and some men reckoned they would become rich from the prisoners they had taken. Those prisoners, without helmets and with their hands tied with spare bow cords, were behind the stakes, guarded there by a handful of wounded archers. Now the bowmen went to make new corpses and take new prisoners.

They went in a rush, and by now they knew how to take down men-at-arms who could not move in the thick mud, and so the archers crashed into the flank of the French and they hammered their enemy to make a new line of dead men, most stabbed through an eye by an archer’s knife after they had been felled by a hammer blow. The screams were unending. The plateau seethed with mud-spattered steel-clad men who lumbered toward the archers, pushed onto them by the thick ranks of men behind, and the clumsy men tripped on bodies, were smashed on their helmets, were murdered with knives, and still they came. Some wore gold or silver chains around their necks, or wore armor that, by its magnificence, proclaimed the wearer’s wealth or position, and those men the archers tried to capture. They would kill the rich man’s companions and, like deerhounds about a bayed stag, would taunt and threaten the man until he pulled off his gauntlet.

“Come on, you bastard!” Tom Scarlet jeered at a man whose white surcoat bore the badge of a red swan. “Come on!” The Frenchman was watching him, blue eyes visible through a raised visor. His helmet was chased with silver swirls and his red velvet sword belt was studded with golden lozenges. He picked his way among the corpses, lunged with his lance at Scarlet’s belly, and Scarlet swatted the lance away with his poleax. A second Frenchman, wearing the same swan insignia, slashed a broad-bladed sword at the poleax, but the steel bounced off the iron-sheathed staff. Scarlet drove the ax hard forward, cracking its spike against the swan-badged belly armor and the man staggered back. The swordsman struck again and Scarlet just managed to block the cut with the ax shaft, then Will Sclate was beside him and grunted as he swung his poleax, which crushed the swordsman’s helmet as though it were made of parchment. The helmet collapsed, bursting at its seams in a spray of blood and brains, and Sclate, huge and vicious, drew the hammerhead back.